2013, Nine-Banded Books, originally published in 1992 by Egotist Books, 139 pages

“…they were just enforcing the law which is a declension of morality…”

-page 33, on Sade’s sentencing

I found the first 26 pages of Bowden’s examination of l’Ancien Regime through the perverse prism of the degenerate nobleman born to the world as Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade in 1740, the year of peak slavery in the modern western world, to be hard to stomach. [1]

The extensive and erotically precise descriptions of Sade’s use of prostitutes was off-putting. However, as I read this book in a single 2-hour span, Bowden proved the stronger on the printed page than his noxious subject. I have thoroughly enjoyed Bowden’s lectures, in which he stood entranced, his eyelids fluttering like the psychotic guitarist for ACDC. It was a pleasure to view Bowden’s unsympathetic sketch of this hideous measure of inhumanity, otherwise so titillating to Post-Moral Man.

It is this reader’s sense, that what Bowden exposes through his presentation of Sade is what becomes of the Аrуаn warrior cast, as an imbedded caste of privileged people, destined for the dearth of the body and the death of the soul as soon as the wanderlust unique to the one-time conquerors of Europe and the furthest corners of the world, took on the aspect of the domestic cattle, swine and sheep central to their earliest identity. The descent from warrior, to aristocrat [best-person] to place-holding noble assured that the worst elements of the lower orders would rise to infuse ever higher levels of depravity into the decadent matrix of privilege which has, over the years since the birth of Sade—when men of Аrуаn type first began referring to themselves as “white”—now become associated exclusively with a race-based materialistic will.

Nothing could be further from the Аrуаn spirit than Sade—yet, he was enabled by and descended from the almost total global dominance of that nomad way of war that in his time expressed itself as imperialism and colonialism and ultimately enabled the most feeble-bound feed-pen of tainted souls—Modernity.

Below are two of Bowden’s choice quotes.

“…Sade does not wish to reach the mind using sex or drugs. Sade sees the cataloguing of every perversion as a liberation of instinct and he wants to destroy the mind through immersion in the flesh.”

-page 77

“…individuality is a form of communication; it is the life on the outside, relayed to the life on the inside. Moreover, it is the life on the inside lived on the outside, and as a consequence, human beings are worlds.’

-page 124

Notes

-1. this reader’s assertion.

-2. “casuist of the improbable” Diction note: casuistry is the specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead.