Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment

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VOLUPTUOUS PHILOSOPHY

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VOLUPTUOUS PHILOSOPHY Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment

Natania Meeker

Fordham University Press New York 2006

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Copyright 䉷 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meeker, Natania. Voluptuous philosophy : literary materialism in the French Enlightenment / Natania Meeker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2696-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2696-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Representation (Philosophy) 2. Materialism. 3. Literature— History and criticism. 4. Literature—Philosophy. 5. Enlightenment— France. I. Title. B105.R4M44 2006 146⬘.3094409033—dc22 2006035285 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

Voluptuous Figures: Lucretian Materialism in Eighteenth-Century France Reading for Pleasure in the French Enlightenment: The Self-Possessed Reader and the Decline of Voluptas ‘‘Flowers Strewn on the Way to Volupte´’’: La Mettrie and the Tropic Body of the Epicurean Philosopher ‘‘I Resist It No Longer’’: The´re`se philosophe and the Compulsions of Enlightened Literary Materialism Dynamism and Disinterest: The Materialist Reader and Diderot’s Dream ‘‘A Fallacious and Always Perilous Metaphysic’’: The Sadean Critique of Sentiment and the Neo-Lucretian Novel

17 59 88 126 155 189

Conclusions

222

Notes

225

Works Cited

293

Index

305

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Acknowledgments

This book finds its origins in an attempt to think through the role played by literature and literary forms of writing in the development of enlightened materialist philosophy. In arguing for the centrality of the experience of poetically induced pleasure to the history of French materialism, I aim to revise and to historicize the notion that materialist thought invariably reaches for a reality that is beyond or outside of representation. Such an understanding of materialism’s import should be viewed, I argue, as the product of specific eighteenth-century arguments around the nature of substance and its relationship to language, rather than as the point of departure for all materialist philosophy. This project owes its very existence—as an idea and then as a book—to the sustained kindness of many people. I will remain particularly grateful to Luce Giard, for the education she has given me in philosophical and critical thinking; to Michel Narcy, for introducing me to Epicurus and to Lucretius; to Jean O’Barr, for inspiring and encouraging me; and to Philip Stewart, for his expert guidance throughout the long process of putting together the argument that appears here. I am equally beholden to the extraordinary support and sheer generosity that has been shown me by Peggy Kamuf, Karen Pinkus, and Hilary Schor during the time I spent working on this book at the University of Southern California; I could not have asked for better colleagues, or for better friends, and am profoundly grateful for their thoughtfulness—as well as for their critical rigor. I also owe many thanks to Je´roˆme Brillaud, Paul Cohen, Corrinne Harol, Anto´nia Szabari, and Helen Thompson, for the care, attention, and intelligence with which they have engaged with various moments in the manuscript. Conversations with Amy Billone and Eleanor Kaufman have been similarly invaluable. I am grateful, too, to Christian Jacob for his having given me the opportunity to present a part of this project in his seminar ‘‘Mise en sce`ne et mise en texte des cheminements de pense´e’’ at the E´cole vii

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viii Acknowledgments

normale supe´rieure in Paris. Marion Hobson was unfailingly generous with her time and with her advice. I could not have completed this book without the intervention of Rebecca Lemon at instances too numerous to recount; her gracious and perceptive readings of my work not only improved the end result, but provided a crucial model, for me, of scholarly professionalism. I would also like to thank Helen Tartar, for her editorial guidance and support at many crucial moments, as well as the anonymous readers of the manuscript, whose comments and suggestions have contributed immeasurably to the book as whole. The graduate students in my seminar ‘‘Voluptuous Aesthetics’’ helped me to hone and refine my argument by challenging my assumptions and allowing me to reread familiar texts in unfamiliar ways, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to Laurence Clerfeuille, for her work on the bibliography. Various parts of the manuscript have profited immensely from the critical and editorial acumen of David Tomkins. The staff of the Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections at the University of Southern California, of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and of the Bibliothe`que nationale de France played an instrumental role in the production of the book, and I feel fortunate to have benefited from their help. I am lucky, too, to have had the support of grants from the Clark Library, the Camargo Foundation, and, at USC, the Zumberge Faculty Research and Innovation Fund, without which the book could not have been completed. Earlier versions of material from this book appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies (parts of chapter four) and in Lire Sade (L’Harmattan, 2004), edited by Norbert Sclippa (parts of chapter six). Finally, I would like to thank Elspeth Kuang, as well as Anne and Janine Chevrier, for enabling me to think about my work—and indeed, about matter and embodiment—in new and productive ways. The mere expression of gratitude to Michael Meeker, Gesine Meeker, and Elena Meeker seems insufficient, given the ways in which they have each been fundamental in forming—and periodically reigniting—my desire to write, to think, and to do academic work. Justin Pearlman reminds me daily of what matters, and why.

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Abbreviations

AL

Melchior de Polignac. L’Anti-Lucre`ce, poe`me sur la religion naturelle. 2 vols. Translated by Jean-Pierre de Bougainville. Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, Antoine Boudet, et Pierre Gilles Lemercier, 1749.

DRN

Titus Carus Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. 3 vols. Trans. and ed. Cyril Bailey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.

E´R

Denis Diderot. E´loge de Richardson. In Oeuvres, edited by Andre´ Billy. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1951.

HJ

Donatien Alphonse Franc¸ois de Sade. Histoire de Juliette. Edited by Michel Delon. In Oeuvres, vol. 3, edited by Michel Delon and Jean Deprun. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1998.

HM

Julien Offray de la Mettrie. L’Homme-machine. In Oeuvres philosophiques, vol 1, edited by Francine Markovits. Paris: Librairie Arthe`me Fayard, 1987.

RA

Denis Diderot. Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot, Le Reˆve de d’Alembert, and Suite de l’entretien. In Oeuvres, edited by Andre´ Billy. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1951.

TP

Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens. The´re`se philosophe, ou me´moires pour servir a` l’histoire du P. Dirrag, et de Mlle. E´radice. In Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe sie`cle, edited by Patrick Wald Lasowski. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 2000.

VOL

Julien Offray de la Mettrie. La Volupte´. In Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. 2, edited by Francine Markovits. Paris: Librairie Arthe`me Fayard, 1987.

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Introduction

Formal innovation (of the sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experimentation. To respond to the demand of the literary work as the demand of the other is to attend to it as a unique event whose happening is a call, a challenge, an obligation: understand how little you understand me, translate my untranslatability, learn me by heart and thus learn the otherness that inhabits the heart. —Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature The benefits of other pursuits come to those who have reached the end of a difficult course, but in the study of philosophy pleasure keeps pace with growing knowledge; for pleasure does not follow learning; rather, learning and pleasure advance side by side. —Epicurus, The Vatican Sayings

Immanuel Kant’s famous essay ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’ (1784) ends with an oblique reference to the enduringly scandalous materialism of Julien Offray de la Mettrie, author of the treatise Machine Man (1747). Kant writes: ‘‘When nature has . . . developed the seed for which she cares most tenderly—namely, the inclination and vocation for free thinking—this works back upon the character of the people (who thereby become more and more capable of acting freely) and finally even on the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.’’1 ‘‘Man,’’ in Kant’s formulation, accedes to enlightened freedom—of thought, act, and polity—in the process of casting off the trammels of a radically determinist mechanism (for which La Mettrie’s automaton serves as the porte-parole). Yet a material residue lingers on as part of the autonomous Kantian subject, if only in the obligation to disavow, in the name of dignity, a persistent entanglement with the figure of the man who is also a machine. Kantian enlightenment—that philosophical revolution against which the work of the 1

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French philosophes has sometimes been seen as little more than an interlude or a preparation2 —carries within it the memory of materialism as a troubling philosophical inheritance. This legacy is nonetheless a constituent part of the movement into maturity that Kant imagines. In other words, for man to leave behind his status as machine, he first had to become one. This book returns to the scene of French Enlightenment materialism as a crucial staging ground for the modern construction of human beings as objects of knowledge. In the broadest sense, it contributes to an articulation of the ways in which eighteenth-century authors participate in what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘‘the elementary exertions of the modern age: the mathematizing and the materializing of nature.’’3 Whether the material subjects of the French Enlightenment are ultimately renounced or embraced by those who follow in their wake, this period’s intense preoccupation with the objectification and rationalization of matter—in forms ranging from human anatomies to atomic particles—remains fundamental to an understanding of the positioning of the age within the various critical genealogies that have taken the Enlightenment (and the French Enlightenment in particular) as a point of origin for modernity.4 The eighteenth-century fascination with the perceptible substance of experience—as available to experiment, narratable in literary texts, malleable through education, manipulable through time, and regularizable in space—reaches across what later become profound disciplinary and methodological differences to inform the molding of the secular body into a particularly rich source of meaning for post-Enlightenment European cultures.5 Debates over the epistemological status and knowability of ‘‘brute’’ matter not only shape the emergence of discourses of disciplinary specialization, but regulate the way in which connections among domains of knowledge—from literary criticism to scientific research—continue to be understood today. The study of matter as an object in itself has remained basic to the practice of scientific inquiry, but has also deeply marked the evolution of the novel as a genre that, according to the marquis de Sade, derives from ‘‘that burning need to portray everything’’ and to penetrate ‘‘into the bosom of Nature.’’6 This book has thus developed out of a desire to consider eighteenthcentury French materialism seriously in its central position as a site of ongoing and high-stakes struggles over the role of material bodies in shaping the nature of apprehension, defining the limits of the human, and structuring a project of enlightenment that links knowledge to forms of emancipation. French Enlightenment materialists are not just invested in attempts to develop a nontheological science of substance, they also promulgate strategies

