Invited speakers:

Thomas Hubbard, University of Texas, Austin, USA

Paul Reynold, Edge Hill College, UK

Rico Sneller, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Eric Marty, Université Paris VII, France

Judith Vega, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

200 years ago – on Dec. 2, 1814 – the libertine novelist Marquis de Sade died in an asylum. During that era in history, many ideas on sexuality have been formulated that still influence modern society: the gender dichotomy, sexuality as a natural and private issue, infantine innocence, explicit sexual imagery being taboo, the nuclear family as cornerstone of society, etc. Sade transgressed these beliefs in his work, and opposed such ideas that have become ingrained in Western societies. He made sexuality explicit in his work, put sodomy above coital sex, plural loves above monogamy, incest above marriage and family, spoiling sperm above sparing it, gender diversity above binary discipline, and instead of opposing reason to emotion, he gave them equal value. However, up until now, little attention has been paid to the relation between Sade’s transgressive ideas and contemporary views of sexuality that got their shape during the Enlightenment. A thorough investigation of this relation and of the actuality of Sade’s work is the general aim of the two-day conference in Amsterdam.

For those not presenting a paper, Registration is required for the morning sessions. To register send a mail to arcgs@uva.nl and mention which session you would like to attend.

09.00   Intro: Lode Lauwaert (Doelenzaal, Universiteitsbibliotheek Singel, Singel 425)

Parallel sessions: Potgieterzaal and Vondelzaal (Universiteitsbibliotheek, Singel 425)

Session A                                                           Session B

09.10:   Fiona Reidy                                                      Sinan John-Richards
09.30:   Wim Lunsing                                                   Natalia Albizu

09.50:   Alberto Brodesco                                          Piotrek Swiatkowski

10.10 – 10.20   Discussion

10.20 – 10.50   Coffee/tea break

Parallel sessions: Potgieterzaal and Vondelzaal (Universiteitsbibliotheek, Singel 425)

Session A                                                           Session B

10.50:   Chandra Kavanagh                                        Riccardo Finozzi

11.10:   Erica Harris                                                     Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste

11.30:   Melissa Deininger                                          Samuel Ernest Harrington

11.50 – 12.00   Discussion

12.00 – 13.30   Lunch

Afternoon Session in de Casa Rosso (Oudezijds Achterburgwal 106-108)

13.30 – 13.45   Opening of afternoon session by Gert Hekma

13.45 – 14.15 Paul Reynolds, Edge Hill College

“Savaged Flesh: The Embodied Practical Philosophy of De Sade”

14.15 – 14.45 Thomas Hubbard, University of Texas, Austin

“’Born That Way’: Sade and the Invention of Sexual Identity”

14.45 – 15.15 Coffee/tea break

15.15 – 15.45 Rico Sneller , Leiden University, The Netherlands

“On Taboos”

15.45 – 16.15 Judith Vega, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

“Pornography as critique: Sade after Adorno”

16.15 – 16.45 Éric Marty, Université Paris VII, France

“Why did the 20th century take Sade seriously?”

16.45 – 17.30 General Discussion

Abstracts

Lode Lauwaert: Introduction

Exactly 200 years ago, the famous libertine writer Marquis de Sade died. A few years before his death, he wrote that acorns should be planted on his grave, because he wanted to be forgotten. That wish, as may now be clear, didn’t become true: Sade’s literature is included in the prestigious Pleiade-series; today in France, we have the literary Prix Sade; conferences about the Marquis are organized; etc. But Sade is not just studied today, also the past two centuries Sade was read and studied extensively, and this in very different contexts: literature, philosophy, surrealism, philosophy, psychiatry, etc. This diversity is also reflected in the conference program, where Sade is discussed from, among others, a psychoanalytic, philosophical, and, sociological perspective.

Abstracts: Morning Session A

Fiona Reidy: Disobedient Bodies – Exploring the boundaries of female pleasure

In July 2014 I completed a ten month qualitative research study on abortion and sexual reproductive practices in Ireland, which produced the Thesis for my Masters at the University of Amsterdam entitled “Too Loud A Silence – Re-Imagining the Discourse on Abortion in the Republic of Ireland”.

