Roland Barthes
Sade, Fourier, Loyola.
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971. Collection "Tel Quel". First edition. 187 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 8.25", shows faint spotting to upper half of front cover, spine displays sunning. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and without markings.
"In "Sade/Fourier/Loyola," eminent literary theorist Roland Barthes offers a fascinating treatise on the nature of philosophical creation. Barthes examines the parallel impulses of Loyola, the Jesuit saint, Sade, the renowned and sometimes pornographic libertine philosopher, and Fourier, the utopian theorist. All three, he makes clear, have been founders of languages--Loyola, the language of divine address; Sade, the language of erotic freedom; and Fourier, the language of social perfection and happiness. Each language is an all-enveloping system, a "secondary language" that isolates the adherent from the conventional world. The object of this book, Barthes makes clear, is not to decipher the content of these respective works, but to consider Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as creators of text."