Sade’s Constrained Libertinage: The Problem of Disgust

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir says of Sade that ‘the supreme value of his testimony lies in his ability to disturb us’.¹ Indeed, the work of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, is renowned for its associations with the ‘unacceptable’: with the celebration of excessive corporeal and moral repugnance. However, analysis of Sade using knowledge from the human sciences, particularly cognitive and affective neuroscience, reveals a hesitancy in Sade’s transgressive impetus that is broadly unacknowledged by critics. Sade’s determination to ‘tell all’ was tempered by the constraints imposed by social decision-making processes and evolutionary disgust, both of which work together to mediate the relationship between the author, characters and reader — a relationship highly significant in libertine fiction, due to its didactic imperative. Sade used textual strategies to encourage an alliance between narrator/educator and reader/student and to buffer the impact of the disgust evoked by his work. The result is a conflicted negotiation of social and moral transgression that, at times, concludes with conventionality and conformity.

Voluptuaries of all ages and sexes — it is to you alone I offer this work. Nourish yourselves on its principles: they foster your passions; and these passions, with which cold and shabby moralists try to intimidate you, are simply the means used by nature to help human beings attain nature’s goals.

—Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir