Marquis de Sade — "Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by …"
Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime?
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There is no God, no heaven, no hell, no virtue, no vice, no good, no evil."
"I am a man of paradoxes, and I embrace them."
"Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates."
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
"Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil."
About Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
French aristocrat-libertine whose name became 'sadism' and whose novels test the limits of Enlightenment liberalism's 'do as you will' axiom. Closely associated with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses author). For an intellectual contrast, see Immanuel Kant, German Enlightenment philosopher of the categorical imperative — Sade and Kant published in the same decades; Kant's 'treat others as ends, never means' is the systematic ethical opposite of Sade's libertine instrumentalism — the two roads philosophy took out of Enlightenment freedom.
The standard scholarly entry points to Marquis de Sade's work: Maurice Blanchot (French literary critic) — Lautréamont and Sade (1949); Jacques Lacan (École freudienne de Paris) — Kant with Sade (1963 essay); Camille Paglia (University of the Arts Philadelphia) — Sexual Personae (1990) — extensive Sade chapters. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Marquis de Sade.