“I accord no importance whatever to gifts, only what I take counts in my eyes.†-Juliette
“Theft is an everyday affair, of all the whims to be found in man not one is more natural.†-Juliette
With the increased rise of capitalist relations the ideal of the social contract informed political theorizing from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau. How might Sade be considered a precursor to Nietzsche, in his favoring of the strong, in particular against all regulation and contractual relationships? As Marcel Hénaff writes, in summation of Sade’s three part attack upon the contract:
"At the first level, there is his cut-and-dried conviction (in the manner of Plato’s Callicles), that power is defined by strength alone, and that all strength establishes domination. Strength alone is real; everything else is manipulation for the sake of strength’s being recognized. Thus, if the partnership contract is not a means for the weak to capture the strength of the powerful by submitting it to the control of the majority, then it is conductive to the one-sided contract, which causes the majority to accept the control of those who are more powerful by making strength pass for the result of everyone’s agreement. In either case the contract is a sham. The libertine position, then, is to affirm naked, undisguised strength or to recognize it wherever it is obliged to operate in disguise.
"But there is another level of this rejection. It stems from the Sadean conception of exchange. According to Sade, every exchange is agonistic; every exchange is – has to be – a challenge. Reciprocity is not an amiable agreement between contracting parties who measure their mutual contributions fairly and exactly. It is not the ‘sweet commerce’ of business celebrated by Enlightenment thinkers…From this standpoint, the contractual relationship is an abdication or domestication of strength. The libertine can only oppose it with the most extreme energy…
“There remains, finally, another aspect of the Sadean rejection of the contract. This aspect has to do with the contract’s regulatory character, its capacity for blocking action, for barring the unpredictable…The goal is to have every single remaining activity or behavior defined and programmed by some article of law, and therefore establish a reciprocal balance of rights and duties.”
“Kind friends, by a single feature alone were men distinguished from one another when, long ago, society was in its infancy: the essential point was brute strength. Nature gave them all space wherein to dwell, and it was upon this physical force, distributed to them impartiality, that was to depend the manner in which they were to share the world. Was this sharing to be equal, could it possibly be, what with the fact that naked force was to decide the matter? In the beginning, then was theft; theft, I say, was the basis, the starting point; for the inequality of this sharing necessarily supposes a wrong done the weak by the strong, and there at once we have this wrong, that is to say, theft, established, authorized by Nature since she gives man that which must necessarily lead him thereto.â€
-libertine Dorval, Julliette
Hénaff further abstracts the contractual to the negotiation of universally signified exchanges, placing questions of “truth†under official definitions of exchange:
This mode of exchange [contractual trade] is probably as old as mercantile relationships themselves But what the bourgeoisie did invent is the extension – or rather the generalization – of this relationship model to the whole field of economic practice, as well as the field of the symbolic relationships articulated with economic practice. What we see at work here is not just the reduction of every product to its exchange value, which hides both productive labor and the forces of production, but also the reduction of the whole order of signs and symbolic goods to their function of exchangeablity, to their capacity for remainderless signifying, with their equivalence measured against the universal standard, the abstract stand-in for every kind of value: money.
What is of interest by analogy is way that “sense†also is attempted to be established by “logic†and other modes of sense-making control, a free flowing economy of meanings where everything becomes abstracted and defined, modularly. How much of argumentation in philosophy is accomplished through rightful exchange, and how much through theft by strength? How much is the convincing argument the consequence of a legal negotiation of signs, a fair barter under a defined economy of meanings, and how much is it a theft, that is appropriated after by the contractual, much as Sade reasoned the ‘social contract’ either attempts to dominate the strong, or authenticates their strength as if a product of the contract itself? How much is sense made/stolen, and much is it imposed/authenticated?
Dunamis