The United Sades of America Hussein Ibish [from The Baffler No.

22] Not long after I took refuge from the academy to work in the policy centers of W ashington, I visited one of D.C. s landmark bookstores, "Politics and Prose" a liter ary venue known, as its name suggests, for furnishing customers with the conceit that they re browsing and shopping in a vaguely subversive fashion. But as I walk ed up to join the store s cultivated and edgy communitas, I committed a terrible e rror: I asked a clerk where I might find the works of the Marquis de Sade. My re quest made its way up through an increasingly consternated group of shop assista nts; I had to repeat it several times before they fully registered what I was as king for. At that point, I was told to leave the store immediately. The scene co ncluded on a perfect grace note when I was sternly conducted to the store s exit b y a female employee who was obviously French. It was as if I had asked for a how -to manual for murder, kidnapping, or child abuse or, at a minimum, the most objec tionable form of pornography. That scene spoke volumes about the curious legacy of Donatien Alphonse Franois, M arquis de Sade, the great and demented aristocratic theorist of unrestrained des ire, in our own republic of consumer longing. Here, in the self-regarding intell ectual center of a city justly famed for the free play of unleashed personal amb ition and the basest kinds of instrumental manipulation of others, Sade was a fo ur-letter word. Nor can I say that I was entirely taken aback by this reception; as I completed work on my doctorate, my professors took me aside to warn me tha t I should never attempt to teach any of Sade s work until I was securely tenured an d even then, they stressed, I should proceed with enormous caution. On one level, of course, it s clear enough why Sade and his work make people squea mish: that was often his goal. To a degree not even rivaled by Sigmund Freud and other later explorers of the id (and its indispensible partner, the sadistic su perego), Sade seemed to insist that the darkest, most destructive urges of human ity are core elements of our nature that the drive to inflict pain, to dominate, e ven to murder, needs to be affirmed as part of the same complex of erotic and cr eative desires that keep human society viable and individuals free. This is perhaps why, despite the careful strictures against uttering his name let alone marketing his work in polite consumer society, the shade of Sade is a marked ly unquiet one in our America. Like other repressed ideas, Sade is everywhere an d nowhere indeed, there appears to be a strong inverse proportion between the popu lar reach of his name and image and actual familiarity with his writings and tho ught. (In an irony that Sade himself would likely have appreciated, the only Eur opean thinker with a similar universal-yet-unread profile in American intellectu al life is probably the great Puritan theologian John Calvin.) It s difficult to imagine anyone, then or now, reading Sade and experiencing profo und sexual excitement. Sade is, indeed, enough of a household name among us that he functions as a sort of shorthand consumer brand for transgressive naughtiness, and the outright flo uting of civilization s taboos. He is commonly associated with sexual sadomasochis m as a commodity, and pornography in general including the mommy porn marketing ph enomenon Fifty Shades of Grey. He s popularly synonymous with cruelty and evil, mu ch like the murderous Machiavel of the Renaissance English-speaking world. And he is also frequently, and reasonably, cast as the most extreme of misogynists. At the same time, Sade is also often represented as a proto-Romantic rebel among the first, and certainly the most radical, protesters against the rational certainti es of Enlightenment humanism (this was indeed the basis of the largely sympathet

ic portrait of Sade in Peter Weiss s 1963 play Marat/Sade). A bowdlerized version of Sade has cropped up occasionally as a generic embodiment of artistic and inte llectual freedom struggling against authority and restriction a Larry Flynt of the eighteenth century, as it were. This was the Sade featured, for instance, in Ph ilip Kaufman s 2000 film Quills. And this is all to say nothing, of course, about the sprawling popcult traffic i n the graphically violent genre we might dub thanato-porn: the voyeuristic cult of invasively depicted death experiences as famously anticipated in the 1973 J. G. Ballard novel Crash. David Cronenberg s 1996 film adaptation of Ballard s book re veled in the erotic allure of death while affecting to critique its exploitation , but by now we ve dispensed entirely with the conceit of critique; thanato-porn n ow runs the gamut from the Saw movie series to Grand Theft Auto videogaming and the latest network TV spinoff of the CSI franchise. If the point of much of Sade s work was to marry the most intense modes of sexual frustration and release to t he practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the land scape of our