
Sodom, LLC: The Marquis de Sade and the office novel - samclemens
http://laphamsquarterly.org/flesh/sodom-llc
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throwanem
Well, she's not wrong that _120 Days of Sodom_ is unbelievably dull. Other
than that, though, I think Chuck Palahniuk put it quite a bit better.

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gbog
Where?

And, well..., I don't know for translations but, read in French, Sade's books
are never boring. They are extremely attractive from a stylistic point of
view, but the theme and the story are utterly repulsive. It's just the work of
a lunatic genious. He was obsessed by debunking one particular lie, which is
that virtue is always rewarded, eventually. To me Justine ou les Malheurs de
la vertu is his only book I was able to read to the end.

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dragandj
People always miss the point that the extremely vile debauchers represent the
upper society: the aristocracy, church, the rich, and whatever was the fourth
main character.

Then, they do all the horible things to the poor in their isolated castle with
the help of hired gunmen.

The style is absolutely fantastic (I do not know about English translation)!

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throwanem
It's been a while, but I recall the English translation's prose as being
rather dry and stiff; it wasn't an obstacle to the reader, but neither was it
rewarding.

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bambax
> _Indeed, according to Sade, sex can never be too orderly or too public. It
> is this valence of his thought that seems overwhelmingly applicable to the
> contemporary office, if not to contemporary social life overall._

An interesting feature of the modern world is that transparency isn't about
freedom but about control; we need to see the actions of others at all times
not because we are genuinely interested in them or their actions, but because
we need to make sure they conform to established models of morality.

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PhasmaFelis
I don't really understand why people treat de Sade's writing as different than
any other run-of-the-mill elaborate fetish fiction. I suppose because, at the
time, nobody else was publishing their elaborate fetish fiction, and so it was
easy to pretend that de Sade was the only person in history who'd ever had a
fetish.

But guys, really, we've had the internet for 20 years now. There's nothing
remotely interesting or unique or special about somebody else's boring, self-
absorbed wankfic.

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bshimmin
I think there's a certain mystique to de Sade because so few people actually
ever bother to read him - I suspect he's one of the better known writers for
whom most people cannot name anything he's written, and certainly haven't read
any of it, but do of course know the general theme. (I count myself in this
group - despite having a degree in literature, I have never been anywhere near
any of his writing; though I have seen the film _Quills_ , which I enjoyed.)

(I'm writing this from a strictly English perspective - I don't know whether
the situation is different in his native France: perhaps all French
schoolchildren are forced to read de Sade!)

Also, not many people get their name turned into a lowercase noun in English!

