Beyond good and evil: Marquis de Sade

The fact that the humankind – who has been using the knowledge he has acquired from nature as a means to dominate over nature and people – has now become an object to be experimented on, and the rebellious force of art in attaining the truth in the presence of an order that determines the human-object relationships characterised by its will to power has urged us to study Marquis de Sade once more, after a hundred and fifty years. The author in question has been able to put across a distinct opinion about culture and nature, and managed to create a unique language with a new way of feeling and thinking, and used this authentic language as the weapon of his rebellion. The "Sade. Attaquer le soleil" exhibition held at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in 2015, which focused on Marquis de Sade, forms the trajectory that this study shall follow in examining the Sadic style as a resource that prompts the content and form of works of art in the transition from textual culture to visual culture. Curated by a Marquis de Sade specialist of thirty-years, writer and critic Annie Le Brun, the exhibition was centring on the texts by Marquis de Sade, who lived between 1740-1814, alongside anecdotes from other thinkers and philosophers, and examples of works reflecting these thoughts in visual arts. In this study we examine Sade's view of culture and nature in light of other philosophical references, the original language of Sade created with a new way of feeling and thinking and potent with limitless negation and repudiation that knows no bounds, and the way his legacy has been interpreted by artists and art movements that followed, with examples. In the first part of this study we carried out an analysis of the philosophy of nature that Marquis de Sade presents while completely demolishing the impositions of conventional ethics. While examining the definitions of good and evil, Eros and Thanatos, and pleasure and pain in a comparative manner with other philosophical references and Marquis de Sade's philosophy of nature, we arrived at the conclusion that although these concepts seem to function in opposition to one another, they actually render each other visible. We enquired into the differences that make up the unique style of this author, who spent thirty years of his life behind prison walls in a world devoid of anyone else. While the philosophical meanings he ascribed to everyday elements such as food, money and clothing in the closed universe he designed, constituted the distinctive features of his style, his mastery of the use of language in the expression of the positive content of perversity in a rational framework, as if with a scientific purpose, rendered the author unequalled. His use of the erotic discours, the most significant weapon of his staggering style, as a tool to express his whole philosophy, enabled the author to change the entire realm of ars erotica. The sparks created by the style of Marquis de Sade that was way ahead of his contemporaries, and their reverberations in the interactions within the different branches of art that led to a mutual advancement, resulted in an expression of the impossible through a new instrument against the established culture. The style of the author, which transcends beyond time, still continues to reveal itself in examples of contemporary art. Keywords: Marquis de Sade, eros, thanatos, pleasure, will to power, rebellion