This Thesis examined the stories of the current pro-choice activist movement who are breaking the silence on a topic historically dominated by shame and stigma; abortion, female sexuality and the right for women to choose what happens to their own bodies. Drawing on post-structuralist and feminist theories, the research deconstructs the mechanisms of power used to dominate the discourse to-date and highlights many issues dominating female sexuality, normative expectations of motherhood and the role of women in society. It raises significant questions regarding the limitations put on women to explore sex for pleasure and the choice to use their bodies for more than just carrying a child.

I would like to propose a presentation to discuss our level of comfort with the exploration of female pleasure in society and suggest that the current pro nuclear/family/marriage model regards sex in just as limited a way as the society which Sade was rebelling against. What are the limitations we put on today’s disobedient sexual body? How comfortable are we with female sex for pleasure, bondage or plural relationships? Do recent support for novels such as Fifty Shades of Grey suggest that S&M are accepted in mainstream society? Can a woman have multiple partners, explore non-monogamy, swinging, orgasmic masturbation, anal sex, bisexuality, or S&M without taboo? Can we be both mother’s and sexual beasts? Or is Sade’s vision of an explorative, rebellious, pleasure-seeking disobedient body still be too much for us to handle? Why?

Wim Lunsing: Tracing De Sade in Japan

Most people here will to some extent be familiar with Japanese styles of pornography and manga, in which sadism plays a major role. As in pornography and manga, the structure of Japanese society can be characterized by a clear hierarchy, in which the higher in rank expect the lower in rank to do almost anything they ask. Conducting fieldwork in a variety of contexts on the topics of sex, sexuality, gender, employment, ecology and art, I became familiarized with the way this hierarchy impinges not only on people’s daily activities but also on their sexual activities. I found that in both cases the lower in rank may find pleasure in their position in the various hierarchies. Although modern sadomasochism in Japan appears to have borrowed much from Europe, older styles of sexual activity are marked by similar activities, but in this case the feelings of those lower in rank are considered of less importance. The US/Western European paradigm of equality as the ideal in sexual relations is in Japan often not sought and may be considered as an impediment to the abandonment needed to attain pleasure, even by heterosexual feminist women. While I that the hierarchies present in relations of employment in Japan often are detrimental to the actual work at hand, in the fields of sex and pleasure they often seem to work quite well.

Alberto Brodesco: Perversions of Sade in the Contemporary Mediasphere

As Roland Barthes writes, Sade is not only an author or the name of a person, but also a “mythic narrator”, the depository over the centuries of all the meanings that his discourse has taken on. In my presentation I want to analyze a few uses of this mythical elaboration within the current audiovisual landscape. I will focus in particular on three cases:

1) The Sadeian scholars’ (transient) interest towards the television show Big Brother (with reference to the French and Italian editions of the program). In its first seasons (2000-2001), the exhibited voyeuristic side of the show elicits the comments of a small crew of Sade’s (or Pasolini’s) specialists (Annie Le Brun, Giovanni Mariotti, Serafino Murri, Giuseppe Bertolucci), that will soon lose any involvement and abandon Big Brother to its destiny.

2) The images of torture from Abu Ghraib prison. Sade is often mentioned by analysts trying to interpret the visual, cultural and historical frame of these photographs. I will focus in particular on two interesting readings by Katrien Jacobs and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin.

3) The scandal (the so-called “Bunga bunga”) that involved the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. In the curious discussion that followed we find a number of allusions to Sade. Commentators split between those who superimposed the figure of (a “black”, fascist) Sade to Berlusconi’s performances (among them the feminist activists Lorella Zanardo and Barbara Spinelli); and those who rejected this comparison (as writer Fulvio Abbate) relying on the anarchist and liberating nature of (a “white” or extreme left-wing) Sade.

Within the contemporary mediasphere the interpretations of the figure of Sade are evidently disparate. If all of these deeply heterogeneous uses in the cultural debate are in some senses “perversions” of Sade’s biography, thought and writing, we can also consider them as proofs or symptoms of his everlasting opposition to being enrolled in an unambiguous semantic field. As Annie Le Brun writes, Sade holds a “resistance to spectacular”. But also, we might add, to the society of the spectacle.

Chandra Kavanagh: Juliette: A model of consent

Throughout the course of Sade’s infamous novel Juliette many people are raped, but Juliette herself is not one of them. Viewed from this angle Juliette becomes a catalogue of the different ways that a person can give and withdraw consent. Other characters in the work give consent on the basis of coercion (329), give consent and then withdraw it (94), or give consent without understanding what they are consenting to (526), and thus are raped. Juliette, on the other hand, is always a model of enthusiastic consent, even when that enthusiastic consent is not happy consent.

This project deconstructs Juliette’s model of consent in order to gain a finer-grained understanding of what it means to consent. The Juliette model of consent improves on current understandings of consent in the following three ways. 1. Juliette’s model allows for the expression of consent and refusal to consent in a way that is non-verbal. The problem of verbal consent has come up time and time again in both philosophical literature and practical cases, while Juliette’s version of consent expects more interpretive ability on behalf of involved parties, it also allows for different tactics for expressing consent and refusal. Second, Juliette’s version of consent makes room for the association of sex, violence and power that many people fully consent to making a part of their interpersonal relationships. Finally, Juliette’s version of consent provides individuals that choose to play a passive role a deep sense of agency that is removed by traditional consent narratives.

This project is taken up with reference to feminist theory, and as a result answers many of the objections that typically arise from attempts to develop a more inclusive understanding of consent. Including addressing vulnerabilities that arise when including implied or tacit consent as a component of sexual consent.

Erica Harris: Could Cézanne be more of a sadist than a pornographer?

In Pornography: men possessing women (1979) Andrea Dworkin argues that ‘pornography’ and ‘sadism’ are synonyms. Is this claim legitimate? In this paper, I will argue that Dworkin’s argument hinges upon a superficial definition of sadism. I will begin by opposing Dworkin’s definition of sadism to a more metaphysical definition thereof found in thinkers like Deleuze and Lacan. For Dworkin, physical violence against women is the be-all-and-end-all of sadism. For Lacan, however, violence is a necessary means for achieving something else: the transgression of an entire system of values. In order to reach his (or her?) goal, the sadist aligns himself with the symbolic order – the rules that set the limits of meaning, morality, and even perception in society – and enforces its laws with indifferent violence. This is the aspect of sadism that Dworkin rightly observes. The sadist does this,

according to Lacan, for a reason other than pleasure in having power and causing others pain.

This is what Dworkin does not see in her analysis – and, according to Lacan, what even the sadist himself does not realize. The sadist destroys, tortures, and maims in order to uncover the ephemeral thing – that Lacan calls objet a – that eternally escapes the swing of his destructive hammer. The sadist, Lacan suggests, is the one who wants to undermine rather than uphold the social order. What consequences might this more complex definition of sadism have on how we categorize pornography? From Lacan’s point of view it means that pornography can no longer be called intrinsically sadistic. The reason for this, I argue, is that pornography reinforces rather than challenges the status quo. Its goal (at least in its mainstream form) is to remove strange objects from sexuality rather than confront the viewer with them. The final question I will ask in my paper is: what, then, might count as a sadistic visual image according to Lacan? Lacan offers the reader a shocking hint when he obliquely references Merleau-Ponty in his description of the object of the sadistic hunt in Séminaire X: the object, he says, has an ‘inside-out-glove’ character (193). The images that display this character – that Merleau-Ponty calls ‘reversibility’ in L’oeil et l’esprit – are images like Cézanne’s apples: paintings that seek to reveal the innermost workings of the body as it perceives the world around it. Lacan’s suggestion, in essence, is that a Cézanne still life might be more sadistic than a porn film like Deep throat.

Melissa A. Deininger: The Marquis de Sade and the Resurgence of Erotica in Modern Literature

Arguably the best-known name in libertine literature, the Marquis de Sade is receiving renewed interest today as the genre of erotic fiction is exploding onto the best-seller market. Sade’s recent elevation to Pléiade status in France and the global phenomenon of works like Fifty Shades of Grey have brought attention to the role literature plays in helping to determine and transgress societal and sexual mores.

