“MUST WE BURN SADE?”

There are many surprising aspects to Beauvoir's consideration of the Marquis de Sade. Beauvoir is a feminist, and Sade is one whose name gave rise to the phenomenon of sexual sadism. Beauvoir has written copiously on the empowerment of women; Sade sought, through sexual means, to punish and control women and then to write, in the form of fiction and essays, a detailed account of his form of libertinism. In asking why Beauvoir reads Sade, and why it is a question whether or not he must be burned, we are asking what, if any, encounter there might be between a philosophy of feminism that grounds itself in freedom, as Beauvoir's clearly does, and a philosophy – and practice – of sexual libertinism that for the most part assumes the pleasurable aspects of the domination of women within heterosexual practice?

There are many tricky questions here, and it will serve us well to consider some of them. When Beauvoir asks whether we should burn Sade, she is referring to Sade the author. Should we burn his books? This is an incendiary title in more ways than one. To ask the question is to recall the burning of heretics and saints, including Joan of Arc. It is also to recall the burning of books, mainly Jewish and heretical, that took place during the Inquisition in Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Spain.