Marquis de Sade — "The horrors of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds …"
The horrors of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"It is not by the means of a religion that we can conquer nature, but by the means of nature that we can conquer religion."
"You are afraid of the people unrestrained-how ridiculous!"
"The law which attempts a man's life is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime -- for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold."
"The greatest pleasure is to be hated."
"Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all."
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.