Li Yinhe talks about sex

Chapter 40 Preface to "The Biography of Sade"
Whether viewed from the revolutionary and subversive aspects of his ideas, or from the irrational aspects, Sade is a very important figure for the history of sociology and the development of human thought.

I seldom write prefaces for others. Some of them are unable to write because they are not in my field; some are unwilling to write because they don’t like the book.But for Sade, an exception had to be made.Because Sade is indeed within my research field, and Sade and his works are indeed too important.

Sade spent a total of 27 years in prison in his life, and no matter whether it was a monarchy, a republic or an empire, he was not given freedom.Sade's biographers argue that there is a great gap between the brutality of his novels and his behavior, and that it can be said that most of his sexual impulses have been vented in his novels.Compared with the punishment he received for that little crime of Sade, the punishment was clearly inappropriate.An indirect reason for his unfair treatment was the strict moral prohibition at that time and the revolutionary nature of his thought.As many famous thinkers have commented on him, his thoughts, language and works are crazy revolutionary and subversive.

Some people compare Sade with Freud and Marx, and think that Sade is more revolutionary and subversive than Freud and Marx, whether in the private or public sphere, so he is regarded as Threat to the entire body of society.It is a challenge to the established sexual order, including the institution of marriage, censorship, prostitution, and the practice of homosexuality.It is a violent attack on the existing social foundation.His work has been banned for a long time, but also because he spurned public decency, he opened Pandora's box and dumped venom on society.In contrast, "Freud lingered politely at the gates of our individual and collective lives; Marx merely redistributed domestic labor; Sade gleefully destroyed all private and public edifice, and declared that the rubble was the only destiny we really deserved."

Many consider Sade to be a libertarian with an emancipatory mind who liberated people from God's authority.Some of Sade's specific claims are actually progressive.He opposed the prison system and opposed the death penalty.Because he believes that if a criminal is sentenced to death, then the society will have two dead people instead of one.After long-term efforts by humanitarians and liberals, all major western countries have abolished the death penalty.In the realm of sex, his ideas are relevant even by 21st century standards.He said: Imagination is the stimulus of pleasure, it is the source of all, and its greatest achievement, its most eminent pleasure, transcends all boundaries imposed on it.His work is nothing short of a sexual orgy.He believed that in the way of sexual behavior, everything should be allowed.And this is an idea that only became popular in the age of Kinsey and Foucault.

French intellectuals and thinkers have always spoken highly of Sade.Especially the liberal leftists even think that he is the embodiment of freedom.Beve listed Sade and Byron as two genius pioneers of Romanticism, and they were the two most important sources of inspiration for later writers.Baudelaire believed that any study of natural man must begin with Sade, the flower of evil.Flaubert called him "the great Sade", saying he offered "brilliant insights" into philosophy and history.Literary critics recognized Sade as a great Gothic writer.Batali was fascinated by horror in literature, which he believed could be harnessed to liberate the human spirit, and he saw Sade as a sincere explorer of social and moral taboos, an indefatigable social and moral taboo, a visionary of all human experience. fearless narrator.The existentialist writer Camus considered him a rebel against the absurd, a "great offender to a hostile heaven", and "the first absolute rebel theorist". The group of radical intellectuals in Paris in the 20s called him a world-class subversive.Beauvoir wrote a monograph on him.Although Roland-Bart did not agree with Sade's ideas, he believed that Sade created a revolutionary discourse.Foucault also attached great importance to Sade's contribution.When he said that sadomasochism appeared precisely in the late 60th century, he probably had Sade in mind, the time when Sade lived and wrote.

In Britain, Sade's reputation is not as high as in France. His works are mainly in line with the sadomasochism theme recurring in the mainstream of British underground literature in the Victorian era, and have become a special pastime for lovers of this special sexual orientation. Taste.However, after the poet Swinbin learned about Sade's works in 1868, his writing style was greatly influenced, especially in terms of horror and cruel colors.Female writer Carter believes: "Sade's works are characterized by their romantic criminal imagination, their persecutor style, their despair, their sexual terror, their insatiable egocentrism, their tolerance of massacre, mutilation and extermination. , played an important role in the formation of modern sensibility."

