Progress and Decadence—Poststructuralism as Progressivism

Abstract

The social and historical phenomenon of decadence has many aspects; they range from the decline of military and political power to the decay of mores, culture, and social structures. One of the first things that comes to mind with regard to the classic example of “late Roman decadence” is a culture that has lost control over the most elementary cravings. Thus, orgies and sensual excesses of any kind are privileged elements of literary descriptions of decadent societies, such as Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Petronius’s Satyricon, Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, or Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, and there might be no better measurement of the decadence of a society than the latter’s relation to the subject of sexuality.’ Strong, young societies are virtuous and chaste and support purity and virginity. In decadent societies, there is a tendency to support “free love,” promiscuity, orgies, and deviant sexual orientations. In this sense, the Marquis de Sade can be conceived of as the ultimate symptom of a decadent French nobility that could not see the signs of the coming Revolution because it was too busy with all forms of perversion.