We’ve probably all used or heard the word sadism or sadist at least once within our lifetime. In the field of psychonalaysis, sadism is defined as follows:
But this word has roots that actually trace back to a particular French degenerate and, through him, to modernity as a whole.
Marquis de Sade: Prototypical French Degenerate
Britannica, under the definition of sadism, mentions:Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was one of the most disturbing personalities in European intellectual history, already saturated with numerous very bizarre individualities.
Sade was a self-proclaimed philosopher, and his authorship spanned different genres. However, he is known primarily for his libertine—some would say ographic—novels, which involve sexual cruelties, including child rape. And, thus, the very idea of “sadism” is named after him.
Of course, Sade’s degeneracy and sadism was not restricted only to his fictional writings. He would personally partake in such activities, rendering him the subject of great controversy among Western academics:
Some of his most famous novels are Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom.
Justine involves all kinds of depraved sexual degeneracy with a young girl, perpetrated also by even the Catholic clergy (Sade was, of course, very anti-Christianity).
The 120 Days of Sodom, on the other hand, which is an unfinished novel, is about décadent aristocrats seeking the maximum sexual gratification possible (and let’s save ourselves the nausea by not going into the details as to what exactly this entailed).
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You’d think that such an author would be hated and forgotten, but that’s not the case—quite the contrary in fact. He was actually one of the most influential figures for 20th-century French intellectuals, most notably of whom is probably Georges Bataille (1897-1962), someone not too well-known in the Anglosphere, but within French intellectual circles, he is often considered to be the spiritual father figure of French Theory and postmodernism.
Worse yet, the French government has officially declared The 120 Days of Sodom to be a “national treasure.”
It must also be noted that Pier Paolo Pasolini—one of the most influential Italian filmmakers and an LGBT activist that was likely murdered by a former lover—also adapted loosely The 120 Days of Sodom into a more modern context, that of WWII, in his 1975 movie, Salò.
But why is the ultimate sadist such a prized figure within European intellectual history, to the extent that he is being openly honored in literature, cinema and even by national governments?
The answer?
It’s because he’s the natural conclusion of the Enlightenment project.
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Liberal-Secular Morality Is Sadism
Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was the first to establish a direct link between the thought of Sade and the liberal-secular morality of the Enlightenment.
Klossowski was initially, in the early 20th century, a painter who was close to the Surrealists, the first modernist French art movement. It was only later that he delved into other fields, such as fiction and philosophy, which is when he ended up befriending the very same George Bataille that we had mentioned earlier.
In 1947, Klossowski released a book titled Sade, Mon Prochain, which can roughly be translated into English as “Sade, My Kin.”
As the title suggests, this book is quite important historically. This was his attempt at rehabilitating Sade and depicting him as some sort of respectable philosopher. Prior to the publication of this book, Sade had but a handful of admirers among the so-called intellectual class. The general public, however, viewed him as a criminal ographer.
One of Klossowski’s arguments is that Sade merely takes the Enlightenment project to its natural conclusion:
According to liberal-secular morality; and within a society where “pleasure” is the foremost component of one’s very existence, where exactly is the problem in experimenting with sexual activities as much as you possibly can, perhaps even being innovative in the process of doing so?
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As Klossowski obviously wrote in French, let us instead quote from Rictor Norton, an American author and LGBT activist, who says more or less the same.
He writes:
Sade is, in actuality, the physical manifestation of the “Enlightenment ideals.”
We can thus quite confidently conclude that the Enlightenment’s conceptual child, that is, liberal-secular morality, is necessarily and undeniably sadist.
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