Authors: Elisabeth Roudinesco
Our Dark Side (8 page)
The death blow as administered by the patients themselves who, having no means of support, denied that the theatrical experiment had any therapeutic benefits. Having lost the support of the insane, Sade remained in Charenton and had one last affair with the daughter of a nurse. He both introduced her to sodomy and taught her to read and write. After his death, the hospice's doctor, who believed in Franz Josef Gall's phrenological theories,
21
claimed that his skull was in every respect similar to that of a Church Father. That thesis was later refuted by Gall's main Austrian disciple, who explained that, on the contrary, the organization of the Marquis's brain bore witness to his vices, depravity and hatred â¦
22
That Sade's madness was âthe perversion of others' is not in doubt. But by making that diagnosis Royer-Colland turned Sade into a new kind of case. If Sade were not really mad and if he should have been imprisoned in a fortress rather than being treated in an asylum, why speak of his madness? We see here the problems that such cases posed for the emergent psychiatry: either Sade was insane and should be treated the same way as other madmen, or he was a criminal and should go to prison. The alternative view was that he was no more than an evil genius who had written unprecedently transgressive books, and should be left free to write and act as he wished, which was obviously politically and morally impossible, despite the new laws passed in 1801.
It is therefore because he was neither mad, a criminal nor socially acceptable that Sade was regarded as a new kind of perverse âcase' who was, to use the new psychiatric terminology, half-moral, half-mad or a lucid madman. âThere is no contradicting the view that he was in theory a perverse man', said the former
Conventionnaire
Marc-Antoine Boudot (1893: 64), and he âmust be judged on the basis of his works. There were the seeds of depravity, but not of madness; such works presupposed a well-organized brain, and even composing his works demanded a great deal of research into both ancient and modern literature; its purpose was to show that the Greeks and Romans had authorized the greatest depravities.'
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, the name âSade' became the paradigm that lay at the very heart of both the structure of perversions and its sexual manifestations. This definition reduced the subject to the finitude of a body that was destined to die and to the imaginary of a psyche that was restricted by the reality of
jouissance
.
Witness the coining of the neologism âsadism' in 1838. The word became a major concept for the sexologists, who linked it to âmasochism' until Freud, who never read Sade,
23
gave that binomial a universal instinctual dimension that went far beyond assigning it to the purely sexual practice of enjoying inflicting pain on the other and having pain inflicted by the other. As for Gilles Deleuze (1991), who knew Sade's work well, he was to split the terms Freud had put together and to reveal masochism to be a world apart that escaped all symbolization. It was a world full of horrors, punishments and contracts between torturers and their victims. Yet how can anyone fail to see that the world of Sacher-Masoch was already present in Sade's literary works, and that Sade has much more transgressive power?
Now that it had been transformed into a pejorative noun, the accursed name of Sade could, throughout the nineteenth century, be used as a stigma to discredit the enemies of the self, the enemies of the other and the enemies of the nation. When Barras, who was the most corrupt man of his day, wanted to traduce the glorious name of the heroic Napoleon, he described him as âthe Sade of war and politics'.
24
Prevented from becoming a criminal by the law â and constantly thrown into prison by the various regimes that followed one another, Sade therefore wrote a body of work that cannot be classified. If he had not spent one third of his life in prison he probably would have had a career as a sodomite, raped prostitutes, seduced adolescent girls, tortured others and become his own victim. We can therefore advance the hypothesis that he was able to create the most indefinable body of work in the entire history of literature â âmajor inconvenience' (Blanchot 1965), âthe Gospel of evil', âa sudden abyss' (Le Brun 1991), âsubversion of the line between vice and virtue' (Sollers 1968) â only because, in the course of his life, he faced the hostility of three political regimes, from the Monarchy to the Empire, that made him and his work the dark side of what they themselves were doing.
We can therefore understand why posterity regarded Sade both as a precursor of sexology, as an heir to Satanism or the mystical tradition â the âdivine Marquis' â and as the ancestor of Nazi abjection. Being the incarnation of every possible image of perversion, and having defied kings, insulted God and inverted the Law, he will never cease to pose a threat, posthumously and like a spectre, to all the representatives of biocracy and their vain pretensions to try to tame delight in evil.
Notes
1
âThose who deserve to be broken on the wheel [
roué
]'; the Regent saw to it that they escaped that punishment.