Both Sade and erotic fiction authors try to create mythologized versions of sexual behavior to appeal to the reader. For Sade, the core of his political philosophy was “il faut tout dire” and many modern authors continue this tradition by popularizing alternate sexual preferences. Today’s erotica can be seen as facing some of the same problems that plagued Sade’s works during his lifetime and beyond: both are usually acquired out of the public eye (for Sade, through clandestine publishers; for modern erotic fiction, through electronic download or home delivery), and while the works might be very popular with readers, the specifics of the novels are rarely discussed in the open.

Using a theoretical framework taken from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, along with critics of romance and erotic novels, I will demonstrate how Sade’s writings continue to have an undeniable influence on today’s erotic fiction, and how the difficulties faced by Sade continue to impact writers and publishers today. I will also discuss the important differences between Sade’s works and erotic fiction that allow modern authors to become more mainstream while Sade continues to occupy his place in Enfer.

Abstracts: Morning Session B

Sinan John-Richards: In Praise of Tact. Tactful Violence in Sade

Maurice Blanchot claims that brutal violence in Sade’s œuvre denotes the absolute limit of what his readers are willing to appreciate, and perhaps defend. Sade’s many instances of violence are both contentious and difficult to read and discuss. However, in this paper, I argue for a distinction between explicit and implicit forms of violence in Sade’s work. By way of Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot I show how explicit violence in Sade is always impotent and solitary. While implicit violence, on the other hand, is creative and nuanced. Implicit violence is governed in tandem by a principle of tact, culled from Roland Barthes, and Maurice Blanchot’s idea of appreciating what is tacitly stated. In this paper I argue that the latter violence, implicit violence, is key to understanding how violence functions in Sade’s work. Sade’s heavy emphasis on the unsayable, the nuanced, and the useless means that his tactful encounters are perhaps even more violent than his brutal descriptions of murder, rape, and paedophilia. Sade’s tactfulness is a plea for that which is able to outplay binaries, and today, more than ever, we can learn from Sade’s implicit violence. In essence, these radical moments of implicit violence in Sade’s work delineate a space where he is seen to be transgressing his own limit. What is valuable from these anecdotal moments is that they promote dissymmetry and suspension. They invoke a searching through what is implicitly stated, and promote what is of value in acting tangentially. These tactful – and ‘Neutral’ – values, I argue, have affected our contemporary view of sexualities.

Natalia Albizu: Repetition, Negativity and Evil. Deleuze’s Inversion of Sade

The works of the Marquis de Sade were never the main object of any monograph by Deleuze, whose interest in literature permeated his entire philosophical project. They did, however, receive an interpretation in writings that were dedicated to other authors, most notably Coldness and Cruelty (1967), an essay intended as a sort of apology of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. There, Deleuze’s purpose was to show, by means of an original reading of both Masoch and Sade, that the worlds presented by them are irreconcilable. The “fathers” of masochism and sadism, respectively, provide us with unique symptomatologies that reveal their irreducibility. By focusing on Masoch and not just on Sade, Deleuze aimed to show that the Freudian conception of sadomasochism, rooted in Krafft-Ebing’s catalogue of sexual perversions, was the description of nothing but a semiological monster: masochism is not the reverse of sadism, and as such, it is not the other pole of the same perversion.

In order to dismantle the Freudian interpretation, Deleuze offers a reading of Sade which inverts Freud’s account of sadism. According to Deleuze, the sadist does not lack a superego that restrains his excesses, but has, on the contrary, an inflated superego which is then linked to a sort of “perverse Spinozism”. Drawing on Pierre Klossowski’s interpretation, Deleuze claims that Sade’s works reveal a series of monotonous repetitions of torture performed more geometrico, repetitions by means of which the sadist aims to get rid of the personal element of passion and achieve the higher nature of the pure Father, as it were. The libertines’ “adventures” represent their desire to achieve pure evil as complete destruction, and thus embody a sort of perverse idea of reason: that of pure negativity.

My aim in this presentation is to trace Deleuze’s reading of Sade in the light of his wider philosophical project, which I will try to do by showing that his accounts of sadism and masochism reflect the conceptual apparatus of Difference and Repetition (1968), and anticipate, at the level of perversion, the claims introduced by Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972) at the level of psychosis.

