Marquis de Sade

Was he just making shit up to be an edgelord?

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He got tortured and still kept writing so you can assume he was pretty serious.

That's a lot of devotion to capturing people against their will and tearing their assholes open into a mess of blood and guts.

What do you mean “making shit up”? Are you unaware that this is fiction? Or ESL?
No, his sole merit is not in being an edgelord—not even principally. He’s first and foremost a philosopher, but not explicitly—his books take the guise of straightforward dialectic, but his actual philosophy is deeper than the edgy erotic surface. The goal of 120 Days of Sodom is not nihilism so much as shearing you of any fancies or idealism, in other words, the universe is cold and merciless and utterly inexplicable, and that’s how you should take it. Feelgood religions coming along purporting to have the answers (in his case he focused on Christianity, naturally, since he wrote under Catholic dominion), politicians purporting to be genuine, anyone presenting as good and honest, are all full of shit and perfectly inclined to depravity, the degree of which will depend purely on their circumstances. Some will never have any real temptation to be terrible. For instance, that quiet churchgoing virgin that you fall in love with and intend to marry will cheat on you with Zac Efron, if circumstance allowed. Basically de Sade is saying, “Stop being a stupid little gullible faggot, everything is as base and pointless as you’ve always feared and you’ll be dead before you know it.” He’s not actually condoning rape and murder and so on, he was definitely tempted by those things and struggled mentally, but he’s using these surface dialectics to illustrate a profounder point, via shock factor.
And that’s all without mentioning the effect he had on Art, as a whole. He completely burst the boundaries on what was “allowed”. This was also one of his principal goals, to rage against censorship. Now because of him, though not many are aware of it or would attribute it to him, it is tacitly felt in Western society that censorship is bad and “naughty” Art is not intrinsically inferior. He also probably induced Realism by refusing to look Heavenward while writing. He wasn’t waxing romantic, he took us deep into the nitty gritty.
All this and more can be said about de Sade, so no, mere edgelord he is not, in fact he’s arguably one of the top 10 most significant artists ever.

thats a pretty nice cover

120 Days is fiction, but didn't he actually kidnap and rape a whole fuck load of people?

Why is there a St. Peter cross on a butt?

No, the “fuck load” part AFAIK is myth, the only proven cases are like two instances, and they’re not nearly as depraved as what he wrote, more equivalent to very rough roleplay. Again, I’m not saying he wasn’t actually aroused by those things, because he was, but he wasn’t blindly frothing for them either, he used them for the purposes of his profounder philosophy for the same reason any writer uses any narrative, because they moved or aroused him—but that wasn’t his main or even secondary motivation in writing about them.

because Man Ray

>Decided to rape to prove a philosophical point

Sounds like a Thomas Harris villain, not an intellectual philosopher

That’s not what I said. His philosophy consists solely in his writings. What he did personally is another matter and purely libidinal.

Then why didn't he kill himself as soon as possible

Because he wasn’t a nihilist. There’s a difference between a nihilist who is overwhelmed by the cold and merciless universe, at which point, I agree, they should quit bitching and remember the words of Epictetus: “The door is always open.” —a difference, I say, (de Sade pastiche) between that and someone who also sees the universe for what it is, but doesn’t “take it personally”. It’s crucial for grounding yourself to see the universe for what it is, but not everyone can hack it—those become suicidal nihilists, yes. De Sade just found it sort of tragicomic.

Also, just to clarify, before someone picks a bone, de Sade’s characters are iconically nihilistic—I know that. But I don’t think he himself was. I don’t think the actual philosophies espoused by his characters were the point, I think he was using them to get at something deeper—not nihilism, but the Absolute.
A nihilist, a true nihilist at least, wouldn’t even bother trying to write literary masterworks, for one thing.

This Sade guy sounds like an absolutely terrible person, someone I'd never have the stomach to read, but you yourself are a great writer and should feel proud of your personal eloquence. Best of luck with your literary endeavors.

The guy was a nutcase but that's what makes literature great. I can read a nutcases worldview and maybe take something away from it at the end.

Literally this. I don't give a fuck about the person, it's his work that matters.

Overrated in way. His writing is merry and like whimsical and show off-y instead of serious and grim. It was his wack off material while in prison. He was posing also, he was a giving, kind, loving person to his family, as complex as your average human being, not a moral deviant who actually followed all his impulses.

"A great connoisseur of arses and flogging summons a mother and daughter: he tells the daughter that if she does not agree to have both her hands cut off he will kill her mother; the little girl agrees and they are indeed cut off; he then separates these two creatures, stringing the girl up by the neck with her feet perched on a stool; tied around the stool is a another cord that leads into another room, where the mother is held; the mother is told to pull the cord – she does so without knowing what she is doing; she is promptly shown the fruits of her labour and as she is overcome with despair she is felled by a sabre to the back of the head."

...
You might as well read edgy "no limit" bdsm fiction by fat 40 year old virgins

he did it first, though, and with a philosophical depth.

>feelgood religion like Christianity
or
>if you do some bad thing "skydaddy" damns you for all eternity

Pick one

>Implying being a pervert is philosophical.

You're out of your element.

Thx, you too

I've only seen the film and thought it was pretty terrible... do I even try this?

>Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, in 1890.[3] He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants[3] Max, a tailor, and Minnie Radnitzky.[4]
every damn time