Search for ‘Leland de la Durantaye’ (2 articles found)
Curse nature
On 2 July 1789, a man whose official designation in the prison fortress of the Bastille was ‘Monsieur Six’ addressed the people of Paris. He spoke – or shouted – from his cell in the Tour de la Liberté, and in no uncertain terms. The officials holding him, and the regime they served, were villains, devils, criminals and worse. What’s more, they had already begun to slit the prisoners’ throats. There was no time to lose. That evening, the governor of the Bastille, who had slit no throats, informed his superior that if Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, whom 13 years of imprisonment without trial had done nothing to mellow, were not removed from his prison that very night he could no longer guarantee its security. His wish was granted and Monsieur Six was taken in the night to a madhouse, where his screams would go unheeded. In the event, 11 days later, the security of the Bastille ceased to be guaranteed when it was stormed by a revolutionary mob.
The men and women who had been massing outside the building for the preceding weeks at last found themselves running through its halls (the governor’s severed head had already been placed on a pike), unlocking door after door as they went. Number six, untouched since its last occupant’s departure, was awash with paper. There was a library of more than six hundred books, many of them rare, and dozens on dozens of manuscripts in a Voltairean variety of genres (Voltaire himself – a friend of Sade’s father – had twice been a prisoner in the Bastille). There were so many manuscripts that their author had prepared a catalogue raisonné to keep track of them: two volumes of essays, eight of fiction, 16 historical novellas, twenty-odd plays, and much more work in progress. Reading conditions were not favourable that night and by morning virtually the whole oeuvre had been destroyed. For the remaining 25 years of Sade’s life there was one loss that he mourned more bitterly than the rest. This manuscript – which he had been careful to leave out of the catalogue – was written in a small clear hand on both sides of a forty-foot-long roll of paper hidden in a crevice of the cell’s 14th-century wall. When the fifty-year-old Sade emerged from his madhouse on Good Friday the following year, the Bastille had not only been stormed, it had been destroyed – burned down and carried away, brick by brick. And so Sade naturally abandoned all hope for the manuscript over which years later he still claimed to shed ‘tears of blood’.
Although Sade was never to know it, his manuscript had survived that night, and every night since: having been smuggled out of the Bastille it was handed down through three generations of one French family before appearing at auction and then being bought by a German sexologist, who published it in Berlin in 1904 as The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. Publication made the manuscript’s subsequent movements, if anything, still more mysterious. It has since been stolen at least once, and been the subject of a great deal of litigation. For decades it couldn’t travel outside Switzerland because of fears it might be seized by the French authorities. Last year it sold at auction for €7 million; Lloyd’s insured it for €12 million.
... Understanding Sade means understanding his libertines. Justine grew through ever more attention being given to them, with each successive version casting more light on what these supremely ruthless men and women are doing. What is made immediately clear is that they are not hedonists, and are not simply following their desires. Their pleasure principle is rigorous and reasoned, and their ultimate goal isn’t even pleasure in any easily recognisable form. This is not so much because it contains pain – it’s a common enough idea, from ancient Greece to recent studies in neuroscience, that pain and pleasure are wedded in mysterious ways – but because their goal is to feel nothing at all, precisely as they perform the most criminal acts imaginable. Sade’s libertines cede to every criminal, harmful, violent impulse that occurs to them; they find that reason not only encourages but obliges them to do so. But the same does not apply to generous or loving desires. They strive to reason away any kind or caring impulse that might come to mind. A libertine in Juliette speaks for all her fellows when she describes ‘a tranquillity, a repose in the passions, a stoicism that allows me to do everything and suffer everything without emotion’. (The true Sadean libertine is never a sadist in the modern or medical sense of the term: although they freely cause pain to the bodies around them, they are ideally indifferent to anything those bodies experience.) This is why the scenes of debauch are so theatrical, so architectural, so excessive, as well as being the reason they are largely unsensual (in that they make few appeals to any sense but sight). We are told in precise detail who is whipping whom while perched on what, we are given the exact position of gardener, turkey-cock, cleric and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, but there is almost no sensual detail, no tingling of excitement, no tiny modulation of voice, no warmth of touch, no odour. What Sade presents is a scenography, and he makes no secret of the fact: he routinely employs terms from the theatre such as ‘scene’, ‘act’, ‘posture’, ‘position’ and ‘tableau’. You aren’t meant to imagine that you’re there and participating: you’re meant to imagine that you’re watching. But the most important thing that Sade’s idea of an exalted apathy explains is why the books can never end and why their libertines are so enraged.
Sade’s philosophy describes a circle of fire in which the libertines are trapped. The first stage of their dialectic of Enlightenment involves doing away with God in favour of Nature. Nature burns away religious belief through the heat of its passions – or so it seems to the apprentice libertine. But things can’t end so harmoniously. For what is Nature, when capitalised in that way? ‘Whore!’ says Juliette, as it dawns on her that Nature is just one more imposition of order on chaos – less obviously erroneous than a Christian God, but of the same immaterial substance. If you are a libertine in Sade’s world you are seeking to break something you fear is unbreakable: belief in order and care for others. This is where real libertine rage sets in. In the speech that gave the Musée d’Orsay their exhibition title, a libertine cries out that he wants ‘to attack the sun so as to deprive the universe of it, or use it to set the world aflame’. The same rage makes a libertine elsewhere in Sade cry out: ‘Oh, if I could set the universe on fire, I should still curse Nature for offering only one world to my fiery desires!’ With the loss of a coherent idea of Nature the libertine loses, as Juliette loses, a coherent idea of crime: Juliette is forced to conclude that ‘crime has no reality: that is, the possibility of crime does not exist because there is no way to outrage nature.’ Sade’s libertines dream of apathy, but for them apathy is like the grail – they can never quite reach it.
‘Far from placing desire above all,’ Blanchot observed, ‘Sade judged it suspect and subordinated it.’ Desire fully felt moves you towards someone, and the very point of the libertine exercise was to move away from them, to ascend ever higher into the empyrean of one’s own autonomy. So much of our energy, Sade observes, flows towards others. Were we able to reverse that flow, to feel all our energy flood back into ourselves, we would be truly free. This is the libertines’ end. That is why they do all they do: why every ounce of fellow feeling has to be systematically stamped out. ‘It is no accident that sadism, as an individual phenomenon bearing the name of a man,’ Foucault remarked in his (unpublished) lectures on Sade, ‘was born of confinement and, within confinement, that Sade’s entire work is dominated by the images of the Fortress, the Cell, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible island, which thus form, as it were, the natural habitat of unreason.’
A turtle's pace
Walter Benjamin notes that in Baudelaire’s Paris a fleet of more than five hundred sedan chairs was still in use for elegant transport; that it was fashionable for flâneurs to purchase turtles and use them to set their pace; that a worker committed suicide in the home of the fantastically popular novelist Eugѐne Sue, leaving a note in which he hoped ‘dying would be easier for me if I died under the roof a man who stands up for us and loves us.’ The chief interest of this phase of the work is to watch an array of ‘individual details’ deployed and redeployed in the search for new forms of presentation and illumination.
… At a number of points in his final years Benjamin referred to the ‘now of knowability’. ‘Every now,’ he claimed, ‘is the now of a particular knowability.’ His most deeply felt philological conviction was that no document of the past – whether recent or remote – is equally comprehensible at all times. Every document, every work, every poem, has what he called a ‘historical index’, a secret rendezvous with the present. For Benjamin the point of historical study was not that the past shed continuous light on the present, or that the present cast a steady light on the past. Rather, at certain points in history works offer a ‘now of knowability’ (or a ‘now of readability’), a moment of fortuitous opportunity,
