Sade or the first theatre of atheism1

Although it is relatively easy to present Sade as an atheistic philosopher, who was nevertheless different from others, it is much less easy to see in what ways his atheism exceeds the usual intellectual categories, is, in fact, unique, in that it cannot be disputed-as some have tried to do-because of the very nature of his thought. This thought is wholly atheistic, distancing it from philosophy in the strict sense of the word, and, paradoxically, bringing it closer to theatre.

Sade's life and work fuse around the imaginary space of both real and virtual theatre to generate a new realm of the mind, or what I call the first theatre of atheism.

At the same time, we must remember that Sade's atheism is unquestionable. He asserts and proclaims it throughout his life with a force that is rarely equalled, but also with undeniable courage. Let us not forget that when Sade was twenty-six years old, sacrilege was still a capital offence. On the 1st July, 1766, the chevalier de la Barre was executed for not taking his hat off during a religious procession. Two years later, on the 3rd April, 1768, Sade was himself accused of acts of flagellation and blasphemy committed against the person of a young beggar-woman, Rose Keller. What made matters worse was that the day was Easter Sunday.

This fact is not without importance, because, while, on an intellectual level, Sade's atheism follows the long established tradition of free thinking, as represented since the beginning of the century by Freret and Toland, and carried on by Grimm, d' Holbach and La Mettrie, one cannot ignore the extreme prudence of the Encyclopedic with regard to atheism, not to mention the theistic positions of Rousseau or Voltaire and of most of those who would play a role in the Revolution of 1789.

Unlike these frequently more anti-clerical than atheistic figures, Sade openly declares his atheism. And this atheism, which is matched by his own intractable anti-clericalism, always proves itself equal to this speech from Histoire de Juliette:

Who are the only real enemies of society? Priests. Who is it that debauch our wives and children daily? Priests.( .. . ) Who constantly work hardest towards the total extinction of the human race? Priests. Who soil themselves most with crime and infamy? Priests. Who are the most dangerous, the most vindictive and the cruellest men on earth? Priests.And we hesitate to eradicate completely this pestilential vermin from the surface of the globe! . . . We deserve all our ills.2

Sade or the first theatre of atheism 39

Nevertheless, this vehement opposition that Sade demonstrates as much against the representatives of God as against the idea of God itself is not a reason to reduce his atheism to mere blasphemy. Indeed, if, throughout his life Sade manifests the same furious determination to 'root out' God 'from men's hearts' , it is because he sees in God the most revolting lack ef being.

T his is doubtless the reason why Sade casts his eye over the entire history of atheism in his century: in order to identify the various ways in which this lack manifests itself. There is no manner of refuting the existence of God to which he does not have recourse. This approach is, indeed, a characteristic of his atheism, which is no less consistent and rigorous for it, since it stems from a revolution of thought, leading to the logical refutation of the existence of God, as developed by Freret between 1722 and 1739 in his Lettre de Thrasybule a Leucippe. But this is not all. Like the characters of his novels, Sade himself, in his letters, never misses an opportunity to demonstrate this refutation, as if he were performing an exercise in gymnastics consisting in a ceaseless movement along the chain of causation, tirelessly destroying any possibility of a first cause, which is always ready to spring back to life.

This is, indeed, the basis of the accusation of repetitiousness frequently levelled at Sade, by those who fail to see that it is by this means that the transition occurs from logical to metaphysical revolt. Having refuted the idea of a first cause, and with the sovereignty of his own spirit, Sade discovers an infinity against which he will, henceforth, have to measure his strength. In fact, it is the violence of Sade's logic that brings him to the very limits of reason and which leads him to assail them again and again until they finally give way, launching him into the void which he discovers to be the true horizon of atheistic thought.

By approaching Sade from a purely literary point of view, modern critics have tried to turn a blind eye to this violence. Thus, Blanchot finds in Sade an 'authentic absolute' , but only 'in the very relative world of literature'3, while Barthes identifies 'the universe of discourse' as 'the only Sadean universe' .4 Not only do both critics neutralise his thought in this way, but, at the same time, they mislead about the nature of his atheism, which is an indissociable aspect of his existence at its most profound levels.

