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Sade My Neighbor
Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era's union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason—an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a world where "the unthinkable" had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and the Marquis de Sade.
Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan.
Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
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About the author
Pierre Klossowski
99 books127 followersPierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 6, 2019
Klossowski was not the first European thinker to take Sade seriously, beyond mere decorative appropriations meant to shock, by a handful of avant gardists, most famously the Surrealists, but also Apollinaire, Swinburne, and Heine among others. Just a few years earlier, in "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality," from their seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, exiled German cultural critics of Frankfurt School Adorno and Horkheimer, in so many words, argue that once we inevitably reject the naivety of Hegelian and Kantian ethics, the Enlightenment project, emptied of its universalism and ethical content, because "it's irrational to care for the weak," logically ends in barbarism--the dead end of instrumental reason, with Sade and Nietzsche in all their unsavoriness waiting in rubble.
In contrast to the apocalyptic sociopathy Adorno and Horkheimer attribute both noble madmen, Klossoswski places positive value on Nietzsche and Sade whose thought represent the dark underside the Enlightenment, the two studies consisting of half-hagiography, half-proto-schizoanalysis, through the lens of a negative theology.
"Sade wished to transgress the act of outrage by a permanent state of perpetual movement — that movement which Nietzsche much later named ' the innocence of becoming.' But Sade caught sight of this transgression of transgression by itself the core of his irreducible sensibility bound to its representation of an outrageous act — which excludes the very notion of innocence."
The figure of Sade, rather than merely being the hallucinatory death screams of a moribund frustrated aristocracy, is for Klossowski a crypto-Christian mystic who used the Eighteenth-Century rationalist atheism merely as a mask for expressing and resolving obscure theological concerns in the context of French Revolution, identical with the death of God. Of course, this study is really just a means of developing his own theories, so many of the leaps are forgiven.
Might recommend first reading Blanchot's 30-page essay on Sade.
In contrast to the apocalyptic sociopathy Adorno and Horkheimer attribute both noble madmen, Klossoswski places positive value on Nietzsche and Sade whose thought represent the dark underside the Enlightenment, the two studies consisting of half-hagiography, half-proto-schizoanalysis, through the lens of a negative theology.
"Sade wished to transgress the act of outrage by a permanent state of perpetual movement — that movement which Nietzsche much later named ' the innocence of becoming.' But Sade caught sight of this transgression of transgression by itself the core of his irreducible sensibility bound to its representation of an outrageous act — which excludes the very notion of innocence."
The figure of Sade, rather than merely being the hallucinatory death screams of a moribund frustrated aristocracy, is for Klossowski a crypto-Christian mystic who used the Eighteenth-Century rationalist atheism merely as a mask for expressing and resolving obscure theological concerns in the context of French Revolution, identical with the death of God. Of course, this study is really just a means of developing his own theories, so many of the leaps are forgiven.
Might recommend first reading Blanchot's 30-page essay on Sade.
March 3, 2008
Pierre Klossowski is a very interesting writer and of course a wonderful artist. He's also the brother of Balthus, the painter. And "Sade My Neighbor" is probably the first text to treat Sade as a serious thinker and philospher. A fascinating historical figure, Sade is not very sexy, unless you think 'power' is sexy. With the French world (French revolution) exploding, Sade is one of the key figures when the shit hits the fan. And this book is one of the first on that subject matter.
December 5, 2017
This work bears a great historical importance, Klossowski being one of the seminal figures in taking seriously the study of Sade as a philosophical figure. But this work retains its import even today. It may aid the reader not only in thinking through the erotic philsophy of Sade, but it also speaks to the thinking at play in Klossowski's own works, especially his fictions.
As Klossowski notes, Sade's thought is the thought of Man pushed to its limits - disclosing the essence of Man in all its violent negation; the inherent monstrosity that rages in the heart of each and every one of us. By seeking to explore this monstrous heart, the being who transgresses being Man in order to most fully be Man, in becoming the monstrous singularity in affrontation of God, language, and all universal or general norms or laws.
