Obscenity off the Scene : Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

Given the dubious etymology and semantic ambiguities of both the English and French words,‘obscene’ and ‘obscène’, I want to interrogate the word’s slippage between significations of a narrowly sexual and a more indeterminate nature. I shall read Sade’s La Philosophie dans le Boudoir through a number of related binary opposites: on-stage/off-stage, politics/sex, low/high, in the light of Derridean and Bakhtinian theories. For Derrida, each term of such binaries carries within it the trace of its opposite, a linguisticundecidability which helps us to understand the ambivalence of the work and how for Sade, the author of Boudoir, true obscenity is always off-stage. Boudoir is dated around 1794, or shortly after theend of the Terror, during which Sade was imprisoned in the ex-convent at Picpus to which the guillotine had recently been moved. For the author of Justine, the sight of victim after victimbeing beheaded just yards from his cell window was considerably more shocking –and in this sensemore obscene (‘repulsive’, ‘loathsome’ OED)—than anything his imagination had conceived.

In this historical context, the Boudoir dialogue (in conjunction with the intercalated pamphlet, ‘Français, encore un effort, si vous voulez être républicains’) points to the immorality and sheerunwatchability (obscenity) of the Terror, while arguing for a sexual utopia without laws and

1

other restraints, irresistibly drawing attention to the consequences of philosophy outside the boudoir, and alluding ironically to what Žižek after Freud calls the obscene superego double of the public law (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 38; see also 54-5), in that the Terror can be said tobe the obscene underside or excess of a Revolution arising from legitimate demands. (cf Grayling, Towards the Light, 146-7)

SPACES: BOUDOIR/THEATRE/MARKET-PLACE/GUILLOTINE

Pedagogy: Like most of Sade’s writings, La Phil has a strong pedagogical intention, and the pedagogy is located intradiegetically, both in the self-conscious staging of sex education for Eugenie and the reader, and in the implied role as apostle of libertinism which she will henceforth fulfil.The unreality of the boudoir outside space and time may seemingly preclude any socio-historical or political reading, an assumption reinforced perhaps by the very isolation of the more politically oriented pamphlet read out by Dolmancé. This textual separation may be thought to imply a separation in content between the political and the non-political, the historicallyrelevant and that which is atemporal or eternal, ie, sexual anatomy and biology. However, Sade’s pedagogy is not separable into sex and politics, the two being inextricably enmeshed throughout the work. This interpenetration of themes is identifiable at the level of textual space.

2

I shall argue that this spatial and thematic ambivalence/hybridity of La Philosophie invites aBakhtinian reading that privileges binary oppositions (in particular, high/low and inside/outside) and emphasises the work’s gay anarchy and political subversiveness over any more negative features.

Derrida’s concept of the subjectile may also be found useful in a discussion of the principal spaces of the text, both present (boudoir) and absent (théâtre, palais de l’égalité, guillotine). Derrida’s interest in the subjectile, as in that of the parergon and the trait, is in the ‘demarcation and/or erasure of borders, boundaries and limits’ (Wolfreys, 82) The subjectile is ‘the material or material support on which a painting or engraving is made’(OED; Wolfreys, 83). For Wolfreys, it is also abstractly ‘that which is adapted to receive a “subject” or picture (…) that which makes the image, the text, the representation possible’ (Wolfreys, 83). Wolfreys sees it as a sort of ghost ‘hovering in the background of any text (…)neither there nor not there, it belongs properly speaking neither completely inside nor outside any text (…) the double border between word or image and world’ (83-4). As such, the subjectile undermines stable representation ‘and therefore gives the lie to the promise of presence, and of full meaning that representational art would appear to guarantee’ (87). Thus, the subjectile is an undecidable in Derrida’s terms, underminingthe promise of presence, and at the same time,

3

pointing to what is absent. In this sense, the dramatic frame of La Philosophie dans le boudoir may be called a kind of subjectile, pointing both inwards and outwards: on the one hand, to the self-conscious mise en scène of sexual instruction inside the text, and on the other, tothe dramatic stage of the guillotine, and of the wider theatre of revolution outside it, so much in the forefront of Sade’s mind as he wrote this work. If we apply this concept to La Phil dans leB, our constant awareness of staging, of representation that the theatrical format makes inescapable, undermines presence, butat the same time, draws attention to absence, or more precisely, to what is ‘offthe scene’ in the year of composition, 1794, ie, the Terror (as of course does theintercalated pamphlet).

