The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction

There are few people in history whose reputation precedes them to a greater degree than the notorious Marquis de Sade. He is rarely thought of as anything but a vile and violent pornographer whose personal life largely mirrored his written work--so much so that the sexual behavior represented in his most notorious novels is named sadism in his "honor". John Phillips has devoted much scholarly research to rehabilitating the image of Sade, and this brief book (from the outstanding Oxford Very Short Introductions series)is an admirable inclusion to this effort. Along with his other works on Sade, Phillips argues that Sade is far more than just a pornographer. Rather, as a writer he displays wit, irony and satire at a level rarely reached; and as a thinker he develops understandings of man and society that are in many ways well ahead of their time, and worth serious consideration on their own merit as plausible accounts. After a brief overview of Sade's life, Phillips undertakes an examination of Sade's literary works, placing them within the context of both the widespread government and priestly corruption of l'Ancienne Regime, as well as the haphazard violence of Robbespierre's Committee of Public Safety. In his interpretation, Sade comes through as a master of social and political satire. But more than just a satirist (though one of the highest order, deserving of recognition along with such greats as Swift, Voltaire, Ehrenreich and Vidal), Sade comes across as someone with a new philosophical approach to man and the world. At a time where atheism was a capital offense, Sade was an unabashed atheist. Long before Freud, Sade recognizes the fundamentality of sexuality to human life. Long before existentialism, Sade was concerned with understanding man within the context of a meaningless world governed only by natural law. Perhaps the best chapter of the book is chapter 5: Theatres of the Body, where Phillips explicates Sade's conception of what we could call (though this is not Phillips' term) a "sextopia", where it is the body and its needs, especially its sexual needs, and not the soul, where man's true nature lay. Especially insightful is his presentation of Sade's "Philosophy in the Boudoir" as an antithesis to the story of the fall-where Eugenie's education into libertinism (which is nicely explicated in the novel) leads her not into expulsion from a spiritual Eden, but assumption into a sexual Eden. There are many fine points to this work. Phillips clearly places Sade's thought on a continuum with both his predecessors (Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Paul Henri Thierry Baron d'Holbach in particular) and those influenced by him (including Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Angela Carter and Guillaume Apollinaire). He does an excellent job of bringing out serious philosophical concerns and arguments from Sade's work, even arguing that desipe Sade's reputation his works are so filled with philosophical discourse that they often *fai