As Maurice Heine asserted as early as 1926, Sade's atheism is more of an existential question than an intellectual one:

We should not lose sight of the fact that Sade is an absolutist, that he takes his thinking unswervingly right to the end, to the extreme limits of its logical

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conclusions. He does not care if these overturn prejudices, received ideas or social conventions. It is not simply that he takes every opportunity to write that God does not exist, he constantly thinks and acts, makes his will and dies accordingly, and this unshakeable and prideful certainty is without doubt that for which he has been least forgiven. 5

The unique strength and character of Sade's atheism-which different kinds of criticism have found equally disconcerting-stern from this way of thinking which is not only unstoppable but, taking its own logic to its extreme conclusion, necessarily engages the physical and moral existence of him who formulates it. Witness the famous letter of November, 1783 written by Sade to his wife after five years in prison for li bertinage:

You say that my ways of thinking cannot be condoned. Well, what do I care! The man who adapts his ways of thinking to suit others is mad! My ways of thinking are the fruit of my reflections; they are part of my very existence, of the way I am made. I have no power to change them, and even ifl had, I would not do so.( .. . ) It is not my ways of thinking but those of others that have proved my undoing. 6

Clearly, Sade's atheism is not restricted to the level of ideas alone. Unlike other atheistic philosophers, he is not content with declaring the sovereignty of his spirit. The awareness of infinity that he draws from it is matched by an awareness of nothingness, leading him to go beyond the idea to look for the origins of the revolution of his own thought.

It is in this sense that theatre seems to me to have played a significant role for Sade, whose life repeatedly bears witness to it. Yet, though critics have not failed to notice how frequently in his work he has recourse to theatrical devices, they have curiously forgotten the fact that, throughout his life, he was a man of the theatre, as if his thinking depended both on the theatre itself, and on a process of dramatisation which goes so far as to question the idea that we have of the world.

This is why I shall first try to show Sade's passion for the theatre and the extent to which this was probably the only constant in his eventful life.

First and foremost, theatre played the same role for him as for any young aristocrat of the eighteenth century, in the course of which we witness a gradual theatricalisation of life in society. In Sade's case, this development was far from negligeable, because it encouraged in him an increasing tendancy to confuse the real and the imaginary.

Between the ages of ten and fourteen, Sade was educated at the College de Louis-le-Grand, run by the Jesuits, who regarded theatre as a

Sade or the first theatre of atheism 41

pedagogical instrument of the first order. A few years later, Sade was choosing his mistresses almost exclusively from amongst the actresses and dancers of the Comedie Italienne, the Opera, and the Theatre Italien. In 1764, newly married, Sade set up at great expense a small theatre in his wife's family home at Evry, as was the fashion of the time. Finally, there are the twenty or so plays, highly conventional in character, that he wrote in prison, mostly in the 1780s. These provide further proof of his involvement in the theatrical experience of his time. Moreover, he attached considerable importance to these plays. We know this from letters to his wife and to his old tutor, Father Amblet, to whom he wrote from prison in April, 1784: 'I find it absolutely impossible to resist my genius, which draws me into this career in spite of myself, and whatever people may do, I shall not be diverted from it' . 7

It was of course in the hope that his plays would be performed that, when he came out of prison in the midst of the Revolution in 1790, Sade made contact with the best-known actors of the French theatre. And right up until the end of his life, he would make repeated attempts to get his theatre onto the stage.

At this point, it is worth underlining the extent to which Sade's immoderate taste for his own theatre profoundly disturbs most of his unconditional admirers. Indeed, the latter tend to exclude all his dramatic output from consideration, on the pretext that it clashes with the rest of his writings. At the level of ideas expressed, this is certainly true. But thinking that, in doing so, they are serving Sade well, such critics in fact commit a serious error in failing to recognise how Sade's work and thought are, unlike those of most writers, a living organism that can never be considered solely from a literary or intellectual point of view.

