"Justine", "Philosophy in the Bedroom" and Other Writings

by Marquis De Sade

No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century--from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka--is indisputable. This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugenie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine. This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.

• ISBN10: 0802132189
• ISBN13: 9780802132185
• Publish Date: 11 January 1994
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 784
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Thank you, Ada Palmer. I had my suspicions about Sade, that more was going on than just some shock and awe erotica, and in Too Like The Lightning, when he becomes part of the dialogue in a key way, she makes it clear that to read Sade as sadism is too narrow a view. I had to go to the source to confirm it, and confirm it I have.

“I am about to put forward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.” (from “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans”)

Sade wants you to think. It’s all to a point— one that kept him imprisoned for much of his life. He’s in dialogue with his peers. He’s parodying 18th century scientific logic. He’s invoking taboo because, as Palmer would put it, that’s the Enlightenment art: mixing forbidden sex acts with forbidden things, especially forbidden talk.

Context is everything. And Sade, within context, isn’t a beast who’s willing to file down his teeth. His pornography is ideas— scathing, provoking, often remarkably funny, terribly, boldly uncensored ideas. About God. Philosophy. Crime and punishment. Sexuality. Morality. On and on. There isn’t an extreme he won’t push. I get the feeling he gleefully contradicts himself, intentionally, again, just to get readers to think. Don’t take it all as read, even what he’s saying. Think you get his point? Wrong again, think some more.

He’s a piece of a larger puzzle, and I would argue a crucial one. All these centuries later, he has refused to die, and it’s worth listening to what he has to say, if only to see where we might still be blind.

Sade warns that he who would use Reason as a key to open one door opens many, and he who would make Reason a scythe to fell injustices must beware what else the blade might cut.