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THE AUTONOMY OF PLEASURE
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Columbia University Press
New York
The AUTONOMY of PLEASURE
Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution
JAMES A. STEINTRAGER

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steintrager, James A., 1965–
The autonomy of pleasure : libertines, license, and sexual revolution / James A. Steintrager.
pages cm. — (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-15158-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54087-2 (e-book)
1. Sex customs—France—History—18th century. 2. France—Moral conditions.
I. Title.
HQ18.F8S74 2015
306.7094409'033—dc23
2015013320
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in Canada
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
cover image: “Scène érotique en couleur” (1748),
Histoire de Dom B., Bibliothèque nationale de France.
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

I am alone here, I am at the world’s end, withheld from every
gaze, here no one can reach me, there is no creature that can
come nigh where I am; no limits, hence, no barriers; I am free.
—MARQUIS DE SADE, LES 120 JOURNÉES DE SODOME

They order, said I, this matter better in France.
—LAURENCE STERNE, A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: Whose Sexual Revolution?
1
chapter one
A Thousand Modes of Venery:
Coital Positions as Actions and Communications
31
chapter two
Voluptuary Architecture: Organizing, Policing, and Producing Pleasure
81
chapter three
Sodomy and Reason: Making Sense of the Libertine Preference
128
chapter four
“the obscene organ of brute pleasure”: Social Functions of the Clitoris
170
Contents

CONTENTS
viii
chapter five
The Fury of Her Kindness:
What Should a Libertine Know About Orgasm?
200
chapter six
Color and Caprice: The Politics and Aesthetics of Interracial Relations
230
chapter seven
Canonizing Sade: Eros, Democracy, and Differentiation
263
Notes
299
Index
377

ix
THE GAP SEPARATING CONCEPTION and maturation has been long
for this project, and I have felicitously incurred many debts en route. A
yearlong fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Har-
vard University back in 2002–2003 gave me the time, space, and intel-
lectual companionship to get work started in earnest. The sheer array of
researchers and creators there was a constant stimulus and a reminder that
at least trying to write for an informed readership beyond one’s immedi-
ate field and disciplinary concerns is a good thing. Let me single out for
particular thanks my fellows Lynn Festa, Kevin Kopelson, Wendy Chun,
Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Mark Robbins, Lisa Salzman, and Laura
Schwendinger. Spending the winter and spring of 2005 as scholar in resi-
dence at the Château de la Bretesche in Brittany thanks to the support of
the Borchard Foundation helped push the project further, in this instance
through splendid isolation and a stunning setting—and one that inspired
through its similarity to the Marquis de Sade’s forsaken fortifications only
on particularly rainy days.
My colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine, have been in the main wonderfully supportive, and I would
especially like to thank Jonathan Alexander, Richard Godden, Daniel
Gross, Andrea Henderson, Jayne Lewis, Hugh Roberts, Michael Szalay,
Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
x
Ann van Sant, Victoria Silver, and Andrzej Warminski. Special thanks go
to Andrew Zissos in the Department of Classics at UCI, who saved me
from a few gaffes of the Greco-Roman variety—he is absolved of respon-
sibility for any that remain—while generously reading the entire manu-
script with a keen eye and kind words. Alas, I cannot thank the late Richard
Kroll in person; his criticisms only stung because they were right and they
were always delivered with a mitigating component of unbridled spirit.
Over the past several years, I underwent several severe bouts of univer-
sity administration, and I would likely not have pulled through without
the enduring, sympathetic, and often conspiratorially comic companion-
ship of my fellow faculty bureaucrats and erstwhile top-flight scholars, of
whom first and foremost: Vicki Ruiz, Rodrigo Lazo, and Sharon Block.
The annual meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies have provided one of the most important forums for testing out the
research in this book, including evenings of occasionally ribald and always
lively conversation in good period style, most consistently including Byron
Wells, William Edmiston, and the late J. Patrick Lee—a Voltairian in more
than one sense—Joanna Stalnaker, and Kate Tunstall. The enthusiasm and
critical discernment of Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, who saw
fit to include this book in the series, have both been of vital importance.
Thanks as well to Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press, who
embraced this project as an abstract and with kind forbearance has guided
it to concrete realization. Without three long-standing supporters, inter-
locutors, and unflagging friends willing to administer the occasional lash of
encouragement, this work would simply not have gotten done: Rey Chow,
Andrew Curran, and Dorothea von Mücke.
While a good deal of my primary material has become easier to consult
in recent years thanks to a loosening of legal and sometimes merely conven-
tional restrictions, as well as digitization, I have nonetheless spent a good
deal of time in the archives of Harvard’s Houghton Library and Countway
Medical Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Clark Library
of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Special Collections at
the University of California at Irvine. I am deeply grateful to the numer-
ous librarians who patiently helped me and taught me how to negotiate
the bibliographical maze created by anonymous publication, although par-
ticular thanks go to the unsmiling one at Houghton who, handing over the
original Latin edition of Nicolas Chorier’s licentious classic Satyra sotadica,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi
laconically expressed her hope that perhaps I would find “some interesting
drool marks.” While most of the material in this study has not yet seen the
light of publication, some of it has. This goes all the way back to my article
“Are You There Yet?” which appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (1999) and is, in somewhat altered form, chapter 5
of the present volume. This article in fact marks the inception of the entire
project, and its argument—in a nutshell, that the complications of intimacy
that were increasingly creeping into institutions such as marriage were
something that radical libertines rejected as anathema to the autonomy of
pleasure—in a way provides the crucial and motivating context for the
rest. Parts of the second half of chapter 2, substantially reconceived, first
appeared as “What Happened to the Porn in Pornography? Rétif, Regu-
lating Prostitution, and the History of Dirty Books,” Symposium 60, no. 3
(Fall 2006) and an earlier version of chapter 7 came to light as “Liberating
Sade,” in the Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (2005).
Although this is a study of writings that generally eschew family and
intimacy as irrelevancies when it comes to pleasure, it would be both
disingenuous and ungrateful for me to concur. My late father left me
many intangibles—including the sound advice to read Aristostle before
Nietzsche—as well as a palpable if thoroughly unintended gift: a copy of
the Grove Press paperback of Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other
Writings. My mother ensured that teleology and eschatology would be
firmly part of my conceptual vocabulary, and I hope—to paraphrase one
of the anonymous readers of the manuscript—that she will approve of
my work if not of the works in this study. Years of conversations with my
sisters Kirsten, Rebecca, and Megan have shaped my approach in myriad
subtle and doubtless profound ways. Finally, to Tanya, who put up with
it all throughout, and to my sons, Max and James, who are currently not
allowed to read this book or even to look at it. May they someday out of
intellectual curiosity eschew this bourgeois injunction.

THE AUTONOMY OF PLEASURE

Introduction
Whose Sexual Revolution?
THE MARQUIS DE SADE remarks at the end of the manuscript of Les 120
journées de Sodome that he began work on October 22, 1785, and finished
thirty-seven days later. He was at the time imprisoned in the Bastille and not
supposed to be composing obscene fiction. To facilitate secrecy, he wrote
in a minuscule hand on both sides of a makeshift scroll of four-and-a-half-
inch-wide sheets that he had glued together. When, just days prior to the
storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, Sade was abruptly transferred to
an insane asylum at Charenton on the outskirts of Paris, the manuscript was
left behind. (He had been haranguing passersby about the treatment of the
inmates—his discontent bellowed out a window via makeshift megaphone:
a funnel intended for the discharge of waste.)
1
While Sade, much to his cha-
grin, was never to see the scroll again, it was recovered by a certain Arnoux
Saint-Maximin and managed to pass into the care of the Villeneuve-Trans
family for a century; it was bought by a German collector in 1900, resold
in 1929 to the avant-garde arts patron Viscount Charles de Noailles, and
eventually ended up the property of Gérard Nordmann, Genevan, heir to
a department store fortune and architect of a world-class library of rare
erotica.
2
In the prologue to Les 120 journées de Sodome, we learn that Sade’s
heroes, four libertines extraordinaire, do not use their wealth to buy books
about debauchery but rather to plumb its depths. To guarantee the absolute

1

isolation required for their plans, the protagonists leave France, arrive at
Basel, cross the Rhine, and climb high into mountains deep in the Black
Forest. With them is an entourage of servants, guards, and victims. Their
destination is the Teutonic-sounding Chateau Silling. In the French imagi-
nation of Sade’s day, this part of the German-speaking world in particular
was considered extraterritorial, primitive, and cloaked in darkness. It was
the perfect void onto which the author could project his sordid fantasies.
With everyone in place, snow severs Silling from any possible connection
with civilization.
The organizing principle of the narrative that follows is this: four female
storytellers, each experienced libertines in their own right, will detail cases
of the simple, complex, criminal, and murderous passions. Thirty days
are allotted to each single type; each day details a specific permutation,
although a single day may contain multiple instances. The hosts will use
these tales to generate their own activities, carried out on the bodies of
their mostly unwilling guests. Sade only wrote out in detail the prologue
and first thirty days, with the remainder sketched for future completion.
Before the festivities begin in earnest, he warns, “And now, friend-reader,
you must prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure tale that
has ever been told since our world began, a book the likes of which are
met with neither among ancients nor amongst us moderns.”
3
If you have
not read Les 120 journées de Sodome, the admonition probably rings of self-
aggrandizing hyperbole. If you have, the claim will likely sound merely
descriptive. After the representation of hundreds of so-called passions—
the etymological sense of “suffering” usually all too present—the work
ends with a detached numerical breakdown of the mayhem. Of the forty-
six people to enter Silling, all but sixteen are killed either during the course
of the orgies (ten) or afterward in a systematic and deadly coda (twenty).
The survivors include the four libertines, the storytellers, the principal fou-
teurs, that is, male servants who generally speaking serve the libertines’
sodomitical penchants, and the cooks.
The cumulative effect of reading page after page of all variety of sexual
activity linked to rape, torture, murder, and psychological abuse is disori-
entation. And while there is something to be said for simply dismissing the
work as vile, it also cries out for intellectual explanation: we need to place
this work that so displaces us.
4
Critics over the years have offered a variety
of interpretations (often ingenious): a taxonomy of perversions invented by
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
2