Piotrek Swiatkowski: Deleuze and Pasolini on de Sade and Masoch

Contrary to a majority of his contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze has never been very enthusiastic about the world constructed by de Sade and frequently expressed his preference for the work of Masoch. In his analysis of Sadism and Masochism in Coldness and Cruelty (1967), he shows how the common goal of both perversions – the need to express the primary nature and to suppress the all too human, physical sexuality – is obtained differently. Deleuze admires the imagination, proper to the world of Masoch, and is less enthusiastic about the domination of rationality and of the demonstrative faculty in de Sade. Similar critique is present in The Logic of Sense (1969), where the ideas of Melanie Klein allow him to differentiate between both perversions. Sadism is equalised with the physical and aggressive world of the schizoid position while Masochism with the imagination proper to the manic-depressive position and its orientation at an unreachable ideal object of the heights.

The main aim of my presentation will be to map the differences between Deleuze’s understanding of Sadism and Masochism in Coldness and Cruelty and The Logic of Sense. Does the Kleinian vocabulary lead to a different understanding of both perversions than the one developed in the earlier work? This analysis will allow me to enumerate the reasons behind Deleuze’s lack of fascination for the work of de Sade and to emphasise the similarities between his understanding of sexuality and that of Pasolini. Both intellectuals seem to share a fascination for the world of imagination proper to sexuality and dismiss the rationalism found in de Sade.

Riccardo Finozzi: Sade, Pasolini and the anarchy of power

The aim of the proposed paper is to show that the kind of transgression envisaged by Sade in his writings, particularly in the 120 Days of Sodom, anticipates and reflects the dynamics of power in contemporary Western society. In order to draw such a conclusion, I shall include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s moral and political critique of modern consumerist society, clothed in the appearance of the declining Fascist regime in his movie Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom. The paper will attempt to illustrate how power based on rationality and control functions through the very annihilation of its forms and means.

Such a paradox is triggered by the need for an absolute transgression on the libertines’ side, which makes transgression itself very different from its conventional understanding i.e. the simple violation of social and moral norms. Power, incarnated by the libertines and their respective social roles, exerts abuse to the point of rendering meaningless any power relationship, thus becoming a truly anarchic drive. In the realm of sex, where each act is bound by a defined gesture – even the “counter-­‐nature” act of sodomy – and where the orgasm sets a limit to the exertion of power, the libertine needs to bring such limits to a short-­‐circuit. Pasolini himself gets consciously caught up into the paradox, becoming himself sadistic towards actors who wish to be victims themselves, sacrificing his own personal approach toward movie making.

The Sade-­‐Pasolini encounter reveals that power is not merely violence but a compulsion to be enslaved through consumerism and conformism, through the very means of “freedom”. In this light, I shall also explore how we could affirm that, in Western societies, protection equals victimization – e.g. norms on racism, terrorism or pedophilia – morality is fictitious and nobody can be defined innocent.

Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste: Sade, “sexual perversion” and us: another history of sexuality from the end of the Enlightenment to the 21st century

Since the 1970’s, history of “abnormal sexuality” has focused on the normalisation of sexual conducts and identities by heterosexuality and gender binarism. This work was needed to denounce the repression of sexual minorities by the “psy-knowledge”. But all these inquiries have led to almost obliterate another factor which is maybe the very core of the late modern and contemporary history representations and experience of “perverse sexuality” in the western world: sadism in its intrinsic link to the work, the figure and the cultural place of Sade.

We aim to propose such a new history and to underline its philosophical and anthropological stakes. It can explain why Sade haunts human and psychological sciences and literature from the first “psychiatrisation” of “abnormal sexualities” (the invention of “sexual perversion”) in the middle of the 19th century till today.

First, we will describe the construction and the cultural diffusions of a “sadian myth” between the Enlightenment and the Monarchie de Juillet in France. Indeed, this “myth” has been the main operator in the opening of the modern clinical field of “sexual perversion” in psychiatry. In other words, it has mainly contributed to the invention of “sexual psychology”. But it does not mean that Sade has been a “precursor” of sexology in any way, as it was claimed in the 20th century. This is another “sadian myth” built by the first sexology in the last years on the 19th century and the three first decades of the 20th century.

Then we will go further into the analysis: behind this “myth” is an original representation and experience of sexuality invented by Sade, who has combined two previous western fantasies of cruelty to create a totally new one: the “open Venus” from the Quattrocento, and the “erotic domination” in the Enlightenment literature.