If he attached so much importance to his theatre, it was not because of its literary value, but because the fact of writing plays was related for him to a whole number of activities, all of which led back to the stage as the place where the real and the imaginary, the singular and the plural, the secret and the spectacular coincide.

One can even say that Sade became a dramatist in the same way that he became an actor or a director or fell in love with actresses. This provides an insight into the most important aspect of his relationship with the theatre, that is, its ability to distance him from his times. Indeed, just when the bourgeois theatre was striving to rid the stage of artifice, theorising a return to more natural forms of representation, Sade loved the theatre precisely because it was an infinite source of artifice and illusion.

He even went to the lengths of installing his own theatre in his

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chateau at La Coste, of employing two actors in residence, and spending sums of money that bore testimony to the enormity of his passion for the stage. During the course of the Summer of 1772, either in his chateau or surrounding area in the South of France, Sade put on no less than fifteen plays from the Comedie Frarn;:aise's repertoire for that year. This did not exactly go down well with his family. On the 29th May, 1772, Madame de Montreuil, his mother-in-law, wrote to his uncle, the abbe de Sade: 'If this has always been his overriding passion, not to say his folly, he can do what he likes up to a certain point . . .'8

One thing is clear: what shocked Sade's family so much was precisely what constituted for him the theatre's physical and intellectual attraction. 'Literally and in every sense' , the theatre was, for him, a space both where the borders between illusion and reality dissolve and where illusion becomes reality. He also found it to be a space of excess where illusion is embodied and where the dramatisation of reality gives unlimited access to the imaginary. In other words, on the stage he was able to rehearse the great sexual theatre which he was already unconsciously planning.

There was certainly something extraordinary going on here. Indeed, it was at the height of this frenetic theatrical activity of the Summer of 1772 that the affair of the girls of Marseille took place, as a result of which, as we know, Sade and his valet were accused of crimes of sodomy and poisoning. In other words, it was just as his mad passion for the theatre reached its peak that occurred the scandal that was ultimately to cost Sade his freedom, as if the theatre was somehow not enough, as if, for Sade, something in the dramatic performance insistently drew him to 'another scene' .

Sade himself, at the end of his existence, seems to have recognised this strange relationship between the theatre and his life: 'it occurs to me that, throughout my life, drama has had a fateful influence'9, he wrote in 1807 in his Charenton Diary, as he listed these strange coincidences.

We are forced, therefore, to the conclusion that everything happened as if theatre had the double function, for Sade, of delaying and, at the same time, of rendering more urgent the need to translate thought into action, while on the other hand pointing up in advance the illusoriness of the stage, beyond which there is always 'another scene' . I would even say that the continual vying for precedence of the mind and the body which shaped both Sade's life and his thinking was, in some astonishing way, materialised in his catastrophic theatrical practices. This helps us to understand better why most critics ignore this passion for the theatre, which reveals the extent to which Sade's thought exceeds the purely

Sade or the first theatre of atheism 43

literary and is indissociable from his emotions. On the other hand, for me, it is disturbing to see how this theatrical practice tragically prefigures and represents the very essence of his genius, which is to show how, in the drama of desire, the mind transcends the body and the body transcends the mind, giving birth to a completely new theatre-the theatre of atheism-which is the spring from which his writing flows, as we shall now see.

At this point, however, a new paradox arises: in order successfully to complete this undertaking of theatricalisation of his own relationship with the world, Sade did not choose the theatre but the novel, whereas, if he had wanted to have recourse to dramatic form, he had all the means to do so. His plays are skilful and technically sound. As for his theatrical practice, this was certainly on a large enough scale to allow for innovations.

If I have found this transition to the novel especially interesting, it is because it raises the question of what the novel brings to the Sadean drama that theatre does not: in the first place, philosophy-but not the philosophy of essays and treatises, and still less the philosophy that was beginning to clutter up a la Diderot the bourgeois drama of the day, thereby creating the worst possible kind of theatre, the theatre a these. On the contrary, Sade's novels put philosophy onto the stage, make it physically present through a veritable theatricalisation of thought which begins by asserting itself as much as a critique of theatre by philosophy as of philosophy by theatre.

