Marquis de Sade by Delphine Lebourgeois
Sade asks of his readers precisely what he asked of his countrymen: one more effort in order to achieve an unprecedented level of freedom. His work is thus a call for permanent revolution and self-overcoming. And, arguably, within the mad dialogue that he constructed between love and death, Sade not only made good his own escape from captivity, but opened up a line of flight for us all.
However, as Foucault points out, in a sense Sade doesn't go far enough and he remains at last a transitional figure shaped by the Age of Reason, even as he points a way beyond it. Thus whilst he succeeded in introducing the frenzy of desire into a world dominated by law and order and made evil attractive to us, he remained trapped within certain conventions of thought.
So it is that Sade's pornographic fantasies of crime and cruelty begin to bore us and we ask of his texts what Lawrence once asked of all those works that forever turn on an ideal of transgression: 'If we can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape in their various degrees, however are we going to live?'
