De Sade

For the record, I'm only really interested in his "philosophy" to the extent that he had one. I might even prefer a secondary source to a primary

Sade's most philosophical texts are probably 'The Misfortunes of Virtue' (an early version of 'Justine', pretty slim and straightforward, much more pornographic material was added in later revisions -- you can get 'Virtue' alongside some of his short stories in a nice Oxford paperback) 'Philosophy in the Boudoir', 'Dialogue Between a Dying Man and a Priest' and 'Aline and Valcour'.

With regards to secondary sources, a good intro point imo is the eponymous biography by Donald Thomas, pretty multi-faceted with good descriptions of his life, philosophy and fiction as well as the historical context (I learned quite a bit about the era reading it) and of course how philosophers and literary critics have assessed him and his importance in the following centuries. There might be better biographies out there but I found it pretty intriguing and evocative of the man.

I feel like Sade is under-rated as an individual, people meme the 120 Days a lot but the man himself lived a pretty remarkable life -- multiple prison breaks; locking himself in his chateau for an entire winter with several peasant girls and a squire; being tried in absentia for "poisoning prostitutes" (later overturned as a miscarriage of justice) being sentenced to death and having an effigy burned in lieu of himself proper; being a judge in the French Revolution and then because an administrative error and also because his colleagues found his habit of trying to spare people from the death penalty suspicious and too "moderate", only being saved at the last minute when Robespierre got overthrown; being suppressed by literally three different regimes (monarchy, republic, empire).

There's also Pierre Klossowski's 'Sade My Neighbour', Roland Barthes' 'Sade/Fourier/Loyola', Maurice Blanchhot's 'Lautréamont and Sade', Angela Carter's 'The Sadean Woman', and a collection of essays from various writers called 'Sade, his ethics and rhetoric'. These might be your thing if you want to cut straight to the philosophical meat of Sade.

Attached: torture-instruments-1508-granger.jpg (738x900, 192K)

Overrated

*and then slated for execution because of an administrative error (his son being falsely labelled an exile)

Much thanks! If it's not too much can you give me the "quick rundown" of his weltanschauung (what the fuck I actually spelled that word right on the first try) as far as you understand it? I want to make a nice screencap including your reccs and this overview, it will be good for sharing in future threads

I think above all Sade had a pioneer's attitude. He wanted to explore the full range of human experience, not just in sexuality, but also in politics, philosophy, morality. A short sample of some of the human types that populate his oeuvre: lecherous monks, unscrupulous scientists, anti-clerical homosexuals, corrupt judges, revolutionary bandits, and African cannibals who, living in their own self-contained society, consider cannibalism moral, natural and conventional.

He's full of interesting contradictions and ambiguities -- even his boundless intellectual freedom makes for a strange contrast with the strictly regimented life he pretty much constantly lived, in the boarding school he attended as a boy and in the military he was enlisted in as a young man, and then, for the better part of his adult life, in the prisons and courts he was perpetually transferring in and out of.

He's notorious as one of the worst blasphemers to have ever existed, and yet Flaubert also called him "the most Catholic writer," probably because of the medieval, Bosch-like quality of his fiction, his inverse moralism, and his Thomistic dedication to critically analysing and mapping out the natural world... one can feel his indirect influence on later Catholic French writers like Huysmans and Bloy, also writers fascinated with the dark and the perverse.

He was an arch-misogynist, the ultimate celebrator and chronicler of cruelty against women, and yet his fiction also teems with a large range of female anti-heroes whom he represents as having liberated themselves from bourgeois morality and sexual enslavement to pursue their own interests, proto-feminists bolder in their ideas than real life feminists would be for quite a long time, certainly more radical than the suffragette movement despite being penned a whole century prior.

Political critics on both ends of the spectrum have accused him both of being a revolutionary and being a reactionary -- his novels are populated by both decadent nobles and bloodthirsty proletarians; all ideals, no matter how virtuous in print, become vessels for sadistic impulses when manifested inside human bodies, all political causes are collapsed to the level of perversion, become nothing more than different flavours of compulsive cruelty, wholly predictable entities in a a universe deterministically devoted to violence.

