Pierre Klossowski: Sade My Neighbor (1947/1991)

Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era’s union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason–an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a world where “”the unthinkable”” had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and monstrosity: the Marquis de Sade. Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade’s reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski’s seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan.

First published in French as Sade mon prochain, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1947
Translated and with an Introduction by Alphonso Lingis
Publisher Northwestern University Press, 1991
Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series
ISBN 0810109581, 9780810109582
144 pages

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