For the Marquis de Sade, the cell was not deprivation, but a more precise form of reading.
That is the first thing I remember thinking… although I am no longer sure when it stopped being an idea and became something closer to a way of looking.
Charenton, his final years, the manuscripts written inside an enclosure where the outside world no longer arrived as reality but as administrative rumor. That detail is always repeated as biography, but what started to interest me was never the historical fact.
It was something else.
It was persistence.
The way a mind can keep producing language when there is nothing left to justify it.
For a long time I thought I was reading Sade.
Then I understood something uncomfortable.
I was not reading him.
I was following him.
And there is a difference I could not name at first.
The cell, in its logic, does not reduce the world.
It replaces it.
There is not enough outside to correct what happens inside.
Only wall. Only return. Only repetition of the same thought until it stops behaving like thought and becomes pressure.
I closed an article about him without noticing.
The screen stayed on.
The cursor blinked as if something still needed to be understood.
It was not a historical image that held me.
It was the feeling that enclosure does not belong to the past.
It only changes surface.
In Sade’s texts — in The 120 Days of Sodom, in Justine, in his stay at Charenton — there is always a point where structure stops being narrative and becomes system. A mechanism that no longer needs moral permission to keep functioning.
That is what stayed inside me.
Not cruelty.
Not excess.
But continuity.
The impossibility of exiting a logic once it has been activated.
Later I found marks in the wall of my own room.
Nothing important.
Small old holes. Traces of something removed without ceremony.
And yet I kept looking at them too long.
As if they were proof that space also remembers, even when it does not announce it.
That is when the shift happened.
The cell was not a place.
It was a form of attention.
And Sade was not inside it as a historical figure.
He was inside it as structure.
As the idea that looking at something long enough can turn it into a system.
I closed everything.
The silence of the room did not change.
But reading did.
I was no longer looking for information about Sade.
I was looking for the exact moment where failing to understand him became impossible to stop.
And that was what disturbed me most.
Not that I kept reading.
But that I still believed there might be a precise point where meaning would stabilize.
As if the next sentence could correct the previous one.
As if there were still an exit that depended on reading a little more.
As if enclosure could be solved through continuation.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
