But what are they actually looking for? And what happens if they find it? Let us recall the physical and historical reality of The 120 Days of Sodom . Written in 1785 while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille, the manuscript is not a book in the traditional sense. It is a scroll —twelve meters of paper glued end to end, written in a frantic, tiny script with no paragraphs or punctuation.
It is a miracle the document survived. It is a tragedy of history that it did. The structure of 120 Days is what makes it unique in the history of perversion. It is not a novel. It is a taxonomy . Sade, an amateur aristocrat of science, attempted to create the Linnaean classification system of sexual violence. markiz de sad 120 dana sodome pdf
Sade’s ultimate joke is this: The violence is repetitive. By page 200 of the PDF, the shock is gone, replaced by a tedious mathematical cataloging of anus tears. But what are they actually looking for