“La peur agit donc fortement sur toi?”. La dialettica tra paura e desiderio nella teoria dell’emozione di Sade

This article analyzes the specific role that fear plays in Marquis de Sade’s theory of emotion, which represents one of the most significant (and extreme) exaltation of the moral role of the passions in the period known as tournant des Lumières. Specifically, I try to highlight how Sade use precisely the emotion of fear to refute the moral didacticism conventionally associated with the sentimental literature, whose key role is evident from the analysis of Richardson’s Pamela and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse. Consciously using the same formal and stylistic procedures of sentimental philosophy, Sade subverts this paradigm from the inside. The dialectic between fear and desire, the base of all sentimental heroes’ psychology, becomes for him the heart of the emotional mechanism – completely asymmetric and “immoral” – that the libertine established with his victim.