Marquis de Sade — "The greatest pleasure is to imagine what is impossible."
The greatest pleasure is to imagine what is impossible.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"My only crime is to have been too daring in my thoughts."
"The only true happiness is to be found in the satisfaction of one's desires."
"It is not by the force of the lash that one brings down a human being to the level of the beast."
"The more one degrades, the more one stimulates."
"The universe is a chaos of matter and motion, without any intelligent principle."
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.
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