Philosophie dans le boudoir is dated around 1795, or shortly after the end of the Terror, during which the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the ex-convent at Picpus to which the guillotine had recently been moved from the Place de Concorde because of complaints about the smell of blood. The work was begun during his imprisonment there in 1794, following his arrest by Robespierre for political moderation and alleged royalist sympathies. From his cell, he had a clear view of this new and efficient method of dispatching large numbers of the condemned. The executed were buried in their thousands in the grounds of the prison. Sade watched this bloody slaughter day after day, and declared in correspondence that it affected him greatly. Against the backdrop of these horrific events in Sade's own life, the cruelties of Boudoir take on a highly ironic character. This sexually obscene dialogue (in conjunction with the intercalated pamphlet, Francais, encore un effort, si vous voulez etre republicains [Frenchmen, one more effort, if you want to be republicans]) alludes to and distinguishes itself from what Slavoj 2izek after Sigmund Freud calls the obscene superego double of the public law, in that the Terror can be said to be the obscene underside or excess of a Revolution arising from legitimate demands.1 In pursuit of my contention that real obscenity lies outside the boudoir, I shall read Sade's revolutionary text through a number of related binary oppositions - in particular, on-stage/off-stage and /high - emphasizing the work's political subversiveness and gay anarchy.2 1 shall argue that the entire dialogue can be read on a political level as inverting all hierarchies in ironic echo of the Revolution.3Throughout Sade's libertine works, there is evidence of a carnivalesque spirit which, in his well-known study, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as a rehabilitation of the flesh characteristic of the Renaissance in reaction against the ascetic Middle Ages, but which he declares virtually absent from the Enlightenment, a period he considers too abstract to understand Francois Rabelais properly.4 Voltaire, for example, accused Rabelais of writing only while eating and drinking.5 Although Bakhtin makes no reference to Sade in his study, it has been persuasively argued, notably by Annie Le Brun, that, exceptionally among eighteenth-century philosophers, Sade brings the body back into philosophy6 In addition to and, in some measure, as a consequence of its focus on the body, the carnivalesque also has a politically subversive impact that depends on the inversion of official hierarchies, replacing with low culture:As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete.7This inversion is accompanied by what Bakhtin calls realism, deflating pomposity and overweening pretensions to superiority:The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.8The reversal of high and aptly describes Sade's dialogue at all significant levels. Both Boudoir's subtitle - ou les instituteurs immoraux [or the immoral teachers] - and epigraph - La mere en prescrira [Mothers should prescribe] (rather than proscrira [proscribe]) la lecture a sa fille [the reading of this to their daughters] - announce its intention to turn the world upside down, ostensibly, though, as we shall see, far from exclusively, the objectives of the education of young women. Sade inverts the process of bourgeois education, according to which the child is cleaned up, and the lower body strictly regulated: Sade's immoral mentors replace Jean-Jacques Rousseau's moral pedagogues. …