"The Aryan
Race" is a fantasy construction, as is "England", as
is "femininity". We are
plagued by the things. Their purpose is to make the
world look more coherent
than it actually is, and to provide a rationale for
scapegoating
"castrating" agents such as Jews, foreigners,
feminists etc. for undermining
this illusion of coherence."

How do you know these things are fantasy? Presumably
because you have a snapshot of reality  to measure
them against. 'Uh-huh, doesn't fit.' So things musn't
be quite as mysterious and/or incoherent as you
suggest, surely?

Ther reason that minorities are oppressed in some
countries is not because they upset epistemological
barrows but because their interests are inimical to
the interests of some other social group.

De Sade reminds me of some of the so-called
'anarcho-primitivists' doing the rounds at the moment.
A lot of them live in Oregon in dung houses and pine
for prehistoric man's 'harmony' with nature. The
leading figure in this movement is a guy called
John(?) Zerzan, who blames all of our ills not on
capitalism but on technology. Technology is held to
have begun with language, wld you believe. Zerzan was
a hero of the Unabomber. Primitivist ideas though are
not confined to any lunatic fringe. Poets are
particularly susceptible to them...I suspect that they
hold a particularly strong attraction today - when
there appearss no strong *forward-looking* alternative
to the capitalist system to attract  idealistic young
ppl, a backward step ('feudalism with Fyodor or
primitive communism with de Sade, take yr pick folks,
the customer is always right') doesn't look as, well,
backward as it really is.

Scott



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Subject: Re: re de sade et al... and Fyodor
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> Dom, could you expand on what you said about not
> recognising fantasy as something apart from reality?

Sure. Reality is full of fantasies, and some of them
got legs. "The Aryan
Race" is a fantasy construction, as is "England", as
is "femininity". We are
plagued by the things. Their purpose is to make the
world look more coherent
than it actually is, and to provide a rationale for
scapegoating
"castrating" agents such as Jews, foreigners,
feminists etc. for undermining
this illusion of coherence. De Sade consistently
complains that religious
morality has sundered us from our own "nature", and
frustrated or perverted
the true course of "the will". Sadeian perversion is
thus restorative in
intent: it's meant to reunite us with the spontaneous
inner primacy of our
"true selves". The keynote here, surprisingly, is thus
not radical
innovation but infantile regression: a nostalgia for a
lost "animal"
integrity, the integrity of the libertine committed to
pleasure (which
always goes uninterrogated, as a kind of pure and
original good in itself).
I think this goes some way towards explaining Sade's
dullness, actually,
although I don't always find him dull (I can
appreciate the prose style
myself): in the end, he really believes that only one
thing matters. A
prototype of what Sheila Jeffreys calls "orgasm
politics".

Sade is not simply a producer of literary fictions,
which just float around
inanely in some separate literary sphere: he's an
ideologist, a scriptor of
fantasies, a forger of icons. Also, of course, an
iconoclast: he threatens
the fantasies of those who like to imagine that human
existence can attain
to a sort of perfect moral coherence and integrity,
with all dissonant
elements purged and cleansed. But it's a
bait-and-switch operation: you
think you're getting a healthy dose of iconoclasm,
when in fact what you end
up with is a fascist iconography.

Also, de Sade was a multiple rapist - he raped many
more women than he was
prosecuted for - and a torturer, and a prostituter,
and these things do
matter and are not peccadilloes however much they may
have seemed so from
the perspective of the aristocracy that practised them
routinely and as a
matter of right. They don't matter any less because he
did them to
prostituted women, or poor women, or women who in any
case were not
aristocrats and not wealthy and powerful and not
liberated and above all not
men, women who had the misfortune to be born in a
century in which, face it,
women mostly did not matter very much. They are not
petty crimes but real
crimes, as real as if they had been committed against
you or me.

> I
> think I might have got it wrong but it sounds like
"if
> you can think it, you can do it".

Thinking is already a kind of doing, a deed amongst
others. Now thinking of
closing the door and getting up and closing it are not
the same deed; but
they are both deeds. The thinking doesn't happen in a
different world. It
isn't innocent or unworldly. People talk about fantasy
as if it could be
innocent of politics, innocent of violence; as if
one's "fantasy life" were
not part of one's life tout court but a sort of
spontaneous psychic quirk
unrelated to anything else. This is the kind of talk I
find nonsensical.

 That may be true of
> de Sade; it isn't of all of us (I hope). And Jimmy
> Carter said lusting after a woman in your heart was
> the same as committing adultery.

Actually it was the other J.C. who said it first;
although what he is
actually reported to have said is that whoever looks
at a woman with lustful
intentions has already committed adultery in his
heart. Blake would have
agreed, I think...

> But I'm fairly sure
> Mrs Carter, and still more Mrs Clinton, would
disagree
> and would say there was a difference between a man
who
> indulged his every whim and one who sought some kind
> of substitute relief, in fantasy or whatever.

The whim is presumably the same in either case. And
there are whims and
whims. What is one to think of a husband whose whim is
to commit adultery,
even if he is good enough to relieve that whim through
some substitute
(quite a lot of men seem to have believed that
prostituted women don't
count, for instance)? I'm not sure that my own sexual
daydreams are for me a
way of committing adultery without committing adultery
- that it is adultery
per se that they substitute for, or even that they are
a substitute for
anything at all. But if it were adultery per se that I
wanted, if that were
the desire I was seeking to satisfy through "fantasy
or whatever", then I
imagine my partner might have some cause to feel upset
about it. It's a
little like the way I'd expect my Asian neighbours to
feel about someone who
liked playing video games in which the aim was to gun
down as many Asian
characters as possible, with the reward for a
successful killing spree being
an animated rape sequence at the end of every level:
relieved that this
person sought a relatively harmless form of catharsis
for his racist/rapist
animus, or horrified that the animus existed in the
first place? At the very
least, I think it would be a bit rich to expect to be
congratulated for
one's restraint in only venting one's fury on a bunch
of pixels, or one's
courage in "exploring" one's "dark side" in so
"honest" a fashion...

> It's
> when you consider a better writer who still has an
> unhealthy fascination with violence, and stimulates
it
> in the reader, that it gets difficult. I don't see
how
> one can hide from the fact that one reason
Dostoevsky
> describes long agonising catalogues of cruelty is
> because he gets a buzz out of it; it isn't the only
> motive but it is there. I read a story like
"Akulka's
> Husband" knowing that fascination is in me too, and
it
> tells me things about both him and me that I don't
> want to know, but I wouldn't be without it.

I haven't read Dostoevsky - yet - and so I don't know
whether or not he is
aware as a writer of that "buzz", and whether or not
he is able to make some
kind of moral sense of it. Does he celebrate it, or
offer it up for one's
naive enjoyment, or does he make one aware of it in
order to make one
suspicious of it?

If the "dark side" really is a "dark side", and if it
is really there, then
one should know about it by all means but also seek
ways to defeat it or
tame it or circumvent it. If it's something you can
just learn to live with,
then it isn't really all that "dark", is it?

We are certainly complex, murky, problematic beings
full of passions and
motives that we don't find it comfortable to hear
about; but we are not
faced with a choice between avowing and affirming
those passions and motives
and simply pretending that they do not exist. De
Sade's is not the only kind
of speech that might speak of them, and answering back
to de Sade does not
mean silencing all "honest" speech.

- Dom




=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon?  And how
could I try to doubt it?  First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle.  Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it.  It would not tie in with anything in my life...  Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday.  We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games"      - Ludwig Wittgenstein

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