a precursor of the scientific study of sexual aberrations that would flower
in the nineteenth century; the utmost version of a tendency toward uto-
pianism in pornographic writing—the epitome of “pornotopia”; a text in
which pornography operates less as sensual stimulation and more as formal
play, as a language game with its own pleasures for the reader; an exagger-
ated reflection of the new emphasis on privacy that marks the emergence
of the bourgeois world.
5
More conventional attempts to situate and explain
the work point to genre and psychology. The setting of Silling and the
doings therein are transmogrified commonplaces of gothic fiction: sublime
isolation, hidden and horrific depravity. Or the whole should be consid-
ered an example of prison writing, in which the author identified with his
captors at the same time he expressed in convoluted form outrage at the
agencies—family, crown, law, religion, and mores—that oppressed him.
6
I will engage more specifically with these interpretations in the course
of this study. None of them are mutually exclusive, and in many respects
each is, I believe, correct. At this point I simply want to draw attention
to an issue common to all. This is the notion that in Sade’s work there is
a system at play: whether it be the social system of his day implicit in his
scenarios or a literary or philosophical system he imposed on them. Let
me approach this topic in a way that may seem oblique and even callous
in light of the gut-wrenching brutality described. Along with the tally of
passions and murders, we find occasional reference to the number of cups
of coffee consumed within the walls of the fortress. On the very day that
the odious machinery begins to grind inexorably toward the apocalyptic
conclusion, we are told that our “champions” first entered the salon and
that a quartet of boys and girls served them three varieties of coffee.
7
On
the fourth day, it is noted that one libertine finds his “brain all afire” thanks
to the coffee he has imbibed.
8
On the seventh day and at coffee time, sev-
eral of the young detainees are stripped and molested; we infer that the
heady brew is partly responsible for this behavior. On the twenty-second
day, nocturnal bacchanals having taken their toll, we learn that “it was not
until coffee was served” that the protagonists “began to come somewhat
to their senses”—an ironic way of saying that they are once again pre-
pared for further derangements thereof.
9
In these citations, we see laid out
the usefulness of coffee for the libertine. It is recuperative, countervailing
excessive alcoholic consumption, lack of sleep, and other rigors of feloni-
ous debauchery. Further, it is a stimulant to both body and mind, actually
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
3

encouraging salacious comportment. How exactly do you keep an orgy
running for four-odd months? To the latent query of the title of Les 120
journées de Sodome comes a simple, albeit only partial, answer: frequent and
punctual coffee breaks.
Many of us today indulge in coffee with an eye to similar—if less lubri-
cious and sanguinary—ends. And if we listen to the place names associ-
ated with premium coffees such as Ethiopia, Yemen, and Java we can still
conjure the beverage’s African roots, its spread into Arabia, and eventual
transportation to far-flung colonies. But although originally closer to home
than Oriental tea or New World chocolate, to the end of the eighteenth
century coffee was a relatively novel bit of exotica in Western Europe.
Moreover, while we are aware of caffeine’s antisoporific properties, the
ubiquity of cafés and our unexamined quotidian habits obscure the extent
to which coffee and its relations were thought of more as drugs than as sim-
ple drinks. Juxtaposing the beverage to opium and alcohol, the materialist
philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L’Homme-machine (1748) con-
sidered that it is by “lashing the imagination that coffee . . . dissipates our
headaches and sorrows without, like wine, saving them for the morrow.”
10

The terms are very similar to those chosen by Sade, who likely appreciated
La Mettrie’s metaphorical use of the term “lashing” to describe coffee’s
powers. And Sade and La Mettrie were hardly alone in their attributions.
To take a celebrated instance, and one that appeared some eighty years
before the composition of Les 120 journées de Sodome, Alexander Pope in
his poem “The Rape of the Lock” (1712–13) gave coffee a pivotal role. In
this mock epic a baron ravishes a curl of hair from a young beauty with
dire and humorous consequences. Exhausted from battle at the card table,
Belinda and her suitors turn their attention to porcelain cups filled with the
steaming elixir. Its recuperative function is thus clear, but it is the stimulat-
ing impact of the beverage that fuels the central crime:
Coffee (which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes)
Sent up in vapours to the Baron’s Brain
New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.
11
Pope’s poem is not Sade’s gory extravaganza. Still, however satirical the
aims and displaced the object, it pinpoints coffee as ancillary to violent
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
4

sexual conquest. But whereas Pope preaches that good nature and good
sense on the part of both Belinda and her admirer might have led to a hap-
pier conjunction, in Sade the push is rather toward viciousness and immod-
eration. Far from trying to find a happy compromise between prude,
coquette, and strumpet, everything in Les 120 journées de Sodome is geared
toward the production of pleasures for the four protagonists, for their plea-
sure is the sole and self-imposed end of the little society in the Black Forest.
While the four libertines have amassed considerable wealth to fund their
endeavor—they have hired help, bought comestibles, paid the agents who
kidnap their victims, and so forth—economics, trade, and the marketplace
are abandoned at the threshold. Any remnant of them is reconstituted as
part of the internal functioning of the chateau, reconfigured as an element
of the orgy.
12
Les 120 journées de Sodome tends to be entirely consistent on
this point. The gravitational field of the pleasurable draws in everything in
the text and functionalizes it—in the way one says a chemical or pathogen
may be weaponized—for this purpose. Food is thus always gourmet, tai-
lored to titillate the palate and prepared with an eye to its aphrodisiac quali-
ties.
13
Similarly, alcohol is used to inflame passions: in addition to coffee,
wine and liqueurs are the other beverages of choice in the work. Moreover,
things and acts that are not always or not usually considered enjoyable
are converted into pleasures and simultaneously marked as stimulants for
more: other people’s pain, most famously, but this hardly exhausts sadism
in its original instance.
One of the more insistent themes and disquieting aspects of Les 120
journées de Sodome is coprophagy. Not that feces is the only distasteful
fodder that the libertines, their victims and those debauchees about whom
the storytellers spin their tales consume: spittle, snot, toe jam, and vomit
all feature on the menu. Nonetheless, the entrée of choice is without a
doubt shit. As with the more traditional fare, so too it is gourmet and
aphrodisiac. Diets are carefully administered to ensure this. Food in all
its guises is transformed from basic bodily requirement into an element
of a self-reproducing social system. Rather than treating ingestion and
excretion as part of the infrastructure of pleasure—processes without
which the body would wither and die, and thus clearly not be able to enjoy
itself—these processes are moved from the environment to the system
itself. Specifically, outputs are reentered as inputs, and so forth, in order
to guarantee complete closure and self-sufficiency.
14
Nothing escapes;
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
5

nothing is wasted. All the bodily “marginal stuff” that Mary Douglas
described as symbolizing the danger of boundary disintegration, points of
vulnerability for idea systems, and in need of ritual control is here dealt
with by being brought within the boundaries of the system.
15
We must
read seemingly innocent enjoyments such as a cup of coffee along with the
most repulsive of practices as counterintuitive metaphors for the absolute
self-referentiality and totalization of the pleasurable. Likewise, the isola-
tion and claustrophobic horror. Completely closed, however, there is no
way to reenergize the system once it has used up its resources, recycling
notwithstanding. In keeping with the second law of thermodynamics and
with no Maxwell’s demon to redirect the elements—no outside force to
counteract entropy—the orderly narrative of the passions ends in a literal
chaos.
16
Sade is careful to preserve, however, those elements that will be
essential to the production of new orgies in the future: the libertines, those
who will tell the stories that incite them, the men who will service them,
and, of course, those who will prepare their meals.
17
Silling is an extreme case of autopoeisis, a term coined to designate sys-
tems that reproduce themselves out of their own elements and determine
their own borders.
18
But what did Sade really know of systems? He uses
the term frequently enough to describe his characters’ behavior. In this
sense, a system is a simple principle or algorithm the consequences of
which can be unfolded at length. To take a case from Les 120 journées de
Sodome, once murder is admitted to be a source of voluptuous enjoyment,
then the varieties of this pleasure, its intersections with other passions, and
its cryptic manifestations (for example, in the guise of justice so called)
can be explored and explained. Beyond this, the usefulness of constructing
systems and thinking in terms of them were ubiquitous topics in eigh-
teenth-century natural philosophy and metaphysical speculation. There
was a general trend against the esprit de système: the rationalist, deduc-
tive reasoning associated above all with scholasticism. Francis Bacon
famously attacked the mindset in the Novum Organum (1620) under the
rubric of the “idols of theater”: ingrained falsehoods attributable from
“various dogmas of philosophies” and “wrong laws of demonstration”
that receive their name “because in my judgment all the received systems
are but so many stage plays, representing worlds after an unreal and sce-
nic fashion.”
19
Notwithstanding such disdain—which only became more
intransigent and focused with the passage of time—rationalism of the sort
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
6

continued to hold sway above all in German territories well into the eigh-
teenth century (Christian Wolff was the major figure here, and Kant was
still very much clarifying his own position on system building and a priori
reasoning in The Critique of Pure Reason in relation to this tradition; German
idealism in fact retained a good deal of esprit de système, as anyone who
has cracked Hegel’s oeuvre can attest).
20
Opposed to this—at least in the
self-justifying accounts—was the systematic mindset: the inductive rea-
soning and experimental methodology of empiricism.
21
It is with the latter
that we associate the great taxonomical impetus in the eighteenth century:
the classificatory schemes of botany, zoology, mineralogy, chemistry, eco-
nomics, demographics, and so forth.
22
I borrow the term esprit de système from Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s
preface to the Encyclopédie, where we find the principal merit of a natu-
ral philosopher is “to have a mind for systems but never to create any.”
23

