Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski

by Jane Gallop

Four writers—the first, an eighteenth-century Frenchman whose works still retain their power to shock, scandalize, and instruct; the others, three twentieth-century Frenchmen, heirs and explicators of their earlier compatriot—form the central cast of characters of this literary-philosophical dialogue which seeks to transcend the barriers of time, space, and sexual identity imposed by traditional approaches to literature. Professor Gallop, acknowledging her debt to such writers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, cites as the shaping principle of her work the central tenet of intertextuality—that a literary work is not a closed system which can be definitively characterized by reference either to its creator or to its beholder. Rather, reader, writer, and text meet, react, and interact in a performance of "polymorphous per-versity"—a performance which, Professor Gallop points out, finds a parodic analogue in the activities of Sade's distinguished libertines. Professor Gallop observes that Sade and the structuralists display a congruity of purpose, in that both take as their goal the destruction of the classical dichotomy, long enshrined at the heart of the humanist tradition, between the ideal and the material. Working from these peculiar conjunctions of theory, purpose, and enactment—and from a distinctly feminist point of view—Professor Gallop moves freely among the texts of her four subjects. She introduces Bataille's Sade to Blanchot’s Sade, relates Klossowski's Sade to Klossowski's Bataille, and, when necessary extricates Sade himself from the web of what has been written about him. She finds that each of the three later writers constructs his own "fiction," with Sade as chief Bataille, caught up in the idea of the "sovereign man," discovers the sovereign man in Sade; Blanchot, for whom the real action is the act of writing itself, describes a Sade confronting the horror of the loss of self in that act; while Klossowski creates several Sades, marking different moments in his intellectual psychoanalytic, Catholic, Nietzschean. Professor Gallop demonstrates, however, that Sade is ultimately not appropriable—cannot, in effect, be consumed—and that, thus, an inversion occurs whereby Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski become extensions of Sade's characters, subsumed into the Sadian world. And she finds herself likewise a part of that world and her work "an ever reverberating extension of Sade's own writing."

135 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1981

About the author

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women's Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976). She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles. She has written on a wide range of topics: psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan; French feminism; psychoanalysis and feminism; the Marquis de Sade; feminist literary criticism; pedagogy; sexual harassment; photography; queer theory; close reading. While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts. She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 40 years.