Scandalized by the neglect into which [the Marquis de Sade] has fallen, yet repudiating the obvious topsy-turvy whereby he has been deified, [Mme de Beauvoir asks in her The Marquis de Sade] that he be regarded as a man and a writer. Yet it is not as author nor as sexual pervert that he interests her, but by his efforts to justify his perversions, to 'erect his tastes into principles'. 'He dreamed of an ideal society from which his special tastes would not exclude him.'…
Mme de Beauvoir tells us that 'eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid one' between persons. Since she then admits that 'every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex-maniac, we take a stand against him', it is possible that she is using the word 'communication' in some highly paradoxical sense reserved to philosophically-trained intellectuals. For the rest of us, Sade's message on this point might seem to come to, F … you, Jack (or Jill), I'm all right….
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