Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Let us (if we can) imagine a society without language.  Here is a man copulating with a woman, a tergo, and using in the act a bit of wheat paste.  On this level, no perversion.  Only by the progressive addition of some nouns does the crime gradually develop, grow in volume, in consistency, and attain the highest degree of transgression.  the man is called the father of the woman he is possessing, who is described as being married; the amorous act is ignominiously termed sodomy; and the bit of bread bizarrely associated in this act becomes, under the noun host, a religious symbol whose flouting is sacrilege.  Sade excells in collecting this pile of language: for him, the sentence has this function of founding crime: the syntax, refined by centuries of culture, becomes an elegant (in the sense we use the word in mathematics, a solution is elegant) art; it collects crime with exactitude and address: “To unite incest, adultery, sodomy and sacrilege, he buggers his married daughter with a host.” pg. 156-157

“Language and Crime” from Roland Barthes’ Sade, Fourier, Loyola