Embodied Disease Femininity Domination and de Sade
Embodied Disease Femininity Domination and de Sade
Title
Embodied Disease: Femininity, Domination, and De Sade
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7097c4t3
Author
Diaz, Jessikah
Publication Date
2019-03-01
Undergraduate
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO
BY
JESSIKAH DIAZ
LOS ANGELES, CA
MARCH 2019
2
ABSTRACT
BY JESSIKAH DIAZ
producing a poetics of the body, organizing itself around sexuality and disease. Previous
scholarship has acknowledged the eighteenth-century trope of the diseased and sexualized
the diseased woman as a formation by and through the material, as an effect of disease. I
ask: what does it mean when disease becomes a vector between the hyper-sexualized
female form and Enlightenment thought? In what follows, I connect the physical human
interdisciplinary focus on organic and inorganic embodiment. Through the works of John
Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, Marquis de Sade, and William Blake, I show how women are
animated by the physical energy of disease. Namely, that this material matter, its
persistence and vitality, becomes a way for women to participate in and pass along a form
nonproductive ways, I propose that venereal disease is a form of collective power that
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my family, my longtime friend Reghan Jameson, and my advisor
personally.
and the Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room where this thesis was written
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….5
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………... 50
5
Introduction
chastity while contributing to public forms of commerce? To embody the foreign while
standing for the failings of the national? To contain and offer life while transferring death?
The figure of the eighteenth-century harlot is both revolutionary and destructive. She is
progress and self-preservation. In some texts she suffers and in others she prospers—
This paper is not interested in the occupation of harlotry so much as it uses the
harlot to think more broadly about the naturalized implications of female sexuality and the
hyper-sexualized female body. I begin by addressing the woman as an organic body shaped
by and containing matter, a formation of stuff that transfers and disperses particles in its
interaction with other bodies. In thinking about how the body transports and exchanges
things, I am also interested in how the physical human form becomes a template or model
for other material and immaterial forms. For instance, medical treatises of the period, such
matter.1 And yet, twentieth-century theorists such as Roland Barthes make metaphorical
what physicians made literal. By also drawing on Lucretian materialism,2 Barthes uses the
This paper takes cues from both the abstract and the literal by connecting the
the sexualized body that emerges from developments in natural science and medicine. I
the physical human body? To be specific, what does it mean when disease becomes a vector
2
Lucretian materialism derives from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, translated as “On the
Nature of Things” (1 BCE), and communicates the laws of Epicurean physics. This pre-
biological perspective of the material world suggests that all organic and inorganic
processes can be explained through the interaction and formation of atomic particles. In
terms of this paper, it is important to remember that atoms are irreducible and active
particles that continue to develop and grow our material reality, not once but constantly.
This materialist framework considers the various and uncontainable ways that physical
human bodies transfer disease and how disease reshapes the material body across time
and space.
In what follows, I examine a variety of works from the Enlightenment period both in
poetry and in prose. While some are well circulated others are lesser known, and they are
all threaded together by the perniciousness of venereal disease. Rather, all works employ
the figure of disease in order to make particular distinctions about the female body;
namely, how the sexualized female body is leveraged to conform to, challenge, or resist a
Julie Peakman’s Mighty Lewd Books delineates the development of natural philosophy
as it attempts to explain pre-biological theories for the roles of male and female in
reproduction. Those scientists that worked against the ideological heteronormative grain,
give primacy to the female in reproduction. His book De Generatine claims that there are
plants and animals that reproduce spontaneously by seeds and eggs carried by the wind.
anatomical female body, Harvey offered an unpopular image of impregnation that waives
In response to natural philosophers like Harvey, there emerged new scientific works
that sought to reestablish the important role of males in reproduction. New findings of “eel-
like animals” in semen and potent “spermatic worms” (spermatozoa) inevitably grounded
women as “mere nourishers.”4 The female figure soon became only passively productive. A
body to be drawn from, to be drained, a site only productive in its submission to the virile
male.
In support of this male driven system of reproduction, satirizers such as John Hill
(1716-1775) use pornographic tropes to denounce scientists like Harvey and declare the
The only Doubt now remaining with me was, whether Animalcula did really float about
in the Air, and slide down the Throat as he described? for I had been used to think they
were originally lodged in the Loins of Males . . . Here again I was at a Stand; all before
me was Darkness and Doubt; I knew not if there were any such Animalcula, or, if there
were, I supposed them too small to be discovered by the naked Eye; and though
perhaps they might be discernible with the Help of a Microscope, yet I knew not where
to seek those opportune Place, hinted at by the great Metaphysician.5
The process of reproduction needs no further inquiry, for males are more instrumental
process of reproduction, thus, the genre provides ample opportunity to comment on the
limitations of the natural philosopher. In its form, it trades microscopes for members and
This paper is interested in the way erotic poetics directly and indirectly remark on
male-centric conceptions of physiology and epidemiology, often challenging any notion that
centers the male in the process of reproduction. This project explores both poetry and
prose but orients itself toward works in the libertine tradition, broadly construed.
We often view the libertine as a promoter of excess and sexual pleasure, an advocate
for what we can more aptly name as sexual nonreproduction. From this position, there is
Additionally, there is no value in a legitimate right to inheritance for all women should be
available to all men. These rakish works encourage immaterial rights to women, but also
feverishly degrade the physical female form as something inferior to men. By harping on
the foulness of the female body, lines such as “her belly is a bag of turds, / And her cunt a
common shore”6 become thematic ways to think about the materiality of the female figure,
To underwrite this argument, the female body is not made foul: it is naturally foul. A
woman’s body is not dirtied through its continuous contact with multiple men; in fact, even
venereal disease can be disavowed from whom it was transmitted. For the libertine, there
is a naturalness to the filth of the female body that aligns the material threat of syphilis
with the material threat of menstruation. I work within this libertine framework in order to
press on how the female body is framed as a naturally menacing form, and in what ways
In order to properly trace a libertine pedigree, this paper begins by exploring poems by
John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester in order to argue that disease is an activation of the
desire and action. I suggest that this material animation shakes awake an immaterial
consciousness better left outside the fluxing physical circuit. Rochester not only introduces
us to the disruptive female body but sets us up to imagine the material as a form of power
observations with its frank vision of sexual violence as a political and philosophical
metaphor. Scholars typically read Philosophy for Dolmance’s speech, “Yet Another Effort,
Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,” and during the eighteenth-century, this
piece was siphoned from the rest of the text and popularly circulated as its own pamphlet.
