Philosophers such as Voltaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx have made the critique of Christianity a decisive battlefield for a new experience of the world. Along these lines, Sade's La filosof a en el tocador is much more than a work of erotic literature. For Sade, religion constitutes the worst enemy of sexual pleasure and of man's political liberty. The sensual negation of the other, which for the libertine has no more value than as an object of pleasure, reaches its pinnacle in crime. Sade's task, then, is to reveal for the first time the destructive aspects of sexual love.