[lbo-talk] the libertine and the ascetic

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 1/11/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Let's face it, the Puritans did more for humanity than the Marquis de Sade -
> still less his pygmy epigones -ever did.

It is dialectically appropriate that it took many true believers in
religion, such as Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton, to help build the
foundations of secular modernity.

Besides, a libertine is the true lover of an ascetic, and in the heart
of a libertine is a devotion to chastity, or so suggests French
literature, e.g. Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses and Michel
Tournier's Gilles et Jeanne.

-- 
Yoshie
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