2
The phenomenon of libertinage appeared in the period 1595â1600, and was a reaction against the bloody events of the wars of religion. Cf. Lever (1985).
3
I use âreal' in the Lacanian sense of a phenomenal reality that cannot be symbolized and that consists of foreclosed signifiers. It is pure heterogeneity.
4
Mirvil is at once Sainte-Ange's brother and her lover. He will be given the task of âdevirginizing' Eugénie.
5
In order to oblige women to become sodomites, Sade recommends the use of dildos (2006 [1795]: 98): âAs as for you my lady: after being your husband, I want you to be my husband Put on your most gigantic dildo [â¦] Hang it around your loins, Madame, and pound on it dreadfully!'
6
Greek pederasty was based upon a loving, sexual relationship â not necessarily involving penetration â between two men. The initiator was an adult (
eraste
) and the other an adolescent (
éromène
), aged between twelve and eighteen, and usually pubescent.
7
The question of bestiality, which was rebaptized âzoophilia' by the sexologists, is dealt with in chapter 5.
8
In the eighteenth century, âanti-physical', like âinfamy' was used to describe anything to do with those sexual perversions that were âunnatural vices', and especially homosexuality. Male
antiphysitiques
were described as âqueers', âsodomites' and âbuggers', and their female equivalents as âbuggeresses' or âtribades'. Cf. Lever (1985).
9
This is the central, and interminable, theme of Sade's great novels
Justine
;
Or Good Conduct Well-Chastised
(Sade 1953) and
Juliette
(Sade 1997).
10
Sade (2006). The same point had already been made by Pascal: âMust one kill to destroy evildoers? That is making two evildoers in place of one' (Pascal 1966: fragment 659).
Sade is the first writer until Victor Hugo to demand the unconditional abolition of the death penalty. Cf. Derrida and Roudinesco (2001).
11
Jambet was the first to notice the analogy between Sade's model (âthe metaphysics of
jouissance
') and the liberal economy.
12
On this point, I do not accept Jeangène Vilmers' thesis (2005: 295).
13
We owe the first â and to date only â biography of Sade that allows us to relate his life to the genesis of his work to Maurice Lever (1991).
14
Sade never killed or poisoned anyone.
15
This is the only known manuscript by Sade. When the Bastille fortress was sacked, Arnaud de Saint-Maximin found the roll which was passed to the Villeneuve-Trans family before being entrusted to Iwan Bloch (1872â1922), who published an incomplete French version. It was then bought by Maurice Heine (1884â1940) on behalf of Vicomte Charles de Noailles (1891â1981). Heine published in three volumes, sold on a subscription basis. Jean-Jacques Pauvert then republished it and was taken to court in 1955â6. The manuscript is now in the Fondation Martin-Bodmer in Geneva.
16
By the Assemblée Nationale's decree of 13 March.
17
Cf. Corbin (1986). The most subtle analysis of the metamorphoses of olfactory power in the eighteenth century, which constantly oscillate between the stenches of the old nobility and bourgeois aspirations to a new hygienics, is to be found in Patrick Süskind's novel
Perfume
(Suskïnd 1987). The author traces the itinerary of the fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whom he compares with both Sade and Marat, and to whom he attributes all the characteristics of the most perverse of criminals. Born in a repulsive Parisian alley and the son of a mother who spends her days cutting up fish, Jean-Baptiste is described as a sort of monster who is devoid of both affects and conscience, but who is gifted with a fabulous sense of smell that allows him to become the greatest perfumer of his day, and to move from the worst of abjection to the highest degree of civilization. But his success does not prevent him from putting his genius at the service of his destructive drives. Having caused the death of everyone he meets, he tries to capture the very essence of the human body in order to turn it into the most sublime perfume. And in order to do so, he commits, without any feeling of guilt and in the name of the science of smells, the most atrocious murders. He dies as his own victim and his raw flesh is devoured by a gang of cut-throats and prostitutes among the stinking corpses in the Cimetière des Innocents.
18
He had previously spent time in Bicêtre: âMadness and syphilis rubbed shoulders with poverty and crime. Old people, the infirm, epileptics, people with ringworm, the mentally retarded, people with venereal diseases, beggars and vagabonds were crammed in with the thieves, rogues and crooks' (Lever 1991: 594).