popular culture, and declare much of this project a fait accompli. But there was always much more to Sade than the simple lionization of the urges to objectify and dominate and Sade s legacy assuredly doesn t end here, in the oversti mulated agoras of our media world. If we broaden the aperture a bit to take in t he official scenes of governance a procedure that Sade himself strongly encourages w e can also see that he haunts our political culture in all sorts of unacknowledg ed ways. While many on the intellectual left have sought to grapple with Sade mo re directly, Sade also exerts a suitably perverse influence on the present-day A merican right. To take just one example, elements of Sade s thought via an embarrass ingly reductive caricature of Nietzsche thrive in the robust American cult of Ayn Rand. Mitt Romney s running mate Paul Ryan frequently cited Rand as his most important i nspiration, and Rand s unabashed championing of economic elites was also echoed by Romney s own notorious dismissal of the 47 percent of Americans who don t earn enou gh money to pay income tax and therefore needn t be bothered with. At least one of Sade s fictional monsters, Roland, anticipated this Randian attack on all forms o f socially conscious responsibility to others as pathologically self-indulgent. In Justine, Roland rebuffs Justine s plea that she be spared since she saved his l ife. What were you doing when you came to my rescue? he demands. Did you not choose [this] as an impulse dictated by your heart? You therefore gave yourself up to a pleasure? How in the devil s name can you maintain I am obliged to recompense yo u for the joys in which you indulge yourself? Similarly, there are echoes of Sade s celebrations of personal violence (as oppose d to the state-sponsored variety) in National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPi erre s infamous response to the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre. LaPierre suggeste d that the appropriate response to the epidemic of gun violence is increased gun ownership in a country already awash with firearms of every variety. One could easily imagine Sade also making the argument that the only rational or natural r esponse to violence is additional and opposing violence with the sole exception of the death penalty, which he opposed with all-encompassing passion. Indeed, Sade s deeply idiosyncratic views on the morality of personal violence are probably Exhibit A for why he cannot pass muster as any kind of guide for leftliberal cultural resistance. If we take his work at face value, he was not oppos ed to individual murders. He frequently had his characters argue that murder sho uld not be punished by the state at all. Yet there probably has never been a mor e passionate opponent of capital punishment the only form of premeditated homicide that normative rational thought typically considers potentially justifiable. This is Sade s challenge to his readers in a nutshell: he specializes in justifying th e conventionally unjustifiable while absolutely and passionately condemning what many would regard as, at least plausibly, defensible and rational.

There is, however, a much surer gauge of what might be called a vulgar Sadean le gacy: the mainstreaming of American porn. Pornography is now so ubiquitous in co ntemporary American culture so impossible to get away from that the two things one m ay be assured of being offered in even the cheapest motel are pay-per-view porn on the television and a Gideon Bible in the bedside table, should you find yours elf in sudden need of one form or the other of shameless mystification. I m sure I m not the only frequent traveler who has never availed himself of either of these kindly offerings, but they re always there. One can t help but imagine both Sade an d Calvin bitterly grousing, in whatever mutually disappointing afterlife to whic h they ve been jointly consigned, about how their intellectual legacies have been downgraded into all-but-interchangeable items of consumer convenience. Can t Touch This There s an especially bitter irony in Sade s image as a cheap pornographer: he was n ot in any recognizable sense creating pornography at all nor can he be neatly pige onholed into any other literary tradition. Sade was an astonishingly prolific wr iter who produced an enormous oeuvre covering a huge variety of genres. Much of it is mediocre to the point of being unreadable, particularly his conventionally sentimental or comedic dramas and stories. There seems little doubt that withou t his notorious libertine novels, most notably Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in th e Boudoir and, especially since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, 120 Days of Sodom, Sade would have been quickly forgotten. Instead, these works, and a few others, have assured him of a profound albeit highly contested and unst able artistic and intellectual influence. Because of the centrality of his erotic novels to his legacy, later critics have often caricatured Sade as not only a pornographer, but