Pornography and the Left: Angela Carter’s Sadeian Woman.

Pornography and Left: A Retrospective on The Sadeian Woman. Angela Carter. Virago. 2006 (1979)

Close to the live debate on Prostitution, lies the more muted feminist discussion of pornography. In the background of arguments about the sex-trade are issues about the commercialisation of obscenity. Or rather, “Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.” (Intercourse. Andrea Dworkin. 1987). In this “occupied territory” surely the pornographic writer is the bureaucratic lackey recording the tortures of its victims. Selling sexual pleasure is only part of a mass-producing industry that reaches the top shelves of the local newsagents. Nobody can doubt that the presence of sexuality, commercially or individually express, sold, consumed, or bound up with gender politics, remains an unresolved issue. Except that is for puritans whose hostile answers are ready-made.

Here we reach a problem that has faced feminists since the late 1970s. Debates continue about sexuality, and oppression, over masculinity and femininity, over LGBT topics, and about their cultural, and economic basis. In this instance the clash between anti-pornography feminists, and those who back libertarian sexual pleasures, those for and those opposed to censorship (sex-positive feminists), has drifted away from argument about the content of the material, to concentrate on the business.

In a sense the terms of debate have not advanced much since the William’s Report (1980) and working out degrees of public protection from “obscenity” and assessing what should be considered “private”. Williams’ concern with pornography was that it crossed this line, by making picture of intimate acts visible. The worries about its accessibility and half and unwilling consumption has increased today with the deluge of images present on the Web. Not to mention the Net’s threat to post-Williams legislation restricting its consumption. Rules restricting sales of certain types of porn to sex shops, or preventing under-age buyers, appear unstable faced with computer access.

Anti-prostitution campaigners also underline the changing nature of the sex-industry. There are allegations of trafficking and near-slavery, as well as increased availability (via the same Internet, and local advertising), which the law can legislate against. Those supporting decriminalisation regard it as a private affair, (choice) but agitate for labour rights and the legal protection of those engaged in this activity. Both issues are normally talked about in terms of choice, privacy, and the scope of public regulation. Or the people involved in the commerce. Not through a take on the activities themselves.

Angela Carter (1940 – 1992) did look at this, in terms of culture and relations between men and women (she barely touches on the Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Trans-sexual field). Most of us know, and revere her fiction but the author of Nights at the Circus’s writing ranged much wider. In The Sadeian Woman (originally published 1979) she thought long and hard about pornography and its connections with sexuality. The centre of this book is pornography’s most radical producer, the Marquis de (post-French revolution – Citizen) Sade (1740 – 1814). His portraits of diverse sexual acts are often difficult to stomach – far from the erotic – but well worth considering for their insights. As Sade is at present rather an academic taste, it involves looking at some pretty abstract ideas to get a handle on what he said, while attempting to relate them to these topics.

Less interested in his tumultuous life, than Sade’s writings, Angela Carter speculates that, “The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all genders, and projects a, model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of the current relation between the sexes.” That in de Sade’s work, Justine, Juliette, 120 Days of Sodom (120 Journées de Sodome) and, perhaps most importantly, in Philosophy in the Bedroom (La Philosophie dans le boudoir), Sade claimed the “rights of free sexuality for women, and in installing women as beings of power in his imaginary worlds.” Carter considers that, “I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women.” This is because, “he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.”

It is hard to read Sade. Sexuality as the “primary mode of being” is, in his novels, a story of unspeakable cruelty, of tyranny, of exactly the violation that Dworkin loathed. It is flesh reduced to machines. Endless stories about ‘instruction ‘ in the art of intercourse and its most extreme forms, wavering near to classic pornographic stereotypes, but then turning viciously into something a lot nastier. Adorno and Horkheimer considered Sade ripped off the façade of the Enlightenment project and showed is darkest side. He replaced love with domination and cruelty, “the history of thought as an organ of domination” (Dialectic of the Enlightenment 1944). This is not entirely false. Sade argued for a “un libre essor à ces désires tyanniques”(free rein for tyrannical desires) in Philosophy in the Bedroom. Though this is in the context of a world of sexual dream playing. That is the famous section, Français, Encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains (Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, if you Would Become Republicans*). It comes from passages describing a utopian sexual fantasy of mutual pleasure – and humiliation.

