3 - Libidinal economy in Sade and Klossowski

Summary

In Sade, the group of relations surrounding the value of the monetary sign and its intensity is quite different from that found in prostitution. To begin with, the client's body is the same as the procurer's – and from this perhaps stems Sade's republicanism. The Society of the Friends of Crime is not the society of procurers. The criminal milieu embodies the duplicity of signs: adultery of money with jouissance, fraud of jouissance when it is converted into currency. The sign of these exchanges becomes the accomplice of untransmittable phantasms; the consumption of the libidinal singularity is bought at the price of universally estimable sums in the form of money. Like Hegel's Mitte, the criminal milieu assures the institution's permeability to desire. In this respect there is little difference between it and the Police. “Perverse” drives are channeled by it towards the social body, the body of exchanges, towards the circuit of the communication of exchanges and goods. It is a milieu of duplicity and dissimulation par excellence, even though it has no need to hide itself, just like the Police, since it too is concerned with the detection and regulation of allegedly socially perverse partial drives.