Indeed, we should remember that it was during his imprisonment in the 1780s that Sade wrote the greater part of his theatre. Now, it was in 1782 that he composed the Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond which, in its radically atheistic character, constitutes an implicit criticism of the conventional morality of his plays. Yet, this text, which presents all the arguments of free thinking with brio and gaiety, would easily find its place in the impudent tradition of the philosophical dialogue if, at the very end, Sade did not have recourse to the theatre precisely to question the limits of the atheistic philosophy whose fundamental values he nevertheless shares. It is in fact at the last minute, when we are waiting for the dying atheist to summon 'six women more beautiful than day' in order to die voluptuously in their arms that, without any explanation, Sade adds a postscript that reads like a stage-direction and that has the effect of a devastating coup de theatre, announcing against all our expectations that it is the priest and not the dying man who succombs to their charms: 'The dying man rang, the women entered; and after he had been a little while in their arms the preacher became one whom Nature

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has corrupted, all because he had not succeeded in explaining what a corrupt nature is' . 10 One can say that it is in this postscript that the specificity of Sade's atheism expresses itself for the first time, demanding that his ideas be taken to their physical conclusions, and offering an example in support, since the very fact that the priest is here contradicted by his own body constitutes the definitive argument against the Christian morality that he defends. This also provides the most dazzling illustration of the dying man's argument of the futility of God, which is in fact borrowed from Freret. What we are witnessing here is a veritable coup de theatre, which brings into play for the first time this interdependence of mind and body, as Sade's atheism is here materialized by theatre. Unlike other atheistic philosophers of his time, Sade goes further than to set the sovereignty of his mind against the illusion of a divinity. For Sade, this sovereignty is established by the reality of the body alone, which is why the theatre, insofar as it functions as the site of bodily incarnation, will offer him the best means of taking free thinking beyond the limits of philosophy.

We must measure the distance here that Sade put between himself and his contemporaries. In introducing the body, as he did, into the philosophical debate, he in a way reestablished links with the philosophical libertinage of thinkers like Vanini or Theophile de V iau, just as Encyclopedists such as d' Holbach, Helvetius or Condillac, who had also been influenced by it, were attempting to distance themselves from this libertine tradition in order to appear more moral and more virtuous. Ultimately, the latter were able to dissociate free thinking and libertinage completely, ignoring the great outpouring of libertine or licentious books that occurred between 1730 and 1780 and that included Le Portier des Chartreux, L' Academie des Dames, L' Education de Laure and Therese Philosophe.

The fact is that, with the exception of La Mettrie's Traite sur le bonheur which anyway belongs to another genre, only Sade establishes the theory that freedom of thought depends on freedom of morals. In this sense, it is Sade who gives back to the libertine tradition its letters patent of nobility. Unlike the philosophers of the Enlightenment, he does so by acknowledging the whole erotic and pornographic heritage of libertine writing.

It is precisely this dramatic entrance of the body onto the stage of ideas, overturning a misleading hierarchy of values, that Sade's atheism will continue to promote. Yet, although many have not failed to comment on the theatricality of the Sadean universe, it is interesting that no one has seen the extent to which this theatricality is linked to his

Sade or the first theatre of atheism 45

atheism. By that, I mean that Sade's theatricality is aimed less at representing particular fantasies than at showing, in relation to each fantasy, how thought is rooted in desire. This is Sade's great discovery. 'People inveigh against the passions without thinking that the torch of philosophy is lit from passion's flame' , he writes in Histoire de ]uliette.11

This is an important characteristic of Sade's atheism. Thought is never simply abstract in his world, there being always someone or something that excites the imagination, which in turn excites the body, and so on, so that the movement, the rhythm, the development of thought manifest themselves in Sade as very physical processes. Reasoning is overtaken and sometimes vanquished by excitement, or else rekindled and magnified by it.

