"Philosophy in the Bedroom": A Review

The plot, such as it is, is simple. Four members of the French nobility get together for an evening of pleasurable enjoyment. The dramatis personae are as follows:

Madame de Saint-Ange, a 28 year old woman who is by now fully committed to the libertine lifestyle.

Le Chevalier, brother of Saint-Ange. He mostly prefers women, although that's just a matter of taste, not of principle.

Dolmancé, who prefers men's asses but doesn't have any strong objections to those of women.

And of course, Eugénie, our 15-year-old neophyte. When the other characters are not engaging in various sexual acts or demonstrating them for Eugénie's benefit, they are lecturing her on the virtues of pleasure, cruelty, and lying, in addition to the importance of not begetting children and the nonexistence of God.

Eugénie also has a passionate desire to murder her mother, which the other characters wish to encourage to the fullest extent possible.

(There's also a servant boy named Augustin who has a 14-inch cock, but he's mostly just a prop so we'll ignore him.)

In the opening scene, Le Chevalier and his sister explain the situation to one another: Eugénie's father has sent the girl to the castle so she can have her proper introduction to libertinism. He worries her dreadful bore of a mother might corrupt sweet Eugénie, make her frigid, and infect her with the life-destroying virus of religion.

(Probably he's also hoping for a little father-daughter incest action when she gets back, but that's only speculation.)

(Not that de Sade isn't more than willing to depict incest. It's just that all we're directly treated to in the work is brother-sister incest. As a Kentuckian I can only surmise that in some circles depictions of incest are thought to be taboo-breaking.)

Anyway, Le Chevalier has business to attend to, so after introducing Madame de Saint-Ange and Eugénie he disappears, promising to return in time for the evening's festivities.

Before long Dolmancé shows up. After inspecting the women's asses and determining that they're almost as good as men's, he agrees to teach Eugénie everything she needs to know. So while waiting to have a foursome with Le Chevalier that evening, they have a threesome in the afternoon.

What follows is equal parts sex manual, discourse on anatomy, political tract, porn script, and inquiry into the nature and meaning of human destiny. Complete with a hefty number of arguments for why Nature must have intended the anus for sexual penetration, far more than any other location.

("Just look how perfectly round it is!")

So, that's the easy part done with: saying what the book is about. What's more difficult is evaluating the work. Or even selecting the right lens for evaluating it.

Should we take a lead from the title and evaluate it as a work of philosophy? Or from the other part of the title, taking it as a piece of eroticism? Read it as a dramatic work? Or take it as a document of its time–a systematic attack on the social taboos of revolutionary France?

As pure philosophy the book is extremely confused. It does, however, have some bearing on our time in that light. Expressed simply, the book argues that there is no God, there is only Nature. Although de Sade's concept of Nature carries with it an awful lot of the features we associate with God: intention, direction, design, etc. Nature decrees that there is nothing higher than individual liberty, individual power, and the individual's prerogative to pursue his own pleasure at the expense of others.

(Similar enough to today's everyday materialist common sense. The influence of the French revolution lives on.)

As drama or eroticism, the book confronts us with a problem: de Sade never allows us to care for his characters as human beings. They have no internal conflicts, no uncertainties, no doubts about the meaning of their actions. As characters, they are mouthpieces for an ideology. As erotic figures, they are masturbatory props.

The closest thing we have to a psychological insight into a character is the knowledge that Eugénie wants to murder her mother. A fact like that could be expanded and made into the basis of a profound character study. Instead, in de Sade's hands, Eugénie is only witness and object of the proceedings. Only the enthusiastic initiate.

It may be that the only way to read the book is as an attack on the sexual and religious mores of its time. And here the work shines–systematic attacks on the Catholic Church and traditional morality might have been groundbreaking and refreshing in the 1790s. The fact that these things have become cliché and our collective degeneracy has reached a point where de Sade himself might be shocked only attests, once again, to the lasting legacy of the French revolution.

Then again, Philosophy in the Bedroom is a book about sex. Its pages are filled with descriptions of a fairly wide variety of sex acts. It's difficult to imagine what they're all there for, however. The descriptions are so functional and so matter-of-fact that it's hard to imagine they're intended to titillate, even when we imagine encountering the work as its first readers did in 1795.

