SOURCE: "Language and the Transcendent Subject in Three Works of the Marquis de Sade: Les 120journées de Sodome, La Philosophie dans le boudoir, and Justine," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 249, 1987, pp. 399-406.

In the following excerpt, O'Reilly examines contradictions in Sade's concept of the self as reflected in his rhetorical practices.

In his pioneering work on Sade [Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1971], Roland Barthes focused attention on Sade's use of language, a context within which such problems as the readability and paradoxes of Sade's texts were resolved into a code that Barthes offered as appropriate to a reading of Sade. However, the shift away from structuralism in recent years has entailed a move away from the study of language as a closed and self-referential system to the study of discourse or language seized as utterance involving speaking and writing subjects as well as readers and...