[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

So 120 Days of Sodom starts out with a moustache twirling villain vibe and then gradually descends in to a repitive and far fetched slog of paedophilia, coprophilia and masturbation and then ends in what is pretty much a monotonous list of torture and murder fantasies. It's a weird book and in a way I'm glad I've read it, but I would recommend it to no one except the person that gave it to me who should be made to read it as penance. Also while while reading this I kept thinking the Marquis de Sade must have been a pathetic and pitiable character.
I'm baffled why anyone considers this book a classic and even more baffled why some people think it is some kind of philosophical achievement.

to me the books are unreadable, i tried them a long time ago, bored me to tears

but the reason they are considered philosophical is because they are a kind of answer to rousseau, who argued basically that "man is born good and society corrupts him"

he's the french representative of the hobbesian state of nature, if you will, and people find parallels between him and the nietzschean will to power or the freudian id-- camille paglia name checks them all as her intellectual ancestors. tldr, nature is savage

de sade was a bit of a real life monster and was often imprisoned for actual cause. as i recall he's also admired for writing all kinds of atrocities with perfect grammar, hahahah... there's a comment about him by barthes i'd look up if i had my books around me, but see if it is on "the pleasure of the text"

the parody rob speaks of only comes with pasolini who uses the 120 of sodom it as the literal incarnation of fascism and as allegorical representation of the republic of salò. but since pasolini was a real artist he just steals de sade for his own purposes (see harold bloom's "the anxiety of influence"). de sade also is a parody of rousseau in a way

congrats on your superhuman endurance anyway. a quality i only display for worthy causes and only if absolutely necessary due to being "efficient" (lazy). not sure if either was for you in this case, but now you can be one of the few and the proud who can quote actual sources

*i purposefully wrote literal incarnation and allegory in pasolini which appears contradictory but not really, in this sense: the story in the movie is an allegory for thenlast days of the mussolini regime. but the acts depicted in them pasolini took literally, which is to day: capitalism is feeding us shit. and he was a good italian and meant this literally, as in the quality of the food, not a metaphor for something else

ah this is fun to talk about