Marquis de Sade — "Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?"
Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
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More from Marquis de Sade
"I am an atheist, and I believe in nothing."
"It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, …"
"One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."
"The only true religion is the religion of pleasure."
"Nothing quite encourages as does one's first unpunished crime."
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.