The Marquis de Sade: the writer who turned desire into a weapon

The Marquis de Sade is not just the man whose name gave birth to the word

"sadism"; he is a cultural explosive device still ticking today, a writer who permanently shattered the boundary between desire, power, violence, and freedom, an author who dared to say what no one wanted to hear and was imprisoned for nearly half his life because of it, an aristocratic libertine and a revolutionary without flags, a ferocious atheist in a century still terrified of God, de Sade wrote while the world tried to silence him, in castles, prisons, and asylums, turning confinement into an extreme laboratory of thought, because in his books sex is never just sex but a political language, the body becomes a territory of domination, morality an hypocritical construction to be dismantled piece by piece, and evil not a mistake but an intrinsic human possibility, described without excuses and without redemption, his characters rape, torture, and kill not for gratuitous shock but to reveal how fragile the idea of civilization is once its masks are stripped away, de Sade does not ask to be imitated, he asks to be looked at, because his writing is a dirty mirror in which the West sees its most unspeakable desires reflected, and that is why he still scandalizes, disturbs, and divides today, because he reminds us that absolute freedom is as frightening as repression, that pleasure can be cruel, that reason can justify horror, and that when humanity stops believing in God it does not automatically become good, reading de Sade does not mean justifying violence but stopping the pretense that it does not exist, it is an uncomfortable, extreme, necessary experience, because de Sade did not want to be loved, he wanted to be impossible to ignore.

Doktor Lazarus

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