We circumvent the rest of the book by separating the pornographic content from its
political content, when in actuality, the erotic becomes political in the way it acts out the
embedded friction between political desire and philosophical action. The pornographic is
necessary because it offers a performance that illuminates the irony in what is being
orated. I examine the text as a whole in order to holistically study how de Sade is not
simply promoting libertinism but is cautioning against the period’s complicity in a broader
social philosophy.
I conclude this project with a brief reading of William Blake’s “London”, a poem that
may seem to be out of place here but is actually crucial to showing a still-developing
libertine tradition. I suggest that “London” is a space where the echoes of material abuse
direct our attention to the egotistical and unguided philosophy of domination. “London”
violence. Although the field may not normally associate William Blake with trends and
commitments to the libertine, I hope this project provides a new reading of the poem that
posits it among a literary ancestry ordering itself through sexuality and violence.
The Enlightenment unapologetically thrusts forward this didactic figure of the woman.
Works ranging by content and medium, from Daniel Defoe’s Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress
sexualized female body. Whether we learn from the constraints of marriage or the
corruptions of the nation, it seems as if everything and everyone has a hand in shaping the
11
sexualized woman. And yet, what seems to be missing is an exploration as to why this
venereal disease as an effect of corruption, an effect of indulgence, and so on. Yet, not much
work has been done to think about this woman as the inverse, as a formation by and
through the material, as an effect of disease. Of course, this paper only begins to scratch the
surface of a topic that is as expansive and dynamic as the material itself. However, I hope
that this project provides an interdisciplinary way of reading this figure as not simply
That what fools call humaneness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this
chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by
stoicism, courage, and philosophy. —Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom
development that attempted to instill virtue in lieu of religion and in response to new
were thrown up in the air as scientists looked for a new theory with which to organize life.
Whether the period oriented us toward progress or directed us toward new systems of
inequality is still up for debate; however, what scholarship does prove, is that the
Enlightenment was a period so teeming and dynamic with possibility that we continue to
What developed during this period is the phenomenon of practical reason, a form of
thinking that is defined by the individual and shaped by impulse or drive. Under these
terms, reason cannot be mudded by old ways of reasoning, and instead, must be redefined
by the individual who remains free from other forces. For instance, if fear and enjoyment
what is morally “good” or “bad” and then for the rational person to guide himself by his
own natural impulses. That is, “when the objective systematization of nature has been
disposed of as prejudice and myth, nature remains only as a material mass,” and so, even
“thinking becomes an organic medium.”7 If what is material is amoral and thus natural,
then the natural organization of life gives primacy to the physical. That is, there is no
strength in virtue, only strength in the physical potential of things, consequently, “self-
In this spirit, Dolmancé, the leading male character of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy
in the Bedroom, denounces any form of universal rule for it is a “terrible injustice to require
that men of unlike character all be ruled by the same law.”9 And to underscore this,
Dolmancé argues that those who murder, thieve, or commit adultery are justified in their
actions, as nature inspires the impulse to act, and provides the vigor for those acts to
succeed. For Dolmancé, it is the weak who circumvent the potential of the strong by
abilities is to deny what is particular to the individual and thus what is natural. The strong
and the capable are the powerful, and are privileged for their natural ability to overcome
what is weak. And yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer use de Sade to point out, philosophy fails
to make the distinctions necessary to resist what eventually becomes totalitarian. The
representation of power. Consequently, the ability to dominate and domination itself are
presented as part of a natural organization of life, rather than harmful to life itself.
Although the politics of the Enlightenment sought to disperse power among the
people, this gesture quickly fell behind a privileging of the individual. In Philosophy,
8 Horkheimer, 86.
9
Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 310.
10 De Sade, 300.
14
virtue. The character calls attention to what society seems to ignore: the same philosophies
that motivated the French Revolution cannot harmoniously live in its new republic. That is,
the Enlightenment, and its need to free itself from the bonds of religion, law, and morality,
is inherently antithetical to the values of a republic that upholds “the state, the community,
[and] the common good.”11 More to de Sade’s point, no Enlightened man is truly interested
in relinquishing his proprietary rights, for to share goods and live by one law would simply
be against nature. More broadly, to abandon the rights of the individual is to defy a
organization of life that is different, albeit familiar to us. It is an order encouraged by the
individual with no substantial goal, advancing through excessive violence and motivated by
puts it, is the “mass idealization of the unrestrained and inexhaustibly available.”12
This section introduces how Enlightenment philosophy, in its trend and tendency to
control nature, extends to and includes the domination of women and female sexuality. It
acknowledges women as both symbolically “natural” bodies and socially gendered bodies.
By focusing on the turmoil happening within man—as compulsively freeing himself from
authority yet uncontrollably keeping his thumb on everything else—I am able to think
about the violent ways the female body is claimed and figured as a resource (whether a
fruitful one or not) during a period defined by “self-destruction” and “social freedom.”13
In order to think about how women are symbolically and materially claimed, I use
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in order to press harder on the topic
of social domination: What does it mean to be dominated? How, to what extent, and by
whom is violence inflicted? Is there any possibility to be liberated from or within this
process? As a twentieth century text published in the wake of World War II, Dialectic is
Particularly, the way reason develops into a permission to not just dominate but
exterminate the Jewish population, as well as many others. More central to my project,
Adorno and Horkheimer also create a parallel between those who are Jewish and those
who are women. The two groups are joined together and marked as those who are
forehead.”14
need to control resources, Dialectic uses Marquis de Sade to show that the
represent. De Sade’s works are exemplary for this undertaking because they often operate
around a central female character. In this position, characters such as Justine, Juliette, or
Eugénie spew ideas about libertinism, its philosophies and amoralities. And yet, while
maintaining her central location in the narrative, the Sadeian heroine either willingly or
13 Horkheimer, xiii.
14
Horkheimer, 112.
