Aline & Valcour, ou le gothique philosophique

In Aline et Valcour, episodes with a gothic influence abound but still contribute to a clear philosophical ambition. In this apparent contradiction between thought assimilated to light (and the Enlightenment) and the gothic aesthetic, an axiological reversal occurs in the topical opposition between light and dark, the rhetorical foundation of Sade’s paradoxical thought, which claims to darken the better to illuminate, to horrify the better to normalize, and to entrap the better to liberate.