Perfect your physics, refine your reason, banish your prejudices (3/4)
Channel: Ari R pronouns she or they
Date: 2021-08-25

Clearly I dashed my hopes of a 3-part recording, just as humanity dashed my hopes for us to do justice for ourselves or the environment that sustains us by learning to care for our environment and each other more equitably and compassionately while we still can.

The claim that "reason alone should warn us that harm done our fellows can never bring happiness to us" is the reason I chose to adapt and read this as a performance piece, and one of the lines that followed, "do not renounce the pleasure of being happy and of making for happiness," was one of the most difficult for me to read because I renounced the pleasure of being happy. I am a cautionary tale, not a role model. Be yourself and treat beings, human or otherwise, with kindness and compassion because treating not only people but also our environment with kindness and compassion makes fucking sense.

The copy I'm reading from was compiled and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse with introductions by Jean Paulhan of l'Académie Française and Maurice Blanchot. Copyright 1965, printed by Grove Press 1990.

And now a few quotes to contextualize:
"Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, better known to history as the Marquis de Sade, has rarely, if ever, had a fair hearing" (xvii). Fair hearings and punishments that fit crimes still feel too rare.

"What Sade has to say to us... already exists within us, like a resonance, a forgotten truth, or like the divine promise whose fulfillment is finally the most solemn concern of our human existence" (xii). As I read his work, I do feel that he has been speaking through me throughout my existence.

"Yes, it is true that Sade was a dangerous man: sensual, violent-tempered, a knave upon occasion, and (in his dreams if not elsewhere) atrociously cruel... he would with pleasure see the whole of mankind done away with, to make room for some new invention of Nature. He was not particularly sociable; nor social either. He cared about liberties... But these are scruples we can set at rest. 

For Sade paid, and paid dearly. He spent thirty years of his life in various bastilles, fortresses, or keeps of the Monarchy, then of the Republic, then of the Terror, of the Consulate and of the Empire" (6)

"For the first time, philosophy is openly conceived of as being the product of an illness, and it has the effrontery to present as a logical and universal theoriay as system the sole guarantee for which is the personal preferences of an aberrant individual.

This is again one of Sade's most important and original contributions. One may safely say that Sade performed his own psychoanalysis.... [W]hat is more, he was the first to demonstrate, and demonstrate proudly, that from a certain personal and even monstrous form of behavior there could rightfully be derived a world view significant enough so that some eminent thinkers concerned only with the human condition were to do nothing more than to reaffirm its chief sperpectives and provide added proof of its validity" (70).

"Like The 120 Days [of Sodom], the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man did not figure in Sade's 1788 Catalogue raisonné, which was limited to works he wished publicly to acknowledge... In any event, the work needs no apology.

What may astonish the reader about the Dialogue is the author's failure to acknowledge it.... Sade's position on the subject of religion was far more radical than that of most of his contemporaries, even the most enlightened" (163-164).