16
unwillingly is subjected to a flurry of violent acts against her. Soon, she is physically and
ideologically overwhelmed by the strength of the male characters and thus consigned to
her position, a “representative of her sex.”15 Throughout de Sade’s oeuvre, men see her as
subjected in the real.16 The woman, as socially and symbolically inferior, becomes
15 Horkheimer, 112.
16 Horkheimer, 111.
17
Someone Adorno and Horkheimer do not address but who is nonetheless an important
predecessor to de Sade is John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. Although Rochester favors
violent language over violent action, I trace the libertine tradition through his work via its
In his book, Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick probes at consciousness and where
it fits among a desire to claim and the physical action of claiming. Desire can be thought of
as a motivating thought, a spurring that comes from inside the body, and actions fluidly
follow through on these impulses. In this form, desire as an impulse and action as its
interrupts this flux, “coming into the story only to gum up the machinery of the physical
system.”17 In keeping with Kramnick, I explore Rochester to think about action and desire
as a physical process perfected by its context and environment, here, images of matter
This reading gives primacy to the physical. So, while sexuality is freed from the fetters
of religion, society, and law, it is no more than an elaborate function of the body, an action
material thing, dismembering the body into “pricks,” “ballocks,” and “arses.” Yet, all these
parts are enlisted without thought into the flurry of the physical circuit. For Rochester,
physicality, by its uninhibited engagement between body parts and fluids, always active,
and ideally separate from consciousness. In departing from Kramnick, I think about how
context and environment are shaped by gendered models of desire and action. It is an idea I
elaborate in the upcoming section, but for now address within Kramnick’s framework. In
these terms, male sexuality is permitted a fluidity from desire to action, and female
sexuality is contextualized by its infinite availability and constant interaction with men.
The ideal environment for the libertine is an unconscious surrendering of the female
body to man’s unconscious sexual desires. Yet, in those moments when we see the
glimmers of mental faculties, the speaker has been jolted out of the physical circuit by the
foulness of the female body. Consequently, the libertine frames the filthiness of the woman
as an offense to male desire. If actions are perfected by context and environment, the vile
Rochester’s poetic form offers insight into sexuality as a material process dependent
on a certain form of environment. Sexual interactions adopt a lyric quality that appear to be
reliant on a harmonic and natural energy. Of course, Rochester is satirizing the personal by
giving the material its own lyricism. Nevertheless, he also constructs a form that provides a
The lyrical is reserved for the material. Instead of a union made by love, the poem gives us
The multiplicity of “grapes” parallels the “the lusty juice of men,” consequently
characterizing sexuality by its boundless physical availability. The rake consumes as much
of the material as passion permits and never skips a beat; even and up until the last line
when he orders the female body—“take you”—as a carafe for the bounty of men’s passions.
Conversely, the female body can also foster a more offensive environment that is
less lyrical. Men, even a bounty of men and their passions, have no part in defiling the
sexual environment. Instead, the female body naturally corrupts the atmosphere and
requires additional “paper” and “spunges” to prepare itself to interact with men.20 More
explicitly, the women are expected to be consciously aware of male desire and action. They
are responsible for self-cleaning which, in turn, cleanses the environment and ensures
fluency for male sexuality: from male desire to male action. Women must surrender their
own physical desires and actions for the ease of men. Without female consciousness, the
female body corrodes male sexuality by “gumming up the machine,” disrupting its lyric
prosody:
19
Rochester, “Song (early version),” 84. 21-24.
interruption from the woman who should have consciously and actively attended to herself
earlier on. And yet, this dilemma provides a new way to read the female form as materially
active in an unsuspecting way: it is a body that threatens to extinguish the heat of desire by
committing violence against the virility of man, by giving him a “bloody nose.”
Consequently, the female body is thought to be not just inherently filthy, but naturally
aggressive, and must consciously work itself into submission for men. That is, women
subdue and restrain their most natural and active qualities by consciously conforming to
male models of desire and action. More specifically, the female body makes itself into a
passive one: a body that is most advantageous contained and most vile when disruptive.
Poems such as this one show how the active and filthy female body become
inextricably linked. The two appear at once and become an important way to think about
how women’s sexuality is ideal when it consciously subdues itself. In this vein, Rochester’s
figure of the prostitute is female sexuality gone awry, an example of the unrestrained, the
belligerent, and the disobedient—a defiant object disrupting the steady machine of male
desire and action. Rochester’s poem “On Mrs. Willis” correlates a hypersexualized harlot to
active contamination: “She rails and scolds when she lies down, / And curses when she
spends.”22 Female sexuality uses disease to act out. The transferences of disease, the
21 Rochester, 139.9-12.
“curses when she spends,” are not simple disruptions but lethal and aggressive actions
In this reading, venereal disease is a complement to the naturally active and hostile
female body. The diseased woman is a figure uncontained and disobedient, she curses and
leaves men bloody. Her diseased body is most threatening because it foregoes
consciousness and cleanliness, and thus naturally resists the libertine’s model of male
sexuality. And yet, with all the dissatisfaction toward women, their bodies, and their
natural resistance to male desire and action, they are still worth the pursuit: “I’ll change a
As it is for the libertine, disease is a liability for the active female body, a forced
foreclosure of female consciousness, a waiver of the possibility to contain and subdue itself.
For Rochester, venereal disease is threatening because it means that women may no
changes the environment, and thus interrupts the flow from male desire to male action.
the Bedroom, reframing it in terms even more explicitly concerned with the problems of
personal agency.
Just like the rake who cannot control the active materiality of the female body, de
Sade further narrows the hope for any form of autonomy. Philosophy illuminates an
important characteristic of disease, that is, the lack of agency in wielding disease as well as
containing and transferring it. The individual body cannot consciously nor autonomously
transfer or refuse the toxic matter. This epidemiological understanding of disease shows us
how futile the efforts are of the individual in comparison to the collective possibility of the
natural. The organic body, in its collection of particles and configuration of matter,
I will now extend Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of de Sade by expanding the
boundaries of violence and power to include, not just women under the control of men, but
both men and women under a collective power of venereal disease. I believe that what de
Sade begins to address through whips and flogs he effectively finishes through the
destructive animation of disease. I hope this reading will show how the Enlightenment is
not just a period fueled by the individual will to dominate; but rather, becomes an
Although this may sound like I am trying to erase all of the violence that happens to
the women in de Sade’s works, my goal is not align the author with feminism nor argue that
he has an earnest concern for women and their welfare. Instead, I emphasize that de Sade
uses the female body in such a way that frames it as “natural,” and thus symbolic of a
Sade’s works is not simply “the representatives of her sex” as I have pointed out before.
Quite conversely, she is the representative of all organic things, including but not limited to
her sex. The period’s misguided position toward nature runs parallel to its position toward
women, as things always available to take. My next section breaks down Adorno and
version of this model which advances disease as a form of power that weaves itself in and
where it comes from. Domination is defined by a divide: between one who has authority
and one who yields to authority. In order to maintain control, one must always have
something to command. Philosophy in the Bedroom offers a way to think about how
philosophy not only divides the sexes but marks this division as crucial for organized life.