19
The great protagonists in this debate were Philippe Pinel, Valentin Magnon and Ãtienne Ãsquirol. Philippe Pinel (1745â1826) was the French founder of psychiatry, medicine-chef at the Bicêtre hospice and then at the Salpêtrière hospital. Pinel's pupil Jean Ãtienne Dominique Ãsquirol (1772â1840) theorized the monomanias and was the architect of the modern asylum. Valentin Magnan (1835â1916) was a French psychiatrist and supporter of the theory of degeneracy. It is was he who substituted the expression âsexual perversions' for âaberrations' or âanomalies'.
20
In order to prove that he really was not the author of that saga, he published a collection of short stories entitled
The Crimes of Love
(Sade 2005) under his own name in 1800. He piled up description after description of murders, incest, perversions, while denouncing those who commit such evil deeds. This was a way of inverting the inversion of the Law, as in the great anonymous novels, and not of making vice hateful.
21
Franz Josef Gall (1758â1828), Austrian doctor, specialist in brain anatomy and inventor of cranioscopy (later known as phrenology or the âscience of bumps'), who claimed to be able to read the character of an individual by examining the bumps and depressions on the cranium.
22
Lever 1991: 659. A cast of Sade's skull was deposited in the Musée de l'homme.
23
The catalogue of the Freud Museum in London indicates that Freud was only interested in sadism but did not read the only biography of Sade: that by Albert Eulenberg (1901). He did not own any books by the Marquis.
24
After reading Justine in 1810, Napoleon signed the decree that kept Sade detained in Charenton against his will. (Lever 1991: 634â36). The name of Marat experienced the same fate. For his detractors, he was the emblem of all the nation's vices. His name was then used to stigmatize the Jews in anti-Semitic discourses derived from Edouard Drumont's
La France Juive
, See Roudinesco and Rousso (1989).
3
Dark Enlightenment or Barbaric Science?
Nineteenth-century âbourgeois' society â and it is doubtless still with us â was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion [â¦] It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fixture of this game. (Foucault 1984: 47â8).
It would be difficult to put it better.
All historians have in fact asked themselves whether the nineteenth century helped to eroticize sexual pleasures or whether, on the contrary, it encouraged their repression. If we look more closely, we find that, far from being contradictory, the two attitudes are perfectly complementary. And it is their very complementarity that allows us to understand how the stigmata of perversion â if not perversion itself â became an object of study after having been an object of horror.
From 1810 onwards, the French Penal Code, which was a product of the Revolution and the Empire, transformed the legislation on sexuality from top to bottom. So much so that, in varying degrees, it served as a model for all European countries throughout the century. It was inspired by the Enlightenment movement, by the principles of Cesare Beccaria,
1
and by the decrees promulgated by the Assemblée législative in 1791. In 1791, Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau stated: âYou are at last going to see the disappearance of the host of imaginary crimes that filled the old statute books. You will no longer find in them the major crimes of heresy, divine
lèse-majesté
, witchcraft and magic for which, in the name of heaven, so much blood has stained the earth' (cf. Vilmer 2005: 98).
From that perspective, all sexual practices were secularized, and none could be sanctioned as either a crime or a misdemeanour, provided that they took place in private between consenting adults. The law intervened only to protect minors, to punish scandal â or in other words acts of public indecency â and to sanction abuses and violence against non-consenting individuals.
2
Only adultery was repressed by the Code because it threatened to vitiate ties of lineage; given that the father is always uncertain (
incertus
), adulterous women must at all cost be prevented from making their husbands take responsibility for children they have not fathered. As for so-called pornographic, licentious, erotic, lubricious or immoral texts, their authors could still be prosecuted for âoffending public morals'.
3
Whatever their nature, the sexual practices of consenting adults no longer came within the remit of the penal justice system, but texts that disclosed them were subject to severe repression.
As a result, what were deemed to be the most perverse sexual peculiarities â bestiality, sodomy, inversion, fetishism, fellatio, flagellation, masturbation, consensual violence and so on â were no longer punishable offences because the law was no longer concerned with how citizens achieved orgasm in their privacy of their own lives. Having lost their pornographic fury, amid such practices, they were rebaptized, using a sophisticated terminology. The medical literature of the nineteenth century no longer spoke of fucking, arses, or cunts, or of different ways of wanking, fornicating, buggering, eating shit, sucking, pissing or shitting. An impressive list of learned terms derived from the Greek was invented to describe so-called âpathological' sexuality.
