Abstract
The scope of the present paper is to compare an excerpt from La nouvelle Justine, the third version of Sade's virtuous protagonist, published in 1799, and Robespierre's discourses, in which virtue becomes the principle of political action (1973-1974). The main purpose is to show that, despite the majority of its recent critical fortune, there is a deeply political gesture in the sadean writing. Such gesture is characterized by an enunciative equivocity, particularly accomplished through the disjunction between point of view and enunciative positioning. This writing operates, therefore, like a counterpoint to the discourses of the Terror, substantiated in the radicalization of the antagonism between “homeland” and its “enemies”. While Robespierre resorts to the virtue as the foundation of the unity, and, above all, the republican body's unity, Sade makes of the equivoque the engine of the writing and of the bodies he puts on the scene, pointing out their singularities and relations of force, subsumed and hypostatized by the jacobin fictionalization of the homeland.
Keywords:
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade; La nouvelle Justine; Robespierre, M. (1758-1794); Terror; Enunciative equivocity