In the final dialogue of the text, the group continues to brutalize the body of Madame de
Mistival in excessive and unorganized ways. Although relentless in its violence, the group
has only one intention, namely that she remain alive: “The suffering must increase
gradually so as to not kill her off beforetimes.”24 As the inferior sex, women must remain
alive so that they continue to be the subordinate group while men are the dominant. In the
dichotomy of nature versus civilization, women are symbolic of nature and thus weakness,
alienating men from these characteristics and isolating them in a position of strength.25
Men are cornered by what they cannot be, and consequently lash out against it. This may
sound as though men have a desire to be part of nature, when in fact—they fear it. Thus,
This template shows how fear organizes life by transforming itself into an action
that inevitably guarantees men a position of strength and dominance. More simply, “life” is
organized through the threat of nature, and civilization maintains its position of dominance
through nature’s abuse. That is, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, the “fear and
weakness [of women], the greater affinity to nature which perennial oppression produces
24
De Sade, 358.
25 Horkheimer, 112.
24
in them, is the very element which gives them life.”26 It is the repressing of women that
guarantees how and for what reason they live, while also, animating the metaphysics of life
through the natural division of the sexes. As we saw with de Mistival earlier, Marquis De
Sade uses sexual violence to personify a tireless play between enervation and revival, so
even as de Mistival is fainting from the sheer violence, Dolmancé declares, “We’ll flog her—
Philosophy shows how keeping women on the brink of life is vital to the lives of men,
providing a notion that men can live their “life to the full only in the collective.”28
Consequently, there is something jarring about the potential of women, as “uncivilized” and
circumscribed women shapes our broader human existence. To think about this less
abstractly, for men to take full advantage of their dominant position, they must extinguish
the arbitrary constraints that restrict them: the religion, the law, and social morality. Which
leads us to ask, how can men continue to oppress women if they’ve destroyed the systems
Jane Gallop’s essay “The Liberated Woman” draws connections between the
American counterculture movement of the 1960’s and what she calls de Sade’s “liberated
woman.” By drawing on a popular critique of “free love,” Gallop argues that the movement’s
26 Horkheimer, 112.
27 De Sade, 359.
28 Horkheimer, 112.
25
totally available to men. For women, knocking down the constraints of wedlock and
To exemplify this model, Gallop uses Philosophy in the Bedroom to detail the subtle
ways in which male desire hinders any true female sexual abandonment. By using her own
personal experience as a reader, Gallop posits that it is easy to assume that the women in
Philosophy are liberated because translations of the text have failed to interpret the distinct
presumptions about gender difference. To begin, in translating the text from La Philosophie
dans le boudoir to “philosophy in the bedroom,” the English translation avoids the
gendering of the term “boudoir.” Indeed, “boudoir” is defined as a “woman’s private sitting
room,” or a place where a woman may “retire to be alone.”30 In its definition, the place
suggests a special freedom from men. When the story opens, Madame Saint Ange is guiding
Eugénie into her boudoir where they are certain “no one shall take it into his head to
interrupt [them].”31 Instead, the two women are surprised to find Dolmancé already
waiting in an armchair to interfere with their lesson. For Gallop, this moment is emblematic
of the subtle and pervasive ways that male desire, as a “philosophy,” asserts itself in the
moment when women try to educate other women: “The entrance of philosophy into the
boudoir is thus represented as male penetration into female space, one which the women
did not consent to—but which they very quickly accept and warm to.”32
30
Gallop, 92; “Boudoir, n.” OED.
31
De Sade, 195 (emphasis added).
32 Gallop, 94.
26
Although I agree that the English translation is missing a key reference to the
gendering of the text, this project does not think of de Sade and Philosophy quite in the
same way. Gallop has noted how the original epigraph of the text—"The mother will
prescribe the reading of this to her daughter”—implies that de Sade intended the text to be
read to and by women. That is, after mothers subscribe to the philosophies of the text, they
would then educate their daughters on the sexual freedom that liberates them all. This
communication is intended to be relayed from woman to girl, a process that guarantees the
male model of the sexually liberated woman continues to be passed down. The book
sexually available to men. Although I agree that the text intends to teach, I think the
epigraph can be read in a way that is not so straightforward. Beyond the female audience, I
think that those Sadeian invested French men would still delight in the fantasy of a mother
educating her daughter on sexual availability. Which means that the intended audience
could plausibly be both men and women, both of whom are expected to learn what the
that de Sade was less keen to appeal to a female audience. A line such as “never may there
be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other” is
Nature’s laws cannot allege, as justification for refusing herself to someone who desires
her, the love she bears for another.”33 The non-monopolized woman faces the expectation
that she remain sexually accessible. And yet if a woman refuses such access, men maintain
33 De Sade, 318-319.
27
“the right to force from her this enjoyment”.34 What Dolmancé calls “temporary”
contradictions are rhetorically integral to the satiric point of “Yet Another Effort,
Frenchmen.” To think only about the erotic parts of the work is to miss the broader point
that the work intends for all its readers, the social impossibility of a pure freedom that
relies on force.
Like Gallop, I agree that de Sade uses women as a device to illuminate his
philosophy. And yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer have posed, this philosophy is motivated
by something broader than women and their sexual availability. The Oxford Reference
defines a “boudoir” as a “room set aside for the lady of the house for informal activities
such as reading.”35 Perhaps the title of de Sade’s work is more conceptually rigorous and
complex than we’ve given it credit for. If the pornographic content is intended to arouse the
reader in the privacy of his or her own bedroom, perhaps the text is the philosophy in our
bedroom. In this reading, we may not want to study Dolmancé as the symbol of
“philosophy,” nor distinguish the erotic from the political, instead, we may consider how
the two forms play off one another. As I’ve said before, a large part of “Yet Another Effort,
Frenchmen,” focuses on how men treat other men through acts of murder, calumny, and
theft. These philosophical issues are centered around men as individual impulses that are
permitted regardless if they are harmful to the larger social body. These references to men
are not dilatory tactics, rather, they expose a form of thinking that is as preoccupied by
class and other social positions as it is with gender. That is, the political is vital to the
pornographic for it betrays a broader system of life that extends beyond organizations of
34
De Sade, 319.
