SOURCE: "Justine and the Discourse of the (Other) Master," in Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791. Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 333-74.

[In his book Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions, DiPiero argues that the novel arose as a medium of resistance to accepted literary genres and to the ideological assumptions they served to legitimize. In the following excerpt, he suggests that Sade's narrative strategies in Justine expose the constructed nature of discourse and ideology.]

In the marquis de Sade's Justine ou les malbeurs de Is vertu we will see [a] protagonist employ the discursive mode she learns from others. She not only represents herself with the express intent to seduce, but she threatens the security of bourgeois patriarchy's system of values.…

Despite critics' claims that Justine is a novel "in which nothing has been spared," the narrator who opens the work before handing narrative responsibility over to Justine implicitly addresses the possibility of achieving narrative mastery, the complete discursive control over the articulation and interpretation of texts. In the first sentence of the novel, he disavows the feasibility of representing the world completely.

The very masterpiece of philosophy would be to develop the means Providence employs to arrive at the ends she designs for man, and from this construction to deduce some rules of conduct acquainting this two-footed individual with the manner wherein he must proceed along life's thorny way, forewarned of the strange caprices of that fatality they denominate by twenty different titles, and all unavailingly, for it has not yet been scanned nor defined.

It is impossible, the narrator states, to represent everything. People might be better off if they could understand and explain nature and thus avoid the "strange caprices" that befall them; so far, however, no one has succeeded in domesticating nature, or in giving it a name whereby one could know and comprehend its system. If there were a masterpiece of philosophy—but the narrator reveals his skepticism in his use of the conditional mood—it would reveal nature as final cause, and demonstrate the system according to which it deals with people. The paradox here is that articulating that which escapes naming might make us feel more secure, but even with twenty different names the mysteries of nature still elude our understanding. Naming unveils and simultaneously dissimulates because it establishes specific discursive structures not only as adequate or realistic representations of actual social practice, but also, as we will see, as substitutes for those practices themselves.…

Barthes [in Tel Quel, Winter, 1967] calls Justine an "ambiguous victim endowed with narrating speech." Justine is the victim of a great many violent crimes, which certainly makes her seem a victim, but because she speaks she possesses what we have determined to be a very significant libertine characteristic: the manipulation of language. In fact, Justine's use of language is remarkably similar to the libertines'. "The master is the one who speaks, who disposes of language in its entirety," Barthes wrote. For three hundred pages, almost the entire recit of the novel, Justine is in control—she narrates, and she controls the scene. Not only is she the novel's principal narrator, but every time she meets a libertine she narrates the story of her life thus far: "And then I told in detail all of my ills" "[the first president judge] heard with interest the tale of my misfortunes" "I relate the horrors whereof I was simultaneously an observer and object." If libertines are those who speak and those who take pleasure in all sorts of sensation, Justine is indeed an ambiguous victim; in fact, as I will show, she looks very much like a libertine. If Justine does not derive some sort of benefit from the sensations the libertines evoke in her, it is hard to imagine why, after having learned the consequences, she continues to tell her tale.

Since the libertines can only occupy the master's position by opposing the principles of virtue and defining themselves against an other, it seems logical to ask whether Justine defines herself in opposition to the libertines. As she tells her tale, Justine takes no positions and she has no philosophies of virtue; she only ever contradicts libertine sophistry. If she is virtuous, then, it is to the extent that she attempts to be the other of vice. Yet, Justine rarely, if ever, resists the libertines. She says that she is virtuous, but her actions belie her words. Situations frequently arise in which Justine has the power to escape her tormentors' clutches, but more often than not she passes them by.…

Justine knows only one way to be virtuous, and that is to tell people that she is. She rarely performs or takes responsibility for a selfless virtuous act: in most instances in which Justine helps another it is for the benefits she can reap. In fact, she remarks early in the novel that "people are not esteemed save in reason of the aid and benefits one imagines may be had of them," and Justine herself seems to subscribe to this platitude. After Rodin burns the brand of the thief on Justine's shoulder and thus prevents her from turning him in to the authorities, Justine flees, leaving poor Rosalie, Rodin's daughter, to be vivisected.

