Discussing the 'real' Marquis de Sade from his mythical and demonic reputation, John Phillips examines Sade's life and work his libertine novels, his championing of atheism, and his uniqueness in bringing the body and sex back into philosophy.

"This is the first book to examine the cultural history of Marquis de Sade's (1740-1814) philosophical ideas and their lasting influence on political and artistic debates. An icon of free expression, Sade lived through France's Reign of Terror, and his writings offer both a pitiless mirror on humanity and a series of subversive metaphors that allow for the exploration of political, sexual, and psychological terror. Generations of avant-garde writers and artists have responded to Sade's philosophy as a means of liberation and as a radical engagement with social politics and sexual desire, writing fiction modelled on Sade's novels, illustrating luxury editions of his works, and translating his ideas into film, photography, and painting. In The Sadean Imagination, Alyce Mahon examines how Sade used images and texts as forms that could explore and dramatize the concept of terror on political, physical, and psychic levels, and how avant-garde artists have continued to engage in a complex dialogue with his works. Studying Sade's influence on art from the French Revolution through the twentieth century, Mahon examines works ranging from Anne Desclos's The Story of O, to images, texts, and films by Man Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Peter Brook. She also discusses writings and responses to Sade by feminist theorists including Angela Carter and Judith Butler. Throughout, she shows how Sade's work challenged traditional artistic expectations and pushed the boundaries of the body and the body politic, inspiring future artists, writers, and filmmakers to imagine and portray the unthinkable"--

An investigation into the significance of Sade as a philosopher of the Enlightenment. It describes Sade's ruthless exploration of the fundamentals of morality - crime and justice, murder and capital punishment, the taboos and rights of sexual expression and the ethical basis of virtue and vice.

Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), one of the most perplexing personalities of Western culture, has been called 'the freest spirit who ever lived' and 'a frenetic and abominable assemblage of all crimes and obscenities'. Yet scant attention has been given to the two women who were the catalysts of his fate: his loyal, tolerant wife, Renee-Pelagie, and his vindictive mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. This groundbreaking account vividly brings to life these two dynamic women and the complex bonds they evolved with the rakish Marquis, as they dedicated themselves to protecting, curbing and, ultimately, confining him. Francine du Plessix Gray draws on thousands of pages of correspondence between the magnetic, aristocratic Marquis de Sade and his plain, bourgeois wife, to explore in historical and psychological detail what it was like to live with this maverick adventurer and man of letters in the decades before the French Revolution. She brilliantly recreates the extravagant hedonism and corruption of late-18th-century France, the ensuing Terror, and the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which de Sade spent his last years.

In 1775, the young Count de Sade decided to turn a flight from legal trouble into an opportunity to undertake the "grand tour." He transformed his sojourns in Florence, Rome, Naples, and their environs into a philosophical travelogue; alongside advice on where to go and what to see, his Journey to Italy would include analyses of local customs and institutions, history and politics, natural phenomena, and the development of the arts. For today’s readers, Journey to Italy provides remarkable portraits of major Italian cities and the surrounding countryside, vivid accounts of aristocratic and popular entertainments, and a clear sense of what it was like to be a tourist in eighteenth-century Italy – from scams, rough roads, and unreliable guidebooks to learned interlocutors, balls, and nights at the opera. We witness Sade learning about the lives of Roman emperors, the machinations and misdeeds of pontiffs, the power struggles of the Medici, the ancient libertine world revealed by the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and a host of artistic examples and cultural practices – the material he would soon metamorphose into trenchant satire, gothic horror, and violent sexual fantasy. This book presents the first English translation of Sade’s unfinished and unpolished Journey to Italy along with his extensive dossiers of notations, sketches, plans, and correspondence. The translation is accompanied by extensive explanatory annotations and preceded by a critical introduction that provides biographical, artistic, historical, and intellectual context for Sade’s fascinating project, connecting his travels in and writings about Italy to his later famous and controversial works.

John Philips introduces the Marquis de Sade's highly original and thoroughly subversive depiction of human sexuality and the philosophical and political thinking that underpins it. He shows how, though Sade's work continues to shock, it can also be seen as the logical conclusion of eighteenth-century materialism. As the only writer of his time who dared to put the body at the centre of philosophy, Sade has a unique place in the history of modern thought. Extracts are taken form the whole range of Sade's writings, including The 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Juliette and his Last Will and Testament.

A collection of de Sade's stories utilizing gothic conventions and questioning sexual and societal mores The notorious author of pornographic novels and a sexual pervert who spent much of his life in prison and whose name was unmentionable in civilized circles, only in recent times has the Marquis come to be seen as misunderstood—essentially a moralist, his exploration of the so-called dark side of the human psyche remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own. This collection will provide an excellent introduction to Sade’s fiction; these accessible stories range from the dramatic novellaEugenie de Franval, in which a father’s criminal passion for his daughter leads to intrigue, abduction, and murder, to comic tales such asThe Husband Who Plays Priest, concerning a lecherous monk who finds an ingenious way to combine clerical duties with secular pleasures. De Sade’s gift as a humorist are much in evidence, as is his particular delight in unusual marital situations—which invariably lead to the most diverting conclusions.

Since their publication, the works of the Marquis de Sade have challenged the reading public with a philosophy of relentless physical transgression. This is the first book-length academic study by a single author that applies the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade to the analysis of a wide array of film texts. By employing Sade's controversial body-oriented philosophy within film analysis, this book provides a new understanding of notions of pain, pleasure, and the representation of the transgressive body in film. Whereas many analyses have used theory to excuse and thus dilute the power of sexual and violent images, the author has here sought to examine cinematic representations of human relations as unflinchingly as Sade did in his novels.

Stuart Hood acknowledges de Sade as a philosopher of the Enlightenment who took libertarian atheism to its limit!