De Sade, Enlightenment thinker.

November 2024 Forums Off topic De Sade, Enlightenment thinker.

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 24 total)
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  • #244561
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    A sane and knowledgeable, and sensible, documentary about Sade:

    #244566
    Lizzie45
    Blocked

    Not for the first time you have shown an unhealthy obsession with this depraved individual.

    You need help!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade#Scandals_and_imprisonment

    #244580
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    “Not for the first time you have shown an unhealthy obsession with this depraved individual.”

    *****

    Yep.
    Blasphemy, eh?

    If God is a figment of the imagination, how can he be calumniated?
    And if he’s real, how can he be so petty as to be offended by calumny?

    You cannot possibly tell me anything that’s true that I don’t already know about Sade. I’ve studied him since I was 12.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Thomas_More.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Thomas_More.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Thomas_More.
    #244584
    Lizzie45
    Blocked

    You cannot possibly tell me anything that’s true that I don’t already know about Sade. I’ve studied him since I was 12.

    Yep, nuff said.

    But I very much doubt you’re doing your fellow little band of brothers any favours by publicising your repulsive fascination.

    #244587
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    It is Sade’s political and materialist views which interest socialists. Your attitude is sensationalist and outdated, given that Sade is on the university curricula in France for literature and philosophy, and has been of interest to radical thinkers since the early 20th century, including Simone de Beauvoir, one of his staunchest admirers.

    #244588
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    ” Actually, the Marquis de Sade, a contemporary of the Founding Fathers, who died over 200 years ago in an insane asylum, has better claim to the label socialist. He championed democracy, was opposed to every form of punishment (‘it is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them’), saw the class-divided nature of society and sided with ‘those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat.’ Indeed, Geoffrey Gorer in The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade (1964) points out that Sade stood in opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer thus argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’” (The Socialist Standard).

    #244601
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Wait a minute. Just let me celebrate my victory:

    Delalande – Complete Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy + Presentation (Century’s rec. : Hugo Reyne)

    #244646
    ZJW
    Participant

    Lizzie can read in full the article from which TM quotes, here:

    Are Socialists Sadists?

    #244647
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    Gorer’s book: the 1964 edition was an updated and revised edition. The book was first published in the 1930s. Gorer also contributed to Ashley Montagu’s “Man and Aggression”, which exposed the human nature fallacy.
    The first English study of Sade was C.R. Dawes’, published in 1927.
    Dawes also wrote, about the same time, a biography of Nicolas E. Restif de la Bretonne, who had, together with a friend, first used the word ‘communism.’

    #244657
    Lizzie45
    Blocked

    Lizzie can read in full the article from which TM quotes

    No thanks ZJW. I have no interest whatever in anyone who ‘gets off’ in response to extreme pain, suffering or humiliation inflicted non-consensually on others.

    #244661
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    This only shows you know very little about him.

    You would have to include in your condemnation all those today who “get off” on silly “bondage” games.

    Sade grew up. If you read the 18th century France expert Richard Darnton, you will learn that the era’s writers used pornography as the language of political dissent, as the previous century had used religion.

    The reality of life surrounding Sade during the bourgeois Revolution and the Empire far outweighed in horror any fiction; and Sade witnessed it all. Furthermore, as far as he could, he tried to ameliorate conditions. As a representative of the Convention he reformed the hospitals and compelled negligent administrators to clean up their act. This “sadist” put his own neck at risk of the guillotine rather than vote a single death warrant while he was a judge on the tribunal. He even saved the life of his lifelong enemy Mme de Montreuil, who had robbed him of over 20 years of his life via lettre de cachet.
    He opposed the slave trade and, with his friend Coulmier, director of Charenton, participated in the new therapeutic projects to help the mentally ill – projects which had included the invention of the manual alphabet for the deaf. …All later dashed by Bonaparte the military thug.
    By far his best writings were not licentious at all, and only a few of these have only recently appeared in English, because, not being lewd, they don’t tend to sell here. (But in France they do).

    #244662
    robbo203
    Participant

    No thanks ZJW. I have no interest whatever in anyone who ‘gets off’ in response to extreme pain, suffering or humiliation inflicted non-consensually on others.
    _____________________________

    Why do you make this assumption that anyone is “getting off” on the extreme pain and humiliation of others??? That’s pretty narrow-minded and bigoted, don’t you think? The article ZJW referred you to does no such thing. It is perfectly possible to look at historical figures and recognize both the good or useful things they said and did as well as the bad things. The SPGB for example broadly describes itself as a Marxist political organization but that does not mean that there are not things that Marx wrote with which we strongly disagree.

    Your response is a bit like how the tabloid press might respond to the very mention of Marx (only in this case De Sade) – super-charged moralism and completely lacking in nuance

    #244664
    Thomas_More
    Participant

    A Christian I knew had a book identifying Marx as the devil. The cover showed a drawing of Marx with horns.

    You accuse Sade of some terrible things. His writings can also be interpreted in other ways by anti-socialists. They focus always, and only, on the three or four “obscene” works, which, although weighty tomes, are but the smallest part of his output. These are in fact a critique of his own class, as well as of the haute bourgeoisie his father forced him to marry into.
    The opening of the most infamous of these three books starts off by expressing Sade’s utter contempt for the super rich perpetrators of the horrors in the novel, whom he calls upstarts and parasites.

    As to the worst of Sade himself, you can only be thinking of the Rose Keller affair, which is well documented. Known as a blackmailer, Rose Keller’s physical examination did not bear out what she had accused Sade of.

    Had she been picked up by the comte de Charolais instead, she wouldn’t have lived to tell any tales.

    #244670
    Lizzie45
    Blocked

    Why do you make this assumption that anyone is “getting off” on the extreme pain and humiliation of others???

    It’s not an assumption but an historical fact where De Sade is concerned. Do some research.

    #244673
    robbo203
    Participant

    It’s not an assumption but an historical fact where De Sade is concerned. Do some research.
    …………………….

    Pay attention. I am talking about the article ZJW referred you to, not the random “sadist” in the street you seem to have in mind. No one on this forum is interested in inflicting pain and humiliation on others….

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