This piece was a response to Brent Adkins’ paper “Foucault and Klossowski: On the Limits of Sade,” and was presented at the 2004 meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the University of Memphis. Foucault and Klossowski: On the Limits of Sade Response by Daniel W. Smith Purdue University Brent Adkins’ fascinating paper, “Foucault and Klossowski: On the Limits of Sade,” seems to me to be operating on at least three levels. The first level, most obviously, is the retrieval of the work of the Marquis de Sade—an extraordinarily famous name but also an extraordinarily under-read and perhaps under-rated thinker. Most of us, unsurprisingly, no doubt tend to equate Sade’s name with, well, sadism, but it was only in the late nineteenth century that Krafft-Ebing (in his Psychopathia Sexualis) had the audacity to associate Sade’s name with his newly-attempted classification of sexual perversions, derived from the presumption that there exists a sexual instinct that could be channeled or deviated away from its “normal” functions and aims (Krafft-Ebing’s fundamental perversions were homosexuality, sadism, masochism, and fetishism). It is much rarer that one attempts to read Sade, not simply as a thinker of sex and criminality, but also as a political thinker, which he most assuredly was, and which is the way he is often read in French interpretations. Atkins deserves much credit for have revived the work of de Sade for us, and for having actually managed to get the Marquis de Sade’s name on the program at SPEP. The second level of Atkins’ paper concerns the work of Michel Foucault. Adkins notes that Foucault’s first biographer, Didier Eribon, recounts that Foucault was in fact scornful of students who had not read Sade, and perhaps it is high time that we all start a lobbying effort to have Sade’s writings included in the “Great Books of the Western World” and routinely taught in the Western Civilization classes at our respective universities. In any case, although Foucault himself never wrote a book on Sade, Sade’s name is nonetheless almost omnipresent throughout Foucault’s writings. The ostensible object of Adkins’ paper to trace out the development and transformation of the role that Sade plays in Foucault’s work. In this sense, the paper is punctuated by citations about Sade from three of Foucault’s books—Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966) and the History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976)—each of which marks a particular moment in Foucault’s interpretation of Sade. The nature of this trajectory is a complex one, but Adkins nicely focuses our attention on one aspect of this trajectory that came to be central for Foucault: the attempt to overcome Hegel. Foucault had observed, famously, in his 1970 inaugural address at the Collège de France, that “whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, our entire epoch struggles to disengage itself from Hegel” (OD 235). Adkins reading of the evolution of the figure of Sade in Foucault’s writings is in a sense a reading of the evolution of Foucault’s anti-Hegelianism. The third level of Adkins’ paper, finally, concerns the various readings of Sade that have appeared in France over the years, since it is in this context that Adkins’ interprets Foucault’s appropriation of Sade. And indeed, the list of those who have written books on Sade reads like a “Who’s Who” of the French intelligentsia. The groundbreaking work was Pierre Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor in 1947, followed by Maurice Blanchot’s Lautréamont and Sade in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s Must We Burn Sade? in 1951, Georges Bataille’s Erotism in 1957, and, much later, Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, published in 1967, which examined Sade’s relation to Masoch. Out of this impressive list—and there are many others who could be added—Adkins’ reading focuses on two: first, Maurice Blanchot’s essay entitled “Sade” (this essay appeared in English translation in the 1965 Grove Press edition of Sade’s Justine, no doubt to give the book a legitimacy that Sade work alone would not have received in an English-speaking audience at the time); and second, Pierre Klossowski’s writings. In effect, Adkins’ argument, in part, is that it was Foucault’s turn from Blanchot’s reading to Klossowski’s that finally allowed him to extricate himself from the specter of Hegel. It’s not that Blanchot’s reading was wrong, but rather that Klossowski introduces an element that was lacking in Blanchot—“the constitution of an individual out of a multitude of heterogeneous impulses” (p. 11)—which Adkins links up with the various processes of subjectivation that Foucault had begun to analyze in Discipline and Punish. Rather than assuming the primacy of the self-positing sovereign individual, Klossowski is instead is able to give us an account of the production of the sovereign individual “as the result of a particular configuration of impulses” (p. 11). Adkins’ paper is thus a complex text, working at a number of levels, and I confess that I hardly feel competent to do it justice in short space allotted to me here. I would simply like to do two things very quickly in my response: first, I want to look at Adkins reading of Sade’s system of thought, and then, second, look at his reading of Foucault’s Sade. * So let me turn first to the reading of Sade. The key notion in Adkin’s reading of Sade is the notion of sovereignty. In a social contract theory like Hobbes, the establishment of society out of the