gender. By questioning those harmful impulses that men are allowed to enact against other
men, the work reveals a philosophy where gender is only the entry into an oppression
Similar to Gallop, Beverley Clack offers a feminist reading of Philosophy and female
sexual violence. Clack proposes that de Sade saw himself as “a philosopher whose works
Adorno and Horkheimer point out, de Sade shares his own form of thinking while pressing
on the trouble of unbridled reasoning. In other words, de Sade is not simply a philosopher
discharging ideas about sexual liberty. Instead, he is a French citizen cautioning against the
Let a simple philosopher introduce these new pupils to the inscrutable but
wonderful sublimities of Nature; let him prove to them that awareness of a god,
often highly dangerous to men, never contributed to their happiness, and that they
will not be happier for acknowledging as a cause of what they do not understand,
something they well understand even less; that it is far less essential to inquire into
the workings of Nature than to enjoy her and obey her laws; that these laws are as
wise as they are simple; that they are written in the hearts of all men and that it is
but necessary to interrogate that heart to discern its principles.37
This Sadeian universe of irony and contradiction is intended to interrogate our own, to
question the natural turned cultural assumption that “survival of the fittest . . . in practice,
means survival of the strongest.”38 Myopically, nature’s laws are simply “written in the
hearts of all men,” and no other form of collective reasoning, no consideration for long term
sustainability, need be developed or obeyed. Clack points out how de Sade’s works are in
37 De Sade, 304.
38 Clack, 275.
29
tune with this picture of nature, as entropic but also generative, where “through
With this in mind, I use Dialectic of Enlightenment to think about the implications of
entropy, that is, how the play between destruction and rebirth, normally dictated by
nature, is increasingly aggravated by men. My claim is that the “new things” created in this
presumption that the strongest individual is permitted to all things natural and available.
Consequently, when men interfere with the natural cycle of degeneration and renewal,
Clack posits that theorists, such as Roland Barthes, maintain a form of “irrealism”
toward de Sade and his descriptions of sexual violence.39 Yet, I’d like to reread the same
passage from Barthes’ Sade, Fourier, Loyola to examine whether or not Barthes “ignores the
extent to which [de Sade offers] exaggerated forms of the kind of abuse to be found in
If some group conceived the desire to realise literally one of the orgies Sade
describes . . . The Sadian [sic] scene would quickly be seen to be utterly unreal: the
complexity of the combinations, the partners’ contortions, the potency of
ejaculation, and the victim’s endurance all surpass human nature: one would need
several arms, several skins, the body of an acrobat, and the ability to achieve orgasm
ad infinitum.41
Clack argues that Barthes is distinguishing between the idea of sexual violence and its
action, and that such distinction ignores the way action is formed through ideas and
39 Clack, 276.
40 Ibid.
41 Barthes, 136.
30
Barthes and illustrated by de Sade, that directs our attention to a more significant refusal
made by humanity. Indeed, de Sade’s picture of sexual excess utilizes every limb and orifice
in the room. However, this abusing of bodies exemplifies the snubbing of nature’s limits
and bounds, that is, the bedroom becomes a place where real material things are exhausted
Both Gallop and Clack offer sociocultural and psychoanalytic ways of reading
female violence in de Sade. However, this paper resituates the female and the sexually
violent within the material. De Sade’s Philosophy draws us into the bedroom not to tell us
but to show us a philosophy. He forces us to witness how the imaginary is made literal, how
a society that ignores the divisive character in its own ideologies must eventually answer to
The crux between Dialectic of Enlightenment and de Sade is the excess of violence
enacted unto women and the way these acts illuminate the period’s brutal efforts toward
all natural things. And yet, Adorno and Horkheimer do not address all the ways that de
Sade uses violence to characterize man’s ambition. Venereal disease is another form of
violence that men wield in de Sade, and yet is different because of its ontological character.
Disease, as an organic form, is pushing back against man, refashioning a clean order of
dominance. This morbific matter is a form of correction, not just of men, but of all human
life.
In this way, the material is detrimental to man’s freedom. The specter of marriage
and the specter of disease are linked in the way they determine and limit how men
42 Clack, 277.
31
organize themselves as individuals in a collective. Both marriage and disease pose a threat
to man’s potential as a figure that has transcended nature, as a figure who has earned the
Let us return for a moment to Philosophy in order to delineate how de Sade uses
marriage to create a model for the loss of freedom. According to Dolmance’s monologue,
men have “no right to bind a woman to [themselves]” for “the exclusive possession of a
acquisition, by a self-interest in the partner, the goods, and the family. Such motivations
force women—more importantly, men—into unjust attachments, and grant one sex the
“legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other.” Consequently, these notions of
arbitrary force, possession, and claim are unnatural, but nonetheless principal,
characteristics of marriage.
love, as a form of privatization. Love is at the heart of the issue, for it is “Self-interest, egoism
and love that degraded these primitive attitudes, at once so simple and so natural.”44 Love
opposed to the happiness of everyone.45 What should be demolished is not simply the
institution of marriage, but the organization of people. People should not be bound
together in any sense by law or sentiment. Thus, to order couples by love would be to
exclude the rest of society from taking pleasure in certain groups of people.
43 De Sade, 318.
44 Ibid.
45 De Sade, 319.
32
freedom that men assume. The republic must permit the exercise of impulses, regardless if
they exceed the boundaries of what has been socially and legally established as morally
“good” or “bad.” The individual’s desires are upheld as the most natural right in that they
and possession with marriage acting as a primary fetter to man’s potential. Once the
constraints of marriage are severed, all women will be released to all men. This natural
right to pursue women includes the right to force sex on them, as one woman belongs to
every man. The right “to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be
contradicting myself, but temporarily.”46 Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, de Sade
intentionally undercuts his own point by offering one sex the right to the other (as long as
it’s only a little bit). This grey area directs us to a larger point: no man wants to share a
woman with other men regardless if it’s his natural right to have access to all women for
enjoyment.
common right and the right of the most powerful. That is, all men may have claim over
women but not all men have the equal right to claim. And what motivates man to pursue
nature, science, property, and women is the egoism that defines him as an individual rather
than a collective. Yet, paradoxically, it is this same ambition that drives a particular group
of men, characterized by their sex, race, class, and nationality, to seek total domination
46 De Sade, 319.
33
against all others. It is their natural right, as the dominant group, to maintain a position
toward everyone and everything as infinitely accessible and reserved only for them.
