El choque voluptuoso de los átomos, Sade y Schopenhauer o del amor perverso: Tránsitos desde el materialismo a la libertad

Abstract

The present text investigates the relationship between two contemporary authors, one French and the other German, about their approaches that unfold in the paths of the mechanistic materialism of the time, although Schopenhauer's is a special case. Both of their particular meditations will have implications in different disciplines developed by each one of the authors, such as physics, psychology, ethics, philosophy and morals. Taking the materialistic conceptions as their starting point, they mapped a universe which is drawn under a net that requires it to operate in terms of mechanical necessity. Therefore the agents are not completely free, this is because their deepest motivations and correlate –their actions– are anchored to an irrational Will of life in Schopenhauer’s case, whereas for Sade is about the sexual and dominium drives. With that said, phenomena such as love and freedom, in the roots of both authors' way of thinking result unfeasible or definitively implausible. Such a condition submerges the individuals in an out of proportion egoism which struggles for keeping their individual phenomenon while throwing them to a continuous fight, obnubilated by the representation principle. However there are two phenomena that manage to tear apart the appearances’ nature: for Schopenhauer is love, and for Sade it will be the perversion that hastens the dissolution of the individual phenomenon, either the own or the other’s. Within the works of Schopenhauer and Sade, love and perversion represent forms of access to freedom by either breaking through or denying the world’s structure, in its constant becoming under ordinary conditions.