state of nature is premised on a sacrifice of my own power and sovereignty to the State and its laws. “The increased security provided by the state,” Adkins notes, “outweighs the loss of individual power” (p. 3). But it was precisely this exchange that Sade found unacceptable, for two reasons. The first is easy to comprehend: the State and the Law are usurpations of the true sovereignty, which for Sade is the sovereignty of the individual. But second, and more importantly, the sacrifice of my power to the sovereignty of the State and the law is unacceptable because it is the law itself that enables the tyrant to exist, the law is the very condition of tyranny. “Tyrants,” writes Sade, “are never born in anarchy, they only flourish in the shadow of the laws and draw their authority from them” (CC 87-88). In an argument against Hobbes, Sade writes: “I have infinitely less reason to fear my neighbor’s passions than the law’s injustice, for my neighbor’s passions are contained by mine, whereas nothing stops or contains the injustices of the law” (CC 86). In this sense, Sade’s entire work is inspired by a hatred of tyranny, and the language of the law in which the tyrant always speaks. This is why Bataille could claim that Sade’s language is paradoxical. Sade’s libertines speak directly of their cruelties and obscenities and tortures, but paradoxically their language is essentially that of a victim: for “only the victim can describe torture; the torturer [or the tyrant] necessarily uses the hypocritical language of established order and power” and authority—the language of the law (CC 17). In this sense, Sade’s heroes speak as no tyrant ever spoke or ever could speak; despite their tortures and cruelties, their language is the counter-language of tyranny. But if Sade sets himself against the law, and the tyranny that the law makes possible, does that mean he simply returns to the anarchic state of nature? As Adkins nicely shows, the answer to this is both yes and no, and the question takes us to the heart of Sade’s system. On the one hand, yes, Sade prefers anarchy to laws. “The reign of laws is pernicious,” he writes, “it is inferior to anarchy; the best proof of this is that all governments are forced to plunge into anarchy when they wish to remake their constitutions” (CC 87). Hence, in the state of nature or anarchy, Adkins writes, “crime, regardless of its form, is more in keeping with nature and thus constitutes the appropriate relation among people” (p. 5). Here, the sovereignty of the individual is expressed in an absolute “power of negation,” “an unlimited and annihilating desire” (p. 5). But such a power can in no way “depend upon the objects it destroys” (p. 2), since such objects would represent a possible limitation to the sovereign individual’s power” (p. 3). Thus, as Blanchot writes, in order to destroy others, the libertine “does not even presuppose their previous existence, because at the instant it destroys them, it has already previously, and without exception, considered them as nothing” (p. 3). This, Adkins claims, is where Sade’s sovereign individual functions in an entirely different manner than the “master” or “lord” in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and allows Foucault to use Sade to break with Hegel. “The sovereign individual is not defined by his or her relation to a particular individual…[which] would create a mutual dependence between the two…[but] by his or her power over everyone and everything universally” (p. 5). Thus, in scene after scene, the libertine annihilates other people, annihilates humanity, and annihilates God—all in the name of this absolute sovereignty. But this is where Sade’s true originality appears. As Adkins shows, one can speak of the category of “crime” here only in relation to the law, and the transgression of the law. If I am undertaking these monstrous crimes in the name of my sovereignty, and my natural desires, then crime as such becomes impossible. “If all desires are natural, then there are no real crimes, only apparent ones. It is impossible to transgress the laws of nature. Everything necessarily acts in accordance with them” (p. 6). Hence the disappointment of the sadistic here: nature himself seems to prove to him that the perfect crime is impossible. His power of negation may be all pervasive, exercised on everything around him, but the process of death and destruction that it represents is only a partial process, and moreover a natural process. Hence the final move of Sade, hinted at by Adkins, though not spelled out in detail. Not only must God and humanity be negated and destroyed, but nature itself must be annihilated. Sade thus distinguishes between two levels of negation. On the one hand, there is negation as a partial process, which manifests itself in experience and nature, but which Sade characterizes as a merely “secondary nature.” On the other hand, there is negation as a Pure Idea, and Idea of Pure negation, which can never be given in experience but constitutes what Sade calls “original nature” or “primary nature.” In The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, the libertine says that he is excited not by “what is here,” but by “what is not here,” the absent Object, “the idea of Evil” itself. As Deleuze puts it: The idea of that which is not, the idea of the No or of negation which is not given and cannot be given in experience must necessarily be the object of a demonstration (in the sense that a mathematical truth holds good even when we are asleep and even if it does not exist in nature). Hence the rage and despair of the sadistic hero when he realizes how paltry his own crimes are in relation to the idea [of Pure Evil or Pure Negation] which he can only reach through the omnipotence of reasoning. He dreams of a universal, impersonal crime…a crime ‘which is perpetually effective, even when I myself cease to be effective, so that there will not be a single moment of my life, even when I am asleep, when I shall not he the cause of some disturbance.’ The task of the libertine is to bridge the gulf between the two elements, the [personal and derivative] element at his actual disposal [in secondary nature], and the [impersonal but original] element in his mind” though which “the sadist negates secondary nature along with his own ego” (CC 28). This is what explains the well-known apathy and self-control of the libertine in Sade’s writings. In practice, the libertine is confined to illustrating his total demonstration of the Pure Idea of Absolute Negation or Evil through partial inductive processes borrowed from secondary nature. But his violence cannot be undertaken under the sway of inspiration or impulse, nor can it be governed by the pleasures it affords, since such pleasures would still bind the libertine to secondary nature. Rather, his violence must be exercised in cold blood, and condensed by this coldness, the coldness of a demonstrative reason. Thus, absolutely sovereignty appears in Sade as an original or primary nature that cannot be given in experience, but is necessarily the object of an Idea, an idea of pure negation or pure evil, which is a delusion, perhaps, but a delusion of reason itself. It is in this sense that Sade can be seen as a purely rationalist thinker. It is true that the apathy of the sadist can produce intense pleasure, but it is not the pleasure of an ego exerting its power and sovereignty in secondary nature, but rather the pleasure of an absolutely negating primary nature exerting its power within the ego and outside the ego, and which ultimately negates the ego itself. The sadistic ego sets himself the task of thinking out the Idea of Pure Negation in a demonstrative form, but is only able to achieve this through by multiplying and repeating the activities of destruction and annihilation in secondary nature. In a sense, one might even say that Sade was a Derridean avant la lettre, since the condition of possibility of the Idea of Pure Negation is its very impossibility. * Now with this brief reading of Sade in hand—the latter part of which goes slightly beyond the outlines of Adkins’ own reading—we can now turn to the question of the role that Sade plays in Foucault’s writings. Now it seems to me that Adkins has two approaches to this question in his paper, the second of which is, in my opinion, more successful—and more interesting—than the first. 1. The first approach is the more obvious and necessary one, which consists in following the development of the figure of Sade in Foucault’s writings by tracing out Foucault’s explicit references to Sade. Adkins cites three of Foucault’s references to Sade, and it seems to me that they constitute a fairly consistent trajectory. The first citation occurs in Madness and Civilization (1961), where Foucault recapitulates the broad outlines of the reading I have just given. The first stage of the libertines’ sovereignty, he writes, is found in the utter freedom in which they act according to their nature and desires, while the second phase consists in “the free exercise of sovereignty over and against nature” (p. 7, citing MC 283). But Foucault then suggests that the limit of reason marked out by Sade opens up “‘the possibility of transcending its reason in violence, and of recovering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialectic’” (p. 7, citing MC 285). But as Adkins points out, Foucault very quickly abandoned this notion of a raw and savage experience (an experience of madness) that would lie at the limit of discourse. By the time Foucault writes The Order of Things (1966), five years later, he has changed his position entirely and brought Sade fully into the domain of discourse. Using one of his favorite techniques—by which he showed epistemic formations determine the nature of the debates that take place within them—Foucault argues that Sade work presented the reverse side of the newly developing biological science of life. What Sade taught the eighteenth-century, he suggests, was “that life can no longer be separated from murder, nature from evil, or desires from anti-nature,” and hence that Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom can be read as “the velvety, marvelous obverse” of Cuvier’s Lessons in Comparative Anatomy. In The Order of Things, in other words, Foucault’s primary task was simply to situate Sade’s writings within the discursive formation that made it possible. Finally, when we get to the History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), ten years later, we find a rather negative characterization of Sade: “To conceive the category of the sexual,” Foucault writes, “in terms of the law, death, blood, and sovereignty—whatever the references to Sade and Bataille, and however one might gauge their ‘subversive’ influence—is in the last analysis a historical ‘retro-version.’” (HS 150). But here again, this is consistent with Foucault’s method: the History of Sexuality analyses the emergence of a new dispositif of “sexuality” in the nineteenth-century—centered on process of normalization and the management of populations (what Foucault called “bio-power”)—which replaced the previous dispositif of sex—which centered on systems of alliance and the symbolics of blood. We have, in short, moved into a new formation of power and knowledge; and in this new dispositif of “sexuality,” the Sadean notions of law and sovereignty no longer function in the same manner, and appeals to them to explain sexuality is indeed a “historical retro-version.” There is thus a rather clear trajectory in Foucault’s appeals to Sade: In Madness and Civilization, a quickly-rejected appeal to savage experience; in The Order of Things, a situation of Sade’s writings with the discourse of the Classical period; and in the History of Sexuality, a passing notice that Sade’s terminology is no longer adequate to explicate the new dispositif of sexuality. Moreover, it is only in the early Madness and Civilization that Foucault makes use of Sade in working through his anti-Hegelian polemics, but as Adkins notes, he quickly drops his use of Sade in this context. The anti-Hegelian polemics continue, but never again, to my knowledge, in relation to Sade. 2. It is thus Adkins second approach to Foucault’s relation to Sade that I find much more interesting, and indeed much more original. It occupies the final third of the paper, and appeals to the work of Pierre Klossowski (although, interestingly, it does not appeal to Klossowski’s book on Sade, but rather his book on Nietzsche). Adkins argument is that Foucault initially countered the movement of the Hegelian dialectic through an appeal to Sade’s annihilating and sovereign individual, but he could not account for the constitution of such an individual apart from an appeal to raw experience. Such an account, Adkins argues, appears in Klossowski’s work on Nietzsche, which provides an account of the sovereign individual as the effect of “a multitude of heterogeneous impulses” (p. 11), which in turn links up with Foucault’s own claim, in Discipline and Punish onwards, that subjects are themselves constituted by the complex interplay of relations of power. Foucault himself had pointed to this parallel between Nietzsche’s theory of the impulses and his own theory of power-relations in a set of lectures he delivered in Rio de Janeiro in 1973 (see Power, pp. 5-16). And indeed, one might suggest that the true status of sovereignty appears most fully in Foucault’s later writings on ethics, where Foucault argues that, in the effect of the self by itself, subjects can constitute themselves in ways that resist the current formations of knowledge and strategies of power—that is, it is in the constitution of the self by itself (the capacity of power to affect itself) that one can locate the actual locus of sovereignty. In any case, I confess that I found this last part of the paper one of the most suggestive, rich, and intriguing portions of the paper. And in fact it sparked in me a final reflection. If we can speak of the constitution of the subject (or sovereignty) from the life of the impulses (in Klossowski’s language) or from variable relations of power (in Foucault’s language), where would one locate the Idea of Pure Negation or pure Evil that Sade speaks of—this domain of primary or original nature that Sade distinguishes from the secondary nature of experience? Deleuze suggests an answer to this question when he distinguishes, within the domain of the impulses, between the destructive instincts and what Freud called the Death Instinct. The destructive instincts are actually given in the unconscious, but always in combination with the life instincts, so that destruction, and the negative at work in destruction, always manifests itself as the other face of construction and unification as governed by the pleasure principle. Such would be the realm of Sade’s secondary nature. When we speak of the Death Instinct, by contrast, we are referring to Thanatos, the absolute negation, which can never be given in psychic life, even in the unconscious—it is, as Freud put it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, essentially silent. Yet we must speak of it, for it is the determinable principle of our psychic life, its groundless abyss, even if, as Freud says, we can only speak of it in speculative or mythical terms. In Sadean terms, the Death Instinct would be the domain of primary nature, the pure Thought of a fearful nature, the Pure Idea of a demonstrative reason, within which the ego is beaten and expelled. And indeed, this is how Sade ultimately defines the Pure Evil of primary nature, which is beyond all constituted order and is made up of raging and lacerating molecules that bring disorder and anarchy. And would this perhaps not be the ultimate lesson of Sade: that the plastic and anarchic principle that is capable of constituting individuals temporarily is no less capable of destroying and dissolving those same individuals? And was this not the political vision one finds in Sade, in opposition to the French Revolution of 1789, when he distinguishes the laws of the State from the institutions of the libertines (“The Society of the Friends of Crime”): whereas laws are tyrannical and by nature bind our actions, immobilizing and moralizing them, pure libertine institutions without laws would by definition be models of free, anarchic action, in personal motion, in permanent revolution, and in a constant state of immorality. Adkins has given us a nuanced and compelling reading of Sade’s work, and its relation to Foucault, and we can only hope that it will spark renewed interest in the writings of the remarkable Marquis de Sade. PAGE 10