In striving towards the impossible through the negative heart of humanity, Sade takes up the imagination as a means of denying action - a useless writing that careens into madness only to set before the reader an intimate image of their ownmost egoity. The creative-destructive power of this monsteous writing opens up a proliferation of possibilities that God's creation and actuality render impossible. At work in Sade's works is the revolutionary heart, in revolt against God, utitlity, telos and the Good. And, contradictory enough, this shattering of reason works itself out, working itself into the exhaustion of worklessness, through the extremity of reason itself - the violent madness that is the essence of reason, moving ever about its limits, in conjunction with the monstrosity that is the essential limit of humanity. Thus does Sade take the thought of his age, of the Enlightenment, to its very end - and in doing so he destroys it, or rather, allows it to destroy itself, as it must. Sade is truly a son of the Revolution, his thought the rotten sun of their reason, his works the unweaving of their radical thread. Sade ever remains, in the shadows of the Enlightenment, at its limits and thus its heart, the fil(s) radical.
As Klossowski notes, Sade's thought is the thought of Man pushed to its limits - disclosing the essence of Man in all its violent negation; the inherent monstrosity that rages in the heart of each and every one of us. By seeking to explore this monstrous heart, the being who transgresses being Man in order to most fully be Man, in becoming the monstrous singularity in affrontation of God, language, and all universal or general norms or laws.
In striving towards the impossible through the negative heart of humanity, Sade takes up the imagination as a means of denying action - a useless writing that careens into madness only to set before the reader an intimate image of their ownmost egoity. The creative-destructive power of this monsteous writing opens up a proliferation of possibilities that God's creation and actuality render impossible. At work in Sade's works is the revolutionary heart, in revolt against God, utitlity, telos and the Good. And, contradictory enough, this shattering of reason works itself out, working itself into the exhaustion of worklessness, through the extremity of reason itself - the violent madness that is the essence of reason, moving ever about its limits, in conjunction with the monstrosity that is the essential limit of humanity. Thus does Sade take the thought of his age, of the Enlightenment, to its very end - and in doing so he destroys it, or rather, allows it to destroy itself, as it must. Sade is truly a son of the Revolution, his thought the rotten sun of their reason, his works the unweaving of their radical thread. Sade ever remains, in the shadows of the Enlightenment, at its limits and thus its heart, the fil(s) radical.
July 15, 2024
“I would like to find a crime whose perpetual effect would be exerted even when I no longer acted, so that there would never be a single moment of my life, even when asleep, that I was not the cause of some disorder and that this disorder might spread to a degree where it would induce a general corruption or a derangement so absolute that even beyond my lifetime the effect of it would still continue.” — Clairwill, Juliette
Klossowski’s study goes further than anything I’ve ever read in bringing out the “voluptuous harshness” of Sade’s negative system; a cruelty unleashed by the death of god which cannot fail to come back to unceasingly destroy the species, reason, and all norms, the individual and monster not excepted. But where Nietzsche—similarly siding with Dionysus over the Crucified—still preserves some kind of paradoxical redemption in “the innocence of becoming” (and this speaks to his free spirit, also to his physiognomy), for Sade there is only corruption that must be followed coldly in its movements (and this speaks to his ecstatic despair). The act of possessing the virgin must also destroy her. Genuine creation disallowed, he pushes the rupture as far as strength allows: first through the reiterated act performed with calculated apathy as the means of dismantling both images of the acts and the dual movement (subordinating/insubordinate) of the impulses, which both serve to ensure a kind of constancy and ultimately arrest sensuous nature, second through the reveries produced by longing for ungraspable objects. Once atheism is admitted, there is nowhere to go but into a vertiginous spiral of “negativity without a use”, finitely participating in a materiality at all times undoing itself, annihilating, incompleting everything. Despite my profound love for Nietzsche, it seems to me Sade’s evil is far more potent in its impotence. He left us a deeply considered system for overcoming the preservative soporifics of ego, morality, state, etc. from within ennui which preserves it as perpetual motion rather than seeking to dispel it. This system also seems to me especially corrosive toward the generalized teleology and tool-being of life, seeing as it basically aims at a total liquidation of objects (utile life) under the sign of a violence which cannot fail to destroy the agent wielding the tool. All life made less than nothing, is innate sovereignty revealed? Maybe. I tend to think so.