The Encyclopédie itself was a work that d’Alembert and his coeditor Denis
Diderot saw as very much against system building, but, as the citation indi-
cates, the line between positions was not particularly neat. Étienne Bonnot
de Condillac’s intricate edifice of knowledge, built up from the premises of
sensationalist, empirical psychology, would probably have struck its tute-
lary spirit John Locke as preposterously close to scholasticism.
24
Mean-
while, it was Condillac who had produced the critical attack on systems
building that had so inspired d’Alembert.
25
Many other thinkers similarly
advertised a deep skepticism regarding any attempt at system building and
yet in other respects indulged the widely acknowledged “taste for sys-
tems.”
26
The great naturalist and preponderant voice in France on the ani-
mal and other kingdoms Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, while
himself constructing an enormous descriptive and analytic catalogue of the
world’s fauna and flora, was highly critical of the elaborate, hierarchical
nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, which first appeared in
1735 and was greatly expanded over the course of many years.
27
Diderot
seems to have been the most consistent: preferring in his own philosophi-
cal works open-ended forms such as dialogue, aphorism, and in general
experimental gambits to either complex chains of reasoning or taxonomies.
Sade seems to have been tempted in various directions. Clearly, the taxo-
nomical impulse is present in Les 120 journées de Sodome.
28
Moreover, his
penchant for putting into characters’ mouths extended defenses of the prin-
ciples of libertinage reveals a scholastic bent. Yet there is often a seemingly
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
7

deliberate inconsistency of philosophical arguments and a taste for disrupt-
ing the very systems that he builds. One might say that Sade adds his own
noise to the information he transmits.
By using terminology such as closure, entropy, and noise, I want to sug-
gest that Sade’s knowledge of systems went beyond the debates and discus-
sions on the topic of his time. In particular, rather than simply presenting
his reader with a taxonomy of passions, his work evinces a grasp of certain
characteristics of dynamic systems—a grasp not just of structure but of
process. Although this knowledge is largely articulated via example and
implication, there is still something uncanny about the way Sade fore-
shadows discussions that later took place within general systems theory,
in cybernetics, and even in theoretical physics. Yet we probably ought
not be too surprised that an author obsessed with building up and break-
ing down systems over hundreds of pages would notice, intuit, or uncon-
sciously formulate certain ahistorical constants. What interests me more
than Sade as either taking part in the debates of his time or as a precursor,
however, are the ways in which this knowledge was part of a network of
communications that itself had the form of a system. Is Les 120 journées de
Sodome unique, then, as Sade claimed? My argument in this book is that
it is not. It was the outcome of an algorithm—of a system in a sense close
to Sade’s usual application of the term—that might be expressed thus: Let
pleasure be the monarch. I borrow the wording from La Mettrie’s defense
and illustration of sensuality L’ Art de jouir (1751), which begins “Pleasure,
sovereign master of men and gods, before whom all is annihilated, even
reason itself ” and goes on to posit climax—“that divine ecstasy”—as the
monarch of monarchs: “the sovereign pleasure” (le souverain plaisir).
29
La
Mettrie, while radical in his materialism, was more tempered in his liber-
tinism: he worried about wallowing in mere animality, and voluptuousness
was for him a modulated and more admirable enjoyment than orgasm. Such
cautionary notes aside, he did express in fairly unabashed terms a wide-
spread intellectual tendency in the eighteenth century to consider pleasure
as an organizing principle for individual ethics and social relations. Radi-
cal libertines such as Sade not only pushed this tendency, however, they
disrupted the lingering philosophical alignments of pleasure with moral-
ity, beauty, nature, and other constraints, for constraints they were—and
unnecessary ones at that—from the libertine point of view.
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
8

Libertine Roots and Radical Libertinage
To appreciate Sade’s relation to the intellectual tendency to treat plea-
sure as an organizing principle, we must first understand a bit about the
complex genealogy of his works and of his commitments—a genealogy
and set of core values, so to speak, that he largely shared with his radi-
cal brethren. Granted, no author reaches the level of violence or mines
so deeply the repulsive as did Sade in his clandestine writings. Notwith-
standing, while engaging a number of genres, from Socratic dialogue to
picaresque fiction, these writings were easily recognizable in their day as
part of a long—if not venerable—tradition: libertinage. The term was not
limited to the world of print. It also characterized a lifestyle, replete with
specific habits and accouterments. For example, a proper libertine might
own—and probably should—a snuffbox fashioned by the Swedish artist
Karl Gustav Klingstedt, who specialized in miniatures, often of a ribald
or erotic nature. But libertinage was not just a lifestyle in the sense of a
fashion, it was also something like a Weltanschauung and a philosophical
self-fashioning or ethics in its original sense: the development of a char-
acter, of a second nature.
30
In a celebrated letter from prison to his wife,
Renée Pélagie, née de Montreuil, Sade bitterly and ironically explains his
refusal to mend his behavior: “These principles and these tastes, I am their
fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I
have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations,
the deeper they root my principles in my heart, and I openly declare that
no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return
for their destruction.”
31
In other words, libertinage was so firmly part of Sade’s identity, so much
his system, that he refused to change even if it meant that his mother-in-law
would relent. She had had him imprisoned with a lettre de cachet, a legal
device requiring the monarch’s signature, which allowed for indefinite
incarceration without trial, that aristocrats might use to control unruly or
uncooperative relatives. As Sade’s plight attests, not everyone thought that
libertinage was something to declare with pride. Both libertine writings
and the behavior they advocated—the two linked in a feedback loop of
mutual information—were widely considered pernicious: threats to reli-
gion, family, health, and the state.
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
9

But what exactly did the label libertine mean? True, we frequently find
an emphasis on sensual and more precisely sexual pleasure. This facet
links the cynical poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester in the reign of
Charles II in seventeenth-century England to the nihilistic prose of Sade a
hundred years later in revolutionary France. Even if one grants this empha-
sis as a common denominator—and not all libertinage even included this
element—there are degrees, various configurations, different formations
that respond to changes in governing and social organization, to historical
events, to the rise of new media technologies, and to developments intrinsic
to libertinage itself. It might be better not to try to define libertinage once
and for all but rather see how partisans and detractors used the term and
to examine how it was linked to other discourses and social practices. This
is particularly true of libertine literature. Are such writings pornography?
On the one hand, many works called libertine in their day are much too
mild to deserve the appellation. Racy, humorous, vaguely titillating, but
never graphic—these are some of the characteristics of the light libertine
novels, comedies of manners with a ribald tinge, that appeared throughout
the eighteenth century. On the other hand, even the distinctly lurid mate-
rial that is my focus and that I will generally be calling licentious libertine
fiction is so generically impure as to defy categorization as mere pornog-
raphy. In his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Robert
Darnton remarks that the word itself “hardly existed” in eighteenth-cen-
tury France, although Rétif de la Bretonne “coined the term pornographe
in a work of 1769, which argued, rather non-salaciously, for a state-run
system of legal prostitution.”
32
While Darnton’s contention is true with
respect to the circulation of the term in Rétif ’s day, coinage is not quite
correct, since the Hellenistic Greek author Athenaeus in his Deiponosophis-
tae can claim the earliest attested usage of pornographos (“one who writes
about prostitutes”).
33
His reservations, moreover, are a common rhetorical
tactic in the historiography of licentious libertine writing and historicism
more generally: a self-aware suspension of what some might otherwise
take to be a relatively unproblematic category that serves to point out its
very contingency and the shifting, constructed nature of conceptual cat-
egories more generally. Notwithstanding, we are soon returned to those
family resemblances—obscenity, lewdness, and, most especially, explicit
descriptions of sexual intercourse—that mark what we understand to be
the pornographic today.
34
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
10

Without hunting for an eternal essence, it would be difficult—even
obtusely historicist—to argue that licentious libertine writing is unrelated
to what we now know as pornography. At the very least, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century writers of pornographic fiction and “erotica” took
Sade and other licentious writers from the eighteenth century and prior as
implicit and often explicit forerunners and models. Further, if we deem a
mark of this sort of writing as stimulation—often but not always or nec-
essarily to onanism, for these are the books that Rousseau described as
“read with one hand”—then certainly this appears one intent of most of
the works I consider.
35
And were libertine fiction only or primarily an aid
to masturbation, one could still study such material for its sociological or
psychological interest.
36
Happily for the scholar, it is a considerably more
complicated phenomenon than this, and one with multiple roots in literary
and intellectual history.
Pornography may well be one future of eighteenth-century licentious
libertine fiction: a genealogical forebear of writings and images with cir-
cumscribed goals in a niche market. It may have and almost certainly did
serve to lash the imaginations and engage the bodies of certain readers
in the eighteenth-century present. Its past, however, has much less to do
with sexual stimulation than with laughter and social critique. Libertine
fiction here looks particularly to Roman satire in both the narrow generic
sense—in Horace’s characterization the type of censure carried out “with
great freedom” (multa cum libertate) in Attic Old Comedy refigured in
a different meter and format—and the later, broader understanding.
37

Here we might recall that Aristophanes, the crucial figure of Old Com-
edy, counted both bawdry and scatology among his weapons: the sexual
blackmail in Lysistrata or the lizard in The Clouds that defecates upon a
doltish Socrates, standing rapt at the heavens with mouth agape. But the
favorite of libertine writers among Roman satirists was almost certainly
Juvenal, whose rhetorical arsenal, with its over-the-top ranting, outrage,
obscenity, and threats of violence, was sure to appeal to the likes of Sade.
In Juvenal’s sixth satire the authorial persona bemoans the lack of chastity
among contemporary women, all the while wondering whether such a vir-
tue ever existed outside the mythical age of Saturn so many examples of
voracious women are there. Witness the empress Messalina, an epitome of
the ancient topos of female insatiability, who forsook the palace after her
husband Claudius was asleep to work as a brothel harlot, always the last to
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
11

