Marquis de Sade — "When we die, we die. No more."
When we die, we die. No more.
When we die, we die. No more.
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"The greatest pleasure of life is love; the greatest luxury is being able to love."
"Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life."
"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, …"
"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 have never done anything wrong in my life, except to think."
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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