THE ALL AND THE TOO MUCH

“To say everything” is the sign of a great audaciousness, an apparently boundless program, which Sadean discourse deems indispensable and definitive. This formula is disarmingly simple, yet nothing is more paradoxical if we pay close attention to it. In effect, two contradictory connotations are intermingled here: (a) that of totality: “to say everything” is the encyclopedic project of the circuit of signifiers, the collection of givens, the accumulation of arguments. In short, for this first point of view, “to say everything” would be the exhaustive and monumental task of literally saying everything, i.e. the Hegelian ambition; (b) that of excess. In this case, “to say everything” would be the demand to hide nothing, to uncover everything, in the sense of the claim (sometimes the threat), “I'm going to tell everything …”; or else it is the complicity between the Sadean character and his interlocutors, when he proposes to tell them the tale of his crimes: “I sense that I can tell you everything.” The formula is that of breaking into, of lifting, censorship, bringing the repressed to light. “To say everything” is literally the Freudian formula, the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis as a technique for recognizing and avowing desire.