After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.

Michel Foucault
About This Quote

In the work of Sade and his contemporaries, we find a wide range of expression: an eroticism that is both fascinating and disturbing; a frankness that is beyond the bounds of propriety; a violence that is extremely graphic; and, above all, an almost complete absence of representation. The works of Sade present us with a vision of life, sex, and death in which the human condition has been reduced to its most extreme state. And if we consider this extreme state as a kind of limit in experience, we can understand Sade’s writings as an attempt to explore the darkness beyond the limit.

Source: The Order Of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences

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