“Sade makes pornograms. The pornogram is not merely the written trace of erotic practice, nor even the product of a cutting up of that practice, treated as a grammar of sites and operations; through a new chemistry of the text, it is the fusion (as under high temperature) of discourse and body. (”You will see me completely naked,” Eugénie says to her professor: “dissertate on me as much as you want”), so that, that point having been reached, the writing will be what regulates the exchange of Logos and Eros, and that it will be possible to speak of the erotic as a grammarian and of language as a pornographer.”
—Roland Barthes, from Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. R. Miller, 1971.
We’re a little wiped out by Christmas. Hope you had a good one too. The Bookkake blog will be back in the New Year with more Monday poems and dirty posts. See you in 2009…
Illustration: detail from a Dutch printing of Juliette from 1789, courtesy of AMEA.