There's a kind of utopianism at work in the pages of Philosophy in the Bedroom. The work is shot through with the fantasy of a world where all anyone has to do is engage in sex and talk philosophy with anyone and everyone they want.

Let me introduce a distinction here: when it comes to literary works that are highly concerned with sex, there exist pornographic works and erotic works. The pornographic work, of which Philosophy in the Bedroom is a supreme example, is a kind of fantasy of a sexual utopia. It imagines a world where sexuality is an uncomplicated pleasure. Something where no one's feelings get hurt, there are no unintended consequences, and even if there are tortures they're entirely physical and never leave any permanent scars. The pornographic work celebrates sexuality as pure physicality and unmixed enjoyment.

The erotic work, on the other hand, takes on the problem of situating sexuality in the context of life. We could point to de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons or Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs as examples here. These are works where the underlying presence of sexuality is all the stronger precisely because of the strongly ambiguous emotions it arouses. In Dangerous Liaisons, seduction is a cruelly fascinating game played for high stakes and sex is an irresistible catastrophe that ruins lives. In Venus in Furs, we see Severin fall, horrified but helplessly drawn, into the ever-deepening abyss of his own desire. The magnetism of the erotic work, as opposed to the pornographic, lies in the way it simultaneously attracts and repels.

For all his intelligence and for all his considerable interest in sex, de Sade seems incapable of conceiving of these ambiguities. The possibility of obsessively desiring something or someone in spite of, perhaps even because of the fact that it promises to destroy you, seems to be no part of his artistic imagination.

We might say that de Sade was willfully blind to these aspects of reality, and that may be part of why he spent half of his adult life in prison. But that would be speculation.

True to his reputation, however, de Sade is at his best when discussing the subject of cruelty. Particularly the subject of feminine cruelty, on which he deserves to be quoted at length:

In general, we distinguish two sorts of cruelty: that resulting from stupidity, which, never reasoned, never analyzed, assimilates the unthinking individual into a ferocious beast: this cruelty affords no pleasure, for he inclined to it is incapable of discrimination; such a being’s brutalities are rarely dangerous: it is always easy to find protection against them; the other species of cruelty, fruit of extreme organic sensibility, is known only to them who are extremely delicate in their person, and the extremes to which it drives them are those determined by intelligence and niceness of feeling; this delicacy, so finely wrought, so sensitive to impressions, responds above all, best, and immediately to cruelty; it awakens in cruelty, cruelty liberates it. How few are able to grasp these distinctions! . . . and how few there are who sense them! They exist nonetheless. Now, it is this second kind of cruelty you will most often find in women. Study them well: you will see whether it is not their excessive sensitivity that leads them to cruelty; you will see whether it is not their extremely active imagination, the acuity of their intelligence that renders them criminal, ferocious; oh, they are charming creatures, every one of them; and not one of the lot cannot turn a wise man into a giddy fool if she tries; unhappily, the rigidity, or rather the absurdity, of our customs acts as no encouragement to their cruelty; they are obliged to conceal themselves, to feign, to cover over their propensities with ostensible good and benevolent works which they detest to the depths of their soul; only behind the darkest curtain, by taking the greatest precautions, aided by a few dependable friends, are they able to surrender to their inclinations; and as there are many of this sort, so there are many who are miserable. Would you meet them? Announce a cruel spectacle, a burning, a battle, a combat of gladiators, you will see droves of them come running; but these occasions are not numerous enough to feed their fury: they contain themselves, and they suffer.

Ah! It makes you wish we lived in a more civilized age, where we could at least enjoy the spectacle of a public execution now and then.

So: how to evaluate Philosophy in the Bedroom? It's a flawed work, a limited work, possibly more valuable on account of the 19th and 20th century works it would inspire than on account of its own merits. de Sade seems more concerned with espousing a philosophical and political worldview than he is with aesthetics, which is always a flaw in a work of art. If you can guess a writer's politics from a novel, it's a defect in the novel.

But it's readable, occasionally thoughtful, and there are some good laughs to be had along the way. It would be cruel not to recommend it.