The Problem of the Sade Cult
69In the world of academia there are fashions as there are everywhere else. They change more slowly than fashions in clothes or cars and they are, on the whole followed more slavishly.
Fifty years ago Simone de Beauvoir published a book on the Marquis de Sade, Faut-il Bruler de Sade? which made him fashionable in left-wing circles. It set an example of foolish veneration that has been followed by a host of left-wing academics since her time. Beauvoir’s book is short – merely an essay – but it managed to squeeze an awful lot of mistakes into a small space. It is full of factual errors (e.g. asserting that Sade's wife adored him), non-sequiturs and pseudo-intellectual terminology. Beauvoir, who had no scientific training, appropriates the term "autism" from clinical psychology and wrongly applied it to Sade. This is a gross insult to all the good, harmless and intelligent people who are genuinely autistic. She takes the term from a discipline in which she is not qualified, because she is just pretentious.
Beauvoir claims that Sade was a revolutionary socialist, and why? because he may once have complained about sending upper-class victims to the guillotine. Hardly surprising if he did, since he was a prime target! That is plainly self-interest. If objecting to the guillotine makes you a revolutionary socialist, then the Scarlet Pimpernel was the greatest revolutionary socialist of all time.
Beauvoir’s attempts to confer a political respectability on her subject lead her into sheer nonsense. She ends her essay by saying that cruelty is no big deal since we all regard other people with total indifference anyway. Well, that was probably true of her, personally. Beauvoir lived very happily under Nazi occupation in France and never made the slightest effort to oppose it. She was even allowed to go and study in Berlin during the war. All her life she went on defending the genocidal regimes of Stalin and Mao-Tse-Tung. She was certainly as indifferent to ethical issues as she was to mere facts. Beauvoir's book has been in print and on reading lists for fifty years without anyone pointing out that it is complete nonsense from start to finish. That indicates that no serious or conscientious scholars of any sort have been participating in this Sade cult. It is perpetuated only by shoddy and superficial scholars.
For a modern example, look at the fairly recent Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment by Ellen Judy Wilson and Peter Hanns Reill (Infobase Publishing, 2004). This book claims to “present a comprehensive introduction to the period, covering such topics as science, education, art and architecture, aesthetics, and music, as well as the key terms, individuals, locations, and significant works…” In fact it is studded with errors and nowhere more so than in its article on Sade. It says that he was put into an asylum because his wife and mother-in-law benefited from gaining “his” property. (p.529)The truth is that the property in question, a large marriage settlement, had belonged to his wife and her family. It was her property! He had got it by oppressive marital laws, behaved despicably as a husband, violated every obligation while grabbing the profits of the deal and had squandered virtually all of it. What purpose does it serve to give a distorted picture of what took place? Why, to promote the Sade cult, of course.
It is no surprise when this silly book claims that the brutalities are included in order to draw attention to the problem of “human evil”. That is denial and hypocrisy.
The Facts on File companion to the French novel, by Karen L.Taylor, (Infobase Publishing, 2007) is very short of facts on this topic. Instead of facts we find confusion and errors. Sade is said to have used “eroticism” to promote militant “rationalism” (p.v). What the heck could militant rationalism possibly mean? Is beating people up militant rationalism or just rationalism? “La Philosophie dans le Boudoir” is mistranslated as “The Bedroom Philosophers”. A boudoir is not a bedroom – it is a lady’s private retreat – and philosophie does not mean philosophers. This is typical of the abysmal level of scholarship found in dozens of works which perpetuate this cult of Sade as a “literary” author, and deny that he is pornographic. To deodorize the play, (which is not even a novel so what is it doing in a book which claims to be about the novel as a literary genre?) Taylor explains the brutal attack on a woman as being symbolic. That is as pretentious as it is absurd. Further down the book claims that Sade “pushed the aims of Enlightenment thought to their most extreme conclusions” (p.125). That is giving student readers a quite false notion of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had nothing to do with promoting violence, oppression, hysteria, cruelty and rape, which are the contents of Sade’s books. Only an Nth-rate scholar would make or believe such a claim. The Sade cult has distorted the whole history of the Enlightenment in order to squeeze Sade into it. Taylor’s book contains 35 references for Sade and only 39 for Voltaire..
Le corps violenté: du geste à la parole Michel Porret (Libraire Droz 1998) a study of Sade and pornography, is a typical book whose title speaks only of “bodies” being violated, not of people. That is symptomatic of the tunnel vision of the author. He sees nothing objectionable in Sade presenting rape victims entirely as objects for use, and asserts that reading such books does moral good because they make him aware of his “choice”. Note that his idea of morality is concerned only with his own choices, and completely leaves out of the picture the choices, rights, wishes, feelings and dignity of any other person whatsoever. How can such a blatantly egotistical approach to life call itself morality? Porret’s notion of morality might have suited Hitler very well, but it is one that I would prefer to do without. His book does not answer any questions because it does not raise any. He merely paraphrases the narrative - "tells the story" - in an approving, euphemistic way, without applying any critical terms of analysis, He seems quite unaware of feminist theory, sexual politics, and the whole of New Puritan discourse, which gives the impression that he has been fast asleep for thirty years.
