NOTEBOOK · THE ENJOYMENT OF EVIL · INTRODUCTION 01
Shame will save the world.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
Evil is supposed to be an exhausted word: theological, inflated, unusable. Yet it returns whenever cruelty sheds its alibis. Sade understood the scandal before modernity could admit it. His libertine does not harm for profit, revenge, or passion. He harms because causeless violence offers a purer form of sovereignty—and because the less reason an act can claim, the greater the pleasure.
The Old Word That Will Not Die: Why “Evil” Still Matters
Evil. The word persists as one of the most enduring presences in the lexicon of our disenchanted days—scandalous in its intractability, unavoidable in its claim upon the attention of our thinkers and philosophers, our influencers, leaders, and moralizers.
These notes will therefore resist treating evil as a relic of theology, a ready-made focus for moral outrage, or yet another weary metaphor in contemporary philosophy’s procession of discontents. But what, precisely, can the word still express?
To name evil in our post-Enlightenment, post-truth age is to risk defeat from the outset. The term seems saturated with ancient dualisms, compromised by religious Manicheisms, and diluted by the hyperbole of polemical discourse. Call every injustice evil and the word soon tells us nothing. Exile it from serious thought and something equally important disappears: the unassimilated remainder in acts of destruction whose cruelty exceeds every explanation offered for them.
The word refuses extinction. It resurfaces whenever the world’s fragility is exposed to arbitrary devastation: when forests are incinerated for profit or sheer delectation; when populations are left to drown or starve; when technologies of war translate human lives into collateral data; when cruelty appears not as the aberration of a few but as a self-validating instrument of the many—a mark of sovereignty and distinction amid the misery of the victimized billions.
Injustice, inequality, exclusion, exploitation, domination: these terms remain indispensable. They identify structures, distribute responsibility, and prevent metaphysical fog from replacing political analysis. Yet none quite names the peculiar scandal of cruelty pursued beyond advantage—violence that does not merely fail to justify itself, but seems to draw energy from that failure.
Sade saw this long before modernity could admit it.
Sade’s Cold Sovereign: Cruelty Beyond Need and Hatred
In Les 120 journées de Sodome, Sade imagines the subject who detests the transcendent realm “with sovereignty”: a distinguished individual dwelling in what the text calls an “emptiness and nothingness of virtue,” governed only by the “laws of nature” (Sade, 120 journées 9, 20). The old guarantees have been cleared away. No divine command, moral ideal, or consoling metaphysics remains. In their place lies the anarchic opacity of lust and the shifting “tensors” of its libidinal economy (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy 237).
Sade’s libertine is not driven by need or lack. Blanchot calls him the sovereign being, l’Unique: the one who refuses dependence even upon the objects of his desire (“Sade” 722–23). He does not approach another person in order to love, conquer, possess, or even avenge himself. He is driven by “the idea of evil” itself, exercised with an almost administrative neutrality through the negation of another person’s sovereignty (Sade, 120 journées 152).
This neutrality is decisive. What horrifies in Sade is not only the extremity of the violation but the affectless composure with which it is imagined. The libertine acts without passion, persuaded that the only drive animating humanity is a purely arbitrary inclination toward cruelty—a “certain wickedness” that draws us toward another being in order to deprive that being of freedom, individuality, and dignity (Sade, 120 journées 121).
The scene is colder than hatred. Hatred still confesses a bond: an injury remembered, a rival recognized, an object invested with feeling. Sade’s sovereign wishes to owe his victim nothing—not even the compliment of rage. The other is useful chiefly as the surface upon which an unconditioned will can experience itself as unique in its sovereignty.
The Arithmetic of Cruelty: Less Reason, Greater Enjoyment
Again and again, Sade returns to the same scandalous axiom: the pleasure of cruelty increases as its transcendent rationale dissolves. Moral, ethical, philosophical, political, ideological, or affective reason does not intensify the act. It limits it by binding violence to a motive outside itself.
“I find in evil a rather piquant allure,” Sade’s subject declares, “capable of awakening in me all the sensations of pleasure, and I indulge in it for itself alone, and with no other interest than itself alone” (120 journées 121). When destruction becomes causeless—as it renounces revenge, gain, justice, duty, and even desire—the principle of “doing evil” acquires a “voluptuous tickling” that motivated cruelty cannot equal (121).
