Is a loathing of rapists and
> >of literary celebrations of rape merely a matter of bourgeois literary
> >taste?
> Dom
The books, written in prison, are fantasies. He was
> imprisoned by the ancien regime and freed by the revolutionaries and put
> to work as a judge, and was in fact sacked because he wouldn't sentence
> anyone to death. Doesn't that argue a complexity in itself, a fault line
> between the writing and the man?
Alison
Dear Dom and Alison,
you have two irreconcilable positions .
Dom , Alison is not saying that
Sade's readable fantasies do make him less responsible
of the crime of rape (if an attempt was ever made, during the mentioned
orgy,
was made in that direction with the initial consensus of the Lady).
For this crime he paid and was being imprisoned for his sexual practices
(sado-maso practices
that nowadays are so freely being advertised, as proved by Elle,
on British Poets, who speaks of "safe, consensual" exercises ).
For Sade to write about it implied to grant us with a critical distance.
Habermas and Apel have stressed how it is impossible to comprehend the
meaning of a text
and of its surrounding reality without understanding also, in a
materialistic sense,
from which ideology and politics
did it sprung out. And De Sade was surely also an ideologist.
Erminia
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