Marquis de Sade: scar over the face of enlightenment

Among philosophers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau who were known as Lumières, there was another writer who focused on a different aspect of philosophical debates of enlightenment: Marquis de Sade. The Enlightenment, however, treated him differently in his lifetime regarding him as an enemy of the people, considering his work as a threat to common order of society. This article attempts to show that the Sade's works are extracted from the very rationality that the Lumières wanted to establish at all levels of social and political structure. Sade rather wanted to highlight the absolutism inherent in the authority of modern reason by drawing on the image of enlightened man. A rereading of Sade’s ideas proves him to be the one who foretold the imperceptible decadence of enlightenment and its souvenirs for humanity by defending the ideal resorts of enlightenment for humanity and at the same time trespassing its borderlines.