Nineteenth-century American intellectuals showed little interest in Sade either.Although Miller had heard that Sade was one of the most misunderstood writers, Sade's influence has been relatively small in America.His reputation is primarily that of a sleazy pornographer.After World War II, the sadistic impulse was used as an analysis of Nazism to explain this collective barbarism, mass murder and torture.

Sade has many enemies, especially women.Beauvoir, Millet and Carter all regarded him as an extreme misogynist and a representative of men's contempt for women.All of them believed that Sade's work was deeply anti-feminist.In his writings, women are mutilated and raped to serve the pleasure of men.He also said that since women's sexual pleasure can be faked, but pain cannot be faked, for women, the highest form of sexual activity is pain rather than pleasure.Beauvoir's view is that Sade's novels show a contempt for women, in his mind, women are inferior, mysterious and passive.Radical feminist Dworkin hated Sade even more. She believed that Sade's works were the product of typical masculinism, and Sade was the pioneer of the masculinist sexual revolution: he created a kind of male who can have A group of women with restricted access, a group of women who are always ready for men to be raped.

But there is an objection that, judging from the tone of Sade's oeuvre, his writing is less about women than about virtue.In the story of sisters Juliette and Justine (whom he wrote about in several novels), the older sister Juliette succeeds as a lucky woman of money and status; Destroyed by insistence on virtue, reduced to the most miserable situation.The victory of evil and the humiliation of virtue is the keynote of Sade's works.Chastity, kindness, obedience, mercy, prudence, resistance to evil and love of virtue and truth, in short, all virtues, are always punished in his stories; and cruelty and evil always prevail.Justine's masochism is due to her obsession with virtue, not her gender.In Sade's world, obscenity and cruelty were the prerogative of the powerful, regardless of gender.

Some critics even argue that Sade defended women's sexual rights and their right to freely dispose of their own bodies, as feminism advocates today.Sade’s point of view, expressed more explicitly than feminism, is that freedom is ultimately the freedom to enjoy and be enjoyed by others.Those who hold this view argue that, if there is anything Sade is not, he is certainly not a sexist.

Sade had a cohesive, logical, consistent philosophy, a philosophy that was very close to Hobbes's philosophy that the relationship between man and man was that of wolf to wolf, and the social Darwinism of the law of the jungle philosophy.He believes that any individual will and behavior are worthless to the natural process, only the continuation of life is meaningful, and how life moves is meaningless to nature.Matter is not destroyed, it is just constantly renewed.What is meaningful to nature is only the renewal of the material world.Murder, war, and the violent death of man can all serve this purpose of nature, because they only hasten the renewal of matter.Mercy, goodwill, and all that is called virtue is unnatural because it slows down the natural process of renewal by helping the weak survive much longer than they should.Natural processes are not at all interested in producing more good people than bad ones, because virtue hinders and limits the operation of natural mechanisms.On the contrary, for nature to function smoothly, evil should prevail, and crime and cruelty are in keeping with nature's aims.

Sade believed that an individual's nervous system consisted of an "electrical current" that responded to sexual stimuli.The intensity of the reaction varies according to the physical condition, some people are stronger and some people are weaker.In the weak, this reaction is weak and manageable, requiring only moderate pleasure, the refusal to inflict pain on others, and moralists call this a "virtue"; desires, the result of which is called "evil".Society rewards virtue and punishes vice, when in reality both are but natural manifestations of the same material factors.By imposing limits on behaviour, society appears to be complicit with the weak, not only against the strong, but against the course of nature.Because of their lack of feeling for others and their lack of moral awareness, the strong are like wolves among the sheep.In practice, human experience is a balance of power between hunter and prey, and who belongs to which side is not determined by morality, but innate.The tyrannical and sadistic impulses are natural and should therefore not be restrained.To regulate one's conduct according to virtue is philosophically absurd unless doing so brings pleasure.

