Pierre Klossowski The Phantasms of Perversion: Sade and Fourier

We shall consider only one aspect of Sade's thought which may enlighten us on the pathological behaviour of our industrial world, insofar as this is foreshadowed by his description. Further, we shall attempt to compare his tableau with the vision of Fourier which, starting from Sadian observations, anticipates possibilities reserved by the modern economic world for the realm of the impulses. Our debate between Sade and Fourier takes its point of departure in the following question: how does the economy, independently, but perhaps by the very law of supply and demand that governs exchange, reveal itself to be a mode of expression, representation and self-interpretation of the affective life? Witnesses to the social upheavals of the Consulate and the Empire (Sade died in 1814, Fourier in 1837), both in a way divine the metamorphoses of affectivity in its conflict with the repressive forces of modern institutions, as well as the metamorphoses of these repressive forces in their conflict with affects. But if this conflict gives rise to a reciprocal metamorphosis of the contending forces, it is because sexual impulses, in particular the forms of voluptuous emotion, are directly affected by the norms of the economy at the time. The primary force of repression within the impulses is the formation of the organic and psychic unity of the agent [suppt]: a repression which, for the agent himself, corresponds to a constraint he suffers during the conflict waged by the impulses against those which combine to constitute him. Meanwhile, on the outside, this repression (hence also this conflict) continues once the agent's individual unity is integrated with, and thus defined by, a hierarchy of values to which corresponds a hierarchy of needs: this hierarchy of needs is the economic form of repression imposed by institutions, by and through the consciousness of the agent, on the imponderable forces of his psychic life. Thanks to his acquired organic and moral unity, the individual defines his impulses to himself within his own milieu only as a set of material and moral needs; which means he can no longer affirm himself by the movements of his affective life, but only as possessor of his unity,

by his capacity to possess or conserve goods external to himself, to produce or give some in order to consume or receive others so long as it is always a question of objects and not of other living entities, except in circumstances where it would be legitimate to possess living beings as simple objects. In order to understand how voluptuous emotions become mere objects of commerce and economic factors in our age of indiscriminate industrialisation, we must consider for a moment what is meant by the terms "sexuality" and "eroticism". The forms of voluptuous emotion might then reveal a connection, at once secret and tragic, with the anthropomorphous phenomenon of the economy and exchange. To take a notable example, what can be seen in Sade's description of perversion, or the attachment of voluptuous emotions to an apparently incongruous object? The behaviour analysed by Sade, from what he calls simple to compound passions, which we call perversion, is nothing but the primary reaction against pure animality, and thus a primary interpretative manifestation of the impulses themselves such as to decompose what is genetically embraced by the term "sexuality": on the one hand, the voluptuous emotions necessary to the act of procreation, and on the other, the specific instinct of procreation (or the propagation and conservation of the species), two propensities whose combination founds the unity of the reproductive individual, and whose prolonged separation, organic maturation notwithstanding, challenges his own life function. The term "perversion", then, only designates the fixation of voluptuous emotions at a stage prior to the act of procreation, while the Sadian terms, simple passions combining into compound passions, designate the different ruses by which the initial voluptuous emotions, in their interpretative capacity, come to choose from among the different organic functions new objects of sensation, in order to substitute these for the solely procreative function and thus keep the latter indefinitely in suspension. What are these substitutions, these ruses, if not so many deductions from the instinct of propagation? Whence the moment that eventually determines in the individual an antispecific, anti-gregarious behaviour. At the individual level, however, this behaviour leads to several gestures, or better still to a unique gesture, which in Sade is the anti-gregarious gesture par excellence: sodomy, key to all Sadian perversions. What

is it that presides over this gesture? That same interpretative capacity of the initial emotions which allows the deduction from the instinct of propagation. The instinctual forces thus deducted then forth the material for a phantasm which emotion interprets, phantasm here having the role of "fabricated" object; it is the use of this phantasm by an instinctual force which gives value to the emotion, which in turn only occurs with this use. The use of a phantasm in perversion to procure emotion requires, precisely, that the phantasm be inexchangeable. Here intervenes the primary valorisation of the emotion experienced: an impulse, which we call perverted by the very fact that it refuses the gregarious fulfillment of the unity (or procreative function) of the individual, offers itself in its intensity as that which is inexchangeable, therefore priceless. And although an individual's unity manages to complete itself physiologically, in bodily appearance, in a sense this unity is exchanged against the phantasm under those constraint it is exclusively maintained. * If Fourier's work is as shocking, as important, as delirious as Sade's, the latter is not as bizarre. Conversely, Sade vigorously abides by the rules of classical expression, even though he often preludes the pathos of romanticism. Fourier, in an often loose, no less reasoned prose, concocts a whole vocabulary (according to a makeshift system) which belongs to both pure madness and the visionary genre, and on the basis of which -- a truly inspired move -- he wields his sarcasm with respect to realities or existing norms. In order to create his classification of the various human passions, Fourier's bizarre terminology reflects a possible order which he actualises by his very vision. In the name of this vision, he wields his virulent satire on the manners and grotesque situations of the society of his time. Therefore Fourier's prophecy of future (utopian, or still nonexistent) felicity corresponds to an explicit critique of the existing economic world. The difference from Sade is that, with the Marquis, this critique always remains embedded in the violence of the social tableau his writing describes. One reason for this is undoubtedly that Fourier, of petitbourgeois means, and a shop assistant during the Empire and the Restoration, had a day-to-day

experience of business; whereas Sade, a great landed nobleman, confined to the Bastille by his mother-in-law, worked on an enormous opus. From the time he was freed and ruined by the Revolution, Sade knew only pecuniary preoccupations, and then at the level of men of letters in modern society. From Fourier's point of view it would seem that Sade was a prophet of doom, that what he represented on the plane of imaginative creation was verified, and continues to be verified, by the social phenomenon of the industrial world. But if the facts seem to decide in favour of Sade, saying that Fourier the prophet of felicity is a false prophet, or even simply utopian, is a matter of interpretation or, at the very least, of collusion. Deciding in favour of Sade against Fourier amounts, for Fourier, to wanting the inevitable. If Fourier behaves like a prophet of felicity it is because for him nothing is inevitable, by reason of the erotic force itself, which is "divine" and thus essentially creative. To defend the inevitable as Sade did (in the name of his thoroughgoing atheism) is to betray and strike directly at the erotic force that Sade wanted to explain but nonetheless deliberately chained to institutions, by condemning it to be destroyed along with them. In other words, Fourier bitterly begrudged Sade for having explored a territory common to both in such a way as to make unrealisable Fourier's project of the free play of the passions. Nevertheless, the prophecy of phalansterian felicity takes its point of departure in the tableau of perversions Sade provides. Fourier wants to restore in his project what implicitly exists in Sade, but what Sade relentlessly seems to destroy by virtue of his rational expression: voluptuous beatitude. To separate the passions as monstrosities from the life functions of the human species, is to ruin these same passions. In order to restore perversity to the life function, aggressivity must be allowed the possibility of creating its object: the seriousness of perversion must be replaced by play. * The social tableau that Sade made the foundation of his major novel Justine and Juliette corresponds to the types of perversion described in 120 Days of Sodom. The perverse characters he invented from pathological cases, and catalogued in 120 Days, no longer necessarily operate in brothels but are organised

according to their condition and estate, fortune and influence, whether in their house, country estate, palace or laboratory: nobles or commoners, financiers, state ministers, prelates or bishops, lords masquerading as innkeepers, surgeons and chemists, highwaymen. By this means (under the influence of the English novelists whose realism he praised, not only the fantastical roman noir of Anne Radcliffe, but Fielding among others) Sade intended to demonstrate that the existing institutions of any regime (Directoire or Ancien Rgime) implicitly further what we shall call the polymorphous perverse; hence that they structure perversions. Justine's perspective (Ancien Rgime) was that of a victim with illusions about norms and normative institutions. Juliette's perspective is that of executioners and monsters, in whose hands institutions are exploited to the limit of their abnormalities. The privileged guardians of these institutions merely obey this institutional structuring of fundamental perversity by reason of a perfect connivance with the means of repression, which they morally suffer themselves before practicing these externally and extracting forms of enjoyment from them. They uphold these institutions all the better by purposely speaking their language; without it their perverse inclinations would be unable to assume, in their own eyes, any consistent form. This is also why Sade has them speak with a rigour of expression and argumentation which is perfectly rational, and does not himself invent some code language. Admittedly, this language is coded precisely because it is rational; it is coded for those in whom Sade thinks he sees his accomplices in thought and deed. Where monstrosity can explain itself as such, there is formed the "Society of the Friends of Crime". But the "Friends of Crime" have no need to overthrow institutions. This is already achieved by the very fact that the clandestine society exists. * Fourier wants to divorce himself from this idea of a clandestine society, as he has from atheist philosophy: clandestinity had once been fruitful, but it is still determined by what it struggles against. Fourier takes up the various groups of accomplices at their point of origin: passions incompatible with the established order. It is no longer a question of sustaining the equivocation of a

