8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kinds of value, July 1, 2001
This review is from: Sade: A Sudden Abyss (Paperback)
The difficulty of coming to a view of Sade is that he represents several things of widely different value. (1) As a man who routinely victimized people less powerful than himself, he deserves contempt. (2) To the extent that he suffered as a result of what he wrote, he deserves sympathy. (3) As a litmus test for intellectual freedom, he continues to challenge us today. (4) Sade's Crimes of Love, which includes a brief preface considering the history and theory of the novel, shows him to be a student of fiction and a practitioner who, though perhaps not of the first rank, can write entertaining stories; in this mode, he deserves respect.
Possibly taking for granted that the reader knows all about the first mode, and admiring him in the second and third, Annie Le Brun gives him passionate, perhaps excessive, praise in the fourth.
Le Brun presents Sade as driven to search for the truth, however politically incorrect, about human motives and human relations. He goes the Enlightenment one better: not content with his contemporaries' unmasking of the deceptions of religion, he proceeds to unmask their backstops in economics, convention, public opinion, ideology, law, and government.
In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume declares with straightforward good humor that reason is the servant of the passions and can never be anything else. Sade plays out the implications of seeing this, and those of refusing to see it: everything that happens in the human world is driven by the personal desires (acknowledged or disguised) of the people involved, plus chance--but we are surrounded by constant efforts to wrap veils of hypocrisy around this fact.
Sade is out to cut those veils away. He insists that we are a part of, not above, nature. He focuses on sex as the field of our most powerful, and most veiled, desires. Through literary means ranging from philosophical discourse to shock therapy, he wants to make us face the reality of the physical world (and the reality of our own wishes) and reject the high-sounding abstractions that issued, before Sade's eyes, in the free use of the guillotine. Le Brun notes that Sade opposed capital punishment, at considerable risk to his own head. (To suggest the kind of argument he might have made: when a government denies its citizens the right to kill but claims that right for itself, it is claiming to stand above the people--when in fact it is a creature of the people and its "moral authority" is only power, the combination of majority rule and force.)
For Le Brun, Sade's mission is to free us to face the facts of spontaneous, individual human desire and its fate in the world of nature. This drive to clarity makes him a worthy member of a tradition that includes Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, Freud, Rimbaud, and the surrealists. We might also add Stanley Milgram, whose book Obedience to Authority shows how fragile is the veneer of enlightened morality in the life of everyday people.
Le Brun considers earlier critics of Sade, pointing out how they shy away from, or bury under "blind erudition," certain aspects of his work. She herself occasionally falls into obscurity, and the translation suffers a bit from lack of close proofreading. But these flaws are minor beside the surprises and insights that appear on nearly every page. The book makes a passionate, if not entirely convincing, case for Sade as one of the greatest French writers, one whose challenge those who want to live without veils must face. It gets five stars, not because it is necessarily right, but because it is the work of a writer for whom writing is life itself.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most provocative book on Sade in years., May 28, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Sade: A Sudden Abyss (Paperback)
Annie Le Brun is clearly the most thoughtful and honest interpreter of the Marquis de Sade extant. Beyond all the other books written on Sade during these past several decades, SADE: A SUDDEN ABYSS not only provides a cogent vision of Sade, how he worked and why he wrote his many books and plays, but explains why we moderns have had such a difficult time in accepting him for what he expressed -- not what critics too often impune that he expressed. With Annie Le Brun we now have a vehicle to return to Sade and to read him, not so much without preconception, but by way of recognizing whatever preconceptions we throw up so as to obscure our enounter with him. The title to Le Brun's book is also precise to its intent -- to open up, for anyone who dares to read him thoroughly, the moral abyss of a world he attacked with such vehemence, erotism, irony and humor, and which remains our world. SADE: A SUDDEN ABYSS is book of intelligence and courage. If you are at all interested in Sade or, more generally, in the relationship of thought to the body, I urge you to read Annie Le Brun's SADE: A SUDDEN ABYSS.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Divine Marquis re-evaluated., January 14, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Sade: A Sudden Abyss (Paperback)
Annie LeBrun, perhaps better known for being a
self-described hermaphrodite than a scholar, has provided
the sort of critical review which the Marquis de Sade and
his writings have not received since Guillaume Apollinaire
branded him "the divine Marquis." In recent years,
criticism about Sade has been limited to comments such as
"boring," "repetitive", and "predictable". Rather than
attempting to justify Sade to the critics who use such
subjective adjectives to dismiss Sade both as a writer and
philosopher, LeBrun ignores the critics and stakes out new,
although also subjective, territory of her own. It is
literary criticism with personality, a much-overlooked
genre, as she suggests new theories concerning Sade's
masterpiece _The 120 Days of Sodom_, and tries to look,
unflinchingly, into the abyss through the eyes of the
very, very human Marquis.
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