SOURCE: "The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)," in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, The Women's Press, 1981, pp. 70-100.

Juliette closes the Classical age upon itself, just as Don Quixote had opened it. And though it is true that this is the last language still contemporaneous with Rousseau and Racine, though it is the last discourse that undertakes to 'represent', to name, we are well enough aware that it simultaneously reduces this ceremony to the utmost precision (it calls things by their strict name, thus eliminating the space occupied by rhetoric) and extends it to infinity (by naming everything, including the slightest of possibilities, for they are all traversed in accordance with the Universal Characteristic of Desire). Sade attains the end of Classical discourse and thought. He holds sway precisely upon their frontier. After him, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense...