Marquis de Sade — "The most powerful empires are those that are founded on crime."
The most powerful empires are those that are founded on crime.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness."
"What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you... every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornic…"
"I am an atheist, and I am proud of it."
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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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