Samuel Ernest Harrington: The Marquis de Sade on binary discourse: Bataille, Foucault and sexual emancipation

Recent critical material has called for the Marquis de Sade to be rebranded a proto-activist of sexual liberation. This argument rightly highlights that Sade questioned and undermined normative binary definitions regarding sex, gender and sexuality. Yet it simultaneously claims that Sade’s occupation of this intermediary space (between sex, gender and sexuality) is a performative gesture, identified as promoting sexual emancipation. I will present this reading of Sade and then contest it, employing two French philosophers from the mid-twentieth century: George Bataille and Michel Foucault. Sade’s views on eroticism are fundamentally dialectical, operating as a warped ‘moral code’. This morality declares the height of sexual pleasure to be rooted in ‘evil’; the greater the crime, the higher the pleasure.

Bataille explains, these crimes are defined by hegemony. Sade’s eroticism is inescapably bound within this discourse. As a result, Sade – even at his most transgressive – simply mirrors or exacerbates normative dogmas. As Foucault similarly describes, Sade can be historically situated in the transition between two interweaving phenomena, unique to late eighteenth century France and intimately tied to the revolution: ‘sanguinity’ and ‘sexuality’. Sanguinity denotes a society of ‘blood’. Whilst ‘sexuality’ here (under which we still live), addresses “a society ‘with a sexuality’.

Thus Sade is not an early ‘queer theorist’ – he is not ‘before his time’, but historically rooted. Sexual behavior has clearly changed in terms of contemporary norms. Yet Sade understands these acts as fundamentally criminal; in his world, it is what gives them their value. This visceral quality is the crux of Sade’s eroticism. And so lastly, if we are to confine Sade to his own historical context and deny proto-liberate status, how do we describe the space between binary oppositions – attraction and revulsion, criminal and legal, normative and transgressive – that Sade’s eroticism demands? Indeed, the broader question is, can Sade’s views on eroticism be identified at all?

Abstracts: Afternoon Lectures

Gert Hekma: Introduction

Most attention has been paid to the biographical, philosophical and literary aspects of Sade’s life & work, but his ideas rarely make it into sexual studies or politics. Although his work is very practical and physical, his perspectives are rarely discussed, although they are very relevant and seducing regarding gender and sexual diversity and “perversion” in society and sciences. In ubiquitous discussions on normalizing and disciplining and hetero- and homonormativity his views rarely come across, although he could offer some inspiration. The main goal of the conference, therefore, is to go beyond philosophical and literary readings, and to focus on Sade from contemporary views of social and sexual sciences.

Paul Reynold: “Savaged Flesh: The Embodied Practical Philosophy of De Sade”

The 20th Century rehabilitation of De Sade from violent misogynist and pervert (pejoratively) to passionate philosopher of a radical enlightenment is evident in a range of work from from writers as diverse as Bataille, Barthesm, Carter, Deleuze, De Beauvoir, and Klossowski. Central to this exercise in retrieval has been a recognition of the power of the transgressive and revolutionary in De Sade, the materialism and counter to idealism of his philosopher and the power of the inversion of all the strictures upon the senses of thinking imposed by Christian morality.

This rehabilitation, which puts De Sade in a constructive relationship between an enlightenment radical impulse and the nihilistic counter-critique of enlightenment in Nietzsche and later Foucault, can be articulated in terms of systems of ideas. What is particularly attractive about De Sade as philosopher, however, is the rarely emphasised and peculiarly embodied nature of his philosophy. For De Sade, philosophy is practiced and inscribed upon the body in sensations, lacerations and articulations beyond the spoken word and its lexical and discursive constraints to phenomenological growth. For De Sade, the violence of his texts is metaphor for the necessity for transgression to be exercised upon the body – to be felt and performed rather than simply intoned and declaimed. This is a practical philosophy – in essence following a tradition going back to Aristotle but moving beyond the narrow confines of a rationalism to recognise the interconnections between poetics, enlightenment and the practice of philosophy by the body as a peculiarly human means of performing freedom. In this paper, this philosophy of the flesh will be explored and assessed, however limited in textual form. Savaged flesh is at the centre of the Sadeian philosophical promise of an existential freedom set against the iron cages of Christianity and modernity.