Commitments to this form of power manifest in the wake of the French Revolution,
a period shaped by the will of people. De Sade, as well as many other writers, reveal how
the new sociopolitical tactics of organization are out of touch as they are myopic. During
the period, the French and the British governments began grappling with the potential of a
republic, of a society that cannot rely on the organization of an aristocracy, and instead
must find new ways to create and maintain order. The threat of the republic shifts the
sovereign's focus from power over territory to power over its own population. Power, as
Michel Foucault argues, “gave itself the function of administering life . . . it is over life that
Nearly two centuries after de Sade, Foucault shows us how authority shifted in the
eighteenth century and began to organize in ways that revolve around political and medical
power. These practices produce what Foucault names, the biopolitics of population that
as a form of power shaped by social and medical institutions, I’d like to think about the
ways that disease becomes its own form of power that threatens the way the social can be
ordered. The following section attends to disease as a form of power that complicates
material potential, becomes a reminder from nature, a threat to arbitrary forms of social
Let then those doctors, who love to play with shadows, and are fond of pursuing questions
that cannot be answer’d, now enquire into the original bulk, figure, and disposition of the
smallest atoms of the body to be changed; what new shape they ought to put on, in order to
their change; by what force, artifice, and mechanism they can lay aside their old form and
assume a new. —Jean Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease
when Dolmancé enlists one of the other men to force Eugénie’s mother, Madame de
Mistival, into intercourse and instill her with venereal disease; Dolmancé declares, “this
valet has one of the loveliest members to be found in all of Nature; however, it distills
disease, for ‘tis eaten by one of the most impressive cases of syphillis.”49 The valet rapes
Eugénie’s mother in order to transfer the disease and its violent long-term effects that will
be a constant reminder to her: “so long as this cruel disease’s impressions shall last, the
whore will remember not to trouble her daughter when Eugénie has herself fucked.”50
Dolmancé addresses the valet’s body and its disease as part of nature while also assuming
that de Mistival’s body will remain naturally receptive to this poison. The autonomy in this
scene is not Dolmance’s but the bodies’. Dolmancé is merely taking advantage of the way
organic things are receptive to one another, group themselves together, and figure
themselves into new forms. My point being, Dolmancé cannot will the disease out of the
valet, he simply sets up the potential for contagion and then lets the bodies do the work.
49 Smith-Rosenberg, 25.
50 De Sade, 362.
35
This lack of agency directs us to a new question: what is being overlooked in the pursuit to
And yet, in typical Sadeian fashion, we are not afforded the time to mull over this
question because the moment is not over. As quickly as Dolmancé summons the man to
transfer the disease, de Mistival’s daughter, Eugénie, agrees to sew up her mother’s vagina
to prevent “evaporation [and] leakage,” so the disease will “more promptly cinder [her]
bones.”51 The goal is that the destructive characteristic of syphilis will take hold of the body
internally and quicken the natural corporeal process of disintegration, thus effecting
Eugenie— Excellent idea! Quickly, quickly, fetch me needle and thread!. . . Spread
your thighs, Mamma, so I can stitch you together—so that you’ll give me no more
In sewing up her mother’s vagina, Eugénie is manually manipulating and degrading the site
of reproduction. She is interfering with nature in hopes that she aggravates and sparks its
most destructive qualities. Yet, her enthusiasm seems amiss, as if Eugénie misunderstands
the way that nature is pervasive regardless of human interference—or perhaps she just
doesn’t care.
This scene is jarring both in the narrative and in our imaginations, as if de Sade is
intentionally and forcefully directing our eyes to what society is failing to see. The sheer
excess of brutal force coerces us to look at a link between nature and failed reproduction, a
connection that shows how man been shortsighted in his will to overtake nature. More
51
De Sade, 363.
52 Ibid.
36
explicitly, the individual who inflicts violence upon the material can be misguided by an
In the closing scene, de Mistival is led out of the house by the Chevalier, while we as
readers are unsure if she is to live or die. The image becomes emblematic of an uncertainty
that asks: if human violence overestimates the relationship between nature and
reproduction, how does reproduction sustain itself, even partially, throughout man’s quest
to dominate? Although I doubt this question can be found in de Sade’s works as excess is
the very antithesis of sustainability, I will now turn to medical treatises in order to think
about the subtle ways in which organic bodies persist against the motivations of human
action.
The epidemiology of disease, that is, the way it spreads in tireless and non-linear
ways, is a way to think about disease as a collective power. In his medical treatise on
venereal disease, French physician Jean Astruc notes that the substance of disease is
“produced and perpetuated here by a sort of morbifick fewel. . .which is of a lasting nature,
or rather is constantly renew’d.”53 The sheer endurance of this matter underwrites disease
as a form of organic power—a power defined in its motion, in its ability to animate itself
and animate other material forms regardless and in excess of the many sites it contacts.
That is, a ceaseless form that will animate all human bodies in an active way that cannot be
53 Astruc, xiii.
37
From this perspective, disease is a lively and energetic matter, clinging at random to
different bodies at different times. It can be communicated in linear ways: between man
and woman or from woman to infant. Yet, venereal disease is not exhausted in one
exchange nor can it be traced through a tidy genealogy of recipients. Like the libertine ideal
of spreading seeds to whomever, whenever, disease has no bounds. One of the few
differences between the libertine ideal and this natural matter is exactly that, one is
illusory and the other is real. What I mean here, is the success of disease is unparalleled
regardless of an ideal pursuit, the more people who are in sexual contact with this
Of course, the rake was very familiar with the power of disease, particularly the way
that his pursuit is inevitably subsumed by his material reality. In Isaac Cruikshank’s
satirical poem, “The Dying Rake’s Soliloquy,” syphilis cannot be controlled and refuses to
deteriorate. In fact, soliloquizing helps imagine how the body succumbs to illness even
when the body is separated—by distance and time—from its initial source. Even after
The dying rake is comparing his own inorganic spirit to the organism of disease. When his
body and money are spent, venereal disease is still at work. Of course, the poem parallels
the corrupt rake who lives out his passions to the corrupt physician who profits off
passions’ effects. However, the poem also offers an example for the pure energy of disease.
That is, the way that this sickness cannot be attended to by medicine nor the body itself:
The humanly form, though alive, becomes little more than a carcass: a lifeless container
completely devoid of ambition, only lit up internally and relocating externally because of
disease. Even as an organic substance, there is no way to slow this malady, so it must be
offered to the wind and returned to its own physical cycle. This allusion to the grave
becomes the final act for the rake, while his body is merely a rest stop for the infection.
That said, the rake does not simply die, he succumbs to the relentless materiality of disease
that effects a persistent and active process of dying. Even after he is gone, the physical
properties of disease maintain its “spirit” across time, place, and bodies.
The dying rake shows us how disease becomes an ideal form of domination because
it works continuously and independently from other bodies. In other words, the aggressive
characteristics of syphilis will inflict the same harm on the human body as Dolmance’s
As a biological form, disease works on multiple parts of the body to “divide, break,
and dissolve the stamina of the parts it falls upon.”55 In this process, the ailment works to
breakdown the whole form by depleting the energy of individual parts. For instance, in de
Sade’s text, the woman may be dominated by a blow to the face or a whip to the back, but
these single acts of violence inflicted on separate body parts are distinct from venereal
55
Astruc, 145.
