A Blog is supposed to create a "public" site. I am not sure I am comfortable with this. The only reason I am creating this is to write about multiplicity, as some kind of a draft space for my various projects. Starting with Sade. I am trying to finish the Sade project before moving to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault. I will be writing various questions raised by each project.
Here's a draft summary of the Sade project in process, extracted from the introduction.
This essay is an introduction to the Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. As an introduction, it will attempt to present, through a close reading of texts across the Sadean corpus and through analyses of these texts, the major philosophical contributions of Sade. These contributions are particularly relevant today, for my aim is to show how Sade’s approach to philosophy opens up ways of thinking that are concordant with contemporary philosophical ways of living and relating to the world. This essay will consider the development of Sade’s philosophy chronologically, from his early writings to his late work, and will describe it in terms of an “ethics of transformation” where power and difference interact in ways privileging both singularity and multiplicity. I will start by analyzing the early work of Sade, best represented by the “sexuated world” of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome [1782-1785], before proceeding to study his later work, best represented by the “unbounded world” of L’Histoire de Juliette [1797]. Overall, I will try to show how Sade develops a theory of disappearance that I associate with “becoming chaos” where he reassesses philosophical approaches to human nature and to human subjectivity in ways that are not just “modern” but also, and in many ways, “postmodern.” The “New Sade” that I would like to present is one who seriously engages postmodern philosophical questions (such as the ones raised and addressed in Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, just to cite a few): he does not limit himself to critiques of transcendence, teleology, linear causality, and dichotomies, but he also contributes a practical and material ontology where multiplicity and becoming are intertwined with singularity and difference. It is precisely this ontology that is Sade’s most important philosophical contribution, for it underlies his approach to subjectivization and/or transformation as it folds the one onto the other in a gesture that not only transcends such dichotomies as self/world, self/other, or ethics/politics, but implodes them into an “englobing” multiplicity associated with “becoming chaos” and with an “ethics of transformation.”