leave, “exhausted by the men but not yet satisfied.”
38
Sade uses Messalina
as an example on numerous occasions, although in a noteworthy departure
from Juvenal she is always a positive one for him. Thus his heroine Juliette
is advised to “model herself ” on Messalina and the Byzantine empress
Theodora, another insatiable who supposedly began her social climb as
a prostitute and, “like these celebrated whores of antiquity,” to procure
“harems of both sexes where you can go and swim at leisure in an ocean
of impurities.”
39
Other ancient sources for Sade and his libertine brethren include Ovid,
especially his Ars Amatoria, the Satyricon attributed to Petronius, Martial’s
terse and often obscene epigrams, and the Priapeia, a collection of verse
personifications of the ithyphallic herms that stood guard over gardens in
Rome—frequently threatening to sodomize thieves—and that were widely
misattributed to Virgil.
40
The title of the last seems the likely inspiration
for one of the early classics of eighteenth-century libertine writing, Alexis
Piron’s poem Ode à Priape (c. 1710).
41
Greek and Roman romances also
provided material, as well as histories, especially of the Roman Empire,
which were not short on examples of excess. The linkage of sex and vio-
lence in, for example, Suetonius may have been an inspiration to Sade in
particular, but he was neither alone nor the first to be intrigued. In the
anonymously published, disingenuously moralizing, curiosity-titillating,
and lavishly illustrated account of the misdeeds of Caligula, Commodius,
Tiberius, and others, Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars [ Monuments
of the Private Life of the Twelve Cesars] (1780), by the antiquarian Pierre-
François Hugues (who went by the invented title “baron d’Hancarville”),
the author borrows the following description of Nero’s behavior from Sue-
tonius: “He had persons of both sexes, stripped entirely nude, tied to posts.
Himself clothed in the skin of a savage beast, he pretended to leave his lair,
and pouncing on his victims, he visited on their bodies horrifying sensual
pleasures [jouissances].”
42
After his depredations, the emperor retires to the
arms of his “spouse” Doryphorus. Tellingly, the name Catullus is only
occasionally dropped: his amatory lyrics, often lewd enough, were not the
major attraction that the broadly speaking satirical sources and historical
accounts were.
Modern satirists in fact drew deeply from the well of the ancients, and it
is a limited account of the Renaissance that highlights Plato, the real Virgil,
or Ovid the author of the Metamorphoses—although in these cases, too,
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
12

there is no lack of either sex or violence. Lucian, the second-century Greek
writer of Syrian extraction, was an enormous influence. In particular, his
melding of philosophical dialogue with New Comedy in the “Dialogues
of Courtesans” served as a paradigm for licentious writers from Pietro
Aretino in the sixteenth century to Sade, whose Philosophie dans le boudoir
(1795) is the last great example in the tradition.
43
In his fictional dialogues
I Ragionamenti (1534–35), Aretino larded his ridicule of pretense and foible
with obscenities, graphic descriptions of intercourse, beatings, and flatu-
lence. Declares one of his spokeswomen on the hypocritical function of
clothing: “it would be more honest to show the prick,

cunt, and ass than
the hands, mouth, and feet” for the former: “do not curse, bite, or spit in
one’s face as mouths do. They don’t kick like feet, or lend themselves to
false oaths, belabor with clubs, steal, and murder like hands.”
44
Similar to
Aretino’s prose works is Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria or Book of the Prick
(c. 1525–26), which explains, for example, that monks invented confession
so that “they could investigate and discover whether there was any pleasure
unknown to them that could be found among the laity” and that they forbid
the latter buggery in order to keep for themselves “such a precious thing as
the asshole.”
45
While La Cazzaria is consistently and grotesquely scabrous,
there is nonetheless kinship with now more reputable fare. Consider Rabe-
lais’s portrayal of his giant hero Gargantua unleashing a stream of urine
on a Parisian crowd, many of whom drown. The tableau was recreated by
Jonathan Swift, that most canonical of eighteenth-century British writers,
in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the eponymous protagonist saves the
Lilliputians’ city from fire in like manner. Swift was indeed a master of the
satirical uses of scatology and cruelty. In the essay “A Modest Proposal”
(1729), cannibalizing Irish children is not only recommended to assuage
poverty and famine, but gruesome details of methods of preparation are
proffered. In the poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), a beau’s delu-
sions about his beloved’s heavenly nature are shattered when he discovers
her reeking chamber pot and its contents.
But like the relation to pornography, the relation of libertinage to sat-
ire is complex. Juvenal’s jibes are conservative in tendency: the lewd and
disgusting are weapons used to bemoan the decadence of contemporary
values. Similarly, Swift’s targets frequently reveal his Tory affiliation and
Augustan approbation of moderation, balance, and good sense. While lib-
ertine satire shares with that of a conservative bent a vociferous disdain for
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
13

pious hypocrisy in particular, its tendency is, generally speaking, politically
progressive.
46
(Sade is a curious case, and I will consider in due course the
mixture of progressive politics with those tendencies in his writings that
Adorno and Horkheimer in their denunciation of instrumental reason, Dia-
lectic of Enlightenment, painted as protofascist.) Further, libertinage tended
to have positive and not just critical goals and was in this regard indissolubly
linked to philosophie as a banner under which a group of like-minded intel-
lectuals gathered and which came to be the label of a partisan group: the
philosophes and the so-called parti philosophique.
47
Of course, philosophie in
this narrow, sociological sense did not spring up ex nihilo. It was related in
myriad ways to more general intellectual trends: the rise of empiricism, the
debunking of scholastic thought that went along with this, and the revamp-
ing of the natural law tradition (most notably by Hugo Grotius, Hobbes,
and Samuel von Pufendorf). It was also indebted to humanism in various
guises, from the skeptical outlooks of Erasmus or Montaigne to, once again,
Rabelais, whose giants of appetite signified an embrace of the bodily against
the Christian denial of the flesh—a model for libertines in general and cer-
tainly for Sade’s heroes, gargantuan in their own way.
Indeed, the emergence of the first wave of libertine writing and think-
ing in the seventeenth century, itself a branch in the genealogy of later
philosophie, is part and parcel of the early modern revival of skepticism.
This libertinage érudit or “learned libertinism” may have emphasized free-
dom from religious prejudice in particular, but it always included a strand
of social critique about love and marriage that slid easily toward sexual
license. The same skeptical heritage holds for those seventeenth-century
philosophers whose names conjure the Enlightenment period at its outset:
Pierre Bayle’s attack on superstition, Locke’s defense of toleration, and the
crypto-atheism of Spinoza.
48
And while many such thinkers, from Hobbes
and Spinoza through to the major names of French philosophie such as
Diderot, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, were charged with impiety
and even atheism—and some, if not all, of them were not only impious but
also nonbelievers—there are marked affinities too between their positions
and the Protestant rebellion against the Church of Rome, its corruption,
venality, and hypocrisy.
As this illustrious genealogy suggests, while we might initially suspect
that libertine fiction was merely the domain of hacks and lowlifes, this
was on the whole simply not the case. Of course, except for the milder
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
14

instances, we often know little concrete about authors because such writ-
ing was published anonymously for reasons of reputation and personal
safety. Even when anonymous, however, we can infer key features of an
author’s background such as degree of education. Of the names we know
with certainty or probability not a few are of noble lineage, and, noble or
not, many writers tested out, dabbled or indulged in licentious genres while
simultaneously pursuing more respectable writing careers. After writing
his phallic ode at about the age of twenty, Piron went on to become a
celebrated playwright; his indiscretion may have cost him a place in the
Académie Française, but otherwise did little to diminish his fame. Sade
published prose works—novels and short stories—that were often wicked
but substantially tamer in comparison to his better-known output, and he
hoped in vain that his plays would be successfully mounted. For those of a
philosophical stripe, moreover, libertine writing appealed for a number of
interrelated reasons: it was associated with a critical political stance, with
materialist science, and with an ethics befitting an enlightened elite, wary
of superstition and of religious hypocrisy.
As an example of this appeal, consider Voltaire’s La Pucelle d ’Orléans,
which circulated widely in manuscript and pirated print editions of varying
correctness and completeness from the time of its composition (c. 1730)
until the end of the century. In 1755, one such edition was publicly burned
in Paris and Geneva, and the printer sent to the galleys for nine years. This
bawdy, irreligious attack on organized religion in the guise of a spoof of
the life of Jeanne d’Arc became one of Voltaire’s most popular works and
one that later libertine writers frequently cited as seminal. A source of both
legal concern and embarrassment for its author, who likely wanted to be
remembered for weightier contributions to French letters, Voltaire none-
theless offered his own highly edited official version in 1760 (figure 0.1).
Another guiding intellectual light of the century, Charles de Secondat,
baron de Montesquieu, wrote the libertine-leaning epistolary novel Les
Lettres persanes (1721), as well as the mildly erotic Temple de Gnide (1724),
before going on to produce his magisterial study of government and mores,
L’Esprit des lois (1748). Similarly, in his mid-thirties and just as he was tak-
ing on the editorship of the Encyclopédie, Diderot penned Les Bijoux indis-
crets (1748), his first novel.
49
Drawing on a medieval fabliau entitled “Du
chevalier qui fist les cons parler” (“The knight who made cunts speak”)
and a novella on the same topic entitled Nocrion (an inversion of noir con,
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
15

that is “black cunt”) that had appeared in 1747, Diderot’s tale of loquacious
female privy parts was reprinted at least six times within a few months of
its initial appearance.
50
At this point Diderot had already seen his Pensées
philosophiques (1746) condemned by the crown; he would shortly thereafter
be imprisoned for four months in Vincennes on account of the materialist
implications—tantamount to an admission of atheism at the time—of his
Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). While Diderot did learn to be more discreet
in what he allowed to be published under his name, libertinage was not
just a youthful peccadillo: there is a strong element of sexual free think-
ing in his later works such as La Religieuse (c. 1760) and his art criticism
frequently courts the erotic; his materialist outlook, if anything, became
stronger with age. Beyond these major names there is also a philosophical
presence in most all licentious fiction by anonymous writers and by those
of lesser renown. The connection between works of the cutting-edge intel-
ligentsia and libertine writings was so tight at the time that the latter were
usually simply called romans philosophiques or philosophical novels.
51
And this brings us back to pleasure, which was a central and shared
element of the genealogy of both philosophie and libertinage. The long
ethical tradition of eudemonism placed the emphasis not on strict rules of
conduct but on individual happiness. It is very much present in Aristotle’s
Nichomachean Ethics, where the philosopher posits happiness as the goal
of ethical choice but seems doubtful whether it can be guaranteed and
unsure as to what its nature might be for humans: political engagement or
godlike contemplation.
52
With Aristotle as example, Aquinas was eventu-
ally to Christianize happiness as the end of spiritual endeavor. He did so
to the dismay of some later Protestant theologians, who found his rea-
soning all too practical in relation to the mysteries of faith. Eudemonism
is key too in the Stoic ideal of ataraxia, that is, a reasoned detachment
that underwrites a negative happiness: the absence of pain and pertur-
bation. Stoicism did have a limited appeal for some eighteenth-century
philosophers. For example, Diderot late in life wrote in praise of the Stoic
philosopher Seneca. Yet the dominant influence as far as libertines are
concerned was Epicureanism, both as a materialist philosophical system
and as a related ethics of pleasure. In the modern era, the Epicureanism
of antiquity circulated primarily in the form of Lucretius’s didactic poem
De Rerum Natura from the first century bce. In the seventeenth century,
Pierre Gassendi led an influential revival of the central article of Epicurean
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
16

