The Marquis de Sade and the Cinema of Transcendence

Abstract

This thesis is an enquiry into the Marquis de Sade, his writing and the perversion known as sadism. The narrower focus of this thesis investigates the problem of the meeting of violence and language in Sade's novels and the implications for cinema. The procedure has been to adopt the Critical and Clinical approach to philosophy that brings together both the literary style of Sade and the clinical symptoms of sadism. This method canvasses a number of Sades novels to consider the psychoanalytical definition of sadism before moving on to discuss the expression of sadism through language. Finally, the model of sadism and language is then applied to a number of films to discuss how violence within the context of sadism functions through language within cinema. The general results show how speech and action can be defined as equivalent forms of sadian violence when expressed through language in both literature and cinema. This occurs, furthermore, through the transcendent model of violence where both speech and action refer to a higher order of violence and this is put at the service of the senses through language. The major conclusions reached suggest that language in literature and cinema can be a demonstrative form of the higher order of violence. Sadism draws out the violence and excess of the world by reflecting it within language. In doing so, violence is designated with a quality of the erotic through this excess. Finally, each act of violence within literature and cinema is an attempt to overcome taboos through transgression. The breaking of a taboo creates an amount of excess but also reinstates the taboo in what becomes an empty act of transgression. The excess is expressed through violence within language and deed according to a transcendent function of language in literature and cinema.