De Sade
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The article in the current Socialist Standard on De Sade is most welcome. Geoffrey Gorer`s biography is by far the best. Recent research has uncovered a Sade more at home with the Parisian proletariat of the Pike Section than was previously thought. For those who read French, see J.-J. Pauvert`s biography of Sade, vol. III.
It is important to pick and choose from the extensive literature on Sade. Maurice Lever`s biography is the best available today and is translated into English.
For me, the most moving episode of Sade`s life is his relationship with the working-class woman Constance Quesnet, with whom he lived after release from the prisons of the monarchy, and who shared his life to the end. Sade writes of times during the upheavals of the 1790s when he, already aged and obese, lived frozen and on carrots with Constance and her son Charles Quesnet. Constance and Charles disappear from history following Sade`s death in 1814.
Not all would agree, though.http://www.sabinabecker.com/2014/12/why-the-marquis-de-sade-is-nobodys-hero.htmlYet he had his sadean sympathisers, Simone Beauvoir and Angela Carter.Can we turn a disregard his earlier sexual violence because we respect his later progressive poltical views?
His sexual violence was what? A spanking? Handing out aphrodisiac sweets? Rose Keller was a notorious blackmailer, and no marks were found on her body.Contrast this with the Comte de Charolais, who murdered working girls, whose screams could be heard all over Paris, and who was NEVER brought to book for anything. Remember too, Sade`s imprisonment was under lettre de cachet, purchased by his mother-in-law, and had nothing to do with any crime.
Have read the link. Load of rubbish!
Error about NO marks on Rose Keller`s bum. She had abrasions consistent with a spanking with a cat o` nine tails. No cuts nor red wax marks. People pay for that today in brothels. How terrible!Were Jack the Ripper like the Marquis de Sade, the Ripper`s victims would have lived to a ripe old age with nothing but a few bruises on their behinds like one gets from a dominatrix. Hardly is Sade "the Jack the Ripper of his time"! Come on!
Sade the anti-speciesist! http://www.cahiers-antispecistes.org/spip.php?article382
Très interessant, but I noticed that Sade wasn't a vegetarian, far from it ("Sade n’était pas végétarien, loin s’en faut"). But then of course you don't have to be one to be against the mistreatment of animals.
I agree. Although I consider crass the reference by some to "the hypocrisy" of me praising the native Americans of the Plains, dependent on buffalo, whilst supporting vegetarianism in the western world of today. Those wishing to eat meat should maybe be prepared to do their own killing, rather than just be open mouths at the end of a production line of mass misery and murder. But to return to Sade. He wasn`t a vegetarian but was making the point regularly that if it is wrong to kill a human it is also wrong to kill another animal, since humans are animals. Conversely (and here he will be less popular with you), if it is OK to kill other animals, then it`s equally OK to kill other humans. Sade didn`t care about animals in particular, I don`t think, but was aware that the nature is the same in either case. Other animals don`t really feature in his novels either, except as background. It was inconsistency and hypocrisy, and the human reluctance – even when calling themselves philosophers or scientists – to let go of dominionism, that he opposed. Similarly today. Many of you who like to think of yourselves as materialists don`t really want to let go of the legacy of monotheistic religion – the legacy of Man being at the centre of things. That is why you don`t really want to take Gould on board, and why you remain, as indeed do many academics and professional atheists, in thrall to hierarchical, Victorian evolutionism (in common with the uneducated majority too, who take their science, like their religion, on faith!)
Actually, there is a sense in which humans are superior to other animals: we have better brains. Other animals are superior to us in other respects (better hearing, sight, smell, even with senses we don't have, etc) but we have better brains, one capable of abstract thinking and forward planning. This doesn't mean that we are entitled to abuse or "dominate" them. Quite the opposite. It means that we are the only animal that has the ability to save other animals. It could even be said that we have a duty to do this. But this doesn't mean that we should not eat some of them any more than it means that some animals should not eat other animals.
Our very intelligence might be our undoing, just as well as at one time it was our salvation. Our "better brains" are in accord with our adaptation, as every animal is complete in its own adaptation. It could even be argued that our abstract thinking has been a factor in our alienation from nature, and that our striving to harness and dominate nature is what will lead to our own demise – in the end, masters of nothing. I haven`t actually been standing here on a vegetarian platform. I eat fish myself, because a stomach disorder prohibits me from eating nuts, beans and seeds, other sources of protein. The entire concept of "superior" – to return to that – is the problem. Who is superior between an elephant, fully at home in her environment and experiencing life fulfilment in her own way, and a human, brimming over with neuroses and anxieties inherited from his childhood and initial repressions, uncomfortable in his nature and a time-bomb for cancer? One has to lose these concepts of superior and inferior. The elephant is as fully adapted to her environment as a healthy human would be to his, if in tune with his nature (a socialist society?)… Given this, any talk of who is the superior – whether a bigger brain or a longer trunk, I`ve got this and you haven`t, yah boo! – is itself infantile and rooted in the age-old dominionism.
Sade Anti-speciesist? is soon to appear on that site`s English translation pages. They`ve translated issue 26; the Sade essay is in issue number 32 – so a bit of patience.
Re-reading for the first time in years THE MYSTIFIED MAGISTRATE, an hilarious novella at the expense of the judicial profession. Still makes me roar with laughter. Sade, comedian par excellence!https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Mystified-Magistrate-And-Other-Tales/400642273354999
Could I extend the scope of this thread to include the materialism of Sade`s contemporaries and ourselves too – in honour to Sade and the other materialists who laid the ground for Marx and Engels to later develop?
John Oswald wrote:Could I extend the scope of this thread to include the materialism of Sade`s contemporaries and ourselves too – in honour to Sade and the other materialists who laid the ground for Marx and Engels to later develop?So long as the "scope" maintains a connection to the title of this thread it wont be in breach of the guidelines and rules.
June 2nd, Sade`s birthday!
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