Sade's text alternates between activity and passivity, but active aggressive-
ness predominates. The desire for mastery is already inherent in the gesture
of writing, but it dominates the staging of the orgy and imprints on it the
most rigorous order. The paradox of the hierarchy of head over body is
that the head gives orders to the agents as well as to the victims, but only
in the service of sexual pleasure. In this way, hierarchy disciplines the orgy,
but with no loss of heterogeneity.

The erotic figures and motifs that contribute to this protocol fall into
four types of operation, the last three of which serve to suppress the femi-
nine: substitution and equivalence, associated with money and directly
modeled on currency (prostitution, masturbation, and theft); serializa-
tion and parcelization, both associated with number and machines; reduc-
tion to the masculine Same or sexual reduction (bisexuality and theories
of reproduction); and enclosure (incest, common ownership of women,
sodomy, and cannibalism).

It will come as no surprise that money is an ordering principle for the orgy.
As a closed system, money was bound to fascinate Sade. Understood as
both the means to sexual pleasure and its symbol, money shares the ritual
character of orgy and possesses semi-magical qualities. As Mary Douglas
puts it, "money provides a fixed, external, and recognizable sign for what
would be confused, contradictable operations or internal states." Ritual
mediates experience and money mediates transactions. "Money provides
a standard for measuring worth, and ritual standardizes situations," and

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