Sade dans tous ses états. Deux cents ans de controverses ed. by Armelle St-Martin (review)

Sade dans tous ses états collects thirteen essays first presented at a conference of the same name in 2014, which was organized by Armelle St-Martin to commemorate the bicentenary of Sade's death. The volume brings together some of the most prominent Sade scholars (Michel Delon, Béatrice Didier) and a number of younger scholars eager to push the field of Sade studies in new directions. As one would expect, one of the goals of this book is to take stock of the scholarship that has shaped our understanding of the Marquis de Sade, from the early debates between André Breton and George Bataille to the biographical discoveries of Maurice Lévy or the public interventions of Jean Paulhan and Simone de Beauvoir in the 1950s and 1960s. Sade dans tous ses états serves as a reference guide of sorts, revealing how far research on Sade has come in the past fifty years and how his writings continue to be relevant to different fields of investigation adjacent to literary studies: critical theory, film studies, art history, or even economics. Sade's unique position as a member of the old elite, a direct witness to the Terror that followed the French Revolution, and a social outcast locked in a mental asylum means that he can help us see eighteenth-century cultural phenomena in a new light. At the same time, his writings have inspired paradigm shifts in our conceptions of power, sexuality, and subjectivity. And it is clear that Sade continues to challenge the established order in the twenty-first century, whether it be through his writing style, the content of his stories, or his anti-Enlightenment philosophy.

There is still much to learn about what might have influenced Sade's writings. Sade dans tous ses états contains two essays that provide new information on Sade's relation to his contemporaries. A newly discovered letter written by Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau makes it possible to compare the strategies used by the two authors to imagine tableaux of incest and libertine excess. The letter reveals how they subvert the codes of sensibility by using tears as a way of showing the cruelty and lack of emotions displayed by their libertine characters. Sade and Rétif de la Bretonne both had difficulties getting their works published during the Revolution. A comparative analysis shows the extent to which they borrowed from each other and how Rétif's attempt to challenge Sade's pornographic imagination was unsuccessful, in large part because he never managed to infuse his own writings with the kind of universal drive that characterizes Sade's. The influence of religious thought and imagery on Sade also remains understudied. One essay fills the gap by noting that the Marquis was likely exposed to paintings representing scenes of crucifixion as a child and later borrowed the codes and organizing principles of these images to create highly visual literary scenes, especially in his short stories. For atheists like Sade or Denis Diderot, Christian myths functioned as a reservoir of stories from which novelists and painters could draw. Sade was clearly influenced by early modern materialist philosophers, but as Tamako Suzuki points out in her essay "La Violence sadienne, la nature et l'homme," it is important to understand that he often elaborated on those theories through the philosophical reflections of his libertines. For example, Sade was familiar with Spinoza's conception of nature, but he also found ways of condensing and radicalizing the concept for his own purposes.

Several essays explore Sade's legacy beyond the eighteenth century. Justine (1791) was a major influence for Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), but also for Frenetic Romanticism. In 1933, Maurice Heine was the first to suggest a lineage between Sade's gothic imagery and the roman noir. The surrealists were fascinated by what they saw as a peculiar...