4
And Latin was often used to mask the crudity that might be involved in describing some acts.
As for the bourgeois, they were, from the Restoration until the Second Empire, free to indulge in their libertine desires in clandestinity, provided that they condemned such practices in the name of public morality and respected, within the bosom of their families, the laws of procreation, which were essential to humanity's continued survival. When it removed the magistrates' authority over sexuality, this industrious and puritanical society was obliged to invent new rules that allowed it to condemn the sexual practices it enjoyed in the privacy of its
maisons closes
, without having to burn the perverse at the stake. It therefore made a drastic distinction between good and bad perverts, or between those who could be regarded as members of a âdangerous class' or an âaccursed race' â and as objects of hatred who should be eradicated â and those who were deemed to be recuperable, curable or capable of achieving a high degree of civilization.
In this context, the positivist discourse of mental medicine offered the triumphant bourgeoisie with the ethics it had always dreamed of having: a law-based ethics modelled on science and not on religion.
5
Two disciplines derived from psychiatry â sexology and criminology â were entrusted with the mission of exploring in depth the darkest aspects of the human soul.
A whole nomenclature emerged at the end of the nineteenth century thanks to the scientific medicine we inherited from Xavier Bichat and then Claude Bernard, and psychoanalysis inherited it. Now completely secularized, perversion was never mentioned as such, and the word became a generic term for all sexual anomalies. The talk was not of
Perversion,
but of
perversions
. As a result, the use of a technical classification to describe the anomalies and dangerousness of human behaviour radically transformed the status of the individuals concerned: the perverse were dehumanized in order to turn them into scientific objects.
6
The elimination from sexological discourse of any definition of perversion in the sense of delight in evil, the eroticization of hatred, bodily abjection or sublimation of the drives, also went hand-in-hand with the erasure of Sade's name, which was replaced by the noun âsadism'. For one hundred years, the works of the âdivine marquis' were banned from sale,
7
and his name was cursed over and over again.
It was left to the writers who adopted the old licentious vocabulary that had been rejected by science to challenge a bourgeoisie they loathed and a sexology they found grotesque, by celebrating the new powers of evil: prostitutes, brothels, pornography, syphilis, artificial paradises, spleen, exoticism and mysticism. They included Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maupassant and Huysmans.
8
For these writers, Sade became the underground hero of an awareness of evil that could subvert the new moral order. The name of Sade was used to sublimate the very word perversion, in the sense of our dark side, at the very moment when it was being eliminated from the catalogue of mental medicine: âSade is the invisible author (he has no face) who is present everywhere. He would not be read, could not be found (Baudelaire asks Poulet-Malassis where he can find a copy of
Justine
), and could not be named (Flaubert called him the Divine Marquis or the Old Man). His books were passed from master to disciple as though they were heirlooms' (Leclerc 1998).
As the notion of homosexuality became more widespread,
9
the idea of a description based upon the inequality of the partners involved or on the specificity of the act disappeared. Psychiatric medicine's homosexual was no longer the man the
polis
needed to introduce boys to virile pleasures, and nor was he the accursed sodomite or invert who distorted the laws of nature.
10
Catalogued on the basis of his pleasure, he became perverse only because he chose another man as an object of pleasure.
It is therefore neither the hierarchy of beings nor the unnatural act that allows the new homosexuality to be defined, but the transgression of a difference or an otherness that are seen as the natural emblems of a natural world order that can be deciphered by science. Anyone who chooses as his object another man (the homosexual) or some part of (or excrement from) a body similar to his own (the fetishist, the coprophile) is perverse, and therefore pathological. The definition of perversity also applies to those who forcefully take or penetrate the body of the other without his or her consent (rapists, paedophiles), to those who ritually destroy or devour their own bodies or those of others (the sadist, the masochist, the anthropophagus, the autophagus, the necrophagus, the necrophile, the scarifier, the mutilator), to those who disguise their bodies or identities (the transvestite), to those who exhibit or capture the body as an object of pleasure (the exhibitionist, the voyeur, the narcissist, the adept at auto-eroticism). Anyone who defies the species barrier (the zoophile), denies the laws of descent and consanguinity (incest) or abolishes the law of the preservation of the species (the onanist, the sexual criminal), is perverse.
