>>25636693
Boredom, a whole lot of it. Sade gets memed a lot but I rarely see anyone mention how mindnumbingly boring it is to actually get through his writings

>>25636723
I only read Justine but was surprised at how wrong and retarded everyone was. It was a fun picaresque novel, except for the autistic convent section midway through

>>25636723
Because you read shitty abridged editions that contain only philosophical babble. Read the full 6 volume edition of Juliette, one of the greatest novels ever written. Adventure, travel, torture, rape, hilarious schemes and heists, throwing women into volcanoes to prove science theories, trivia about made-up countries, elaborate descriptions of engineering inventions, and most importantly a lot of genuine HUMOUR! Sade is a humorist, all of the over top stuff is meant as an inside joke, but people completely miss the point because they've been groomed to read Sade as this le scawwy edgy serious author. Sade is an absurdist, his magnum opus Juliette is like a combination of Dumas and Rabelais.

>>25636693
Start with the 120 Days and don't take it at face value. I could write a whole book on the right way to read and think about Sade, and it's not as merely a masturbating pervert. He was first and foremost a philosopher, but the tricky thing is that his philosophy isn't really what's explicitly stated by the characters. He's accomplishing two things primarily: 1. busting the boundaries of what's acceptable in literature, as an iconoclast and 2. intending to recreate the universe *as it actually is* in miniature in a way that makes you think. Silling, the castle where the novel takes place, deep in the Black Forest, is the universe in microcosm. Outside of religious fantasizing, what does the universe actually do? Turn a blind eye when all sorts of atrocities are committed, inflict them itself in the form of cancers etc. There is no God, and what we are as humanity is entirely what we choose to be, and there are no rules. In the meantime we have to reckon with the fact that the universe is a brutal, anti-human place and there is nothing "divine" or special about humanity. This is why he places so much emphasis on shitting. It's the clearest example there is of the nasty, dressed-up animals we really are. Angels don't shit. Sade wants to remove the scales from our eyes and reckon with the cold empty universe and our own true nature.
Paglia is right that on another layer, he's refuting Rousseau, who popularized the cute idea that humanity is inherently good, and it's society that makes us bad. Sade correctly asserts that it's very much the opposite, as humanity shows any time society breaks down. Society is the pretend we all play, with the aid of religion. Give people absolute power or remove them from society and you see what they actually are. In that way, although it'd be easy to read him as an anarchist, actually he's very pro-society, pro-order and is making a critique by taking the false ideas of the religious, the anarchists and Rousseauism to its most extreme conclusion.
But of course, he *is* also an eroticist and pornographer, I'm not trying to minimize that. It's just that he's not as simple as the type of people who read him and then go "what the hell it's just a bunch of shitting and edgelording??" and don't get it.