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of approaching texts that enable this substance to be accurately perceived by readers as elemental to their experience of and in the world. To take one example of this phenomenon, the baron d’Holbach’s categorical assertion that ‘‘The universe, this vast assemblage of everything that exists, everywhere offers us nothing but matter and movement’’ may be read as inaugurating both a program of philosophic inquiry and a theory of the person.7 The former is conceived in the aim of ‘‘bringing man back to Nature, rendering reason dear to him, making him adore virtue, and dissipating the shadows that hide the only path that may properly lead him to the felicity he desires.’’8 In turn, the viability of this objective depends upon the assumption that the human subject is comprehensively describable as ‘‘susceptible to two kinds of movement; some are substantial movements whereby the entire body or some of its parts are visibly transferred from one place to another; others are internal or hidden movements, of which some we can feel while others are accomplished without our knowledge and can only be guessed at from the effects they produce on the outside.’’9 In a characteristic move, d’Holbach, whose intellectual career evolved out of his contributions to such fields as mineralogy and geology, slides from a programmatic insistence on the manifestly physical composition of the universe—‘‘Man should have recourse to physics and experience in his quest for knowledge’’10 —to a diagnosis of the human body as a signifying system, partially legible to itself through an analysis of the effects of sensation on its surfaces and in its interior. As d’Holbach shows in his Syste`me, eighteenth-century materialisms are profoundly involved not just in identifying ‘‘matter’’ in general as a privileged object of study, but in developing rhetorical strategies for allowing readers to comprehend and perceive themselves as material bodies. Even d’Holbachian materialism, then, often neglected by critics due to what appears (in a post-Enlightenment context) to be the aridity of its determinism, conjugates its thoroughgoing materialization of the real with a hermeneutic method for reading the variable and sometimes invisible symptoms of this materialization on and in human bodies. For d’Holbach, as for many of his co-enlighteners, matter in motion represents itself in persons through a series of effects that are at once substantial and symptomatic of invisible, internal reactions to events and objects. These effects are empirically verifiable, yet always subject to interpretation. Even in the framework of d’Holbach’s harsh critique of the oppressive political systems and the harmful ‘‘fictive relations’’ that may be brought about by human ignorance of the absolute primacy of matter in ordering the world, substance shows a surprising vul-

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nerability to forms of representation and to figures of speech.11 For d’Holbach, as for other philosophers of the period, the material subjects of the Enlightenment consistently situate themselves at the dynamic intersection of sensation and trope. The aim of Voluptuous Philosophy is to elucidate the way in which the emergence of these subjects depends upon the gradual, deliberate, and rhetorically inflected repositioning by materialist writers of the relationship of language to substance, so that enlightened readers may eventually come to apprehend themselves as wholly corporeal bodies whose sensations preexist their own representation as such. Many scholars have pointed out the links binding natural science to literary forms—including genres such as fiction and poetry—throughout the French Enlightenment.12 Literary works have come to be seen as indisputably contributing to and influencing the progressive formulation, as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment project, of a secularized notion of matter—what is referred to in the Encyclopedia as ‘‘a substance that is extended, solid, divisible, mobile and pliant [passible], the first principle of all natural things, and which in its different arrangements and combinations, forms all bodies.’’13 Yet these texts are not generally understood as fundamentally shaping the outcome of this project. The practice of materialist analysis—insofar as it privileges, in d’Holbach’s terms, ‘‘experience’’ over ‘‘imagination’’—appears destined to occupy an epistemological arena from whence literary writing may be regarded as a delightful, but hardly determinant, supplement to the more serious labor of philosophy.14 ‘‘Literal’’ forms of knowledge, not literary ones, continue to structure the task of enlightenment as it is understood today. In this context, the Encyclopedia, which aims to develop ‘‘the true principles of things’’ and to ‘‘mark out the relationships among them,’’ has long remained a privileged point of reference for catachrestic invocations of ‘‘Enlightenment thought’’ generally.15 If fictional description and philosophic analysis, during the eighteenth century, can be said to share many of the same methods—to participate in a joint elaboration of the materially determined parameters of human perception, for instance—it is more often natural philosophy (with its intrinsic connections, during this period, to science and medicine) that comes to exemplify the methods and ambitions of the political, cultural, and intellectual endeavor that Kant calls ‘‘Aufkla¨rung.’’ In Voluptuous Philosophy, I call for a relocation of the problem of literary or figural representation at the heart of eighteenth-century debates around matter.16 French materialisms of the Enlightenment are critically and diversely invested not only in the development of a highly sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter itself, but in the production of

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specific relationships between readers and the ‘‘matter’’ of the texts they consume. Put bluntly, this means that even the most overtly scientific forms of materialism are caught up in strategies of representing matter that highlight either its difference from, or its involvement in, the tropes that serve to describe it. The ascension of an enlightened materialism, in the second half of the eighteenth century, may indeed coincide on the one hand with attempts to reorient the perceptions of readers toward what Horkheimer and Adorno famously call the ‘‘instrumentalization of nature’’ seemingly so typical of this period. But on the other hand, the development of a secular science of matter, nature, and the human body also crucially corresponds, I argue here, with efforts on the part of some materialists to sever the engagement of readers in the figural or poetic aspects of a text from their sense of their sensations as materially given in the world—constituted in substance and outside of discourse. Figure may henceforth be grafted onto matter—as, for instance, a pleasure-inducing accoutrement—but it may not fundamentally intervene in readers’ perceptions of the material world. Legitimately ‘‘enlightened’’ readers are thus authorized to find perceptible evidence in texts of their innate predilections or natural modes of feeling, but they do not emerge materially transformed—namely, meaningfully altered in the very substances of which they consist—from their encounters with these texts as figural objects. While such a position may today seem self-evident—of course books do not define the ‘‘substance’’ of sensations, since readers come to the act of reading with their bodily mechanisms of perception already in place—I contend here that the obviousness of this position is at least in part a result of the success of certain eighteenth-century arguments in favor of it. Enlightenment writers must make explicit the distinctness and immediacy of bodily sensation, taken as originally separate from its representation in figure, precisely because such immediacy is not just a matter of ‘‘common sense’’ (or, as the marquis d’Argens puts it in his materialist philosophical compendium, La Philosophie du bon sens, of ‘‘good sense’’). The innate ‘‘feeling’’ of bodily experience as fundamentally prediscursive is itself the consequence of new discursive strategies that enable readers to perceive their own bodies in specifically pretextual ways. This project thus testifies to a gradual dissociation of matter—considered as the substance of which bodies in general consist—from literary or poetic representations—considered as acts of creative invention or poesis.17 This process takes place incrementally over the course of the eighteenth century, and continues well beyond it.18 But the account that I present here is not one of increasing opposition between a modern, scientific worldview that

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organizes itself around grammars of relative transparency—languages that aim for accuracy rather than effect—and a pre-Enlightenment fascination with the intrinsic poetry of things. Instead, I see the struggle to enact a separation between perceptible substance and poetic form as internal to the discourses of eighteenth-century materialism, when these discourses are broadly construed as encompassing literature as well as philosophy, poetry as well as science. The rift that I propose to examine in the chapters that follow—between a materialism that is intrinsically figural and a materialism that seeks to distance itself from figure in its unpredictable effects on readers—is significant not only within philosophical and scientific writings on the nature of matter. This disjunction between materialisms also plays a central role in long-running and vociferous discussions, throughout the Enlightenment, of the corporeal consequences (‘‘dangerous’’ or not) of literary forms of textual consumption. More crucially, this rupture is not just visible in fictional works—often explicitly involved during this period in the diffusion of enlightened ‘‘theory’’—but makes literature a contested space for materializing diverse relationships to language in the bodies of putative readers. Indeed, the gradual emergence of the literary field as a distinct arena of writerly production coincides with the rise of the idea of an enlightened reader who remains more or less fundamentally abstracted from the bodily responses that this kind of writing may induce. The very definition of ‘‘the literary’’ as an autonomous domain may ironically be dependent upon the simultaneous concretization of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects. This study’s focus on a moment of profound diremption at the heart of eighteenth-century French representations of matter derives from my attempts to excavate a theory of material substance that has hitherto had a vexed status within the myriad narratives seeking to account for the new sciences of enlightenment: neo-Epicurean or Lucretian materialism. While references to Lucretius abound in the literature and philosophy of this period, few eighteenth-century writers engage overtly and systematically with the Epicurean heritage transmitted to them across the multifaceted recuperation of ancient materialisms that takes place in France during the seventeenth century.19 Lucretius’s great poem, De rerum natura, thus stands at both the center and the margins of the preoccupations of an age often (self-)defined by its philosophical inclinations. For Lucretius (as well as for some of his eighteenth-century devotees), materialism has its origins in an explicitly poetic rendering of the visible and invisible world. The entry into materialist science, in this framework, is inseparable from the perception of matter

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in its figural dimensions. Moreover, in De rerum natura, it is readers’ investment in the pleasure that poetic form makes available to them that initiates a voluptuous conversion to materialism. Matter, in the terms established by Lucretius, is constituted through its inherent resemblance to poetry, in that the elements of both substance and poetic discourse are fundamentally and appealingly figural in composition and structure.20 In the context of this homology, the pleasure that figural language ‘‘naturally’’ engenders can be made to induce a materialization of the poetic trope in the voluptuous bodily responses of readers to the text that they are moved to enjoy. In his exposition of Epicurean doctrine, Lucretius is thus not only exquisitely sensitive to the pleasures—and potential displeasure—his readers may experience as a mechanism determining the conversion to materialism, but he understands figure as such to inspire a form of delight (voluptas) that is in itself both poetic and philosophic. Voluptuousness, then, provides an index of the truth-value of Epicurean doctrine and a practical embodiment of this truth in the recognition of the freedoms procurable in matter. In other words, Lucretian materialism comes into being with the acknowledgment of the material power of poetry to effect, through pleasure, a transformation in the substance of things in themselves, beginning with the perceptions of the reader of the poetic text. Voluptuous pleasure functions as a form of cognition—and a cognizance of form—that disperses itself outward from the reader through the atomic matter in motion of which the universe is imagined to consist. For Lucretius, the transmission of Epicurean doctrine depends both upon the preservation of the Epicurean canon and upon the reliability of figure as a substantially suasive force that reiteratively and viscerally engages the reader with the materialist principles grounding true knowledge. Lucretian materialism thus requires poetry for philosophy to make itself felt as a lived transformation of the self. Lucretius reiteratively links the emergence of a materialist subject to the production of the voluptuous delight experienced in the act of reading. If the fact of having perused De rerum natura is often described (by its classical critics and admirers alike) as definitively conversive for the reader, it is in part because Lucretius himself presents the poem in this way. This capacity to seduce its readers is a key element of the work’s persistent scandal—sometimes viewed as putting Epicureanism in direct competition with the power of the divine word to enact similar transformations—as well as of its fascination for eighteenth-century publics. The contested and often ambiguous status of De rerum natura during the Enlightenment both derives from and produces a struggle among the