FIGURE 0.1. In this illustration from a collection of engravings printed circa 1765 intended to accompany
editions of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans, the king inspects and conﬁrms the virginity of the titular heroine,
Joan of Arc. Licentious images of the sort were often included in editions of Voltaire’s scandalous poem,
which was reprinted frequently throughout the eighteenth century. Copyright © the British Library Board,
Voltaire, La Pucelle d’Orléans, P.C. 31. c.25.

physics—atomism—and wed this to Christianity. It was a surprising
move, since the epithet Epicurean had long been anathema to the Church,
conjuring incontinence and atheism (Dante characterizes the central belief
of Epicureans—a corollary of atomism, although he does not say this—
as the soul dying with the body; he puts those who hold it in the sixth
circle of Hell).
53
Later, La Mettrie’s radical, atheistic L ’Homme-machine
divulged a profound Epicurean stamp that resonated with libertine writ-
ers. But Epicureanism is also present, if less explicitly so, in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, all
of whom advanced ethical systems that might be broadly categorized as
sentimental and egoistic—focusing on subjective feelings in relation to
perceived utility—and who tended to prefer pleasure and pain as discrete,
almost quantifiable elements over discussions of happiness, intangible and
obscure by comparison. This was the case too for Bentham’s later attempt
to produce an objective utilitarian ethics.
54
French licentious libertine writers on the whole not only adopted this
preference for pleasure over happiness, they also tightened the knot. Sex-
ual enjoyment appeared as concrete and immune to criticism: who would
counter its claim to sovereignty or who dare contradiction with the asser-
tion that one’s pleasure is not pleasurable? Yet just as libertinage shifted
the concerns of satire to a positive program, the libertine lens refracted the
influence of Epicureanism. If Epicurus and Lucretius emphasized so-called
katastematic pleasures—intellectual freedom from fear and withdrawal
from the disturbances of sensuality—over kinetic pleasures, libertines
generally opted for the latter.
55
Sade, for example, uses the obscure term
volgivague, or “wandering,” to characterize female sexual voraciousness;
while simply descriptive, on the one hand, it is also meant as high praise.
56

He borrows the adjective from Lucretius, who recommends as a remedy
against the wounds of love “wandering with Wandering Venus” (vol-
givagaque vagus Venere).
57
But whereas Lucretius intends that one engage a
prostitute—this is the meaning of “Wandering Venus”—in order to drain
off desire and mitigate the greater danger of psychic attachment, Sade’s
position on love is that it rather distracts men and women alike from full
sybaritic indulgence. While Epicurean-minded libertines earlier in the
eighteenth century do at times recommend moderation, this is still, gener-
ally speaking, done in the name of economizing one’s forces in order to
maximize immoderation in the long run.
58
There is little room in Sade’s
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
18

world for Epicurus’s correction to misperceptions of his teaching: “it is not
drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or
consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which pro-
duce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons
for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the
source of the greatest turmoil for men’s souls.”
59
The thrust of my argu-
ment in this book is not that eighteenth-century libertinage and philoso-
phie overlap. This overlap is frankly indisputable. It is rather that they also
parted ways in significant respects and that libertinage had characteristics
all its own. Indeed, if libertines were able to throw off the yoke of religion
and morality using philosophical reason, what is more surprising is that
they ultimately came to consider reason itself as an undo restraint.
The Conditions of the Autonomy of Pleasure
If we are to grasp how the breaking of the alignment of reason and pleasure
and other effects of the differentiation of libertinage came about, it is help-
ful to consider eighteenth-century libertine fiction in terms of distinctive
if not always absolutely distinct subgenres that, with qualifications, corre-
spond to periods. The outset of the first of these can be more or less dated
to the death of Louis XIV and the Regency of Philippe II, duc d’Orléans
during the minority of the new monarch (1715–23). The final twenty years
of the Sun King’s long reign were marked by increased religious sentiment
at Versailles and conflict between France and other European powers. The
Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, which declared Protestantism illegal within
the nation’s borders, and the official revocation of the Edict of Nantes in
1688, which had sanctioned tolerance for the Huguenots or French Cal-
vinists, were causes of consternation not only for supporters of religious
freedom but also for France’s non-Catholic neighbors. The War of the
Grand Alliance (1688–97) involved many of those nations and was primar-
ily intended to stop Louis’s expansionist policies. Its outcome was ambigu-
ous and soon followed the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), which
would determine whether the French monarch could extend his hegemony
into the Iberian peninsula. Against the lugubrious tone of this time, the
Regency was a period of happy reaction. (In this respect, it was much like
the Restoration in England, also known for libertinage, which was largely
an import of the seventeenth-century French version that Charles II and
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
19

his courtiers had learned while in exile during the Protectorate of the Puri-
tan Oliver Cromwell.) The regent himself was widely known as a hedonist,
and the sudden infusion of levity he brought to the court, while certainly
not to everyone’s taste, made a strong impression on the literature of the
first decades of the notoriously mistress-prone Louis XV’s reign: gently
ironic novels of seduction and amorous education such as Crébillon fils’s
Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit (1736–38) and Charles Pinot Duclos’s
Les Confessions du comte de *** (1741).
60
The heyday of the novel of seduction overlaps in great part with the
beginning of the second period: the emergence of licentious libertine fiction
in the 1740s. In many respects this must be characterized as a reemergence,
for certainly there were models of licentious writing in the seventeenth
century. There was the anonymous and highly influential L’École des filles
(1655), to which the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded having masturbated and
that he subsequently burned.
61
L’École des filles was soon followed by Nico-
las Chorier’s Aloisiae Sigaeae, Toletanae, Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris
et Veneris (c. 1659). The title played on the commonly assumed but false
etymology of satire in satyr, creatures legendary for lubricity. The work
was originally published in Latin but became better known under the com-
mon title of its French translation as L ’Académie des dames. The convent
setting and lesbian nuns in Vénus dans le cloître (1675) served as models for
many later libertine tales. In turn, these works had roots in earlier sources,
notably the anonymous La Puttana errante or The Wandering Whore (1642),
frequently misattributed to Aretino, and the last’s own Ragionamenti.
62

Ironically, while Aretino made a point of using blunt vernacular words for
genitalia and such—his writings a constant refrain of cazzo, potta, and culo,
or “prick,” “cunt,” and “ass” respectively—these same terms came to serve
as euphemisms in bawdy tales in other tongues (figure 0.2).
But while these earlier licentious writings are often philosophically
engaged, those that take off in the 1740s in France reveal a deep association
with philosophie as a historically circumscribed movement and group iden-
tity. The first major work in the vein is the anonymous Histoire de Dom
Bougre, portier des Chartreux (1741), attributed to Gervaise de Latouche.
Similar and of crucial importance for my case is Thérèse philosophe (1748),
the very title of which advertises the continuity of philosophical and
libertine positions. It is now widely considered to be the work of Jean-
Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens (1701–1771). The genre seems to
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
20

FIGURE 0.2. The title page of an early French edition of L’Académie de dames depicts an academician
crowned with the horns of cuckoldry and reaching out toward a comely lady. The spurious publication infor-
mation indicates that the book was published in Venice under the auspices of Pietro Aretino. Bibliothèque
nationale de France.

have encouraged thinking beyond the limits of the legally, socially, politi-
cally, and even metaphysically acceptable. But while Thérèse philosophe,
Dom Bougre and others like them from the mid-century might already be
seen as a radical wing of philosophie, the next wave of licentious writings
in the 1770s through the Revolution do not just represent an extension of
this trend but also a radicalization of libertinage itself.
63
This moment in
the historical evolution of licentious writing might be termed la foutro-
manie or “fuck mania” after the title of a long ode to sexual pleasure from
1775 attributed to royal administrator Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan.
64
The
names of the major prose authors are Andréa de Nerciat, Honoré Gabriel
Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, and Sade himself.
65
A seventeenth-century
libertine text such as Vénus dans le cloître could be remarkably lewd, yet
it would still distinguish between a justifiable and forthright “liberty” and
a dangerous, disordering “license.”
66
This distinction was a point of both
politics and ethics that continued to function into the 1740s and in texts
that we would other describe as licentious in terms of their graphic con-
tent. The authors of the radical phase of libertinage in the later eighteenth
century, on the contrary, made every effort to blend license with liberty
and obliterate the distinction as an ideological nicety worthy of sardonic
suspicion and skeptical critique.
In their libertine writings, and those like them, we find an increasing
propensity to treat the sphere of pleasure as radically autonomous: not
beholden to any outside restraints, be they those of religion, mores, rai-
sons d’état, positive law, natural law, biology, intimacy, or even aesthetic
judgment. All of these restraints are instead treated as heteronomous,
to use the term that Kant employed in relation to ethical freedom, espe-
cially insofar as he rejected any putative moral system based on senti-
ments of good and bad. Not all the texts are as totalizing or totalitarian
with respect to such autonomy as Les 120 Journées de Sodome, and Sade
himself went on to treat the matter in other ways. His favored genre was
the open-ended narrative form of the picaresque, where his character
Justine, the eternal victim, or her sister Juliette, the libertine adventurer,
move from one encounter with pleasure and pain to the next. Granted,
Sade’s ongoing taste for enclosures suggests that the total institution and
totalitarian microsocieties were always a major temptation and solution
for him. Another fictional expression of this autonomy, which might be
called the “Free Mason strategy,” emphasized secret societies.
67
The title
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
22

