The Libertine's Nature. Lars-Henrik Schmidt
have to write ‘Misdeeds of Love’ in order to carry out a complete analysis of the problematic they span – but neglect. Common to them as well is their ignorance of eroticism: the point at which the other’s relating is further involved, at which one must play along, and one’s desire is the other’s desire. At the same time, in eroticism there is always a rival and as such the relation may be interpreted as a social coincidence and made into an object for social analytics.
The Erotic Triangle
The libertine’s natural goal is to be happy, and this in turn means spontaneously acting out his passion. But the sine qua non for this acting out is the others, which is why the passion must be said to be always-already social. However, it is this basic relation against which Sade wages war; for precisely this reason the philosophy of passion is a means of problematizing the social. The libertine wishes to relate to other people as pure objects, that is to say, only as means, not also as ends. Apparently it is the libertine’s nature to relate), without regard to how the object relates, without relating to how others relate to the object in question, and without relating to his own relation. It should be the libertine’s nature to be pure nature. The humaneness (social human existence) of the object and of himself is not something to which he wishes to relate. He wants, then, to transgress the condition of ‘relating to relations’. And again this constitutes wanting to transgress the social self. We always stand in more than one relation in that a self-relation also presents itself. Or at least this is how one has to consider the situation in the perspective of Social Analytics.
The libertine of Sadian fiber has to learn to see all persons, all creatures surrounding him as so many victims that fate has delivered to satisfy his profound perversion (JL VIII p. 29; JL VIII p. 67). A libertine like this makes other people into objects for his desire, and he disregards conventional prescriptions for how one is to relate to other people. A libertine does both in the form of the orgy: he makes use of the other in a sexual situation, in a criminal act, and he legitimizes his criminal disregard of the third party (eg. the law, morality, religion, etc.) in a philosophical digression that throws light on his sensuality and its naturalness. The critique of the social in Sade is localized in the orgy as a synthesis of sensory and philosophical excess.
On the one hand, presenting evil is a way of problematizing the social: the presence of evil is a challenge to the social bond in relations. On the other hand, the libertine practice is the unremitting transgression of our culture’s principal prohibitions, with murder then incest as the top scorers. Sodomy is far and away the predominant practice (i.e., unnaturally taking advantage of the other as if he were a woman and woman as if she were other than woman), itself viewed as a serious crime at the time: a crime against the social conception of nature. On top of this, everything is recounted with a monotony mimicking nature’s perpetual movement so as to illustrate that it is nature that remains dominant, even in what appears to be the social. The texts demonstrate that the social does not actually exist at all, that only nature is indeed real, that is, constant. Through its constancy the Sadian work thus expresses a firm truth, a reality, according to Sadian logic.
What is complicated, then, is ascertaining to what extent Sade really succeeds in transgressing the social with this strategy. And the thesis is that despite all his zealousness to transgress the social conventions he is incapable of extirpating the last remainder. He does not extirpate the invitation nor overcome the presence of the rival. The reservation of a remainder like this prevents the ultimate, nihilistic reduction of fellow man to a pure object, to simultaneously in-dependent and non-worthy. This reservation is crucial from the point of view of Social Analytics, for it is in this that the social becomes manifest.
Not even Sade, the keenest and most discerning of critics, can exorcise this remainder, and this is why one should perhaps listen attentively to it in Sade’s text too, partly to localize it and partly to determine the obstacle that Sade himself installs in attempting to realize his project. Even the will to excess proves to be a will to order.
As a philosopher of excess and thus of transgression, Sade is not a tragic philosopher, but he comes up against passion’s tragic condition, at which point his project is doomed to disappoint. Confronted with the structure of passion, he discovers the real problem: the insatiability of passion, its productive multiplication. Excess leads to transgression, which leads to excess, which leads to transgression, and so on in a maelstrom, which however is exhausting for any libertine. His own limited, physical nature becomes a kind of limit; but exhaustion and satiation are radically different in character. Sade’s psychological and physical problem is simply that women are, like nature itself (JL VIII p. 94), insatiable. As Delbène-Sade himself says about the female sex’s desire: “Thus ‘tis unimaginable what we do, after what excesses we crave, men have no idea what a woman is capable of when Nature goes unchecked, when religion’s voice is throttled, when the law’s sway over her is broken” (JL VIII p. 132; p. 88). The psychological problem that turns into philosophy is the woman’s insatiability in light of the man’s exhaustion. So man must become woman, play woman, and he must limit woman. This objectification of the woman can only be bought by monopolizing her natural insatiability and amusing oneself in a way that overcomes this natural exhaustion. The consequence is sadism – the protest against the man’s limitation.
The situation gives rise to a thesis that must be tested: the libertine’s desire is first of all to reduce fellow man to a pure object, but in the event that this reduction is realized the possibility for this very desire is removed. Second, what the libertine would like to do is transgress others’ relation to this reduction, but in the event that the transgression succeeds the possibility for this very desire is removed.
We can try to clarify the relationship in a simple ABC figure:
Expressed in terms of the simple play of ABC in Social Analytics, what this means is that A (the libertine) wants to stand in a direct relation to B (the victim), plus that A wants to disregard C’s (the victim’s self-relation, i.e., what he thinks about the treatment) relation to B, such that C coincides with A. The libertine cunningly wants to replace the object’s self-relation, and on the whole limit the number of relations by making them into pure repetitions.
The connection between reduction and replacement can be made clear in the same figure. Wanting to reduce the play of ABC relations to a simplified AB interrelation is wanting to overcome the social, which consists in also relating to C-B in the relation between A and B. In the social, A also relates to C’s relation to B. If we say that CB is B’s self-relation, then the libertine (A) is going to wish to reduce or disregard this relation in order to relate directly to B as a pure object. If we imagine, on the other hand, that C is another – a rival, a conscience, fellow man, or a generalized authority (the law) – then the libertine is also going to wish that AB and CB merge, such that the relation to the relation is neutralized as one interchangeable relation; but now it is the libertine who is replaced.
Both versions of the social relation’s becoming one-dimensional – and as such transgressed – also, in consequence of the very transgression, cause the real possibility for desire to be annihilated. To insist on pleasure, which is the libertine’s nature, is therefore to reopen the play of the social anyway. In other words, the libertine will not succeed in short-circuiting the play of the social – precisely because he wants to.
As long as the play of ABC is open, socius functions as the contemporary framework for the three crucial dimensions of experience: the object-relation, the relational relation, and the self-relation (the relation to the other, the others and to my other). AB is a pure object-relation; the AB relation that also involves the BC relation is a relational relation, and, finally, the last relation is a self-relation insomuch as the C position is A itself in another (temporal or reflective) form. In short, the thesis is that Sade cannot transgress the social: even the most asocial of all thinkers installs the social in his will to excess. This incompetency obliges us to speculate on a connection between the A and C positions which is neither reductive or interchanging; in connection with this, the need arises for the category called commonness. The bent