The Revenge of the Libertines or, Sade’s Counter-Education
by Beatrice Gross
“Eugenie, let me kiss your beautiful behind while I bugger mamma, and you…Madame, bring yours near, so that I can handle it…socratize it.” (Philosophy in the Bedroom, p. 358)
There is something of Plato’s maieutic in Sade’s pedagogical project, as the frenetic initiations staged in his sadistic utopias tend to reveal innate propensities, awaken, rather than create, key principles of existence, namely here, lust and cruelty. Achieved through a reversal of scholastic values, the Sadian education is essentially natural, chaotic, emancipatory, where the cardinal virtue of absolute libertinage is reached through exponential discharge and destruction, from orgiastic pleasure to the contemplation of decaying corpses. Sade’s societies of perversity constitute as many secret universities, retaining from the academia the hierarchy of masters, pupils and victims, as well as the mimetic methods of repetition and emulation.
While post-Revolution France gives way to the triumph of Rousseauist morality and deism, the Convention decreeing in 1794 the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, Sade keeps loathing the exemplary educator, and completes in 1795, just a few months after regaining (temporarily, it will turn out) his freedom, Philosophy in the Bedroom, an atheist tale of a physical and spiritual education, for the scatological constantly intersects the eschatological. In that historical context (and until 1958, really, when the author’s scandalous oeuvre finally becomes legally available), Sade’s materialist philosophy must retire in the privacy of the boudoir to disseminate its lessons in libertinism[1].
Philosophy in the Bedroom stages a specifically didactic collection of seven dialogues (and their dramatic application), starting, in the original publication, with the Epigraph: “Mothers will prescribe this reading for their daughters.” After a successful edification of the philosopher’s pupil, the neophyte Eugenie de Mistival, then duly disabused of the fallacious notions of virtue, ethic and religion, the instructive fiction finishes with an episode of extraordinary violence: the newly convert to Sade’s system of vice and persecution, zealously participates to the brutal rape of her own mother.
The liberating process of the libertines however seems both fueled and doomed by the very nature of their experience of limits. Hence, controlled apathy appears as the ideal stage of being, and desire is ultimately rationalized through language: in the end, as Roland Barthes explained, the mastery pursued in Sade’s debauchery is actually that of philosophy, the education, that of the reader.
[1] Lacan noted in Kant with Sade (1962), “the Sadian bedroom is equal to those places from which the schools of ancient philosophy took their name: Academy, Lyceum, Stoa.” (Translation: James B. Swenson, Jr.)
