Abstract

The conclusion situates the book within the broader revisionist trends in Enlightenment Studies and makes clear its challenge to the ways in which Sade is often deployed in contemporary “Continental” Philosophy and Critical Theory. The book’s reconstruction of Sade’s philosophical “system” makes clear the inadequacy of understandings of the period that have located Sade as the “dialectical” other to Kant. The specific targets of this conclusion are Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, and those who have deployed the Kant avec Sade trope. The conclusion demonstrates that such uses of Sade cannot withstand sustained scholarly attention to Sade’s actual philosophy.