Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.08 AVERAGE
3.08 AVERAGE
It's hard to figure out exactly what de Sade is up to. My take was that he's writing a parody of philosophical thought at the time, and I felt that if anything it's some sort of condemnation of people who extrapolate "natural" behavior from sources like Hobbes. The back of the dust jacket says that no such stuff is going on and de Sade is just a freaky freako.
I guess that might be a valid critique, but then I think about some of the movies I've watched(Old Boy, Gozu, etc)...and if he's a freaky freako, at least he's a smart and eloquent one.
I guess that might be a valid critique, but then I think about some of the movies I've watched(Old Boy, Gozu, etc)...and if he's a freaky freako, at least he's a smart and eloquent one.
I've never had this much fun reading about the endless miseries of a self-righteous heroine.
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
sad
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
"What's that one in here for?" Sade's jailers used to wonder. "Seems like they got him for conspiracy against God." "Ever heard the like of it?"Encountering Sade at this point in my life ended up initiating a reversal of the manner in which I tend to acquire knowledge: rather than first learning about everyone else and later discovering their inner Sade, I came to find Sade and, many a time, ended up finding everyone else. Don't mistake me, he was likely nothing more than some colony-fattened twat who, for whatever reason, refused to be as subtle about his violations as most of those in his position of the social hierarchy at the time period tended to be for the sake of convenience: financial, religious, and otherwise. However, much like the saying involving the broken clock, the 100+ pages of introductory material I insisted on getting through before diving into the actual text of 'Justine' weren't wrong regarding certain tenets of Freud and various others (I think it might have been Mann who had the 'slaves invented Christianity' bit in TMM, but it's all very fuzzy), and I even picked up on certain phrases that, if rendered in more modern syntax, wouldn't look out of place in a piece by Fanon or Naomi Klein. So, similarly to how it is more than likely that Austen read Wollstonecraft while the latter was still undergoing more than a century of virulent ideological suppression after her death, and just how how one of the writers of the introductions puts it, people weren't willing to read Sade, but they were willing to read the writings of those who, in one way or another, obviously had, and were willing to put in the work of sanitizing whatever they'd extracted during their readerly travails. Now that I've finally engaged with the primal source, I can't say I loved what I read, but when compared to the writings of many of the less voraciously opining bigots that liberals like to excuse these days, in enough places, it was a lot more interesting.
My neighbors' passions frighten me infinitely less than do the law's injustices, for my neighbor's passions are constrained by mine, whilst nothing constrains, nothing checks the injustices of the law.
[B]ut what right have you to expect the wealthy to relieve you if you are in no way useful to them?Where did Sade come from? Outside of what will inevitably happen when you consider one chunk of the population as religiously inviolable and give them robust enough finances and little enough legal constraint, my hypothesis is also grounded in a time of my life when, god knows why, I took a course on the hagiographies of female saints in the European Catholic tradition. These hagiographies were basically biographies with a religious marketing bent, as, more often than not, this text was presented as evidence that the named woman of the named period had lived in the right fashion in order to merit being canonized and attaining sainthood. The right fashion incorporated piety, of course, but it also hinged a great deal on whether the woman(/girl) had suffered enough. That was easy enough to prove when Romans were going around persecuting Christians with crucifixions and throwing to the lions and all that, but harder when all that went away and the only source of possible torment grew increasingly interiorized. Now, the early to medieval period in Europe in which most of these hagiographies were written was not a time when people were uploading texts onto servers in order to crosscheck for facts or plagiarism, so authors would go wild in their 'constructions', or flat out making stuff up. Losing breasts, losing eyes, live immolation, skinning, rape (sometimes miraculously prevented, sometimes not), starvation, etc: as long as the abuse, in tandem with the piety and holy works, was both intense and differentiable enough from that of other saints, there was a good chance that the author's pick would be approved. In other words, in another universe, Sade, being born a good five centuries earlier, was in one way or another in the business of creating a religious cult for likely financial reasons. He picked a woman of high birth (the poor were never brought into the world with enough wealth to make their giving it all up for a religious life all that impressive) with a decent enough story of religious inclinations of the masochistic sort, dressed it up with a couple of tales of woe, and with the sanction of the Catholic Church, we now have Saint Justine, patron saint of orphans, or lightning, or something else related to the story that hadn't yet been snatched by another figure. So, you think Sade's bad? Try reading the actual hagiographies out there, and you'll see that all he was doing was going into a bit more detail about the mortal bits and not being nearly as overt about the climactic religious denouement/saintly payoff.
[L]et them open their purse to our needs, let humaneness reign in their hearts and virtues will take root in ours; but as long as our misfortune, our patient endurance of it, our good faith, our abjection only serves to double the weight of our chains, our crimes will be their doing, and we will be fools indeed to abstain from them when they can lessen the yoke wherewith their cruelty bears us down.
It is not very difficult to forswear theft when one has three or four times when one needs to live; it is not very necessary to plot murder when one is surrounded by nothing but adulators and thralls unto whom one's will is law; nor is it very hard to be temperate and sober when one has the most succulent dainties constantly within one's reach; they can well contrive to be sincere when there is never any apparent advantage in falsehood.Moving on from that, let's get into the morals of the Marquis de Sade. It's not like they actual matter, especially in a world where hundreds of millions, if not billions, of folks believe that anything good could come of a government designed by slave owners, all of them bigots, some of them sleeping with the enslaved half sisters of their wives and subsequently owning their own children in more ways than one. What I'm interested in is the kind of bogeymans that so obviously, if not egregiously coincidentally, fueled the nightmares of the white capitalist puritans that have dominated that status quo of mainstream for the last few centuries or so. The fear of the queer, the fear of the anarchistic revolutionary, the fear of the atheist, the fear of the non-white/non-Euro mortality that is entirely the norm elsewhere outside a couple of dominating continents, the fear of the existence of all of these types coming together, reasoning out their oppressions, and then spilling forth to take on the comparatively miniscule numbers representing the Powers That Be. Sade's problem, of course, is that his hitting upon some quite modern ethical and/or political and/or socioeconomic sensibilities hundreds of years before they were permitted to become fashionable is his coupling them with rape, pedophilia, theft, torture, murder, and general lack of consideration, compassion, or consent in regards to the ever present Other. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, mainstream US liberal pundits like to cry when it comes to white supremacist systems like the slave-catching originating police force or the military industrial complex. If those institutions are defensible, it stands to reason that ideas of those such as Sade can at least be useful.