as the arch-pornographer , representing either the worst or the best of the genre. But this is deeply mis leading. Insofar as pornography is a commodity of mass-marketed and stylized rep resentations of sexual practices, Sade is better seen as an anti-pornographer. H is work is unquestionably obscene, and transgressive in the extreme, but its imp act is neither conventionally pornographic nor erotic. Although much of his fict ion bears a great deal of similarity to the Gothic novel genre (of which he was a noted and serious critic), his best work, in the libertine series of fiction, is sui generis. It doesn t correspond or submit to the stylistic or thematic pattern s established by any previous writer nor has it been successfully reproduced by an y successor. Though stultifyingly repetitive in themselves, Sade s most provocativ e works are simply not containable or assimilable by others. They subvert themse lves in an infinite loop of contradiction, contortion, and, in many ways, ultima te incomprehensibility. A powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has pushed many toward t he overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed sadistic, thought of Ayn Rand.To see how completely Sade fails to permit even highbrow visual interpretations of his work, one need look no further than Pier Paolo Pasolini s 1975 film Sal, a loo se adaptation of 120 Days. As any patient reader soon discovers, Sade s project is an exercise in stretching, in certain very limited directions, language and ima gination (and repetition) beyond all conceivable boundaries. His images of unima ginable, and physiologically impossible, cruelty, indulgence, and excess belong entirely to the medium of the wordsmith. Any graphic representation transforms S ade s literary surplus into heavy, grounded imagery, unmoored from the fantastical lightness of prose. It inevitably literalizes, contains, and forestalls Sade s ov erflow of deranged fantasies and rhetorical overkill. In Sal, we see Sade s scenes staged with graphically represented bodies a process tha t makes the horrible more horrible, but also much more mundane, and empties Sade s grotesque fantasies of all their dark humor. Sal tries very hard to be funny, bu t it just can t. By contrast, no matter how horrible the images described by Sade s

unnamed narrator in the first part of 120 Days, he rarely fails to amuse. In his effete verbosity, one can almost smell the powdered wig, see the over-rouged ch eeks, and feel the faint, exasperated swishing of the handkerchief before the fa ce of the world-weary, jaded, and supremely haughty late eighteenth-century aris tocratic storyteller (yet another of Sade s outlandish fictional characters). Because Sade can t be successfully reproduced, he can t be mass-marketed. Beyond sim ply being pornographic, erotic words and images require the fetishism of brandin g to become viable commodities. This means there must be a recognized set of sty les of pornography or of any commercial genre, for that matter that are easily repro ducible and that will at least promise the consumer some foreknowledge of the pr oduct in question. To be successfully mass-marketed, porn is best watered down o r sprinkled into other well-established genres of fetishism, especially what s now called romantic fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, boils down to an ex ecrably written version of Cinderella for our time a familiar and reassuring fairy t ale, albeit larded with a supposedly edgy brand of erotica. Porn is particularly prone to sub-generic classification, for the simple reason that it s intended to reproduce a given set of symbolic fantasies, some of which a re already psychically or socially fetishized before they become commodified. He nce pornographic novels or videos within a given subgenre are not merely allowed to repeat, in effect, the same book or film over and over again; instead they m ust be quite monotonously re-created. Endless, precise, and meticulous reproduct ion is required by the audience. This is, to some extent, true of any genre of p opular fiction, but porn s commercial impulse to be innovative is even more deeply suppressed than it is in other highly repetitive genres such as action thriller s or romantic comedies. And even the silliest, most repetitive genre can, under the right circumstances, open up the possibility for real subversion of its cent ral tropes and motifs. Porn, of whatever variety, seems to foreclose that prospect. It is designed to m eet an audience s expectations and satisfy its fantasies, certainly not to complic ate them or subject them to critical examination. These fantasies are not meant to have any broader personal, social, or political significance, and their porno graphic representations must never imply that they do. They are presented and us ed as if they really were merely ends in themselves. In this context, it s painfully evident that pornography that subverts or implicit ly critiques the fantasies it reproduces the sort of sexual writing, in other word