Marquis de Sade (1740–1814)

I don't like Sade. Remove pornography, the violence of graphic sexual scenes in which he indulged ad nauseam, and all that's left are philosophical platitudes, sophisms as boring as they are ignorant. Here's an embodiment of that. More, in this particular work, the sex itself is not even worth it.

The virtuous Sophie/ Justine is constantly humiliated, robbed, and raped by a whole gallery of perverts characters, in adventures that are supposedly meant to illustrate the laws of nature: the show more weak (those believing in charity, empathy, compassion) can only end up, and rightly so for Sade, suffering at the hands of the strong (the selfish and violent ones). I won't even bother to denounce such nonsensical ethos! Suffice to say that there's not much of a plot, and so that this whole tale is plain boring. Young and depraved homosexuals, libertines monks, brigands and forgers... Sade's imagination surely is inhibited! But it's all so predictable that, even if you read it only for the sex (something which is sick in itself -again, it's mostly all about a poor girl being raped over and over...) it will probably annoy you more than anything else. Personally, it may have been edgy back in its days, but, no matter how hard it tries (no pun intended...) to disguise itself under the cover of a supposed 'revolutionary ethos', to me this was nothing more than disturbing porn for twisted pervs and losers (well, Sade spent a great deal of his life in jail...).

The ending is just plain caricature. show less

This 1782 short didactic dialogue from the Marquis de Sade says things that we now consider quite normal in public discourse but at the time of writing would have had the most serious consequences if published.

Forget for the moment that, in his actual practice of life, De Sade was a complex sociopath, simply read what he writes and be a little surprised at the moral stance he takes within this atheistic and existentialist text (make sure you read the full and not an abridged text).

The show more question is whether this is what De Sade actually believed or whether, given that sociopaths can be skilled at argumentation without necessary belief, it is an exercise - a paradoxical play with the intellectual methodology of the Jesuits who had taught him in his youth.

Does it matter? Not really. Or only if you think the man matters and not the text because history has made this short 'tale' (perfectly conventional in style) into an ur-text of an atheistic existentialist revolution in thought that underpins much of what we really think today.

De Sade succinctly gives us a run-down of every basic argument for the irrelevance of God to our human existence and leaves us with the 'moment' ... pleasure in accordance with nature. Fear of power is the 'reason' for not commiting crime and social morality somehow is built out of that.

The moral aspect of the tale is its weakest element precisely because it is so evidently manufactured. De Sade baulks at having a philosophy of morality, leaving us with something lying between a vague Hobbesianism and an Enlightenment natural morality.

The dying man, neanwhile, has lined up some houris for a pleasurable final hours in this life rather than have any expectation of the next and the priest is left without any validation whatsoever of his spritual role. For an eighteenth century text, it still packs a bit of a punch.

De Sade was certainly uncompromising and this earliest extant work gives us that bifurcation at once between the reality of the man (a narcissistic monster in social terms) and his radical thought processes which slashed away the lies that hold society together.

He is the ultimate anti-Plato. Plato condemned the lies of the poets but De Sade lays the ground work for a subversion of the lies of idealism. He would go on to subvert all moral claims of any sort except as individual pleasure through the exercise of superior power.

In fact, the work was not published until 1926 (to have a subsequent influence on dissident French political and philosophical thought) so it cannot be regarded as in any way an influencer of nineteenth century thought but it shows us that the death of God would have consequences.

De Sade may not have been the first to think these thoughts and clearly others were to think similar thoughts (especially the existentialists, anarchists and nihilists) between 1782 and 1926 but his placing of those thoughts within a parody of Jesuitism in a text seems to be unique and prescient.

Personally, I don't think we can assume that the tale is precisely De Sade's position. The cynical atheistic materialism and dedication to pleasure sounds just like him but the attempt to add a moral gloss based on 'nature' strikes me as deliberate and cynical and of its period.

Perhaps the latching on to this piece by many French intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century was (being uncharitable) an excuse to seize hold of the atheism and hedonism yet claim an Enlightenment moral cover story that does not stand up to much scrutiny.

Read between the lines and De Sade is saying that we should be moral because, if we are not, bits of us may be cut off by Authority and that Authority must be a restraint that is based on the monopoly of force in the interests of society and not on any theoretical or ideological guff.

This helps to make De Sade the sociopath's sociopath exhibiting something many sociopaths crave - a structure of order to bind them so that their crimes are either limited by others to protect themselves or such that they can choose their own work-arounds to get their way.

And yet the dying man's analysis of the God-thing is pretty unanswerable unless you resort to arguments derived from 'faith' (which is not intellectually satisfactory by any means). The work faces us head-on with the central problem for society that truth and morality are not friends. show less

Apart from the book's scandalous content, it's remarkable for its perfect fusion of form and content, as the chapters and episodes grow increasingly shorter and atomized as the captives' bodies are physically dismembered by the sadists-murderers lording over the mountaintop castle. As depraved as it is, one mustn't forget that it's only fiction, and it's a measure of a society's intellectual freedom that such infamous historical works are allowed to be published and preserved.

De Sade veers between pornography and political theory in a series of dialogues; I definitely found the latter more interesting. Especially as some of group sex goings-on seemed logistically infeasible. The book is worth reading for De Sade's fascinating political views. The participants in the dialogues don't really deserve to be called characters, as they are clearly De Sade's mouthpieces. This seems fair enough, considering the book is meant to be a sort of textbook to lead young girls show more astray. On the one hand De Sade condemns homophobia, women's subjugation in marriage, and intolerant religious laws in a manner that feels oddly contemporary. On the other, he argues that murder should be legal and women have no right whatsoever to refuse sexual advances. It's impressive how shocking De Sade can still be, more than 200 years after he wrote this book.

In his arguments for greater freedom, De Sade the libertine appears to be a forerunner of today's libertarians. This amused me as nowadays libertarianism is heavily associated with economics, something De Sade clearly couldn't care less about. I read Philosophy in the Boudoir just after finishing The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama, and was delighted to find similarities between the two. For example, both Fukuyama and De Sade note that in a democratic society of equal rights, the individual desire for mastery still needs an outlet. Whereas Fukuyama suggests sport, De Sade firmly believes that the solution is sex. show less