Sade's Sensibilities

Contributions by Mladen Kozul, Will McMorran, Natania Meeker, Eliane Robert Moraes, Christopher C. Nagle, John Phillips, Caroline Warman, Courtney Wennerstrom Edited by Kate Parker, Norbert Sclippa

Not available to order

Publication date:

20 November 2014

Length of book:

202 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611486476

Sade’s Sensibilities tells a new story of one of the most enduring and controversial figures in European literature. Blending ideas about subjectivity, identity and natural philosophy with politics and pornography, D.A.F. de Sade has fascinated writers and readers for two hundred years, and his materialist account of the human condition has been widely influential in post-structuralism, nihilism, and feminism. This new collection of essays considers Sade’s Enlightenment legacy, both within and beyond the narratives of radicalism and aberration that have historically marked the study of his oeuvre. From different points of view, these essays argue that Sade engaged with and influenced traditional Enlightenment paradigms—particularly those related to sensibility, subjectivity, and philosophy—as much as he resisted them. They thus recover a Sade more relevant, even foundational to our twenty-first century understanding of modernity, selfhood, and community. In Sade’s Sensibilities Sade is no longer a solitary, peripheral radical, but an Enlightenment philosopher in his own right.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Kate Parker
Part I: Feeling, Thinking, Reading Sade
Chapter 1: Coitus Interruptus: Sadean Intimacy and the End(s) of Narrrative
Christopher Nagle and Courtney Wennerstrom
Chapter 2: The Reader in the Boudoir
Eliane Moraes
Chapter 3: Obscenity off the Scene: Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
John Phillips
Chapter 4: Sade, Philosophy and Fiction
Norbert Sclippa
Part II: In Pursuit of D.A.F. de Sade
Chapter 5: “A little short fat man, thirty-five years of age, inconceivably vigorous, and hairy as a bear”: The Figure of the Philosopher in Sade
Caroline Warman
Chapter 6: Sade at the End of the World
Natania Meeker
Chapter 7: Sade and the Medical Sciences: Pathophysiology of the Novel and the Rhetoric of Contagion
Mladen Kozul
Chapter 8: The Marquis, the Monster and the Scientist: Sade, Sexology and Criticism
Will McMorran
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors

Published to commemorate the bicentennial of D. A. F. de Sade's death, this collection of essays argues that the 21st century deserves a more complete picture of Sade. Parker and Sclippa present the essays in two sections: 'Thinking, Feeling, Reading Sade' and 'In Pursuit of D. A. F. de Sade.' Part 1 focuses on common themes in Sadean scholarship—apathy, perversion, obscenity, and the carnivalesque. The contributors demonstrate that Sade uses these themes as a means of political critique of the Revolution, rather than simply to titillate. The essays in part 2 present Sade as an individual who was firmly part of the Enlightenment, rather than lurking on the boundaries. Moreover, in this section, the authors argue that in addition to being a product of his era, Sade's writings on materialism, medicine, and sexuality have the ability to reach across centuries, influencing discussions in the 21st century. As Parker notes in her introduction, 'Sade is both curious … and a curiosity,' an author who continues to provoke. This book offers a compelling collection of writings attesting to the enduring offerings of the divin marquis. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.