De Sade revealed that reason cannot argue against murder.

Evidence

What Horkheimer praised in de Sade and Nietzsche was that they did not conceal the fact that it was impossible for them, using reason, to produce a single basic argument against murder; that, instead of concealing it, they shouted it from the rooftops. In place of the mythic victim and ritual murder, there appeared banal, rationalized, thoughtless murder; in place of mythic pleasure and ritual devotion to nature, there appeared dull, rationalized pleasureleisure, holidays, fun. `The chronique scandaleuse of Justine and Juliette, with its production-line methods, and its foreshadowing in an eighteenth-century style of the nineteenth-century shockers and twentieth-century mass literature, is the Homeric epic with its last mythological covering removed: the history of thought as an organ of domination.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1387

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s core ‘instrumental reason’ thesis; connects to any reader work on Adorno/Horkheimer. — connects to: Horkheimer credited de Sade and Nietzsche with speaking truth about bourgeois culture — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1461
• SEED: Potential essay: the genealogy of ‘leisure, holidays, fun’ as rationalized, dulled pleasure replaces ritual devotion — a mode of modern consumer critique.

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer credited de Sade and Nietzsche with speaking truth about bourgeois culture #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1461