Donatien Alphonse François de Sade did not see people; he saw ergonomics. In the 120 Days of Sodom, the victims do not merely suffer; they are organized. They become footstools, coffee tables, and breathing candelabras. For the Marquis, the human body is the world’s most versatile building material—one that comes with internal heating and a responsiveness that oak or marble could never offer. Objectification is not an insult; it is a promotion: ceasing to be an erratic subject to become an object with a crystal-clear function.
The friction of the chair against my spine reminds me that design is always an imposition. I feel a small cramp in my neck as I type, a sharp tug that makes me think my own vertebrae are just the scaffolding for a screen that refuses to let me look away.
The air in this room smells of hot plastic and that sickly sweet scent flowers emit when they first begin to rot in the vase. Suddenly, oxygen tastes like ash. It is the atmosphere of a laboratory where skin becomes leather and bone becomes structure.
The Comfort of the Object: The End of Will
It is fascinating that today we spend thousands on ergonomic chairs that “cradle” our anatomy, when Sade simply used the anatomy of others to cradle his own. Mental health has become decoration, elegant wallpaper for an old prison where we are taught to be “flexible” at work—a pretty word for saying they expect us to bend like a well-oiled hinge. In Silling, flexibility was a physical requirement; today, it’s a LinkedIn demand.
One more second and I’ll start thinking about the last time I felt my body belonged to me and wasn’t just an extension of the keyboard.
A body serving as a table has no existential doubts. It doesn’t have to choose what to have for dinner or which career path to follow. There is a terrifying peace in the loss of will. Sade did not seek mere dominance; he sought the visual harmony of a salon where every piece of furniture was a testament to his power. Flesh is merely the textile for a designer who does not accept returns.
Ergonomics of Dominance: The Weight of the Gaze
There is a subtle contradiction in the fact that we are horrified by the idea of being furniture, yet we spend eight hours a day acting as the support for a corporate structure that doesn’t even see us. My wrist aches from typing—thoughts that would ruin my social life in eight minutes if anyone could read them—and yet I enjoy every gasp of breathlessness produced by the tension in this text. The will feels cornered when the environment is designed for you to be useful, not free.
Who dares admit that objectification is the ultimate relief from responsibility? Maturity in this century of algorithms consists of accepting that we are already furniture in someone else’s living room. Sade simply had the honesty to strip the varnish off the idea. In the end, interior design is the management of obedience, and the body is the only material we haven’t yet learned to fully recycle.
Inventory of the Libertine Living Room
We explore a map where utility is the only permitted ethics. The “total comfort” fetish is the shiny wrapper for a mechanism that wants us to stay still, assuming our assigned shape. We are subjects simulating depth while functioning as simple load-bearing points in the architecture of capital, forgetting that Sade’s sovereign did not seek beauty; he sought for flesh to adapt to the angle of his whim.
Perhaps desire is just the name we give to the hunger to be used by someone who knows what to do with us.
Maybe, if we stopped pretending to be sovereign subjects, we would start to enjoy the stability of being an object. Or perhaps we would just stay there, waiting for someone to move us so we can catch a bit more sun.
Tomorrow you will sit at your desk again, adjusting your anatomy to the shape the world expects of you. You will pretend your posture is a choice, while your vertebrae creak under the weight of a routine that has turned you into the support for your own fears. The only body that truly matters to you is your own, and only when you notice someone looking at you not as a person, but as an obstacle or a resource. The rest is just the glow of the screen reflecting a piece of furniture that still thinks it can run away.
