Sade's Sensibilities by Sclippa Norbert Parker Kate & Norbert Sclippa

Author:Sclippa, Norbert,Parker, Kate & Norbert Sclippa [Parker, Kate & Sclippa, Norbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Natania Meeker

Sade at the End of the World

What does it mean to read Sade at a moment of eco-nomic and environmental crisis? Sade, imagining a world where everything (and everyone) is subject to consumption, allows us to experience in narrative what Angela Carter has called “the fiscal morality of a market-place red in tooth and claw.”1 In his fascination with accumulated wealth as a mechanism of social and sexual domination, Sade paints the portrait of a humanity (productively) decimated by its own appetites, and in this sense he seems a fitting prophet for a social order that both fetishizes greed and subjects all creatures, humans included and not excepted, to a relentless logic of acquisition and possession. Sade’s libertines are the avatars of a corruption both moral and financial, “ces sangsues toujours à l’affût des calamités publiques qu’ils font naître au lieu d’apaiser” [those leeches, always on the lookout for public calamities that they inspire rather than assuage], as he describes the protagonists of Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome.2 The figure of speech here is telling: the anti-heroes of the narrative, sucking the lifeblood of the public, are not just like the leech, they are in fact driven by the very same forces that animate him. Their hungers are identical, and they are where the story begins.

In its obsession with consumption, Sade’s materialism, poised at the moment when matter in motion becomes desire in action, oscillates between ancient and modern models. We witness in his work how a classically-inflected representation of the universe as the circulation of material particles may be reconstructed around all-consuming appetite as the animating force of that circulation—an inhuman vitalism in which “we” (including each animate and animal body) are all subject to the same compulsions.3 At the origins of capitalism we find a yearning to overcome the constraints that structure a neo-Epicurean understanding of matter and its movements. Sade envisions a world in which desire breaks down distinctions among beings—humans, animals, and even plants—and in this way reveals how our sense of human exceptionalism is undermined by the vital force of desire itself. The energy of appetite, rather than disrupting the “fiscal morality” of the market, is only heightened within it—and this is an energy that is shared among all bodies. In this context, Sade uncovers the fundamental inhumanity of consumption as a driving force; all kinds of creatures may potentially find their place within his economies. If Sade, as James Steintrager has recently shown, has often served as the emblem of a liberation that fails to arrive, it is perhaps in part because the “freedom” that he envisions appears to leave so little room for human nature, and indeed human sovereignty, as such.4 Our mastery of other bodies and beings fails to differentiate us from them; instead, it heightens their proximity to us.

Yet Sade keeps open a place for human exceptionalism—a mode of being in the world that does in fact distinguish his heroes and heroines from the other creatures upon which they satisfy their desires.

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