39
disease which, in one transmission, affects “the whole mass of humours.”56 Nevertheless, de
Sade’s characters continue to execute acts of violence with a ceaseless and tireless energy
and no foreseeable end. The only intelligible part of their pursuit is the will to dominate,
The question: “to what end” becomes the very point of the text, so that even we as readers
become tired engaging with these acts over and over. De Sade finds unexpected ways to
remind us how we as individuals become exhausted while the violence does not. But one
thing I have yet to address is how the hyper-sexualized and diseased female body is viewed
as a “collective” body, or a body that stands in for all others; and, more importantly, how
the violence of disease refashions this body in a way that reassigns power from the
As I’ve said before, the sexualized and diseased woman is a recurring trope in
and legal value. A woman’s chastity assumes a certain lineage and thus guarantees
proprietary rights for her husband and family. Because of this process, a woman’s sexuality
is never her own, but is instead a resource bound to others such as her father, husband, and
children. And yet, when disease intervenes, it combusts all of the neat and tidy ways the
To be diseased is to be unclean and thus unfit for marriage and reproduction. The
connection between the sexualized female body and society is indivisible. And yet, we can
56
Astruc, 145.
40
begin to think about this connection more macroscopically, as Susan Sontag does when she
identifies “a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.”57 In this vein,
when physicians of the period frame venereal disease as a “morbifick fewel originally
brought from abroad,”58 they are operating under a presumption that codifies the illness as
foreign.
intimate life. For instance, William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress famously illustrates the
demise of Moll Hackabout, a country girl who couldn’t make an honest living in London and
thus succumbs to a life of harlotry. Yet, what really keeps Moll away from a virtuous life is
more specifically gendered than just the city’s corruption. Moll cannot participate in the
required “sexual contract”59 that underwrites women’s participation in not just intimate
life, but all of society; she cannot participate, that is, in a contract that legitimizes the female
position by “civilizing” the natural woman. In Hogarth’s engravings, disease manifests itself
in material ways by spotting and scabbing the body of the woman. These markings of
disease allude to a body whose validity has been spent, a woman who has waived her right
to the sexual contract and must now exist outside the social sphere. To society, the
uncivilized body and thus a person who occupies a vulnerable social position.
58 Astruc, xiii.
What is worse is how these weakened bodies invite further acts of violence, as
society has already assumed they occupy a subordinate space. Moll Hackabout has already
given up her social value, so symbolically, she has no legitimate place in civilization. She has
relinquished her right to the private and domestic sphere which is the only space reserved
for women in society. In this way, the harlot becomes a model for the way we think of the
sexualized woman as natural and uncivilized: as weak, both culturally and philosophically.
She is a figure that permits continuous acts of domination from whomever, whenever.
Yet, as I’ve already pointed out, weakness is not a measure of physical strength so
much as it is a social position that women occupy. That is, weakness cannot be measured
accurately in the face of force. In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau opens the
section “The Right of the Strongest” by noting, “the strongest man is never strong enough to
be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty.”61
Thus, the “right” of the strongest is characterized in its ability to enforce others to obey.
And those who yield, do so because of their socially weak position, not because of weakness
itself: “Force is a physical power . . . To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will.”62
Rousseau’s example of power is that which makes one continuously yield to force, “after all,
the pistol in the robber’s hand is undoubtedly a power.”63 However, a pistol implies a
circumstantial power that can easily be violated if what it is used to get, can be concealed.
Indeed, a pistol is a force, but power itself must be pervasive and inviolable. Thus, in order
for a pistol to remain a power, it requires participation and reinforcement from a collective;
62 Rousseau, 52.
63
Rousseau, 53.
42
it depends on continuous standing and brandishing, until the pistol becomes a symbol of its
systemic power.
But who is part of this collective and why must there be a collective at all?
Paradoxically, the collective relies on the individual, on his need for self-preservation:
Since men cannot create new forces, but merely combine and control those which
already exist, the only way in which they can preserve themselves is by uniting their
separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance,
uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in
concert.64
Rousseau helps delineate how men—as not just leaders of the republic but the republic
itself—become a form of power. In addition to this, in the separation of church and state,
men become the only legitimate power. Consequently, women will yield absolutely to the
power of the republic, as the “duty of obedience is owed only to legitimate powers.”65
Of course, Rousseau points out that there are few other forms of legitimate power
aside from the republic, as legitimacy itself is defined by the state. That is, the social body
determines to which powers we yield: “obey those in power . . . All power comes from God,
I agree; but so does every disease, and no one forbids us to summon a physician.”66 Yet,
what Rousseau seems to overlook in this moment is the physician's ability to aid every
disease. How can disease not be considered a form of legitimate power if it holds the
potential to make all men and thus the republic itself, yield to its force?
That being said, disease is unlike any other form of power, as it is not exclusive to
men, nor women, nor any other living thing. The organic body does not have any autonomy
64 Rousseau, 62.
65 Rousseau, 53.
66
Ibid.
43
over the way it yields to disease. Disease itself dictates how it will live and move. In this
way, neither men nor women have any true autonomy over how they wield this power.
And yet, disease unexpectedly and paradoxically liberates women by becoming one of the
few powers they can actually possess. When disease is communicated to the body of the
woman, it still lives in the body of the man and holds potential to be passed to the body of a
different man. Unlike whipping and flogging, disease offers women the opportunity to
strike back. Of course, this is a shared power in that it is not exclusive to women, nor do
women alone decide how they communicate this power. Instead, they must answer to the
body.
Obeying the body becomes a way to think about how disease transforms women,
from a site of power to a vector of power. Disease becomes a woman’s entry into a more
egalitarian society, a true republic where power is shared among men and women. A
collective power that is always reinforced by the body itself: “That whoever refused to obey
the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing
other than that he shall be forced to be free.”67 Disease becomes a form of forced freedom. A
perverse form of liberation, a chance for women to give back as good as they’ve had it. And
67 Rousseau, 64.
44
The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth:
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Now we’re going to turn, albeit briefly, to William Blake’s “London.” Although this
poem is more commonly associated with institutional corruption and human suffering
following the French Revolution, my hope is that we may read this poem differently, as a
the same kinds of questions I’ve been asking throughout this project. We may not normally
associate Blake with libertinism, but I suggest that his work can be positioned among an
ongoing libertine tradition. What I mean here, is that Blake is part of a libertine genealogy,
a chain of male reproduction that is continuously producing a poetics of the body that is
London
There is a trend among writers such as Marquis de Sade, John Wilmot, the Earl of
Rochester, and William Blake to address marriage and disease as a detriment to men. Blake
would seem to be the outlier among the three, yet he fits within Adorno and Horkheimer’s
approximation of the libertine, as one who “reveals an organization of life as a whole which
is deprived of any substantial goal.”68 A definition of libertinism that does not rely on
pleasure so much as a pursuit to organize. Blake’s works are another reflection of the
period’s tendency to use female sexuality and the female body as “methods of reproduction
organization. Tristanne Connolly suggests that Blake’s art is preoccupied by images of birth
68
Horkheimer, 88.
