Four writers--the first, an eighteenth-century Frenchman whose
works still retain their power to shock, scandalize, and instruct;
the others, three twentieth-century Frenchmen, heirs and
explicators of their earlier compatriot--form the central cast of
characters of this literary-philosophical dialogue which seeks to
transcend the barriers of time, space, and sexual identity imposed
by traditional approaches to literature.
Professor Gallop, acknowledging her debt to such writers as
Friedrich Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, cites as the shaping
principle of her work the central tenet of intertextuality--that a
literary work is not a closed system which can be definitively
characterized by reference either to its creator or to its
beholder. Rather, reader, writer, and text meet, react, and
interact in a performance of "polymorphous per-versity"--a
performance which, Professor Gallop points out, finds a parodic
analogue in the activities of Sade's distinguished libertines.
Professor Gallop observes that Sade and the structuralists display
a congruity of purpose, in that both take as their goal the
destruction of the classical dichotomy, long enshrined at the heart
of the humanist tradition, between the ideal and the material.
Working from these peculiar conjunctions of theory, purpose, and
enactment--and from a distinctly feminist point of view--Professor
Gallop moves freely among the texts of her four subjects. She
introduces Bataille's Sade to Blanchot's Sade, relates Klossowski's
Sade to Klossowski's Bataille, and, when necessary extricates Sade
himself from the web of what has been written about him. She finds
that each of the three later writers constructs his own "fiction,"
with Sade as chief character: Bataille, caught up in the idea of
the "sovereign man," discovers the sovereign man in Sade; Blanchot,
for whom the real action is the act of writing itself, describes a
Sade confronting the horror of the loss of self in that act; while
Klossowski creates several Sades, marking different moments in his
intellectual itinerary: psychoanalytic, Catholic, Nietzschean.
Professor Gallop demonstrates, however, that Sade is ultimately
not appropriable--cannot, in effect, be consumed--and that, thus,
an inversion occurs whereby Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski
become extensions of Sade's characters, subsumed into the Sadian
world. And she finds herself likewise a part of that world and her
work "an ever reverberating extension of Sade's own writing."
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