s, that Sade specialized in, to the ruthless exclusion of anything resembling st andard-issue titillation will fail in its overt mission by provoking reflection ra ther than arousal. This would have a self-defeating effect similar to that of an insomniac trying to remedy his or her condition by assiduously taking notes on the experience while trying to fall asleep. It s difficult to imagine anyone, then or now, reading Sade and experiencing profound sexual excitement. A plethora of other affects are infinitely more plausible: fascination, boredom, amazement, a musement, disgust, horror, frustration, anger, admiration, or indifference are a ll more readily produced by his baroque narratives and verbose prose style than erotic arousal. This effect turns up on nearly every page of the libertine novels. If we avoid t he more ghastly passages which, believe me, is not easy we can see how deliberately counter-erotic Sade s thought is by simply pointing to his persistent predilection for the foul, as exemplified by this passage from 120 Days: Beauty, health never strike one save in a simple way; ugliness, degradation deal a far stouter blow, the commotion they create is much stronger, the resultant agitation must hence be more lively. . . . [A]n immense crowd of people prefer to take their pleasure with an aged, ugly, and even stinking crone and will refuse a fresh and pretty girl. The description of the crone Fanchon that follows makes the point even more vividly. And the murder of Augustine in Part the Fourth is virtually unreadable

, and unsurpassed in its unmitigated horror. Sade not only invites the reader to reflect on the nature and origins of the sex ual acts, deviations, and perversions that he so exhaustively catalogues, he dem ands it. And he insists that they have profound philosophical and political impl ications. Commercial porn, since at least the late nineteenth century, has been based on the most straightforward possible commodity fetishism, and is not only intended, but fully expected, to mask the power relations it represents. By cont rast, Sade s best work coldly and unflinchingly lays bare those relations but only f or sustained consideration, not in any neatly programmatic prescriptive or polit ical schema. Far from presenting any actionable or even coherent model for liberation, Sade s w ork resists the reader s effort to draw any stable conclusion at all. For good or ill, Sade cannot be appropriated politically, or even philosophically, because o f the internal inconsistencies, incongruities, and contradictions that make up t he core of his thinking and writing. He raises an infinite loop of questions, bu t neither offers nor allows any answers. The Cunning of Unreason If we cannot view Sade as an apostle of political deliverance or personal libera tion, he nevertheless was far ahead of his time, in subject matter if nothing el se. His writings anticipate a huge cross-section of twentieth-century Western ar t, scholarship, and politics. Indeed, we could reasonably posit that his work la id the cornerstone for the entire anti-humanist project. Surely Sade s most import ant contribution, at its high point, lay in dragging Enlightenment reason to abs urdist logical conclusions, spelling out the method of its implosion, and antici pating the backlash against it that culminated in the sixties and seventies. Wha t he bequeathed us was nothing less than a slow-growing but highly malignant, if not terminal, cancer buried deep in the corpus of Enlightenment rationalism. It s impossible to know whether Sade who was almost certainly mentally ill for much of his life, if not for all of it deliberately sabotaged the Enlightenment by ruth lessly parodying it or really held the philosophical and political convictions h is characters voice ad nauseam. They appear to champion reason, based on quasi-p hilosophical sophistry, but their arguments seem deeply arbitrary and profoundly irrational. Whether Sade intended to create a systematic satire of the philosop hies of Rousseau and Kant or sought simply to take the logic of the laws of natu re and the categorical imperative to their unsustainable conclusions in a mad tr ajectory of narcissism and self-gratification, his writings delved one yard belo w the mines of the Enlightenment s humanist conceits, even though his own ordnance exploded more than a century later. All of Sade s major works pursue and, indeed, relentlessly repeat his anti-Enlightenme nt arguments. But he airs them most compellingly in the demented and appalling, but also absurd and hilarious, introduction to 120 Days, and, above all, in the claims made by its leading character, the Duc de Blangis. They are further elabo rated in a lengthy polemical pamphlet, Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Woul d Become Republicans, that Sade shoves incongruously into the middle of Philosoph y in the Boudoir by simply having its leading character, Dolmanc, read it aloud t o the other characters. The pamphlet, she tells them, argues that murder is a hor ror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tol erate in a republican State. Insofar as they can be coherently summarized, Sade s monstrous antiheroes ideas const antly restated are of a piece with such horrific broadsides. If one laid them side by side, their message would amount to this: individual liberty and autonomy ar e absolute; anything that interferes with the use of an object (including anothe r human being) to satisfy one s caprices, whatever they might be, is immoral; huma