69 Horkheimer, 87.
46
body. That is, his illustrations press on how the body, in its natural processes, restrains and
determines the life of man. Like the libertine writers, Blake values a nonreproductive
Rochester, de Sade, and Blake are quite different in the ways they attend to sexuality and
female reproduction, specifically in the way they address the literal and abstract material
potential. Yet all three are part of a broader tradition that expands the possibilities of
sexuality far beyond the reaches of social, legal, and moral boundaries.
In turning to the poem, I begin with the assumption that William Blake’s poem
“London,” “insists on the visibility of the prostitute.” Namely, that the harlot brings to the
surface the things that London would rather forget.72 Although I agree that Blake makes the
harlot central to the poem, she does not bring to us anything that may be visualized. The
visibility of the harlot is more dependent upon our hearing her than our seeing her. Lines
such as “In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear—”73 communicates
suffering through sound. The cries of child chimney sweepers mark the “blackning Church”
while the sighs from soldiers runs in blood “down palace walls.”74 The soldiers, the
children, and the harlot are merely echoes, distant sounds that only materialize through
other things.
71 Connolly, xiv.
72
Matthews, 73.
74 Blake, 41.10-12.
47
Nevertheless, “London” still has visually stimulating moments that thrust us into the
streets of London and force us to recognize the “Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”75 The
signs of destruction manifest in response to noise, thus it is intentional that we hear “the
youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the newborn Infants tear.”76 Namely, that the violence
associated with the “blast” is characterized by an absence, rather than a presence. The
This London is not organized in any real intelligible way, it is a cacophony of sounds,
a material and temporal mess. Connolly points out that the mystical qualities of Blake’s
work are “metaphor from material existence.”77 Blake’s artistic tendency to play with the
natural and the abstract transfers seamlessly to his poetic form. If the “exterior should
reflect the interior more literally,” then the violent internal energy of disease would
explode in tears from the infant’s eyes. Sentiment and passion do not betray life quite like
absence becomes an effect of the internal work of disease. Disease works to erase the
harlot, to move her to the margins of the poem, so all that is left of her is resonance. In these
terms, the echoes of her curse offer a metaphor for her material existence. For the ways in
which disease works tirelessly to cinder her bones, to corrode her humours, to disorganize
75
Blake, 41.4.
76 Blake, 41.14-15.
77 Connolly, 40-41.
78 Connolly, 42.
48
the female body from the inside to the outside until we hear only the residual sounds of her
material existence.
connects the children, the soldiers, and the harlot by a broader form of violence that affects
society as a whole. That is, the poem relies on the physical residue of ash, blood, and tears
sensation of Blake’s poem because she has already been dissolved, materially annihilated.
Blake’s mystical works, such as The First Book of Urizen and The Book of Ahania are
exemplary in thinking about how the body is defined by nature: “shapes screaming flutter’d
vain/ Some combin’d into muscles & glands / Some organs for craving and lust.”79 Figures
may be “barr’d and petrify’d against the infinite,” 80 however, the material body is
determined in these restraints, in the way it organizes itself through nature’s pursuit. But
the material is not organized in “London,” it is sprawling itself all over the buildings,
dripping down the walls, leaving the borders of the body. It’s as if nature’s pursuit has
finally yielded to the pursuit of the individual, the pursuit of the church, state, and
nature. The infant is born into a similar universe as Urizen and Ahania, although admittedly
not quite as supernatural, a universe that organizes without any substantial goals. Yet, the
infant cannot be placed socially for his mother is gone, and cannot contain himself
materially for he is bursting with tears and disease. Such disorganization posits him as
79
Blake, “The Book of Ahania,” 4.31-33.
unformed, both socially and materially. This unformation produces echoes that direct our
attention to something lost while, at the same time, alludes to more violence to come.
“London” is a space where the individual has pulled forward from the collective and
the natural, and thus has overestimated its own power. The signs of human egoism
manifest as material cast-off, as bloody and ashy excess. The poem does not simply provide
sociopolitical commentary, but prophecies a broader crisis to come. It has us looking for
physical signs of the harlot, but only gives us the sound of her absence vibrating from the
margins of the poem. These echoes become the sounds of dissonance, of a society complicit
Blake’s “London” makes an inference to the material that has much more in common
with Rochester and de Sade than one might expect. This libertine lineage is rooted in the
relentless disorganization of power in the physical world. These works orient themselves
through sexuality and violence, developing their ideas through material consumption,
resistance, and finally, annulment. The works of Rochester, de Sade, and Blake are pressing
on the continuous straining of the collective material body, a body corrupted by a pursuit
so unnatural that it finally yields itself to the margins, giving itself away to man.
50
Conclusion
This project began as an attempt to redeem the sexualized woman of the eighteenth-
century. Instead, it has stumbled through what I like to think of as an anti-redemption. I did
not intend to frame disease as a profound and vital form nor do I deny that most forms of
malady are often, and rightfully, thought to be destructive to life. But what I’ve found is that
these destructive characteristics of disease offer vindication for the collective body, a
chance for nature to push back against the atomized existence of the individual.
I’d like to return for a moment to my very initial question: what does it mean to be
the vector of disease? To embody the metaphysical in one material form? This project has
posited disease as a form of collective power, for its dependence upon numerous particles
for formation, for its commitment to reproducing itself again and again in its contact with
multiple bodies, and for the way it persists past the individual’s existence. Unexpectedly,
disease offers a thread with which we stitch together not just the social body, but the
broader body of life. Life is texturized by the material human body, and it is disease that
helps weave an organic fabric of particles, flesh, and sores. This visual form continues to
move itself across time and space, shaping itself through a shared narrative, as colorful and
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Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.
Blake, William. “Europe: A Prophecy.” In The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake,
Blake, William. “London.” In Blake’s Poetry and Designs, 41. Edited by Mary Lynn Johnson
and John E. Grant. 2nd ed. New York; London: Norton Company, 2008.
Blake, William. “The Book of Ahania.” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 84-
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