Juliette
by Marquis de Sade
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marquis de SadeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-01-31
ISBN: 0802130852
Number of pages: 1216
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Juliette
Book Review: .
Summary: 3 Stars
It's not great literature, and were it not for the shock and humor value, it would fail to even be engaging literature. As a matter of fact, it does get painfully tedious after the first couple hundred pages, when you begin to realize that the book is not building towards anything in particular but is just going to be going on and on and on in the established fashion (stomach-turning sadistic sexual exploits told in fancy old-english prose interupted here and there by philosophical discourses.) Still, this is well worth reading (at least through to the end of Part 1 or so.) Most seriously philosophers and scholars dismiss De Sade's philosophy of evil, and while it is certainly not the end-all be-all in the realm of intellectual thought, I personally felt there were many moments of exceptional profundity in his philosophical diatribes, which efficiently and aptly tear apart the fallacy of "goodness" while offering a fresh way to look at morality in general. Essentially, the philosophical portions of the book elaborate a well-thought-out system which entirely justifies and applauds any act of Evil imaginable (the non-philosophical portions illustrate just how far the imagination can go, once let loose on this path), and furthermore encourages such acts, while condemning acts we would typically view as "moral" and "virtuous" as symptoms of a profound inner weakness. It may sound upsetting to some, and it is certainly every decent, church-going American's worst nightmare put down on paper, but one needn't except Evil as the ultimate Good in order to get something of value out of De Sade. Rather, this serves as a profound illustration of the fact that any actions one takes in life can, when it comes down to it, be logically and powerfully argued as virtuous -- and morality itself becomes little more than a flimsy whim of subjectivity; an entirely man-made self-defense mechanism that is the result of the ego's desire to convince itself that it is somehow noble and transcendant, or at least has an established "system" for how to become so. The fact that De Sade's "system" makes more sense than Christianity's definitely says something worth thinking about. And that isn't: "Go out and kill and torture young children before enacting all of your darkest fantasies on their corpses," which is where De Sade prefers to take it, being the sick puppy he is -- but rather: "Look at the beliefs you accept and the values you hold honestly, for they are a weak, contradictory, and ultimately meaningless attempt to understand your life in the simplest, easiest terms possible." Basically, the result of a very natural human need to compensate for everything that yet remains unknown to him/her.So, all in all, fairly poor as a work of literature, but worth it for the sections that carefully and persuasively dissect all common notions of morality, and display both the fallacy of them as well as what they really say about the people who house them. You will not find these challenging and thought-provoking excursions in the more popular 120 Days of Sodom.
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