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period’s philosophic materialists to determine the proper relationship—in a world composed of material bodies—between figures of substance and figures of speech. Enlightenment neo-Lucretians, including Julien Offray de la Mettrie and the marquis de Sade, respond to the poem’s emphasis on the physiological effects of readers’ engagement with figure by developing nostalgically voluptuous materialisms that deploy the tropic force of a libertine literary tradition—informed by the Lucretian critique of sentiment—alongside their theorizations of pleasure as a freedom from constraint. Both La Mettrie and Sade insist that the experience of enjoyment invoked by explicitly literary language can and should end in the eroticized dispersal of each reader’s perceptions across the ever-multiplying tropes that organize, for them, the Epicurean apprehension of substance. In lingering over the figural dimensions of matter, however, and in suggesting that the most formal of pleasures may hold the key to material transformations in human perception, these two philosopher-critics go against the grain of a more authoritatively ‘‘enlightened’’ perspective. According to the latter view, the philosophic reader, in order to exercise good judgment, must disavow the profound interconnectedness of the material and figural worlds so that the voluptuous pleasures engendered by the literary text can begin to serve as the object, rather than as the source, of intellection. La Mettrie and Sade accordingly remain, for all their debts to the larger scientific and philosophic communities to which they refer in their works, unassimilated in crucial ways to the narrative of enlightenment as a process of critical self-elaboration and (potential) emancipation—the movement that Michel Foucault has called the ‘‘permanent reactivation of an attitude’’ and that Kant refers to as an ‘‘exit’’ of sorts.21 Even if Lucretian Epicureanism continues to play, throughout the eighteenth century, a significant part in the development of theories of substance—as well as in the ongoing production of secularist notions of the human—it is slowly cleansed of its insistence on the dynamic engagement of specifically literary pleasures in the organization of human perception. The libertine Epicureanism of unruly passions and seemingly unreflective hedonism—for which the domain of literature serves as a privileged discursive space in the elaboration of materialist philosophies—gives way, by the end of the century, to the celebration of an Epicurus whose voluptas is the faithful handmaiden of a more sober reason. Even as the French Enlightenment is increasingly structured by efforts to portray matter as an organizing principle of all bodies, the successful representation of rational thought as enabling an objective or neutral knowl-

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edge—one not irredeemably tangled in its fictions—becomes reliant upon the gradual undoing of the literary field as a space of materialist inquiry and material transformation.22 But, for a judiciously nonfigural materialism to take precedence over the intrinsically poetic pleasures extolled by the neoLucretians, a persuasive alternative to the scandalously voluptuous method that determines the relationship of the Lucretian philosopher to the corpus of his sensations must be given legitimacy in the eyes of putative readers. The progressive development of a modern scientific materialism thereby becomes contingent upon the outcome of a struggle over reading strategies. Prospective readers must receive serious instruction in the proper means of comprehending the relationship between their persons and the matter of the texts that they consume. As Louis Bollioud-Mermet puts it in his 1765 essay on reading, ‘‘The occupation of reading, although freer and less difficult than that of the writer, is not without demanding a certain labor; and a work done with order and with art will never produce the effect that the Author seeks, if the reading of it is not methodical, reflective, and well-digested.’’23 For this kind of measured appreciation to be made possible, the bond linking embodied substance to its literary representations must be loosened. If the former is no longer to be susceptible to regular modification through the unpredictable interventions of figure, the naturally occurring configurations of matter in the world must take on an ontological stability that will eventually stand in contrast to the variability of representation. What Karl M. Figlio (writing on eighteenth-century theories of perception) refers to as the ‘‘unity of consciousness’’ should discover and reproduce itself in the act of reading, rather than making of this activity the site of a transmutation that affects this consciousness across aesthetic and material registers.24 Enlightened critics of neo-Lucretian voluptas therefore tend to emphasize the self-possession of the philosophic reader as crucial to the exercise of reasoned judgment, rather than seeking the progressive dispersal of this reading subject across a tropically constituted material world.25 Forms of figural representation—including the literary text itself—become for these enlighteners redundant supplements to the task of analytically shoring up a self that is always more than the sum of its senses, even as it is formed by them. In the context of an enlightened materialism that attempts to distinguish the epistemological project of knowing matter from the poetic experience of feeling the effects of figure, the voluptuous ethic of the neo-Lucretians constitutes not only a dangerous mixing of truth with fiction but a perverse resistance to endorsing a properly philosophical strategy for assuming the labor of critique. Such a refusal is made to read, as the century progresses,

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as a deviant and potentially obscene dependence on the dissolute seductiveness of the trope—a mode of ‘‘debauchery’’ that Sade, for instance, recognizes and celebrates in his reappropriation of Lucretius for the purposes of the novel. Neo-Lucretians like La Mettrie and Sade are described by their critics as reuniting the most bankrupt aspects of theological argument—its absolute resistance to reason—with an obsessive interest in the most perverse dimensions of bodily experience. Their infatuation with a formal style that never stops appealing directly to the person of the reader recalls, from one kind of enlightened secularist perspective, both the emergent genre of pornographic literature and the kinds of premodern ‘‘superstitious’’ belief that d’Holbach derides as ‘‘imaginary systems.’’26 La Mettrie and Sade thus seem, to many of their contemporaries, to conjugate in their writings the obscenity of a dogmatic theology with the textual apotheosis of a heedlessly voluptuous body that stands as both the origin and demise of thought. As the nature of pleasure becomes more and more often the explicit object of philosophic analysis, the figural pleasures of Lucretian philosophy appear increasingly like the failure, rather than the products, of intellection. If matter, for the Lockean Condillac, can be characterized as ‘‘a multitude,’’ where the ‘‘subject of thought should be one,’’ neo-Lucretians seem to desire the fragmentation of the unified consciousness into the tropic substance of its parts.27 Their participation in an enlightened project of emancipation is accordingly a deeply problematic one. They substitute for an analytical autonomy of willed action a figurally induced autonomy of feeling, derived from a disappearance of the subject into pleasures made possible through the dynamic abstraction of sensation into form, and form into sensation. Does this mean that Lucretian materialists are in fact aiming for a reduction of matter to pure poetry—a celebration of style over substance? Posing the question in these terms entails accepting as given the rupture between body and language that is, during this period, a matter of intense debate. The neoLucretians, like Lucretius himself, are in fact seeking to alter the ways in which their readers perceive even the most material aspects of existence; these writers imbue sensations and anatomies with figure in order to show that even the most substantial of bodies is vulnerable to self-transformation when it becomes a poetic object. Stable, prediscursive embodied ‘‘identities’’ as we moderns may understand them do not exist in this framework, which presents bodies of every kind as fluid, diffuse, and—in a very real sense—exquisitely vulnerable to words. Yet the eighteenth-century neoLucretians lose their battle to recuperate this ancient approach to figure as a crucial means for apprehending the material world. Literary language ac-

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cordingly has often tended, post-Enlightenment, to appear as extraneous to the problem of matter and ‘‘the body,’’ particularly where the latter’s pleasures are concerned. In fact, the framing of materialism in general as a reality beyond writing is a key consequence of the eighteenth-century struggle against a classical materialism that does not find its own origins in the split between representation and things-in-themselves. The gradual subordination of literary modes of truth-telling to scientific ones in a variety of contexts, including academic ones, represents another such effect. The narrative presented here of an ongoing conflict over the proper place of substance in the act of reading explicitly contests the notion of French Enlightenment literature and philosophy as straightforwardly engaged in a schematic project of objectification, rationalization, or ‘‘naturalization’’ of matter, whether this matter appears in the form of ‘‘soft’’ bodies or in that of ‘‘hard’’ elements. Instead, I suggest that any movement toward instrumentalization necessarily involves a complex series of renegotiations of the relationship of readers to the texts that present substance to them in manifold guises. In order for matter as such to be completely secured as an object of critical reflection, it has to be constantly purged of its contamination by the figures that make it comprehensible in the first place. This process of disinfection is made possible by means of renewed appeals to readers to replace a voluptuous entanglement in literary and poetic language with a reasoned appreciation of the texts that they peruse. As a result, the Lucretian enjoyment of figure in its immediate appeal to the senses does not disappear, but remains viable in the form of superstitious, unenlightened, or variously pornographic reading strategies. Moreover, while such modes of enjoyment, through which Lucretianism may remain present to post-Enlightenment readers, must in the end be disavowed for the process of enlightened critical emancipation to proceed, this disavowal is itself always subject to reiteration. It cannot simply go without saying, but needs to be reasserted by critics as enabling ‘‘good’’ judgment. In this context, within the modern cultivation of literature as a site for the deployment of both disengaged analytical expertise and ‘‘naturally’’ occurring sentiments of identification with persons, the feelings of visceral strangeness sometimes occasioned by the corporeal pull of tropic style may continue to be explicitly overlooked. Derek Attridge, in his book on The Singularity of Literature, describes literary works—and indeed Western art in general—as bringing together what he refers to as the three properties of ‘‘invention,’’ ‘‘singularity,’’ and ‘‘alterity.’’ In presenting literature as an event (rather than as an object), Attridge poses the question: ‘‘How does an entity or an idea unthinkable or unimag-

