Part Two: Friendship and Love

[Part One is here]

As an idea, transgression for transgression's sake does not resonate in a pleasant way with me, and while I believe that pushing against and breaking sexual boundaries is a thing to be encouraged and celebrated, it seems to me that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

To explore what these ways might be, I turned first to the archetypal transgressor: the Marquis de Sade. As a comparative, there is no greater extreme to be found, and I am aware that my own petty thinking, if not thoroughly examined, leads straight to Durcet's château. That's nowhere I want to be, and nowhere I'd want to encourage anyone else to go. But there must be a broad expanse of reason and emotion between the Victorian prude and the murderous libertine, and somewhere on that well-trod ground lies the personal boundary that causes such unpleasant resonance within me.

I gathered ideas about the nature of that boundary from Sade's work itself, and from Simone de Beauvoir's essay "Faut-il brûler Sade?" ("Must We Burn Sade?"), first published in Les Temps Modernes in 1951 and 1952. While working towards her final critique of Sade's understanding of the erotic, Beauvoir writes:

It has rightly been pointed out that there is never any permanent bond among Sade's libertines, that their relationship involves a constant tension. But the fact that Sade systematically makes selfishness triumph over friendship does not prevent him from endowing friendship with reality. Noirceuil is very careful to let Juliette know that he is interested in her only because of the pleasure he finds in her company; but this pleasure implies a concrete relationship between them. Each feels confirmed within himself by the presence of an alter ego; it is both an absolution and an exaltation. Group debauchery produces genuine communion among Sade's libertines. Each one perceives the meaning of his acts and of his own figure through the minds of the others. I experience my own flesh in the flesh of another; then my fellow creature really exists for me. The shocking fact of coexistence eludes our thinking, but we can dispose of its mystery the way Alexander cut through the Gordian knot: we must set ourselves down in it by acts. "What an enigma is man!—Yes, my friend, and that's what made a very witty man say that it's better to fuck him than to understand him." Eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid one. We might say, parodying Claudel, that in Sade "the penis is the shortest path between two hearts."

The question asks itself: is eroticism the only valid mode of communication between individuals? Is the erotic, in and of itself, genuine communion? The problem with that idea, Beauvoir writes, is that while Sade's critiques of the abstractions that distract us from the truth about the human condition were undeniably concrete and authentic, they were heavily derived from his own experience. His position of privilege--he was a Marquis, after all--allowed him to project his individual experience onto humanity, and to assume that his solution to his own existential and ethical crisis was the only valid solution for everyone else. The ultimate value of Sade's work, therefore, is not in the answers it provides, but in its ability to disturb us, and to force our re-examination of what she calls, "the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy takes "Must We Burn Sade?" and places it within the larger context of Beauvoir's thought:

Centering his life in the erotic, Sade missed the truth of the erotic event. This truth, Beauvoir tells us, can only be found by those who abandon themselves to the risks of emotional intoxication. Living this intoxication we discover the ways in which the body turned flesh dissolves all arguments against the immediacy of our bonds with each other and grounds an ethic of the appeal, risk and mutual vulnerability.

"Emotional intoxication," then, is what elevates transgression from the simple smashing of personal and social boundaries into something that approaches transcendence. From this it follows that the transgressive relationship needs to be capable of supporting such intoxication.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle extensively describes the perfect form of friendship that exists between good people who resemble each other in virtue. He writes, in part:

Such friendships are of course rare, because such men are few. Moreover they require time and intimacy: as the saying goes, you cannot get to know a man till you have consumed the proverbial amount of salt in his company; and so you cannot admit him to friendship or really be friends, before each has shown the other that he is worthy of friendship and has won his confidence. People who enter into friendly relations quickly have the wish to be friends, but cannot really be friends without being worthy of friendship, and also knowing each other to be so; the wish to be friends is a quick growth, but friendship is not.

I would argue that similar qualifications apply to any erotic relationship, but are particularly important in relationships that involve sexual transgression, whether the boundaries crossed are set by society or by the individuals concerned. It is not enough for partners to be self-aware, to have integrity, and to be honest. Transgression is the exploration of a territory that may be entirely new to one or more partners. One partner might lead and another follow, and those roles can switch during the course of the journey. At times, no one will have any idea at all about where they are going, and therefore each must be worthy of the other's trust, and each must know that the other is worthy. This implies a form of partnership that transcends the boundaries of an individual's isolated virtue.

Aristotle's Greek does a much finer job of expressing this. But there are clumsy English words for that kind of worthiness. "Friendship" is one. "Love" is another. True transgression without either of those frameworks in place feels like exploitation to me. Therefore, it seems to me that the key differentiator between transgression as simple license and transgression as freedom can be found within the quality of the relationship as expressed and experienced by the people living in it.

Next: Fiction