Sade Mushroom Clouds and Silver Linings

This chapter wants to restrict myself to the aspect of sadism, the peculiar type of evil-doing that made Sade so famous and that appears to have some pride of place in contemporary Anglo-analytic treatments of evil. It wants to reveal the philosophical background that Sade believes would support the practice of sadism. The chapter turns out that this attempt for argumentative support leads him into trouble. Sade spent more than 30 years in confinement because of criminal behavior. He became especially notorious forhaving kidnapped, raped, and tortured a woman named Rose Keller, for performing illegal sexual acts with several prostitutes and poisoning them in the process. So there is generous evidence for supposing that Sade was an evil person. French philosopher and writer Maurice Blanchot provides us with an extremely interesting reconstruction of the Sadean argument. He shows us how a seemingly simple philosophy runs into contradictions and therefore needs to evolve and develop into something different.