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inable within existing frameworks and feeling come into being as part of our understood and felt world?’’28 The literary evocation of alterity as Attridge describes it—the capacity of writing to invoke ‘‘a wholly new existent that cannot be apprehended by old modes of understanding’’29 —is also at work in Lucretian materialism. The neo-Lucretianism of the eighteenth century makes use of the power of literary figures to reveal to readers the profoundly creative force of matter. The conversion to materialism, then, is also a conversion to a mode of experience that takes difference—or ‘‘otherness’’—as the defining experience of what it means to be a material body. The Lucretian atomic entity takes on, in this context, the characteristics of the literary trope in order to allow readers to discover a voluptuous freedom of movement within an endlessly shifting landscape of embodied forms. It is undeniable, however, that other Enlightenment materialists can be just as interested as the neo-Lucretians in the power of rhetoric—and of literary fiction in particular—to form and shape the responses of readers. As Marc Andre´ Bernier has recently shown in his study Libertinage et figures du savoir, enlightened thinkers of all stripes are invested in the labor of putting materialist knowledge into (materialist) practice. In Bernier’s description of eighteenth-century sensualism and its accompanying materialisms, ‘‘their essential task consists of rethinking the relationship of the subject to its object, and, in order to remove any sort of transcendence, of establishing the idea that representation cannot be dissociated from the impression that the world makes on our senses. In general, the problem of sensation is posed in order to ground knowledge in experience.’’30 Throughout the French Enlightenment, the literary work represents a privileged means of affecting publics and of providing an experiential basis for materialist arguments, as Bernier claims. The disavowal of the Lucretian approach to this problem, however, allows the modern materialist perspective to emerge—within the novel itself—as an affirmation of the capacity of representation to confirm the plenitude of the natural world in and of itself. In this sense, enlightened materialists are attached not to the destabilizing force of the physical pleasure to be taken in figures, but to literature as a demonstration of the intrinsic resemblance of bodies—and persons—to themselves. Literature, in this framework, enables us to contemplate our own abiding embroilment in sensation as an extradiscursive force. It moves us to rediscover our materiality in our unwilled—often compulsory—responsiveness to words and images. In this context, the alterity of matter is one that seems internal to us, as

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readers, and thus cannot stand as an invitation to incorporate or apprehend a body fully external to our own. My account of the struggle dividing neo-Lucretians from their forwardlooking materialist compatriots is intended to engage with contemporary recuperations of the French Enlightenment as a privileged moment of crossfertilization between literature and philosophy—the scene of a meeting of genres ‘‘in a harmonious synthesis destined to become the ideal of the entire age, from Voltaire to the marquis de Sade,’’ as Pierre Hartmann has recently put it.31 I understand the productive collision of literary figure and philosophic reason, for which the period remains known, to lay the groundwork for a moment of extreme diremption, from which the tropic freedoms of the neo-Lucretians emerge transformed either as the emptiness of a libertine style without substance or as the mechanical excess of obscene delight. Machine-man comes to function primarily as a determinist caricature of robotic constraint just as the Sadean philosopher-libertines are buried under the weight of their own transgressions. In either case, the ways in which these figures gesture toward the possibility of a critique that is both embodied and formal, substantial and abstracted, remain only marginally perceptible, postEnlightenment. Yet, I do not mean, in making this claim, simply to shift the scene of the debate around the status of the material subject during the eighteenth century from philosophical to more literary forms of discourse. Literature, as the neo-Lucretians make clear, may write the terms of its surrender in insisting upon both the critical legitimacy of neutral appreciation and the inevitability of personal identification as strategies for approaching fictional texts. The instrumentalization of matter, to the extent that it can ever successfully take place, is also the objectification of figura. Neo-Lucretianism is the materialism that must be forgotten for the Kantian movement into maturity to begin.32 The first chapter of Voluptuous Philosophy explores the position of a Lucretian tradition of poetic philosophy in relationship to what has been seen as a typically eighteenth-century interest in the ‘‘materialization’’ or ‘‘physiologization’’ of the human subject. While scholars of the Enlightenment have portrayed natural philosophers from the 1760s on as increasingly receptive to a secular Lucretian materialism, I describe this renewed interest in De rerum natura as based in an effort to de-somatize the figure of the reader so that the student of Lucretius might consume the poem without unduly fearing any of its notoriously suasive effects. Far from revealing a turn toward the systematic materialization of experience, the dissemination of translations of De rerum natura is an index of the extent to which matter

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is in fact ceasing to matter in the consumption of philosophical texts by putatively neutral readers. A long history of intellectual engagement with Lucretius as the exponent of a specifically voluptuous philosophy, grounded in the involvement of the potential convert to Epicureanism with the pleasures of poetic form, becomes obscured in the context of an enlightened insistence on the Lucretian oeuvre as either scientifically instructive or formally delightful, either philosophically useful or gorgeously conceived. In this chapter, I begin by discussing the means by which a transformative ethic of voluptas may be derived from De rerum natura, and explore the persistence of this reading of Lucretius in the critiques of Epicurean materialism that predate his ‘‘reinvention’’ in the 1760s. I then investigate the treatment of Epicurean doctrine in three pre-Revolutionary translations that aim to present the poem to an audience of philosophically informed readers. The enlightened translators of Lucretius reveal themselves to be interested, I claim, in repudiating an earlier conceptualization of Lucretian substance as both textual effect and material body. The second chapter examines in more detail the changes in the notion of the reader that are occurring around the time that the new translations of Lucretius appear. Here I discuss the emergence of an idealized ‘‘self-possessed’’ reader, at home in the judicious display of a rational appreciation of texts, as in part a response to the dangerous admixture of figurative language, readerly delight, and potential physiological mutability that neo-Lucretianism is thought to promote. The pleasure of self-possession is regulated not by an ethic of voluptas—whereby matter can only be grasped in its motion across a field that is both textual and real—but by a desire to reaffirm the powers that may be exercised over substance by a self originally constituted outside of its particular representations in language. Because material substrates are conceived by this self-possessed reader as fundamentally unavailable to discursive modification, they are henceforth free to emerge as discrete, manipulable objects that may be studied, known, and ordered according to the will of the educated individual. Within the discourse of self-possession, pleasure ceases to be understood as the outcome of a process of reflection, and becomes instead a natural, universalizable response to stimuli—a symptom of the bodily organization of a specific individual, rather than a force that may alter or transform this organization. My argument here is initially built around the analysis of two treatises on reading that are published in the 1760s. Toward the end of the chapter, I turn to a discussion of the presentation of both voluptuous and ‘‘self-possessed’’ pleasure in the Encyclopedia, in order to examine the ways in which this presen-

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tation reaffirms a renunciation of voluptas in favor of the more legitimate delights of coherent judgment. The next four chapters of Voluptuous Philosophy focus on specific interventions in the ongoing eighteenth-century debate around the epistemological status and ethical aims of Enlightenment materialism. In chapters 3 and 4, I examine the writings of two materialist authors whose best-known works appear within months of each other: the radical mechanist La Mettrie and the philosopher and litte´rateur Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens. La Mettrie’s 1747 treatise Machine Man is often described as a philosophical adumbration of many of the principles that are figuratively incarnated in the 1748 obscene novel The´re`se philosophe (attributed to d’Argens). La Mettrie’s most famous creation—l’homme-machine—is regularly seen as anticipating a modern scientific determinism that prefigures the post-Enlightenment advent of the cyborg and the evacuation of the autonomous will into the anonymity of the biological organism. In a response to this reading, I show, in a chapter on La Mettrie’s profound commitment to the voluptuous figures of neoLucretianism, that he understands the literary sphere to ‘‘complete’’ materialist philosophy in making possible the experience of materialism as a form of transfigurative release from constraint. For La Mettrie, the mechanical body of ‘‘machine-man’’ functions as the exemplary tropic body, fully realizable as a mode of subjectivity only through an investment in literary practices and, not coincidentally, in explicitly literary pleasures. In chapter 4, I show how the figure of The´re`se in The´re`se philosophe is set up to counter the privileging of literature that La Mettrie, as a neo-Lucretian, suggests might provide a solution to the paradoxes embodied in the notion of a determinist materialism as a paradigmatic instance of free thought. In this novel, it is only through the rendering of literature as a site of ineluctable constraint that philosophy is able to come into being in the exercise of rational and objective judgment. Furthermore, the rift between Lamettrian and Dargensian materialisms—one figural, the other seeking to resist the effects of figure—recapitulates the larger incompatibility of a nostalgic Lucretian philosophy of poetic voluptas with an enlightened science for which matter becomes an object of dispassionate study. The last two chapters of the book move to slightly later moments in the development of eighteenth-century materialisms. In chapter 5, I address the perspective on a poetic Lucretianism developed by the philosophe who has remained perhaps the most famous, and famously literary, materialist of the century: Denis Diderot. Diderot, I argue, has a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to the pleasures of the text proffered by Lucretius to his readers.

