Must We Burn Beauvoir?

–A. Alexander Antonopoulos, Concordia University

“Circumstances and my own pleasure led me to write about Sade,” explains Beauvoir regarding her essay “Must We Burn Sade?” (cited in Bergoffen’s “Introduction,” Beauvoir 2014, 43).

First published in 1951-52, this essay appeared in France two years after Le deuxième see (1949). But if the “circumstances” were a preface to Sade’s novel Justine, the “pleasure” remains elusive.

Subsequently reprinted in her 1955 Volume Privilèges (Privileges), the essay has been resurrected today in the context of Beauvoir’s Political Writing, appearing in a new philosophically accurate translation as part of the 1914 Volume of the Beauvoir Series, edited by Margaret Simons et al. (Beauvoir 2014). This collection offers, alongside an abundance of other newly translated essays by Beauvoir, a “heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy” (Simons “Introduction,” Beauvoir 2014).

Although by now widely known, her essay’s defense of the Marquis de Sade, a misogynist eighteenth century pornographer and privileged aristocrat who was incarcerated for his debaucheries, has not only surprised, but profoundly shocked, indeed outraged, generations of feminist readers.

Beauvoir not only praises Sade as a “great moralist,” she openly admires the “defiant authenticity of his defense of an eroticism that proved irreconcilable with his ‘social existence’” (Simons 2014, 2).

But just as Beauvoir asks about Sade: What is his place? Why does he merit our interest? So too the question must be posed of Beauvoir’s essay. How does it speak of literature, and Beauvoir’s place in the literature of a postdisciplinary world?

While in my other work I have developed a trans rereading of The Second Sex and its revolutionary thesis in conjunction with her scientific-philosophical work (Blackwell Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, 2017), on this occasion I move to the domain of her views on literature.

In my presentation today, I wish to suggest that in its current iteration, as the expression of Beauvoir’s political writing, this essay challenges us to consider the relation between truth and fiction. Read as a sequel to The Second Sex, its literary claim to truth emerges as a postface to the Myths section of The Second Sex.

I. Of Burning Books

Beauvoir has more in common with Sade than may be supposed.

Let us not forget that it was not only Beauvoir’s writing on Sade that shocked readers. The SecondSex itself was indexed in Québec and not read openly until after the Quiet Revolution in the 1970s due to its ideas on maternity, marriage and religion. Notoriously, Beauvoir is known to have said in an unreleased 1959 French language interview with Québec’s Radio Canada (Descarries; Delphy and Chaperon 2002, 433-4) that “marriage is immoral,” God does not exist, and that abortion is not a crime. These ideas are not foreign to The Second Sex, a radical critique of patriarchal politics in the neoliberal age: heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and their founding principle, the reproductive imperative.

Although The Second Sex has survived through generations of feminist waves due to its trenchant analysis of gender, the ideas expressed therein have run up against not only the religious climate of Catholicism in Québec, but the political correctness of so-called family values and their anchoring in white supremacist neo-capitalist consumer ideologies. Although scholars have been loath to penetrate the depth of her critique, impetus has grown for greater philosophical inquiry into the possibilities for change that the problematic of The Second Sex has posed as one that reaches beyond the limits of women, gender, and the patriarchy.

II. Myths in The Second Sex

A subject not entirely foreign to trans studies today, it is the concept of the “norm” and the process of “normalization” that informs Beauvoir’s views in the section on Myths.

The Second Sex‘s first section on Destiny goes deeply into the construction of Woman as the Other in Man’s knowledge about Man through scientific myths about women’s biology and psychology. In the Myths section, Beauvoir turns to mythological thought itself and the role of representations of Woman in literature in the construction of Woman as M-Other.

There are different kinds of myth. This one, the myth of woman, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition–namely, the “division” of humanity into two classes of individuals–is a static myth. . . . We are not told that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine. . . .The contrary facts of experience are impotent against this myth (1989, 253; 2011, 266).

Female roles are exemplified in the Wife and the Mother and maintain the norm of maleness that consign woman to the place of the “Other” to Man, the Subject.

“Man seeks in woman the Other as Nature. . .being, Woman embodies nature as Mother, Wife and Idea” (1989, 144; 2011, 163). The Myth of the M-Other is for Beauvoir at the root of primordial patriarchal distinction of Subject and Other.

While sympathetic feminist analyses may subdue her critique of patriarchy, bringing her raw rhetoric into a feminist disciplinary frame that retains large portions of gender normativity in sex, Sade echoes Beauvoir’s excoriating critique of the sex/gender system and is for this reason a valuable resource, a complement to her own political analysis in The Second Sex, of the crimes of patriarchal thought and its legacy of institutions: marriage, the family, the alleged “naturalness” of procreative sex.

III. Sade, Foucault, and Beauvoir’s “Thought from Outside”

A. Sade

“The original intuition which lies at the basis of Sade’s entire sexuality, and hence his ethic, is the fundamental identity of coition and cruelty” (Beauvoir 2014, 58).

Paraphrasing the Myths section of The Second Sex, Beauvoir explains Sade’s challenge to the normalization and biopolitics of sex: The 18th century abolished God and substituted nature as the supreme good; it postulated a natural order, assumed “the harmonious order which assured the harmonious agreement of individual interests with the general interest,” natural health and usefulness to the species as sexual desire merges with the very movement of life: it is fruitful and rests with the idea of “the perfect woman” (Beauvoir 2014, 77).

Sade’s “immense merit,” for Beauvoir, lies in taking a stand against these abstractions and alienations which are merely flights from the truth about man; not only in his having proclaimed aloud what everyone admits to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign himself. He chose cruelty rather than indifference (93-4).

In contradistinction to the world of mythological thought, is for Beauvoir Sade’s fiction, wherein

Nature is manifested as evil. Instead of setting up an opposition between morality which derived from God and society, Sade’s writing embodies Nature as cruel and voracious. (78).

But the natural order cannot control Sade since he is “radically alien” to it in his aberrations.

For Sade, just as for Beauvoir, the charge against codes of morality based on the natural good is that they are artificial. In the appeals to nature’s authority by (pseudo)science and myth even though hostile to nature, society manifests its original perversion by the very way it contradicts nature.

How could individual freedom be recognized in an order that oppresses it? Sade respected singularity. For Beauvoir, Sade rejects the ethical recognition of other people founded on false notions of reciprocity and universality.

But Beauvoir is clear on this: “It was not murder that fulfilled Sade’s erotic nature; it was literature” (69).

B. Foucault

Outside the tradition of philosophy and Sartrean existentialism, Beauvoir’s defense of Sade as literary thought approximates the speech activity of the parrhesiastic truth-telling tradition of the Stoics and Cynics as described by the later Foucault in his 1983 Berkeley Lectures on Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia (published as Fearless Speech).

As such, Beauvoir’s defense of Sade may also be outside the norms of feminism itself, in lending grotesque support to this arch-villain of literature as the touchstone of morality. In what universe can we defend her?

On the one hand, what appears as misogyny to feminists emerges as a powerful challenge to heteronormativity and gender normativity. “Uncovering the despotic secrets of the political machine” (Bergoffen 2014, 40), Sade cements Beauvoir’s place as a critical voice that problematizes the “truth of sex,” that norm organized around the reproductive imperative, and technologizes her critique of the cisgender equivalencies between sex and gender.

On the other, through Sade’s literary speech and the truth of fiction Beauvoir finds support for her most post-disciplinary revolutionary methodology. This challenge through cruelty of the norms of nature embodies literature as that form of thought that escapes the noisy, “wordy interiority of consciousness,” the dynasty of myth and representation, to become “material energy”: “The violence of the body and the cry. . .forsaking the wordy interiority of consciousness becomes material energy, the suffering of the flesh, the persecution and rending of the subject itself” (Foucault, “The Thought from Outside,” Foucault/Blanchot,1987, 18).

C. Beauvoir’s “Thought from Outside” Today

In accordance with a proliferation of Trans perspectives on the mutability of gender in post-disciplinary academic society today, Beauvoir returns us to literature. Beauvoir’s support of Sade belongs to a language that moves us beyond a rhetoric centred on the oppression of women, to a problematization of gendered embodiment itself.

Outside the dynasty of myth and representation, Sade’s literature opens to a language which escapes the mode of being of discourse: to the experience of literature as embodied prosthesis. In the transformation and transition of the subject itself from a subject subjected to norms to one that begins the transgression of them, this is: “an experience whose particularity, however, is to want to be incommunicable”  (Beauvoir 2014, 45).

Beauvoir’s transgressive pleasure in writing about Sade is embodied in the testimony of this shared experience. An experience of the testimony of writing whose “supreme value lies in the fact that it disturbs us” (Beauvoir 2014, 95), it marks Beauvoir’s place, alongside Sade’s, as the free speech of literature: a fearless thought from Outside.

***

Alexander Antonopoulos is a Canadian scholar and researcher. He teaches courses in gender and sexuality at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montréal. His recent work on Beauvoir includes a chapter on her essay on Claude Bernard appearing in the 2017 Blackwell Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. He is currently developing a book on trans masculine embodiment in The Second Sex.