rational language which would serve the esoteric interest of abnormalities. A language must be reinvented as so many idioms of the passions -- something which Sade did not care for, and absolutely refused to do. For Fourier, it is a question of reconstructing language according to a logic appropriate to the passions, and thus of rendering intelligible the abnormalities which rational language renders incommunicable. It is only in this sense that the perverse ceases to be perverse, that total monstrosity ceases to be monstrous, in order to become a flowering of livable forces. According to Fourier, this would mean a positive overthrow of institutions. No longer must the institutions "structure" perversions as depicted in Sade's social tableau; rather, perversions must in turn create their own institutions. How can they accomplish this? By specific forms of activity requiring the formation of groups. The different age brackets establishing the affiliated groups projected by Fourier, testify to a preoccupation which is totally absent from Sade: namely, how does a perversion develop once granted its object? Hence the concern for the psychology of children. In Fourier, the child and the infantile world pass to the fore: the site where institutions, while claiming to stifle the libidinal offshoots of humankind, can only cultivate sterile abnormalities.1 We must immediately banish the perspective of our psychoanalytic therapeutics, along with notions of neurosis and perversion. Neither Fourier nor Sade has the least idea of curing beings of their perversion or of the reverse of perversion, neurosis. The imagination confined in the phantasm of a perversion aspires to free itself by the creation of an object; i.e. to flee its forces so as to situate itself outside its constraint and discover its meaning, thus to recognise as law what motivates the emotion. But it would also be incorrect to believe that the spirit of "privilege", ambition and pride, the exercise of power should be considered as a vice or evil: for Fourier (as for Sade) these aggressive aspirations must be safeguarded. However, what Sade advocated in the way of clandestine castes exercising with impunity their free imagination, is for Fourier only sterile and arbitrary. Compared to the immense resources each new generation represents, the clandestine society, since it is turned in on itself, remains impoverished. On the other hand, the principle underlying clandestine groups must be upheld and extended to all existing

society: the latter must be disintegrated, disaggregated into the various affective classifications of age and social level. Thus it can be said that in comparison with Sade, Fourier proposes a competition between multiple "clandestinities" in such a way that the affects, as propensities determined by a particular object, remain secret from each other' until confronted with those in which they will find their complementary combination. In effect, each group of affects is founded on emotions whose phantasms cannot be communicated other than within their own immediate circuit. Thus it is necessary to create a sphere where one or many simulacra may be able to mediate an exchange of complementary phantasms at the level of individuals, and thus permit a co-operation between these different groups. * Sade, even before Nietzsche, grapples with gregariousness. Although given to perspectives and formulations of a different origin, both see in the species a raw material which only justifies itself by the elaboration of exceptions: monsters, in gregarious terms. Yet the intrinsic quality of the monster is to avoid simple individual unity. At once less and more than an individual, the monster shatters its own unity for the benefit of the phantasms that make it a monster. For Sade (as much as for Nietzsche) the individual is only ever the accidental meeting-place of different impulses which, unable to express themselves other than through an agent, only grant him an illusory identity, and duration of identity: the time of a conflict. What then is the exception? A momentary success of "nature" which, according to Sade, only manages to achieve its total expression in any one instance of the species by destroying in the same movement the specific functions of that person. This is what the sodomite act testifies: precisely because it strikes at the law of propagation of the species, it becomes for Sade the key gesture of integral monstrosity. From the point of view of Fourier, Sade seems to negate what he otherwise rightly affirms. This supposed monstrosity, for Fourier, does not belong in its own right to a few privileged persons to realise wholly at the expense of the species. The still unsuspected wealth of the so-called polymorphous perverse, or the diversity of the passions, is not the product of blind forces, but lies in the