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Diderot’s approach to matter as a ‘‘first principle’’ of things conceals a disparity between the inherent dynamism of his theories of substance and the more static position assigned by Diderot to the reader as a ‘‘practical’’ embodiment of this theory. For Diderot, neo-Lucretianism may be recuperated as a rehabilitation of sensory delight, but it is stripped of its transfigurative potential as a mode of lived experience accessed first through engagement with literary form. Chapter 6 explores the durably scandalous—but nonetheless eminently canonizable—writings of the marquis de Sade as a final, failed instantiation of neo-Lucretianism. I investigate in this chapter how Sade, in a mordant critique of a literary and political ethos of sentimentality, attempts to create a specifically Epicurean aesthetic that will reintegrate a neutralized science of substance with an imaginative cultivation of voluptuous enjoyment. Sade reiterates, in his revisionist theory of fiction, the Lucretian condemnation of romantic love as a harmful form of mystification, and in doing so displays the dependence of an enlightened social order on sentimental identification as an illegitimate (and politicized) mode of possession. In his attempt to present a Lucretian alternative to a sentimental ethic, however, he also reveals the way in which the triumph of philosophic reason is predicated upon the destruction—or rather, the disavowal—of the epistemological conditions that once made possible the Epicurean preoccupation with the philosophical freedoms vested in poetry. By situating the Lucretian project of transfiguration in the context of the novel, Sade ironically confirms the repositioning of neo-Lucretianism within the sphere of the aesthetic and its subsequent demise as a mode of voluptuously material engagement with the poetic fashioning of substance. In this sense, Voluptuous Philosophy tells the story of the inevitable failure of Lucretian poetic philosophy to speak in a meaningful way to modern experience. Yet, in examining this failure, we can begin to think beyond it—and, perhaps, toward the recentering of literature within a contemporary understanding of how matter makes itself both known and felt to us.

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Voluptuous Figures: Lucretian Materialism in Eighteenth-Century France

It is enough to point out that the subject of thought should be one. Now a mass of matter is not one; it is a multitude.1 —Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines

In the ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire’’ prefacing his 1768 translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke describes the poem as ‘‘the boldest work that any human being had ever dared compose.’’2 Panckoucke was not alone in this assessment, since an explicit commitment to the voluptuous atomism associated with Lucretius had so often been made to serve, in more orthodox circles, as a gauge of swinishness.3 For French Enlightenment intellectuals, the open embrace of Epicurean doctrine could easily devolve into serious accusations of atheism and libertinage. Nonetheless, the spectral presence of Lucretius haunts eighteenth-century science with remarkable persistence. Enlightened French philosophic materialism not only provides an important site for the reiteration of a Lucretian debunking of superstition, but gradually incorporates a nascent utilitarian calculus reminiscent of the Epicurean investment in the primacy of pleasure as supreme good. The reemergence of an explicit interest in Lucretius’s poem that takes place in the latter half of the eighteenth century in France seems unsurprising in this context—part of a generalized philosophical response to a new, and more openly secular, critical imperative. As Johan Werner Schmidt has put it in his work on Denis Diderot’s engagement with Lucretius, ‘‘It became necessary to study phenomena and facts, to ask ‘how’ and not ‘why’ . . . and to do so without reference to the existence of God, a need that a renewed and freshly interpreted Epicureanism answered to a large extent.’’4 Moreover, the scientific injunction described here by Schmidt appears to take on heightened urgency given the period’s increasing emphasis on the mechanics of pleasure as ever more fundamental to human experience. As Diderot sums it up in the Encyclopedia, ‘‘every man is voluptuous, more or 17

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less.’’5 Even if Lucretius’s poem remains throughout the Enlightenment a text first defined by the whiff of scandal associated with it, the eighteenthcentury return to Lucretius seems symptomatic of an ongoing commitment on the part of Enlightenment materialists to the articulation of pleasurable sensation in particular as a crucial mechanism for apprehending and organizing the ‘‘stuff ’’ of existence. From this perspective, the lingering scandalousness of Lucretian sensualism—in its critique of religious faith and endorsement of bodily delight for its own sake—becomes tangential to an understanding of De rerum natura as an exemplary Enlightenment text avant la lettre: antireligious, proto-empiricist, and susceptible to proselytic use.6 Does the earthly voluptas of Lucretius indeed come into its own in the pleasure-seeking eighteenth century,7 and should we see in this focus on the mechanisms of corporeal enjoyment a confirmation of the importance of materialism in general for an enlightened understanding of human subjectivity? From one perspective, the private interest of the materialist philosophers of the second half of the Enlightenment in a poem often decried as a locus classicus of antitheological eudaemonism appears quite characteristic of what has been portrayed as the radicalization of French materialism that takes place toward the end of the century. In the context of this radicalization—described unflatteringly by Ernst Cassirer as a ‘‘retrogression’’ into dogmatism8 —the enlightened philosophic investment in Lucretius’s De rerum natura comes to stand as an indicator not only of the increasing secularism of prominent Enlightenment intellectuals, but of a ‘‘hedonistic turn’’ linked in part to the gradual somaticization of the human subject occurring in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy.9 The Enlightenment provides a fertile ground for the cultivation of forms of scientific materialism with potentially radical and destabilizing effects on ancien re´gime religious orthodoxy—effects eventually played out, in perhaps the most celebrated instance, in the pornographic pleasure-seeking of Sade’s libertines. The Epicurean suspicion of theology, as well as Lucretius’s emphasis on corporeal pleasure as a summum bonum, fit neatly into this narrative of De rerum natura as a forerunner of modern scientific fascination with the explanatory narratives of physiology. This reading situates increased attention to Lucretius within a movement toward a mechanized and rationalized modernity whose revolutionary subject eventually becomes the cyborg, the postmodern ‘‘homme-machine.’’10 But it tends to underestimate the significance of Lucretian materialism as a doctrine crucially invested in science primarily as a series of embodied and poetic effects on a specific reader. Reading De rerum natura as a symptomatic expression of a general process of secularization thus

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downplays what prior to the Enlightenment was seen as the central transgression or scandal of the Lucretian perspective: namely, the latter’s focus on materialism as formally conversive, a means of transfiguration grounded in the discursive production of readerly pleasure.11 The history of intellectual engagement with Lucretian materialism as a voluptuous strategy of reading—a method of apprehension ordered by and through a poetic text—is obscured by the post-Enlightenment conceptualization of Lucretius as situated either on one side or the other of what comes to be seen as an inevitable rift between the scientific analysis of bodily enjoyment and the production of this enjoyment in literary form. In this chapter, I take up readers’ changing relationships to Lucretian voluptas or pleasure in order to propose a new understanding of the assimilation of Lucretius as a vexed but crucial part of the Enlightenment materialist canon. I argue here that late eighteenth-century translations of Lucretius do not in fact consistently reveal a systematic investment in the ‘‘materialization’’ or ‘‘physiologization’’ of human experience and knowledge that has come to be understood as broadly characteristic of Enlightenment discussions of subjectivity. Instead, I suggest that renewed interest in the project of translating De rerum natura corresponds to a significant change in the way the act of reading becomes envisioned, during this period, as itself fundamentally dematerialized—an index of the extent to which matter ceases to matter in the ‘‘proper’’ consumption of texts by thoughtful readers. Lucretius proposes, in De rerum natura, a theory of embodiment whereby tropic language and material substance are connected to one another in the act of reading in order to effect the voluptuous conversion of an exemplary reader to materialist doctrine. This characteristic emphasis on the substantial pleasures prepared by the Epicurean text long functioned as the defining scandal of the poem, but it is not until the eighteenth century that Lucretius was regularly presented to readers without fear of (or desire for) contagion by the very pleasures that the poem describes. As I will show, this transformation, far from indicating a widespread and ‘‘enlightened’’ acceptance of the poetic and material enjoyment induced by Lucretian doctrine, suggests instead changes in the philosophical status of reading for pleasure in its relationship to material embodiment. Late-Enlightenment translations of Lucretius are underwritten by a model of the enlightened reading subject according to which the poetic exposition of Lucretian doctrine is no longer made to function as a threateningly immediate intervention in the material experience of readers. The rise of materialism in the second half of the eighteenth century is sustained by the development of a modern technology of

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reading in which matter stops working as an active principle in the formation of enlightened subjects.12 By the end of the century, the concurrent production of several French translations of De rerum natura implies that Lucretius’s poem can indeed be read safely, not because the doctrine of hedonistic atomism has been absorbed into the cultural imaginary, but because new methods of reading enable the disinterested perusal and circulation of even the boldest of texts. The increased availability of Lucretius’s De rerum natura to a literate public goes along with a carefully monitored emphasis on the dematerialization of the poem’s possible effects on such an audience. In other words, the full emergence of eighteenth-century scientific materialism as an explanatory network relies in part on the contemporaneous emergence of a fully disembodied understanding of the relationship of the reading subject to texts (particularly poetic or figurative texts).13 Ultimately, while late-period French Enlightenment materialism would itself fall victim to a backlash of sorts after the Revolution, the understanding of reading that undergirds the development of this materialist tradition would display a remarkable tenacity as a bequest of the eighteenth century to an emergent modernity. The somatic pleasure that was once imagined to follow upon and govern the reading of Lucretius’s poem would become—and remain—the domain of pornographic, not philosophic, experience. In fact, the more materializable subjectivity became, the harder it would be to portray reading for pleasure as engaging a series of either freely philosophic or actively transfigurative effects on those who indulged in it. In order to elucidate more fully the significance of the act of reading for pleasure in eighteenth-century approaches to Lucretian materialism, I begin here with a discussion of the centrality of readerly voluptas to De rerum natura. I first describe the place of voluptuous experience in structuring the initial encounter with Epicurean doctrine in Lucretius’s poem. The second section of the chapter turns to one of the most impressive—albeit rarely studied—monuments to early eighteenth-century critical investment in the Lucretian project: Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius, of which Voltaire remarked, ‘‘I am still surprised that in the middle of worldly dissipations, and thorny political affairs, he managed to write such a long work in verse, in a foreign language, he who would have hardly produced four good lines in his own tongue.’’14 Polignac is of interest in this context because, as a philosopher and a theologian, he remains explicitly concerned with Epicurean materialism as necessarily bodying forth a series of material symptoms in readers. Polignac (like Lucretius, but unlike later eighteenth-century critics) refuses

