I don't think I recognise the category of fantasy, at least not as it's
often deployed - to describe something apart from the real, something at
play in the midst of the work of the real. On the contrary, fantasy sustains
the real: it's the most deadly serious thing there is, in a sense. Not the
private individual daydream-life, but the collective delusion, the icons
that the iconoclast recognises as so important and powerful precisely
because they subtend a concrete order that would fragment without them.

De Sade and the Sadeian are iconic, and they support an appraisal of cruelty
which is always ready to see "jouissance" as the saving grace of terror and
domination. I don't believe that terror and domination have any saving
graces. I think that the "jouissance" that is to be found in the precincts
of fear and cruelty makes it worse, not better.

Fred West was a stupider Sade, if you like: more brutalised, possessed of a
less poetic turn of phrase. But I think he had the essentials down. If one
can be insouciant about the vices of the aristocrat, one ought to extend the
same condescension to the builder. Sade disapproved of the death penalty
because he disapproved of the idea of moral virtue that motivated it - fancy
being so uncouth as to want to "punish" the "wicked"! He was generally in
favour of murder, however. I don't know what kept him from killing, always
assuming that he did refrain from it, but I doubt it was any sort of
residual humanism.

> Do we then
> condemn Rabelais or Voltaire for their literary
> cruelties?

I don't really care about "literary" cruelties, except insofar as they
belong to an iconography which sanctions real cruelties, as I think de
Sade's does.

> Sade would have been, I guarantee it, repudiated by Hitler as a decadent
> writer.

Hitler was a decadent writer - "the bohemian corporal", as the German top
brass used to call him. But the point of the comparison is not to suggest
that they're particularly similar, but to suggest that de Sade is to de
Sade's writings as Hitler is to Hitler's writings. We don't separate _Mein
Kampf_ from Hitler's actual "struggle" too readily - we aren't inclined to
see it as the mass-murderer "at play". I question our willingness to regard
de Sade's writings as otiose, inconsequential with regard to the rest of his
career of violence and predation.

> He is a troubling extreme in literature, and continues to be
> troubling: and so he should be.  He writes about disturbing extremes of
> human possibility, however you look at it; but for me the strongest
> reaction to the endless permutations in his books is _boredom_, ennui
> (the philosophy in between is more interesting); and surely he makes a
> frightening dystopic critique of the ancien regime itself?

This is what Kathy Acker appears to have seen in him - an extraordinarily
generous reading, I should add. It's an immanent critique, and it never gets
out - we stay trapped in the "labyrinth" of libertinage. But why enter it in
the first place?

> Do we just pretend that those extremes do not exist in human beings, or
> if they do, that writing must not investigate them?

I would say that Andrea Dworkin's writing investigates them pretty
thoroughly. Most people seem to think it would be better if she had never
written, however. Something of a double standard, I think.

> I simply do not
> accept the Andrea Dworkin line that we must burn Sade.

The man or the works? The works we might keep much as we keep _Mein Kampf_ -
it's as well to know what people are capable of...

- Dom




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