project of a "divine creation". All of humanity constitutes the agent of the universal Eros. It is not the chance monsters that resolve to fully experience the universal Eros, but the continually transformable and organisable character of the impulses. Number and quantity, far from dissipating rare and singular emotions, on the contrary contribute to their diversification. Large numbers of specimens never repeats the same emotion, but ensures the expression of its infinite variety. Since the impulses always exceed individual unity in one's own phantasms, rendering it capable by its plurality of passions of associating with other impulses in other unities, the law of exchange (supply and demand) must involve psychically affirmed subjects, and not those economically determined by institutions; the true producer or true consumer is not the purely fictional unity of individuals, but their phantasmatic impulses: as things stand, their supposed abnormality. The appropriation of the polymorphous perverse by the integral monsters described by Sade, would therefore be in Fourier's eyes only the necessary response to the fact that institutions for their part appropriate individual life functions in the name of an erroneous conception of the norms of the species, which is profitable to them because they sterilise the individual's perverse tendencies so as better to proclaim them unproductive. But the relationship of integral monsters to institutionalised norms, and of institutions to abnormalities, is two-fold. The appropriation of perverse propensities has its analogue in the converse situation, that of the existing economic regime: the appropriation of wealth by a few establishes fraud in psychic exchange, in the same manner as with the distribution of material goods. The "economic" monster polarises the "psychic" monster in the absence of an economy rounded on the psychic character of exchange, or in the absence of a pathological interpretation (of the law) of supply and demand.2 * At issue is the shafting of the "psychic goods" or wealth offered by the polymorphous perverse and the mechanics of this division of goods through exchange, which presupposes that to be exchangeable this kind of wealth is "communicable".

For both Fourier and Sade, the inherently incommunicable phantasm requires the creation of a simulacrum; but precisely this sense of simulacrum from the point of view of exchange, is taken by Fourier in a totally opposite direction. The principle of the simulacrum for Fourier is play (entertainment, spectacle, ritual ceremony, competitive activity -- therefore not work but creativeness). Contrary to Sade, this will establish a total gratuity of psychic (as well as material) exchange. However, it is not only fundamental aggressiveness or the way that he wants to overcome it in play, but the unsimulated reality of perversion, its unsimulatibility, which puts in question Fourier's enterprise. For a simulacrum to exist there has to be a real, irreducible basis, inseparable from the phantasm which governs the reality of a particular behaviour. It someone is driven to kill, to torture or to less radical forms of violence, the phantasm acting in the organism and its reflexes remain ineradicable. This is exactly what Sade asserts and what Fourier denies. Once a phantasm comes into existence, it must be reproduced as a simulacrum: the simulacrum in this sense is not, however, a catharsis -- that would only be a misuse of forces -but rather reconstitutes and reproduces the reality of the phantasm at the level of play. Fourier gambles not so much on liberty as on liberating creation; whereas the creation of an object compatible with perversion (which could allow it to take on the appearance of a game) is precisely what Sade does not propose: for him, perversion itself is a game with respect to the inevitability of norms. This is why the destruction of its object is inseparable from the perverse emotion, why what we call the death instinct is indissociable from the life function. Fourier does not defend sublimation, in Freud's sense, but rather a malleability, indeed a plasticity of the impulses; antagonistic drives are only "life" and "death" relative to the fixity or the mutation of the phantasm. This is why Fourier insists on the serial and combinatory character of perversions, suitable for the elaboration of renewable structures of pleasure. This debate could be prolonged indefinitely. A fundamental resistance is necessary, even when this is still an illusion: pleasure (sexual pleasure), thus the voluptuous emotion presupposes a resistance, and the simulacrum has no value, no effect unless resistance exists outside the simulacrum. Nevertheless, Fourier constantly objects that the experience of resistance, of

aggressiveness, even of violence, forms the mainspring of play. And if play is in effect a simulacrum, why wouldn't the latter absorb the experience of violence, once violence constitutes the substance of the simulacrum? Without doubt an agent is necessary to express the singularity of a perversion or mania. But how could anyone "seriously" simulate what they feel except -and no better than -- by simulating exactly that phantasm which makes them a maniac or pervert? Seriousness here does not reside in the fanaticism with which the agent is attached to his phantasms, but in the irreducible force with which the impulses subject the agent to his phantasm, becoming manifest themselves in the act of consuming him. Without this seriousness neither would there be any real sensual pleasure, which is only ever experienced because it takes this seriousness into account, so as to become light and frivolous, "at the cost of seriousness", with respect to the rest of existence. * If in his projects for a secret society Sade shows that the monster or pervert has to rely on accomplices, he does not conceive the law of exchange other than in an institutional manner. These accomplices (insofar as none believe in any "unique" God or guarantor of their own physical and moral identity), these Sadian monsters "exchange" in order to betray one another, and nothing is better received in integral monstrosity than fraud. Nor could it be any different, since institutions and the individuals they define only exist through fraud in respect of the impulses which secretly guide them.3 Sade knowingly ignores any possibility, thus any notion of exchange between individuals at the level of the passions, and all the more so at the level of perversions. It is by virtue of the incommunicability of what they feel within themselves, with respect to each other, that only a simulacrum of communication exists for Sade, that of prostitutional venality -- a simulacrum (signified by the universal equivalent of money) excluding any intelligibility of what a person momentarily represents to the one who enjoys him, unless it be in fact his body or that thing his expropriated body may be worth for and in the phantasm of the other.4