n impulses of all kinds, including theft, rape, and murder are the dictates of na ture, and hence no law should forbid them; private property is an intolerable evi l as it deprives others of that property s use, thwarting their natural inclination s ; religions, especially Christianity, are monstrous evils designed to justify th e repression of individuals natural rights ; atheism of the most iconoclastic variet y is, therefore, the only defensible religious attitude; and the accumulation of power by elites should be constantly and violently resisted by bloodthirsty and immoral citizens eager to defend their individual prerogatives by smashing any so cial or political institution that might restrain them. This logic explains Sade s apparent defense of murder but passionate opposition to the death penalty. Individual murders are natural, because the blood-thirsty impu lses behind them arise spontaneously from organic being. Therefore, it is tyrann y to punish them. The state, however, is an artificial and inorganic structure t hat has no vital being in nature and it therefore has no right to take a life, eve n under the most extreme circumstances. It is natural for individuals to objecti fy each other for whatever purpose, but it is intolerable for the state or any i norganic institution to do so. In short, Sade created a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment rationality that as the limitations of reason became increasingly ap parent toward the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth becam e increasingly powerful. It is, of course, extremely difficult to know to what extent Sade agreed with th ese precepts, though he goes to great lengths to encourage readers to assume tha t he does. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, some characters accuse Dolmanc of being the secret author of Yet Another Effort, a sly suggestion that identifies the auth or with the character, and both with the pamphlet s arguments. In 120 Days, Sade u ses similar feints with Blangis, who is often cast as an ironic self-portrait of the author. The novel even makes reference to the brave Marquis de S*** who, whe n informed of the magistrates decision to burn him in effigy, pulled his prick fr om his breeches and exclaimed: God be fucked, it has taken them years to do it, b ut it s achieved at last; covered with opprobrium and infamy, am I? Oh, leave me, for I ve got absolutely to discharge ; and he did so in less time than it takes to t ell. Such self-distancing irony again raises the question of authorial intent: How se riously did Sade mean to be taken? Even if he was mad and dangerous, Sade was ce rtainly no hypocrite. He paid for his chosen way of life, and dearly. Sade prove d utterly unable to live in accordance with any of the social or political syste ms of his times. He was jailed under the ancien rgime for eleven years, ten of th em in the Bastille, for various forms of libertinage and criminal abuse. He was released after the Revolution and became a member of the extreme Left, but was i mprisoned and sentenced to death by the Jacobins. After the Reign of Terror, he was again released, only to be ordered arrested in 1801 by Napoleon for his immor al writings ; declared insane, he was held at the Charenton asylum for the remaind er of his life. Sade spent at least twenty-six of his seventy-four years in inca rceration of one kind or another. That he sacrificed such an exceptionally large swathe of his adult life to confinement by the state strongly suggests that alt hough much of Sade s work is based on a dark and twisted humor, he wasn t simply kid ding. Likewise, even if we view him in earnest, doesn t Sade simply end up reinforcing t he kinds of cultural authority that he professes to attack head on? Don t his argu ments remain trapped in a binary from which he cannot escape in which vice, in ord er to be praised, must remain clearly identified as vice and opposed to virtue? How can one transgress without acknowledging the moral authority of the forces t hat one is transgressing against? Don t his extensive arguments in favor of blasph emy all, in effect, come full circle to make him, de facto, a defender of the sp iritual legitimacy of the Church? Blasphemy requires some acknowledgment that wh at is being profaned is, at some level, actually sacred. Many of his fictional o

utrages, for instance, involve the abuse of a consecrated host. To everyone but the faithful, this host would appear to be some sort of damp wafer, the sexual use of which would be odd but inconsequential and hardly scandalous.

