On De Sade, Epstein, fascism and ritual cleanings - Mitchell Abidor in NYRB:

'The recent publication of two works by the Marquis de Sade enables us to see that sadism is not just “the impulse to cruel and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of such acts with lustful feelings,” as Richard von Krafft-Ebing defined it in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. Sadism, as it is depicted by Sade, is also, and perhaps primarily, the creation of a world in which the powerful and wealthy are able to lure the poor and powerless, hold them captive, and reduce their bodies and selfhoods to nothing.

In this, as some clear-sighted post–World War II writers have noted, Sade’s writing was, inter alia, a harbinger of fascism. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for example, wrote that Sade “prefigures the organization, devoid of any substantial goals, which was to encompass the whole of life” under the totalitarianism that drove them from Germany. Reading Sade in the age of #MeToo and Jeffrey Epstein is an uncanny experience, for his novels are also a blueprint for the world of the sexual predators of today.

This winter brings the first complete English translation of Sade’s vast epistolary novel, Aline and Valcour, in a lavish, three-volume edition from Contra Mundum. The translation, by Jocelyne Geneviève Barque and John Galbraith Simmons, is a masterful one, allowing Sade’s prose to flow, neither assuming the language and rhythms of the eighteenth century nor interpolating anachronisms from English today. It is, by all appearances, the work of two people who have studied the writing of Sade deeply and admire it.'

(...)

'Like a guard in a concentration camp, the Sadeian hero is allowed absolute freedom to do whatever he likes to his victims, who are in most cases kidnapped or purchased and imprisoned in castles or chambers from which no escape is possible. In one of many instances that appear to foreshadow the fate of those imprisoned in the Nazis’ camps, Sade wrote, in The 120 Days of Sodom, “Here you are far from France in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, beyond steep mountains, the passes through which were cut off as soon as you had traversed them; you are trapped within an impenetrable citadel.” Even more directly, in a passage from Juliette quoted by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment—where they wrote that we find in Sade “a bourgeois existence rationalized even in its breathing spaces”—Sade wrote: “The government itself must control the population. It must possess the means to exterminate the people, should it fear them… and nothing should weigh in the balance of its justice except its own interests or passions.”

Apollinaire was first followed by the Surrealists. In 1926, Paul Éluard praised Sade in the movement’s organ, La Révolution Surrealiste, writing that “for having wanted to infuse civilized man with the power of his primitive instincts, for having wanted to free the romantic imagination, and for having desperately fought for absolute justice and equality, the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned almost his entire life in the Bastille, Vincennes and Charenton.” André Breton went even further, saying in a 1928 discussion of sexuality that, “By definition everything is allowed a man like the Marquis de Sade, for whom the freedom of morality was a matter of life and death.” We get an idea of Sade’s notion of “absolute justice and equality” in The 120 Days of Sodom, where he wrote: “Wherever men shall be equal and where differences shall cease to exist, happiness too shall cease to exist.”'

(...)

'Imprisoned for the Marseilles escapade, Sade would escape, and within three years he found himself involved in yet another sexual scandal. He was finally imprisoned in 1777 under a lettre de cachet, a royal order for arrest without trial, obtained by his mother-in-law to protect family honor against any further criminal sexual exploits. Sade would remain imprisoned until the Revolution abolished the lettre de cachet in 1790. Arrested again in 1801, under Napoleon, and held at Sainte-Pélagie prison, Sade was transferred to the asylum at Charenton in 1803 after attempting to seduce fellow inmates at Sainte-Pélagie. It was in Charenton that he organized the theatrical productions immortalized by Peter Weiss in his 1963 play Marat/Sade, and where Sade would die in 1814. While in the asylum, at age seventy-four, in what a biographer called “his least glorious phase,” he regularly sodomized (for payment and with her mother’s consent) a young woman of sixteen, Madeleine Leclerc, noting the frequency of his acts in a journal.

Not all postwar intellectuals fell under the sway of the divine marquis or saw him as simply a philosopher who lived his ideas in a more extreme way than others. Some saw the fascism latent in his novels—and said so explicitly, as Raymond Queneau did in 1945: “all who embraced the marquis’s idea to one degree or another must now envision, without hypocrisy, the reality of the death camps, with their horrors no longer confined within a man’s head but practiced by thousands of fanatics.” Camus noted in The Rebel, published in 1951, that the “ideal society” constructed by Sade “exalted totalitarian societies in the name of liberty.” And it was the cinematic provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini who presented the connections between Sade and fascism most starkly of all in his final film, the 1975 Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom); there the book’s brutalities are enacted under the flag of Mussolini’s Social Republic.

