Cruelty

There is no better testimony on cruelty in love than letter 141 in Dangerous Liaisons (Choderlos de Laclos, 1782), sent by the Marquise de Merteuil to the Vicomte de Valmont, with whom she was in love, urging him to break off his relationship with the Présidente de Tourvel. She dictates to him a “little epistolary model” linked to the repetition of a sentence: “It's not my fault.” It begins thus: “One tires of everything, my angel; it is a law of nature. It is not my fault. So if I am tired of an affair which has preoccupied me totally for the last four boring months, it is not my fault… It follows that I have been unfaithful to you for a while now. But to some degree your relentless tenderness has forced me into it! It is not my fault. Today a woman I am madly in love with demands that I give you up for her sake. It is not my fault… Farewell, my angel. I took you with pleasure. I leave you without regrets, I shall perhaps come back to you. That is the way of the world. It is not my fault” (2007 [1782] p. 346). The cruelty of this “story” told by the Marquise serves Valmont's own cruel purposes and he “quite simply” copies this model and sends it “quite simply” to the Présidente, his lover. It is a transfer of love under the aegis of cruelty which - we may reassure ourselves - will be the undoing of the three protagonists.

Human cruelty (Grausamkeit) raises all the more questions in that Freud perceives in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) the “intimate connection” that exists between “cruelty and the sexual instinct” (p. 159). In this work, he conceives the sexual act as an element of aggressiveness striving for complete union and notes that the connection established in childhood “between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts” is likely to prove “unbreakable in later life” (p. 193). He thus links the instinct for cruelty, characterised as a part-instinct, to the “need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object” (p. 158). In Chapter Six of