We’re All Sadists Now

By Published on August 21, 2015

An article on campus sexual mores by Rod Dreher this week drove me to reflect on who is the most influential thinker of our present age. Thirty years ago as an undergraduate in England, I would have argued that it was Karl Marx. Yet Marx looks increasingly like a nineteenth century figure, as Jonathan Sperber has so deftly demonstrated. Even the twentieth century revolutions inspired by his thought now seem more often like ethnic conflicts merely pretending to be class war. Perhaps a more persuasive case can be made for Nietzsche and Freud, as Phillip Rieff thought. Certainly the advent of ‘Psychological Man’ is one of the dominant master narratives of our day. But Dreher made me think the real prophet of this present age might be someone else: the Marquis DeSade.

In the popular mind, DeSade is associated with the idea of achieving sexual gratification through inflicting pain on another. Yet that notion rests upon a more sophisticated understanding of sex and personhood.  DeSade’s specific sexual predilections assumed the notion of sex simply as one more consumer commodity in the marketplace and upon the idea of other people as merely instrumental to the achievement of personal sexual pleasure. DeSade turned the sexual relationship into an economic relationship of exchange aimed at the satisfaction of the individual consumer.  He was truly a prophet born out of time and, like all such, doomed to be decried in his own day as a madman.

Read the article “We’re All Sadists Now” on firstthings.com.

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