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If we think of romance as a genre of action film, in which an intensity of the need to survive is played out by a series of dramatic pursuits, actions, and pacifications, then the romance plot’s setting for fantasy can be seen as less merely conventional and more about the plotting of intensities that hold up a world that the unconscious deems worth living in.

If we start from the principle of denying others posited by de Sade it is strange to observe that at the very peak of unlimited denial of others is a denial of oneself. Theoretically, denial of others should be an affirmation of oneself, but it is soon obvious that if it is unlimited and pushed as far as it can go, beyond personal enjoyment, it becomes a quest for inflexible sovereignty. Concern for power renders real, historical sovereignty flexible. Real sovereignty is not what it claims to be; it is never more than an effort aimed at freeing human existence from the bonds of necessity. Among others, the sovereign of history evaded the injunctions of necessity. He evaded it to a high degree with the help of the power given him by faithful subjects. The reciprocal loyalty between the sovereign and his subjects rested on the subordination of the latter and on their vicarious participation in his sovereignty. But de Sade’s sovereign man has no actual sovereignty; he is a fictitious personage whose power is limited by no obligations. There is no loyalty expected from this sovereign man towards those who confer his power upon him. Free in the eyes of other people, he is no less the victim of his own sovereignty. He is not free to accept a servitude in the form of a quest for wretched pleasure, he is not free to stoop to that !

message to all bitches