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STEPHEN KOCH
dividual" over social responsibility, libertinage has become the metaphor
for an isolation without human legitimacy. This is his importance as a
moralist.
The problem is that Sade's cruel moralism is directly opposed to
the enormous prestige of love. The energy of which he speaks-and it
is absolutely extraordinary-is dynamic because it is anguIshed. It can–
not-to speak in the broadest terms--come
to
an achieved selfhood in
the experience of another. This energy cannot come to rest in love.
It was when Sade was cut off from the world by his illness and the
Bastille that he could emerge from his divine isolation to grapple
with an impenetrable exterior world, to confront it in imagination, alone.
He was
force.d
to assimilate the exterior world into his imagination.
However much he might distort this world (for the sake of verisimilitude,
there might be
somebody
in
Justine
who is not depraved) he had to pay
the price when it stubbornly retained its externality, and when he dis–
covered he had no words to support his radical assertion of privacy.
Unable to create anything but the external, he could only make himself
real through an unjustifiable rage against it. To
be
at all, he had to
be
guilty.
Since he could neither reject nor love the outside world, he did the
two next best things; he argued with it and he raped it. Both aspects
of this comic, double-edged destiny were condemned to failure. Argu–
ment, of course, offered nothing: it was entirely rigged against him.
And sexuality, for someone who cannot experience himself as part of
another, can become pornography: cruel and obscene, a poetry of
spiritual bondage. Both reason and sexuality are consummated in shared
experience, and despite his guilty, voiceless solitude, Sade did not seek
tolerance, or sympathy, or company. He wanted freedom. The romantic
satisfaction of this need-the transfer of the erotic into Kant's esthetic
dimension, for example, or humanistic pantheism-were denied
to
Sade.
He confronted with fierce and prophetic forthrightness the possibility
that an esthetic of repose based upon love may no longer
be
available.
His ruthless honesty, his relevance and his threat grow from his ability
to live with this in all his unforgiving rage. As an artist, Sade "chose
in favor of" others, in favor of slavery, in favor of the revolutionary
energy of
ressentiment.
To exist at all, he chose in favor of a self he
c.ould never create except negatively, and he chose against literature.
He is of course an artist, but one who can't stop. The solitude that
before his time became real through esthetic reconciliation, and after
his time by Mallarme's aspiration to silence, could
be
for him only a
shriek of hatred. Naturally his books have a
deus ex machina,
because
hooks have to end. The repentant M. de Franval is crushed by a resent–
ful world. Justine's breast is shattered by lightning. But here reconciliation
