CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Manta, Alexandra Claudia |
|---|---|
| Title | AN ENLIGHTENMENT PARADOX/ PARADIGM INCARNATED: BIOPOLITICAL SADISM AND THE LIBERTINE/ NON-LIBERTINE DIFFERENCE IN THE WRITINGS OF DONATIEN ALPHONSE FRANCOIS, MARQUIS DE SADE |
| Summary | The present thesis looks at the main writings of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man 1782, The 120 Days of Sodom 1785, Justine, or Good Conduct Well-Chastised 1791, and Philosophy in the Boudoir 1795) from a biopolitical perspective, constituted around the ways in which power grapples with bodies through a sovereign act of deciding on their “making,” “unmaking,” and “re-making” via their continuously assigned possibilities for life/ death. Reading Marquis de Sade through the framework offered by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben entails producing a 'Sadean' politics of life/ death as opposed to Sadean eroto/ pornography. Here, I (re)define 'sadism' as intrinsic to an operation of sovereign power that decides on the life or death of bodies. In Sade's novels, 'sadism' is a normal operator of exceptional violence that, in a power relation, systematically and randomly disarticulates a “form-of-life” that is politically meaningful and therefore livable, from a biological state of “mere existence” that is politically irrelevant and therefore killable (Agamben 1998). It affects the (human) bodies at stake to the extent that in it, life and death are distributed among bodies in function of a “libertine/ non-libertine difference” that exemplifies an anthropological, biological, and political differentiation continuously taking place as the effect of a constant decision made upon individual/ collective bodies. The “libertine/ non-libertine difference” figures as a biopolitical split superseding other types of differences (of gender, of sexual orientation, of class, of age, of political belonging) by inhabiting these in turn or by gliding over them. Through this system of differentiation, power re-configures its modalities of force, its technologies of domination, its discourses and institutionalized relations so as to always be able to reach every body, and some bodies while not others, in ways not immediately evident. |
| Supervisor | Loutfi, Anna Ziad |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/manta_alexandra.pdf |
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