At first I was looking for information about the Marquis de Sade.
A name.
An author.
Something that could be clearly placed inside history.
At first, it was simple curiosity—almost academic.
But it did not stay that way for long.
Then I began to notice something strange.
I was no longer reading to find out who he was.
I was trying to understand why I kept returning to him.
I would close one text and open another.
As if something essential was missing from the next one.
As if the explanation was always slightly displaced, always waiting on the next page.
That was the strange part.
The more I learned about Sade, the less defined he became.
No coherent figure appeared.
Only a question that refused to settle.
I knew the basic facts.
An aristocrat from France, born in the 18th century.
Imprisoned for years in places such as the Bastille and later the asylum of Charenton.
Author of works like The 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue.
But none of that information closed anything.
It only opened more space.
Because what I was experiencing was not understanding.
It was return.
A soft compulsion, hard to justify.
As if the thought could never fully step away.
Sometimes I closed the book and stayed still.
The room remained unchanged.
Dust suspended in the light.
The low hum of the air.
Thin cracks in the wall I had never noticed before reading him.
Nothing had changed.
But the way I looked at it had.
Sade was not “in” the texts.
He shifted.
He leaked.
Not as a presence, but as persistence.
An idea that never fully becomes an object.
Nor a memory.
Nor a conclusion.
Only insistence.
And that is where it became uncomfortable.
Not the content.
But the repetition.
The fact that returning did not resolve anything.
It only sharpened the feeling that something was about to become clear.
After weeks reading Sade, I understood something unsettling.
I was never trying to understand him.
I was trying to understand why some things, once seen, refuse to disappear.
And yet I kept going back.
Not out of curiosity.
But because of the suspicion that, if I stayed a little longer, this time there might be an answer.
Even though part of me already knew that no answer had ever been guaranteed.
There was no clear transition.
No moment where I decided to change the subject.
At some point, the reading simply stopped feeling historical.
And started feeling structural.
What had been the Marquis de Sade no longer functioned as an object of study.
It functioned as a lens.
Something through which other scenes began to reorganize themselves.
At first I did not recognize it.
I was still reading works such as The 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue as if I were still inside a literary framework.
But there was a drift.
Small.
Persistent.
The idea of the gaze.
The idea of seeing something that is not addressed to you.
Or worse: seeing it while knowing you are not the center.
It was not a new idea.
But it began to repeat with an uncomfortable insistence.
As if Sade was not speaking about scenes, but about structures of perception.
About how desire organizes itself once it stops being private.
About how the mind shifts when access is no longer exclusive.
It was not a moral question.
Not even a narrative one.
It was something more basic.
The place from which one looks.
And what happens when that place is no longer guaranteed.
That is where the displacement began.
Not as a clear concept.
But as a sensation.
The feeling that some ways of seeing are not meant to produce understanding, but instability.
And I began to notice something I had not been searching for.
A figure that did not have a stable name in my mind at first.
Only a repeated scene.
The presence of a third.
Not as a character.
But as a condition.
Something that reorganizes space without touching it.
Something that turns intimacy into observation.
And observation into evidence.
What disturbed me was not the scene.
It was the persistence.
The fact that, just like with Sade, returning did not close anything.
It only sharpened the question.
What does it mean to look when the gaze no longer confirms anything?
What happens when desire stops sustaining exclusivity?
And why, the more I tried to treat it as an external idea, the more it resembled something internal.
Not a fantasy.
But a kind of mental structure that activates when the certainty of attachment begins to crack.
As if the same mechanism that once led me to Sade was now drifting into another, more concrete region.
More uncomfortable.
Harder to justify.
And the strangest part was that.
That I was not studying it as a phenomenon.
I was recognizing it as an echo.
As if some ways of seeing do not choose their objects.
They only find them.
And repeat them.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