The proposition is obscene, but it is not obscure. To dominate another person for money remains tied to money; to do so in revenge remains tied to a prior wound; to kill in the name of an ideology remains tethered, however mendaciously, to a promised world. Such motives do not excuse violence. They make it intelligible within an economy of means and ends.
Sade asks what happens when that economy is voided and discarded.
His sovereign subject is defined not merely by transgression, but by the arbitrariness of destructive agency: the power to injure, violate, and unmake, under “the sole principle of debauchery and libertinage” (120 journées 10). Sovereignty begins where the act no longer appeals to anything beyond the intensity of jouissance it yields. The pleasure lies not despite the disappearance of reasonable motive, but because of it.
This is Sade’s Copernican shift. Evil ceases to be an unfortunate instrument—something committed for a reward, under compulsion, or in service of a false good—and becomes an “idea” pursued for itself. Its libidinal intensity rises in proportion to the act’s emancipation from cause. The formula is brutally economical: The less reason, the greater the enjoyment.
The formula does not mean that every apparently senseless crime is secretly committed for pleasure. Nor does it abolish history, psychology, ideology, or material interest. It identifies a surplus that those explanations can leave behind: the enjoyment attached to being able to negate another person without having to answer why.
Here the Enlightenment subject encounters his obscene underside. Behind the expansive agency of the self-founding individual, Sade uncovers a sovereignty tempted to recognize no law other than the subjection of another. The subject proves his independence by making someone else dependent; demonstrates his freedom by abolishing another’s; converts the absence of justification into evidence of power.
To dominate in revenge is still to acknowledge a causal world. To dominate without cause is to savor what Blanchot calls the “sovereign power of negation” in its purest expression (“Sade” 723).
Flies to Wanton Boys: Evil After the Gods
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” Gloucester says in King Lear: “They kill us for their sport.” Sade’s modernity begins when humanity no longer needs the gods to play the game.
Entire regions are destabilized by conflicts whose strategic and ideological explanations disintegrate amid the rubble they create. Climate catastrophe accelerates not only because economies require energy, but because waste itself has become a form of reckless enjoyment—a compulsive attachment to practices known to threaten the conditions of life. Technologies of surveillance, extraction, and killing hide indifference to the human behind the serene face of protocol. Populations are abandoned not always from scarcity, but from the political decision that their suffering may be watched, administered, and continued.
In each case, explanation remains necessary. But explanation must not become absolution, and causality must not be allowed to conceal surplus cruelty. A policy may have an objective and still generate forms of suffering that exceed it. A war may have a declared aim and still acquire a self-perpetuating appetite for ruin. A market may pursue profit and still cultivate a sumptuary pleasure in waste. An audience may deplore catastrophe and still consume its images with fascinated repetition, if not downright Schadenfreude.
This is why Sade’s scandal haunts our era more urgently than it did his. Modernity has multiplied the sites where the negation of another person can be conducted at a distance, divided among institutions, or disguised as technical necessity. It has also multiplied the screens on which arbitrary suffering becomes atmosphere: continuously transmitted, intermittently deplored, and rapidly displaced by the next spectacle.
Human-caused evil now permeates intimate and collective life as a background condition. Yet philosophy has often contemplated it in transcendental terms—as privation, fall from Grace, mystery, tragic fate, or the occult work of wanton gods. Sade’s scorched anthropology refuses that alibi. Evil is human practice: material, embodied, historical. It is produced in relations among people, organized by discourse and institution, and intensified wherever the negation of another becomes a source of distinction.
Sade’s lesson should not console us, and it should not license cynicism. It should make moral and intellectual evasion more difficult. If evil can be enjoyed precisely where justification collapses, then the task is not merely to expose false reasons. It is to confront the pleasure invested in having no reason at all.
That confrontation leads to a more disturbing question. What if Sade’s imperative is not outside Enlightenment law, but its hidden double? What if the command to act universally carries, in its shadow, an equally imperious command to enjoy?
The next entry enters that shadow.
List of Bibliographical Abbreviations
120 journées (Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage)
Bibliography
Blanchot, Maurice. “Sade.” Sade: Œuvres. Ed. Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1953. 685–732.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Sade, D. A. F. de. Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage. Ed. Eugène Dühren. Paris: Club des Bibliophiles, 1904.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. Kenneth Muir, Arden Edition [2nd ser.]. London: Methuen, 1952.