120 Days of Sodom

by De Sade, D. A. F.; Bataille, Georges; Havoc, James

• ISBN13: 9780983884255
• ISBN10: 0983884250
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-31
• Publisher: Sun Vision Pr

Summary

The 120 Days of Sodom is the most extreme book in the history of literature. The Marquis de Sade narrates the escalating sex-crimes of four libertines who barricade themselves in a remote castle with both male and female victims and accomplices for a four-month, precipitous orgy of sodomy, coprophagia and rape leading inexorably towards torture and human decimation. A masterpiece of black humour, pornographic to a point of excess and aberration never reached by any other writer, and required reading for anyone looking for the seminal origins of contemporary culture's fascination with cruelty and violence, The 120 Days of Sodom is the first and ultimate literary outrage. It also stands as the first attempt by an author to collate a systematic psychopathology of human sexual disorder, pre-dating Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis by a century.Until now, Sade's masterwork was only available in tame, outdated translations. This new, uncensored and more complete version of The 120 Days of Sodom brings the work back to incendiary life, returning it to the streamlined status of the revolutionary, raw work Sade had intended. Unbearable, unforgettable, violent, cruel, blasphemous, obscene: The 120 Days of Sodom is a unique and addictive detonation of the senses for the discerning 21st century reader.With a foreword by Georges Bataille, author of The Story of the Eye.

Excerpts

Sade, who cut himself off from humanity, only had one occupation in his long life which really absorbed him - that of enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of destroying human beings, of destroying them and of enjoying the thought of their death and suffering. Even the most beautiful description would have had little meaning for him. Interminable and monotonous enumeration alone managed to present him with the void, the desert, for which he yearned, and which his books still present to the reader. Boredom seeps from the monstrosity of Sade's work, but it is this very boredom which constitutes its significance. As the Christian Pierre Klossowski says, his endless novels are more like prayer books than books of entertainment. The accomplished technique behind them is that of the "monk... who sets his soul in prayer before the divine mystery”. One must read them as they were written, with the intention of fathoming a mystery which is no less profound, nor perhaps less "divine”, than that of theology. This man, who appears in his letters as unstable, facetious, beguiling, fanatical, enamoured or amused, capable of tenderness and even of remorse, contented himself, in his books, with an invariable exercise in which an acute but permanent tension, infinitely sustained, springs from the cares that limit us. From the outset we are lost on inaccessible heights. Nothing remains that is hesitant or moderative. In an endless and relentless tornado, the objects of desire are invariably propelled towards torture and death. The only conceivable end is possible desire of the executioner to be the victim of torture himself. In Sade's will, to which we have already referred, this instinct reached its climax by demanding that not even his tomb should survive: it led to the wish that his very name should "vanish from the memory of men”.FROM THE FOREWORD BY GEORGES BATAILLE