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Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbor and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

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Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbor and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers Volume 10 Issue 4 Article 7 10-1-1993 Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbor and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion George Connell Follow this and additional works at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy Recommended Citation Connell, George (1993) "Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbor and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 10 : Iss. 4 , Article 7. DOI: 10.5840/faithphil199310442 Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol10/iss4/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers by an authorized editor of ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI'S SADE MY NEIGHBOR AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION George Connell Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbor represents a fascinating example of a hermeneutics of suspicion directed toward a virulent if ignored atheist, the Marquis de Sade. Klossowski's book is especially interesting for three rea­ sons. First, it discerns a specifically religious structure of thought and sym­ bolism where many anticipate only madness and perverse sensuality. Second, it illustrates the function of perspective in a hermeneutics of suspicion. Third, it accentuates elements of Sade's thought that recur persistently in French post-structuralist thought and that suggest a pervasive defiant stance in that thought toward the divine, the eternal, and the normative. While Christians and other theists have grown used to questions by non-be­ lievers about their motives and mental health, recent philosophers of religion have shown that suspicion is a double-edged sword. That is, questions about the hidden agendas, psychological complexes, and ideological blinders of non-believers are fully as legitimate as similar questions about believers. Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbor, written in the 1940s and 1960s but only recently translated into English, represents a fascinating example of a hermeneutics of suspicion directed toward a virulent if (at least in American philosophical circles) ignored atheist, the Marquis de Sade. Klossowski's book is especially interesting for three reasons. First, it discerns a specifically religious structure of thought and symbolism where many anticipate only madness and perverse sensuality. Second, it accentuates elements of Sade's thought that recur persistently in French post-structuralist thought. This re­ currence is hardly surprising or accidental since Sade has been a particular favorite and persistent concern of French intellectuals since World War Two. In revealing the religious agenda of Sade's thought, Klossowski gives much needed clues to philosophers of religion trying to assess the religious signifi­ cance of contemporary French thought. Third, Klossowski's studies illustrate the function of perspective in the hermeneutics of suspicion. In the 1940s when he wrote the essays that made up the first edition of Sade My Neighbor, Klossowski was a Catholic convert who had studied at a Dominican seminary before giving up plans to enter the priesthood. But the Klossowski of 1967, who wrote "The Philosopher-Villain" with which the second edition begins, has abandoned Catholicism and aligned himself with the anti-humanist wing FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY 553 Vol. 10 No.4 October 1993 All rights reserved. 554 Faith and Philosophy of French philosophy.l This change of perspective alters his reading of Sade­ in the preface to the second edition he rejects the "pious intentions" and "monotheistic normalizations" of his earlier readings of Sade. But the break isn't absolute. He allows three of the four essays of the first edition to be reprinted, either entirely or largely unchanged,2 and even admits that the argumentation he now rejects is "perfectly coherent." It is philosophically interesting to see how Klossowski's reading of Sade both changes and retains a deeper consistency as his perspective changes. And it is especially interest­ ing to see an atheist interpreter discern in an atheist thinker an on-going relation to the idea of God that is as ineluctable as it is defiant. I. Sade and the Revolution Though the second edition of Sade My Neighbor opens with "The Philoso­ pher-Villain," the latest written of the essays in the book, the best entrance to Klossowski's reading of Sade is the essay, "Sade and the Revolution," the first of the 1947 essays reprinted in the second edition. Here, Klossowski places Sade in the context of the collapse of the ancien regime and the eruption of the revolution. In so doing, Klossowski shows that he, like so many young French intellectuals of the 1940s, was enthralled by Alexander Kojeve's reinterpretation of Hegel. Kojeve's reading of Hegel places supreme emphasis on the master-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology. And it is in those terms that Klossowski reads the French revolution. According to Klossowski, the great accomplishment of Medieval Christendom is the trans­ formation of the harsh master-slave relations of the ancient world into the lord-servant relations of Feudalism. Because all persons in Christendom find their place in a theocratic hierarchy, because all in fulfilling their social roles ultimately serve God, there is a dignity and moral standing that extends even to the lowest members of society. True to the spirit of Hegel, Klossowski traces the downfall of this theocratic order to an interior source: it succeeds itself to death. The specific genius of the theocratic hierarchy is concentration of power. Many vassals serve a single lord, many lords a single king, and many kings a single God. But as the king succeeds in consolidating his power, giving rise to a nation-state, he unknowingly sows the seeds of his own downfall. By gathering all political power to himself, the king renders the nobility redundant and thereby funda­ mentally alters the character of that estate. Stripped of their functions but not yet of their privileges, the nobles face a crisis of self-consciousness. For privilege separated from the functions that legitimate it is arbitrary self-in­ dulgence. Unwilling to surrender that privilege and unable to justify it, the lords become cynical libertines who exist strictly for themselves rather than for vassals, king and God. According to Klossowski, Sade gives unequaled expression to this decadent, gratuitous existence in his tales of perversity and THE HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION 555 cruelty. Specifically, Sade's predilection for sexual acts utterly unassociated with reproduction nicely symbolizes the unproductive, self-gratifying char­ acter of this class. Though functionless, the nobility is not without influence: the rot of this mediating class spreads to the rest of society. The servants, unable to see themselves as serving God and king in catering to the arbitrary and decadent whims of their openly impious masters, find their own self-understanding thrown into crisis. Klossowski writes: In the measure that this moral skepticism, this instigating or convinced athe­ ism, spread into monarchical society, monarchical society reached a state of decomposition such that the feudal relations between lord and servant con­ secrated by theocratic hierarchy were already virtually broken: the ancient relationship of master and slave was de facto reestablished (SMN p. 52). The atheism and debauchery of the lords places the servants, now degraded to slaves, in an appalling dilemma. On the one hand, the slaves may continue doggedly to believe in God, to obey the moral code, and to perform the duties of their station. But this is to submit to the depredations of those unbound by conscience. This Sade chronicles in Justine in which the virtuous heroine suffers endless abuse and outrage. (The subtitle of the book is "Good Conduct Well Chasti zed.':) On the other hand, they may abandon belief in God, moral restraint, and feudal loyalty as does Justine's ruthless sister, Juliette, who rises to wealth and high social station. The choice between Justine's and Juliette's ways, the choice between victimage and victimizing, is truly a diabolical either/or. H might appear that revolution, by wiping away the corrupt status quo and replacing it with a new moral and political order, represents a real third alternative to passive submission and active immorality, but Sade argues this is not so. For to take up arms against the masters (and ultimately the king) is to become one with the masters in their lawlessness; it is to make Juliette's choice. In "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would be Republicans" in Philosophy in the Bedroom, Sade argues that the consistent revolutionary, the consequent regicide, will draw the conclusion that all traditional morality is empty prejudice. In a perverse casuistry, Sade defends the moral blameless­ ness or even praiseworthiness of calumny, theft, prostitution, incest, rape, sodomy and murder. Despite masking itself as revisionist moral reasoning, the real force of these arguments is the subversion of moral decency as a whole. His point here is that to kill the king, to guillotine Louis XVI, is to agress against morality generally and to join Juliette, not in a realm beyond good and evil, but as Klossowski puts it, in a "utopia of evil." What sense can we make of Sade's absolutism on this issue? How should we understand his fantastic identification of the king with the moral order as a whole? Ironically, it is Sade's conservatism, his continued allegiance to the 556 Faith and Philosophy thought-world of the theocratic order, that makes revolt an all or nothing proposition for him. In that thought-world, God, king and morality are not neatly distinguished, but each is the symbolic equivalent of the other, and all three the respecti ve guises of the unitary authority of the theocratic order.
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