Donatien Alphonse François de Sade would have been fascinated by the concept of Virtual Reality, but he probably would have been bored within ten minutes by the lack of material resistance. For the Marquis, freedom was not an abstract concept occurring in a cloud; it was something exercised against matter, against bone, and against the will of the other. Today, however, we are building a paradise of sanitized sensations where you can simulate any abyss from the safety of your living room, without the risk of staining your hands or being arrested for anything more serious than a connection error. It is desire without the consequences of anatomy, a toy sovereignty where the body is just a peripheral we’ve forgotten to update.
I feel a strange tension at the base of my neck, that knot that appears after spending too much time trying to focus on a reality flickering at sixty frames per second. It’s a reminder that my spine still obeys gravity, no matter how much my mind tries to convince itself it’s floating in a digital environment. I wonder if we are losing the capacity to feel anything that doesn’t have an off switch. I don’t know. Perhaps flesh is the last obstacle we have to becoming truly free, or the last frontier preventing us from becoming mere data.
The air in the room smells of that dry ozone emitted by processors pushed to their limit and a faint, distant scent of synthetic lavender that someone decided was the aroma of relaxation. It is an aseptic, almost surgical atmosphere. It makes me think that in the virtual world, sweat is a rendering option and blood is just a special effect that doesn’t stain the carpet. It is the definitive domestication of excess: transgression with a pause button.
The Sovereignty of the Avatar: The Self as a Costume
It is ironic that we are obsessed with personalizing our avatars while our mental health has become a kind of modern decoration; we buy digital skins and accessories for characters that have no nervous system, while our own collapses from a lack of sun and real touch. Sade understood that the “self” is defined in the clash with the external, in friction. In Virtual Reality, there is no clash, only the collision of polygons. You can be a libertine or a saint, but at the end of the session, you are just someone taking off a headset to find your face marked by the weight of the plastic.
Sometimes, the truth isn’t high-resolution. It’s blurry. Like that feeling of disorientation when you return to the physical world and find that your hands take a second too long to obey you.
I wonder if you, on the other side of the screen, don’t feel that your life is sometimes a low-fidelity VR scenario: plenty of interaction, but very little actual weight. Or maybe your eyes are just tired. The line is very thin between total immersion and simple ocular fatigue.
Sadism Without Victims: The Paradox of Binary Ethics
Sade understood that the human being is a predator that has learned to use silver cutlery to hide the fact that, if it could, it would devour the entire world. In VR, they give us the silver but take away the food. We can simulate the darkest scenarios of The 120 Days of Sodom without there being a single real victim, leaving us in a fascinating moral limbo. If there is no harm, is there transgression? Or is it just a more sophisticated form of intellectual masturbation? Haptic technology tries to give us back touch, but for now, it only gives us vibrations that mimic life, as if the entire universe were a giant mobile phone trying to get our attention.
I feel a dull emptiness in my stomach, that sensation of freefall that occurs when the brain detects movement that the inner ear doesn’t confirm. It’s a technological nausea, a protest from my biological system against the visual lie. It’s curious how the body is the first to denounce that what we see is not what we are.
Why are we so urgent to escape our own flesh? Perhaps because the body is the place where pain, illness, and death reside—things Sade accepted as part of the game, but which we prefer to filter with an algorithm. Digital order is the fear we have that our biological fragility is the only thing we cannot update. Sade invites us to inhabit our vulnerability to its ultimate consequences; virtual reality offers us a refuge where death is just a loading screen and desire never actually breaks a sweat.
The Return to Matter
There is a strange relief in knowing that no matter how much we perfect immersion goggles, they can never simulate the weight of a real gaze or the temperature of breath on the back of the neck. Sade died asking for his grave to be covered in vegetation to disappear, an act of dissolution into matter that today seems like an unattainable luxury in a world where every one of our virtual movements is recorded forever on a server in Arizona.
Today, when everything is an “immersive experience,” true subversion is physical contact without mediation. The capacity to feel something that hasn’t been programmed by a Silicon Valley engineer is the last sovereignty we have left. The virtual world can give you the image of pleasure, but it cannot yet give you the real exhaustion that comes after having truly lived.
I stopped writing for a moment to look at the palm of my hand. There is a small scar near the thumb, a reminder of a time I cut myself on glass years ago. That scar doesn’t have a perfect 3D model, nor can it be erased with a software patch. It’s there, stubborn and real. Sometimes I envy avatars for their flawless skin, but then I touch that mark and remember that the only reality that matters is the one that leaves scars.
