Annie LeBrun

from the introduction:

...All this is acted out via the mad insolence of a twenty-year-old body, then a thirty-year-old body, a body which functions frenetically well but which, weakened by imprisonment and time, will slowly petrify and turn into a no less threatening inert mass. It is a formidable tragedy of living which has only been recorded by Sade - deliberately so. For in Sade there is a physical immensity that re-endows the relationship of mind and body with its original, naturally catastrophic dimension. It is certainly because he refuses, with all his might, the traditional allegiance of the organic and the spiritual that Sade simultaneously allows himself the redoubtable privilege of conceiving what goes on inside him in terms of earthquakes, the orbit of the sun, volcanic eruptions or continental drifts. Nothing could be more monstrous, since humanity is thereby confused with a possible form of energy, and since man becomes one mere probability of being, no better than another. But also, by the same token, nothing could be more banal: even if we have forgotten it, wasn't everybody's childhood haunted by a violent impression of physical dominion on a universal scale?

The causes of the continuing fascination exercised by Sade - even over those who thought they knew him well - had to be found somewhere in this indeterminate region between monstrosity and banality. In time, I grew convinced that this fascination was strengthened by the fact that Sade's extreme singularity reflected constantly upon a universality. However, this universality had nothing abstract about it, being simply the physical universality of people and things. It resembled a ground swell, carrying off one ridiculous concept of mankind and bringing back another, far more profound. Sade never stopped expropriating man from within himself and giving back to the world. He did not realize this was the work of all great poets, giving everyone back his sense of physical sovereignty - one of the greatest privileges of childhood, which we are in such a hurry to forget. I began to wonder if this constant refusal to let go of it, like other men, might not be Sade's veritable crime, the fundamental crime which justified all those committed after…

 

From the chapter, "Fresh Piglet of My Thoughts:"

Again, one cannot help wondering why Rimbaud and Sade - both despising women trapped in feminine roles, if not women altogether - have both given female forms to their images of freedom? One thinks, too, of Jarry, announcing without preamble that "We don't like women at all, but if we ever loved one, we would want her to be our equal, which is no minor thing!" Yet in the most liberated character Jarry ever created is young Ellen in The Supermale. This gives us further cause to wonder about the nature of the poetic wager born with Juliette, and which gives rise to the most disturbing thoughts of our modernity. For it is nonetheless surprising that Sade, Rimbaud and Jarry, distant as they were from women, unite in betting on the future of the female form. What, in terms of choice, have female forms to do with freedom?

The answer is, of course: everything, precisely because female forms have always been considered hopelessly foreign to freedom. And because, in seeking it, one risks taking an enormous detour through the labyrinth of bodies. It may even be a double, triple or infinitely repeated detour, since this body can produce so many labyrinths. If Sade, Rimbaud and Jarry all chose the female form, which is naturally capable of creating other forms like itself, it is first of all because it constitutes the greatest challenge to the artifice of thought, having in its power to invent an infinite number of improbable beings. Because through the female form, and violently at that, it is possible to represent the inevitable rivalry of nature and thought which true poetry always manages to evoke. Because in the female form, representing as it does a double challenge - one issued by nature to thought, one issued by thought to nature - the enigma of human freedom receives its full expression.

Sade was the first to choose an exquisite female body and make it into a scene of poetic confrontation between natural fatality and the artifice of thought. It was as if he wanted to propagate this confrontation throughout the universe. For these reasons, his is certainly the most prestigious of poetic minds. We owe him the power of discovering, across erotic energy and its infinite transformations, the material character of freedom. I'm not sure we yet know what that is.

On one particularly tender day, Sade wrote a letter to his wife, beginning with the words: "Fresh piglet of my thoughts." I hope that one day there will be a woman who can dream of receiving a love letter that begins as well, for the whole world is thereby laid at her feet, and freedom - real freedom, freedom as lived by Juliette - is rolled out before her like a carpet. I shall not discuss Sade's letters here. I recommend only that you read them when very much alone.