Must We Burn Sade?

Gini is reading Simone de Beauvoir's essay "Must We Burn Sade?" (1951, 1952) David found a description of the essay here (I've excerpted it below.)

7. Must We Burn Sade?: Freedom and the Flesh

We are a long way away from Pyrrhus and Cinéas where Beauvoir declared our freedom immune from assault. In that early work, our freedom insulated us from the risks of intimacy. In The Second Sex, avoiding the risks of intimacy remains possible, but now this avoidance is identified as a mark of our moral failure to live the ambiguity of our condition. Beauvoir's essay "Must We Burn Sade?" (1951, 1952) written in response to a request to write an introduction to Sade's Justine, details the effects Beauvoir's changed position on the relationship between freedom and intimacy has on her ethical reflections. The central ethical question: "the problem of the true relation between man and man" remains unchanged. Indeed what interests Beauvoir about Sade is that, "[he] posed the problem of the Other in its extremist terms; in his excesses, man-as-transcendence and man-as-object achieve a dramatic confrontation." What has changed is Beauvoir's understanding of the drama of intersubjectivity. Marking this change, this essay also marks a return to the question of the responsibility of the artist raised in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Must we Burn Sade? identifies the Marquis's decision to write as an existential project, an authentic ethics, and a politics of rebellion. Crediting Sade with uncovering the despotic secrets of the political machine and recognizing his utopian appeal to freedom, Beauvoir accuses Sade of perverting the meaning of our individuated and situated freedom. He was, according to her, a great moralist who endorsed an unsatisfactory ethics.

Sade is Beauvoir's Janus-faced ally. She does not refute his claim that cruelty establishes a relationship between the self and the other. Sade is correct. Cruelty reveals us to each other in the particularities and ambiguities of our conscious and fleshed existence. The tyrant and victim, Beauvoir tells us, are a genuine couple. They are united by the bonds of the flesh and freedom.

Beauvoir does not dispute Sade's validations of the flesh and freedom. She admires his phenomenological point of departure. This is the source of his ethics of authenticity. His descriptions of the powers of cruelty and the meaning of torture, however, are incomplete and therefore inadequate. Insofar as his descriptions account for the powers of cruelty, they allow him to mount an effective critique of our social, political and personal hypocrisies. Insofar as they do not attend to the perversions of freedom and the flesh that cruelty exploits, they fail to offer a legitimate understanding of our intersubjective lives.

In the end, Sade was mislead (which does not mean that he was innocent). He mistook power for freedom and misunderstood the meanings of the erotic. In his fascination with the conflict between consciousness and the flesh, Sade exposed the contradiction of the sadistic enterprise. The contradiction, according to Beauvoir is this: attempting to lose himself in the pleasures of the flesh and in this way to experience both the ambiguity of his being as consciousness made flesh (or flesh made consciousness) and the reality of his being for and with others, Sade substitutes the spectacle for the lived experience and accepts counterfeit transactions of domination and assimilation/incorporation for genuine relationships of reciprocity and gratuitous generosity.

Centering his life in the erotic, Sade missed the truth of the erotic event. This truth, Beauvoir tells us, can only be found by those who abandon themselves to the risks of emotional intoxication. Living this intoxication we discover the ways in which the body turned flesh dissolves all arguments against the immediacy of our bonds with each other and grounds an ethic of the appeal, risk and mutual vulnerability.

Between the early Pyrrhus and Cinéas and the later "Must We burn Sade?" we discern the impact of what might be called Beauvoir's phenomenological turn to the body. Once she abandons the idea that our freedom, as absolutely internal, is immune from an assault by the other, and accepts the radical vulnerability of our lived embodiment, questions of violence and desire cannot be severed from the question of our fundamental humanity or questions of ethics and justice. In condemning Sade for his perversion of the erotic, Beauvoir also faults him as an artist. Though she criticizes him for being a technically poor writer, the heart of her criticism is ethical not aesthetic. Sade, according to Beauvoir, violated his obligations as an author. Instead of revealing the world to us in its promise and possibilities; instead of appealing to us to work for justice, he took refuge in the imaginary and developed metaphysical justifications for suffering and cruelty. In the end Beauvoir accuses Sade of being the serious man described in her Ethics of Ambiguity.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/

27/05/2007 12:50 PM