One should never lose sight of the principle which in Sade is essential to the practice of integral monstrosity: it is from the negation of the moral God, from the abolition of a responsible and self-identical self, that Sade derives the practical consequence of expropriation (voluntary or forced) of the self's body. In effect, all cases of perversity use the self's body and the body of others as instruments for liquidating personal identity to the benefit of their particular phantasm. To abolish the ownership of the body of oneself and of others is an operation inherent in perverse imagination. The pervert inhabits the body of another as if it were his own, and so attributes his own to the other, which amounts to saying that the expropriated body is recovered as a phantasmatic domain such that it becomes merely the equivalent of the phantasm. But it will only really be the simulacrum of the phantasm provided it is produced under the sign of value or price. The difference (not only historical and social) between the Sadian world and that of Fourier is that the former cannot concern itself with the mediating role assigned by Fourier to the production of objects relative to the passions. If only for Sade himself, the sole production he acknowledges in this regard is the book he writes, and in a general way, the artistic production considered in the Society of the Friends of Crime: art and literature become instruments for the valorisation of the phantasms they suggest and describe. Given that he interprets unintelligible monstrosity by the evident means of art and philosophical argument, Sade himself enters the field of exchange; having written books, he wants to propagate a way of seeing and understanding. That he is violently contemptuous of traditional pornography, absolutely agrees with his moral stance: his postulate of universal prostitution. For pornography exists only to deny this postulate. It falls to Sade to become the first modern thinker to insist on the close relationship between the phantasm and its commercial valorisation, thus on the role of money as a sign of the phantasm's inestimable value. Money is an integral part of the representative mode of perversion. Because the perverse phantasm is inherently unintelligible and inexchangeable, money constitutes (by its abstract character) its universally intelligible equivalent. But we must distinguish between two things here in Sade: on the one hand, the phantasmatic function of money, the act

of buying or of being sold, insofar as money is only an exteriorisation of perversity, a means of realising it between different partners; and on the other, the mediating function of money between the closed world of abnormalities and the world of institutional norms. Here we find the same relationship that logically structured language has in Sade with respect to abnormalities -- a relationship of mutual transgression and condemnation between abnormalities and the norms. Money, the equivalent of scarce wealth, the sign of toil and hardship in the institutional sense, must signify the rediversion of this wealth in favour of the perverse phantasm If the phantasm requires a determinate expenditure, the equivalence of the phantasm thus concretised will be expressed by as much wealth as represents the purchasing power of this money: so much external toil and hardship in vain. Consequently money here, the equivalent of wealth, signifies the destruction of this wealth even though retaining its value; just as language, the sign of what exists (as having a meaning), becomes for Sade the sign of the nonexistent, or simply of the possible (devoid of meaning according to the norms of institutional language). At the same tinge that it represents and guarantees what exists, money becomes, in the Sadian world, all the more a sign of what does not yet exist -- all the more, I say, because in integral monstrosity the transgression of norms, which any abnormality always signifies, presents itself as a gradual conquest of the nonexistent or the possible. And indeed, Sadian transgression is a constant reappropriation of the possible, to the extent that the existing state of things has eliminated the possible from any other form of existence. The possibility of that which does not exist, can never remain only possible. For if this possibility were retrieved by the act of transgression, acquiring a new form of existence, it would have to be transgressed once more, since there would be another eliminated possibility to retrieve. What the act of transgression retrieves, with regard to the possibility of that which does not exist, is its own possibility of transgressing what does exist. As perverse behaviour, the act of transgressing existing norms in the name of a still nonexistent possibility suggested by the phantasm, is eminently represented by tile very nature of money. This nature lies in the freedom to either choose or refuse commodities from