Anyone else might have been little impressed by the menace; what would I have to fear as soon as I found the means to prove that what I had just suffered had been the work not of a tribunal but of criminals? But my weakness, my natural timidity, the frightful memory of what I had undergone at Paris and recollections of the chateau de Bressac—it all stunned me, terrified me; I thought only of flight, and was far more stirred by anguish at having to abandon an innocent victim to those two villains, who were without doubt ready to immolate her, than I was touched by my own ills.

Underscoring how unlike anyone else she is, Justine says that leaving Rosalie aggrieves her but she makes no move to help her; the only action she foresees is proving—that is, telling or explaining—her innocence.

Justine's most protracted attempt to tell of her innocence is the novel's recit itself. Except for fifteen paragraphs, the novel is composed of Justine's narrative to Corville and Lorsange. Justine encounters Corville and Lorsange when on her way to Paris for the confirmation of the death penalty she received in Lyon for having killed the baby in the fire. Lorsange and Corville ask her to tell them the story of her life, and since they appear rich and influential, Justine decides to oblige them. Attempting to charge her tale with all the pathos and abjection she can, Justine begins. Calling herself Therese in order to defend her family's honor, she prefaces her story with a disclaimer, informing her listeners that her narrative is transgressive: "To recount you the story of my life, Madame… is to offer you the most striking example of innocence oppressed, is to accuse the hand of Heaven, is to bear complaint against the Supreme Being's will, is, in a sense, to rebel against His sacred designs.… I dare not …' Tears gathered in this interesting girl's eyes and, after having given vent to them for a moment, she began her recitation in these terms." From the very beginning of Justine's narrative we can see some of the tricks she picked up from libertine narration. Barthes and Sollers [in Tel Quel, Winter, 1967] showed that the libertine use of language went beyond simple representation, and actually became criminal itself: as Sollers showed, telling became an act, the accomplishing of a crime. In the first sentences she utters, Justine accomplishes a transgression merely by her use of language: she claims that to recount equals to accuse and to bear complaint; to tell her story, she says, is to rebel against God's will. She turns a speech situation into a speech act because narrating her story, she avers, perpetrates an offense. Pausing only a moment to let the transgressive elements of her tale register with her audience, she plunges enthusiastically into the story.

Justine pauses a half-dozen or so times during her narrative, punctuating the recit with reminders that telling the story is transgressive: "Oh, Madame, I shall not attempt to represent the infamies of which I was at once victim and witness." With a little encouragement, however, she narrates the libertines' attempt to inscribe their marks of violence on Therese, the principal character in Justine's story. Justine's hesitations accomplish more than simply signaling to her audience that the tale is violent and that the very telling is blameworthy, however. Perhaps realizing that repeated description of events can cause her listeners' attention to wander, Justine incites them, through her hesitations, to inscribe their own marks of violence on her heroine Thérèse: "You will permit me, Madame,… to conceal a part of the obscene details of this odious ritual; allow your imagination to figure all that debauch can dictate to villains in such instances … and indeed it still will not have but a faint idea of what was done in those initial orgies." Justine gives them all the material they need to complete the story, but cannily telling them that what really happened is far worse than what she narrates, she gets them to supply for themselves the erotic details and to write their own endings to the story she begins. To keep her listeners actively involved, she frequently breaks her tale off: "But how can I abuse your patience by relating these new horrors? Have I not already more than soiled your imagination with infamous recitations? Dare I hazard additional ones? 'Yes, Therese,' Monsieur de Corville put in, 'yes, we insist upon these details.'" Justine's narrative strategies here resemble the libertines' to the extent that she informs her listeners that transgression is about to occur, and also to the extent that she redefines herself as victim by inciting her listeners to violate her mentally as they imagine scenes of violence she must have undergone.

Justine's use of language is equivalent to that of the libertines. The libertines, unable to achieve their goal of self-affirmation and plenitude, need language to define themselves over and against an other. The same is true of Justine. In order to assure maximum reaction from their addresses, the libertines describe the violence about to occur. The same is true of Justine, who hesitates before telling her audience the explicit aspects of her tale, and who reveals that even narrating her story is an affront to God. The libertines proceed by describing their acts of violence to Justine, and then inscribing their marks on her. The same is true of Justine, who incites her listeners to perform mental violence on her as she sets up a scene and then leaves the conclusion to them. But while the libertines use language as a means to jouissance and the concomitant narcissistic unity, Justine's narrative, despite making her seem the epitome of virtue and integrity, actually effects a radical split in her subjectivity. If the image of virtue she presents to her listeners seems designed to evoke their pity and provoke them to help her—which they finally do—the reality of Justine, the woman behind the image, is more complex and elusive than her representation of herself would suggest. Justine portrays herself, in the figure of Therese, as absolutely other to vice and libertinism, but as we will now see, Justine and Th&ese are not simply different names for the same woman: the two are radically different in their otherness and resistance to libertinism.

Klossowski argues that Justine is the paradigm of virtue and that her function in the novel is to throw the libertines into relief. Maintaining that she is no more complex than the image of virtue that the libertines and Corville and Lorsange receive from her narrative, he claims that the libertines manage to reach her in the deepest recesses of her being. He argues that Sade portrays Justine as "always equal to herself" and that Sade exploits the distress "of a consciousness reduced to its last defenses at the point at which it sees its inviolate self-possession threatened, in the representation that the self has of its own integrity, while consciousness always remains inseparable from the body lost to its eye." Yet, I would have to argue that Justine cannot be "equal to herself," because she depicts herself as a text, a collection of episodes, indeed a recit. Her complexity arises from the disjunction separating her life from the representation of it. Using the pseudonym Therese, she constructs a narrative other that necessarily differs substantially from her reality. She only describes episodes that cause her to appear virtuous because she is the other of libertinism. Her ordeals last more than thirteen years, and enough certainly happens to Justine over the course of these years to give her material for her tale. But Justine tells not "the story of [her] life," which is what she claims to be doing; she only tells the story of her troubles and of her resistance to the libertines. On at least four occasions Justine collapses periods of up to four years into one sentence ("I had remained four years in this household unrelentingly persecuted by the same sorrows,") and she never tells any episode in her thirteen-year journey unless it is hideously violent and morally degrading. She admits that some amusing anecdotes exist in her repertory, but the necessity of detailing her misfortunes takes precedence: "Were my cruel situation to permit me to amuse you for an instant, Madame, when I must think of nothing but gaining your compassion, I should dare describe somne of the symptoms of avarice I witnessed while in that house." By her own admission events occurred in Justine's life that do not contribute to the image she tries to project. Her narrative self does not correspond to her reality; Justine constructs her narrated self—Th&ese—with a very particular point in mind: to move her listeners to pity (attendrir). Justine is not, consequently, portrayed "equal to herself," as Klossowski claims, and Therese becomes an alienated, textual manifestation of Justine.…

Justine is concerned with the perlocutionary force of her tale, and she seems never to worry that her story might appear exaggerated or untrue. Justine strives to move her audience to pity, and the strategy she has chosen for doing so involves portraying Therese, her narrated self, as the incarnation of virtue. Therese is the undauntable other of libertinism whose spirit the libertines never succeed in breaking. Her story consists of nothing but repeated episodes of violence, and her virtue appears greater with each encounter because she never ceases to offer resistance. Justine and Therese differ in one significant respect, however. The more violence Therese suffers in Justine's story, the greater her virtue and her resistance to corruption seem to be. The real woman Justine, however, the narrator who lived through these ordeals, had an entirely different kind of resistance, one essential to the pathos of the story she constructs. That resistance is a specifically physical resistance. If we look closely at Justine's encounters with the libertines, we see that she is repeatedly violated because she offers strong moral and physical resistance. That is, everyone who meets Justine is taken with her remarkable beauty, and one of the reasons why the libertines find her so attractive as a victim is that her body appears fresh and virginal, and hence ripe for transgression. Even after repeated scenes of violence, even after being raped, branded, beaten, and infibulated, Justine's body is none the worse for wear. All marks on Justine's body mysteriously disappear—even her hymen grows back. At the end of her ordeals Justine is still described as a woman with "the loveliest figure imaginable, the most noble, the most agreeable, the most interesting visage, in brief, there were there all the charms of a sort to please."

