First night. How many nights your deathwatch cries have made me flinch in the shadows of the night. Sad and lonely, like you, I wandered alone, in darkness, in this vast city. The glow of street lamps is not able to destroy the shadows; on the contrary, they become more prominent: this is the chiaroscuro of painters! I wandered alone in order to know humankind. This small and today extravagant essay had an immense influence during the eighteenth century. But exactly what kind of public administration was this state brothel?
Ultimately, the state brothel could become a better model than the panopticon or the prison to conceive the functioning of new technologies of government invented within modern democratic European societies.
On one hand, it unveils the fabrication of the modern colonial subject as desiring and sexual revealing hierarchies and segmentations within the political management of organs penis, vagina, uterus and fluids semen, blood, milk, water. On the other, it shows how democratic subjugation links freedom and subjection, pleasure and terror: apparently antagonistic affects and modes of consciousness.
Other questions surface when exploring the modern relationship between submission and freedom, control and liberation, violence and love, power and pleasure, sovereignty and debt within the utopian projects of state brothels.
As if continuing their rivalry in the afterlife, the growing popularity of Sade during the twentieth century has increasingly overshadowed Restif.