Thomas Hubbard: “Born That Way”: Sade and the Invention of Sexual Identity

Biological determination of same-sex attraction has been a key argument in contemporary American apologetics for gay and lesbian sexual rights, assimilating legal claims for equal treatment to the civil rights of other biological classifications, such as racial minorities and women. What is little appreciated by contemporary advocates is the intellectual genealogy of this argument, which has its modern roots in Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir. Even Foucault’s seminal work takes scant notice of Sade’s originality, instead attributing the critical moment in the invention of sexual identity to late 19th century medicalization of sexual practices.

Dolmancé, a self-identified “sodomite” and the intellectual guru of Sade’s dialogue, repeatedly makes the argument that all sexual penchants, however unconventional, are implanted in individual “constitutions” by Nature, and for that reason should not be subject to moral condemnation. Like many modern gay apologists, Dolmancé asserts that sexual preferences, whether for girls or boys, manifest at an early age due to distinctive physical formation. In one passage, he specifies that Nature has endowed the sodomite’s anus with softer membranes more like those of a woman, giving him a special inclination to anal pleasure. This argument has no known precedent in 18th century medical literature, but is directly paralleled in Ps.-Aristotle, Problemata 4.16; Sade’s close reading of ancient texts and his fidelity to Aristotelian physiology (as for instance, in his insistence that only male seed is genetically determinative – an outmoded view by his time) is apparent in multiple passages. This biological determinism contrasts with the environmental explanations of “deviant” sexuality found in Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and other Enlightenment writers.

It must be emphasized that Dolmancé’s concept of “sodomy” was more specific than modern “homosexuality,” in that it entailed anal fetishization of both men and women. He further argues that the penchants for criminality and infliction of sexual pain are also implanted in some men’s constitutions by Nature. Modern apologists who utilize the argument of biological determination must grapple with the inevitability, grasped by Sade, that this theory could also justify pedophilic, violent, and other socially condemned orientations.

Rico Sneller: “On Taboos”

It was Sade’s specialty to identify and break taboos. Today, it is an often heard cliché that taboos should be infringed, especially in art. In the Netherlands we remember the artistic picture, publicly exhibited, of a vagina peeing in a man’s mouth; and recently in Germany a female artist created paintings by publicly ‘expelling’ paint-filled eggs from her womb. According to Freud ‘primitive’ man was much more capable than modern man to handle ambivalent feelings, for he possessed an elaborate system of taboos. Taboos are compromises that we make with our suppressed desires. We could ask ourselves, though, if it is not properly human to install taboos in order to stay mentally balanced. Additionally, can we relate to taboos in such a way that they inspire us without us breaking them? Can Sade by our guide in this respect, or should he be heeded?

Judith Vega: “Pornography as critique: Sade after Adorno”

Sade’s work has various relations to the politics of his time, engaging both republicanism and feudalism. His pornography is a typical political pornography, already occupying a specific position in a more general genre then, but even more specific now, as that sort of pornography has become rare in our times. Its still topical meaning firstly ensues from its exemplifying a typical modern political analytics, in the sense that Sade thematises violence, not just in terms of illegitimate state power, but also as a matter of the relations between subjects. I am, then, interested in the ways in which Sade’s work can be read as a form of social critique. There evidently have been many sorts of critical perspectives on Sade’s work, including feminist ones. But these are inconclusive as to the status of Sade’s work as critique. How may we approach it from that angle? Sade’s relation to the Enlightenment has been received ambivalently. He is seen as either the epitome or precisely the demolisher of Enlightenment thought, as either following or thematising its instrumental rationality (Adorno) or its lust for transparency (Foucault). Resolving one such ambivalence, I would like to actually restore Sade – in any case partly – to the tradition of Critical Theory, arguing that we may read his work as a form of immanent critique, a method dear to Critical Theory.

Éric Marty : “Why did the 20th century take Sade seriously?”

“Why did the 20th century take Sade seriously?” That question becomes both obvious and fully significant once it is connected to the modern moment whose main protagonists are Adorno, Klossowski, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes and Pasolini with his terrific and unforgettable, Salò ou les 120 journées de Sodome. Each of them has inscribed Sade into his intellectual endeavor – an endeavor that was also personal.