One can even say that the dramatic tension engendered by the theatricality of Sade's text is indissociable from the conditions in which this rooting of thought in desire occurs or does not occur. For example, the slow, mechanical succession of Justine's adventures shows her successive failure to embody any true thought, stifled as she is by virtue, religion and conformism. On the other hand, it is remarkable how quickly, throughout Juliette, scene follows scene, as thought is made flesh with the speed of lightning-like saltpetre, as Juliette says herself. Here, pleasure consists in the excitement of testing out new thoughts in one's own body.

It is through this excited confusion of mind and body that Sade builds his technique of aggravation of ideas, following which they are always put physically to the test. This technique is indissociable, in my view, from the sole use of dialogue. In this sense, it is far from insignificant that the two summits of his thinking represented by Les Cent vingt journees de Sodome in 1785 and Histoire de Juliette a little more than ten years later were immediately preceded, if not begun by two dialogues, the Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond of 1782 and La Philosophie dans le boudoir of 1795. It is as if, in order to launch itself, Sade's thought needed to be incarnated, if only in the elementary form of the dialogue that constitutes the very matter, or more exactly the living tissue of all his novels.

Of course, one could argue that, in doing so, Sade merely follows the tradition of the philosophical dialogue, except that I know of few philosophical dialogues in which the exchange of ideas leads to the physical demonstrations which Sade takes so much pleasure in describing. Witness the end of the Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond already mentioned, and the whole of La Philosophie dans le boudoir, in which Sade dramatises both the testing of ideas by the body and the testing of the body by ideas in conditions of the most extreme violence. So, in the

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same way that notions of depravity subvert the libertarian machine that La Philosophie dans le boudoir might have been, if it had been reduced to the education of the young Eugenie, it is the new ideas of the Revolution, outlined in the midst of bedroom scenes in Franfais, encore un effort ... , that are mirrored in the body. It is this small effort that Sade's atheism asks the French to make-simply to put a little bit of the body into the principles declared by the Revolution, to make visible the physical reality of the means employed to achieve the stated aims. This is both the object of his theatricality and the generative structure of his atheism.

Yet, it is particularly interesting that most commentators refuse to see this. Think of the extraordinary blindness exhibited by Gilbert Lely on the one hand and Maurice Blanchot on the other in deliberately separating the political reflections of Franfais, encore un effort . . . from its libertine context, with Lely seeing only an erotic education and Blanchot only political philosophy in the text, whereas everything hinges upon the dramatic confrontation of these two registers, leading to the first critique of politics by means of the erotic. In fact, neither Blanchot nor Lely seemed aware of the remarkable reversal that Sade operates here, proposing, as the title of the work indicates, to put philosophy in the bedroom for the very first time, whereas all others, even today, are concerned to put and keep the bedroom in philosophy. This is a truly Copernican revolution, whereby Sade's atheism appears to have the sole aim of opening up for each of us the improbable and terrible scene of the unavowable.

This is an unprecedented change of perspective which is first and foremost a theatrical revolution and secondly the construction of a quite different relationship with the world, for the fact alone that Sade relentlessly perverts the philosophical dialogue through theatre or theatrical dialogue through philosophy,just as he employs all the resources of drama within the novel, constitutes in itself a radical cr itique of the theatre's inability to 'say all' . It is as if Sade were here laying down the principle that, in order to 'say everything' , it is not enough to show everything, and that simply wanting to show everything falls far short of doing so.

It is undeniable that in his novels, Sade systematically uses theatrical techniques to erotic ends, but he also constantly and cleverly misappropriates the tool of theatre in order to reveal what lives and moves in the very depths of our solitude. In so doing, he completely undermines the idea that we have of theatre but also of philosophy, drawing all the physical conclusions from his atheism, one after the other, beyond what can be endured.

Sade or the first theatre of atheism 4 7

In other words, one hundred years before the famous 'everything is permitted' that Dostoievsky was to deduce from the death of God, Sade forced us to see the intolerable physical consequences of this event by drawing upon the entire range of theatrical illusions to lay bare the most shameful of our desires, the most hidden depths of our solitude.

