Abstract
The Marquis de Sade modified his early ideas about sensibility in his post-revolutionary writings, especially in L'Histoire de Juliette (1799-1801). Throughout L'Histoire de Juliette, Sade's characters discover that the power of the will-le moral-can master the physical world of sensation. To achieve this state, however, they must first understand the working of the sensory apparatus itself. By using this biomedical knowledge, Sade's libertines could unleash their inner drives and push themselves into transcendent forms of experience. Sade's method had two components: first, libertines must repress their sensibility in all its moral and physical dimensions in order to unleash its full power. Second, libertines learned to shock their nerves through extreme sensory experiences and thus overwhelm ingrained moral values and behaviour. Taken together, these experiential techniques potentially released the libertine's creative mind. In this process, the libertine transcended the conventions of aesthetic mimesis, by substituting expressivity for reality itself