----- Original Message -----
From: domfox <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 11:07 AM
Subject: Re: re de sade et al... and Fyodor


To respond to some points made by Dom:


>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.


- Therefore , you are against all "ideologies". All ideologies aim
to make the world look coherent (or become such).
These are fantasies too.





> : 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.

- Therefore you should  regard as dull also Ted Hughes, among  the poets of
the
"natural",
dislike Rousseau and of course greatly dislike Heidegger. But, do you
really??? I wonder.


 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.

- fascism has become a too omnicomprehensive term to be use in a meaningful
way  in this context.
(If one wishes not to allow students to smoke in class one is called  a
"Fascist"..)
The term itself has been - by now - over-abused. It could also reveal
some grade of intolerance, fault-fonding, censorious attitude in those who
continually resort to it.
To call something "fascist" is to affix a label . The term should remain in
its historical setting and be justified by extensive explanation as for
which reasons it is being used. And to what purpose.  It cannot become a
synonym of " tyrannical".
So, of exactly what iconography are you thinking about? Please, expand.


>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.

Prostitution, in terms of exploitation of unwelthy prol;etarian women is as
much a problem now as it was then.
Are you so confident that society has changed so radically in the last three
centuries? This is optimistic, indeed.
By the way, women matter less today that , for example during the Roman
Empire, at the time of Julius Caesar.
They had a huge power , at the time.
It is this idea of progress you are expressing (" women who had the
misfortune to be born in a
century in which,,,women mostly did not matter very much,..) which I
disagree with .
These situations fluctuate, through time and space, and have no linear
course.
And depend on the values of a given society. It is therefore not the
progress of centuries than makes the difference but the spiritual tradition.
And we still have the same tradition of those who abused women in 17th or
18th century Europe. The mentality of our male conational is rather the
same. if not worse....
I do not think that in the France of De Sade proletarian prostitutes has a
worst time than contemporary London/New York/Tokyo prostitutes (still abused
and assaulted or even  killed, shockingly,  in a time which claims to be
sensible to Feminist Rights and have Social Concern for the "week citizens".
I have doubts about all these "progressive issues".
(for your record, medical enquiries show that domestic violence is
performed by both men and women almost in the same percentage).


> 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.

How about the postmen and the milkmen and plumbers who apparently have the
25% of possibilities to turn to be the natural fathers of the children of
the
planet? Imagine the worry of men when the door-bell ring. Which are their
wives instantaneous daydream?
Nobody is safe, says the statistics



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