Sade must have seen this tension himself, since it appears in his novels time an d again. After a lengthy diatribe in which Blangis defends theft and other crime s, Sade s narrator in 120 Days dryly observes, It was by means of arguments in this kind the Duc used to justify his transgressions, and as he was a man of greates t possible wit, his arguments had a decisive ring. Sade s antiheroes are often desc ribed in his narratives sometimes even by themselves as criminal, sick, depraved, and o r adjectives obviously designed to appall the reader, but that are incompatible with any sincere philosophical defense. Are they good because they are evil? Or does that make them, in the end, simply evil after all? Or are they beyond good an d evil in which case, why the remorseless cat-and-mouse game with readers over his antiheroes moral nature and their endless depravities and crimes? This is precisely the kind of systematic self-subversion that makes Sade so slip pery, difficult to systematize, and impossible to appropriate. Such incoherencie s and contradictions in Sade s work have led a number of scholars, including Laure nce Bongie, the prominent historian of Counter-Enlightenment thought, to deny al most any value in his libertine fiction (although Bongie does highly praise his famed prison letters). But the temptation to dismiss Sade s work, whatever its mer its as literature, has to be tempered by a realistic assessment of the profound influence it has exerted on the Western world over the past century and a half. Choosing Sades Critical elements of Nietzsche s attack on Enlightenment reason appear to be rooted in Sade, although scholarly opinion is divided over how direct this influence ma y have been. The imprint of Sadean precepts can be seen clearly in Nietzsche s 188 7 On the Genealogy of Morals and, above all, in his bitter denunciations of Chri stianity, which seem to mimic in both substance and language those of Sade s antih eroes. And Nietzsche obviously originated almost all of Ayn Rand s ideas, though s he pompously claimed to have been influenced only by Aristotle. Rand essentially popularized a distorted version of Nietzsche and therefore some elements of Sad e s legacy. She notably claimed to have been the most implacable philosophical ene my of Kant, a title that surely belongs to Sade and not Nietzsche, let alone Ran d. Ironically, while Sade, Nietzsche, and Rand all champion the primacy of the indi vidual will, Sade s antipathy toward all forms of private property could not have been more absolute. Sade s contempt for property and the rationalist philosophical system derived from its defense indeed places him well to the left of the Jacob ins and most other French revolutionaries. For Sade, property is the essence of despotism. Conversely, Rand and her present-day followers on the American right (along with many others) cast private property as the essence of liberty. Like so much else having to do with Sade, his historical descent into present-da y influence doesn t follow anything resembling a straight line. Sade is so subvers ive that all efforts to directly appropriate him politically have been entirely restricted to the Left, usually as a vehicle for attacking the Right. Sade has managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our narcissistic, self- and other-devouring culture that traces of his influence are almost ubiquitous. Scholars began to systematically rediscover Sade s work, after decades of censorsh ip and obscurity, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This rec overy took place in two related contexts. The first was the growth of interest i n the full range of human sexual behavior, most notably through the work of Rich ard von Krafft-Ebing. His 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis popularized the term sadism (derived from Sade s own name, of course). Soon thereafter, Freud famously began

excavating the psychic origins of sexuality, often drawing on the same primal fa ntasies that inform the Sadean landscape. Here, modern interpreters have cast Sa de s writings, particularly 120 Days of Sodom, with its obsessive lists of and com mentaries on paraphilia, as precursors to both Krafft-Ebing s documentation of hum an sexual behavior and Freud s investigations into its deeper psychological origin s. Sade s novels are also rightly regarded as neurotic symptoms, par excellence, i n and of themselves. Freud s work exerted a strong ideological influence on the early twentieth century Left, which viewed his brand of psychoanalysis as fundamentally subversive of t he dominant bourgeois social order (though Freud made it amply clear that his sy stem offered little hope