of Nerciat’s Les Aphrodites (1793) names one such imagined clandestine
network of libertines.
But while the imagination of libertine networks dedicated to the singu-
lar pursuit of pleasure is a hallmark of this period, the sharing of arcana,
pacts of mutual discretion, and depictions of groups in the know feature
in much earlier licentious writing as well. In this respect, I am not argu-
ing that the radical autonomy of the 1770s and beyond represents a sud-
den rupture with the past. On the contrary, it is in some ways the end
product of the acceptance of the pleasure principle, and many earlier texts
give a foretaste and help pave the way. Which is to say that the algorithm
“pleasure, sovereign master” already had system-building effects: it gave a
coherent shape to the discourse of libertinage and initiated a concatenation
of effects. Further, we might say that it had always been possible to think
the autonomy of pleasure. Aquinas did so when he spoke of fomes (literally
“tinderwood”), which he characterized as our postlapsarian inclination
to animal sensuality and that he glossed with a citation from Saint Paul:
“I see another law in my members fighting against the law in my mind”
(Romans 7:23). Fomes thus indicates autonomy in its exact etymological
sense: a law-unto-itself. It also posed a peculiar problem for Aquinas: since
fomes names our “deviation from the law of reason”—the law that should
rule us as humans—he must clarify how it can be thought of as a law at
all.
68
Of course, Aquinas thought fomes a danger to be avoided, were this
possible for fallen creatures. Libertines, on the other hand, inversed the
valuation: making sensual deviation the law to be followed and in so doing
questioning the degree to which reason could or should govern the realm
of pleasure. They explored the autonomy of pleasure in a thoroughgoing
way— although this always remained to a degree implicit—and in their
writings we can track some of the various consequences of their algorith-
mic investment. Further, I would argue that it was only in prerevolutionary
France that conditions were perfect for enabling such a long-standing, pro-
found, and radical version of the autonomy of pleasure. While there was
licentious writing in England and Holland at the same time; in both cases
the extrapornographic concerns largely have to do with the marketplace,
merchants and traders, and the shaping of what we see in retrospect as mid-
dle-class values. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749),
better known after its heroine as Fanny Hill, remains the best example of
this. Among other things, Cleland’s heroine is a sexual Robinson Crusoe,
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
23

whose desert island is prostitution. Like her male counterpart, she eventu-
ally emerges from her moral shipwreck no worse for wear, economically
prudent, and providentially wealthy.
69
Unlike him, she has considerably
more enjoyment en route. While Fanny Hill does nod in the direction of
materialist philosophy, it does not get involved in politics, rights discourse,
or related matters—except perhaps at a third remove. It appears that the
constitutional solution to extensions of monarchical power in England and
the success of republican government in Holland meant that the use of
licentious fiction to produce counterfactual alternatives to social and politi-
cal reality had considerably less purchase in these other arenas of eigh-
teenth-century libertine production.
In France, on the other hand, the rise of absolutism with Louis XIV
had meant that the power of the aristocracy was curtailed. Yet here was a
disenfranchisement that simultaneously meant a potential freeing up for
libertine pursuits. It was a situation that would continue and develop up
to the Revolution. The licentious libertinage of the 1740s emerged at the
moment in Louis XV’s reign that the absolutist state was increasingly in the
hands of ministers and ministries—we would say bureaucrats and bureau-
cracies. Moreover, the parti philosophique, with the support of the king’s
mistress Madame de Pompadour, was gaining more and more influence
in the halls of power, although not without resistance or controversy. To
an extent, the radical libertinage of the 1770s and following decades was
an attempt to think the future of social organization and politics beyond
the monarchy via the example of aristocratic license, and if the notion of a
licentious and functionless aristocracy was at times more a figment of lit-
erary-philosophical imagination than a politico-economic reality, this was
really beside the point for what was in this regard an essentially counterfac-
tual activity.
70
At the same time, the absolutist state was in fact increasingly
involved in policing the morals of its subjects—the aristocracy included—
and this provoked both positive and negative reactions on the part of lib-
ertine writers and others: suggestions as to how the state might enable or
harness the pursuit of pleasure as well as expressions of resentment that it
should interfere at all. It is noteworthy that the frame narrative of Les 120
journées de Sodome indicates that the four protagonists, while eschewing
legitimate roles in the economic and political system, profited parasitically
from wars waged late in Louis XIV’s reign, but that the action itself takes
place during the Regency. While there is an attraction to the amoral power
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
24

of absolutism, there is also nostalgia for a time when not only libertinage
was the court vogue but also when the aristocracy itself enjoyed a brief
resurgence of robustness and freedom—a reassertion of its old droits de
seigneur. Given his commitments, Sade was probably right to express such
nostalgia: after the French Revolution and relative stabilization of the new
political order, radical libertinage as studied in these pages more or less
comes to an end, although we can continue to track its ramifications and
influences in a number of areas from pornography to the regulation of
prostitution, aestheticism, decadent literature, sexology, sexual liberation-
ism, and poststructural theory.
A Note on Method
On the whole, I think matters of methodology are best left to be unfolded
en route. It may be helpful nonetheless for me to sketch out an account
of what I see myself doing and not doing in methodological terms. In her
seminal work on the influence of the printing press, Elizabeth Eisenstein
has suggested that the symbolic value that had come to be attached to the
philosophes and other critical writers provided the storming of the Bastille
with a rationale. The prison contained only a handful of inmates, so what
we might be tempted to call its real value as a target of early revolutionary
violence was negligible. The symbolic value of the storming was great,
however, and this value stemmed in part from the fact that some of the
inmates were writers. Further, one group of writers who posed a political
threat that the medium and functioning of the press effectively amplified
were those whom Eisenstein, citing Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm,
characterizes as practicing “the métier of Aretino.”
71
We must proceed
with some caution if we are to understand this métier as libertinage: at
the beginning of July of 1789, Sade may have been in the Bastille, perhaps
because of his libertine ways, but not because of his career as a clandes-
tine writer of hellishly licentious fiction, which had yet to begin in ear-
nest. Grimm’s insinuation likely had as much to do with Aretino’s political
barbs—scabrous to be sure—than with libertinage as a hedonistic lifestyle
choice. Much more than Sade, it would have been the acidic political critic,
journalist, erstwhile enemy of the parti philosophique, and fellow prisoner
Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet who would have better fit the description
(Linguet would emerge to write a scathing denunciation of the Bastille as
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
25

an institution of the Ancien Régime and nonetheless find himself decollated
in 1794). Yet maybe there is no reason to be too precise. As Darnton has
argued, libertine writers, atheist philosophers, political critics—sometimes
but not always rolled up in one—worked to the same end: the delegitimiza-
tion of the political and moral order through argument, ridicule, and sheer
contempt.
72
In his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, what Darnton
provides is a rich account of the clandestine book trade prior to 1789. His
explanation of the effects of this trade on subsequent historical events—
similar to Eisenstein’s account of the effects of print as a medium of dif-
fusion of radical political discourse on the same—is in terms of real but
tenuous causality. Licentious fiction would serve as a confluent cause of
social change: one of many driving factors. While a critic might say that
all that has been proven is correlation and not causality, I have no hesita-
tion in granting the hypothesis that libertine writing played some causal
role in the French Revolution. This hypothesis is also simply not my inter-
est. Rather, I begin with the observation that the political and economic
orders in eighteenth-century France were the enabling conditions of radi-
cal libertinage. The printing press and the circulation of printed material
were also enabling conditions. These conditions increased the probability
that a differentiated discourse on pleasure would take hold, but they did
not determine that it would or, once the ball was rolling, along what lines
this discourse would develop. Those determinations—or, rather, preex-
isting approaches and various contingencies that began to congeal into
probabilities—were by and large a function of differentiation and system
checks for internal consistency.
73
With reference to Peter Bürger, who thought long and hard about the
question of autonomy with respect to art, I am embracing the method-
ological problems and promise of taking seriously “nonsynchronism in the
development of individual subsystems” and the conceptual and historical
integrity of these subsystems rather than looking for some whole that could
be grasped as such and that would make sense of the various parts.
74
Bürger
is interested in the status of the autonomy of art—“the detachment of art as
a special sphere of human activity from the nexis of the praxis of life”—as
simultaneously “real” and subject to “social determinacy,” an ideological
category that encompasses both a truth and the false hypostatizing of that
truth as the “essence” of art.
75
He therefore rejects simply reading off the
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
26

history of art from a tacitly or explicitly assumed history of bourgeois soci-
ety. As he polemically puts the matter, “where that history is taken as an
already known reference system and used as such in the historical investi-
gation of partial social spheres, cultural science degenerates into the proce-
dure of establishing correspondences,” adding that the “cognitive value of
such an enterprise must be rated as small.”
76
In my case, I grant to liberti-
nage the emergent status of a system that, while it does interface with—is
coordinated or in conflict with—many others, nonetheless sets itself apart
(pace Bürger, subsystem is not the right word because the prefix implies
precisely the whole that he otherwise rejects, and the same goes for partial
social spheres). In this regard, my approach is markedly coherentist: I want
to show that only when we approach libertinage in terms of differentiation
and autonomy do various otherwise inexplicable phenomena make sense
and that only then does the discourse hang together. What I am doing is
certainly akin to intellectual history or, probably better, conceptual history,
although I take my distance from the so-called history of representations.
This is not because I am not to an extent doing the history of representa-
tions, but rather because I have folded such history into an argument that is
ultimately about causation and that therefore entails more than description.
It is just that much—but by no means all—of the causal explanation in this
case comes from within libertinage. And this is also why new historicist and
kindred accounts of literary production also fail: where they would read
literary texts in terms of privileged contexts or in terms of shared assump-
tions, structures, or correspondences, I will insist on differences, emergent
features, and what might be summed up as the explanatory inadequacy of
context. Of course, while I would like to think that such coherence has
been coaxed out of the data rather than imposed on it, I must leave it to the
reader to decide whether the detailed analyses and the arguments add up
to a convincing picture.
If my approach may be termed a historical sociology, my data are for the
most part words on the page along with some printed images that accom-
pany much textual libertinage. (I might add that often enough my interest is
exploring how word and image do not coincide, rather than assuming their
complementarity.) In its own disciplinary unfolding, sociology has often
shown itself attuned to language. In Karl Mannheim’s seminal work in the
sociology of knowledge, Ideology and Utopia (1929), attention to language
is fundamental because there is nowhere else “in the realm of social life”
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
27

