Must We Burn Sade
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell.... Kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."--incipit from "Must We Burn Sade?" (1951-52) by Simone de Beauvoir, cited as coming from Sade's will but in actuality from a letter from Sade to his wife "Incest, rape, infanticide, prostitution, adultery, murder, theft, sodomy, lesbianism, bestiality, burning, poisoning, abduction, parricide — to them these are virtuous acts to be proud of." --Must We Burn Sade? "Hobbes, with whom Sade was familiar and whom he quotes freely, had declared that man is a wolf to man"--Must We Burn de Sade? |
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"Must We Burn Sade?" (1951-52, French: "Faut-il brûler Sade?") is an essay by Simone de Beauvoir published in Les Temps modernes, December 1951 and January 1952. Like other writers before and after her, de Beauvoir attempts to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding that of existentialism by some 150 years. Furthermore, de Beauvoir identifies Sade as a forerunner of Freud with an intuitive grasp of the nature of the human heart.