Et in Arcadia ego: Marquês de Sade e a construção da utopia em Os Invisíveis de Grant Morrison

Abstract

As comic book writer Grant Morrison makes the Marquis de Sade one of the characters in his graphic novel The Invisibles, turning him into a utopia-builder in a world on the verge of an eschatological event that will ascend humanity to a new level of existence, people familiar with the writings of the infamous libertine may question the reasons for such a choice. Thus, this work investigates under which conditions the "divine marquis" is chosen as a fitting candidate for the role while trying to understand how the process of appropriation as a fictional character articulates him with other themes present in the narrative: the price of revolutions, the romantic movement, the problematic relationship between fiction and reality and reality as language. Such a venture will rely on, among others, the theoretical subsidies of the poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault and the logician Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the fathers of modern semiotics, to treat the issue as "semiosic archaeology" inquiry and to also understand how the passions and their relationship to the concepts of interest and selfishness that emerged both in the economic sphere and moral philosophy resulted on Sade's perverse philosophical stance. However, the non-emancipatory implications of using Sade, whose radical negativity propagated in the discourses of the notorious debaucher at the end of the 18th century that is yet to found a parallel in the 21st century, must not be overlooked and will be analyzed to understand the potentialities and limitations of Morrison's utopian discourse, including its realworld applications.