>But, erminia, isn't that much the same as saying "I've got to rape people,
>I can't help it. Authoritarian laws try to suppress my freedom." What's
>needed is understanding, rather than emulation. I don't on the whole
>believe that people have no choice.
Paz, thinking about the contemporary pornography industry, on Sade:
"Modernity desacralised the body, and advertising has used it as a
marketing tool.... Sade had dreamed of a society with weak laws and
strong passions, where the only right would be the right to pleasure,
however cruel and lethal it might be. No one ever imagined that
commercial dealings would supplant libertine philosophy and that pleasure
would be transformed into an industrial machine."
Perhaps these days de Sade would be an ascetic saint.
It strikes me to read Sade requires, besides enormous stamina, a fairly
sophisticated understanding of the distinction between writing and
reality: ie, the writing is not real, and is impotent, and Sade
understood this profoundly. (I think Said argues something similar about
Swift).
Next to his revolutionary contemporaries, Sade seems in fact a mild
figure - wasn't he sacked as a judge because he would not sentence people
to death? I would think we could not do without de Sade, even though
Philosophy in the Bedroom et al bored me to death and I never finished
any of them. I always thought that was the point, I mean the boredom,
not my slackness as a reader: the end result of all pornography is
boredom, after all. I even got bored with Apollinaire's pornography,
which is a lot shorter, although he managed to shock and amuse me before
he bored me, and parts were very erotic - a function entirely of the
quality of the writing.
Best
Alison
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