SOURCE: A review of An Erotic Beyond: Sade, in New York Times, April 19, 1998.

[In the following review, Jamison comments on the changes in Paz's responses to Sade's literary legacy in An Erotic Beyond.]

The works of the Marquis de Sade arouse strong passions—readers tend to find his ideas either exhilarating or repugnant, and rarely anything in between. In this thin, dense volume [An Erotic Beyond: Sade], the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz offers a glimpse at the way his own responses to Sade have evolved over the course of his lifetime. Upon first discovering Sade as a young man, Paz wrote an "enthusiastic poem." but by the time he wrote the essay "An Erotic Beyond" nearly 15 years later, he was able to transcend emotion in order to examine Sade not as a pornographer but as a philosopher. Long before Freud, Paz points out, Sade observed that...