There's a reason Sade experienced multiple revivals in the 19th and 20th centuries, first by the Freudians starting to tentatively map the sexual geography of the unconscious mind, the irrational undercurrents beneath civilisation, and then by the existentialists in the aftermath of the two world wars, the cataclysmic self-destruction of European culture. His work seems uncannily prescient, he charts the whole future of the Enlightenment project, the disillusionment of the modern world with itself, the failed utopian inheritance of the French Revolution.

Sorry, this wasn't really a quick rundown.

Nope, that's great man, thanks. I've been wanting to read him for a while cause he keeps coming up in different books I'm reading or just mentioned as important relating to this or that idea. I'll definitely share this info around, I'm sure many will find it helpful

Attached: de sade.png (888x926, 179K)

Dude just eat hooker feces lmao

Cheers, no worries. I'm flattered. Sade is really interesting, glad to see people take an interest.

more like, force the hooker to eat your feces

Good stuff user, thanks

>anti-clerical homosexuals
that is indeed unusual, we’re almost veering into the realm of fantasy here...

I don't see the point of reading him. I've read other philosophical papers that outlined the nature of de Sade's transgressive project, much like you did, and I don't see the point of wasting time with such extremely sadistic literature, especially when you find the philosophy aspect to be suspect. I think, in this instance, visual media is more effective. It's no different than watching a gory movie with lots of rape and going, "Everything is permissible!" It pretty much conveys de Sade's project of trying to normalize certain taboos in a much quicker manner. There's nothing truly astounding about such antinomian claims, and again, I find them suspect.

Why read the writings of a pervert sodomite

Cringe

Sade's books are more like Gothic novels than splatter films. Consider the precision with which an Ann Radcliffe or an Emily Bronte describes some young heroine's series of emotional contortions, the whole gamut of subtle terrors and pleasures she experiences as she tiptoes along the creaking floorboards of a shadowy Teutonic castle, and then transfer that descriptive richness to extreme circumstances, ones more reflective of the gruesome reality of 18th century Europe. His fairy tale ogres are real people, the cruelties he describes commonplace.

Of course, an argument for the literary merit of Sade's fiction means nothing if you have a fundamental aversion to the subject matter -- my initial interest in him was purely prurient: I find torture hot. That being said, many of his works, particularly his short stories, contain little or no sadistic elements whatsoever, and as I said, even earliest versions of his most sexual works aren't as padded with erotic content as their later revisions (done at the request of the printers, if I recall correctly). Readers interested solely in the pornographic aspect are liable to find themselves bored during the long passages of philosophical exegesis and social commentary.

120 Days Of Sodom is possibly the most cringe, tryhard thing I've ever had the misfortune of reading.

Only the movie is shittier.

Nice milkies tho.

>What do you think: is he based, or cringe?
these don't apply to french authors. they're eminently both at the same time.

>Is there a deeper level to his work or is it just edgy nonsense?
Once again, yes and yes.

>Is there a deeper level to his work or is it just edgy nonsense?
How can you ask? He has tons of philosophical pages and you're wondering if there's a philosophical meaning?

De Sade:
>sex good

is this really what gets you retarded tweens to respond? a "based or cringe should it read it XD" OP?

Sade felt deeply sentimental about his ancestor Laura de Noves, loved his uncle the Abbe de Sade, loved his wife and sons (though often caused them a lot of stress) and used his position as a judge in the revolution to protect his in-laws, despite them having been responsible for keeping him in prison indefinitely without trial.

Pic related, a dream Sade had about his ancestor.

Attached: Screenshot_2019-08-21 At Home With The Marquis De Sade.png (1045x343, 289K)

yeh

I've only read the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man (an early piece, with still too much faith in atheist nature) and The 120 Days, which is not the most philosophical of his novels, due to its being an unfinished plan – though there is something to it, in the sense that Blanchot will describe him as the writer par excellence, that this is just pure writing, a neverending list of cruelties/passions on a scroll, a continuous block of text (originally) without paragraphs, that paves the way for Guyotat's infamous Éden, Éden, Éden. Philosophically my reading of Sade has been supplemented by the 20th-century French writers already mentioned in this thread, above all Klossowski, Blanchot, Deleuze (Coldness and Cruelty). I'm sure there's more recent historical articles that place Sade in his own historical philosophical context, of 18th-century materialism, the influence of Spinoza, D'Holbach, La Mettrie, et al. – I haven't looked into it but that seems interesting to me.