> Personally, I don't like violence associated with sex, but having read
> about the later life of Foucault, I am more aware than ever of the range
of
> human possibility even among philosophers...
>
> Douglas Barbour
Hello, (De Sade, again)
Sometimes ago, Dom associated Sade's sexual preferences and modes of
conduct towards the others with a kind of Nazi attitude ante litteram
seeking male dominance at
the expenses of defenseless victims.
I was lost in the last pages on the novel I was translating (now finished)
and
forgot to reply also to Chris Heyden who asked me to "elaborate" my idea
of De Sade as politics.
De Sade was a atheist and an iconoclast. Now, in the Fascist/Nazist
mentality
there is no space for atheism. Actually, there is quite the opposite
tendency towards
mysticism (of some kind). Around 1933, Otto Strasser, a National Socialist,
accused
his Marxist opponents to attribute no importance to the religious feeling
and the emotional content
of mysticism (and with it the sex-political orgasmic patriarchal reactionary
nature !)
The idea of punishment (in religious terms) is at the very core of the
patriarchal political mentality.
And indeed, the fundamental religious ideas of all patriarchal religions in
based on the negation of
sexual needs. Religious rites (and lately political ceremonies) would in a
way grant vicarious
alternatives of the pleasures and roles in the sexual acts.
These practices (especially the political - see Fascist, Nazist behaviors)
while being in antithesis to the sexual acts and needs.
This kind abstinence from the satisfaction of the
sexual arousement creates a constant state of mental excitement which,
incapable
of relishing its tensions in sexual performances, finds vicarious ways of
expressing
its aggressiveness of desires.
I think Sade was preaching quite the opposite .
It is only when the demands and drives of the flesh
are censored and poured into other (say, religious/political) practices
that the excess of the abstinence can produce real cruelty and "sadistic"
outcomes.
I think therefore that the definition "sadistic", when applied to political
cruelty and despotism,
does injustice to Sade. For me, Sade was parodying that mentality from a
strongly atheistic
anti-authoritarian position.
In Reich's study on the Mass Psychology under Fascism
the German Nazional Socialist Otto Strasser accusing
his Marxists opponents to undervalue Mysticism is seen as a sexually
neurotic mature man
who, while perceiving sexual acts and desires as degrading, seeks the
putative
power of purity and perfection stressed by all religious doctrine and
political ideologies grounded in mysticism
(among which first of all the Nazi and the Fascist ones).
De Sade? He is an anarchist.
Erminia
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