Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
by Ran Prieur
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, was a French nobleman of
the late 1700s who sexually abused numerous prostitutes and servants, was
imprisoned the Bastille, served as a judge after the Revolution, was accused
of moderatism and nearly guillotined, was imprisoned again for his writings,
and lived out his years in an insane asylum, where he completed fiction and
philosophy that was decades, and in some ways centuries, ahead of its time.
Those who would condemn Sades writings because of his personal behavior
should consider Abraham Lincoln, who is widely admired for his opposition
to chattel slavery, even though he personally started and conducted an
illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and admitted that
the purpose of the war was not to end slavery but to reinforce the monolithic
character of the American domination system, or as he put it, preserve
the Union. If you think Lincolns crimes were different because he was
President, then Sade would agree. . . but in reverse! To kill a man in a
paroxysm of passion is understandable, but to have him killed by someone
else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably
discharged is incomprehensible.
The fundamental difference between people who like the Marquis de Sade,
and people who dont, is their view of evil. To the anti-Sadeans, evil runs
from the frightening edge of consciousness all the way to the infinite depths
of the universe, and human society is at best a fragile shell of civility that
keeps us from plunging into bottomless horror. Therefore, good means
authorities and rules that keep the world safe and predictable, and any ethic
or practice of selfishness or wild freedom is simply a movement toward evil.
Good people who like Sade see evil as a dead end, not the default condition of
the universe but an aberration, which can keep itself going only with great
difficulty. Not only can we defeat it with good, which means something like
empathy, but we can defeat it with awareness, because evil cannot exist in
full illumination, and we can even defeat it with more evil, in the same way
that you can blow out a fire with an explosion. The worst thing we can do
is to repress evil under a veneer of civility, which keeps it both stable and
hidden.
Theres no better example of hidden evil than the long tradition of sexual
abuse by the upper classes. In every rigid hierarchy, from primitive tribes to
the Catholic church, the rulers are constantly tempted by the sexual side
of domination. Im not sure why domination has a sexual side, but it does,
and its more compelling than non-sexual domination or non-dominating
sexuality. The Marquis de Sade was on one level another participant in elite
sex abuse, and on another level its greatest enemy, because he brought it into
the light. For one thing, he left witnesses. Normal elite sex abusers kill their
victims, or intimidate them into silence, or make the abuse so unbelievable
that if the victims try to report it, everyone will think theyre crazy. Sade
was a psychic exhibitionist who seems to have wanted his victims to tell
their stories.
More important, through his writing he brought his own feelings, and a value
system that justified them, into the light. His masterpiece is Philosophy in
the Bedroom (available in PDF from the Marquis de Sade eLibrary). Heres
a typical passage:
Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves;
nothing has more of the egoistic than her message, and what
we recognize most clearly therein is the immutable and sacred
counsel: prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense.
But the others, they say to you, may avenge themselves. . . Let
them! The mightier will vanquish; he will be right. Very well,
there it is, the primitive state of perpetual strife and destruction
for which Natures hand created us, and within which alone it is
of advantage to her that we remain.
Philosophy in the Bedroom is like Nietzche, but a hundred years sooner
and mixed with graphic sex. Its like Darwin but decades sooner and without holding back. Darwin followed Sade in declaring nature a war of all
against all in which the strong are right to exterminate the weak, but he
stopped there and left the human social implications vague and unspoken,
which enabled the elite to quietly keep social Darwinism to themselves and
engineer two centuries of tyranny and ecocide.
Sade took the same idea to its logical conclusion and said that every individual human should be free to rob and rape and murder! His vision, almost 100
years before anarchism, was the total democratization of force, even force at
its most horrific. His goal was to break the alliance between savagery and
Empire, which would have denied savagery its strongest tools, made Empire
impossible, and prevented every major atrocity of the industrial age.
Of course I dont agree that every human should be free to rape and murder,
and I think his vision was naive, but its damn hard to explain why. The
whole modern age could be called the Sadean Age, because for 250 years
weve been struggling with the issues he raised. We believe in freedom,
still defined in 18th century terms as the freedom of selfish individuals
to gratify desires. We believe in equality, that this freedom should be
distributed to all. And almost everyone still holds Sades proto-Darwinian
view of nature as an amoral, hyper-selfish struggle for survival. To this day,
Sade challenges us to take these beliefs seriously or abandon them, to shit
or get off the pot.
For 250 years weve done neither. What Sade (and Adam Smith, and Jefferson, and many others) failed to understand is that enlightenment-style
freedom cannot possibly be held by all, because it includes the freedom to
dominate, and its the nature of domination to form monopolies and hierarchies. Once there is power-over, no law, religion, or ideology can stop it from
forming a giant system in which no individual has any power, but merely
channels the power of the system itself.
I said the elite kept Sades philosophy for themselves, but even they dont
get to live by it. True Sadean freedom belongs only to the Beast, the social
organism made up of every link of power-over in the world. In the modern
age, the physical form of that Beast is the industrial megamachine. It is the
worlds one and only Sadean actor, ravaging whole continents for no other
reason than the joy of indifferent brutality. Its human slaves experience this
joy vicariously through the beautiful deadness of monolithic architecture,
through the addictive rush of increasing numbers and soulless change, and
through scenes of wild freedom on television. More than would ever admit
it take secret pleasure in forests being turned into parking lots. They call
it progress or civilization or modernization or even evolution, but a
more precise term is technosadism: the spiritual habit of taking pleasure in
withholding empathy from the living while they are turned by mechanical
action into the dead.
Technosadism is a religion, and for some reason humans need religion. Its
not enough for us to say, heres a set of rules that makes a good game. We
need a Story, a Meaning, a Role in something larger. Technosadism provides
this meaning by projecting its own behavior onto nature, defined as the
whole universe. This world rests on the back of selfish brutality, which again
rests on selfish brutality, and so on all the way down. And our holy quest
is to out-brutalize nature itself, to beat it into submission: wolves, jungles,
volcanoes, planets, stars.
What this religion is missing is God, and not just a bearded sky father but
any kind of guiding intelligence. The modern machine metaphysics that
the universe is nothing but lifeless bouncing particles and waves is often
credited to Descartes, but he believed in God, and even Isaac Newton was
into esoteric spirituality. So how did we lose God? Richard Dawkins could
not say it any better today than Sade did in Philosophy in the Bedroom in
1795:
. . . if movement is inherent in Nature; if, in short, she alone,
by reason of her energy, is able to create, produce, preserve,
maintain, hold in equilibrium within the immense plains of space
all the spheres that stand before our gaze and whose uniform
march, unvarying, fills us with awe and admiration, what then
becomes of the need to seek out a foreign agent, since this active
faculty essentially is to be found in Nature herself, who is naught
3