This interplay between presence and absence mirrors the opposition that extends throughout the work between pleasure and pain, hedonism and puritanism. Presence Onstage: the mother, sex manifest, joyously celebrated. Absence Offstage: the father who has given permission for all to occur; sex latent, joylessly denied, repressed into violence; the outside world, alluded to in the work’stitle (dans…trace), the philosophy of the Terror, pamphlet (not present onstage, but rather a narrative of what is external to the represented.

4

Female body unites the two: the very embodiment of absence, both in her anatomy and her ignorance, Eugenie is being trainedas an ambassador, a sex-terrorist who will be sent into the world to initiate a sexualrevolution, the feminine principle of a newFrance.

The Body takes centre stage both inside the boudoir and outside it on the guillotine, but only in the boudoir is the subjection of reason to passion, of politics to sex openly acknowledged. Not merely inverting but, in the explicit representation of sex and violence, going well beyond the rules of bienseance in French theatre, Sade thus brings the violence of the times and the sexual repression that underpins it inside and onstage. If, for Zizek, there is an objective violence inherent to the normal state of things—a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language, and a ‘systemic’ violence—aviolence that is invisible and against which ‘subjective’ violence stands out (Violence, 1-2),French revolutionary society collapses this distinction so that the invisible systemic violence has become visible, and crime has becomepart of ‘the normal state of things’, as the anonymous author of the intercalated pamphlet points out: ‘N’est-ce pas à force de meurtres quela France est libre aujourd’hui?’ (La Phil, 255)

Violence is thus intrinsic to the daily scene—and indeed, mise en scène in the spectacle of the Terror. Sade’s Boudoir ironically parodies this staging, as the aristocrats establish their own society—one based on sex—and ritually executea victim—Mme de Mistival—who might be taken as

5

symbol of the new republic in one crucial sense in a sadean context: its excessive puritanism. Atthe same time, Sade’s ‘violence’ would seem to befundamentally sexual, obscene in the accepted modern sense—but its dramatic expression (a symbolically public genre) similarly renders the distinction between the public and the private, the on- and off-scene, the seemly and the obscene, unstable. La Phil brings philosophy intothe boudoir, but it also proposes to take sex outside it in the manifesto for an openly sexual republic contained in the intercalated pamphlet. If sex is therefore on-scene, in the sense of itsrepresentation as both normal and desirable, how can it be obscene? Like Zizek’s view of Jacobin revolutionary violence (Violence, 171), it is extra-moral and so cannot be immoral.

This extramoral dimension of the work’s sexual contents is also reinforced by its symbolic value. Contemporary readers might well have seen in the assault on Mme de Mistival echoes of the metaphorical rape by the revolutionary mob of aristocratic lands and property: inverting the conventions of the literary, it is the metaphorical that is ironically literalised here in Sade’s inverted utopia. Eugenie’s hapless mother is certainly treated roughly, and given what may prove to be alethal injection of disease, but she is eventually released, and may survive any infection. Robespierre’s guillotine offers no such chance of reprieve. Sade’s scenario differs from the reality outside in another important sense: while Robespierre is impelled to murder bythe obsessive need to purify…both the body and the republic, the libertine’s motivation is the

6

rejection of the pure as a dangerous chimera in pursuit of the abject and its pleasures. (Add note on Kristeva’s Abject)

