The Marquis
de Sade had a rather large problem in his lifetime. He was living in an age where an idea of God had been
created, and this generally accepted idea did not allow for any of the ideas
Sade spoke about. there was an idea that God was virtuous, eudaimonic and
restrained itself from any profane or hedonistic ways.
But this
idea of God was challenged by de Sade.
He said
“The idea
of God is, I admit, the only wrong that I cannot forgive man for!”
And the
church were neither impressed by him when he said:
“Religion
is incoherent when it comes to liberty.
No man can be free who pledges himself to a Christian god. Niether its dogmas, its rites, its
mysteries or its morals will suit a Republican”
French
Revolution era, this ‘God reality’ was so buttress strong that even
Robespierre, the great revolutionary, who broke down the French Landed Gentry
system and Louis 16th, was shocked by De Sade too and imprisoned him.
Robespierre
certainly did not approve, especially when Sade said that
“Where does
the revolution lead? To the
disappearance of the individual, to the death of choice to uniformity”
Sade, at an
early age, began living the life of a libertine and took the obstinate path of
extremism into excess, almost to the level of fanaticism. He was so determined to be a free
spirit, he was even prepared to be imprisoned and even die for it. It was Apollinaire in 1909 who was the
first to publish some of his works, and then made legal in 1958 by the lawyer
Maurice Garçon who argued that there were parallel ideas in Bataille, Cocteau
and Breton.
His
fantasies of torture, humiliation, assassination were some of the practices in
his imagination which filled people with fear and caused his imprisonment. However, behind prison bars his
imagination blossomed and in his enclosure his imagination knew no bounds.
120 days of
Sodom was produced imprisoned between 1772 and
1784. Later Justine was publish in 1791.
His vision
of the world is entirely conditioned by his desire. He took a rather Indian God ‘Shiva’ viewpoint, saying that
“Destructive forces are just as much a part of the world as the creative
forces”
He believed
man to be part of nature and that, nature was violent and therefore natural cruelty,
end, death are also natural.
He said
“Cruelty, far from being a vice, is the first feeling imprinted on us by
nature”
He even
argued that religious practices, such as martyrdom were infact our desire to
practice in pain and ‘sado-masochism’.
As an
artist he was swallowed up by the dark contemplations of his soul.
“To see is
to believe, but to feel is to be sure!” he said.
Erotic
images were always censured during his era, but he invited people to examine
the contradictions in our conscience and the phenomenal vastness of our
desires.
He said
that
“Virtue, which is only a state of inertia and rest, can never lead to
happiness”
His belief
was that imagination led to happiness.
“All happiness of man is in imagination” and it was this idea that inspired
surrealist artists such as Bunuel, Pasolini, Peter Brook, where the nurturing
of dream archaic language where the mind has no control and images run riot,
that practiced this creative process.
Sade once
said that
“We take a
stand against the passions without imagining that this is the very flame
lighting up philosophy itself”
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