Most citizens walk the streets convinced they are free because they can choose between fourteen types of oat milk or vote for a manager who will forget their names in two weeks. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, from his desk in the Bastille, laughed at that surface-level liberty. For him, the citizen is a slave who has forgotten his chains, while the slave in his tales is an expert in the geography of his own limits. In the Sadian universe, freedom is not a right granted by the State; it is a spasm of truth that only occurs when the social structure has completely collapsed.
My neck itches a bit, right where the hair starts—a nagging reminder that my own body has demands I haven’t authorized. I stop. Why am I writing this instead of sleeping? I don’t know. Perhaps the word “freedom” is just the name we give to our exhaustion.
The air in this room is stagnant, with that smell of dry paper and the overheated plastic of a CPU that has been on for too long. The oxygen feels a bit stale. It is the atmosphere of someone who has accepted that their freedom consists of choosing which screen to stare at until their eyes sting.
The Fiction of the Citizen: Captivity with Wi-Fi
It is ironic that we are terrified by the image of a Sadian cell while our mental health has become a kind of modern decoration; we buy indoor plants to convince ourselves we aren’t furniture in an open-plan office. Sade understood that the citizen lives in a state of collective hypnosis, accepting laws they didn’t write and desires injected into them by advertising. The slave in his novels, however, has no illusions. He knows the exact weight of iron and the temperature of another’s will. In that brutal transparency, there is an honesty that the “free man” cannot afford.
Sometimes, the truth isn’t elegant. It’s dirty. Like the back of a radiator that no one has cleaned in years.
I wonder if you, on the other side of the screen, also feel that your calendar is just a whip with a more minimalist design. Or maybe you just need a coffee. No, wait—I’m not supposed to use coffee metaphors. Maybe you just need a moment of silence. The line is very thin between social alienation and a drop in blood sugar.
Sovereignty of the Limit: The Body as the Only Homeland
Sade understood that the human being is a predator that has learned to use silver cutlery so as not to recognize the taste of what it eats. His paradox is simple: only when the body is pushed to the extreme, when social law vanishes and only the nerve and the scream remain, does the individual become real. The citizen is a legal abstraction; the slave in the dungeon is a biological certainty.
My chair has creaked again. A dry sound, almost a reproach. It’s irritating. It distracts me from the depth of this reflection on sovereignty, reminding me that I am a subject tied to a metal spring that needs oiling.
Why are we so afraid of the idea of not being our own masters? Perhaps because it forces us to admit that our autonomy is a performance staged so the economy keeps running. Order is just the fear we have that someone will treat us the way we would treat the world if there were no cameras watching. Sade invites us to look at the chain to understand that the first step toward freedom isn’t breaking it, but stopping the pretense that it isn’t there.
The Oblivion of the Surface
There is some relief in knowing that the system cannot monitor what you feel when pain or pleasure pulls you out of language altogether. Sade died asking for his grave to be nameless, for the earth to erase his memory. He knew that the total transparency we love so much today is the grave of true individuality.
Today, when everything is about “connecting” and “being visible,” the figure of the slave inhabiting his own secret seems almost enviable. Freedom is not being able to go anywhere, but having a corner of the soul where the State’s code doesn’t know how to translate what is happening.
I stopped writing for a moment to look at the wall. There is a small damp stain that looks like a map of a non-existent country. That country has no laws, no citizens, no human rights. Sometimes I envy that stain for its ability to simply be there, ruining the perfect paint of the room.
