Colette Capitan
Social Order and Gender: Concerning Sade But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color? --Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show
I started studying the French Revolution as the moment when "liberal" ideology takes form, and I asked myself about Sade's works as an intrinsic production in literary form of this historical moment. As far as Sade and the French Revolution are concerned, there is more than a mere contiguity between an author's works and his time: Sade's works are to be taken as that which gives meaning to the (individual and national) discourse of emancipation which is being formed and to the (corresponding) discourse of legitimation of the social relationships based on oppression and exploitation. Asking oneself about Sade is asking oneself about the "values" of the dominant ideology, and beyond that, about the axiomatics of domination, about norms and transgression.
Nation (males), Nature (women) 1. The French Revolution of 1789 and the idea of Nature. What was at first a revolutionary movement with a universalist aim (collective emancipation of individuals and goods) becomes in the national framework the sequestration of public affairs for the benefit of one social group (the class of men) at the expense of another (the class of women). The repression of political activism by women, depriving them of the rights and status of citizen-subject, and relegating them to the realm of the "private," is done in the name of Nature. The idea of Nature is used to exclude women from public life and to forbid them legally and judicially to have access to it. "Nature" then is a specific political category of national-revolutionary actuality. 2. Nation, the signifier of male solidarity? The nation's emancipation
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gives the class dimension to individual emancipation from the old regime's oppression and feudality. It marks the patriot-revolutionaries' collective access to the status of historical subjects. As monarchy is marked by the divine, Nation is marked by the male. Nation, Republic, Fatherland ("sovereignty,.... public functions," "military service," etc.) symbolize the different modalities of the collective buying back of their fights by the male-individuals, who from now on are full citizen-individuals. 3. If national unity hides class antagonisms, the idea of "Difference" hides the retention of relations of oppression and domination at the expense of "naturalized" groups: sexism, racism, and xenophobia as productions of the national accession to power. Male solidarity and hatred of women. The "family" is not a "figure" of the nation, but its sign3 4. Nation and Nature as the two sides--political and ideological--of a single, conservative social relationship based on oppression and exploitation. Like the revolutionary nation, which, in order to fight the united monarchies as the permanent evidence of a threat of a return to the "system of oppression, "3 undertook to "liberate" (i.e., conquer) the "brother peoples," the idea of Nature (Difference) serves the dominant group in its denial of the political character of its domination.
Nature and property 1. The idea of Nature as the ideological form of the right of private property. The idea of Nature hides the exercise ofmor the maintaining of--the right to appropriate the groups which are kept out of the emancipation movement (blacks in the West Indies, women); it is used as a legitimation of their exclusion from the realm of the political ("natural" incapacity due to their color, their sex). The bourgeoisie's accession to the status of the new dominant class turns the legal category of"private property" (taken from Roman law) into a political category: reappropriation of oneself, reappropriation of one's goods (land, money, share of public life), to which the reappropriation of the Nation by itself (national sovereignty) and of its goods (the "national wealth" of the former properties of the King, the clergy, and the nobility) gives its revolutionary class dimension. Groups excluded in fact and in law (mainly women) from the abolitionist movement, where class practicesmand consciousness--are forming, will be called "nonpolitical," "natural" In a society based on appropriation and generalized exchange of goods (a market economy), they are reduced by
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this fact to the status of objects, objectively thought of and treated as objects of exchange, which then acquires the status of a political act. The private property right which defines the new social subject (control of the world, of"Nature," of public life) gives the status of things to the groups that are deprived of it.
Woman: mark o f the appropriated gender If the right of appropriation is the sign of domination, woman designates, but does not necessarily cover, the appropriated human group. And it is not specific to it either. 1. Gender (female gender) is an uncertain category. Mutilations, rapes, murders are concrete practices that shape the physical body and political concept of woman. 4 Woman is the signifier of the difference between the sexes. 2. Women are things? The work of Claire Michard-Marchal and Claudine Ribrry shows how the categories of "nonanimated" and "animated nonhuman" are used in discourse to qualify the category of woman. 6 The legislation of the French Revolution equates rape and theft in the penal code: regarded as striking at property rights, both rape and theft are penalized as "pillage of property: 3. "Things" are women. Only traitors, thieves, or gays (i.e., "perverts") can be against the Nation, Property, Difference. Analysis of the penalties imposed for treason or crimes against national sovereignty during the revolutionary period shows the connection objectively made and the signifying chain established between: traitor~foreigner/woman~enemy/royalist. Woman has a position both central and polysemic, from traitor to internal enemy ("royalist"), covering the semantic (political) field of "other-foreigner-enemy." 4. Women are not only things. Women is both 1) the signifier of the difference between the sexes, a constituent part of social order, and 2) a concrete social group attesting to the constraining, artifactual character of gender: the political fact of oppression. In this second case, woman connotes "pervert?' In other words: the (gender or sex) break is really in the realm of the social (a "femme-femme"--a feminine woman--overdetermines "pervert," it does not efface it). In "Nature" (?) there are intermediaries.
