Marquis de Sade — "What is more immoral than war?"
What is more immoral than war?
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More from Marquis de Sade
"To be truly free, one must be free from all laws, even those of nature."
"I have no God, no morality, no law but my will. I reject the poison that they call religion, for it is nothing but a chain that binds the soul, a vile invention of the cowardly man to escape the torme…"
"Virtue is but a mask which one puts on and takes off according to need."
"Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?"
"Virtue is nothing more than a chimera."
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.