Crappy Philosophy : The Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille

People like things that make them comfortable. There is a reason why people use the word “step out of your comfort zone” to indicate doing something that is scary or unpleasant. It’s very easy and safe to be complacent and to not wish to be disturbed, or even consider disturbing things. It’s easier to just rest in one worldview, and stay there.

Philosophy is definitely known for changing worldviews, for sure. Why would we want you to think critically if we had no hope of opening your eyes to views different from your own, at least from time to time? But then, there are times when the writings of philosophers become difficult, or worse yet, might have disturbing implications.

What if, however, instead of the edgy grumblings of Nietzsche, or the smirking anxiety that comes with Kierkegaard, we went a little further? Well, a lot further…

The Good Marquis and the Librarian

Before I explain things further, let’s go back a little, in time. Meet Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), an 18th century nobleman with quite a bit of notoriety. You see, while the Marquis de Sade was a philosopher, of sorts, he was also best known as a pornographer. To the extent that he was put in prison for the sheer amount of obscenity in his work.

A pornographer, you say? It’s the 21st century and porn is mainstream, so what’s the big deal? Well, it wasn’t that Sade wrote horny novels. It was that his horny novels were so over the top that they bubbled over long ago. In fact, the name Sade might sound familiar if you know anything about BDSM. The “S” comes from Sade. Sadism, that is, gaining sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on another person, stems from the good Marquis. 

Sade’s books were lengthy, and he threw out left and right any sort of random and very perverted sex act he could think of, to fill in the space. Don’t think Fifty Shades of Grey, but more like Hellraiser, but with more human excrement.

From a culture full of equal parts religion and atheistic reason, this libertine’s works were not taken lightly. Turn of the 19th century France, even after the Revolution, is not going to take kindly to this level of pornography, especially with new immorality crackdowns by Napoleon and his people. Sade was arrested and dodged death several times, but ultimately ended up in an asylum for his work and his “lifestyle choices.”

For the Marquis, who wrote a treatise on libertinage, The Philosophy of the Bedroom, his main desire was to twist the mainstream morality in every way. The three main characters, speaking to each other, recommend a wide range of sex acts to corrupt each other, in as mild mannered tones as a lady recommending what type of tea to serve for her guests. For Sade, to pervert became the point.

Fast forward nearly two centuries later, and another Frenchman discovers and admires the Marquis de Sade. A man who worked at the Bibliotheque Nationale categorizing medallions, archivist Georges Bataille (1897-1962) originally wanted to be a priest. For nine years he considered the vocation, having converted to Catholicism from a nonreligious upbringing. However, Bataille renounced religion altogether, embracing libertinage in his own work.

Bataille would not only pen his own pornographic novel (Story of the Eye [1928]), but would also pen an apologetic piece for the Marquis de Sade, pushing for a scatological form of philosophy that would push so many limits that it’s hard to imagine how it got published at all.

Le Verrou, or, The Bolt by Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1777-1778

A Crappy Situation: Bataille’s Philosophy of Excrement and Appropriation

In “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade” (1930), Bataille wished to make sure everyone knew his great appreciation for the Marquis de Sade and his work. But rather than write some vague compliments on Sade’s awesome way of writing porn, he went further, and created a philosophy of how humans work, what underlies religious experience, but also everyday experience as well. And it gets gross.

To Bataille, Sade introduced many important elements in his pornographic work, but few were as important (to Bataille) as the scenes in Sade’s novels, of which many include characters graphically eating their own or others’ feces. Yes, you heard that right. They engaged in coprophagia, that is, eating poop.

How the heck does Bataille get a philosophy from this? Well, for Bataille, the idea of eating one’s own waste becomes symbolic for how humans interact with the world around us, in general. For Bataille, there are two drives: appropriation, eating for nourishment; and excrement, releasing waste from what you have eaten. These two underpin this entire philosophy.

When eating something, you want to incorporate it into yourself, become one with it. As such, eating becomes representative of what we do as humans in many areas. Clothing, dwellings, mundane things, we take them to ourselves and make them our own, part of us. Such things Bataille considers homogenous.

However, sometimes we wish to see something at a distance, or rather, distance ourselves from it. This is where the excremental factor sets in. Certain things become heterogenized, that is, set apart from us. With this excretion, we set apart such things as philosophy and religion, and, yes, therefore God.

I wouldn’t recommend reading the rest, as I’m already nauseated rereading this essay to explain to you!

But What’s the Point? Or Is He Being an Edgelord?

It’s a little of both. Bataille was, like Sade, a strange person. Sometimes with a strange character comes a strange philosophy. Bataille believed in subversion through perversion. In taking the sacred, in the character of religion, and relating it to fecal matter, the most profane thing of all, Bataille gave the established order two middle fingers.

However, not to sound too strange myself, I think we can gain a greater point from this nauseating discourse. Bataille’s criticism of religion is the idea that God or theological practice exists outside of us. For Bataille, this is what we would call a social construct. God existed outside of us, sure, but only because we placed him there. 

It’s blasphemous AF for sure, but I can think of ways in which we sort our lives where you could see it in these impulses. Consider, perhaps, how you choose your hobbies and fandoms. If you, for instance, ship a certain pairing in your favorite book or TV show, you have accepted them to yourself. However, you might roll your eyes when someone ships another pairing.

In the grander scheme, we appropriate to ourselves the people we, as a society, like or understand better. We put aside people who are vastly different from us, or who make us uncomfortable. 

When I first read Bataille as an undergrad around 20 years ago, my early-20s goth self kind of embraced aspects of it. Once you get past the edgelord speak, parts of it make some sense. It also appealed to someone who wanted to eventually do some rather edgy work in philosophy in grad school. So, if anything, there is something that can be said for the strange philosophers who thumb their noses at convention and academic philosophy at large.

By the way, I tried really hard to read both works by the Marquis de Sade and The Story of the Eye. The former were clearly written with shock value in mind more than eroticism. With The Story of the Eye, much in the tradition of other French porn classics (yes, they exist) of the time (like The Story of O), there was too much reliance on increasing graphic and violent content in order to maintain the reader’s attention. I definitely had to nope out of The Story of the Eye after the young couple decides to beat up the priest with a relic. 

For reference, I did sit through a murder, weird stuff with eggs, and a bloody orgy. They can’t all be winners.