52'

In a society of the spectacle, filled with sex and violence, Sade's work, destined to become common place, retains an unsurpassed subversive charge. To grasp the persistence of his ghost, we focus on the Sadean character who resisted his executioners the most, but also his author: Justine.

We are going to tell you the story of a book written in the heart of the French Revolution, matured in a cell of the Bastille before it was taken: Justine or the misfortunes of virtue.

Its author, the Marquis de Sade, has remained unsurpassed in the clinical description of cruelty since the 18th century. He claimed to draw the long catalogue of abuses that fill his works from his imagination alone and claimed to teach us about humanity and its gigantic wanderings. The wanderings of a world where only crime pays. Where the law of the state is never anything more than a screen to mask the law of the strongest.

A world that remains our own, even though the winners of capitalism have replaced the aristocrats of the Ancien Régime. Where the news hypnotizes us with stories of madness, violence, and power—stories we then binge-watch in true-crime series on Netflix.

This world where the ghost of Sade roams, Sade helps us to lay it bare. To enjoy it or to resist it.
Always looking at it straight in the face.