When challenged, the cultists invariably reply by defending their right to read and study the books – they do not answer the question about why they are adulating and misrepresenting them. They claim they are being censored but they resort to personal abuse of those who disagree and this creates a pressure of conformity. By exerting that pressure of conformity of opinion they are the ones who are imposing censorship. These days one even hears the term "Sade studies"! How can the production of books such as the above be described as "study" ? To study something means to take an interest in factual accuracy, and to relate what you are saying to what other scholars have said on the subject. A serious scholar takes part in a collective endeavour with certain minimum standards of reliability, exactitude and moral seriousness. The Sade cultists are not scholars, they are just masturbating. Their books get published because they will sell, not because they are of intellectual value.
There is nothing surprising about female academics joining in this cult of obsequious veneration. A large salary can exert a strong influence on what people are willing to believe.
Whatever question you ask a Sade cultist, they always give the same answer, like a school pupil who has rote-learned a chunk of notes to use in an exam. They always protest that someone is trying to stop them studying what they choose; they never reply to the question about why it is necessary to lie about the texts, inflate their literary value and misrepresent their author.
The behaviour of European academics has been slavishly imitated by Americans. If anyone protests against the cult, the big-wigs of the establishment step in to pretend that Sade is not pornographic and is the victim of some sort of misrepresentation. Dr Kevin Joel Berland of Pennsylvania State University in the USA writes on an 18th-century website that “nobody's advocating the "excesses often associated (often inaccurately) with the Marquis.” When challenged to produce some examples of those supposed “inaccuracies” he could not produce even one. Nor could any of the other 1700 members of his forum. He is trying to suggest that Sade is a poor little victim who has had a bad press - although he has no evidence for such a claim. Dr Berland has not written any major research works, (his CV laboriously lists every review he has ever published!) but he is the moderator of a supposedly academic website where neutrality and objectivity should operate. The Sade acolytes cannot help having weird names like Norbert Sclippa, but if they are supposed to be intellectuals they should at least be aware of the requirement to produce support for what they assert.
Such tactics merit the term dishonest. These critics deny the pornographic nature of the texts and resort to intellectual cheating. Sade was an active rapist and murderer. His books are graphic descriptions of the attacks he personally carried out on victims over a number of years and the attacks he planned and fantasized about throughout his nasty little existence. The consensus among the psychiatric profession is to regard Sade as a psychopath and categorize his works as pathological deviance. Literary critics who persistently misrepresent that are out of step with scientific investigation and if they try to use scientific terms (which many of these Sade cultists do) they are guilty of a kind of intellectual fraud.
The inaccuracy of the Sade cult is not a coincidence. Truthfulness is a moral principle. Sadism is an attack on all morality, and those who defend it cannot be trusted to follow standards of honesty and accuracy which are the foundations of academic study. Therefore the claims of the Sade cult to work within academic institutions or be regarded as a discipline in a "liberal" academic infrastructure is nonsensical.
Instead of admitting the books are pornographic they club together to ascribe literary value to what is actually a parade of four-letter words and scenarios so repetitive that the books appear to have been churned out with a wallpaper printing machine rather than being written. The term cult is merited by the way in which all these dishonest critics agree to back each other up. “Shhhhhhhh…..! I won’t tell if you don’t….”
Sade acolytes employ various insidious forms of censorship to promote their opinions. Often they complain that any opinion differing from that of the Sade cult constitutes a “repetitious debate” which is best avoided. Oddly, they do not object to a one-sided monologue of adulation as repetitious. They seem to have adapted their idea of repetition to suit their absurd beliefs. The cultists frequently fall back on accusing better critics of trying to prevent them reading these texts when what the better critic has done is expose misreading, lies and fraud. When lost for any other way of defending their behaviour, they simply resort to woolly terms such as “hobby-horses” or “pet theories”, betraying their inability to engage in rational discussion.
The whole Sade cult is an exercise in denial. It can be compared to Holocaust denial and in fact the theories of many leading feminists assert the continuity and integrality of all genocides, holocausts, rape and sexual oppression. To divide them into “fiction” and “non-fiction” is naively pre-structuralist. There is no fiction or non-fiction, there is only ideology.
To conclude, the Sade cult is a parade of hypocrisy and lousy scholarship. It is perpetuated by denialists, pseuds, the ignorant and those who want to make a quick profit out of an unsavoury subject. It has no claim to be an academic study.
