SOURCE: "Sade and the Problem of Closure: Keeping Philosophy in the Bedroom," in Neophilologus, Vol. LXXV, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 519-28.

In this excerpt, Carpenter examines Sade's violations of the Classical principle of closure, particularly in Philosophy in the Bedroom, as a threat to "the notion of ideology as such. "

As Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the Classical age had mastered the art of excluding from society its undesirables, be they the criminal, the deranged, or the physically or politically abnormal. But Sade, half grand seigneur, half Revolutionary, straddled the boundary between the social and the antisocial. His contacts and influence made total seclusion impossible. As much as the authorities, egged on by Sade's venomous mother-in-law, tried to hermetically seal the marquis behind the walls of his cells, he always managed to make himself heard. Sometimes this was in the form of a more or less secret correspondence, by which...