Despite this did Sade’s natural order, where all are a mix of pulsating desires, and violence, prefigure an urge for the freedom to exterminate? That is, not in the imagination, but in reality, as well? That in Sade we can find an anticipation of the death camp – as these Frankfurt School theorists considered? This is less than clear. Sade attacked the death penalty in terms that show a high degree of humanity. He was punished during the French Revolution for his dislike for repression. He wished to be ruled by Nature, not to rule it. If so, then his portrait of sex-driven power is a physiological theory, without the corollary of political tyranny. Sade has more in common the most anti-authoritarian Lumières, like Diderot, who criticised (if imperfectly) tyranny, power, and their expression in early colonialism, than any variety of fascism. Sade’s love of annihilation referred more to himself than to others.

Sade’s philosophical debts are to the early ‘mechanical’ materialism of the 18^th century. His sexual clock-work machines, his description of primal drives, of murder and violence, are lodged there. Fewer are clearer than Carter about this. To Begin with he is astonishingly rigid about people’s own ‘nature’. His characters, she observes, are either “naturally vicious or naturally virtuous”. In Philosophy in the Bedroom the ‘heroine’ Eugénie is stripped of “all her socialised virtues “ and restored to a “state of nature”. One in which there is “cruauté naturelle” (natural cruelty), under the law of nature in which we “tous enemies les uns des autres, tous dans un état de guerre perpétuelle et réciprcoque”. (all enemies against each other; all are in a state of perpetual and reciprocal war). A Hobbesian version of sexuality – the lust for intercourse is never-ending propulsion even unto death. The unspeakable horror of the text’s ending, when Eugénie rapes and infibulates her mother, is “an exemplary vengeance on the very idea of good” to Carter, is an even stranger speculation. Against the generation of life itself. O, not to be born is, past all prizing, best!

Michel Foucault thought, “For Sade as for Goya, unreason continues to watch by night; but in this vigil it joins with fresh powers. The non-being it once was now becomes the power to annihilate. Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence and of recovering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialectic.”(Madness and Civilisation). The surrealist pornographer George Battaille regarded Sade as a pioneer of the deeper truths about sexual ‘transgression’. The ‘beyond’ here is never reached. As Foucault’s later writings on Sexuality (Histoire de la Sexualité) suggests, there is nothing pre-existing about human sexual behaviour and fantasy that is not caught up and transformed historically, in different social forms, in distinct ways with ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ (the nexus of force and social ‘truth’ that makes society). Sade may be considered an obsessive talker about sex who manufactured what he considered to be Nature’s Law. There is, if Foucault’s view is correct, no possibility of Sade’s vision of setting loose human desire resulting in free “morality” dictated by Nature alone.

Angela Carter describes Sade’s Utopias which aimed at that. In some respects Justine and Julienne enter into a simple repetition of “instructions” in sexual artifice – unwillingly (the former) or eagerly (the latter). But there is lot more going on. Two of Sade’s imaginary Nowheres are inverted Edens, with death lurking near-by. Juliette discovers in the Sodality, an Abbey of Thélème where “do what thou wilt” is the only law. It is a world in which atheism rules, and there are no family or moral bonds. It is composed of libertines, pursing every possible form of sexual experience, their victims, and servants. So, like all Utopias, there are a few….flaws. As Sadeian Woman observes, the “egalitarianism of the Sodality only extends to the members of the class of masters.” And expulsion if guaranteed for good works. Another character, this time an experienced one, now menopausal and sterile, Durand enters the Castle of Silling in A Hundred And Twenty Days of Sodom is a brothel in which “the sexual act is one of mutual, if sequential dominance”. The book contains a holocaust of torture and murder. It is really hard going. “Scientific Order, ruthlessly applied, reduces the world to chaos. Durand, the rational biochemist, is the very mythic terror reason fears most.”

In Philosophy in the Bedroom that Sade sets out far wider utopian plans. Encore un effort, Carter tells, us even got published as a separate pamphlet by later radicals. This is a perhaps the nearest he could envisage to an Earthly paradise – still bound to the world, but where sex is freed from the needs of animal reproduction. Sade wills an atheistic republic; we are merely “créatures nécessitées de la nature” who should be liberated from the absurd morality of Christianity and the despotism of all religion. It will be ruled by the mildest and the most limited laws. A supporter of the French Revolution (that let him, for a time, out of Prison and the Asylum) the Marquis became a Citizen – a functionary until imprisoned again for protesting against inhumane measures of his Paris Section under the Terror. From these initial lines one wonders at the implicit criticism of the way the Revolution unfolded – and its Cult of the Supreme Being. Not to mention the lack of effort put to free women, or sexuality.