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to see the aesthetic pleasure readers might take in the perusal of the Epicurean poem as in any sense subordinate to the philosophical or scientific aim of the text as a study of the nature of the constitutive elements of the material world. Instead, Polignac reminds his readers that the dangers of the Lucretian text are fully visible in the way it aims to function both as figurative discourse ought, by inducing pleasure in those who peruse it, and as an intervention in an exemplary reader’s material perception of the real—an attempt to inaugurate within this reader the experience of poetic pleasure as real proof of Epicurean epistemology. For Polignac as for Lucretius, the conjunction of knowledge and sensation that marks the very experience of reading De rerum natura allows the production of an active (rather than a passive) form of pleasure, where readers are meant to understand their bodily investment in the material world of substance not as determining, but as freeing. My reading of Polignac’s project thus serves to highlight the ways in which his perspective on Lucretian poetry as materially productive quickly becomes unsustainable in the context of late-Enlightenment materialism. In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss why the series of translations of Lucretius produced in France after the 1760s seem no longer to be primarily involved, as Polignac is, with the question of the pleasures that might be corporeally solicited by De rerum natura. These translations testify to the way in which the study of materialism as a science is becoming divorced during this period from a commitment to the production of material effects in the bodies of communities of readers. (The pleasure of reading, then, is no longer thought of as potentially transformative in a mental and physiological sense, with the exception of the limiting case of pornography.)15 The publication of these translations bears witness to the ways in which literary and poetic texts might be said to be losing their philosophical purchase on substance as a constitutive element of subjectivity. From here on out, the pleasures of literature may function to unveil our material natures to ourselves, but not to change them substantially. By the end of the Enlightenment, putative readers have been freed, in the guise of critical or rational subjects, from the texts that solicit them. Their bodily responses are no longer linked primarily to figuration and, in theory at least, can consistently be made more readily available for mastery through processes of empiricist self-discipline (such as education or Cartesian ‘‘habituation’’). At the same time, the act of experiencing pleasure—the moment of voluptas—itself gets reconceptualized as taking place before or beyond authentic philosophic engagement.

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This split between a self cultivated in philosophy and a natural self unthinkingly present in its moments of embodied delight—moments in which pleasure is understood as threatening the dissolution, rather than the transfiguration, of the autonomous reading subject—is fully visible in the way in which De rerum natura is presented to enlightened audiences after 1768. The models of reading deployed in the paratexts to eighteenth-century French translations of Lucretius serve to reaffirm the development, in natural philosophy, of an approach to Lucretius as a philosopher of passive substance, rather than one of active pleasures. For the late eighteenth-century translators of Lucretius, we read freely as enlightened subjects only when the act of reading is itself understood as profoundly immaterial. The price paid by philosophic understanding is thus the material pleasure of the text.

1. Reading Lucretius: voluptuous freedom and the Epicurean conversion Epicurean doctrine explicitly invokes the thoughtful cultivation of pleasure as an urgent16 task of the philosopher. As Epicurus writes in his Letter to Menoeceus, ‘‘we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good.’’17 Despite its overwhelming significance for Epicureanism as both lived practice and materialist theory, the centrality of pleasure (heˆdoneˆ in Greek, voluptas in Latin) to Epicurean philosophy has conventionally represented the aspect of the doctrine most vulnerable to critical misreading. For Cicero, the use of the word voluptas was alone enough to render the philosophy suspect and ‘‘notorious.’’18 This process of contamination was often understood by its critics as transitively infectious, so that eighteenth-century rehabilitations of volupte´, for instance, customarily start by addressing the related problem of Epicurus’s sullied reputation as a piggish hedonist. The definition of volupte´ in the Encyclopedia includes a succinct explanation of the dilemma: ‘‘The word volupte´ was the object of indignation; those who were already corrupted by it abused the term; the enemies of the sect prevailed against them, & thus the name of epicurean became an extremely odious one.’’19 As this passage makes clear, voluptuousness inflects the semantic substance of Epicurean doctrine from the outset. The ‘‘boldness’’ of Epicurean philosophy as Panckoucke evokes it in his introductory description of De rerum natura is thus effectively two-pronged. On the one hand, the mention of Epicurus and his disciples had historically been associated with atheism, despite the efforts of those

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scholars who, like the seventeenth-century theologian Gassendi, sought to christianize the doctrine. On the other, perusal of the Epicurean text threatens to introduce unwary readers to new and seductive material pleasures among which is included the encounter with the philosophy itself. The exposure to Epicureanism is likely ‘‘to produce very dangerous impressions in those minds that are less than attentive, and to lead them into disastrous transgressions.’’20 These ‘‘disastrous transgressions’’ are not just symptomatic of the ‘‘impressions’’ made by the text, however. They may also be understood as a fundamental part of each reader’s interaction with the doctrine, so that the first pleasurable impression made upon the reader by the words themselves will uncontrollably engender the desire to repeat the experience in other modes. Voluptas is suspect, as Cicero suggests, in that it embodies, as nomen, the seductive power of language on the embodied person. This ongoing emphasis on Epicurean materialism’s potentially contagious effects on vulnerable readers is unequivocally staged by Lucretius himself, in the much celebrated invocation to Venus with which De rerum natura begins. The goddess, exhorted as the divine incarnation of the pleasure of men and gods (hominum divumque voluptas), is described as inspiring a form of sensuous delight that is both inherent in natural elements—in that Venus serves to ‘‘guide the nature of things’’ toward pleasure—and the fortuitous product of Venus’s own work upon the natural world. In the opening lines of the invocation, Venus seductively awakens nature to her presence and in doing so displays the poetry in things: ‘‘for thee earth, the quaint artificer, puts forth her sweet-scented flowers; for thee the levels of the ocean smile, and the sky, its anger past, gleams with spreading light.’’21 Lucretius implores Venus to imbue the words of his poem with the same ‘‘lasting loveliness’’ with which she characteristically endows the rest of the natural universe. She is shown standing at the origin of the words themselves—‘‘nothing without thine aid comes forth into the bright coasts of light’’—and as the purveyor of a certain supplemental delight that will eventually constitute the poem’s effectiveness as suasive speech.22 While Lucretius soon turns away from this rendering of Venusian voluptas to his presentation of the Epicurean theory of matter, his initial, allegorical focus is on the imbrication of pleasure in the exposure of readers to Epicurean doctrine as a poetic object.23 This strategy is not simply a rhetorical one, since the capacity of any reader to respond with pleasure to the ‘‘true philosophy’’ that Lucretius outlines will later become an index of this reader’s ability to relish the freedom (from

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anxiety, fear, and desire) that Lucretian materialism seeks to sustain. In a passage that appears toward the end of the first book, Lucretius writes: So now, since this philosophy full often seems too bitter to those who have not tasted it, and the multitude shrinks back from it, I have desired to set forth to you my reasoning in the sweet-tongued song of the muses, and as though to touch it with the pleasant honey of poetry, if perchance I might avail by such means to keep your mind set upon my verses, while you come to see the whole nature of things, what is its shape and figure.24

For Lucretius, the success of his project as materialist epistemology is contingent upon his ability to fix the attention of his reader on his verse. Pleasure, intimately linked to an engagement with the poetic form of De rerum natura, functions as the lens through which the world may be viewed afresh, enabling the longed-for materialist conversion. The reader’s mind is first to turn, not toward the natural world as material object, but toward the poem as formal structure. The ‘‘nature of things’’ will initially be glimpsed sidelong. The object of De rerum natura is thus both explanatory and explicitly hortatory, as Lucretius aims to transfigure his addressee, Memmius, by dispelling the ‘‘terror of the mind’’ typically instilled in men and women by the superstition and ignorance Lucretius sees as pervading human society. The pleasure that serves as both cause and effect of the poem is the crucial mechanism that will allow this conversion to be performed. In this sense, pleasure does remain for Lucretius a scientific phenomenon, subject to causal explanation by way of a materialist reading of empirically determined processes. Yet voluptas is also figured as constitutive of the literary practice of Epicureanism as a mode of urgent and intimate address to a determinate reader. Voluptas must thus be ceaselessly rediscovered in the interaction of the reader with poetry in order for materialist knowledge in its scientific form to become philosophically meaningful as care of the self. Lucretius enlists the seductiveness of poetic discourse as a vehicle for the successful incorporation of Epicurean practice into the bodily substance of the delighted reader, just as he suggests that the pleasure produced by the words themselves—‘‘the pleasant honey of poetry’’—may function as an element of the voluptas that is to be carefully cultivated by the Epicurean philosopher.25 Lucretius’s exordium to Venus implies that the pleasure of the poetic text, born in the voluptuous contemplation of Epicurean precepts, prefigures and accompanies an entrance into material delight, carefully defined, as the ideal state of the philosopher. The sensuousness of nature—bursting into bloom

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at the approach of Venus—becomes in this context a proof of the poetry inherent in material substance itself. If Epicurean voluptas lies at least in part in the just appreciation of matter in motion—in contrast to the quasimetaphysical fear of the unknown that religion seeks to compel—then reading is the (reiterative) technique that is to produce this transformation in the willing student.26 Pleasure, transmitted through the entranced reader, is both the beginning and the end of the poetic experiment on matter that Lucretius undertakes: ‘‘On a dark theme I trace verses so full of light, touching all with the muses’ charm.’’27 What starts as an effort at persuasion in the beginning of the poem—the ‘‘coating’’ of the rim of the cup of truth with the sweet taste of poetic speech—becomes the nectar that is delightfully imbibed from the very words of Epicurus himself: ‘‘From thy pages, our hero, even as bees in flowery glades sip every plant, we in like manner browse on all thy sayings of gold, yea, of gold, and always most worthy of life for evermore.’’28 Language, here, does function to seduce, but not, as many eighteenth-century commentators would continue to suspect, in order to lure the unwary reader into a life of unreflecting and luxurious consumption. Instead, the perlocutionary force of poetic speech—defined first in terms of voluptuous enjoyment, and only later as ratio—is an indicator of the philosophic force of Epicurean doctrine. The atomistic first principles of the physical organization of the world materialize themselves proleptically in the reader’s pleasure, a pleasure that is the very essence of figure in its superfluous yet insistent embodiment as philosophy’s sweet ‘‘coating.’’ In this sense, as Richard Minadeo puts it in The Lyre of Science: Form and Meaning in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, ‘‘The meaning is the form. . . . It must be experienced.’’29 While Lucretius first urges Memmius to feel his introduction to the Epicurean text as a process of pleasurable transfiguration, the poet goes on to theorize the nature of material substance in a way that is meant to make clear to his reader precisely what is at stake in the conversion to Epicureanism. The transformation that Lucretius understands Epicurus’s materialist philosophy to enable is vigorously presented in the proem to the second book, in a passage remarkable for the apparent cynicism of its endorsement of a philosophical Schadenfreude famously identified by Francis Bacon as ‘‘Lucretian pleasure.’’ The proem begins with a description of the philosopher observing with joy the struggles of those who remain unfree, whether they are entrapped by the vain and damaging pursuit of power or victimized by the forces of nature. ‘‘Sweet it is,’’ writes Lucretius, ‘‘when on the great

