Seminet, Philippe. Sade in His Own Name: An Analysis of Les Crimes de l'Amour. (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, 128.) New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. ix + 232; bibliography; index.
Review by Rudy de Mattos, Louisiana Tech University.
Philippe Seminet’s book is the finalization of a project which started almost a decade ago when working on his dissertation on Sade and Les Crimes de l’amour. Since then, Philippe Seminet has been working on Sade and Les Crimes de l’amour.
Sade in His Own Name is not an attempt to undermine nor give a radically different image of the infamous author but rather an attempt to provide a broader understanding of the author beyond Sade’s famous unsigned works on which most of the exegetes have focused. Seminet’s intent and methodology is clearly stated in his introduction: “Taking as my point of departure Foucault’s notion of the ‘author-function’, which is intended to provide the whole picture of an author based on everything that is known about him; I have attempted to fill in that part of the picture that has been neglected, namely that of the author as he wanted to be perceived publicly by publishing in his own name.” (3)
The book is divided into five chapters as follows:
-chapter 1: Early Approaches to Sade
-Chapter 2: More Recent Approaches to Sade
-Chapter 3: Sade’s Aesthetics of the Novel: Idée sur les romans
-Chapter 4: Les Crimes de l’amour: Volumes 1 and 2 – The First Wave
-Chapter 5: Les Crimes de l’amour: Volumes 3 and 4 – The Second Wave
-Conclusion: From Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu to Les Crimes de l’amour: A Common Vision
-(Also includes Notes, a Bibliography and Index)
The first two chapters constitute an excellent synthesis of our knowledge – as it currently stands – of Sade and the research on Sade’s writings since the re/discovery of the author’s controversial work in the 1950’s. The first two chapters are extremely pertinent. They offer a well-written synthesis on – and to some extent history of – the various analyses of Sade’s work as well as a successful attempt to present the dialectical reception of the author on both sides of the Atlantic. The distinctive perspective adopted in these two chapters is not only geographical but also temporal since the American approach (such as the feminist reading) was, as Seminet shows, a reaction to the former.
In the first chapter, Seminet focuses on the French psychoanalytical and literary approaches of Sade’s work by looking at the groundbreaking readings of Jean Paulhan, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille, Roland Barthes, and finally Foucault.
The second chapter looks at the American and more recent approaches not only to Sade’s work but also the critical literature on his work. As Philippe Seminet explains “Gallop thus reads Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski as little more than extensions of Sade to suit their own agenda. She takes Bataille to task for deliberately misreading Sade in order to support his own theory of sovereignty”(35).
Regarding these two chapters, I only regret that Philippe Seminet did not develop further his presentation. In his attempt to present the reader with a broad understanding of Sade as a public writer, and of his work and its reception, Seminet tackles all the major critics. His presentation of the works on Sade is, however, too synthetic, dedicating only a couple pages to most critics or approaches (only two pages on Lacan’s reading for instance). George Bataille’s analysis of Sade’s work is the longest with five pages. Also, one would expect an entry dedicated to important works more recently published in France, such as Philippe Sollers’s Sade contre l’être suprême (précédé de Sade dans le Temps). This being said, these two chapters are an excellent tool for people (graduate students in particular) who wish to know of Sade and his work beyond the clichés.
Chapter three is, in my opinion, the most original in its approach. Following closely Foucault’s concept of the “author-function”, Seminet looks into important aspects in Sade’s writing process. Unlike most critics “focusing on his language, his psyche, the aberrations of his life and/or works, or his treatment of women,” (53) Seminet considers Sade, “the man of letters” (53), and his relation to the novelistic genre. He looks into readings that influenced him and his work as well as his Idée sur le roman and “take him on a par with the more canonical French authors of his day (e.g. Voltaire Diderot, Rousseau, and Laclos)” (53).
In the last two chapters, Seminet pursues his portrait of Sade by looking more closely at each tale in Les Crimes de l’amour and how they illustrate Sade’s “tableau des moeurs séculaires.” One of the merits of these two chapters lays in the fact that Seminet did not focus only on the most known tales, that is, Juliette et Raunai, ou la Conspiration d’Amboise, or Miss Henriette Stralson, or even Ernestine. He gives equal importance to the lesser known tales, such as Laurence et Antonio.
Of all the features that makes this book useful, readers will appreciate the fact that each chapter and each entry within each chapter (despite the concision) is written in such a manner that it can be read independently from the rest, allowing the reader to follow Seminet’s thought without relying heavily on information provided earlier.
Finally, Seminet’s style, clear, concise, and academic without being pretentiously obscure, makes the reading of what is probably the most extensive work on Les Crimes de l’amour enjoyable.