Marquis de Sade — "Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the…"
Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"I have spent my life in prisons, and I have found the solitude to be a great source of inspiration."
"My only regret in life is that I am not able to live it as I wish."
"The more one degrades, the more one stimulates."
"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."
"Crime is the soul of lust."
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.