#de sade

[videoreligion]

De Sade (1969)

[amtskind]

serge gainsbourg as marquis de sade in the french three-piece téléfilm valmy (1967), by jean chérasse and abel gance.

unfortunately this trilogy seems to be rather obscure and lost, as i couldn't find any of its episodes to stream.

[severin-photocopy]

I love problematic bisexual frenchmen

[qeleresh]

[arsanimarum]

The Marquis de Sade, cited by Georges Bataille in Erotism: Death and Sensuality

[cultreslut]

Leather-bound copy of Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom by Libra Classica on ebay

[c4xcocoa]

who knew Veronica was fruity?

[xdazzlex]

they're mostly some sort of erotica, and it's not accidental :) They're for my dolls <3 I guess I will read some of them, but not sure if all ;)

[enyafans4communism]

imagine being such a freak they name the being a freak symptom after you

[stijlw]

i read the marquis de sade reader selected+transl. by margaret crosland. repulsive and boring. i think i got more out of the biographical stuff, de sade's pleading letters to his wife requesting she send him biscuits in prison etc. read in preparation for tackling carter's sadeian woman at some point

[videoreligion]

De Sade (1969)

[severin-photocopy]

coldness and cruelty by deleuze is such a comfort reading

[empirearchives]

Oh yeah, about the sadistic comment, I was thinking about how funny it is that the original sadist, the Marquis de Sade, was actually alive at that time. I guess they were sort of… enemies?? Napoleon actually called his sadism one of the most disgusting things he ever read. Kind of hilarious. So he definitely wasn’t sadistic, anyway.

Also, someone literally made an illustration of Napoleon throwing Sade’s book in the fire. Idk why someone would make that but okay… lollllll

[haggishlyhagging]

Here is the true conventionality at the heart of de Sade's "rebellion." These descriptions of his acts in every way remind us of the trials of the witches that the church fathers themselves carried out in the name of traditional doctrine in the preceding centuries, against the bodies and souls of women. His sexual fantasies and acts resemble these inquisitions in every facet. Only, in his inquisitions, he plays all the roles, becoming at one moment the inquisitor, and at another the witch; he creates and espouses an anti-Christian doctrine, and then forces a woman to act as the professor of this doctrine. Interchangeably, he plays the torturer and the tortured.

But is even this confusion between himself and his victim not, in fact, typical of the inquisitors of history? The monks who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum as the doctrinal justification for witch-burning clearly created their descriptions of the ideas and acts of witches out of their own psyches, and afterward attributed these fantasies to their victims. In their minds, they as freely moved from victim to torturer as did de Sade in his rituals of cruelty. We read that the witch-burners believed themselves to be the victims of the women they accused; we discover in their own accounts that they felt they were in mortal danger from the power of witches. Just as Rose Keller, or Jeanne Testarde, never existed as themselves in the mind of de Sade, but only as actresses who performed the roles he created for them, so the "witch" never existed as the church saw her; rather, the Christian idea of the "witch" was a shadow side of that religious mind.

Yet finally, that which above all gives us the key to the traditional shape of de Sade's rebellion is that he chose the same victim for his rage as had the church fathers through centuries of tradition. For the body of a woman is culture's time-honored and conventional victim. So in the end, we see this rebel is the most loyal of sons. Like his fathers before him, he reduces a woman to an object. Like his fathers, he imagines she is more evil than men. Like the church fathers of the inquisition, he punishes her. And like these same fathers, he imagines himself as her victim.

But now we see that the rebellious sons, and their fathers, not only share an ideology which conceives of women as the vessel of evil, but share a condition of the mind. For these two minds, loyal to one another in their shadow lives, move by the same mechanisms. And these are the mechanisms of projection and denial.

Denial is not mysterious to us. It is simply that means by which the mind forgets a part of itself. So we have the words "conscious" and "unconscious," and by these words we know that the mind has a knowledge of its own being which it will at times make inaccessible to itself. The mind will choose not to know what indeed it does know. But projection is born from denial. For this forgotten knowledge has a way of insisting on life. Even through the very effort we make to push this knowledge of ourselves away from us, it reappears. Thus, in Totem and Taboo, Freud tells us that the knowledge we wish not to know is "ejected from internal perception into the external world." We deny a part of ourselves, and deny knowledge of this part, but just as we deny this, we see this knowledge outside us as part of the world. What we detach from ourselves is, in Freud's language, "pushed onto someone else."

Both the church and pornography have chosen the same victim on which to push this denied knowledge. In these twin cultures, a woman is a blank screen. The nature of her real being is erased, as if her cultural image had been carefully prepared for a clear projection of an image, and she comes to stand for all that man would deny in himself. But she herself, as we shall later see, is no accidental victim. A woman's body evokes the self-knowledge a man tries to forget. And thus he dreads this body. But he does not understand this dread as belonging to himself, and a fear of what the female body calls up in him. Rather, he pretends to himself that she is evil. His conscious mind believes she is evil. As Karen Horney says, "everywhere, the man strives to rid himself of his dread of women by objectifying it." Pornography offers us a clear example of this "objectification" in the words of de Sade, who tells us that woman is “a miserable creature, always inferior, less handsome than he is, less ingenious, less wise, disgustingly shaped, the opposite of what should please a man or delight him . . . a tyrant . . . always nasty, always dangerous. . . .”

The pornographer, like the church father, hates and denies a part of himself. He rejects his knowledge of the physical world and of his own materiality. He rejects knowledge of his own body. This is a part of his mind he would forget. But he cannot reject this knowledge entirely. It comes back to him through his own body: through desire. Just as he pushes away a part of himself, he desires it. What he hates and fears, what he would loathe, he desires. He is in a terrible conflict with himself. And instead he comes to imagine that he struggles with a woman. Onto her body he projects his fear and his desire. So the female body, like the whore of Babylon in church iconography, simultaneously lures the pornographer and incites his rage.

-Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature

[briebysabs]

Bring the sassy diva back!

[enlitment]

Oh this one's evil!

Behead Marquis de Sade because there's no way I could ever match his freak. Would love an opportunity to talk to him before though. I have a lot of questions.

Wed Émilie. I'm kind of a dummy when it comes to physics but I'm sure we'll still be able to have interesting conversations. The fact that her family likely owned several mansions doesn't hurt either.

And again, it's not like she ever took the sanctity of marriage all that seriously, so I'd imagine there'd still be a lot of freedom for both parties. Win-win!

That leaves me with no other option but to bed Cicero I guess. Huh. I mean, something to potentially tell grandchildren about I guess. Also a potential for the head on the rostra jokes.

on a completely unrelated note, does anyone know if noise-cancelling headphones were a thing in the late Roman Republic?