This politically subversive dimension alone invites a Bakhtinian reading, but there is more than a whiff of the carnival on Sade’s virtual stage. (Note: The political dimension of carnivalas an expression of popular opposition to policies of church and state (SW15); politics: anti-bourgeois since bourgeois rejects carnivalesque (SW202)) As in Carnival, for Bakhtin, La Phil appears temporarily to suspend reality, and critically to invert official hierarchies, replacing ‘high’ with ‘low’ culture:(cf SW7):

As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension ofall hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete. (Rabelais and his World, 109; quoted by SW7))

(Note: Boudoir: inside/outside: sites of discourse: ‘Only a challenge to the hierarchy of sites of discourse, which usually comes from groups and classes ‘situated’ by the dominant in low or marginal positions, carries the promise ofpolitically transformative power.’ (SW201) NB: Storming of Bastille largely symbolic since contained few prisoners.)

7

One could argue that the entire play can be read on a political level as inverting such hierarchies in ironic echo of the Revolution: Thesubstitution of low for high that is central to carnival is one of the principal drivers of plot in La Phil, as the daughter is given authority over the mother. (Low defined: SW167)daughter against mother, children against parents(292), inside (boudoir) against outside (Terror),education of genitals against that of the mind/soul, material against the spiritual (175), God made in Man’s image (55), pleasure against procreation (38), anus against vagina, father against mother (47), vice against virtue (50, 60 et seq), the supreme body against the supreme being (51 et seq), the divinity of the body rather than of the soul, pain against, or rather for pleasure (167), crime decriminalised (cf 255 irony), etc.). Both the work’s subtitle--‘ou les instituteurs immoraux’--and epigraph--‘La mere enprescrira (rather than ‘proscrira’) la lecture à sa fille’--also point to its intention to ‘turn the world upside down’--in this case, the aims ofthe education of young women.

Moreover, in the education of Eugenie, Sade inverts the process of bourgeois education, according to which the child is ‘cleaned up’, andthe lower body regulated, denied or censored: lesinstituteurs immoraux replace Rousseau’s moral pedagogues (ref from Emile?). The unmentionable becomes not only mentionable but de rigueur. (cf SW144-5)

The description of the well-endowed but pox-ridden valet, LaPierre--(cf 304: ‘distillant le virus et rongé d’une des plus terribles véroles qu’on ait encore vues dans le monde’), Dolmancé’s

8

‘dirty treatment’ of Mme de Mistival, and her rape by both her daughter and this servant similarly force the low into the open, the repressed to return. Her disgust is thus challenged, subverted and eroded through linguistic recategorization (cf SW187) Augustin’stearing off her clothes is described by Dolmancé as the service of a chamber-maid (295); Eugenie’srape of her mother is not a rape but a ‘husbanding’ –‘venez, belle maman, que je vous serve de mari’ (299); whilst Lapierre’s infectionof her with the pox is jocularly inverted by Dolmancé as a cure for Lapierre!: ‘Lapierre, foutez cette femme-là; elle est extraordinairement saine; cette jouissance peut vous guérir: le remède n’est pas sans exemple.’ (304-5) The sewing up of the vagina, in addition to the act’s symbolic meanings, is also a metonymic displacement: what the libertines are determined to do is to shut Mme de M’s mouth, to close down the discourse of puritanism (one identifiable above all with Robespierre at this time). Whereas the mother’s orifices are closed, the daughter’s are opened (306). This substitution of low for high, this assertion of the daughter’s rights over the mother’s (290) hasa further, more overtly political sense: it is the basest member of the rabble, Lapierre, who isinstructed to husband this well-bred lady from the ruling classes. Thus, at the level of social class, and in ironic replication of the Revolution, the high is assaulted by the low.