Broadly, I think Sade has gone further than anyone I’ve encountered in thinking singularity not within the general but as manifold singularity. Further than Deleuze, than Levinas or Blanchot, further even than Bataille, who for all that is admirable in his ‘negative community’ still remains committed to something that reeks of the human. Sade also reaches a point where the only belonging is in the impossibility of belonging, of belonging only to death, but he goes further (only Blanchot approaches him here): not even death affords anything genuinely creative or any closing the fissure, but it preserves nonetheless a limit obstinate against matter’s attempts to attain constancy and transcend decay. In other words, it preserves an outside that is forever excluded by the thought of everything, unity, completion, and stasis. And the fact that this limit is unattainable by its very nature means our lives are both utterly worthless and, for that very reason, irreducible to works and values. Sade might not even allow himself that last breath from cruelty, but that’s where I think Bataille and Blanchot are vital, even if not as impressively virulent.
I’ve barely mentioned Klossowski here, so I’ll only add in passing that this, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and Living Currency are inestimably dear to me. He has a megalomania to him that I think helps him enter Sade in a way other commentators might not be able to. His stint as a theologian colors his reading in a way that I find quite exciting as well. He writes with the idiosyncratic and oblique sensibility of a theologian too, so Alphonso Lingis also deserves a mention for a translation that couldn’t have been easy.
Klossowski’s study goes further than anything I’ve ever read in bringing out the “voluptuous harshness” of Sade’s negative system; a cruelty unleashed by the death of god which cannot fail to come back to unceasingly destroy the species, reason, and all norms, the individual and monster not excepted. But where Nietzsche—similarly siding with Dionysus over the Crucified—still preserves some kind of paradoxical redemption in “the innocence of becoming” (and this speaks to his free spirit, also to his physiognomy), for Sade there is only corruption that must be followed coldly in its movements (and this speaks to his ecstatic despair). The act of possessing the virgin must also destroy her. Genuine creation disallowed, he pushes the rupture as far as strength allows: first through the reiterated act performed with calculated apathy as the means of dismantling both images of the acts and the dual movement (subordinating/insubordinate) of the impulses, which both serve to ensure a kind of constancy and ultimately arrest sensuous nature, second through the reveries produced by longing for ungraspable objects. Once atheism is admitted, there is nowhere to go but into a vertiginous spiral of “negativity without a use”, finitely participating in a materiality at all times undoing itself, annihilating, incompleting everything. Despite my profound love for Nietzsche, it seems to me Sade’s evil is far more potent in its impotence. He left us a deeply considered system for overcoming the preservative soporifics of ego, morality, state, etc. from within ennui which preserves it as perpetual motion rather than seeking to dispel it. This system also seems to me especially corrosive toward the generalized teleology and tool-being of life, seeing as it basically aims at a total liquidation of objects (utile life) under the sign of a violence which cannot fail to destroy the agent wielding the tool. All life made less than nothing, is innate sovereignty revealed? Maybe. I tend to think so.
Broadly, I think Sade has gone further than anyone I’ve encountered in thinking singularity not within the general but as manifold singularity. Further than Deleuze, than Levinas or Blanchot, further even than Bataille, who for all that is admirable in his ‘negative community’ still remains committed to something that reeks of the human. Sade also reaches a point where the only belonging is in the impossibility of belonging, of belonging only to death, but he goes further (only Blanchot approaches him here): not even death affords anything genuinely creative or any closing the fissure, but it preserves nonetheless a limit obstinate against matter’s attempts to attain constancy and transcend decay. In other words, it preserves an outside that is forever excluded by the thought of everything, unity, completion, and stasis. And the fact that this limit is unattainable by its very nature means our lives are both utterly worthless and, for that very reason, irreducible to works and values. Sade might not even allow himself that last breath from cruelty, but that’s where I think Bataille and Blanchot are vital, even if not as impressively virulent.
I’ve barely mentioned Klossowski here, so I’ll only add in passing that this, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and Living Currency are inestimably dear to me. He has a megalomania to him that I think helps him enter Sade in a way other commentators might not be able to. His stint as a theologian colors his reading in a way that I find quite exciting as well. He writes with the idiosyncratic and oblique sensibility of a theologian too, so Alphonso Lingis also deserves a mention for a translation that couldn’t have been easy.
January 27, 2020
In seeing in Sade's cruelty towards the figure of the virgin his denial of the presence of the object and consequently of loss [of originary purity], inaugurating an potentially unlimited series of quantitative negations (each and every object of desire can be equivalently exchanged under the sign of "nothing") which informs the Sadean project of pure and monstrous negation, Klossowki has produced a decisive if provocative interpretation of Sade as having more in common with the ancient gnostic thinkers than the aristocratic libertines or even the materialist atheists of his day. For all of you Sade enthusiasts out there, I can't recommend this book enough.
