De Sade, fantôme de la modernité
This essay examines the relation of de Sade's works with modernity. De Sade is a visionary: he wasn't blinded by the Enlightment, in which he saw an inherent darkness. What some perceived as his madness — the natural reason, the bourgeois reason which he celebrates and exacerbates — is a mirror of our own, a mirror in which our societies refuse to see themselves and their own utilitarian reason, guided by opportunism and self-conservation. This refusal shows de Sade's works as a part of our modernity which we seek to suppress — de Sade as le refoulé de notre modernité.  First, this essay looks at the esthetic filiation from de Sade to Baudelaire and, by comparing de Sade's libertine and Baudelaire's dandy, shows how the negative esthetic of Baudelaire presupposes de Sade's conception of Evil as a product of nature and reason, and how it transfigures this conception in such a way that Good can only proceed of this awareness in Evil, through which lies the only possibility to become at once human and lucid. One must always go back to de Sade to understand Evil, writes Baudelaire, who thus highlights de Sade's — or rather a ghost of de Sade, as his name is seldom mentioned in Baudelaire's — key role in this concept of conscience dans le Mal, making him the sine qua non condition of his modernity. The second part of this essay analyzes the notion of petite souveraineté. This borrowed sovereignty, which forbids the real sovereignty, is the product of the libertine's subjection to nature and to Reason, i.e. to the bourgeois and natural Reason. The natural education by which the libertine — he who can only possess by submitting the other to the system to which he consciously submitted himself, the possessed yearning to possess, the man reduced to a ghost who create ghosts himself — wants to dominate the Other(s) is a reproduction for himself of his own subjection. This notion of petite souveraineté confronts a tradition of idealistic critics who see in the libertine the subject of a total liberty, a sovereign subject – and thus who don't notice that the historical meaning of his Reason is laden with consequences.
Sade Baudelaire Modernité Modernity Reason Nature Conscience dans le Mal Awareness in Evil Souveraineté Sovereignty Enlightment Adorno Dandy Libertin Libertine Formation