Sade: Laying down the Law
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Abstract
Sade was of ten the v ic t im, or the pat ient, of the law laid d o w n : condemned f irst, and executed in eff igy, for commi t t ing acts of indecency of a type not uncommon among the French aristocracy of the late eighteenth century, subsequently held on the author i ty of a lettre de cachet, released by the Revolut ion, only to be rearrested, through administrat ive error, as a suspect ci-devant; ending his life in an asylum of the Empire for having wr i t ten wha t he wro te . Af ter his death, the law cont inued to condemn his wr i t ings, unti l recent ly. 1 The texts of the law can take the texts of Sade as their object, as the case before t hem, about wh ich they lay down the law. Most recognisably serious approaches to Sade's texts by literary theory or crit icism wou ld reduplicate this st ructure, taking those texts as a case and at tempt ing to lay d o w n the law about t hem. Insofar as wha t I shall say is serious, it wi l l not escape f rom this conf igurat ion of languages. A presupposit ion informing this structure is that a certain discourse of law can in some sense conta in , constrain, or comprehend Sade: the law as prescript ion can conf ine the body of the marquis in the Bastille or in Charenton, or condemn the body of his wr i t ings to the enfer. But the apparently descriptive laws of poetician or narratologist constrain none the less, in establishing poetic or narrative l a w s ' bearing on those texts. In the 'case' of Sade, however, this model of conta inment is t roubled: any a t tempt to include or comprehend Sade's wr i t ing wi th in the law must recognise that that wr i t ing already contains the law in its turn — in other words the 'case' to be comprehended comprehends, or at tempts to comprehend, the law wh ich posits it as a case. Sade's novels of ten.