Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body (review)

Hénaff, Marcel. Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body. Trans. Xavier Callahan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

It is somewhat strange to be reviewing a book more than twenty years after its publication, twenty years after one’s first encounter. One of the finest readings of the marquis de Sade, Marcel Hénaff’s L’Invention du corps libertin (1978), has been translated into English by Xavier Callahan. Hénaff, in his preface to the new edition, refers somewhat apologetically to the “temerity” of youth, and observes that so much has been written on Sade in the intervening years that to engage with the more recent scholarship would require a new book–hence, aside from providing an updated bibliography, he has chosen to leave his work as it was. What might such a project have to offer us in today’s critical landscape?