"Body [in] Parts: Bodies and Identity in Sade and Guibert" explores the link between Herve Guibert, one of France's most provocative contemporary writers who died of AIDS in 1991, and the Marquis de Sade, the most notorious Enlightenment libertine. In both authors bodies lose their corporeality. They are denied a history through shifting biographies and autobiographies, then lose their physical reality in time. Bodies are objectified and mechanized before being cut up or imprisoned as a way to dehumanize them. Ultimately they become ghosts who haunt the texts. Guibert incorporates Sade into his own works: Sade's staged, brutalized, destroyed bodies become in Guibert unmasked, sexually fantasized, and diseased. Guibert does indeed know Sade's world well, its pleasure linked to suffering, grounded in bodies that lose their identities and ultimately disappear.

Book Information
ISBN 9780934223973
Author Clara Orban
Format Hardback
Page Count 168
Imprint Lehigh University Press
Publisher Associated University Presses