“Never has justice been a seeming and right relationship really existing between two things. Justice has no real existence, it is the deity of every passion: this passion finds justice in this act, that passion finds justice in that act, and although those acts may be contradictory and usually are, those passions find them just nonetheless. So let us abandon our belief in this fiction, it no more exists than does the God of whom fools believe it the image: there is no God in this world, neither is there virtue, neither is there justice there is nothing good, useful, or necessary but our passions, nothing merits to be respected but their effects. Nor is that all. I go further and regard unjust acts as indispensable to the maintenance of universal harmony, necessarily disturbed by an equitable order in things. This fact once realized, for what reason would I abstain from all the iniquities my brain conceives since it is proven that they are useful to the general plan? Is it my fault if it be my capacities Nature is pleased to enlist for preserving her law and order in this world? Of course not, and if only through atrocities, execrations, and horrors this end may be attained, why, let's perpetrate them cheerfully and serenely, in the knowledge that our delights answer Nature's aims."
—Juliette (1797) by the Marquis de Sade
“The principle which must be our starting-point is, that a general perfection in industry will be attained by the universal demands and refinement of the consumers, regarding food and clothing, furniture and amusements. My theory confines itself to utilizing the passions now condemned, just as Nature has given them to us and without in any way changing them. That is the whole mystery, the whole secret of the calculus of passionate Attraction. There is no arguing there whether God was right or wrong in giving mankind these or those passions; the associative order avails itself of them without changing them, and as God has given them to us. Its mechanism produces coincidence in every respect between individual interest and collective interest, in civilization always divergent. It makes use of men as they are, utilizing the discords arising from antipathies, and other motives accounted vicious, and vindicating the Creator from the reproach of a lacuna in providence, in the matter of general unity and individual foresight. Finally, it in nowise disturbs the established order, limiting itself to trial on a small scale, which will incite to imitation by the double allurement of quadruple proceeds and attractive industry.”
—Charles Fourier, “Of the Role of the Passions” (1841)
“Sade and Fourier are both committed to the ideas of the eighteenth century to the extent that they first appeal to nature to justify the truth of their theses. But the conclusion they derive from their starting point exceeds the eighteenth century's idea of nature. If, at first, nature's role was to defend the passions against all moral and religious views, the view that prevailed at that time, in the end the newfound sovereignty of the passions ultimately turned nature against itself. In Sade, the initial faith in nature turns into actual hatred: "Yes, my friend, I abhor nature" and "This is the expression of a primordial and elementary feeling: to outrage nature, this is man's most profound necessity; this need in him is a thousand times stronger than the need to offend God." But even Fourier, who never tires of preaching the future harmony of man and nature, can't help criticizing the state of nature as it currently exists: the ugliness of bedbugs and toads, the wildness of many animals and their aggression toward humankind, and the pallor of moonlight as the only nocturnal illumination are all things that should be ameliorated as soon as possible. Thus, although initially nature is called on to justify the liberation of human passions, the latter-once they have become sovereign-prove to be lacking in respect, not only for the existing state of society with all its conventions but ultimately for the state of creation itself. In Sade, this takes the form of an irreconcilable hatred that in the individual is directed in equal measure against society, God, and nature; in Fourier, it comes through indirectly in the innumerable reforms that are wrung from society and nature by the law of passionate attraction.”
—Elisabeth Lenk to Theodor Adorno, May 9, 1965
