Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings [Anglais] [Broché]

The collection begins with "Dialogue between a priest and a dying man", perhaps the shortest, and least depraved, of his works. The dialogue is a concise evisceration of Judeo-Christian philosophy, advocating the supremacy and amorality of Nature.

"Philosophy in the Bedroom" follows, which is Sade at his most philosophically eloquent and sexually twisted. Every taboo is torn to pieces (sometimes literally) while the characters engage in philosophical dialogues about Nature, religion, politics, and, obviously, sex. There is a political treatise in the middle of the dialogues. The treatise is Sade at his most learned and compelling. Amid the erotic carnage, Sade displays himself as one of France's greatest philosophers. Foucault? Whatever.

Eugenie de Franval is next. It is a romantic tale about the love between a father and his daughter. It pre-dates Balzac, although it has a realistic style familiar to anyone who has read Pere Goriot (another tale of familial love, but not about incest).

Justine closes out the collection. This version is considerably longer than "the Misfortunes of Virtue" in the story collection of the same name. Sade fills the story with copious monologues discussing the stupidities of religion, the nature of fetishism (pre-dating Freud and Krafft-Ebing by a long shot), and the glories of crime. Depraved? Yes. Entertaining? Absolutely. Justine is comedy at its blackest. You'll laugh at all the misfortunes Justine gets herself into and her abundantly sentimental character. Kind of like "Pride and Prejudice", but totally messed up.

Reading Sade has opened my eyes and my mind to his scorched earth brand of philosophy. Nietzsche pales in comparison to the furious directness of Sade. Also, check out the chapter on Sade and Rousseau in Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae" for more insight than this silly little review.

Quality reading. Pick it up now!

The reader new to de Sade might well wish to begin with JUSTINE. It is here that he delineates a world that is composed of two categories of people: those of vice and those of virtue. With the former, de Sade presents a very nearly exclusive male dominant protagonist, one who is wealthy, middle-aged, possessed of a castle or subterranean dungeon, and has a proclivity to speak at great length on the superiority of vice over virtue. With the latter, De Sade, as he does in JUSTINE, gives the reader a young, well-shaped, nearly indestructable female whose sole purpose is to suffer a non-stop series of assaults both on her body and to her mind. Each assault is a carbon copy of its predecessor. Justine (called Therese) is kidnapped or tricked into entering the lair of a rich and dissolute monk or nobleman who promptly lectures Justine/Therese on the inevitable triumph of Vice over a feckless Virtue. Each time this Vice figure rapes and sodomizes Justine, he tells her, "You see, my dear? If there were truly a virtuous God watching over innocent lambs like you, then I would surely be struck down by a bolt of lightning." Typically, Justine's only reply is, "But Moniseur, surely you can allow your hard heart to be softened by my plight." As if to punctuate the superiority of his position over Justine's, her tormentor simply increases the pace of his ravagings.

What becomes clear well before the half way point is that both the tormentor and his victim are allegorical stick figures from the morality plays with which de Sade was undoubtedly quite familiar. And just as those figures of morality from the Middle Ages were sure to point to a victory of virtue over vice, de Sade was determined to reverse the results. JUSTINE, as well as his later JULIETTE and 120 DAYS OF SODOM, all point to the same nihilistic end; either there is no God or what is worse, there is one but this deity has so arranged his cosmos that the universal deck is stacked against those who seek to live the good and pure life. Today, as the modern reader plows through the thousands of pages of de Sades' canon, that reader will find that the real titillation lies not in the finite ways that a female body can be corrupted but rather in the more nearly infinite ways that this corruption can be justified. Few writers have made this point more clearly--or more horribly--than de Sade.