Phaedrus

Of the two short texts I'm supposed to be looking at (or long since finished looking at actually) that Blanchot wrote about Sade, one of them is called 'the madness of Sade', and on the last page of the essay he writes "[Sade's] demon was not the demon of lubricity. It is more dangerous than that. It is Socrates' demon, which Socrates always resisted and Plato would have preferred not to give into: it is the madness of writing, a movement that is infinite, interminable, incessant." There's another half a page, and then a quote from Sade explaining that, however much it leads men to shiver, the philosopher must be prepared to say everything... I'm not doing a very good job of translating, but you get the point of that last statement. As far as the demon of writing and comparisons between Socrates and Sade, before I can deal with that, I suppose I should say one or two things about Phaedrus.
Since last I wrote, I've read through the Phaedrus... I'm not sure whether I had read it before and forgotten most of it, or simply read enough about it second-hand that large sections of the argument were familiar. The most valuable thing in there might be the origin of crickets... those who were so overwhelmed when music appeared that they could no longer interest themselves in food or sleep or anything else but playing music - they would have starved to death if the gods hadn't taken pity on them and turned them into crickets, able to make music with their legs and live without sustenance. Anyway, the dialogue certainly does accord well with what you said about the platonic Socrates' relation to writing, and makes my previous position hard to defend (which doesn't mean I won't try...). Yes, as you said, Plato's Socrates distrusts writing because a written text can't defend itself. He says near the end of the dialogue that writing is a frivolous pursuit, and the only writers who can be called wise are those who are able to defend his statements when challenged and demonstrate the inferiority of his writings out of his own mouth - they must be writing as a pastime and not imagine that writing is a serious pursuit. He has nothing but contempt for those who place great value in their literary works on whose phrases they spend hours "twisting them this way and that, pasting them together and pulling them apart". There is, however, something very weird about the Egyptian myth he gives as the origin of writing... namely that it is a god who comes down and delivers writing, while it is a man who criticizes the gift this god has given him, bringing up all the objections that Socrates will seem to subscribe to afterward, saying "if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls, they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, etc." Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to know what this detail means or whether it means anything, but Socrates is generally pious, and objects to stories in which gods behave in an immoral or unfitting manner. It should also be pointed out that earlier in the dialogue, Socrates delivers a long lecture demonstrating that love is a bad thing, totally convincing Phaedrus, before he turns around, admits that he didn't mean a word of it and sets about proving the opposite. Why should we have faith in what Socrates is saying now? Particularly considering we are taking in the speech in written form, knowing that this is not simply a recording of a real dialogue that was written down after the fact, but that we are reading something which was carefully composed in writing. I realize that these are the sorts of things that us literature people quibble about, but I do think they are serious objections, precisely because Plato cannot have been unaware of this contradiction as he wrote. It should also be noted that in this dialogue it is stated with particular clarity that the art or knack of persuading people is a necessary prerequisite to teaching or philosophizing - sophistry is here neither useless or harmful, except that it must be subordinated to a higher end... sophistry is jumbled together with the composition of poetry, whether written or oral, and with every imaginable written form, including even the writing of laws. What Socrates seems to me to be speaking against is much less writing than a certain purely passive relation to writing or to the words or teaching of others. There is here a doctrine of self-reliance, a warning against epigones, and a warning against learning the conclusions that other people have come to through their though and their lives rather than looking carefully at the process by which those conclusions were reached. Just as texts shall not be used in place of memory, they shall not be used in place of thought. I also think it is noteworthy that the Symposium, being the most closely related text, centered around the same topic and keeping Phaedrus as a central character, begins with a follower of Plato acting in a spirit directly contrary to Plato - while the slavish devotion of Apollodorus (and at the end Aristodemus, who, like a dog is sleeping in the corner, but perks up when his master is about to leave and follows him out) while this devotion might be a sign merely of Socrates ability to elicit love, of being the truly erotic individual, it must be noted that Socrates always approaches the people he would speak with in what might appear as a deferent manner, respectfully telling him he is sure they would know better and he would like them to explain things to him. In the Symposium in particular, though he'll come out with some belated cutting remarks about Agathon's speech, Socrates is pure charma dn seduction, drawing men toward the truth. Apollodorus walks around abusing everyone he meets - even when they want to ask him about his favorite topic (Socrates), he still treats them abrasively. A follower necessarily betrays the thought of his teacher. It is also noteworthy how often in Plato's dialogues it is the follower of a school that Socrates argues with rather than the founder. Gorgias does very little talking in Gorgias - even in Phaedrus, Phaedrus is representing Lysias, whose speech he so admired. Though Socrates does undermine Protagorus, he treats him relatively leniently, finding a point of agreement that preserves a part of what Protagorus initially claimed. Part of what Socrates seems to attack is often the credulousness of a follower... though of course presumption and the belief that one knows more than one really does is clearly the more important target. Socrates' true followers went off and started schools of their own. Anyway, I'm drifting off subject.
The madness of writing, the willingness to say anything. Sade and Socrates were both silent because they couldn't be quiet, weren't willing to be quiet, couldn't imagine life without continuing there eternal process of negation. But that isn't the main link between them. Sade complained that if you killed a man, his suffering was soon over, the pleasure was fleeting. Every crime was flawed and imperfect, fleeting and unsatisfying. Unlike Socrates, Sade did feel that increasing these small pleasures in quantity and diversity was a worthwhile pastime, but his main interest in all of his writings is very clearly the pursuit of the ideal form of Crime (and he calls the pursuit of this ideal form philosophy). Sade's virtuous characters are punished, but so are his evil characters... the only difference is that the evil characters don't mind their punishment, as long as they are being imprisoned, tortured or killed in pursuit of Disorder and Crime. In order to commit crimes on the level of the Absolute, it is necessary for Sade's most important crimes to be virtual - unlike a theft, a rape, a murder or any ordinary act of perversity, a book that corrupts its reader (Sade, like Socrates had a great deal of faith in a speaker, teacher or statesman's ability to have a real moral effect on his audience), a book that corrupts is a crime that continues taking effect long after the death of its author. While a person can only be killed once, the number of people a book can corrupt is limitless - here we are moving away from any attempt to link Sade to Socrates, the search for ideal forms really is the one small point of intersection - well, that and the sense of compulsion, the unity of life and thought, philosophy experienced as holy quest and the figure of the philosopher as the highest form humanity could aspire to. Blanchot most often links Sade to Hegel, the links to Nietzsche are so numerous and obvious people often seem to embarrassed to bring them up except in passing - Sade could be used as a starting point to teach stoicism or Epicurianism as well. Learning philosophy with the Marquis de Sade would be a fun class to teach...