Ada Palmer: recommendation

Transcript context

…De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer? Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature. But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone. The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places. De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is? I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work. Forest animals have forest camouflage. Desert animals have desert camouflage. Woodpeckers that eat grubs have a beak shaped correctly to be able to get grubs. Clearly, therefore, an intelligence designed everything to fit where it needs to fit so that carnivores have carnivore teeth and herbivores have herbivore teeth. “Yes,” says Thomas Hobbes, quoting all this, and says, “And furthermore, the penis is round and the anus is round. s to fit so that carnivores have carnivore teeth and herbivores have herbivore teeth. “Yes,” says Thomas Hobbes, quoting all this, and says, “And furthermore, the penis is round and the anus is round. So, clearly, God designed the penis to fit into the anus and not into the vagina, which is a long, thin shape.” He’s playing with the question of why we believe these century-old, or in that case, millennium-old arguments about what is and isn’t natural, and inviting us to reexamine questions like, well, what that a woodpecker needs does it have? What that a woodpecker needs does it not have? Because it doesn’t have fingers with which to disentangle its legs from a thread if it gets tangled up. In that way, Sade is using pornography to open the questions that Darwin will later answer.…

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