Sade et la loi (review)

François Ost's comprehensive study of the marquis de Sade appears at first glance to be a sophisticated introduction to this author, providing lengthy biographical information, and a clear exposition of Sade's thought that assumes no prior acquaintance on the reader's part. In fact, however, Sade et la loi is more focused than most introductory studies, offering a complex and elegantly written appraisal of Sade's moral and ethical stance, measured against Enlightenment conceptions of the law as deriving from the social contract and as the basis of social order. Ost's conclusion is that, while rejecting the social contract and the personal sacrifice that it necessitates, Sade nevertheless substitutes his own law, one that is categorical in both a Kantian and a broadly religious sense. What skews the perspective somewhat is the author's conviction that, in spite of his repeated declarations of atheism, Sade remains within a sacred dimension, going beyond what other critics before him, notably Pierre Klossowski, have termed a negative theology, to embrace evil as an absolute. There is little textual evidence to support such a hypothesis. Although Sade's libertines yearn for absolute power to wreak absolute destruction, such aspirations remain of course unfulfilled, at best an imaginary antidote to the uncertainties of the relative. Sade's world is not a metaphysical one, Manichean or otherwise, and the wicked folk who inhabit it are fundamentally human, rather than diabolical. If the libertines enjoy cursing God, or desecrating hosts and chalices, it is because they (and Sade) sadistically derive pleasure from the believer's shocked reaction. Given Ost's theological reading, moreover, it is somewhat surprising that psychoanalysis, with its profoundly deterministic and essentially atheistic assumptions regarding all human behaviour, should be his principal method of enquiry. Sade is thus a pervert for whom the posterior is the fetish object that enables him to disavow or deny sexual difference. The libertine's horror of the female sex organ is similarly interpreted in terms of a refusal to acknowledge the mark of difference that it constitutes. These hypotheses are convincingly argued but they sit uneasily alongside a return to nineteenth-century views of Sade as apostle of evil. In other ways, too, Ost is scathingly critical of his subject, and not all of this criticism is valid. Focusing on La Philosophie dans le boudoir, and especially on the intercalated pamphlet, Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains, which is given the kind of close reading lacking in some commentaries, the author credibly scotches any notion of Sade as feminist avant la lettre, his 'republic', we are told, being solely one of male jouissance. On the other hand, all of Sade's political writings are simplistically dismissed as little more than hypocritical opportunism, and Ost seems quite impervious to Sadean irony. The black comedy of the needlework scene in La Philosophie is earnestly adjudged to be 'la scène la plus cruelle de l'œuvre sadienne' (p. 152). One cannot help wondering why Ost chose to apply his very obvious critical acumen to the work of a writer whom he clearly despises. Perhaps the answer lies in a rare instance of praise: Ost cannot but admire the illocutionary force of Sadean discourse, a moment which may self-reflexively reveal more about the author's than the marquis's psyche. As Marcel Hénaff so succinctly observed with regard to Sade's style more than twenty years ago, 'dire, c'est jouir'.