Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The use value of D. A. F. Sade (An open letter to my current comrades)
- 2 Sade, or the philosopher–villain
- 3 Libidinal economy in Sade and Klossowski
- 4 A political minimalist
- 5 The Society of the Friends of Crime
- 6 Sade, mothers, and other women
- 7 The encyclopedia of excess
- 8 “Sex,” or, the misfortunes of literature
- 9 Structures of exchange, acts of transgression
- 10 Gender and narrative possibilities
- 11 Sade's literary space
- 12 Fantasizing Juliette
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French
3 - Libidinal economy in Sade and Klossowski
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The use value of D. A. F. Sade (An open letter to my current comrades)
- 2 Sade, or the philosopher–villain
- 3 Libidinal economy in Sade and Klossowski
- 4 A political minimalist
- 5 The Society of the Friends of Crime
- 6 Sade, mothers, and other women
- 7 The encyclopedia of excess
- 8 “Sex,” or, the misfortunes of literature
- 9 Structures of exchange, acts of transgression
- 10 Gender and narrative possibilities
- 11 Sade's literary space
- 12 Fantasizing Juliette
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French
Summary
In Sade, the group of relations surrounding the value of the monetary sign and its intensity is quite different from that found in prostitution. To begin with, the client's body is the same as the procurer's – and from this perhaps stems Sade's republicanism. The Society of the Friends of Crime is not the society of procurers. The criminal milieu embodies the duplicity of signs: adultery of money with jouissance, fraud of jouissance when it is converted into currency. The sign of these exchanges becomes the accomplice of untransmittable phantasms; the consumption of the libidinal singularity is bought at the price of universally estimable sums in the form of money. Like Hegel's Mitte, the criminal milieu assures the institution's permeability to desire. In this respect there is little difference between it and the Police. “Perverse” drives are channeled by it towards the social body, the body of exchanges, towards the circuit of the communication of exchanges and goods. It is a milieu of duplicity and dissimulation par excellence, even though it has no need to hide itself, just like the Police, since it too is concerned with the detection and regulation of allegedly socially perverse partial drives.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sade and the Narrative of Transgression , pp. 62 - 75Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995