La Cité perverse
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
La cité perverse – libéralisme et pornographie (2009, Perverted Society - Liberalism and Pornography) is a book by Dany-Robert Dufour in which the author attempts to display that the economical and financial crisis starting in October 2009 has provided us with at least one advantage: it has revealed the perverted mechanisms regulating the function of today's society.
We live in a world that has made egoism (Adam Smith's "self love") its foremost principle. This principle henceforth commands all forms of conduct, whether in the uppermost classes, among juvenile dilinquents or the middle-classes. Destructive for the notions of "being together" or "being your-self" it urges us to live in a perverted society: pornography, selfishness, contestation of every law whatsoever, acceptance of social darwinism. It makes the Other a tool and results in our world becoming de Sade-ish. It extolls henceforth the alliance between Adam Smith and Marquis de Sade.
Against the old moral order, which summoned everyone to master his passions and urges, Dufour proposes that a new order has substituted the old one and that it is now, on the contrary, fashionable to display one's passions and urges regardless of any consequences. He analyses today's world as a result of the revolution of western metaphysics during the century between Pascal's puritan philosophy and de Sade's porno fixated one (philosophie puritaine – philosophie "putaine").
de Sade had so well demonstrated how a world subject to the principle of absolute egoism would appear that he was to be imprisoned for 27 years and his books to be concealed in the archives of libraries for two centuries. Dufour investigates de Sade's return, first masked, then overtly, during the 20th century and the world which will become the result of this. He also tries to indicate some ways to escape this (a)moral trap.