Only think of it! you sacrifice one, but you save a million, perhaps; may one hesitate when the price is so modest?
To like what others like proves organic conformity, but demonstrates nothing in favor of the beloved object.When I started this work, I had the choice of two versions. One was a compact, under two hundred pages hardcover claiming to have some version of the text of 'Justine', with nary a footnote, endnote, introduction, afterward, or translator name in sight. The other, a comparatively monumental 750+ paperback, claimed to contain the 'unexpurgated' version of 'Justine' and a couple more of Sade's more complete works, in addition to two introductions, an author chronology, and a collection of letters, Socratic dialogues, and other materials deemed to be useful to the project of not only reading Sade, but understanding him. After comparing the first's dry bones straightforwardness to the other's endlessly lush bombasticisms, I went with the second, as since this was my first time reading Sade, I wanted to make sure I put in enough effort that, should it come down to it, I could afford for it to be my last. 427 or so pages later of my picking and choosing what was necessary and what was not (this edition's 'Philosophy in the Bedroom', 'Eugénie de Franval', various nonfiction tracts, and some other stuffs have been left untouched) I'm glad I went for more than twice as long reading experience, as while even the latest salaciously morbid orgy became tediously repetitive by the end of the text, I imagine censors of this text have often been more perturbed by its anarchist socioeconomic digressions than its rape scenes. These days, you can probably get all of the good stuff that Sade managed to come up with without hundreds of pages of whipping and anal sex, but it is good to remind oneself every so often how far back one can trace it, in the European canon at any rate.
I say that civil activity, industry, a little social ease would defeat my subornations and divest me of a great proportion of my subjects. I combat these perils with the influence I enjoy in this city, I promote commercial and economic fluctuations or instigate the rise of prices which, enlarging the poverty-stricken class, depriving it, on the one hand, of possibilities of work and on the other rendering difficult those of survival, increases according to a predictable ratio the total number of the subjects misery puts into my clutches.
[L]et them do what they will for me if doing it gives them pleasure, but let them expect nothing from me simply because they have enjoyed themselves.So, is this text misogynistic? It'd be easy to argue as such, but at least the doesn't spare the Ancient Greeks/Romans when it comes to their own gynephobic temper tantrums. Is it crazy? Considering that I've been officially diagnosed as insane for the last seven years and unofficially so for nearly the last two decades, you're asking the wrong person. Is it degenerate? Again, in asking me, a queer, you're asking the wrong person, and besides, you using that word speaks more about your fascist tendencies than it does my own depravities. Should we conflate homosexuality/bisexuality with pedophilia/rape/woman hatred/lack of morality, as does Sade? Have you been living under a rock for the past two centuries? Should we rescue the non white women from the non white men because they are subject to moralities that, as Sade describes, are differentiably oppressive compared to our own? Is that a rhetorical question, or an excuse? Should we continue to excuse the tenets of disaster capitalism, something that Sade apparently generated a working hypothesis for back in the day, because we can't imagine how we'd live otherwise? That's your call. It's been almost a year since the pandemic came down, and if something hasn't yet happened to destabilize everything in a more revolutionary manner than it has been thus far, it's hard to believe that anything will. Perhaps the problem is not enough people are reading Sade. Separation of author and text and all that, but he wrote himself that:
Oh, Monsieur, how harsh these principles are! Would you speak thus had you not always been wealthy?
upon this he is like unto those perverse writers whose corruption is so dangerous, so active, that their single aim is, by causing their appalling doctrines to be printed, to immortalize the sum of their crimes after their own lives are at an end; they themselves can do no more, but their accursed writings will instigate the commission of crimes, and they carry this sweet idea with them to their graves: it comforts them for the obligation, enjoined by death, to relinquish the doing of evil.Who are we to deny him?
Mäh.
The book is repetitive at best, the whole philosophic aspect of "pureness" against "perversion" is interesting, but the main character is so extremely stupid I just couldn't bare with her. I mean... There are convents in France. Why didn't she just go and make herself a nun after the first seven encounters with perverse people she found so disgusting?
She doesn't learn and keeps stumbling over and over with the same stone. I mean, yeah, at first she is young and naive and thinks the world is black and white. But, come on! At some point it's not naivite anymore and just plain stupid.
The book is repetitive at best, the whole philosophic aspect of "pureness" against "perversion" is interesting, but the main character is so extremely stupid I just couldn't bare with her. I mean... There are convents in France. Why didn't she just go and make herself a nun after the first seven encounters with perverse people she found so disgusting?
She doesn't learn and keeps stumbling over and over with the same stone. I mean, yeah, at first she is young and naive and thinks the world is black and white. But, come on! At some point it's not naivite anymore and just plain stupid.
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Was fine but I ended up finding a different translation because I was not a fan of the one I personally picked up initially. Interesting in a historical and background standpoint
adventurous
challenging
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes