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When Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade, died in the insane asylum of Charenton in 1801, few would have predicted that he would be read or even remembered more than two hundred years later. The Marquis himself even requested in his will that “the traces of my grave disappear from the face of the earth, as I flatter myself that my memory will be effaced from the mind of men” (see “Marquis de Sade,” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marquis-de-Sade). His novels and philosophical writings offered, in the name of libertine pleasure, acts of violence so horrifying and disgusting that they were repeatedly banned, censored, burned, and condemned, both in his own lifetime and later on. Indeed, it can be challenging even to read at second hand about scenes such as the one in Sade’s 1785 novel Les 120 journées de Sodome, in which beautiful, virtuous young Constance is impregnated by libertines, her leg broken, her nipple chewed off, and her fetus extracted and killed. Yet Sade became a touchstone for many of the twentieth century’s pivotal thinkers, including Freud, Breton, Stein, Man Ray, Marcuse, Lacan, Barthes, Deleuze, and Foucault.
Even in his own day, a few readers recognized in the spectacular violence of Sade’s texts possibilities for a radical philosophical critique of the excesses of the Ancien Régime. As James Steintrager points out in his authoritative new book, the fate of Constance was “not dissimilar to that suffered by Damiens, so hideously dispatched for his attempt on the life of Louis XV” (295). In the social and political milieu of eighteenth-century France, aristocrats such as Sade were being systematically disenfranchised as an increasingly paranoid monarchy sought to quell all resistance to its absolutism. Rich and bored, the aristocracy “were freed up to play games of seduction, test out unusual sexual positions, and so forth” (294). Libertinage as a lifestyle claimed radical liberties in the boudoir in the absence of political freedom. In the work of nineteenth-century decadents...