In the early 20^th century, French surrealists celebrated Sade’s work, seeing it as a literary exponent of psychopathological theories; then, a growing popularization was accompanied by a quasi-mystical celebration of his excesses; in the 1960s, Sade was viewed as proposing a contemporaneous critique of the limits of Enlightenment reason, while an attention his rhetorical mastery sought to attenuate the violence and cruelty omnipresent in his project; in the 1990s, he was fully canonized and recognized as a major author in the French tradition (Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge).

In the past two decades, a materialist approach has emerged in Sadean scholarship, in part due to the publication of Caroline Warman’s Sade: From Materialism to Pornography (2002); its strength is precisely to show how familiar Sade was with Enlightenment materialist philosophy. This turn to materialism is part of a larger methodological shift in the humanities, visible in such influential schools as posthumanism and new materialism.

This panel seeks to broaden materialist understandings of Sade through a double gesture: it situates Sade within Enlightenment materialism and proposes that Sade is a materialist philosopher in his own right. It also seeks to recast Sade’s materialist thinking within contemporary materialism, highlighting its consistency with current approaches and suggesting that it allows us to think the implications of materialism today.

Panelists will pre-circulate their papers and then have 8 minutes to elaborate on their contributions. The respondent will have 10 minutes to engage with the pre-circulated papers. Because participants will be discussing The 120 Days of Sodom, we will privilege open discussion; for this purpose, the remaining half hour will be dedicated to discussion, including questions from the audience, in order to foster dialogue on Sade’s contribution to Enlightenment materialism and its relevance in contemporary materialist debates.

Carole-Anne Tyler reads Sade’s materialism along with Kant’s idealism through the lens of ethics. She argues that Sade’s materialist hedonism may seem amoral in its insistence on the liberty to enjoy without regard for the Other. For Kant, freedom is based on self-mastery; for Sade, it is grounded in mastery of the Other. Both share an investment in sadistic mastery but differ on whether self or Other are to be mastered; the ethical dimension of their projects is that there is no excuse for failing in one’s duty to mastery. This paper is part of a book on voice in literature, film, and theory, proposing that it stands in as the “unconscious” of both idealist and materialist ideas about language and communication.

Valentina Denzel argues for viewing Sade’s materialism as sensational, especially as it relates to the question of logos/discourse. Sade’s materialist project is one that excites the senses, and it becomes both a political and rhetorical strategy in the hands of a procuress whose narration complexifies power relations and assures her survival in the hands of the libertines. It is precisely the alliance of sensational materialism and speech that undermines the libertines’ misogyny and violence. Her paper is part of a book project on the impact of Sade on the punk movement, feminism, and comic books in France, the UK, and the US.

Bruno Penteado offers a theory of Sadean objects through the lens of Thomas Nail’s work, which develops a dynamic ontology of objects as perpetually in motion and affecting one another. Sade consistently refers to his victims as objects. Penteado suggests that, instead of dehumanizing victims, referring to them as objects entails a radical stance that sees human subjects as nothing but dynamic bodies (and, therefore, kinetic objects) that, as metastable matter determined by movement, can affect and be affected by one another. This paper is part of a book project that focuses on how indebted French philosophy’s legitimization of stupidity is to the French novel.

Ery Shin considers the political implications of Sade’s forgoing of the material as such, exploring how his outward-directed violence turns inward and considering the political grounds upon which death wishes are banned. She argues that the logic informing Sade’s work reframes life as something to be consented to, not sustained under coercion. Sade’s tales unearth both the desire for death and the anti-social energies running throughout all desire. Her contribution is part of a book project mostly grounded on Sade that considers how conceptions of blasphemy can illuminate present-day debates on suicide.

Eleanor Kaufman, who is writing a book on Sade and 20^th-century French philosophy, will serve as a respondent. Her expertise in continental philosophy will allow us to better understand and contextualize Sade’s role in materialist and philosophical debates.