for a more democratic alternative). But Freud s ideas als o informed the strategies of corporate mass culture and advertising particularly t hrough their practical application in propaganda pioneered by his American nephe w, Edward Bernays, the founder of the new twentieth-century discipline of public relations as well as those of the fascist Right. With mass society increasingly sub ject to manipulation at the unconscious level, often through highly sexualized i magery, Sade with his eroticized fantasies of harsh punishment and arbitrary, rigoro us discipline was to some degree rehabilitated as a writer who channeled a crucial subconscious dynamic. Sade eventually became identified in a good deal of psych oanalytic thought as the voice of the shadowy obscene superego that regulates the libidinal economy by prompting and structuring enjoyment while simultaneously en forcing the law that prohibits it. Likewise, various artistic and intellectual movements, especially the Surrealist s, rediscovered Sade s shortcuts to the unconscious and embraced them. Existentialis t, structuralist, and poststructuralist critiques that expand on the anti-humani sm pioneered by Nietzsche s Genealogy of Morals all have roots in elements of Sade s writings. Sartre and Camus, and even Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky, al l expanded on themes originating in Sade wittingly or unwittingly. In her 1955 ess ay Must We Burn Sade? Simone de Beauvoir wrestled with the fact that, in spite of existentialism s obvious debt to Sade, as a feminist she found his writings deeply troubling. Somewhat grudgingly, Beauvoir concludes that Sade was indeed engaged in an existentialist project avant la lettre, and takes him seriously as a mora list, but ultimately she condemns his ethics and artistic values. The anti-human ist agenda, arguably initiated by Sade, culminated in French poststructuralism, and above all in the work of Michel Foucault (who reveled in homosexual sadomaso chism in his personal life). The Left has been drawn to Sade s attack on Enlightenment reason from two perspect ives. The first values Sade s anticipation of the logic of various contemporary ev ils, including fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, or corporate-driven mass consumer culture. In their influential 1944 study of the limitations of the rationalist t radition in capitalist economies, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were probably the first to draw a direct link between Kant a nd Sade. Sade and Nietzsche, they wrote, both took science at its word, and pursue d the implications of reason still more resolutely than the positivists. Moreover, they added, because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reas on a fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the rooftops, th ey are still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers. If the point of Sade s work was to marry sexual frustration and release to the pra ctice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture and declare it a fait accompli. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Kantian rationalism, taken to its logical concl usion, lends itself perfectly to totalitarian systems. They further note that Sa de s arbitrary but rigorous and ruthlessly imposed sadomasochistic orders prefigur ed the elaborate mechanisms of repression that flourished under totalitarianism, which (much like their Sadean predecessors) vacillate between utopian and dysto pian impulses. They hold that Sade s anti-heroine Juliette already explains and en

acts the ruthless but logical consequences of a purely rational categorical impe rative when such ideas are placed in the wrong hands. Horkheimer and Adorno see Sade s protagonists as callous automatons of alienated, but rational, Kantian orde rs, as well-developed proto-fascists or, indeed, as modern bureaucratic functionar ies of any ideological persuasion. A similar argument by the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan holds that S ade, in effect, completes Kant by monstrously closing the circle left gaping by th e open-ended categorical imperative. Moreover, Lacan identified the categorical imperative as simply another term for the superego itself. Ever the surrealist o f theory, Lacan argues that Sade can be presented as if he were Kant. If Sade s ar bitrary but rigorously enforced imaginary social systems are a parody of law, Sa de himself can therefore be cast as a parody of Kant. A different, though happily much less influential, strand of left-wing thought h as identified in Sadean violence, if not a liberatory potential as such, at least a necessary revolutionary impulse. In 1930, Georges Bataille cited Sade as the e xemplar of the ecstasy and frenzy that characterize the urges that today require wo rldwide society s fiery and bloody Revolution. Michel Foucault, greatly influenced by Bataille, seemed to see in the 1978-79 Iranian revolution an eruption of the kind of spontaneous revolutionary violence envisioned by Sade in Yet Another Effo rt, and defended in the name of virtuous immorality. Sade appears to be arguing thr ough Dolmanc that insurrection . . . indispensable to a political system of perfec t happiness . . . has got to be a republic s permanent condition, and that the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes into, and identifies h im with, the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government. Foucault s woeful misreading of revolutionary violence in Iran as exem plifying these virtues has done lasting and significant harm to his reputation. Assume the Position While Sade cannot be successfully appropriated, let alone commercialized, he has slowly but surely managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our narcissistic, self- and other-devouring culture that traces of his influence are almost ubiqu itous. These Sadean echoes are hardly restricted to and probably not even mainly t o be found in commercial pornography. By linking Enlightenment and mythology at th e hip in their pioneering and still relevant critique, Horkheimer and Adorno ide ntified traces of Sade s obscene, highly regimented social orders not just in the horrors of fascism and Stalinism, but also in the more mundane tyranny of indust rialized mass culture. They repositioned for us the ongoing conundrum, apparentl y inherent to modernity, that people demand their own subjugation at least as mu ch as they yearn for their own empowerment. And they found, at the core of this problem, Sade and Nietzsche s critiques of reason. The heavy tension between egalitarianism and egoism is common to both Sade s think ing and contemporary American political culture. As Julie Hayes notes, after the French Revolution, Sade was prey to conflicting notions of society, government, and class structure. He hated the abuse of power, particularly as it applied to him, but his sense of class consciousness was stronger than ever. In a letter to his attorney at the end of 1791, he confronted the mobility of his perspectives, a sking him, What am I at present? Aristocrat or democrat? You tell me, if you plea se, lawyer, for I haven t the slightest idea. This irresolvable tension between rad ical egalitarianism and radical individualism in Sade is precisely what makes hi m and his work politically and philosophically impossible. What could be a more resonant puzzle for the way we live now? Is anything, in th is sense, more Sadean than self-negating Tea Party slogans such as keep your dirt y government hands off my Medicare? Much of American culture is committed to egal itarianism, and demands and expects certain social and economic protections from government. But simultaneously, and often in the same breath, it venerates extr

eme wealth, individual privilege, and the prerogatives of the rich. This dichotomy is driven, at least in part, by the classic American illusion of widespread social mobility and the idea that anyone can join our morally unrestr ained power elite by hewing to the character-defining virtues of hard work, whil e also incongruously courting the favor of fortune. Meanwhile, a powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has pushed many toward the overtly avaric ious and predatory, and indeed sadistic (though hardly Sadean), thought of Ayn R and. Economic Darwinism is thus bizarrely repackaged as a corrective for corpora te amorality as well as the cure-all for absurd social injustices such as bailouts for financial institutions deemed too big to fail. So to rephrase Sade s quandary slightly, what are we, Americans, at present? Oliga rchs or egalitarians? The normative response to the tension between individual r ights, which protect the prerogatives of the powerful, and collective rights, wh ich protect those of the general public, is that we seek to find a balance betwe en the two. This is the consensus view of both the notional center-right and center -left in our punitive-minded political culture and this may really be the only poli tically plausible or reasonable answer in this otherwise untenable standoff. But Sade, that shadowy doppelganger of the Enlightenment, still lurks in the dark c orners and liminal spaces of our culture, whispering that reason often carries a very hefty price tag and with ever more elaborate punishments to come.

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