that we find “such a clearly traceable interdependence and sensitivity to
change and varying emphasis as in the meaning of words”—together word
and meaning forge “a collective reality.”
77
Later social constructivists such as
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann would insist not only on the structuring
relation of language to collectivity but also on the variety—one might add
the irreducible and nontotalizable heterogeneity—of social realities created
by existence and overlay of different “semantic fields.”
78
Or again we might
consider how Niklas Luhmann defended and extended the systems model
for sociology that dominated the postwar era and was particularly associated
with Talcott Parsons—whose work was abandoned in part because it was
insufficiently heedful of interpretation and social narratives—by replacing
actions with communications as the fundamental operation of social systems,
with meaning as their medium. I take up this tradition with the eye of liter-
ary scholar and with particular attention to the relation between libertinage
as a communication system and what might be called its textual rhetorics:
language as figurative, forceful, performative, playful, constitutive, and cor-
rosive. Ironically, one of the things that rhetorical analysis reveals is that the
more libertinage became radicalized, insisting on its prerogatives, the less
impact it was likely to have on other social domains. Pushed to the limit,
the autonomy of pleasure enunciated totalization and in so doing ensured its
marginalization. Rather than try to squeeze a cause for social upheaval out of
libertinage—again, I have no doubt that it can be done—my aim is to grasp,
expose, and examine this often curious marginal movement as such. This
marginal movement entailed evolution, both in the sense that libertinage
changed and developed over relatively long historical stretches of time and
in the sense that these changes can be understood in part as adaptations to a
variegated and itself shifting environment. It also entailed involutions: those
internal tendencies and developments irreducible to the environment. And it
entailed revolutions, if by the term we understand marked and radical breaks
with earlier and other ways of thinking and, more to the point, of expressing
sexual relations as social relations and vice versa.
Finally, if my focus is eighteenth-century French libertinage in its
historical specificity, I have not sought to use this focus to preclude the
analysis of connections between this focus and both earlier and later peri-
ods. The reader will encounter frequent references to Roman antiquity
as well as to twentieth-century works of sexology, psychoanalysis, philo-
sophical defenses of liberation, and mass media contributions to what
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
28

Michel Foucault famously characterized as the “discourse of sexuality”:
all that talk about sexuality as our hidden essence and identity that we
have mistaken as a biological reality. The literary and philosophical influ-
ences of ancient satire on libertinage or, for example, of Sade’s writ-
ings on poststructuralist theory are there, and they are real. At the same
time, we must be wary of confusing influences, intertexts, and the back
formations forged by literary and philosophical reception with continu-
ities. Libertines often used satire in ways that would be unrecognizable
to their forebears, and their borrowings fit into a quite different set of
circumstances. Sade would likely have found his lionization by some
critical thinkers, sexual liberationists, and, indeed, certain feminists, as
laughable. Yet notwithstanding the problem of false continuity, I am also
concerned to explore parallels that appear under in most respects vastly
different social and historical circumstances but are enabled by the same
fundamental condition: sufficient social differentiation to encourage the
pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself and to spur the consideration of
various means for encouraging such autonomy.
Thus, although I will mainly be interested in the reception of texts from
classical antiquity within libertinage, I would argue that a different but
comparable set of circumstances held in Rome during the early empire.
79

That is, something akin to the differentiation and autonomy of pleasure
held as far as the senatorial class was concerned—like their French aristo-
cratic brethren politically debilitated by the centralization of power—not
to mention for well-heeled parvenus (the Satyricon skewers the latter in
the depiction of Trimalchio, a freedman or libertinus in the original sense,
with vast riches but questionable taste). Moreover, analogues are a general
feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity: the era of what
the sociologist Anthony Giddens has labeled, somewhat problematically,
as we shall see, “the democratization of intimacy.”
80
Well before Foucault,
in a memorable expression, urged us to stop talking about sexuality and
desire and to turn instead to “bodies and pleasures,” libertines had already
imagined a foundational role for both.
81
Because of this, we can reverse
the usual order of historical explanation and actually use concepts and
discoveries from the earlier period to shed light on the latter. The libertine
principle that pleasure could serve to guide individual behavior and even
as the basis of society yields remarkable insights into what the modern
experience of the contingency of mores, practices, and institutions means.
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
29

Many of the writings that I study certainly have their moments of excess,
violence, and sheer absurdity. And their attempts to reduce the complexi-
ties of social life and social organization via the pleasure principle resonate
with the impasses of later liberationist talk, remnants and reminders of
which are with us to this day. Nonetheless, not in spite but rather because
they delved so deeply into the systematic deployment of license, we may
still at times draw on what I would be tempted to call their libertine wis-
dom. And while I do take the structural similarities that underlie these
transhistorical parallels to be real, they also, simply, give us to think. To
make such assertions is to invite criticism from some of the very histori-
cists with whom I am fundamentally aligned. Let me caricature them as
dogmatic particularists, the direct descendants of those that Sir Philip Sid-
ney memorably dismissed as “so tied not to what should be but to what
is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things,
that his example draweth no necessary consequence.”
82
Clearly, I think
that the risks of abstraction and generalization are worth taking and the
liberty to do so is worth defending. This is not, of course, a license to
ignore the particular or the concrete, let alone to do whatever one pleases.
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?
30

A GLANCE AT THE ANIMAL KINGDOM presents us with an astounding
variety of sexual relations, yet such heterogeneity tends not to apply within
individual species. Humans, on the other hand, while we share sexual flex-
ibility with certain relatives among the higher primates, have developed it
in theory—if not always in practice—to a significantly greater degree. We
have created esoteric traditions in which certain positions might only be
attained with the aid of complex instructions, diagrams, and physical train-
ing; we have also produced rather pedestrian handbooks of the more easily
executed positions for everyman and everywoman. There is a fair amount
of reflection from antiquity to the present on what to make of the fact that
we need not engage in intercourse in the naturally prescribed manner, if
such a manner can be said to exist at all. Consider pioneering sexologist
Iwan Bloch’s description of proper congress in his The Sexual Life of Our
Time in Its Relation to Modern Civilization (1908): “Passing to the con-
sideration of the posture adopted during intercourse, we find in civilized
man, who in this respect is far removed from animals, the normal posi-
tion during coitus is front to front, the woman lying on her back with her
lower extremities widely separated, and the knee and hip joints semiflexed;
the man lies on her, with his thighs between hers, supporting himself on
hands or elbows—or often the two unite their lips in a kiss.”
1
With the
chapter one
A Thousand Modes of Venery
Coital Positions as Actions and Communications

31

expression “lower extremities” substituted for the ordinary “legs,” Bloch
clearly intends that we take his description as clinical and as if microscopic.
But the rhetoric of empiricism notwithstanding, Bloch’s evidence appears
anecdotal. When he does provide sources, these are usually references to
the work of other sexologists. He also turns for support to what we now
class as literature. Bloch oversaw the first publication of Sade’s manuscript
of Les 120 journées de Sodome, a work that he considered a compendium
of pathological practices that, for lack of a disciplinary framework, was
forced to appear in fictional form. It was Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexu-
alis (1886) in gothic dress.
Although Bloch speaks confidently of “the posture,” his qualification
that this refers us only to “civilized man” confirms that the facts of life have
a social and historical dimension. Attempts at description, moreover, shade
off into prescription. Bloch does note that there are other positions pos-
sible, but the only ones that “demand consideration on hygienic grounds”
are “lateral decubitus of the woman, dorsal decubitus of the man, and
coitus a posteriori (for example, when the man and woman are extremely
obese).”
2
He puts these positions quickly aside and, citing anthropological
authority regarding its universality and naturalness, returns posthaste to
the preferred mode: “Ploss-Bartels has proved that the position described
above as normal was usual already in ancient times and amongst the most
diverse peoples. The adoption of this position in coitus undoubtedly
ensued in the human race upon the evolution of the upright posture. It is
the natural, instinctive position of civilized man, who in this respect also
manifests an advance on the lower animals.”
3
In Bloch, instinct and civili-
zation are peculiarly conflated. In the front-to-front position, the meeting
of the genitals below in copulation is counter-balanced with the meeting of
heads above in osculation. Intimacy, spirituality, and rationality are hereby
injected into an act otherwise shared with animal-kind; it is elevated, civi-
lized, and humanized. Man on top, of course, in keeping with the natural
order of patriarchy.
In spite of moral laxity and sex education, we might wonder how far we
have come from the days when sexology was not ashamed to advertise its
normalizing impulse. Although here it is my evidence that is anecdotal, I
would wager that if an educated North American—or an uneducated one
for that matter—were asked to name positions for coitus, he or she would
likely only be able to come up with two or three designations. One of these
A THOUSAND MODES OF VENERY
32

would be missionary. The word might be delivered with a sniff of disdain
and, for those disposed to irony, accompanied by a wink to suggest that
below the surface of Christian zealotry and justifications for imperialism lie
hidden libidinal springs. But, while it is somewhat surprising that a term so
pungent with white man’s burden should have survived into postcolonial
times, is there a common alternative besides normal or usual? Another posi-
tion would be the colloquial doggy style. The canine reference has long been
common in English. In The School of Venus (1680), a free translation of the
École des filles, we find a woman explaining that her paramour took her
“Dog fashion, backwards.”
4
Out of modesty, pedantry, or perhaps simple
love of learned archaism, one might with Freud intone a tergo, more ferarum
(from behind, in the manner of beasts).
5
In either the classical or vernacu-
lar tongue, the supposed animality of the position would be emphasized.
This is something more pronounced in the Latin, where ferae are specifically
wild as opposed to domesticated animals. Here we are reminded of what
Freud wrote concerning the upright carriage of homo sapiens, civilization,
and the disparagement of olfaction: “It would be incomprehensible . . . that
man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world—
the dog—as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt
through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is
that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not
ashamed of its sexual functions.”
6
Our modern addition of a diminutive suf-
fix to dog suggests further repudiation and embarrassment.
Many of the concerns that both Bloch and Freud express are those of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The implied notion that
civilizations are at different evolutionary stages is redolent of Herbert
Spencer, whose enormous influence was on the wane but whose theories
were still part of the zeitgeist. Yet the guiding binary of human-versus-
animal with respect to sexual positions is so prevalent across time and
space that we might rightly wonder if it should be treated as a universal.
Could it be that, along with the incest taboo, the two most frequently men-
tioned manners of coitus provide a foundational opposition for culture
tout court? Although the topic of sexual positions has not, that I know of,
ever been taken up by structural anthropologists, it would be worthy of
such an analysis. The opposition of the two main manners of intercourse
is analogous, for example, to a guiding binary that Lévi-Strauss saw as a
cultural universal: the raw and the cooked.
7
Moreover, it links up nicely
A THOUSAND MODES OF VENERY
33

