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The Divine Marquis' Ethical Project: Sade and the “Turn to Religion” in Postmodernist Philosophy

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The Divine Marquis' Ethical Project: Sade and the “Turn to Religion” in Postmodernist Philosophy School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts The Divine Marquis’ Ethical Project: Sade and the “Turn to Religion” in Postmodernist Philosophy Melissa Michele Russell This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University April 2014 To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgement has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. - Melissa M. Russell 29/04/14 Abstract This thesis argues that Sade’s work constitutes a transgressive ethical project which, in spite of its grounding in a materialist atheism, cannot escape from Christian ethical categories. In accordance with the nature of transgression Sade must invoke and reinstate those very limits and categories--such as good and evil, vice and virtue, the sacred and profane--that he attempts, with enormous relish, to destroy. This thesis does not argue that Sade explicitly employed a theory of transgression. However, following Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, who both base their concept of transgression on a reading of Sade’s work, I use transgression to provide a philosophical lens through which to reread him and to determine the precise nature of his transgressiveness. Sade’s pornographic writings can still generate outrage in the popular imagination even if they are now largely unread. However, this thesis aims to show that it is not primarily the offensive sexual content of his writing which makes Sade’s work deserving of the label ‘transgressive.’ Sex is the vehicle for transgression because sexual taboos have been the effect of and have helped to constitute the theological, philosophical and ethical systems which many Enlightenment thinkers sought to challenge. Sade’s compulsive urge to produce his pornographic writings (even at the risk of his life) are evidence of his wish to affront Christian concepts of virtue and the intellectual structures that sustain their moral, political and religious authority. Sade’s materialist atheism is integral to his transgression since it empowers him to reject the tenets of classical theism, the infallibility of scripture and the narrative of Christian origins and thus repudiate an ethics based on what he felt were the repressive, universalising moral edicts of Christianity. However, the logic of Sade’s version of libertine ethics does not lead to universal ethics founded on some alternative principle such as reason or nature. As Foucault explains, transgression never destroys the limits it aims to challenge or subvert because it is defined by those limits--the law which transgression requires to remain in place in order to guarantee transgression’s efficacy. Sade rejected universalising ethical theories in favour of championing the autonomy of the individual, freed from oppression under any metaphysical law. A defining feature of the ethical praxis exemplified by Sadean libertines, the freedom from the universal is therefore only obtained through transgression of laws, both religious and political, but at the same time remains open to dialogue with such laws (and the religious categories which inform them). Reading Sade’s work as an ethical project demonstrates how these categories might productively be transgressed, and enables us to rethink ethics both with and beyond such categories. In order to establish and define Sade’s ethical praxis, and his atheistic materialism, this thesis situates Sade in the Enlightenment intellectual contexts which underpin his work but also at times become the objects of his satire. In exploring and describing Sade’s ethical system, this thesis will also demonstrate how Sade can be used to re-examine contemporary ethical theories. The twin concerns of discovering a secular ethics which affirms individual agency yet ensures ethical treatment of the “other” is at the centre of postmodernist thought, as exemplified in the Levinasian ethics of the other. It is possible to read Sadean ethics using the concept of the relationship to the “other,” a relationship which respects the autonomy of the other, while remaining open to that other. No matter what form the relationship takes; violent or irenic, the relationship can never be dissolved. Since such an ethics is structured by transgression, Sadean ethics demonstrate the limitations of an ethics conceptualised as a relationship to the other alone. Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... i A Note on Translations ................................................................................................ ii Introduction The Life and Legacy of the Arch-Libertine the Marquis de Sade: How to Read Him Now .............................................................................................. 1 Sade in the News ................................................................................................... 1 Transgression and Paradox ................................................................................... 2 Sade’s Life: the Ancien Régime, the Republic, and Napoleon .............................. 4 From the Prison to the Madhouse ......................................................................... 8 Persecuted by Revolution and Napoleon ............................................................ 13 Sade’s Library: An Enlightenment Education .................................................... 16 History of Authorship and Dates of Publication of Sade’s Work ....................... 21 Pornographer, Revolutionary, Monster, Martyr: The Reception of Sade and his Work.................................................................................................................... 22 Sadism and Medical Discourse ........................................................................... 23 The Sovereign Man: Sade and the Surrealists .................................................... 25 Sade and Evil in Philosophy, Literature and Drama ........................................... 26 Sade in Popular Culture ...................................................................................... 30 God, Nature, and Human Nature During the Enlightenment .............................. 32 Postmodernism and Sade .................................................................................... 37 Thesis Structure and Chapter Summary .............................................................. 39 Chapter 1 Overture: The Uses of Literature ............................................................................................. 44 The Novel in the Eighteenth Century ................................................................. 45 Dissent and Dissidents: The Satirical Novel in the Eighteenth Century............. 49 The Sadean Novel and Anti-Novel ..................................................................... 51 Uncovering the Origins of the Philosophical Novel ........................................... 54 Libertinage as Philosophy ................................................................................... 57 The Shady Figure of the Libertine ...................................................................... 58 Atheists and Sodomites: Sade’s Libertines ......................................................... 61 The Libertine Novel ............................................................................................ 64 Satire and Pedagogy in the Libertine Novel ....................................................... 68 Exposing Hypocrisy: Satirising Ethics ............................................................... 69 Sex in the Convent: Satirising Religion .............................................................. 70 Anguish and Ecstasy in Sade’s Sentimental Novels ........................................... 72 Sade the Teacher ................................................................................................. 74 Rereading Sade, Rereading the Enlightenment ................................................... 75 Chapter 2 The Many forms of Atheism: From Deism to Materialism .................................................................................... 76 Atheism in Heresy and Blasphemy ..................................................................... 77 Dialectics: Classical Theism and Atheism .......................................................... 79 The Basis of Atheism: The Nature of God ......................................................... 80 “Polytheistic Atheists” and Heresies: The Spread of Christianity ...................... 84 The Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation ............................................... 85 Reformation: Doctrinal Disputes ........................................................................ 87 Negotiating Faith and Reason: The Enlightenment and Beyond ........................ 89 Mainstream Enlightenment and Atheism ............................................................ 90 The Lens-Grinder ................................................................................................ 91 The “War” between Faith and Reason: Theories of Nature and Materialism .... 92 Natural Religion .................................................................................................. 95 Revolution and Atheism...................................................................................... 97 From Superstition to Neurosis:
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