"Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes"
About this Quote
Lust, for de Sade, isn’t a naughty appetite; it’s a regime. The line snaps shut like a trap: “will be served” twists the language of service and hospitality into something predatory, as if desire were a guest who must be fed no matter the cost. Then the verbs arrive in a brutal escalation - “demands, it militates, it tyrannizes” - stripping lust of romance and giving it a full political career. This is de Sade’s favorite provocation: he talks about sex the way other writers talk about sovereignty, exposing how easily the rhetoric of “passion” becomes a permission slip for domination.
The intent is less confession than indictment-with-a-smirk. De Sade is fascinated by the way people outsource responsibility to their impulses, calling it nature, fate, or “love,” and then act surprised when the result is coercion. By personifying lust as a tyrant, he both dramatizes its force and mocks the self-exculpation of those who claim they “couldn’t help it.” The line is engineered to make the reader feel the slide from craving to compulsion to violence.
Context matters: de Sade writes out of the late Enlightenment’s stress test, when reason, liberty, and virtue are being loudly advertised while institutions of power (church, aristocracy, prison) keep running on cruelty. His work refuses the era’s polite fiction that desire can be civilized by good manners. Here, lust becomes a miniature model of political abuse: it doesn’t negotiate; it occupies.
The intent is less confession than indictment-with-a-smirk. De Sade is fascinated by the way people outsource responsibility to their impulses, calling it nature, fate, or “love,” and then act surprised when the result is coercion. By personifying lust as a tyrant, he both dramatizes its force and mocks the self-exculpation of those who claim they “couldn’t help it.” The line is engineered to make the reader feel the slide from craving to compulsion to violence.
Context matters: de Sade writes out of the late Enlightenment’s stress test, when reason, liberty, and virtue are being loudly advertised while institutions of power (church, aristocracy, prison) keep running on cruelty. His work refuses the era’s polite fiction that desire can be civilized by good manners. Here, lust becomes a miniature model of political abuse: it doesn’t negotiate; it occupies.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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