How do you spot an iconoclast? Perhaps they wear unusual trousers; perhaps the absence of trousers is a more reliable sign. Probably not. What is more likely is that their acts and writings are so consistently distinct from their age that they cannot merely be designated an 'aberration', or the person in question dismissed as just plain insane. Thus end my preliminary remarks; thank you for suffering them - assuming that anyone reading this sentence has done so, or perhaps has, wisely, skipped the crap - and patiently waiting for me to declare the question that this essay will at least attempt to discuss: does the Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse Francois, Comte de Sade to his fans) deserve his reputation as a radical?

With an absolute absence of any references to Lacanian psychoanalysis (because it's wilfully opaque/unrelated and I'm just name-dropping), mirroring and reflection are how I perceive Sade's intellectual 'achievements'. For the sake of clarity, the image produced by a mirror is not what is 'genuinely' - let's not trouble ourselves with the concerns of appearance and reality; it's simply not worth it - there: the image is the object's inverse. This ostensibly irrelevant digression on mirrors does serve some purpose because it suitably illustrates the 'accomplishments' of Sade. His thought isn't an intellectual rupture; it consists in the erection (ah, the joys of puerile punning!) of a credal mirror: 'whatever you believe I believe the opposite. You disapprove of sodomy' - not homosexuality since this word and concept was a late-nineteenth century invention - 'I don't. You believe incest, bestiality, torture, murder, and an interminable number of conceivable depravities are immoral; to me they're perfectly acceptable. To morality', to quote the Beatles, ''you say yes, I say no''. Thus ends my inept paraphrase of Sade's 'principles' (if such usage is not paradoxical when referring to peremptory permissiveness).

I hope the previous paragraph suitably evinces the simplistic nature of the Marquis de Sade's 'thought'. However, simplicity does not necessarily imply the absence of radicalism. What does is the nature of the simplicity - the basic (or just base) inversion of morality and beliefs. This affirmation of the opposite of what society believes has, by the superficiality of the reversal, the effect contrary to that intended. In stressing the other Sade conversely reaffirmed the norm. This might initially seem odd, but, as in the case of a mirror, to produce an image (Sade's 'iconoclasm') an object (late-Enlightenment ethical standards) to reflect was required, thus causing him to have been absolutely and necessarily acting and thinking within the bounds of his society, to the extent that he was utterly dependent upon the object he wished to invert. His position was therefore one of unbounded subservience and passivity - conformity in dependence.

In his analysis of Sade and the anonymous author of My Secret Life in his Hisory of Sexuality: Volume 1, Michel Foucault emphasises another aspect of Sade's conformity. The philosopher comments that 'rather than seeing in this singular man a courageous fugitive from 'Victorianism' that would have compelled him to silence, I am inclined to think that, in an epoch dominated by (highly prolix) directives enjoining discretion and modesty, he was the most naive representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk about sex'. I see conformity in Sade because he is reliant on that which he rejects; Foucault goes further: the act of rejecting is itself concomitantly an act of conforming. For these reasons, le Marquis de Sade est un exemple peu compliqué d'un conformiste.

[No pretence - merely the ineluctable pursuit of variety. Next time it'll probably end with something like 'Shantih shantih shantih' - maybe there'll be an epigraph, too: 'Only Connect!' or some such Forsterian rubbish]