Sade thus attacks purity as the real source of violence, inverting the growing social taboos against the ‘lower body’ and its products, making

9

impurity a virtue ‘both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories (…) a focus upon gaps, orifices and symbolic filth (…) physical needs and pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’, materiality and parody’ (SW23). (Note: ‘Eventually all the body’s products, except tears, become simply unmentionable in decent society.’ (Stephen Greenblatt, quoted by SW188))

ComedyThis substitution of the impure for the pure in favour of a celebration of the body’s lower functions, makes for a savage black comedy that is strongly carnivalesque. ‘In carnival the exaggeratedly bulging and dirty lower stratum is given priority and turned into the source of comic display’ (SW185). The gaping orifices and bawdy humour surrounding them recalls the gay obscenity of Rabelais: ‘(…) comic privileging of bottom part of the body’ (cf measuring of penises), a flaunting of the material body ‘as a pleasurable grotesquerie’ (SW183). As Mme de Saint-Ange opines, ‘ce qu’il y a de plus sale, deplus infâme, et de plus défendu est ce qui irritele mieux la tête’ (91). There are scatological puns, double entendres and other word-plays: Mme de Saint-Ange to Dolmancé: ‘La réputation de franchise n’est pourtant pas celle que l’on donneà ceux qui, comme vous, sont accoutumés à ne prendre les gens que par-derrière.’ (164); ‘il faut être entouré de culs quand c’est un cul qu’on fout.’ (298 + 299). There is coarse banter--Augustin: ‘Dame! Monsieux, c’est que ça venait de couler tout près du chose de cette gentile tourterelle, et vous voulez que ça dressetout d’suite pour vot’ cul, qui n’est vraiment

10

pas si joli, da!’ (183)—and in such behaviour as the measuring of penises and Mme de Saint-Ange’s farting in Dolmancé’s face (280), comique de geste in the best tradition of bawdy French farce. These representations of the body in terms of comic vulgarity correspond closely to Bakhtin’s description of ‘grotesque realism’: SW8-9: This is fundamental to the corporeal, collective nature of carnival laughter (SW8): ‘corpulent excess…the human body as multiple, bulging, over-or under-sized …The openings and orifices of thiscarnival body are emphasised, not its closure andfinish…. Lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, ‘spirit’, reason)

THE RABELAISIAN COMIC (to come after Inversion?)

For our twenty-first century sensibilities, this scandalous black comedy could only appeal to the most macabre and most cruel sense of humour. As Robert Darnton has made clear, however, humour depends on culturally and historically variable factors. In The Great Cat Massacre, he relates how cats were tortured and murdered in eighteenth-century France and other European countries to the universal merriment and delight of onlookers,acts that we in the West, at least, would now deem shockingly barbaric. (cf 77) For Darnton, the ‘great cat massacre’ is a carnivalesque event: ‘high season for hilarity, sexuality and youth run riot’ (83), and having an ‘aura of hilarious witch-hunting’ (85). I would suggest

11

that the same may be said of the treatment of theprudish Mme de Mistival, especially against the background of daily manifestations of far greaterbarbarism. Darnton’s evocation of the circumstances surrounding the cat massacre bears some similarities to those of La Phil. In both scenarios, the religious bigotry of the bourgeoisie acts as trigger (Darnton, 89), and Mme de Mistival’s summary judgement and punishment is strongly reminiscent of the kind ofimprovised popular tribunals that perceived injustices sometimes led to in eighteenth-centuryFrance (ibid., 98).

All these grotesque qualities have a positive force in Bakhtin’ (SW9) What is the positive force here?As Gilbert Lely has argued, La Phil is in fact, when read in its historical context, the least cruel of Sade’s works. In the context of a Terrormanaged by puritanical bourgeois intellectuals, is it so implausible to consider that Sade intended the ‘needlework’ scene to be a piece of ironic, Rabelaisian farce? We would therefore wish to agree only in part with Geoffrey Bennington when he suggests that, as the referential, denotative function of language is cast into doubt in Sade’s texts, ‘in a sense, theonly “real” cruelty in Sade is that worked in thebody of language’ (‘Sade: Laying Down the Law’ inOxford Literary Review 6, no 2 (1984), pp. 38-56;this ref, p. 54). This language also functions metaphorically and symbolically in relation to contemporary events.

