So I came across the following quote about the Marquis de Sade and thought it was too interesting not to share:

So I came across the following quote about the Marquis de Sade and thought it was too interesting not to share:

"But for all Sade's aristocratic indulgence of a peculiar whims and profligate spending on whips and whores, he is also one of the first major authors of what we might term modern bureaucratic literature. His writings are extraordinarily, pruriently concerned with acts that can be accomplished only by people working in groups who follow, in an orderly fashion, arbitrary rules and regulations. These secular constraints not only defy common sense but fly in the face of what we usually think of as basic respect for the sensations and lives of others. Thus another neologism: sadism. The writings of the Marquis de Sade describe dispassionate intimacy in the plural. In this sense, they foreshadow the social world of the contemporary office."

-- From Sodom, LLC by Lucy Ives

The rest of the essay draws out those comparisons in a delightful and unsettling way. The essay is found in the Fall 2016 issue of Lapham's Quarterly which remains an absolutely wonderful magazine and well worth checking out.