Throughout the century, the elite's fascination with the ability to detect, quantify, identify and control all sexual practices, from the most normal to the most pathological, was conspicuously focused on the great principles of semiology (the description of signs) and taxonomy (the classification of entities). Its stated objective was to find an anthropological explanation for crime and sex crimes, and to establish a radical distinction between a so-called ânormal' sexuality that paid due regard to health, procreation and restrictions on pleasure, and a so-called âperverse' sexuality centred on sterility, death, futility and
jouissance
(Lanteri-Laura 1979: 39).
Until our era, the desire to paint vice in order to marginalize it all the more was probably never stronger than at the moment when the European world that had emerged from the Revolution was torn between its fervent desire to revert to the monarchical power of old, and the great attractions of abolishing it for ever. And it is precisely at this hesitation between support for the Enlightenment and the attractions of the Counter-Enlightenment that we have to situate the new and multi-faceted science of sex. What had been a science of horror and then a science of norms now became a science of crime. Being a thinker of the dark Enlightenment, Freud inherited that science of norms, but only in order to challenge its basis.
Not all the great pioneers of sexology were of the same opinion.
11
Some saw the perversions as a natural phenomenon that was present in the animal kingdom and that originated from a particular biological or physiological organization, while others insisted that they were acquired, specific to human beings and therefore present, in different forms, in all cultures. Still others argued, finally, that they resulted from a depravity that offended the natural world order, and therefore from a hereditary pathology â lucid madness, non-delirious mania, semi-madness, deviant instincts â that was transmitted in childhood as a result of bad education. But whatever their views, all those who pioneered this approach believed that the perverse suffered as a result of their perversions, and that they must be treated and re-educated, and not just punished.
This was a repeat, in a different form, of the debate that had already divided the supporters of the philosophy of the Enlightenment: was evil a product of nature, or of culture? But while the men of the Enlightenment had refused to divide the world into a Godless humanity and a humanity that was conscious of its spirituality in order to study the human phenomenon in all its diversity and potential for progress â from a state of nature to a civilized state â the scientists of the second half of the nineteenth century established a very different definition of nature derived from the theory of evolution. In their view, the state of nature was nothing more than the reign of man's primal animality. For Darwin (1859; 1871), there was no difference between man and the higher mammals.
According to Freud (1917), Darwin had inflicted a second narcissistic wound on humanity, but for the scientific community the new paradigm meant that although animals, which were inferior to man, came first in historical terms, civilized men still displayed to varying degrees â in both their bodily organization and their mental and moral faculties â the inedible mark of that inferiority and anteriority. Deep in his heart, the human animal could turn into a human beast at any moment.
It was because of the way it modified the way we see nature that Darwin's paradigm of animality became part of the discourse of medical medicine. Henceforth, the perverse were no longer defined as those who defied God or the natural world order â animals, man, the world â but as those whose natural instincts betrayed the presence, within man, of a primal bestiality that knew nothing of any form of civilization.
From the publication, in 1871, of
Dracula
, in which Bram Stoker revived the vampire legend, to the English doctor Frederick Treeves' description of the famous case of John Merrick (the âElephant Man'), we can see the extent to which the imaginary of animal monstrosity was the source of all sorts of fantasies about the possible crossing of the species barrier. On the one hand, the horror of the blood-sucking lord of rats, bats and graves who rose from the night of time â inspired terror; on the other, the inhuman treatment inflicted upon an abnormal man who, thanks to medical science, succeeded in making the transition from self-disgust to a sublimated internalization of his bestiality, inspired compassion.
12
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austrian doctor and a contemporary of Freud's, provides a rigorous synthesis of all the currents within sexology in his famous
Sexualis Pathologica
, which went through many different editions. He defines the perverse as the âstep-children of nature' (Krafft-Ebing 1924: 574) and regards them as mentally impaired beings whose âinverted' sexual lives indicate that animality really has triumphed over civilization. He therefore appeals to the clemency of men, and is convinced that scientific investigation will eventually restore the honour of these wretches so as to protect them from the prejudices of the ignorant.
Krafft-Ebbing leads his reader through a sort of vast existential hell where we meet representatives of all social classes:
13
village idiots who exhibit their organs or who penetrate animals via every possible orifice, university professors wearing corsets or women's shoes, men of fashion who haunt cemeteries, transvestites in search of disguises or rags, quiet fathers who go in search of children (or people who are close to death) to rape and abuse, ministers of religion who blaspheme or prostitute themselves, and so on.
