For an engine to run without cracks, you don’t ask the metal for its opinion. You simply grease it and push it to the limit. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade understood this long before we invented air conditioning or fourth-generation antidepressants: the libertine needs the other to be a piece of furniture. Or less. He needs the body he operates on to be a mute surface, a map of flesh that emits no sentimental interference. Sadian pleasure is not a dialogue; it is a bombardment of a demilitarized zone.
I have a cramp in my pinky finger from typing so much. Maybe it’s a potassium deficiency or simply my body protesting the lack of empathy in this paragraph. Biology loves to complain; it’s its way of reminding us it’s still there, getting in the way.
Indifference is not a lack of attention.
It is a technique of isolation.
If the other feels, their pain or pleasure becomes noise that muddies your own experience. Sade sought the “apathetic body,” an entity that receives the impact without returning the echo. It’s practical. It’s clean. Deep down, it’s what we all look for when we order food for delivery and hope the driver doesn’t tell us his life story. We just want the package.
Organic Silence: Managing the Object
It’s curious that today we call “professionalism” what Sade called apathy. In the office, in bed, or at the gym, we strive to be bodies that execute functions without the trace of subjectivity spoiling the result. We notice a strange vibration when we realize that the system’s highest aspiration is for us to be perfectly insensitive to others’ wear and tear.
Mental health has become decoration. Elegant wallpaper for an old prison where the goal is that nothing affects us too much.
If the other’s body doesn’t feel, your power is infinite because it has no resistance. The Sadian doesn’t want a human response; he wants a predictable physical reaction. Put that way, it sounds terrible, but it’s what we do every time we ignore a message because we “don’t have the energy” to manage another person. We are practicing our own little sovereignty of indifference.
Sometimes I get tired of being right. It’s an unnecessary burden.
The Mechanics of the Void: Why Crying Spoils the Rhythm
There is an annoying contradiction in the act of cruelty: the executioner needs the victim to be human for the act to have meaning, but needs them not to be human to enjoy it without nausea. Sade solved this with systematic desensitization. The will suffocates when the other begins to have a biography; that’s why the libertine cuts the tongue or covers the eyes. It’s better to work on an unknown than on a name.
It’s unsettling. Very unsettling.
Who has the courage to admit they prefer the absence of a response? Maturity in this market of disposable affections consists of accepting that apathy is the most effective lubricant of modernity. We’ve been convinced we seek “empathy,” but what we really want is for the world not to interrupt us with its problems while we try to manage our own chaos. The body that doesn’t feel is the only one that doesn’t force us to make promises we won’t keep.
Inventory of Marble Skin
We explore a map where sensitivity is a leak of energy. The “authentic connection” fetish is just the wrapper of a structure that prefers friction without consequences. We are subjects who simulate depth while operating over a void, forgetting that Sade’s sovereign doesn’t seek a partner; he seeks a support.
Maybe love is just the fear of being alone with our own indifference.
Or maybe, quite simply, we are too tired to care about anyone else.
Tomorrow we will put back on our “sensitive person” face before heading out, adjusting the mask of compassion in the mirror while checking notifications from a world falling apart. We will pretend what we see hurts, while secretly being grateful that the screen is glass and not skin. The only body that really concerns us is our own, and only when it starts to hurt too much. Everything else is background noise.
