SOURCE: "Sade and the Pornographic Legacy," in Representations, No. 36, Fall, 1991, pp. 1-21.

In this excerpt, Ferguson discusses Philosophy in the Bedroom as an "antimetaphysical" and "anticultural" political dialogue and relates elements of the text to French policy regarding the national debt.

In the discussion that follows, I shall be, essentially, taking up various aspects of the view that Sade attempts in Philosophy in the Bedroom to write a political dialogue that would be as material—as physical and as unmetaphysical—as possible. In that sense, understanding pornography as a genre with specific claims embedded in its medium seems important. For pornography's medium—or its heuristic medium—would avoid representational metaphysics; it would write in bodies (as in the passage at the beginning of the Philosophy in which Madame de Saint-Ange offers herself up as an instructional aid, the living embodiment of an anatomy chart).

In addition to arguing...