The case against Nature: perverts and inverts 1. "Perversion: act of perverting. Changing to bad . . . . Esp. and usu. sexual perversions: bestiality, exhibitionism, fetishism, masochism, necrophilia, sadism, etc?' (Dictionnaire Petit Robert).
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"Pervert: verb from Latin per verter~ to reverse, to overturn" (Dictionnaire Petit Robert~ "Inversion:... II. sexual inversion.., psychic abnormality leading to sexual affinity only for someone of one's own sex. See homosexuality; invert" (Dictionnaire Petit Robert). Thus: inversion refers to gender (to the signifier); perversion, refers to the meaning, to the signified (to the meaning-for-the dominant). 2. For the dominant, it is not inversion that is decisive (it does not threaten the order itselt~ it maintains the idea of Difference), but rather its signifier: gender. It can even have a positive or overdetermining value within the order (SS promiscuity in Nazi Germany, for example). 3. As far as "pervert" is conerned, we have to make a distinction. In principle, "pervert" cannot characterize the referent (Good--the order--cannot be thought of as Evil). But it is not this contradiction that is important. The logic of appropriation is the reification of the body of the dominated person(s) ("fetishism," etc.) and the naturalist ideology ("beCstiality," etc.)~ Per vertere, to overturn the social, is not to abolish it (to abolish the o~'der); it is to testify to it ("sadism," etc.). "Pervert" testifies to the social (political) character of the domination. 7 "Perversion" can even less overturn the social, as it is an indicator of it, being the mark of sequestration on the part of the dominant class. It is the measure of totalitarianism, of the radicalization of power within power relationships. Perversion is domination. It is the signifier of dominationnof social order. 4. Since "pervert" denotes "social relationships," per vertere can only be carried out by the enemy. The dominators' perception of the dominated person as a social subject proves that there is a recognition of social totality on the part of the dominators, and thus a break with the naturalist model. But it is a suspect social subject, since she/he is the object and not the subject of appropriation. If "Nature" does not exist, but oppression and sadism and the refusal of appropriation do, the oppressed person can only seek to reverse, to overturn the conditions of appropriation or abolish it--can only be "perverted:' Comment: The oppressed person does not have to act. It is enough just to exist. Just her/his presence, her/his existence as a dominated being attests to (is the sign of) perversion. To deny that there is perversion, oppression, one only needs to deny the oppressed person and make her/him disappear into Nature. 5. Woman, uncertain gender, on one side (that of "femininity") gender connotes "pervert," as we saw. And on the other side, as we just saw, "pervert" and "dominated person" (woman) cover almost the same semantic field, the one which is circumscribed by the practices of the domination.
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The director: Sade 1. Sade's works or the discourse of "Nature." Sade, the great organizer of "Nature" The aristocrat, the victim of the "system of oppression," understands that the Revolution and liberty make appropriation and subjugation legal. Critics call Sade a "paradoxical" author ("instinct" in the name of laws, murder in the name of the republican government, crime in the name of moral values, etc.). The reason is that Sade puts on stage social relationships (and not sexual relationships, which are only the instrument). Nothing is more alien to Sade than belief in a "Nature"; just hypothesizing it invalidates Sade's project. But the reference to "Nature," besides makiag Sade an author of his time, allows the justification of his ideas while dissociating the sense (praise of a social system based on the subjugation of some in the name of the freedom of others) from its moral equivalent (the sense being non-sense in the hypothesizing of "Nature"). It is this loudly asserted resort to ethology to support a didactic aim that also makes Sade a modern author. 2. Sade is aware of women's subjugation, and understands that appropriation (fetishization) is murder and extermination (rape equals property damage~ Hatred of women is hatred of the dominated person, the inferior. It is the prelude to male solidarity, the only positive value in Sade's works, which the State is the fulfillment of. Lesbianism (a "fancy" which is no obstacle to the collective appropriation of women, which it facilitates~ incest, murder of girls at birth (eugenics) all bear witness to the community of women and the supremacy of males--of the State. Sade's project is a political project. 3. In some way it can be said that the condemnation of Sade by the French Revolution was not for excessiveness but for treason. Sade expresses and makes visible, or even dramatizes, what must not be seen nor heard: the true nature of power between the oppressor and the oppressed, the former's hatred and fear of the latter (remember Sade's denunciation of "the masses"). Contrary to what Barthes says, there is no "alternation" in the sadic orgy, there is no sadic "game" (even if there were, the inversion rites, as we know, do not cancel the power relationship; they stabilize it).s Perversion is precisely in the imposition of a divided consciousness, of an alienated identity.9 Sade shows that perversion is not in social disorder (of gender, of the sexes) ~~ but in social order (Sade, "master of ceremonies" says Barthes), which rests on and reproduces subjugation. Sade knows it--and says it: the Evil is in the limits set to oppression. 4. The paradox is less in Sade's works than in their exegesis. There is the exegesis of the Right (liberalism as the origin of totalitarianism, of Nazism, etc.~ and the exegesis of the Left (the hard porn or "childbirth without suffering"
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picture of a torn and bloody woman as the image of "consent" shows the objective--not just fantasized, as de Beauvoir thinks--place of women in a heterosexual society~ And there are the concrete facts: elitism "justifies" murder, and murder is directly linked to the theories supporting Difference (for example, the ideas of the New Right)~ Sade, the great celebrant of social order.