Sex, naturally, was Sade’s principal concern in Encore un effort.. In houses for women, and men, under government protection, there will be “ fournis tous les individus de l’un de l’autre sexe qu’elles pourront desirer” (provided with all the individuals of the other sex that they could wish for) A world, then, where women have equal right to satisfy their desires, in which any form of sexual expression is permitted, from sodomy (described as a harmless practice persecuted out of prejudice), paederastry, to incest. Sade’s own penchant for coprophagy will no doubt also be satisfied. Carter notes “Sade does not concern himself with problems of capital investment or economic organisation in the hypothetical republic”.

How can we assess this? There are many criticisms of the Sade’s visions. They were not just daydreams. He acted on them, though thankfully not with the ultimate violence of his imaginary characters. Sade indulged in acts of cruelty (against prostitutes, thus giving to support to the feminist hostility to men using sex-workers as objects to be exploited). Notoriously he was prosecuted for whipping Rose Keller. There is room here for a discussion of the connection between sadist desire and acts. Regardless of the nature of the sexual wishes involved perhaps the issue really resolves around the degree of protection these woman had from unwanted behaviour; nobody can eliminate the desire itself. Pornography, home-made or commercial, is designed to offer at least a simulacrum of satisfaction for them.

The survival and readership of Sade’s writings illustrates the futility of efforts to ban obscenity. As are attempts to prohibit the mutually consensual fulfilment of the yearnings he described, and listed in Kraft-Ebing’s even more rigorously comprehensive studies. Unfortunately there are more than a few difficulties with one particular case, the way sadism is expressed; it is not only in Sade’s case that ‘other-harming’ is not all play-acting. Modern media make us aware of obscenity: the acts of the depraved on the unwilling flesh of others. Perhaps all we can hope for are means to prevent and prosecute cruelty, not to stifle what cannot be seen until it is acted on. We should be grateful to Sade for showing them in a light which exposes their deepest roots, rather than glossing them over in erotica, however charming and endearing. Sade was intensely moral – but his role is rather like Nietzsche in philosophy: he leads to a re-evaluation of all values, without offering us alternative ones of any lasting worth.

More fundamentally it was, Carter argues, Sade’s inability to concern himself with love that tells the most. He was in his “drama, flesh is used instrumentally, to provoke this spasmodic visitation of dreadful pleasure. In this flesh, nothing human remains; it aspires to the condition of the sacramental meal. It is never the instrument of love.” In the same Enlightenment tradition that Adorno and Horkheimer despise, this might be called the imperative to treat people as ends-in-themselves, not means to an end.

Pornography should be tolerated. Sade nevertheless is at the limit of the tolerable. We endure his writings because they push to a limit what can barely be said. Having said it, though he is much more the predecessor of George Battaile, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, or Michel Houellebecq, or films, such as Belle du Jour, not to mention Passolini’s Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom, than, say, Asian Babes. The publisher of the Daily Sport makes his living by serving up wank-material, commerce dictates his content. Sade offers an exploration of the boundaries of the erotic and violence, and unpicks social frontiers around individuals. But making people into tools, as a literary device, or a wish, is in the end a mere shard of human being and for all its ability to pierce is not sharp enough to cut into the real basis of what makes us enjoy and suffer in the world. Sade showed, in short, a mere aspect of humanity, and,  not the most important one.

The Sadeian Woman concentrates on this radical failing. It is a “holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves”. This is “the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.” Angela Carter is not concerned with the Holy as such, which one could consider a terror as frightful as anything Sade dreamt up. The left would do well to consider expanding its grasp of what it at stake by thinking about one of the roots of feminism, in replacing all forms of oppression by mutual equality.  This book invites us to consider a side of human existence that we often keep to intimate friends and ourselves: affection. She cites Emma Goldman, “the most vital right is the right to love and be loved..” and that “A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of women’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy.” In these lyrical lines we find a free egalitarian sexuality united with the love of the world that all true humanists share. Something to hope for, and the warmth that sustains us even in the darkest times.

* In fact the gender here is inclusive, including both male and female people.

More recent Tendance reflections on Pornography: Stewart  Home: Pornography in the Service of the Revolution.