with another fundamental opposition: the dirty and the clean, often tied
to matters of civilization and imperialist ideology.
8
While there may well
be something to this universalization of the distinction between human
and animal with regard to sexual positions, we must nonetheless pay care-
ful attention to historical particularities, linguistic subtleties, and local—
including libertine—differences on this score. Furthermore, the binary
simply does not take into account the myriad other ways that humans can
engage in coitus or have imagined doing so.
Bloch himself should have been fully aware that the actual multiplicity
of positions threatened to undermine the function of positing the “nor-
mal manner,” which was to suggest that there is an instinctual trend to
civilization. I point this out not because I want to indulge in attenuated
deconstruction. It would be easy enough to show that sexology from this
period tends to work with binaries that quickly crumble on closer inspec-
tion. These are not deeply philosophical texts. More interesting is that the
instability of the structure of these texts is directly related to sexology as
process: such binaries must be produced, reaffirmed, and then systemati-
cally destabilized in order to generate meaningful data. For example, Bloch
must constantly open up and close down the paradox that the abnormal is
normal.
9
Thus, on the one hand, he notes that because “sexual anomalies
constitute a phenomenon generally characteristic of the human race, race
and nationality, as such, have less to do with the matter than is commonly
imagined.”
10
The abnormal is normal—or at least is evenly distributed
throughout human populations. On the other hand, after denying a couple
of stereotypes, he goes on to note that among so-called Semitic peoples,
“the Arabs and the Turks” stand out as “sexually perverse nations.”
11
Here
the normal is abnormal. The question of positions comes up explicitly in
this regard: “Among the Aryan races the Aryans of India must be consid-
ered pre-eminent as refined practitioners of psychopathia sexualis, which
they have reduced to a system. In addition to recognizing forty-eight figu-
rae Veneris (different postures in sexual intercourse), they practise every
possible variety of sexual perversion; and they have in various textbooks
a systematic introduction to sexual immorality.”
12
Alongside hygiene
and Spencerian social evolutionism, we recognize in Bloch’s description
the biologization of race and the concomitant concern about degenera-
tion. There is also a healthy strain of Orientalism in a sense close to that
made current by Edward Said, for whom the “Orient” was constructed by
A THOUSAND MODES OF VENERY
34

nineteenth-century scholars as a static, ahistorical contrast to a progressing
West.
13
For Bloch, certain “others” are, in a way, hypercivilized to the point
where complexity leads to degeneration (Turk, Arab, and Indian, to name
the most important cases). What interests me here primarily, however, is
that Bloch attributes to such degenerate nations exactly the same knowl-
edge that forms the basis of his own discipline: a psychopathia sexualis. And
while to practice this is apparently immorality, there is no small irony in the
fact that without such perversion and variety the scientist would have very
little to do. The price of universal normalcy would be the end of sexology.
Alongside the multiplicity among “other” nations, another problem with
Bloch’s depiction is that some of the terms of his Orientalist discourse could
just as easily apply to certain epochs of Western history, and not particularly
distant ones at that. Given the knowledge he had of Sade and other libertine
writers, Bloch must have been adept at compartmentalizing his data. An
example from revolutionary France entitled Les Quarante manières de foutre
(1790) makes the conundrum clear.
14
The little pamphlet describes how to
get into various sexual positions and includes accompanying illustrations.
Our paucity of terms does not afflict this work: we find alongside la bonne
mode, or “proper manner,” and en levrier, or “greyhound style,” a variety of
other postures. These include “the cavalcade,” “the windmill,” “the world
upside-down,” “the mare of Father Pierre,” “the extremity,” “the swim-
ming frog,” “the pouter,” “the reconciliation,” “the bawdy clyster,” “the
nursemaid,” and many more (figures 1.1 and 1.2). There is already a bit of
Orientalism here too, although perhaps exoticism is the more appropriate
term. For example, one position is named la sultane and another la chinoise.
But these are folded into the enumeration of the many others. The Quar-
ante manières de foutre is a rather late entry in the Western tradition of the
“postures”: descriptive catalogues, often inserted into fictional narratives,
of the variety of ways in which human male and female may join in coition.
The very existence of this tradition shows the precariousness of Bloch’s
ideological position. It also undoes the assumptions of more recent—and
more readily praised—work on the history of sexuality, notably compli-
cating Foucault’s assertion that the modern West alone has broken with
the tradition of the ars erotica and produced in its stead a scientia sexualis.
Although he traced its roots to ancient Roman attitudes and Christian pas-
toral care (especially the development of the sacrament of confession), Fou-
cault located the emergence of the “discourse of sexuality” largely in the
A THOUSAND MODES OF VENERY
35

eighteenth century. He specifically mentions Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets as
an almost literal allegory of this emergence: the date when sexuality became
a secret that would henceforth endlessly be incited to speak its truth.
15
But
it seems that at the very moment Foucault chose to locate the emergence
of the discourse of sexuality as such, libertine writers were busy not only
extending the Western erotic tradition but also inserting it into and thereby
constituting a specifically libertine scientia.
16
In the following pages I will examine the tradition of the “postures” as
it appears in licentious literature from ancient Rome to the Renaissance
and through the eighteenth century, considering how an already compli-
cated erotics—complicated because thoroughly enmeshed with satire and
rhetoric—became increasingly systematized. The “postures,” moreover,
help me open a question that is crucial to my overarching project: Does it
make sense to speak of pleasure as a social system? In Leviathan Hobbes
provides a complex model of the human psyche and catalogs a variety of
passions and subpassions: “griefe,” “hope,” “despaire,” “courage,” anger,”
“confidence,” “ambition,” “pusillanimity,” “magnanimity,” “valor,” “lib-
erality,” “miserableness,” and “kindeness,” to name only a few.
17
When
it comes to constructing his social system, however, it is the three causes
of “quarrel” embedded in human nature that determine the need for and
nature of the compact with a sovereign: “competition,” “diffidence,” and
“glory” all lead to the war of every man against the other unless there is
a “common power to keep them in awe.”
18
This simplification has enor-
mous explanatory power: it helps us grasp the origins and nature of soci-
ety as well as suggesting how a community might best be ordered. In the
eighteenth century, libertinage made use of a similar simplification to con-
struct a sort of idealized hypothetical model of society, but it took what was
often specified as physical—as opposed to moral—love and what Hobbes
himself calls “Natural Lust” or “Love of Persons for Pleasing the sense
only” as the driving force of social relations rather than fear and copula-
tion rather than contract as its elemental bond.
19
To take up the terms of
the Histoire de Dom Bougre (1741): “pleasure is the primum mobile of every
human action” (“le plaisir est le premier mobile des toutes les actions des
hommes”).
20
One advantage this decision concerning the ultimate source
of our actions had over Hobbes’s conception was that it dispensed with the
need for a political sovereign to overawe by force and fear. Reduced to
coitus, the sexual compact could be conceived as conspicuously natural—a
A THOUSAND MODES OF VENERY
36

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Writing Letters.
I.
A few years ago, noticing that members of the Order were remiss in not a few important
qualifications of good letter-writers, we gave them some helpful hints on the subject. The
effect, owing to either the excellence of the hints or the aptness of the members, or
both, was immediately apparent, and so marked was the improvement that we could,
almost at a glance, pick out from our correspondence the letters written by old and those
written by new members of the Order.
But a new assemblage has now come about the Table whose letters are not as correct as
they should be. Especially is this true of the Knights, who, with a few exceptions, do not
conduct their correspondence in as ideal a manner as do the Ladies.
First, good handwriting. Do not think it out of fashion. All cannot afford a typewriter.
Besides, writing-machines are not essential to good correspondence. What is vastly more
essential is a plain hand. There is no excuse for bad writing. All can write well. The only
reason some write ill is because they themselves think their poor writing good enough.
Are you in such company? Some say to us, "Excuse blots." There is no excuse for them.
Others say, "Pardon my mistakes." You should not make mistakes that a pardon will
cover. All pardon errors that the writer did not know he made; you ask pardon for errors
you know to exist but are too shiftless to correct.
You not infrequently write your name on the very bottom of the paper. How can we tell
what it is? And you wonder why you receive no reply. One member, in four successive
letters, signed his name thus: "John B. Smith," "John Bertram Smith," "John Smith," and
"Bertram Smith." How do you expect your correspondents to keep track of you under
such a kaleidoscope as that? Always use one signature, and only one. Again, a letter
comes from "J. B. Smith." The handwriting is characterless, and may belong to boy, girl,
man, or woman. Your correspondent begins his reply, "Dear ——" What? Are you "Mr.,"
"Miss," or "Madam"? Spell out a first name—a given name, because given you at baptism.
A Touching Morsel of Armenia.
Three years ago the Table received a letter from a young friend resident in Brousse,
Turkey in Asia, a city on the opposite side of the Marmora Sea from Constantinople. It
was written in a funny jumble of English, German, and perhaps a few French and Turkish
words thrown in, and enclosed a small handful of Turkish stamps. We replied to it,
sending some Columbian stamps, and asking the writer to tell us about his home, his
school, the fruits, etc. That our letter was understood we are not sure, but after three
years we received a second letter, the contents of which, in so far as we are able to read
them, follow. In accordance with the writer's injunction we omit his name, although he

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The Autonomy Of Pleasure Libertines License And Sexual Revolution James Steintrager

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