The Marquis de Sade's unfinished novel, The 120 Days of Sodom (originally Les 120 Journées de Sodome
Unlike other erotic literature (e.g., Story of O or Fanny Hill ), 120 Days contains no romance, no redemption, and no moral lesson. It describes pedophilia, incest, coprophagia, blasphemy, and murder with the cold detachment of a medical textbook. Sade wrote it as a philosophical argument: that the ultimate freedom is the ability to exert absolute power over others without any natural or divine consequence.
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The "best" academic PDF sometimes includes the original French text. Sade’s 18th-century French is idiosyncratic; the phrase "les infames" (the infamous ones) and his legalistic jargon lose nuance in translation.