Sade: A Sudden Abyss

By Annie Le Brun

The literary adventure of D.A.F. (1740-1814) is unique and paradoxical. He was widely read in the nineteenth century, but his books disappeared almost completely from circulation in the century. Meanwhile the exegesis of Sade poured from the presses of the Western world in a flood of words in which the writer, the novelist, and the exceptional pet disappeared.

In France today, J. J. Pauvert, who considers Sade "the greatest French writer," is publishing a new edition of the complete works with a new introduction by Annie Le Brun. Sade: A Sudden Abyss is the translation of this introduction, which shows Sade as the inventor of an entirely new language through which he fathoms human nature, desire, and relationships of power.

In this fresh and authoritative survey of Sade's work as a whole, Le Brun frees it from such critics as Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Barthes (who see Sade's language as a metaphor for history, society, or writing itself). She asks, Where is Sade himself in these texts? What exactly does Sade tell us? What is obscured when Sade's writing is placed in a "universe of discourse" rather than understood as a manifestation of a life spent in eleven prisons over twenty-seven years? Like a powerful laser beam, her reflections cut through two centuries of intellectual hide-and-seek and let Sade for the first time be seen and read in his own light.

Annie Le Brun is a French poet and literary theorist. Her books include L chez tout, a critique of the French neofeminist movement; A distance; and Les chateaux de la subversion, a study of the Gothic tradition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087286250X
• ISBN13: 9780872862500
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Kinds of value

The difficulty of coming to a view of Sade is that he represents several things of widely different value. (1) As a man who routinely victimized people less powerful than himself, he deserves contempt. (2) To the extent that he suffered as a result of what he wrote, he deserves sympathy. (3) As a litmus test for intellectual freedom, he continues to challenge us today. (4) Sade's Crimes of Love, which includes a brief preface considering the history and theory of the novel, shows him to be a student of fiction and a practitioner who, though perhaps not of the first rank, can write entertaining stories; in this mode, he deserves respect.Possibly taking for granted that the reader knows all about the first mode, and admiring him in the second and third, Annie Le Brun gives him passionate, perhaps excessive, praise in the fourth.Le Brun presents Sade as driven to search for the truth, however politically incorrect, about human motives and human relations. He goes the Enlightenment one better: not content with his contemporaries' unmasking of the deceptions of religion, he proceeds to unmask their backstops in economics, convention, public opinion, ideology, law, and government.In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume declares with straightforward good humor that reason is the servant of the passions and can never be anything else. Sade plays out the implications of seeing this, and those of refusing to see it: everything that happens in the human world is driven by the personal desires (acknowledged or disguised) of the people involved, plus chance--but we are surrounded by constant efforts to wrap veils of hypocrisy around this fact.Sade is out to cut those veils away. He insists that we are a part of, not above, nature. He focuses on sex as the field of our most powerful, and most veiled, desires. Through literary means ranging from philosophical discourse to shock therapy, he wants to make us face the reality of the physical world (and the reality of our own wishes) and reject the high-sounding abstractions that issued, before Sade's eyes, in the free use of the guillotine. Le Brun notes that Sade opposed capital punishment, at considerable risk to his own head. (To suggest the kind of argument he might have made: when a government denies its citizens the right to kill but claims that right for itself, it is claiming to stand above the people--when in fact it is a creature of the people and its "moral authority" is only power, the combination of majority rule and force.)For Le Brun, Sade's mission is to free us to face the facts of spontaneous, individual human desire and its fate in the world of nature. This drive to clarity makes him a worthy member of a tradition that includes Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, Freud, Rimbaud, and the surrealists. We might also add Stanley Milgram, whose book Obedience to Authority shows how fragile is the veneer of enlightened morality in the life of everyday people.Le Brun considers earlier critics

The most provocative book on Sade in years.

Annie Le Brun is clearly the most thoughtful and honest interpreter of the Marquis de Sade extant. Beyond all the other books written on Sade during these past several decades, SADE: A SUDDEN ABYSS not only provides a cogent vision of Sade, how he worked and why he wrote his many books and plays, but explains why we moderns have had such a difficult time in accepting him for what he expressed -- not what critics too often impune that he expressed. With Annie Le Brun we now have a vehicle to return to Sade and to read him, not so much without preconception, but by way of recognizing whatever preconceptions we throw up so as to obscure our enounter with him. The title to Le Brun's book is also precise to its intent -- to open up, for anyone who dares to read him thoroughly, the moral abyss of a world he attacked with such vehemence, erotism, irony and humor, and which remains our world. SADE: A SUDDEN ABYSS is book of intelligence and courage. If you are at all interested in Sade or, more generally, in the relationship of thought to the body, I urge you to read Annie Le Brun's SADE: A SUDDEN ABYSS.

The Divine Marquis re-evaluated.

Annie LeBrun, perhaps better known for being a self-described hermaphrodite than a scholar, has provided the sort of critical review which the Marquis de Sade and his writings have not received since Guillaume Apollinaire branded him "the divine Marquis." In recent years, criticism about Sade has been limited to comments such as "boring," "repetitive", and "predictable". Rather than attempting to justify Sade to the critics who use such subjective adjectives to dismiss Sade both as a writer and philosopher, LeBrun ignores the critics and stakes out new, although also subjective, territory of her own. It is literary criticism with personality, a much-overlooked genre, as she suggests new theories concerning Sade's masterpiece _The 120 Days of Sodom_, and tries to look, unflinchingly, into the abyss through the eyes of the very, very human Marquis.