Sade, Fourier, Loyola

"In Sade/Fourier/Loyola, eminent literary theorist Roland Barthes offers a treatise on the nature of philosophical creation. Barthes examines the parallel enterprises of his three subjects as logothetes, or founders of languages: Sade, the language of erotic freedom; Fourier, the language of social perfection and happiness; and Loyola, the language of divine address. Each of these is an all-enveloping system, a "secondary language" that isolates the adherent from the conventional world. His object, Barthes makes clear, is not to decipher the content of their respective works, but to consider Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as creators of text."--Jacket.