The problem here I think is one of "enframing". If you frame Sade as
"literature", if he you see his "world" as a literary world amongst other
literary worlds, then you may well argue that darkness and terror and
corruption and amorality must be part of any literary _gestalt_ if it is to
hold true, and that punishing or exorcising Sade for his particular
extremities is dangerous because it threatens the "truth" of all literature.
I think there is a kind of indolence and complicity in this enframing,
however: it is like trying to read the Bible as literature, or the Unabomber
manifesto, or the Communist manifesto for that matter. None of these texts
is strictly or simply "non-literary", but none of them sits comfortably in
that frame - as passive literary artifacts presented for our objective, if
not untroubled, contemplation, "demonstrations" of one truth or another
about the world outside the text.
In speaking of de Sade as an ideologist and iconographer, I am trying to
break that frame: not to reduce the literary to the non-literary, e.g. the
political, but to undermine the distinction between literary "consciousness"
(the organic _gestalt_ which reflects on the world of human affairs) and the
political "unconscious" (the world of acts and motivations in which one is
always caught up without mediation). Iconography is literature "at large";
ideology is the world inscribing itself. One cannot ignore these
transactions.
De Sade is not only a negative dialectician, showing us what to steer clear
of, but a pornographer dictating our (or at least his; but not only his)
enjoyment; and he is not only a fanciful conjurer of spectacular literary
horrors, but also a gifted apologist for a way of life who sets forth an
elaborate a/theo/logical justification for the doctrine that might equals
right - like a social Darwinism _avant la lettre_ (hence: The Divine Ronald
Reagan).
And, finally: he used prostituted women, but was never himself prostituted;
he raped, but was never himself raped; he tortured, but was never himself
tortured. One must never forget how privileged he was.
- Dom
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