The Libertine's Nature - Lars-Henrik Schmidt

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The crucial point is that in our century the theory of knowledge, and with it epistemology, has been partly replaced by reading strategies, plus that in the history of exegesis the text is more or less unconsciously awarded feminine characteristics. In this way a reading can be compared to an appropriation of “woman,” of an externalized soul with which the reader wishes to be united. One does not seek the woman but what one seeks receives the name of woman. Such is the case with truth as well, which although lost is thought of as veiled.

      In this connection, it is however crucial that one distinguishes between two different versions of the lost soul. In one version the passive interpreter believes that he can reappropriate the lost soul, which is thus considered only temporarily lost. In the other version the “soul” is definitively lost, and for that reason the reading is the interpreter’s active appropriation and not a re-appropriation. In this way, a canny or careful reading strategy can be pointed out as heir to classical exegesis, as opposed to an uncanny reading that is prepared to be surprised.

      The difference between the two strategies seems to demonstrate the opposition between a dialectical re-appropriation of what is temporarily lost and a tragic appropriation of what is definitively lost. Thus, between the dream of reconciling with and to what is lost on the one hand and reduction to reconciling to and not with what is lost on the other, an opposition is revived. This division forms a pattern where hermeneutic, deconstructive and pragmatic readings can be opposed to structuralistic, epistemological and interpretive readings.

      Using the erotic grasp, one can say that the hermeneuticist acts like Casanova, who lets himself be seduced, is faithful to his women and takes good care of them; he must be put in contrast to the structuralist, who acts like Don Juan in that he loves the text in every text, just like Don Juan can love the woman in every woman. He can overcome every text because even this effort is the proof that what it is really about is a text-woman. Continuing the family resemblances, we could say that the deconstructivist acts like Kierkegaard’s Johannes the Seducer, who gives the text-woman a reputation but is only faithful to himself and his composite idea of what a woman is taken from parts of women in whom he has found something interesting. As for the seducer, he must be put in contrast to the Therapist, who as the knight of the epistemological reading wants to rescue a hidden sub-text; the essential thing for him is to break free from the blurring obstacles. In this strategy, emancipation is the same as knowledge, and today this is still the purpose of reading. Finally, the pragmatic reader is represented by the Husband, the good reader, who learns to love the one he gets by using the material at hand and gathering a little here and a little there as is most befitting; but always with only one text-woman at a time. He may then finally be put in contrast to the interpretive reader that I defend here, namely, the Libertine, who initiates the text in order to continue the libertinage: the libertine production of meaning. What must be emphasized here is that the libertine wants something from his reading and it is in this that his family resemblance with the Therapist and Don Juan is to be found. It is true that he is hardly distinguishable from the Husband, who, however, is closely related to the Seducer and to Casanova, since he only wants the best for his relationship to the text. In contrast, the libertine interpreter wants to do something suspicious with the text, without wanting to rescue it like the Therapist or, like the dissatisfied Don Juan, wanting it to give in. He is scrupulously aware of his construction, and along with that the lost immediacy. And he should also be man enough to take advantage of the erotic strategies the situation offers even though he has his preferences. As the agent of his taste, an interpreter listens to his echo, i.e., to the opposition in the text; but he does not find himself. The reappropriative reading could, on the other hand, suitably be characterized as narcissistic.

      Given that the situation is arranged in this way, which is to say that it is Sade to whom the reading should relate, the almost unavoidable question is whether Sade as Sade is done justice in an interpretive construction like this; the answer is given: Sade cannot be justified! But one can, for one’s own sake, bypass his bibliography with respect and propriety all the same. The matter is rather one of coevalness, including a matter of the shape in which Sade can be made contemporaneous. By perceiving the texts as another’s body, we keep company with the interpretive and analytical problem concerning the subject in Sade’s text: the subject of the enunciation and the utterance. Quite simply, in the interpretive construction that I am proposing, these problems do not seem very interesting. Something is present in Sade’s text. Whether this is a mask for Sade, whether the position is contradicted elsewhere, in other arrangements, etc. is irrelevant.

      What this is about, then, is that in the redundancy of the Sadian libertine’s statements, a style of thought can be constructed; that is, a philosophical position comparable to other positions. The question, then, of whether Marquis de Sade would admit to, accept, denounce or condemn this thinking that is called Sadian is not important, as I claim neither to explain nor to analyze Sade. I interpret Sade because with this interpretation I hope to make progress with the problem that “he” knows something about but that I have constructed. For an interpretation of this kind, Sade’s choice of the novel as the typical mode of expression of his time is of less interest than the fact that he wrote the same novel over and over again, distancing and repeating: an interpretation wants to transform inadmissibility into untidiness, make room for it on today’s horizon, so to speak.

       The Way It Goes

      With the interpretive construction and constructive interpretation proposed by this book I aim to do two things.

      In part, using the perspective of the history of ideas, I will read Sade generally as a philosopher, comparing him with other writers from the Enlightenment and connecting his ideas to the great themes of the era, particularly his concept of nature, and specifically read him as one of the originators of an anthropological discourse and of the aesthetics of the sublime. In terms of the history of ideas, the most important interlocutors here will be Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche.

      And, in part, using the perspective of Social Analytics and Sade as the occasion, I will attempt to construct a “theory of pleasure” with a view to undertaking a revaluation of the priority given to “the other” in traditional (and this of course more or less means Christian) moral philosophy. Hereby I hope to be able to bring about a displacement (from suffering to pleasure, from regard to respect, and so on) that can prepare for a different ethics.

      So as to realize this project, my presentation falls into three sections. The first part is an attempt to present and locate Sade’s complex of problems through his aesthetics and his philosophy of nature, and its objective is to demonstrate that it is worth listening to Sade. The second part is a presentation and transgression of Sade’s lesson in pleasure, in which it will be demonstrated that on Sadian premises one can take a entirely non-Sadian route. In light of this, the third part tries out Sade’s will to transgress the prohibitions of nature and humanity, and it seeks to demonstrate his limitation.

      Hence: the first part concerns a displacement from nature to physiology or sensuality; the second part is about a displacement in pleasure from the other’s pain to one’s own craving, and finally the third part is about a displacement from prohibition to abstention.

      In short, the thesis is that it is not possible for Sade to transgress the social, but that precisely in his failure lies the condition for the possibility of letting an ethics cast anchor in the maelstrom. Sade’s will to transgression unwittingly happens to indicate a point for the social. In reality, his misfortune indicates what I shall call our dis-fortune. Using the history of ideas as an interpretive construction and a constructive interpretation, it is then my aim to render plausible the thesis of this book, which experiments with overcoming Sade’s complex of problems through a presentation of and reconciliation to Sade’s limitation – a limitation that consists of nothing less than the social self.

       Le Philosophe

      Sade considered himself a “philosophe”; in his era this meant very precisely a critical

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