De Sade's Juliette undeadness
example · Lacan ·
retold in 3 talks
In Sade's novels, victims like Juliette are tortured in every possible way but reappear in the next scene as beautiful as ever, Lacan's example of modern undeadness predating video games.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“Juliette is tortured in all possible ways, but magically in the next scene he is already there, again there as beautiful as ever.”
“the father of this is Marquis de Sade… the victim Juliette — she is endlessly tortured but all the time remains”
“the victim is tortured again and again in all possible ways but somehow magically she retains all her beauty”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Pablo Picasso2Gregory Bateson1Georges Braque1Louis Aragon1Damir Arsenijević1Tom Tykwer1Laurent de Sutter1Germaine Greer1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
In Sade's novels, victims like Juliette are tortured in every possible way but reappear in the next scene as beautiful as ever, Lacan's example of modern undeadness predating video games., illustrating obscene immortality,undeadness
Marquis de Sade's character Juliette is endlessly tortured but always survives, for Žižek this is the literary ur-form of undead immortality, which Lacan also recognised, and it maps onto the digital mode of existence where one erases a failed encounter and starts again., illustrating obscene immortality,death drive,digital subjectivity
Sade's heroine is tortured in every possible way yet retains her beauty and goes on, Žižek reads this as the philosophical prototype of the undead immortality structure., illustrating undeadness,death drive as immortality,sadism