Bataille - Violence - Sexuality - Sadism (original) (raw)
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An Unblinking Gaze: On the Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (PhD thesis in philosophy)
Throughout the 20th Century, a number of philosophers, writers, artists and film makers have implied that there is some profound significance to the work of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). The project at hand is to evaluate the claim that Sade, in some sense, is a philosopher, and to assess what his philosophy amounts to. There are two aspects to this task. Firstly, I will consider the various philosophical interpretations of Sade’s work. This part of the study will serve as a guide into the Sadeian labyrinth, and will establish some of the more central interpretive themes, in particular the claim that Sade’s thought anticipates that of the Nazis, or that he brings early Modern thought to its logical conclusion. Secondly, I will inquire into Sade’s writings themselves. Of particular interest are Sade’s thoughts concerning the nature of sexuality, psychology, and the human condition in general, his critique of conventional morality, and his description of the nature of power.
Janus Head, 2006
Georges Bataille is one of the most influential thinkers to have seriously considered the work of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade. What is undeniable is that the two thinkers share a number of thematic and theoretical commonalities, in particular on the subject of human nature and sexuality. However, there are serious theoretical divergences between the two writers, a fact generally overlooked in the secondary literature. Rather than being a mere precursor to Bataille, as himself implies, I suggest that Sade is a very different thinker, a fact that Bataille does not fully acknowledge.
The Enigma of the Will: Sade's Psychology of Evil. Janus Head 2009, 11 (2), 365- 401.
Janus Head, 2009
Scholars have traditionally taken the Marquis de Sade to he a straightforward advocate of immoral hedonism. Without rejecting outright this view, I argue that Sade also presents a theory of the psychology of pleasure, placing him amongst the more insightful psychological thinkers of the late 18th century. This paper outlines Sades description of the immoral will, in particular his account of how an agent can come to enjoy the humiliation, torture and murder of others. I argue for thefollowing claims: firstly, that Sade, perhaps despite himself, suggests that the sadistic will is patholo^cal; secondly, that Sades work gives a far less flattering view of the sadistic will than is commonly supposed.
SADE'S LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCE IN MODERN EROTIC LITERATURE
SADE'S LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCE IN MODERN EROTIC LITERATURE, 2023
ABSTRACT The most prominent erotic literature of the 20th century has been greatly influenced by the works of Marquis de Sade in both philosophical and stylistic aspect, who has left a perennial heritage to all the authors of philosophically inspired, sexually charged works, novels and stories of libertinage and the psyche of a modern individual. The overtly descriptive, „confessional“ narrative, along with lascivious, „pornographic“ depictions of sexuality and libertine philosophy, as its main characteristic and bottom line, has strongly provoked, but also productively initiated numerous debates and controversies on in literary and cultural circles and has never until the present postmodern time, ceased creating new discourses on Sade and Sadeian thought. Apart from the „oversexed“ and overtly erotic literary expression, I shall emphasize the importance of the stream of consciousness in all the authors mentioned, as well as the strong naturalist influence on the literary ars erotica and above all, the essential literary and philosophical feature of all the authors discussed is their extremely avantgarde approach to life and sexuality, explicitly expressed in their literary work, starting with Sade, reflecting on Henry Miller, compared to George Bataille and finally exposed in Pauline Réage as the most explicit representative of the erotic avantgarde scene. George Bataille applied his unique philosophical and psychological thought to his literary work, known as erotica noir, by inscribing Sadeian concepts and descriptions to insinuate sexuality in its pure, natural form, cruel and profane, yet at the same time profound and spiritual as it may be, as a complex unity of sacrilegious and divine, whilst Miller provided us with very similar notions and therefore I shall develop a constructive contemporary comparison between the two authors, based on the expression of their understanding of the very the nature of sexuality described in their works. Moreover, I shall exemplify their strong connection to Sade, whose ambivalent philosophy of pure reason, libertinage and cruelty which can be found in all Bataille's and Miller's, and Réage's works in a form of a rational and existentialist narrative and intro - and retrospective contemplative writing, reaching the world by an inner self experience and I shall also strongly emphasize the sadomasochist writings of Pauline Réage as the first „Sadeian woman“, in Angela Carter's term. The paramount ideas of Sadeian philosophy is best manifested by autobiographical narrative with an overwhelming personal expression, transcending from a descriptive erotic confessional into a most elaborated, yet spontaneous stream of consciousness and an important theoretical frame of Sade's works from various perspectives, from philosophy and literature to feminist theory shall be presented as a guideline to different readings and understandings of Sade's timeless literary and philosophical heritage. KEY WORDS: autobiographical, avantgarde, dark erotica, eroticism, libertine, literature, philosophy, pornography, sexuality, Sade, Sadeian, sadomasochism
The ethical night of libertinism: Beauvoir's reading of Sade
Continental Philosophy Review, 2022
This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's reading of the eighteenth century writer and libertine Marquis de Sade, in her essay "Must we Burn Sade?"; a difficult and bewildering text, both in pure linguistic terms and philosophically. In particular, Beauvoir's insistence on Sade as a "great moralist" seems hard to reconcile with her emphasis, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, on the interdependency of human beings and her exhortation to us to promote other people's freedom, as well as the aspiration of The Second Sex to equal relations between the genders. While earlier scholars addressed the ethico-political implications of Beauvoir's essay, they insisted that the ambiguity so fundamental in her philosophy is denied by the Sadean hero, and that the Other can never be attained in his system. In this essay, I argue that Sade paradoxically emerges as an ethical model in Beauvoir's text: as a writer, he assumes the ambiguity of the human condition in the extreme. Further, Sade reveals the potential of sexuality if it is explored in a form of eroticism that largely transgresses behavior constructed as normal: his writings open up new forms of existence, where, contrary to prevailing ideas, woman's sexual freedom is claimed as equal to man's, where genders are unstable and heterosexuality no longer the standard. Beauvoir's fascination with Sade in this essay can be linked with the seemingly unresolvable asymmetry in the relation between men and women in The Second Sex: in his writings is revealed sexuality's potential to subvert patriarchal norms and mystifications, and perhaps, in the end, even gender itself.
Much Sense the Starkest Madness: Sade’s Moral Scepticism
Angelaki, 2010
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment [Dialektik der Aufklärung, first published in 1944], argue that Donatien-Alphonse-François, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), and Friedrich Nietzsche have brought the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason to an end. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Sade has revealed philosophy’s moral impotency, in particular “the impossibility of deriving from reason any fundamental argument against murder [...].”1 Marcel Hénaff, Susan Neiman, and Annie Le Brun have similarly suggested that Sade has demonstrated that morality is no more philosophically justified than immorality. There is no doubt that there is much discussion of moral philosophy in Sade’s surviving works. But are these extraordinary claims of Sade’s sceptical powers justified? To answer this question, this paper sets out to identify the moral and meta- ethical claims made in Sade’s works, and to assess his arguments for those claims.