Abstract EN:

In la nouvelle justine and histoire de juliette, sade creates the bodies of victimes and libertines, and represents to the extreme the details of violence and orgical en joyment. The sadic universe constituted in that way relies on an aesthetic and ethical crisis. Our study is organized around two themes : "the seduction" and "the body" which appear to structure this universe. The representation of the body, which occupies the center of the description of frenzy scenes, reveals a special aesthetic project of shock which has nothing to do with the mimetic "reproduction" of art. The will of seduction, which is a perverted relation between master and pupil, dictates the relation between the caracters in the sade's novel. It is a subversive undertaking through which the libertine establishes a new "ethic" on the ruin of the traditional moral norms. Beyond the varied conceptions about sade, like "agressor" or "liberatoir", we find in his universe a very coherent aesthetic and ethical process: to seduce and convince the others with a strange beauty and a lucid but delirious intelligence. By his writing, the author intends to give expression to "all the dark spots of the human heart" and thus to draw to his world the reader's attention and to let him undergo, in his turn, the venture of seduction.