choderlos de laclos

'On peut citer de mauvais vers, quand ils sont d'un grand poète.'

'J'ai bien besoin d'avoir cette femme, pour me sauver du ridicule d'en être amoureux.'

'...ce délire de la volupté où le plaisir s'épure par son excès, ces biens de l'amour, ne sont pas connus d'elles. Je vous le prédis; dans la plus heureuse supposition, votre présidente croira avoir tout fait pour vous en vous traitant comme son mari, et dans le tête-à-tête conjugal le plus tendre, on reste toujours deux. '

--Choderlos de Laclos

this guy is pretty funny. 18th century culture is really better than 19th century culture, although the arts weren't yet ready to express it. it's really only in the brief 'post-romantic' 1910-1920 period that art attained all of its expressive potential (prior, that is, to the invention of modern sound and video recording). it's not until schoenberg's op.10-21 that music attains a full pallette, and is capable of anything (unfortunately a decline into modernism followed precipitously). and for literature, the best parts of proust. and then the era of high art was over, and we had to start again from scratch.

but perhaps a superior culture doesn't need superior artworks. or at least, doesn't need expressive artworks, but decorative and amusing ones, because the real seat of the culture is life itself and not its products. casanova and sade wrote only when they had nothing else to do, out of boredom. it's possible that the post-romantic artists only needed to expand the expressive possibilities of art because they could feel their culture collapsing. art was their only refuge from lifelessness. but, foolishly, to justify themselves, they painted this refuge in art as the summum bonum of human life, rather than the desperate fallback that it is. could it be that the artist's perpetual critique of the philosopher as dry and lifeless conceals a deeper lifelessness on the part of the artist?

in the master-slave dialectic, hegel paints the slave as dignified by his self-objectification in labor, or rather, in the products of his labor. he comes to self-consciousness as a maker, a creator, a craftsman, or at least a farmer. supposedly this becomes a problem only further along, when, under capitalism, he no longer produces a product but only money itself, thus, money alone becomes his objective essence. but maybe the mistake is already in the master-slave dialectic itself: the master is criticized because he cannot be recognized, his life consists in fulfilling his desires through consumption, and what he consumes cannot recognize him, but can only disappear, be used up. but what if in this disappearance, this subtraction of entities, he has caught on to the truth of being (which ought to be crossed out, not for heideggerian reasons, but to signify its subtractive nature), namely, disappearance?

hegel says '...the thing is independent vis-à-vis the bondsman, whose negating of it, therefore, cannot go to the length of being altogether done with it to the point of annihilation; in other words, he only works on it. For the lord, on the other hand, the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it. What desire failed to achieve, he succeeds in doing, viz. to have done with the thing altogether, and to achieve satisfaction in the enjoyment of it.' the artist is just another kind of bondsman.

when choderlos de laclos writes 'le plaisir s'épure par son excès,' he indicates that not only does is the thing annihilated in the enjoyment of it, but the lord qua subject as well.