Foucault, Sade and the Enlightenment

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the uses that Foucault proposes of Sade's work (from History of Madness to The Will to Know), that is, how these uses are likely to awaken an indirect clarification about the mistaken status that the Enlightenment receives in thought. Foucauldian. Here, they are explicitly opposed to the literary figure of a transgressive Sade who associates himself with writing and thinking from the “outside”, and that of a Sade “sergeant of sex”, provider of a disciplinary eroticism that accompanies the unfolding of an instrumental rationality