The significance of Justine's inability to retain a trace of the marks of violence inscribed on her is paramount if she is to appear as the quintessence of virtue. Since the strength of her virtue is in direct proportion to the amount of violence she undergoes, it figures that Justine must be violated as often as possible if she is to appear the other of libertinism. Yet, if her body showed signs of wear, the transgression involved in each violation would be less, particularly since the libertines violate whatever offers greatest resistance. The narrated, textual Therese thus differs from Justine in its ability to retain the marks or memory of violence. By creating the textual Therese, Justine constitutes a means by which the traces of violence she underwent can be recorded and inscribed in the memory of her audience. The more violence they hear she underwent, the more they construe her as the apotheosis of virtue. Justine's description of her resistance to vice in the figure of Therese in this way makes virtue—as we saw was the case with libertine vice—a specifically discursive phenomenon.

Consequently, Justine's story of Therese foregrounds a form of vraisemblance. Despite the fact that it is physically impossible for anyone to have lived through the ordeals Justine describes, much less to remain beautiful and innocent to boot, the tale retains an affective and ideological register clearly endorsing bourgeois patriarchy's conception of feminine sexuality and, consequently, moral rectitude. The story of Therese is not realistic in any traditional sense, but it is vraisemblable, since in the abstract and globalizing conception of virtue it highlights a determined political vision of the way things ought to be. Strikingly, then, Justine's version of virtue, which depends on the narrative construction of Therese as the unrealistic yet ideologically plausible apotheosis of virtue, is rhetorically equivalent to libertine vice. It is a discursive construction with no sound philosophical or moral basis, and it exists solely as the negation of its other.

Justine and her libertine tormentors are engaged in a dialectical struggle in which neither virtue nor vice has any positive characteristics. Each exists solely as the negation of its other, and each requires the support of a discursive representation in order to smooth over the gaps implicit in its logical and ideological composition. Both Justine and the libertines depend on the narrated figure Therese to fill in the holes in their philosophical narratives. The libertines need to inscribe their violence on Therese in order to annihilate her and approach the consummation of their own jouissance, and Justine must mark Therese so that her tale will attain the level of vraisemblance required to convey the pathos she specifies early on. Justine and the libertines are consequently engaged in a rhetorical struggle, one concerned less with the ideology of virtue and more with the narrative structure of ideology.

Justine and the libertines compete in telling different stories about Therese. The novel could go on forever, like Le Roman bourgeois, except for the deus ex machina that terminates Justine's life. Up until the moment of Justine's death, the novel is a battle of conflicting philosophies, with each side sharpening and refining its point of view with no possible resolution in sight. Justine's narrative winds down to the point at which she met Mme de Lorsange and M. de Corville when, as in a labyrinthine heroic novel, she discovers that Mme de Lorsange is her sister Juliette. Justine and Juliette retire to the latter's chateau, where Justine receives all the loving attention she ever wanted. One day a storm appears.

Lightning glitters, shakes, hail slashes down, winds blow wrathfully, heaven's fire convulses the clouds, in the most hideous manner makes them to seethe; it seems as if Nature were wearied out of patience with what she has wrought, as if she were ready to confound all the elements that she might wrench new forms from them. Terrified, Madame de Lorsange begs her sister to make all haste and close the shutters; anxious to calm her, Therese dashes to the windows which are already being broken; she would do battle with the wind, she gives a minute's flight, is driven back and at that instant a blazing thunderbolt reaches her where she stands in the middle of the room; at that moment a burst of lightning lays her flat in the middle of the room.… The unhappy Therese has been struck in such wise hope itself can no longer subsist for her; the lightning entered her right breast, found the heart, and after having consumed her chest and face, burst out through her belly.

Where no mortal had succeeded in reaching Justine and leaving a trace on her virginal body, in a flash nature inscribes its mark on her and annihilates her, thus putting to an end in as random a fashion possible the antagonistic relationship she entertained with the libertines.