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October 9, 2007A few days ago I started reading this book about super-villain philosopher Sade to think about outrage and the necessity of outrage in a world gone mad, and also to support some of what I've read in Lacan and a recent brush with Derrida. So far I am a little bored and lost with Klossowski's treatment, but I will trudge forward and hope to glean a few tidbits here and there.
Update: I gave up on this one for now. Hey it's Indian-summer here, so I'd rather ride the bike.
Update: I gave up on this one for now. Hey it's Indian-summer here, so I'd rather ride the bike.
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May 10, 2021Just read a little of, not really useful
March 20, 2023
I can say that it is the deepest, most equipped and hardest diagnostic, analysis and criticism book I have ever read on Marquis de Sade. It would be fair to say that he was quite surprised and impressed. This work consists of two separate texts. The fact that there is a serious time difference between them, as well as conveying the formation of the author's way of thinking, organized an intense attack on the Sadeist thought system.
In his first work, he diagnoses Sade, who rejects God. His claim is that he had to reject God. While describing this in detail, he claims that Sade is actually connected to God by this obligation. This is a very interesting finding. In Sade's words, he tried to prove the diagnosis and was not considered unsuccessful. In addition, the writer Klossowski analyzes this great "perversion" of Sade in the second text. It seems to me that the effort to associate Sade fantasies, which he defines as heresy, with atheism was quite forced. I can say that the more accurate the first text is, the harder the second text is. He presents many different perspectives in this text. The first one seems to be skeptical, with the certainty not here.
I think it is very, very important to understand Sade's irony. What he's talking about isn't about sexuality or perverse fantasy feelings. When the language of socialist and class conflict there is missed, heresy and fantasy are tried to be placed on a philosophical ground.
When we consider the book in general, I can say that Klossowski has produced a very good text, albeit forcibly.
I just laughed when he described Sade as a lowly philosopher.
In his first work, he diagnoses Sade, who rejects God. His claim is that he had to reject God. While describing this in detail, he claims that Sade is actually connected to God by this obligation. This is a very interesting finding. In Sade's words, he tried to prove the diagnosis and was not considered unsuccessful. In addition, the writer Klossowski analyzes this great "perversion" of Sade in the second text. It seems to me that the effort to associate Sade fantasies, which he defines as heresy, with atheism was quite forced. I can say that the more accurate the first text is, the harder the second text is. He presents many different perspectives in this text. The first one seems to be skeptical, with the certainty not here.
I think it is very, very important to understand Sade's irony. What he's talking about isn't about sexuality or perverse fantasy feelings. When the language of socialist and class conflict there is missed, heresy and fantasy are tried to be placed on a philosophical ground.
When we consider the book in general, I can say that Klossowski has produced a very good text, albeit forcibly.
I just laughed when he described Sade as a lowly philosopher.
October 9, 2024
klossowski a facut o treaba minunata as spune punand cap la cap in cartea lui filosofia lui sade (ca eu sa pot trece prin ea fara zecile de pagini de fetish porn 😊) nu mi-ar fi trecut niciodata prin cap sa o compar cu Samsara si chiar am ajuns sa prind cateva idei cheie din ce a stat la baza lui
sincer sunt norocoasa ca nu am descoperit lucrurile astea pe la 17 ani cand aveam obsesia cu fratii karamazov/ “problema raului”, sunt sigura ca ar fi starnit ceva ( si mai mult) in mine
un eseu chef’s kiss, apreciez titlul (tare pun intended din partea lui) si apendicele de la final in care facea o schita de psihoanaliza mi-a placut si el tare mult
sincer sunt norocoasa ca nu am descoperit lucrurile astea pe la 17 ani cand aveam obsesia cu fratii karamazov/ “problema raului”, sunt sigura ca ar fi starnit ceva ( si mai mult) in mine
un eseu chef’s kiss, apreciez titlul (tare pun intended din partea lui) si apendicele de la final in care facea o schita de psihoanaliza mi-a placut si el tare mult
April 2, 2023
Puede que lo relea en el futuro, pero me ha parecido soporífero.
May 13, 2015
Ensaio sobre a obra de Marquês de Sade.
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