Sade's philosophy developed along this line of thought.His innovation lies in pushing the ethical implications of the above-mentioned materialist principles to their logical conclusions.Sade stresses that cruel pleasures are perfectly natural.Society, on the other hand, is an unnatural structure which hinders the natural process of development.Nature doesn't care about what is called "evil". It looks at war, persecution and tyranny with benevolence.Nature has no property, so stealing is not a crime.There is no difference between murder and natural death, just the molecular recombination of life.There is no difference between eating pork and eating human flesh, because both can prolong life.Once Sade's view of nature as the renewal factory of life is accepted, all moral standards are invalidated: ethics becomes superfluous.

Sade also believed that reproduction was not nature's preferred goal, otherwise women would not have survived past childbearing age.So homosexuality is a crime only in a social sense, like incest, prostitution, and other kinds of perversion.They are natural phenomena that have their material roots and raison d'être.

Sade listed 600 kinds of human sexual impulses, ranging from the simplest sexual impulses to the impulse to murder a sexual partner, including the impulse to hang, drown, boil, and behead the weak.Sade's torturers were all wealthy men who used their wealth as a guarantee to mutilate, torture, and kill others, and his victims were always doomed.In other words, sexual satisfaction is rooted in power.Power dehumanizes victims, who fall into the hands of their abusers as prey to lions in the jungle.Sade's ultimate achievement was to turn sex into the most refined expression of obscene cruelty and absolute despotism.

Some people think that Sade criticized the ugliness of capitalism from the standpoint of the feudal aristocracy. He regarded the corruption of money and capitalism as dark power, while the feudal aristocracy was much cleaner and healthier in comparison.In scene after scene of the psychological drama Sade created, a recurring theme was the radical emancipation of the self, a position that not only pushed eighteenth-century materialism to its limits but established a social Darwinism Theories of survival of the fittest, stealing, murder, rape, domination are all sanctioned, and the only limits to these actions come not from moral ethics or self-regulation, but from the victim's ability to resist.There is no limit to human impulse, and everyone should be free to vent: Sade's goal is freedom without responsibility.

However, this anarchic individualism is flawed.Sade failed to see that human beings are social animals, and love for others is as natural as love for oneself.Nature itself may be a blind, amoral force, but man, far from being a lone wolf, is a gregarious, sentient, rational being.Social mechanisms for the protection of personal property are as natural as the natural order.Other thinkers who deny God always replace God's place with a new moral authority or standard.For example, Sartre's existentialism replaces God with political forms so that human beings can live together in an orderly manner.What Sade offers us is the law of the jungle, that is, no law at all.

Foucault once said: "In Sade, sex has no norms, or internal rules derived from its own nature; but it is subject to the law of unlimited power, which recognizes no other than itself. Other laws." In Sade, many behaviors that social norms cannot tolerate are described in a grandiose manner.

The most amazing effect of Sade's work is that what he wrote in the eighteenth century is still astounding in the twenty-first century.Sade defined obscene sexual cruelty as the only true criterion of personal behavior. He only saw the bestial side of people, but could not see other aspects of people. Sade was a psychological terrorist.Sade was not the great liberator, as many have judged him to be, but the creator of a horrible vision of the end of hope, history, and civilization.

Sade's work is the destruction of universal humanity.Whether viewed from the revolutionary and subversive aspects of his ideas, or from the irrational aspects, Sade is a very important figure for the history of sociology and the development of human thought.In 1876, since Ebbing combined the two concepts of sadism created in the name of Sade and masochism created in the name of Masoch to form the concept of sadomasochism, Sade became a newborn Case studies in psychoanalysis.His name and works deservedly entered the ranks of literary classics and sadomasochistic works.

(End of this chapter)