The arbitrary conclusion to Justine's life represents more than simply Sade's only way out of the impossibly antagonistic relationship he had created, however. The final inscription of violence on the victim's body is a literal and metaphoric dis-figurement of the character Justine. The lightning permanently deforms the beautiful young woman, thus accomplishing the feat Justine's antagonists failed to perform. Correlatively and more importantly, however, the marks left on Justine's body by a non-intentional, indeliberate force obliterate her figurative incarnation in the form of the narrated Therese: eliminating the discrepancy between the woman and her self-representation, the force of nature that marks and kills her immediately extricates her from the dialectical and antagonistic relationship with vice.

In concert with the opening paragraph of Justine, then, the title character's death shows nature as final cause. Indeterminate because it lies outside of any discursive configuration capable of containing it, nature as a force of the Real lacks any ideological dimension. Yet, the conclusion of Justine underscores the determinate work of interpretation that ascribes to any act a meaningful and finite sense: Juliette reads the marks on her sister Justine's body, and she inserts the woman's life into the narrative and ideological paradigm that the tale's vraisemblance was designed to construe. "The miserable thing was hideous to look upon; Monsieur de Corville orders that she be borne away.… 'No,' says Madame de Lorsange, getting to her feet with the utmost calm; 'no, leave her here before my eyes, Monsieur, I have got to contemplate her in order to be confirmed in the resolves I have just taken.'" Juliette contemplates her sister's disfigured body, and reads in the hideous marks the unambiguous proof that nature demands people's adherence to the principles of virtue. Her interpretation of her sister's gruesome death is that straying from the path of virtue might provide one with a few chimeric rewards here on earth, but the true road to felicity lies in austere virtue. Juliette goes off to become a Carmelite, and the horrible example of her sister's death leads her to become "the example of order and edification, as much by her great piety as by the wisdom of her mind and the regularity of her manners."

The conclusion of Justine's pitiful life strikes Juliette as too significant not to be meaningful. The story seems to close on a highly charged, resolute note: the miscreant Juliette sees the light and reforms her life. She thinks she recognizes the will of nature in the marks it inscribed on Justine's body, and as she contemplates the corpse, she pronounces these final words:

The unheard-of sufferings this luckless creature has experienced although she has always respected her duties, have something about them which is too extraordinary for me not to open my eyes upon my own self; think not I am blinded by that false-gleaming felicity which, in the course of Therese's adventures, we have seen enjoyed by the villains who battened upon her. These caprices of Heaven's hand are enigmas it is not for us to sound, but which ought never seduce us.

Juliette abandons vice and embraces virtue, it seems, solely because of the natural phenomenon that disfigured and killed her sister. She interprets the definitive marks left on Justine by the bolt of lightning as the unequivocal proof that the moral of her sister's story unambiguously advocated virtue, and furthermore that this moral represents a divine will. In addition, Juliette continues to refer to Justine as Therese, even though she knows her true identity, as if to emphasize the discursively constructed nature of both her life and her virtue. Juliette observes the bizarre yet nevertheless natural phenomenon of her sister's untimely death, and forces it into one of the narrative paradigms that Justine's tale offers.

Juliette's interpretation of Justine's story matches the one prescribed by the novel's external narrator. This narrator, who opens the novel and who assumes control after Justine's death near its conclusion, apologizes for having written a didactic work whose lesson may be difficult to absorb:

Doubtless it is cruel to have to describe, on the one hand, a host of ills overwhelming a sweet-tempered and sensitive woman who, as best she is able, respects virtue, and, on the other, the affluence of prosperity of those who crush and mortify this same woman. But were there nevertheless some good engendered of the demonstration, would one have to repent of making it? Ought one be sorry for having established a fact whence there resulted, for the wise man who reads to some purpose, so useful a lesson of submission to providential decrees and the fateful warning that it is often to recall us to our duties that Heaven strikes down beside us the person who seems to us best to have fulfilled his own?

The opening paragraphs of the work situate the novel within the didactic critical tradition that had evolved to shield fiction against charges of illegitimacy or moral indecency. In addition, the unequivocal interpretation concerning bourgeois virtue's moral and political superiority that the narrator's posturing intimates all reasonable readers will advocate situates the novel in the tradition of heroic fiction's master narratives. Juliette's interpretation of her sister's life, sanctioned by the novel's external narrator, strips Justine of her personal specificity and makes of her a purely abstract, emblematic figure of bourgeois conceptions of virtue.