among the different existing ones. By this possibility of choice of refusal, it questions the value of what exists in favour of what does not exist. That which does not exist according to the norms, hence the abnormalities only negatively stated in language as an absence of these norms, is positively stated by the money unspent, thus denied to what exists. The closed world of perversion, being the world of the incommunicable, sanctions by money the very incommunicability that exists between things; this is the only intelligible way that the world of abnormalities can react positively towards the world of norms. In order to make itself understood by the institutional world, integral monstrosity borrows its monetary sign; which, according to the Sadian postulate, amounts to asserting that there is only one authentic universal communication: the exchange of bodies by the secret language of body signs. Sade's argument is more or less the following: institutions claim to preserve individual liberty by substituting for the exchange of bodies the exchange of goods by means of money, a neutral as well as equivocal sign. Under the pretext of circulating wealth, money only works to ensure the secret exchange of bodies in the name, and in the interest of, institutions. The disavowal of integral monstrosity by institutions returns, de facto, as a material and moral prostitution. The whole meaning of the secret societies imagined by Sade is to make this dilemma apparent: either communication through the exchange of bodies, or prostitution under the sign of money. This dilemma is again raised by Fourier, who seeks to formulate it by taking it up at the source; whereas Sade pushes the excessiveness of the established order to the point of making the use of money an instrument of integral monstrosity. With respect to the outside, candidates for integral monstrosity can only assert themselves morally by logical language and materially by money. Morally, they find accomplices amongst normal beings; materially, they recruit their experimental victims at a high price, thus creating a competition for those to whom the institutions accord a subsistence just below the "normal". In the closed world of integral monstrosity, the phantasm (in itself unevaluable, ungraspable, useless and arbitrary) becomes constituted as a rarity once it passes to the level of bodily prestige. Already we witness the beginning of the

modern commercialisation of voluptuous emotions, except for the difference that, with industrial exploitation, suggestiveness can be standardised at a low price, thus making the living object of such emotions very costly; whereas in the Sadian era of manufacture, suggestiveness and the living object are indistinguishable. The living simulacrum of the phantasm is highly prized in the closed circuit of Sadian monstrosity. Sade is happy to record among the rules of the Society of Friends of Crime that membership is "barred to those unable to indicate a minimum yearly income of 25,000 francs, annual dues being 10,000 francs per person". Apart from this condition, no discrimination on the basis of either rank or origin is allowed. In return "twenty artists and men of letters are to be admitted upon remittance of a modest fee of one thousand francs per annum. This special condition is part of the Society's policy of patronising the arts; it regrets that its means do not allow it to admit at this insignificant price a larger number of these gifted persons whom it will always hold in high esteem". Writing this during the Directoire, Sade is being ironic about his own case: a fallen grand noble, he ekes out the miserable existence of a man of letters, accorded no esteem. Yet this question of the value of the incommunicable, in terms of the relationship with its equivalent, is one of the most pertinently raised within the Sadian outlook. As product of an art, the book or instrument, the elaboration, being the equivalent of the incommunicable phantasm and thus the simulacrum, becomes here an object of speculation, and is paid at the level of exchange, not only because it is an article of consumption, but because the act of suggestion, for whoever makes it, is from the outset the result of a bargaining between phantasms and the individual who experiences them: phantasms can only be endured by divulging them. Since the individual pays with his own substance to be freed from the grip of his phantasm, by an equivalent or simulacrum, so will he make others pay the price of having to divulge his phantasms in order to benefit from the simulacrum thus created. But the irony goes further. After all, it is Sade the man of letters who provides the substance of his imagined society. The Society of the Friends of Crime is firstly that of his own readers and thus, as he conceives it, a mental space. The secret society is only justifiable at the intellectual level, but the latter involves the production of

