Summary
Annie Le Brun: Sade en face and in profile
Apollinaire was not mistaken when, back in 1909, he declared the Marquis de Sade "the freest spirit that ever existed". He probably had enough insight into Freud's theories about the unconscious, although they were not overly well-known in France at the time, that he was glad to realize that Sade, more than a century before the inventor of psychoanalysis, was the first to expose the decisive role of sexuality in all human behavior. However, he knew how to recognize in a visionary manner the underground way in which Sade's work, the most scandalous of all and kept for a long time in the department of libraries called Hell, not only influenced the XIX. century, but also had to determine the thought of the 20th century. Because Sade is the originator of an unprecedented reversal of perspective, by being the only one to place philosophy within the boudoir, while until then, at best, one would try to introduce the boudoir into philosophy, which means subordinating sexuality to an order that is foreign to it. And while some indeed recognized its essential role, only Sade dared to see in it the origin of everything, and even reason itself. "They faint on passion without thinking that it is precisely with their flame that the torch of philosophy is lit," he will declare in 1796 in Juliet's history. The extraordinary power of Sade's thought comes precisely from there, from its physical rootedness, because by becoming aware of its sexual uniqueness Annie Le Brun.
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