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sea the winds are buffeting the waters, to gaze from the land on another’s great struggles; not because it is pleasure or joy that anyone should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortune you yourself are free.’’30 Lucretius extols the Epicurean philosopher as ‘‘firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others,’’ standing aloof and apart from the common miseries of human existence.31 The powerful may stage ‘‘mimic wars’’ to assuage their anxiety, but, as Lucretius suggests, it is not the spectacle of conflict that is in itself alleviatory or voyeuristically pleasing. The student of Epicurus should be immune to scopophilic pleasure as ultimately a form of constraint on both the subjects and objects of identification. Rather, it is in the repositioning of the philosopher vis a` vis the material world in its entirety that Epicurean doctrine works its transmogrifications. Emergence into a state of spectatorial detachment—with its multiple and shifting perspectives on the panorama of worldly strife—occurs with the realization that nature reliably provides ample sustenance for human pleasures, properly conceived, and that the fear of death can be conquered not by the accumulation of worldly goods, but through the study of natural processes. The suggestion that sadistic delight in the spectacle of others’ suffering might constitute a truly philosophical pleasure may seem provocative, but, as Lucretius explains, the intensity of this pleasure is in no sense bound to the prospect of identification with the suffering object of contemplation.32 Instead, he evokes a freedom that is born not in an act of will—the choice to pity or to scorn an other—but within the feeling of suffusive and honeyed voluptas that was conjured in the proem to the first book. The independence of Epicurean philosophers is thus defined not in the context of their ability to assent rationally to an apodictic materialism, but in their capacity to sustain the experience of philosophic pleasure even in the face of ‘‘real’’ strife. While the proem to book one opened with the image of Venus stimulating a latent pleasure in the very substance of the earth—so that the universe appears as ‘‘enchained by delight’’—the beginning of the second book displays voluptas as the necessary condition of a freedom that is rendered in the form of an ineluctable sweetness—a voluptuous sensation of exquisite materiality on the part of the reader. The seductive suaveness of Epicurean poetry is shown here as inhering, not in its ability to ensnare its audience in passive submission to their own embodied pleasures, but in the way in which the poet reveals matter itself to constitute an open space of infinite delights. The rematerialized body of the Epicurean convert becomes a free body in the recognition of its own, henceforth inevitable, voluptuousness, so that the

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pleasure taken in the text should be the first taste, deliciously iterable, of the unfettered sweetness of the philosophic existence itself. ‘‘And so we see that for the body’s nature but few things at all are needful, even such as can take away pain, yea, and can also supply many delights.’’33 Lucretius presents his readers at this point with the possibility of a perfectly free material body, a body that discovers its independence not in a moment of action, but in the process of poetic contemplation. ‘‘Come now,’’ he writes, ‘‘I will unfold by what movement the creative bodies of matter beget diverse things, and break up those that are begotten . . . : do you remember to give your mind to my words.’’34 Voluptas thus comes to define a stochastic domain where a full range of pleasurable sensations coexists with the transfiguration, through poetry, of the philosophic body as a fully material body. The importance of the philosopher’s ongoing and voluptuous engagement with doctrine in its poetic form is reaffirmed, here, as the sign of his conversion. Although eighteenth-century narratives of originary nature—what Marx refers to as ‘‘the fiction and only the aesthetic fiction of the small and great Robinsonades’’35 —might lead us to expect differently, the transfiguring mechanism of Lucretian materialism does not depend, as the proems show, on the invocation of a return to a natural state that somehow preexists doctrine, despite the fact that Lucretius will go on to produce an often cited account of the origin of humankind in book five.36 The process of (re)discovering nature is one that is (re)enacted in the contingent movement of the reader through the encounter with poetic narrative. The characteristic state of human subjects who have not yet begun this emancipatory process is one of painful ideological enthrallment to narratives of belief, so that prospective Epicureans will experience the trajectory toward knowledge as a struggle against the power of theology to define bodily ‘‘feeling’’ as if this feeling were fully determinant. Lucretian poetry, which disseminates pleasure alone, thus works to ‘‘free’’ the reader from the gloomy realm of religious discourse, where the body is entirely bound and subdued by awe-inspiring myth. The condition of possibility for this struggle, in Lucretius’s terms, is a delighted recognition of (rather than a reasoned assent to) the heady sweetness of poetry, in which the ‘‘nature’’ of matter is re-presented as voluptuous experience. Lucretius thus marks the conversion enabled by Epicurean materialism as implicated in a generic transformation in discursive techniques, so that the material and luxuriant ‘‘worldliness’’ of Epicurean empiricism is the product of an imagined journey ‘‘far beyond the fiery walls of the world’’ first undertaken and, more crucially, narrativized by Epicurus himself.37

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The figure of Memmius as addressed by Lucretius in his poem is that of an exemplary Epicurean reader, distinguished by his responsiveness, his attention (always, however, threatening to waver), and the prospect of his delight. As Lucretius portrays him, Memmius seamlessly experiences the transition from poetically induced pleasure to physically produced knowledge. If Epicurean physics remains in the service of Epicurean ethics, it is in the sensation of ineffable douceur that the Lucretian reader recognizes the practical validity of the materialist knowledge that De rerum natura is written to impart. The pleasure that Memmius takes in the act of reading is understood to anticipate (and later, coincide with) the pleasure instilled in material substance itself as a poetic force. Reinforcing this connection, Lucretius famously likens the elements of matter to letters: Nay indeed, even in my verses it is of moment with what others and in what order each letter is placed. For the same letters signify sky, sea, earth, rivers, sun, the same too crops, trees, living creatures; if not all, yet by far the greater part, are alike, but it is by position that things sound different. So in things themselves likewise when meetings of matter, its motions, order, position, shapes are changed, things too are bound to be changed.38

If the correspondence of language to matter—the analogical interweaving of one with the other—is here made explicit, poetic language and material substance are represented from the beginning of De rerum natura as alike in their ability to inspire a contingent yet consistent voluptas in prospective converts. The initial exposure to Epicurean doctrine, however harsh the truths it may have to transmit, is meant to be memorable in its joyfulness. The ‘‘sweet tongue’’ of Lucretius should recall to us the poetic verve of our own sensations in an immediate thrill of recognition.39 While we may be tempted to understand this voluptuous delight as an essentially constraining or determinative force—the ‘‘unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right’’ of the Phaedrus, for instance40 —Lucretius should instead be said to describe the aleatory ‘‘swerve’’ of an authentically free pleasure as originating in the most basic elements of the materialist universe—the atomic particles or ‘‘first-bodies’’ themselves. For Lucretius, voluptuous materialism relies on the literalized embodiment of chance in the reader, a transformation dependent on the lusciousness of his poetic technique. Voluptas is the product of figure, and is itself only describable as such—a ‘‘sweet tongue’’ that tastes of itself. In the second book of De rerum natura, Lucretius presents the Epicurean theory of material substance according to which matter is made up of tiny,

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indestructible, and indivisible particles, primordia rerum (primary particles) too small to be observed by the naked eye. Agglomerations of these particles or semina (seeds) constitute the material world as we experience it, although the primary bodies are in themselves imperceptible to us. Epicurean physics as a system rests on the ability of the philosopher to effect an analytical movement from the perceptible (corpora generally, comprehended by humans through the senses) to the invisible (known to Epicureans through the encounter with doctrine).41 We find at this point that matter, in all of its solidity, is in fact reliant on the Lucretian text to make itself known, since it paradoxically resists sensory apprehension. De rerum natura thus enacts a direct apprehension of material substance—unimaginable without textual intervention—not just in the production of an aesthetic response in the reader but in the poetic revelation of the fundamentally imperceptible existence of primary particles. These particles, similar in their activity to the letters of the alphabet as Lucretius describes them above, are in constant motion, since they are not only substantial but weighty—possessed, as Lucretius puts it, of gravitas: ‘‘For in truth matter does not cleave close-packed to itself, since we see each thing grow less, and we perceive all things flow away, as it were, in the long lapse of time, as age withdraws them from our sight: and yet the sum of all is seen to remain undiminished.’’42 The Epicurean universe is one that is made and unmade in a process of continuous flux whereby material things flow into and out of one another as their constitutive particles are redistributed. Generally speaking, these particles tend to move vertically downwards, in the image of a ‘‘rain of atoms’’ also present in the earlier Democritean depictions of the world as physically determined by the linear movement of atoms through space. But it is in his depiction of this atomic movement that Lucretius introduces the crucial element upon which the Epicurean critique of Democritean determinism rests: the clinamen, or atomic swerve, that allows for the reinsertion of contingency into what would otherwise be the relentless predictability of atomic motion in and through space. As Lucretius puts it, ‘‘But if they were not used to swerve, all things would fall downwards through the deep void like drops of rain, nor could collision come to be, nor a blow brought to pass for the first-beginnings: so nature would never have brought ought to being.’’43 The appearance of the atomic swerve makes free will possible, since the clinamen is not in itself the product of any determinate cause and instead seems to work, as Warren F. Motte, Jr. has put it, to ‘‘subvert the control mechanism.’’44 If the introduction of the clinamen signals the return of free-