12

Philosophy in the Boudoir offers a healthy counter-image to a far greater moral and political obscenity. The on-stage so-called ‘obscenity’ of words and actions in Sade’s text is little more than a sacrilegious game, on the one hand, and a joyful celebration of the sexual body on the other. If, as I am arguing, obscenity is the unwatchability of violence, deemed unfit for the stage in the French classical tradition, the onlytruly obscene act in Sade’s drama is the rape of Mme de Mistival, whose puritanical attitudes symbolise a repression that is shown to lead inevitably to violence, while the far greater obscenity of indiscriminate murder as a similarlystaged event is located ‘off-scene’—a ‘trace’ notion which the word ‘obscene’ carries within it—in the violent return of the repressed that was the Terror. (Defs of obscenity?: cf FF, Ch 1) Mmede Mistival’s treatment has political resonances in a Freudian perspective. Instead of her headbeing cut off, it is her vagina that is sewn up (another reversal)….the head for Freud being a symbol of the genitals. Mme de M’s fate may be read, therefore, as a suture (Derrida meaning?), as a stemming ofthe flow of blood.

Sade’s sexual discourse is thus implicitly political, taking us ‘off-stage’ into a politicalcontext to which carnival always refers. As we have seen, the inside points to the outside, so that the carnivalesque elements of La Phil move the focus incessantly and irresistibly outside the boudoir to the terror which frames it (quote

13

SW16; SW16-19). Linguistically, but also symbolically, obscenity is literally off-scene.

This inversion of spaces so characteristic of carnival is paralleled by an equal inversion at the level of character and action. ‘The boundaries between all categories are confused and transgressed’ (SW120): daughters become lovers, husbands, while valets and gardeners are allowed to seek pleasure alongside their masters.Augustin is ‘king for the day’, again a low temporarily elevated to high. An off-scene, minorcharacter thus becomes an on-scene principal in one of the work’s key scenes, participating actively, with the chevalier, in the deflowermentof Eugenie, itself a carnivalesque inversion, as purity becomes impurity, virgin becomes whore.

These features appear at first glance to be mere inversions, whereas, for Bakhtin, hybridity and not merely inversion constitutes the real threat of carnival (SW24 quote?) It is hybridity that isfeared by the cultural elite as the ‘promiscuous mingling of the high and the low’ (SW112) In fact, in La Phil, the mix of the sexual and the political, of the comic and the violent, makes the work notoriously hard to classify—less an either/or than a both/and or a neither/nor, suggesting an undecidability (Derrida) or hybridity (Bakhtin). I want to argue that many ofthe elements we have examined so far do, indeed, go beyond a straightforward inversion to confuse and so challenge fixed identities, mixing genres (theatre, libertinism, politics, philosophy), andtherefore, discourses (classical, low, respectable, vulgar), subverting social

14

hierarchies (from aristocrat and bourgeois to peasant and valet).

LINGUISTIC HYBRIDITYThis mix of discourses, ‘the dialogic opposition of different speech genres’ is inherently carnivalesque (Dolmancé: scientific, Eugenie: childlike, Augustin: dialectic, Lapierre: vulgar,etc) (SW12)The insertion of Augustin’s ungrammatical peasantvernacular into the educated discourse of the libertines is not a simple inversion but a hybridmingling of high and low characteristic of the carnivalesque, as Dolmancé echoes the gardener’s agricultural metaphor:

AUGUSTIN: -- Ma fy! Madame, vous dites pourtant quelquefois comme ça que je commence à ne pas si mal aller à present, et quand y a du terrain en friche, c’est toujours à moi que vous le donnez.DOLMANCÉ, riant: -- Ah! charmant! …charmant!... Lecher ami, il est aussi franc qu’il est frais…(Montrant Eugenie.) Augustin, voilà une banquette defleurs en friche; veux-tu l’entreprendre?’ (145)

HYBRIDITY OF CLASSThis linguistic hybridity is of course simultaneously a hybridity of class.Of course, it may be objected that Augustin’s liberties are temporary, Dolmancé preserving a control of Augustin and thus exhibiting an elitist control of the low. (Terry Eagleton makesprecisely this critique of carnival as a serious threat to the hegemonic powers, since, as he putsit, ‘there is no in an allowed fool’ (ref?).

