Sade and Goya  

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"Sade and Goya lived at about the same time. Sade, locked up in his prisons, sometimes at the extreme edge of madness; Goya, deaf for thirty-six years, locked up in a prison of absolute deafness. The French Revolution awakened hope in both of them: both men had a pathological loathing of any regime founded on religion. But more than anything else, an obsession with excessive pain unites them. Goya, unlike Sade, did not associate pain with sensuous pleasure. However, his obsession with death and pain contained a convulsive violence that approximates to eroticism." --The Tears of Eros (1961) by G. Bataille, Peter Connor translation, p. 132-133

 This page Sade and Goya is part of the Marquis de Sade series  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein
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This page Sade and Goya is part of the Marquis de Sade series
Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein

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French writer Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) and Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828) were near-contemporaries.

Both Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault have drawn attention to similarities between Sade and Goya.

Georges Bataille

In The Tears of Eros Georges Bataille compares French writer Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828). Sade was locked up in prison for half of his adult life, Goya was locked inside his own body, locked in his deafness. Both applauded the advent of the French Revolution. Both abhorred state religion. Both were obsessed with pain, but unlike Sade, Goya "did not associate pain with sensuous pleasure" ("Goya n'associa pas, comme Sade, la douleur à la volupté") but his violence approximates eroticism.

Michel Foucault

"For Sade as for Goya, unreason continues to watch by night; but in this vigil it joins with fresh powers. The non-being it once was now becomes the power to annihilate. Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence, and of recovering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialectic.
After Sade and Goya, and since them, unreason has belonged to whatever is decisive, for the modern world, in any work of art: that is, whatever any work of art contains that is both murderous and constraining."

--Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization, tr. Richard Howard

See also




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