RESEND: They Get Off on This
(Sorry if you’re getting this twice - there was an issue with delivery this morning that I believe has been resolved)
In January, the other Failing newspaper wrote about a scandal in France surrounding the exile of Gabriel Matzneff, a literary celebrity who had for decades writtenly openly and proudly about sexual relations with boys and girls, some as young as 8 years old. Matzneff’s call to account only came in late 2019, with the publication of a book called “La Consentement,” by Vanessa Sprignora. Sprignora was not only one of Matzneff’s victims, but also the subject of his breakout 1974 book, “Les Moins de Sieze Ans” - literally translated, “Under 16 years old.”
For the entirety of Matzneff’s career, it has been illegal in France to have sex with a child below the age of 15. But his work was celebrated by the cultural brass, and as recently as 2013 Matzneff was awarded the prestigious Renaudot prize. #MeToo caught up with him at long last this year, and the literary community in France finally - and with much groaning and foot dragging - excised Matzneff from their corpus. He is being charged for propogandizing pedophilia, more than 40 years after his first work on the subject was published.
On the sudden shift in allegiance among the French elite, Matzneff is quoted in the Times as saying, “Who are they to judge? These associations of the virtuous, how do they sleep, what do they do in bed and who do they sleep with, and their secret, repressed desires?”
There is in fact a long, proud tradition of libertinism in France. Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom - perhaps the most famous work of libertine art - was written by the Marquis de Sade in 1795. The work was actually of little note until it was resurrected by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who republished the book in 1910 with an eerie introduction that suggested the long-dead author, “could very well dominate the twentieth.” The novel has never been out of print since, and was made into a famously repellent film in 1975.
The plot of 120 Days of Sodom, if you’re lucky enough to not be familiar, goes something like this: a small group of aristocrats kidnaps a few dozen homeless adults and children, and over the course of four months subject these captured victims increasingly extreme forms of violence and sexual abuse, culminating in mass murder.
One might reasonably ask, if de Sade’s works are so grotesque, then what’s the appeal? From a recent New York Review of Books:
Like a guard in a concentration camp, the Sadeian hero is allowed absolute freedom to do whatever he likes to his victims, who are in most cases kidnapped or purchased and imprisoned in castles or chambers from which no escape is possible. In one of many instances that appear to foreshadow the fate of those imprisoned in the Nazis’ camps, Sade wrote, in The 120 Days of Sodom, “Here you are far from France in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, beyond steep mountains, the passes through which were cut off as soon as you had traversed them; you are trapped within an impenetrable citadel.” Even more directly, in a passage from Juliette quoted by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment—where they wrote that we find in Sade “a bourgeois existence rationalized even in its breathing spaces”—Sade wrote: “The government itself must control the population. It must possess the means to exterminate the people, should it fear them… and nothing should weigh in the balance of its justice except its own interests or passions.”
You can draw a line from de Sade to Nazism, as Pasolini did in his film. You can also draw a line from de Sade to Matzneff, or to Jeffrey Epstein, as the author above did. Freedom, absolute freedom for the individual, can be perfectly congruent with mass domination and subjugation. Indeed, mass domination and subjugation is often the immediate result of absolute freedom for the individual.
In America we would not normally associate artistic and literary elites with fascism, but this is for purely cultural and aesthetic reasons. And on the other hand, we scoff at the right wing glorification of “freedom,” noting wryly that the supposed party of freedom loves cops and the surveillance state. But there is no contradiction here. We associate fascism and other right wing movements with oppression and control, but fascism is also about absolute, unfettered freedom - for an elite.
That’s the real draw of the current right movement: not domination but freedom. The freedom to go to Applebees during an epidemic, the freedom to say and do whatever you want, to whomever you want. Freedom to Lulz. Viewed in this lens, the right’s obsessive hatred of “political correctness” makes sense: the purpose of the movement is to circumscribe the absolute freedom that has been enjoyed by a small portion of society for hundreds of years.
A movement centered on individual liberty is by definition not interested in the collective - there is no irony in the fact that so many hippies became Reagan Republicans. There is an inherent conflict in the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” that each value is presented with equal weight, inviting a clash between one person’s pursuit of happiness and another person’s liberty, or life. What if freedom is necessarily a zero sum game? What if the truth is that, the only freedom anyone has, comes at the expense of the subjugation of someone else? What if the issue is not enough freedom, but instead that some people have way too much fucking freedom?