jadis

This was more or less the reception of Sade throughout the 19th century: people read bits and pieces here and there (little was widely available), giggling at the obscenity and not daring to take him seriously. All this changed in the 20th century, first with the Surrealists and then, more significantly, after WW2, when he became an icon for an era of French modernists, including Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Sollers. For them it was not so much about the obscenity and the libertinage as about the terrifying inner logic of his texts, the challenge he poses to Enlightenment humanism by "telling it like it is" about the violent power struggles undergirding all social relations.

Salo is a peculiar chapter in that history. It's a return to Adorno's "Sade as a harbinger of 20th century fascism" thesis and as such it's not a particularly interesting reading of the Sadean text imo. BUT it also happens to be a remarkable film in its own right and it will always have the poignant resonance of being the last film Pasolini completed before his horrifying murder by Italian fascists.