The conclusion of Justine highlights the hermeneutic processes implicated by the story Justine tells and by the tradition of the moral exemplum to which the work belongs. Juliette insists on seeing a moral significance in her sister's natural death, and she inscribes the young woman's life in the ideology of bourgeois patriarchal virtue. Justine consequently resembles La Princesse de Clves and La Religieuse to the extent that it objectifies a valorized interpretive practice and underscores the limits of its ability to negotiate contemporary political and moral reality. Where La Princesse de Clves and La Religieuse foreground the failure of literary convention and the concomitant demystification of fiction's mechanisms, however, Justine undertakes a dismantling of the politics supporting a privileged model of vraisemblance. It uncovers the resilience of a determinate ideological system to appear natural even when the narrative episodes it contains could scarcely be more preposterous.

Unlike many of his predecessors who ceaselessly repeated that their narratives were true, Sade never claims that Justine is referentially accurate. He ironically maintains, rather, that the violent narrative episodes he relates are essential to impart the moral lesson that virtue is better than vice. However, Sade never depicts any actions in Justine that might be construed as virtuous—except, perhaps, the heroine's resistance to libertine sophistry. Since we have seen, however, that libertine vice and Justine's virtue constitute themselves exclusives through the negation of their other, it is equally possible to interpret vice as the libertine attempt to resist the oppressive ideology of bourgeois notions of virtue, a classbased political philosophy designed to keep the disenfranchised powerless. Justine unsettles the traditional bourgeois conception of virtue, a conception based primarily on sexual restraint and the respect of property, and it demonstrates the extent to which an individual's body and his or her access to pleasure have become a marketable commodity and, consequently, a form of property whose circulation can be rigidly controlled. Sade's libertines strive to break free from the politically determined apprehension of their own bodies and of the pleasures that traverse them; their failure to achieve unmediated access to the complete repertory of their own sensations, however, rehearses the narrator's early warning that all attempts to erect self-contained and self-present systems are doomed to failure. Sade's libertines rely on narrative constructions to transgress their victims and increase their own pleasure; their own access to the truth they propound is consequently restricted to language's capacity to represent the ideological systems they strive to breach. The idea of truth in Justine is not only relational and contingent upon the dialectic between vice and virtue, but it is constructed at every step of the way, from the philosophical explanations of transgression to the physical mutilation of Justine's body, uniquely through narrative.

Sade's novel depicts individualism as it is constructed only through the transgression of existing social laws. His libertines strive to upset their victims' sense of virtue by disfiguring the stability of the philosophical language used to support it and consequently wrenching them free of the social bonds uniting them to their fellow humans. Paradoxically, delivery from social bonds constitutes both the source of jouissance for the libertines, who strive to become absolutely unique, and the epitome of torture for Therese, who requires a sense of identity with her fellow human beings in order for her conception of virtue to make sense. Libertines can only accomplish optimum transgression and retain the linguistic and physical mastery that ensues by expounding their philosophies and by narrating the scenes to transpire; in addition, their mastery relies on a disfiguring of language. Consequently, their quest for pleasure and mastery depends on a dual dialectic linking the opposition between the individual and the social to that opposing mimetic and poetic uses of language. That is, libertines first establish themselves as the masters of language by deploying standard tools of rhetoric and sophistry in order to upset their victims' stable conceptions of truth, a process that disconnects their victims from their own social realities. Demonstrating that language can shape and re-form reality as much as it can refer to it, they isolate their victims and strip them of all social identity. The ensuing physical mutilation pits consecrated individuals against one another. The victims inevitably lose the battle because they define themselves as victims: not to do so would rob them of the only sense of identity remaining to them.

Justine, however, retains her identity throughout these horrendous ordeals and it is primarily because she has appropriated libertine mastery of language. Telling her story to each of the libertines she meets, she constructs a narrated persona on whom she heaps the repeated scenes of abuse that contribute to construing her as the apotheosis of virtue. Therese consequently seduces the libertines because she presents an unsounded depth of material ripe for transgression. Justine as narrator enjoys a mastery of language similar to the libertines' because she remains in control of discourse's constative function by directing her audience to inscribe their own marks of violence on Therese. The pathetic figure that emerges is purely an effect of language. Destabilizing narrative's referential capacity, Justine avers in the very first words she speaks to Corville and Lorsange that her story is, in fact, a blasphemous speech act that questions God's sacred intentions. Thus, Justine's language reproduces the libertines' in its dual dialectical construction. Seducing her listeners into believing that her narrative contains a truth-value joining her to the social construction of virtue, she nevertheless withholds the information that reveals her individualistic and poetic use of language.

Justine's tale is a protracted seduction designed to project to her listeners an image corresponding to their desire, and she obfuscates the crucial difference on which her narrative depends between telling the truth and constructing it. That is, the story must appear referentially accurate if her virtue is to appear intact, but the tale derives its rhetorical strength by liberating itself from a purely constative register so that the play of language may construct a pathetic figure based not on truth but on listeners' desire. Justne consequently hypostatizes the representational indeterminacy characteristic of eighteenth-century French fiction: it sketches out the zone of conflict between ideologically incompatible positions, and situates its narrative at the precise juncture where their epistemological preconditions meet. Vice and virtue in Justine are discursively formulated, both depending on the logic of the narrative in which they appear. Neither enjoys an a priori preeminence, and both are shown to be truths constructed through a poetic use of language in which the constative dimension is overshadowed by language's power to construct meaning in the social world it putatively describes. The work's narrative, from which the external narrator indicates readers should draw their own conclusions about the benefits of virtue, consequently establishes a polemical tension between the competing ideologies it puts forth, as well as a continuing ambivalence concerning its own truth-value. Its title character imitates and subsequently appropriates libertine mastery of language in an attempt to direct reader response toward her own putative virtue. Justine's attempt to speak an unequivocal master discourse bereft of a figurative dimension open to interpretation is thwarted, however, at the novel's close. The bolt of lightning that disfigures her and the call for interpretation of her life that it seems to issue refigure her language, effectively summoning a reevaluation of her story and the ostensible stability of the master's language.

Justine flirts with the possibility of an unequivocal, master discourse of narrative and philosophy whose stable referentiality would reproduce in unmediated fashion the truth of the events or analytic systems to which it refers. The work's random and nonsensical conclusion, however, renders the master's position untenable, and it consequently contests the putatively natural ascendancy of any of its ideological positions. Although Justine claims to follow in the tradition of the didactic tale whose self-evident moral promotes reigning conceptions of virtue, it ironically undermines that claim by highlighting its immaterial basis. Projecting to different classes of readers the lesson they have been historically and culturally conditioned to recognize, the novel deftly skirts the issue of political or moral absolutism by allowing the traditional moral reading to coincide with the philosophically and politically more astute one. Those associated with this latter reading receive the author's sardonic nod of approval for recognizing that political or moral truth is a construction of received narrative traditions, and they can claim for that very reason the privileged position of interpretive superiority—at least temporarily. Sade's novel incites the critically astute to assert their own smug attitude of "political correctness" by pointing out the obfuscated operations of political hegemony on the unknowing folks who blindly respect its teachings.

This last position is a difficult one to escape, however, even if it is easy to criticize. Clearly my own account of Sade's fiction … cannot escape similar charges of critical and political blindness. To bracket a specific interpretation and reveal its shortcomings is, of course, to attempt to occupy the master's position. To assert the legitimacy of one's own historical narrative—be it of a literary genre, the history of interpretation, or the sociopolitical events constituting war or revolution—is to attempt to foreclose interpretation and to privilege an expressive causality that one simply "found" in the raw data analyzed. The master's position, as must by now be all too clear, is an untenable one. As Diderot's Religieuse demonstrates, each tale and every history can always be re-framed and recontextualized. The position of mastery is always a resolutely political one, since it strives to make its own accounts and claims appear natural and unconstructed. Readers of Justine who understand that its truth extends beyond the level of its narrative and is constituted instead on the level of its discourse—where the very notion of truth is constructed in the first place—are those who come closest to reading the work "entièrement."