Must We Burn Sade

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The 120 Days of Sodom is the Marquis de Sade's masterpiece. A still unsurpassed catalogue of sexual perversions and the first systematic exploration of the psychopathology of sex, it was written during Sade's lengthy imprisonment for sexual deviancy and blasphemy and then lost after the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789. Later rediscovered, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1936 and is now introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay, 'Must We Burn Sade?' Unique in its enduring capacity to shock and provoke, The 120 Days of Sodom must stand as one of the most controversial books ever written, and a fine example of the Libertine novel, a genre inspired by eroticism and anti-establishmentarianism, that effectively ended with the French Revolution.

"The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit that has yet existed," wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration-a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud-of the psychology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935. In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade's "Reflections on the Novel," his play Oxtiem, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay "Must We Burn Sade?" and Pierre Klossowski's provocative "Nature as Destructive Principle." "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, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."-From Sade's Last Will and Testament." -- from http://www.amazon.com (April 19, 2011).

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade relates the story of four wealthy men who enslave 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually torture them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes. The book was written while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille and the manuscript was lost during the storming of the Bastille. Sade wrote that he "wept tears of blood" over the manuscript's loss. Many consider this to be Sade crowing acheivement.

'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' Simone de Beauvoir To what extent does our social existence determine who we are? What is the meaning of sexuality for human existence? What is the meaning of 'old age'? What is a woman? And what, for that matter, is a man? Stella Sandford explores the philosophical basis of Beauvoir's reflections on these and other questions, from her early moral period, through her post-war philosophical crisis, to the astounding polymathic studies of her mature thought. She demonstrates the persistence of the fundamental existential and ethical questions that drove Beauvoir's work and her constant revision of her own positions. With a central emphasis on Beauvoir's major work, The Second Sex, extracts are also taken from her first philosophical and political essays, as well as The Mandarins, Old Age and her essay on the Marquis de Sade.

In The Other Within, Fredrika Scarth builds upon the recent studies that have surfaced as part of the Simone de Beauvoir renaissance to offer a reading of The Second Sex as an ethical text. Scarth provides us with a unique and enlightening study of Beauvoir's writing on the female body, and in particular on maternity as an important piece of Beauvoir's writing. Unlike other feminist scholars who find in Beauovir's writing a horror and repudiation of mother hood, Scarth argues that Beauvoir's writing on maternity can open up new possibilities of embodied subjectivity and agency, and can found a truly ethical relationship with the other.