Sade and the First Check
The first time Sade thought about checking himself, he didn’t know it would repeat.
It wasn’t an important decision.
It was almost a gesture.
Something small.
Like opening a door for no reason.
Afterwards he couldn’t remember if he had opened it.
That was the first thing.
The normal thing.
Or what seemed normal.
Sade remembers sitting down.
The screen on.
His hand still.
That fits.
That should close the scene.
But it doesn’t.
Because there is a second moment that doesn’t match the first.
The moment he realizes he is checking whether he is still there.
Not his body.
Not the room.
Him.
He thought it was fatigue.
That explanation didn’t last long.
Because fatigue doesn’t explain why he needs to check again even after he has already checked.
He stands up.
Looks at the mirror.
Normal.
He recognizes himself.
That should be enough.
But it isn’t.
Because the problem isn’t the reflection.
It’s the moment before recognition.
Sade writes something down to fix it.
“I am here”
Later he doesn’t remember writing it.
He reads it as if it came from somewhere else.
That should be a proof.
But proofs don’t work like proofs anymore.
They work like repeated doubts.
He decides to test it.
Walks through the room.
Counts the steps.
Comes back.
Everything matches.
That should end the loop.
It doesn’t.
Because something worse starts forming.
That the problem isn’t whether he is there.
But whether he was the one who decided to start checking.
For a moment he thinks he understands.
The idea appears.
Almost complete.
But it doesn’t arrive.
It breaks before finishing.
As if it had been thought by someone who is no longer there.
Sade stops.
Not because he chooses to.
But because he doesn’t know if stopping is an action or a result.
There is a brief moment of clarity.
Too brief.
In that moment he understands something uncomfortable.
That he has been trying to find himself in the wrong place.
Not in what he does.
But in the moment just before he does it.
And then the sentence returns.
Not as a thought.
As something that comes back.
I need to check that I am still the one who is checking.
And before he finishes thinking it, he is already doing it again.
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…
