Sociology

The names of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch have been used to denote two basic perversions in literature  sadism and masochism. Illnesses, to a greater part, are named after famous patients, but more often it is the doctors name that is given to the disease. Sade and Masoch are portrayed as sick individuals, obsessed with the idea of extreme violence and sexual perversion. However, sadism and masochism, to a great extent, should not be equated with the plague. Kraft-Ebing, for example, credited Masoch for having redefined a clinical entity not merely in terms of the relation between pain and sexual pleasure, but in terms of something more fundamental connected with bondage and humiliation.

In the works of Masoch, there is a general transcendence of the imperative and the descriptive toward a higher function. Literary substance is directed towards persuasion and education, contrary to the claims of critics. The audience is no longer in the presence of a torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her. The audience is dealing instead with a victim in search of a torturer who needs to educate, persuade and establish an alliance with the torturer in order to accomplish the strangest human schemes. Pain, pleasure, and sexual perversion are, in a sense, elevated concepts of human discourse. In the novel Venus in Furs, Masoch treats brutality and torture as liberating mediums. The novel tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, obsessed with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he requests to be as her slave, and encourages the latter to treat him in mortifying ways. Initially, Wanda cannot comprehend or relate to the request, but after humoring Severin a bit, she finds the advantages of the method to be both interesting and enjoyable. After each mortifying acts, Severin describes his feelings as suprasensuality. The two then travels to Florence. In Florence, Wanda recruits three African women to dominate Severin.

The relationship reaches at a crisis point when the woman meets a man whom she would like to submit. Severin, angry and frustrated, ceases to submit, arguing that men should dominate women. Severin argued

That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is mans enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work.

Masoch treats torture, pain, and sexual perversion as liberating mediums. Pain is an affirmation of existing conditions. In the novel, pain is synonymous with gender inequality. Ironically, the repetitive application of pain is an affirmation of the reality of gender inequality. Torture is the general medium of pain. It is, in a sense, the liberating sensuality  the educational undertaking towards realization. Sexual perversion is also an affirmation of a social defect. Women are treated as subordinate individuals  inferior beings as Darwin argued. Masochs image of a brutal woman rejects this view.  Women can become equals of men if the former has attained self-efficacy in education and rights. In a sense, Masochs concepts are elevated ideals of reality. Man is the educator of the woman  educating her to be his co-equal (sense of empowerment). As Delueze argued the masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself. Dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions and displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation of roles and discourse (22, italics mine).

With Sade, the overall intention is also to educate. He is interested in something different, that is, to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence. As Delueze argued

He is not even attempting to prove anything to anyone, but to perform a demonstration related essentially to the solitude and omnipotence of its author. The point of the exercise is to show that the reasoning does not have to be shared by the person to whom it is addressed by any more than pleasure is meant to be shared by the object from which it is derived. The acts of violence inflicted on the victims are a mere reflection of a higher form of violence to which the demonstration testifies (19).
In the novel Justine, Justine is presented as an abuse individual hidden under a virtuous mask. When she seeks refuge and confession in a monastery, she is forced to become a sex-slave to the monks who subject her to numerous acts of sexual perversion. After helping a gentleman robbed in a field, she herself is subjected to the same punishments, only this time by a gentleman. When she goes to the court to beg for mercy, she is humiliated, unable to defend herself.

Now, in the quest for work and shelter, Justine constantly fell into the hands of perverts who would usually rape and torture her. Eventually, Justine is falsely accused of theft and sent to jail awaiting execution. She allies herself with Miss Dubois, a criminal who helped her escape from the prison. Justine then wanders off and accidentally trespasses upon the lands of the Bressac. Eventually, Justine becomes introverted and miserable, and struck by a bolt of lightning.

A critical reading of Sades work revealed the following ideas 1) the pursuit of virtue and vice are both for the sake of pleasure  as pleasure is the goal of mankind 2) pain is essentially good, - its removal only heightens pleasure 3) evil and crime are pleasurable acts, avoiding the sublimation and delayed gratification in acts of virtue 4) there is, in a sense, a kind of pleasure reserved for the just in the punishments inflicted by law on those judged guilty and, the will to power is the will to pleasure, and all the use of reason is oriented toward the attainment of that end.

In a sense, Sades concepts of pain and pleasure are elevated philosophical constructs. Pain and pleasure are not merely physical outbursts of artificial affliction. They are manifest forms of social and psychological criticisms. The notion of primary negation is derived from the necessity to create, preserve and individuate. Both are primary objects of opposition to the laws of existing social structures. What differentiates Sade from other social critics is his use of criticism. Sades medium, from an orthodox viewpoint, is unacceptable, malignant, and lacerating. It is disgusting from a moral perspective, but highly liberating. Indeed, Sades literary medium, while highly frustrating to the common mind, is directed towards total liberation. Elevation is equivalent to liberation.