15

Yet, we should remember that, at this time, and in spite of a revolution that was essentially bourgeois, any social let alone sexual intercourse between the upper and lower orders would have been considered undesirable, to say the least. In this light, the pamphlet’s proposalto establish brothels on every street corner, where the aristocratic and bourgeois male might mingle with low culture, can be read as a direct challenge to the separation of the classical and the popular, dirt and purity, the legalisation ofthe immoral in a legal system still profoundly influenced by notions of sin. (SW137)

To return to the spatial dimensions of the work, it is above all at this level that La Phil goes beyond simple inversion to a ‘promiscuous mingling’ that is somehow curiously disturbing.

The Guillotine is the physically absent but symbolically ever-present space, indicated explicitly in the pamphlet in references to murder and capital punishment, but also implicitly in the emphasis throughout the main dialogue on staging, the body, and above all, in the emphasis on sexual pleasure and the opposition to the puritanism of a religion which contemporary readers would undoubtedly have associated with Robespierre and the Terror.

The Boudoir is also a hybrid space ideologically (ambivalence?): democratic space of the body controlled by aristocratic/elitist authority. As such, points backwards but also forwards to the

16

slow progression in the 19th and 20th centuries towards a new democratic subject.

Palais: It is the palais de l’égalité where Dolmancé purchases the pamphlet that acts as fulchrum between the inside and outside. The palais is also source of dissidence, ‘libelles’ which have traditionally challenged religion and monarchy under the ancien regime. Libelles (or….)were bought and sold in such public spaces (eg? See Darnton). Like the fair and the market, the palais is, therefore, another hybrid space (SW39)in which opposition to the dominant ideology flourishes (SW36, 37-8), and therefore, a locus of the carnivalesque.

This co-mingling extends to a shift of spatial identity, as the boudoir temporarily becomes the market place when the pamphlet is read out, and of course, a theatre for the rest of the time, itself a dangerously hybrid space.

La Phil = TheatreThe space in which all action occurs is entirely neutral, lacking any detailed description—‘un boudoir délicieux’ (31)—an absence that shifts attention to the dramatic form, to theatre as symbolic space. ‘Boudoir’ functions, then, as a descriptor of theme, not place. On the other hand, the work’s dialogic form is indisputably theatrical, and its structure is recognisably Aristotelian: the arrival of the principal protagonists, the education of Eugenie which is in part a preparation for the punishment of the mother, the latter’s arrival, a coup de theatre,

17

followed by the climax of her multiple rape and the denouement of her expulsion. The piece is thus a microdrama of sex and violence, its self-awareness as theatre echoing the real violence on the equally theatrical stage ofthe Terror (guillotine). The point here is the location of the action on discursive and symbolic levels, so that the question of whether it was ever really intended to be performed may be bracketed off. (Note: During the Terror, opera-houses and theatres were either closed or continually playing patriotic plays (collapse of the Terror: 27th July, 1794; La Phil, 1795) cf ‘Popular Theatre in the French Revolution’ by Michele Root-Bernstein (politics as theatre and the stage as a political scene). Sade’s ‘theatre of sex’ may therefore be an ironic counterblast to the regime’s anti-theatre policies and to the vacuous contents of those plays that were allowedto run. Such irony would have a personal source, given the failures of Sade’s own theatrical enterprises at this time.)

