Marquis de Sade Overview

De Sade's writing is the endless elaboration of a single principle: "Virtue is vice, and vice is virtue" -- an incitement to debauchery, depravity, and decadence, and a testament to the value of the animal passions. But de Sade didn't merely... [more]

De Sade's writing is the endless elaboration of a single principle: "Virtue is vice, and vice is virtue" -- an incitement to debauchery, depravity, and decadence, and a testament to the value of the animal passions. But de Sade didn't merely celebrate and praise acts of sexual perversion and violence; he articulated their logic, their rationale. He did far more than reject the rigid tenets of the Age of Reason, he inverted them. "I have supported my deviations with reasons," he proclaimed with astute irony, undermining the very idea of rational support. The only valid rationale, for de Sade, was the rationale of nature: a logic of violence and destruction. De Sade replaced Kant's moral Kingdom of Ends with a deviant -- and yet still wholly rational -- theater of cruelty. But this endeavor was not simply literary or ideational. De Sade lived his ideas passionately. "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change." And he never did. He spent a total of 27 years in prison for his various crimes of passion, and was sentenced to death three times, though each time he escaped. He wrote in prison cells and insane asylums. When presented with the choice of moral retribution or physical incarceration, de Sade saw no choice at all. Instincts, he insisted -- and especially the instincts of the pervert -- were more intelligent, more rational, than any moral code. "All universal moral principles are idle fantasies," he wrote. Clearly, he thrived on fantasies of a different kind. In "Justine," perhaps his most famous work, de Sade detailed the sexual exploits of a young girl. Here we see his vision of an amoral world articulated relentlessly and explicitly: God is portrayed as a force of evil, and Justine is condemned to suffer as long as she denies this fundamental truth. Its sequel, "Juliette," inverts its precursor: Justine's sister Juliette unabashedly enjoys all the benefits and pleasures of evil. Between the two books, the order of virtue and vice is reversed: Juliette, who affirms the evil passions, emerges triumphant, while Justine is condemned. This, for de Sade, is the only reasonable outcome. But these inversions are by no means simple; de Sade's irony challenges the very distinction between reason and perversion, between the upright bourgeois citizen and the perverted criminal. In "120 Days of Sodom," de Sade's subject is a rigidly stratified group of people who've fled from the social world to a remote castle. Everyday-life is structured with meticulous and unwavering precision, with this subtle twist: these quotidian customs are completely perverse. The inhabitants of the castle are bent upon living out their devotion to vice to the fullest, but they do so inside a fastidious order that is maintained despite the unrelenting debauchery. Rather than reject order and reason in his valuation of the criminal instincts, de Sade opted for a parodic synthesis: an affirmation of the powers of both reason and vulgar passion capable of constructing the appropriately perverted soul. Unfortunately for him, this perverted logic wasn't persuasive enough to keep him out of prison. [show less]