simulacra, and the producer of these is dependent on the demand of a clientele. The presence of the artist or writer in the Society of the Friends of Crime indicates the relation of the creator to society in general, which is closely linked to the problem of the production of goods and of their value-in the economic circuit, and in particular to the production of objects concerning psychic life, which is inherently unevaluable. The more the clients feel constrained by their own phantasm, the more the offer of a corresponding simulacrum increases its price. The Society of the Friends of Crime, according to Sade, shamefully exploits the producer of simulacra and glorifies itself by his inventions, but declares itself unable to equitably remunerate him. A similar disproportion is inscribed in the very nature of the enterprise: the more the phantasm requires the simulacrum, the better the simulacrum acts and reacts on the phantasm and nurtures it, and the higher is the price of the phantasm. Because of this, it acquires the seriousness of anything which occasions a "necessary" expense. The representation of venality in the order of Sadian phantasms adds to the valorisation of the phantasm. Not because poverty compels people to sell themselves, but quite the opposite, because their own wealth coerces them into it. Thus Juliette, the principal Sadian character, comes to variously evaluate the charms comprising her body -- although she is by no means a professional courtesan, but a woman of quality, a (premeditated) widow of the Comte de Lorsange, thus an adventuress through moral corruption. All this goes into the subtlety of the phantasm that Juliette devotes herself to making tangible. Yet the fortune thus accumulated by Juliette precipitates her into a constantly renewed expropriation of her own body. She always remains in the throes of a phantasm, and her only satisfaction comes from never having given a pittance towards the relief of human misery. This is because, in effect, Juliette represents human misery herself. How can the unevaluable wealth of the phantasm be given a monetary value? Where does this monetary value come from if not the deprivation it simultaneously signifies? This is the height of evaluation for Sade: the equivalent of the phantasm (the sum paid) not only represents the emotion in itself, but also the exclusion of thousands of human lives. From the perspective of gregariousness, this scandal increases the value.

Therefore money signifies: exclusive voluptuousness = famine = annihilation = the supreme value of the phantasm. In other words, the more this money represents thousands of mouths, the more it confirms the value of the expropriated body, the more this same body is worth thousands of lives: a phantasm = a whole population. If the misuse of money did not exist, if there were not the burden represented by this misery, the evaluation would immediately collapse. Thus it follows that money has a positive signification so far as it represents the equivalent of innumerable human lives, and a negative one so far as it arbitrarily compensates for the inexpressibility of a phantasm. But this use of money is itself inherently arbitrary, because the value of money always remains arbitrary. In itself, it is nothing but a phantasm corresponding to a phantasm. . . The precarious situation of the artist or man of letters, of the producer of simulacra within the Society of the Friends of Crime, is now absolutely clear and comprehensible. The producer of simulacra figures as an intermediary between two differing worlds of evaluation. On the one hand, he represents the intrinsic value of the simulacra produced according to institutional norms, which are those of sublimation. On the other hand, he serves the valorisation of the phantasm according to the obsessional constraint of perversion. In both cases the producer of simulacra is honoured for his "spiritual impartiality", even though in fact he is treated as a purveyor. Such is the personal situation of Sade shortly after the Revolution. One cannot serve two masters. But Sade wants to demonstrate that either way it is the saner master, hidden under the cover of institutions and showing its true face in the Society of the Friends of Crime. Once again, this master is integral monstrosity, while money, infamous sign of its wealth, becomes the sign of its glory in the Society of the Friends of Crime. It is by the expenditure on phantasms that Sade's imagined clandestine society holds hostage the world of institutional sublimations. Abolish money and you will have universal communication between beings, Sade proves by this kind of challenge that the notion of value or price is inscribed at the very base of voluptuous emotions, and that nothing is more contrary to sexual pleasure than pure gratuity. *

Fourier's opposition to Sade is best characterised by what he called Celadonism, the pure love he intended to safeguard as the height of voluptuous imagination, in order to compensate for the satisfaction of simple concupiscence. But in his ultimate opposition to Sade, Fourier at the same time allows him a certain achievement in the analysis of voluptuous emotions, which hitherto seemed to make their respective points of view irreconcilable. Fourier understood perfectly what the deliberate gesture of selling oneself signifies for the voluptuous imagination. How does he incorporate into his "Harmonian" economy the simulacrum of this gesture, which he abominates as such within "civilisation"? By a curious bargaining that enters into the spirit of competition, at once theatrical and perverse, he tries to demonstrate the close relationship between spiritual and animal voluptuousness: this demonstration is only possible if the rarely of pure love is redeemed by the tribute paid to the carnal demands of the many. An example of this is given in Le Nouveau monde amoureux, in the undertaking of the mission he calls the "Angelicate" by a pair of lovers who, in spite of their own physical beauty, observe absolute chastity with respect to each other. A sort of priesthood is assumed here, the serenity of which acquires its full value by the prostitution of the two lovers. Both testify to their beatitude by individually surrendering themselves to the desires of their many admirers; hence Fourier revalorises the spiritual to the extent that the "angelical" lovers, precisely because they are angelical, respond to the carnal "demand" of the many. Prestige remains attached to the negation (or rather, to a simulacrum of the negation) of animality in those who precisely want to satisfy it. Thus the Angelicate redeems itself in sacrifice to the animal passions, whilst these set the whole price of the purity called angelic. Far from reviling carnal passions, the Angelicate assumes their ultimate signification. ------------1 . Simone Debout draws attention to the fact that Fourier does not acknowledge any libidinal movement in the child. But even if he remains limited in this regard, the fact that play must he

