Marquis de Sade — "Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced."
Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Nature has granted me a right to satisfy all my desires."
"The greatest pleasure of all is to give pain."
"Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life."
"Virtue is a chimera, a dream, a fantasy."
"The greatest pleasure is to cause pain to others."
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.