I'm on the road doing a soft shoeshoe shuffle in Canberra. I will post latter. I will try and read Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbour when I can grab a quiet moment.

From what I can gather this text was the origin of the re-reading of de Sade in France undertaken by Bataille, Sartre and de Beauvoir, and Deleuze. Hence its historical importance of Klossowski's text.

And, I presume, Klossowski's Sade My Neighbour is the key text to the reading of de Sade in Australia, which has just started to happen from I can gather.

The quick skim at the airport indicated that de Sade is far more than the debauched aristocratic libertine. That is the conventional image in Australia. He celebrates sexual perversions and so sits behind all the S&M bondage stuff that circulates on the internet under the sign of pornography.

Klossowki's text also gives us the philosopher of nature, who worked in the atheistic materialist tradition of the French Encyclopediasts, such as La Mattrie, Helvetius and d'Holbach. Their metaphysics of nature is one of matter in motion, which sees nature and human beings as machines, and which allows for the unlimited rational exploitation of nature by human beings.

What a suprise.