Sade’s attraction for some has nevertheless persisted—as the most extreme example of counter-Enlightenment thought, the voice of the abolition of reason. It was, after all, the very impotence of reason that was made so starkly and horrifyingly manifest in the two world wars and the period between. Sade’s exclusive concern with the sovereignty of the individual, on an absolute freedom from any constraint, continued to lure a certain class of intellectuals in a period of mass politics. In Weiss’s Marat/Sade, the two historical figures embody the most radical expressions of these dichotomous forms of rebellion: the political and the individual. As Beauvoir wrote of him, “Sade supposed there could exist no other road than that of individual rebellion.”

This was his weakness, but it was also a source of his enduring appeal. And so, Sade survived. But can his oeuvre survive our own time? And should it?'

*

'It is impossible not to think of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices when reading Sade. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the age of the girls delivered to the libertines “was fixed between twelve and fifteen and anything above or below was ruthlessly rejected.” And in Aline and Valcour, two libertines “keep a seraglio of twelve young girls… of whom the oldest is not yet fifteen, and is replaced at the rate of one a month.”

Epstein’s plane was flippantly and familiarly known as the Lolita Express; in one reported incident, a twenty-three-year-old woman brought to him was rejected as too old. Like Sade, Epstein had hirelings to procure his victims. The financier’s procuresses lived well, as did those in Sade’s work, who in 120 Days received “thirty thousand francs—all expenses paid—for each subject found to their liking (it is extraordinary how much all this cost).”

The libertines in Sade, to quote Barthes, also “belong to the aristocracy, or more exactly (and more frequently) to the class of financiers, professionals, and prevaricators.” And like the victims of Epstein, those victimized and assaulted by Sade’s characters in his fiction, as by Sade himself in real life, “belong to the industrial and urban sub-proletariat.” The power differential that plays such an important part in the contemporary scandals is limned in the biography and writing of Sade. It was Camus who summed up the Sadeian universe as one of “power and hatred,” a term just as aptly applicable to Epstein’s world.

Epstein’s Caribbean island, to which young women were flown, his ranch, and his townhouse are a contemporary version of the castles in which Sade’s fictional and actual victims were assaulted. Just as in the case of Sade, where the will of the victims was ignored, their lives reduced to obeying the libertines’ orders, Epstein’s girls were at times referred to as his friend Ghislaine Maxwell’s “slave[s].” As the victims in the pages of Sade hear: “no one knows you are here… you’re already dead to the world and it is only for our pleasures that you are breathing now.”'

Read the article here.

A friend recommended this to me, and rightly so.

To believe that the books by D.A.F. de Sade foreshadowed Nazism (fascism) or maybe even influenced the architects of concentration camps and gas chambers is simply grotesque. Either you have never read any Holocaust literature or you've never read De Sade. There is no bridge between Death in Venice and Death in Auschwitz, as Jean Améry famously put it, and there is also no bridge between De Sade and Auschwitz.
Yes, fascism and nazism had erotic components, might even to a certain degree be understood as a male fantasy, the torch light processions for example, but the state machine that turned into a killing machine cannot be compared to the fantasies of a man who ended up in an asylum. The killing machine of the Nazis was 'successful' because this machine was efficient, the fantasies by De Sade are the opposite of efficient, this is also what Adorno and Horkheimer, or Queneau for that matter, appear to have missed. His fantasies are rather tedious, and the obsession with repeating the same actions over and over is slightly dull, De Sade is also the Great Repeater.

And then Epstein. De Sade gave birth to fascism and Epstein, really? Maybe also to Chernobyl?

First things first, sexual predators like Epstein have always existed. In the times of De Sade it's very well possible that certain aristocrats, maybe even quite a few, acted like Epstein with impunity. We should keep in mind that a teenager in these days was treated more or less like an adult, we might not like that, but the past doesn't care for our moral likings.

De Sade's philosophy can be criticized, should be criticized, but to link it to fascism would equal linking André Breton to terrorism. Because Breton wrote.
'the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd,' we could argue that surrealism gave birth to contemporary terrorism.

De Sade's work should remind us that the fantasy is free, that the fantasy exist on the other side of good and evil. Yes, De Sade's ideas of freedom are problematic, but the urge to fight fantasies with morality is more totalitarian than De Sade's work. The fact that he himself committed a few crimes is not unimportant, but what about all those noblemen in his days who did the same thing without ever thinking that they committed a crime. Without ever ending up in an asylum. Think of the droit du seigneur.

Mitchell Abidor writes: 'We need not burn Sade, but neither should we praise him.'

Ah, right, decency is not burning the books by De Sade, or not to praise him. This is how the moral rearmament looks nowadays: don't praise De Sade.

Let's count our blessing. We can read him, but we cannot praise him. Only in our fantasies, for the time being at least.