Marquis de Sade — "The more one degrades, the more one stimulates."
The more one degrades, the more one stimulates.
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"There is no God, no heaven, no hell, no virtue, no vice, no good, no evil."
"One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."
"My manner of thinking, so you say, is an abomination. And yet, I have never been able to think otherwise."
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"No need to touch at greater length on what pertains to the full business of population, from now on we shall address ourselves principally, nay, uniquely to those libertine lecheries whose spirit is i…"
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.