developed from childhood onwards and maintained at every age, largely compensates for this restriction on his acumen. 2 . It is important to indicate here that Fourier understands sharing above, all in its psychic sense and that the "expropriation" is a moral one, presupposing neither a levelling nor expropriation of fortunes -- which would be contrary to his ludic principle of competition. The "phalanstry" must group together precisely those who are initially differentiated according to whether or not, and what, they possess. Nevertheless, in practice, this system of association only admits the materially more fortunate because they serve those who, being deprived of means, are no less richer in passional imagination. If all society is to be decomposed into a multitude of series, or phalanxes, which compete according to this principle of the free play of the passions; and if for Fourier, according to the rule of competition and contests, a purely passional hierarchy is to be set up (giving rise, always according to the rules of the game, to a "new nobility", a new "commonalty", a new "priesthood" wherein each may, according to their individual psychic behaviour, either rise to a "higher" ludic level or fall to a "lower rank", without any irreversible lowering of status, all eventualities being envisaged only according to the flee play of the passions); then it appears that this project is indeed conceived, in the context of Fourier's times, as an ironic tale which, by its very ingenuity, administers a profound lesson: namely, that if expropriation of the psychic self occurs in favour of polymorphous impulses, there will ensue a material expropriation of individual wealth in favour of universal psychic exchange, such as Fourier intends by his curious institution of the Angelicate. 3 . . . secretly guiding them where? On the whole, back to that initial stage of sterile and anti-gregarious sensuality which conflicts with the specific instinct of procreation, thus beyond their own individual "unity", beyond their self-identity, to a total ambiguity of attracting and repelling drives whose intensity consciously relived (by Sadian protagonists) incites everyone to seek in the corporeal and moral presence of others only the momentary actualisation of their own phantasms -- that is, a mutual expropriation of bodies allowing a person to be inhabited such that he experiences himself as does his "expropriator". . . How could

these phantasms by which primordial voluptuousness (in that non-differentiation of the sexes and the incongruous connection between them) frustrates the instinct of propagation be communicated, since this instinct forms precisely the basis of all intelligible communicability? In effect, to communicate is to wish to be reproduced, perpetuated. Even when mutually practiced, perverse monstrosity constitutes an absolutely mute fact. In general, rational discourse (the logos) can still only ensure, by way of an exchange between individual identities, a simulation of that very thing from the depths of one's being which a person could hardly ever give to, or receive from another. Sade neither claims to account for what is actually experienced between partners by his description of "deviant" contacts or couplings, nor will his analysis of libidinal processes explain after the event the momentary law which governs them. Only reflexes of the "horror", "repugnance", "pleasure" observable in others, from the above all imaginary spectacle from which the pervert procures his ecstasy, emerge in an identifiable and describable way from his mute and incommunicable depths. Particularly as here the intensity of the phantasm comes from the absence of the principle of reciprocity, which is indispensable to Fourier's project. 4. This problem seems to momentarily shift in Sade's eyes, when he begins to take account of revolutionary ideas and temporarily participates in the new institutions. At the tinge of writing the pamphlet "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans", contained in his Philosophy in the Bedroom, he considered entrusting to the State the application of his own ideas on perversion and imagines a collectivisation of everything exposed in Juliette. Juliette was written at the same time as Philosophy in the Bedroom during the Directoire.; but this scheme to collectivise integral monstrosity seems entirely refuted by the atheistic aristocratism of the characters who are his mouthpieces in Juliette. Even in this scheme, however, which seems to most approach Fourier's phalansterial ideas and sometimes to almost anticipate them, his own belief in human incommunicability is so strong that he wants to see the new institutions assume his own total atheism so as to guarantee its practical consequences. The expropriation of one by another, by agreement or force, derives from what he calls the right to compel enjoyment, based on the fact that any source of

arousal, anyone who provokes excitation, is by the same token contracted to submit to the; one who is excited. Items; the provoked excitation is considered as an injury, hence a wrong which the coveted one must rectify, and although reciprocity is implicit in this state of affairs, it remains understood that the culprit's aversion to it will increase the worth of the phantasm for the one who exercises this right. [Pierre Klossowski]