Ig live: full in telegram
L’Anti-Justine, ou les Délices de l’amour (1798) by Nicolas-Edme Restif de La Bretonne is one of the most singular texts in French libertine literature. Its title already announces its program: it is a direct answer to Justine of the Marquis de Sade. Restif, who devoted a fierce hatred to Sade (a reciprocal aversion), affirms it without detour in his preface: « No one has been more indignant than me by the dirty works of the infamous of Sade [...] This scoundrel only presents the delights of love only accompanied by torments, of death itself, for women. My goal is to make a book tastier than his ». Where Sade makes suffering the heart of pleasure, Restif claims an eroticism of tenderness and voluptuousness, where « everything is voluptuousness, love and tenderness ».