Perversion and subversion: oppressor and oppressed "Subversion: overthrow of received ideas and values, reversal of the established order, especially in the field of politics" (Dictionnaire Petit Robert). According to whether one is within "Nature" (Difference) or within the social domain (oppression), one is part of the assumptions within the social order (homosexuals, "inverts," women), or part of the subversion of the order (abolition of sex classes). Inversion allows Difference to remain. The oppressed who claim Sade see themselves through the dominant discourse within "Nature" Subversion is fated to never cease, to never end in social order. Perversion being the logic of the heterosystem ("crime is the logic of republican government," says Sade), radicalism is the logic of resistance. To subvert in order not to subjugate: the characteristic of the social is to be the bearer of oppression, of division. Behind order there is disorder, abuse." One needs to subvert, not to substitute another order for the existing order, but to abolish the order) 2 She, he: the ideological--and concrete---cement of a social system of which Sade gives us the discourse and of which lesbianism makes possible the theory.
Translated by Annick Nenquin and Mary Jo Lakeland Notes 1. Signifier is used here not in a pure linguistic form, but defines at the metalinguistic level the words of the language as social indicators of domination (meaning-for-the-dominated-persons~ From the same point of view, signified is used as indicating the meaning-for-the-dominant, that is, social order (Difference and appropriation~ 2. Figure is a kind of reduced form used here as the equivalent or original of the term with which it is associated. On the contrary, sign is defined as an intrinsic production of the power relationship, without a symmetrical relationship being possible. 3. The term used at that time to designate the "old regimeY 4. Monique Wittig, "The Category of Sex," Feminist Issues 2, no. 2, (1982), pp. 63-68. 5. Collette Guillaumin, "The Practice of Power and Belief in Nature," Part I, "The Appropria-
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tion of Women," Feminist Issues 1, no. 2 (1981), pp. 3-28; Part II, "The Naturalist Discourse," Feminist Issues 1, no. 3 (1981~ pp. 87-109. 6. Claire Michard-Marchal and Claudine Ribrry, "Enunciation and Ideological Effects: 'Women' and 'Men' as Subjects of Discourse in Ethnology," Feminist Issues 6, no. 2 (1986), pp. 53-74. 7. Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis: the surveyors of"perversion: 8. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960; originally published in 1845). 9. Nicole-Claude Mathieu, "Quand c&ler n'est pas consentir. Des drterminants matrriels et psychiques de la conscience dominre des femmes, et de quelques unes de leurs interprrtations en ethnologie," in L'Arraisonnement des femmes. Essais en anthropologie des sexes, ed. Nicole-Claude Mathieu (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985). 10. The fact that sexual relationships in Sade's works are only heterosexual by chance does not invalidate what was said in paragraphs I and 2 above. Sade's lack of interest in transvestism, noted by Barthes, shows very well that Sade does not believe in "Nature" and that it is only a pretext for him. 11. J.Gabel, Sociologie de l'alibnation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). 12. Monique Wittig, "The Point of View: Universal or Particular?" Feminist Issues 3, no. 2 (1983), pp. 63-69. Barthes sees Sade as disarticulating sememes to arrange them. But he adds that "Sade says nothing," that he does it "in order to say nothingY But to deconstruct for "nothing" is, whether one wants it or not, to work within the meaning, not on the meaning. So Barthes cannot say, as he does, that the work of writing in Sade can only be done through "thefi"--there is no breaking open of the meaning.
Bibliography Barthes, Roland 1976 Sade-Fourier-Loyola. New York: Hill & Wang. (Originally published by Seuil, Paris, 1971) Beauvoir, Simone de 1972 Faut-il brt~derSade? Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, Maurice 1965 L'lnconvenance majeure. Preface to Sade, Frangais encore un effort st vozts voulez ~tre rbpzzblicains. Paris: J.J. Pauvert. Klossovski, P. 1967 Sade mort prochain. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, Jacques 1971 Kant avec Sade. In Ecrits II. Paris: Seuil. Sade 1965 Francais encore un effort si vous voulez dtre rkpublicains. Paris: J.J. Pauvert.