Theatre and DissidenceTheatre in general had a long history as a locus of dissidence in Europe, and for Stallybrass and White, a strongly carnivalesque space, partly because of its associations with another source of resistance to the political hegemony: the fair. (True of French theatre?: SW claim that these hybrid processes underpinned the stock accusation against the popular stage as early as the sixteenth century (SW115). It is also a mark of many works of literature in the eighteenth (egBeaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro, and Mozart’s opera of the same name. CHECK)

18

After Charles II’s return to the English throne in 1660 ?, Bartholomew Fair was considerably extended over several weeks, and ‘as the fair grew and flourished it drew the theatres into itsorbit. The traffic in ideas, plays, personnel, actors and managers between the fair-booths and the theatres was considerable in the eighteenth century, not least because the fairs offered theatre people the chance of employment during the summer period when the theatres were closed. (…) Actors came from the fashionable theatres to perform at the fairs’ booths.’ (SW111) Moreover, both the boudoir and the stage at this time are loci of immorality. (Immorality of stage, condemned by puritans in England (see ref): was this the case in France? (SW92)), an immorality that went hand in hand with the mingling of classes. In 18thC France, theatre wasa meeting-place of bourgeois and lower classes, where the body odours emanating from both mingled. Cf. Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume, pp.3-4: In 18thC France, ‘there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.’ Et seq. Appalling lack of sanitation- streets rank with smell of garbage and sewage. Middle-class and wealth people hid personal odours by extreme use of perfume. In that bourgeois culture aimed to eradicate all smells, confining them to the lower orders, Sade’s grotesque collective body onstage evokes that offstage in the audience. Thus, this offstage has come onstage, counterpointing the offstage/onstage grotesquerie of the Terror. (SW94)

19

Theatre, finally, is both speech and writing, and as such, each carries with it the trace of its opposite. Related to the play between presence and absence, drama isthe hinge (Wolfreys, 67) which points to the impossibility of plenitude within a sign, the ‘doubling and division, the difference of and within (the self)’ (67-8). While the theatre of La Phil performs speech self-consciously, the pamphlet performs writing in speech, underlining themutual dependence of both. In this case, speech and presence appear to oppose writing and absence (as in the Western philtradition), but this opposition is undermined by the speaking of the written (by Dolmancé) and the writing of the spokenin a theatrical dialogue which could never have been intended for performance. Similarly, the present (inside the boudoir)and the absent (outside it) cannot be separated. Thus are what is onstage and what is off-stage inextricably confused: obscenity, in one of the word’s possible meanings, is at once off the scene (in the external events contemporaneous to the composition of this work) and on the scene (not of Sade’s boudoir, but of Robespierre’s Terror).

Conclusion

20

In every sense, then, La Phil is a thoroughly carnivalesque work: binaries: low/high, official/popular, grotesque/classical, the grotesque body, the erotic, the punning derision of authority, the mise en scene of an obscene that inverts the real obscenity of the Terror, transgression in its symbolic and especially its material sense, the symbolic status of the textual spaces (boudoir, theatre, market-place), and their dangerous hybridity, or ambivalence in a Derridean sense. These perspectives help us to read the work more positively, and indeed, as a veiled polemic against the indiscriminate use of state power against the individual and the tyranny of religious fanaticism, aspects which critics have hitherto tended to identify only in the intercalated pamphlet. As I hope to have demonstrated, however, this inherently political discourse is implicit in the main body of the work.

All of the foregoing also helps us to understand what some critics (eg Philippe Roger) have seen as the weakness (indeterminacy) of Sade’s political position. It is this very ambivalence that is politically threatening, a clear illustration of the strong current of political didacticism in Sade’s work.

Note?: La Philosophie dans le boudoir and the Justine and Juliette novels represent the last wave of the sustained use of the so-called pornographic for satirical and pedagogical purposes, at least until the twentieth century. As Lynn Hunt has argued, Sade’s libertine works of the 1790s

21

‘took the politically and socially subversive possibilities of pornography to their furthest possible extreme and, at the same time, he paved the way for the modern, apolitical genre of pornography. His attack on every aspect of conventional morality undermined the use of pornography for political ends in the future. Pornography was now identified with a general assault on morality itself, rather than a specific criticism of the irrationalities of the ancien régime moral system.’ (Lynn Hunt, ‘Pornography and the French Revolution’ in The Invention of Pornography, edited by Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1996), pp. 301-39; this ref. p.330))

22