Sade thus transforms theatre into a fantastic instrument of knowledge, capable, for the very first time, of objectifying, via the imaginary of the body, the body of the imagination. In this respect, the stage upon which the Cent vingt journees de Sodome is set is striking. Towards the end of the century of Louis XIV, four great libertines decide to withdraw for one hundred and twenty days (from the 1st November to the 28th February) to a castle cut off from everything and everyone, accompanied by the four most famous procuresses of Paris and by forty-two objects of their lust, in order to imagine and act out six hundred perversions, from the simplest to the most criminal, at the rate of one hundred and fifty per month.

With this aim in mind, Sade organises the whole architecture of the castle around a vast amphitheatre which is absolutely theatrical, this being the only reality, either of the velvet backdrop, or of the stage, of the costumes, of the secondary characters or the narrators. This amphitheatre is closed on all sides, the materialisation in extreme form of a process of erotic derealisation of the world. The only spectators are the actors themselves, so that nothing exists outside the desire that all strive to lay bare. As for the drama that unfolds, it reaches an unbearable level, less because of the boundless freedom that is represented than because of the opportunities given to everyone to enact his secret desires. Sade warns his reader of this at the outset:

Many of the extravagances you are about to see illustrated will doubtless displease you, yes, I am well aware of it, but there are amongst them a few which will warm you to the point of costing you some fuck, and that, reader, is all we ask of you; if we have not said everything, analysed everything, tax us not with partiality, for you cannot expect us to have guessed what suits you best.12

It is in this simple yet terrible manner that Sade drags us into the depths of horror, plunging us into the abyss of the most disturbing loss of erotic identity, since, suddenly confused by what revolts us most, we no longer know who we are.

Moreover, we could not properly measure the extent of Sade's atheism without taking account of the profound ways in which its dynamism is bound up with a spectacular determination to shake us to

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our roots, relentlessly exposing the essential interlocking of mind and body, attempting to show what cannot be shown. By this, I do not mean that Sade plays upon the unrepresentable, the inexpressible, as many modern rhetoricians have tried to have us believe. It is precisely the opposite of this that Sade intends when he proclaims that 'philosophy must say everything' , and it is because he wants to say everything that he works tirelessly to represent the drama of desire, constantly showing desire as an arbitrary and ephemeral spectacle, while revealing to us at the same time the void from which this spectacle appears and into which it disappears. This is an essential element of Sade's theatricality, within which order is made only to be unmade, postures are adopted only to collapse again, the flame of form flickers for a moment before dying away. But this is also an essential element of his atheism in which form is always threatened by the void.

While this conception of life and death as accidents of eternal matter is shared by many atheists, Sade illuminates it with the brilliant intuition of an analogy between form and desire, throwing completely new light on what might today be called the real processes of the mind. The remarkable coincidence is that whilst this great drama of desire was played out on the body as its only stage and in the imaginary as its only perspective, Sade should have gambled with his freedom to create it, at the very time when, under the pressures of history, the theatre was turning its back on ideology; in other words, just when the body was rigidifying into a wooden actor in didactic representations of the world that have continued to poison almost all forms of theatre until our own times. This is, I think, of considerable importance, from the point of view of the very history of both the theatre and sensibility, to the extent to which the moralising trends that take control of the stage at the end of the eighteenth century do so at the expense of a systematic dematerialisation of the body-the paintings of David exemplify this well. This dematerialisation of the body went side by side with the affirmation of abstract principles-liberty, equality, fraternity-in the name of which, ironically, the State began to reduce individual freedoms.

In this respect, La Philosophie dans le boudoir, in which Sade attempted to discover, in the midst of the Revolution, just what liberty, equality and fraternity meant in concrete terms, constituted an astounding reversal of current socio-political thinking. In replacing the theatre of the voice with the theatre of the body, Sade inaugurated the most merciless critique of the terrors of ideology, just as they were making their first appearance in the modern era, that is, just as people were starting to be killed in the name of liberty. One could also say that, at a time when

Sade or the first theatre of atheism 49

revolutionary ideology was replacing the discourse of religion to produce new chimeras which were just as effective as their predecessors at distancing human beings from their physical materiality, Sade invented another scene which was the equivalent of a new mental space. On this new stage, Man and the world took on quite different dimensions, in particular, that which gave back to each body its imaginary space, that is to say, the very source of that infinite freedom of which the ideology of revolution implicitly deprived it.

Hence the unique character of Sade's atheism which not only opposes religion itself, but all forms of religiosity. One cannot help but be be impressed by the unerringness with which he finds the sensitive spot of his time in the problematic space of the theatre. It is as if, from the depths of his solitude, he was alone in foreseeing and pointing to the palpable danger that no one else saw coming.

I am thinking more specifically of the ideological representation of private life on the social stage in which almost all forms of theatre at the end of the eighteenth century were engaged. Who then could have foreseen that this revolution in the history of representation (indissociable from the other revolution) would be at the expense of the life of the senses, presenting a systematically false picture of what emotions are and of the ways in which they are displayed? And yet this was the price that all the revolutionaries would unconsciously agree to pay, without of course knowing that this was the start of a long tragedy of the senses, ending with socialist realism for which there is no aspect of life that is not a hostage to the theatre of ideology. Now, this was the price that Sade alone, at the risk of his liberty, deliberately refused to pay: opposing anything which, both within and outside himself, might allow such a dictatorship of representation to develop, he gradually internalised the external trappings of theatre to reveal to each and every individual the subversive force of the theatre of his passions.

Such is this first atheistic theatre, from which stems the coherence of Sade's 'way of thinking' , and which leads to a discovery of the organic links uniting the material and the imaginary, whilst showing us how the abstract-like another form of the divine-does as much harm to the singularity of creatures and things as to their freedom. This coherence is indissociable from a theatricality which, for the first time, is able to represent Man and the world from the perspective of their infinity and their nothingness. Sade never ceased to maintain that 'all Man's happiness is in his imagination' , and yet, a few years before his death, he also observed: 'the intervals ["entractes"] of my life have been too long' .13 It is from the heart of this imaginary theatre that he invites us to share his

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courage and to seek our sovereignty in the very depths of the abyss. A valuable part of Sade's legacy to us is, therefore, the first theatre of atheism-a heroic theatre, if ever there was one.

NOTES

ANNIE LE BRUN Translated by John P hillips

1 This paper both extends and develops an earlier article of mine, 'Sade and the Theatre' (The Divine Sade, edited by Deepak Narang Sawhney, PLI Warwick journal of Philosophy (February, 1994), 36-45), putting atheism at the very heart of Sade's relationship with the theatre.

2 Histoire de Juliette, CEuvres Completes, edited by Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris, Pauvert, 1987), vol. 8, 418 n.

3 Maurice Blanchot, Lautreamont et Sade (Paris,Editions de Minuit, 1963), 17. 4 Roland Barthes, 'L'Arbre du crime' in Marquis de Sade, CEuvres Completes

(Paris, Cercle du Livre precieux, 1967), vol. 16, 531. 5 Maurice Heine, 'Avant propos au Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond' ,

Le Marquis de Sade (Paris, Gallimard, 19 50), 31. 6 Marquis de Sade, CEuvres Completes (Paris, Cercle du Livre precieux, 1967),

vol. 12, 409-10. 7 Ibid., 441-2. 8 Quoted in the 'Dossier chronologique' relating to Sade's theatre, drawn up by

Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Annie Le Brun in Marquis de Sade, CEuvres Completes (Paris,Pauvert, 1991),vol. 15,358.

9 Quoted in ibid., 503. 10 'Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man' in The Marquis de Sade,]ustine,

Philosophy in the Bedroom, and other writings, translated by Austryn Wainhouse & Richard Seaver (New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 175.

11 Histoire de Juliette, 0. C., edited by Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris, Pauvert, 1987), vol. 8, 132.

12 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York, Grove Press, 1966), 253.

13 Quoted in Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Annie Le Brun, Marquis de Sade, CEuvres Completes (Paris, Pauvert, 1991), vol. 15, 492.

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