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dom to what would otherwise have become a bleakly determinist universe, impervious to change or chance, it also heralds the contingent recovery of voluptas as the central trope of Lucretian science.45 Voluntas and voluptas are revealed as intrinsically connected—movements linked together through the inherent substitutability of one letter/atom for another. Indeed, the passage in which Lucretius explains the effects of the clinamen on living things has been marked since the Renaissance by a moment of semantic hesitation that has worked to underline the uneasy persistence of voluptas at the very heart of atomist science, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out in an essay on chance (for which the clinamen becomes the privileged figure) and psychoanalysis.46 The passage in question is transcribed in early editions of De rerum natura (including the Oblongus and Quadratus manuscripts, dating from the ninth or tenth centuries) as ‘‘libera per terras unde haec animantibus exstat, unde est haec, inquam, fatis avulsa voluptas per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluntas.’’47 As Cyril Bailey puts it in his commentary on these lines, ‘‘It is generally agreed that libera voluptas is an improbable expression. The natural expression is libera voluntas ‘a free act of will’ which is ‘wrested from determinism.’ ’’48 Following Lambinus’s 1563 edition of the poem, Bailey reads voluptas and voluntas as having been haphazardly transposed, since the notion of a truly contingent pleasure—voluptas as a figure of freedom—seems to him counterintuitive or ‘‘improbable.’’ Will is ‘‘naturally’’ free, while pleasure, we might surmise, is inevitably bound.49 As Bailey continues, ‘‘Pleasure gives the incentive and will determines the action.’’50 Bailey’s gloss of this passage relies on what he reads as the difficulty of conjugating independence, structured through conscious choice, and voluptuous delight, defined as a passive or inherent quality of things. Yet from the beginning of the poem, with its prayer to Venus as both genetrix and emancipator of a war-weary world, Lucretius reads pleasure as a kind of radically material autonomy—a delight ‘‘wrested,’’ perhaps, from fearinspiring ritual—and, what is more, as an autonomy embodied in the first deliberately sensuous taste of the ‘‘honey’’ of poetry. The lapsus that has for so long troubled commentators on Lucretius confirms the difficulty of defining the precise status of Epicurean voluptas within De rerum natura when the poem is viewed as a closed system. The enactment of voluptuous pleasure, not unlike the introduction of the clinamen, requires an intervention from ‘‘outside,’’ since it is only in reaching out to an interlocutor (as Lucretius demonstrates from the outset of the poem) that the elements of philosophical inquiry are put into creative motion in the first place. This intervention does not take place through an interaction be-

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tween an active will and the passive matter which this will seeks to subjugate. On the contrary, it is in the beguiling surprise of pleasure in and of things that the Epicurean disciple becomes aware of his conversion. As Lucretius says of Epicurus, ‘‘For as soon as thy philosophy, springing from thy godlike soul, begins to proclaim aloud the nature of things, the terrors of the mind fly away, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things moving on through all the void.’’51 Derrida is thus able to read the (accidental?) conjunction of voluptas and voluntas in the following terms: The mere difference of a letter introduces a clinamen precisely when Lucretius is at the point of explaining the extent to which the clinamen is the condition of the freedom and will or voluptuous pleasure that has been wrested from destiny (fatis avolsa). But in all cases the context leaves no doubt as to the link between clinamen, freedom, and pleasure. The clinamen of the elementary principle—notably, the atom, the law of the atom—would be the pleasure principle. The clinamen introduces the play of necessity and chance into what could be called, by anachronism, the determinism of the universe. Nonetheless, it does not imply a conscious freedom or will, even if for some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable.52

Lucretius, for all his critique of theology as mass delusion, is less concerned with freedom as ‘‘enlightened’’ choice than he is with pleasure as giving rise to a moment in which one reader’s experience of the world may be materially reconfigured. His intention is at least in part to give readers what they most want to receive—not an illusory freedom of pure choice—but the possibility of bodily reinvestment in the material autonomy of the semina rerum as the very substance of delight. The voluptuous atom swerves— unconsciously—and in this motion the world, and the poem, are born in the person of Memmius, the reader.

2. Into the Enlightenment: rereading Lucretius I have focused here on Lucretius’s positioning of voluptas vis-a`-vis the figure of the ideal Epicurean reader in De rerum natura because commentaries on the poem take the problem of the possible corporeal effects of the text— positive or negative, freeing or enslaving, aleatory or inevitable—as a central critical concern well into the eighteenth century. On the one hand, modern commentators on Lucretius tend to see the place of readerly voluptas in De rerum natura as subordinate to more explicitly philosophico-scientific ques-

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tions, even when these questions are also presented as aesthetically inflected.53 Earlier exegetes of Lucretius, on the other, typically approach Lucretian Epicureanism as intensely preoccupied, for better or worse, with the problem of readerly voluptas as the most meaningful consequence of Lucretian ethics generally and of the Lucretian text in particular. In this sense, premodern critics of Lucretius remain exceptionally responsive to the Epicurean emphasis on the reader’s consumption and transmission of doctrine as one of philosophy’s most enduring and affecting pleasures. Following Epicurus, these critics tend to understand the scientific claims presented in De rerum natura—including, for instance, the Lucretian exposition of the nature of the atom—to be wedded to the ethical aims of Epicurean thought. With Lucretius, Epicurean doctrine narrates the space of textual consumption as a primary site of voluptas, so that the body of the reader becomes the privileged locus of the recombination of word and matter. This reader, exemplary or otherwise, is accordingly shown as having a significant role to play in the potential transmissibility of the doctrine. For premodern critics of Epicurean materialism, the figure of the voluptuously embodied reader thus emerges as a troubling symptom of the injurious consequences of the material transfiguration Epicureanism seeks to produce. Moreover, in keeping with the centrality of voluptas—as trope and as experience—to Epicurean thought, the legend of Lucretian authorship as it was transmitted through the fourth-century writings of Saint Jerome portrayed the poet himself as the victim of a ‘‘love-philtre’’ he had consumed. Driven mad by the (honeyed?) draught, Lucretius is said to have eventually committed suicide, but not before having penned De rerum natura in the rare intervals of lucidity he experienced. (The poem comes into being, in this anecdote, in the interval between sanity and complete mental collapse.) Here the enchanting ‘‘sweetness’’ of Lucretius’s poetry reappears, in inverted form, as the pharmakon of the murderous draught. If Lucretius seeks to charm his readers, he does so at their (and his) peril. The persistence of this myth coincides with the presentation of De rerum natura as itself a kind of ‘‘philtre,’’ mixing madness and reason to advance a process of seduction that betrays the reader into materialist belief.54 The legend of Lucretius’s decline and suicide—‘‘medically’’ induced—is part of an exegetical tradition that takes Epicurean materialism extremely seriously as a forceful intervention in the experience of putative readers. From this perspective, Lucretian poetry is written to engage a bodily response, and in doing so seeks to transform the fundamental conditions governing its readers’ knowledge of the world. As the baron des Coutures writes in the preface to his

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seventeenth-century translation of Lucretius, ‘‘He shows perceptibly [sensiblement] that the object of our most ardent desires is an aim that runs counter to our happiness . . . he establishes in a powerful way the first bodies or atoms as the guiding principles of this immense vastness: he elegantly describes their combinations, their liaisons, their movements, their weights & their different figures.’’55 In des Coutures’s schema, Lucretius redirects readers’ desires through his manipulation of poetic language; the solidity of his atom is reiterated in the power of his prose, while the gracefulness of corpuscularian movement is made acutely visible in his elegant deployment of figure. The enjoyment that des Coutures describes himself as experiencing in his readings of De rerum natura thus remains both implicitly physiological and actively figurative. ‘‘With these maxims,’’ des Coutures writes, ‘‘that have since appeared only too certain to me, I attach myself to this philosopher.’’56 This kind of ‘‘attachment’’ is exactly what eighteenth-century critics of Epicurean materialism will seek to forestall as too outrageously ‘‘bold.’’ In this sense, Lucretian science continues to be understood by some eighteenthcentury readers as operating first and foremost by means of the binding power of pleasure on readers’ imaginations. Indeed, this mechanism can still be thought of during this period (by Polignac, among others) as the primary one governing the initial engagement with atomist description. Des Coutures’s 1685 introduction confirms the enduring power of this emphasis, even as he strains to demonstrate the ways in which such delight might reinforce, rather than dismantle, an ethical imperative. But, while antimaterialist dismay at the prospect of the seductive effects of the dissemination of Lucretian doctrine persists throughout the Enlightenment, the relationship between philosophic or scientific practice generally and the kind of readerly pleasure described by des Coutures in his introduction becomes increasingly ambivalent. After the appearance of des Coutures’s translation toward the end of the seventeenth century, it would be eighty-three years until Panckoucke undertook his (extremely free) ‘‘traduction libre’’ and La Grange produced his own, more famous, prose version, under the guidance of enlightened materialists Diderot and d’Holbach. The dearth of new French scholarly translations during the first half of the eighteenth century (and well into the second) does not, however, reflect a lack of interest in materialist philosophy generally on the part of Enlightenment intellectuals—far from it. By 1759, for instance, the abbe´ Dufour expressed his consternation at the progress made by materialist thought in the following terms: ‘‘Materialism, this monster that is so often struggled against, without having been destroyed, today

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makes inroads too rapid not to be alarming.’’57 In his book on the development of French materialism between 1734 and 1784, Franck Salau¨n estimates that it was around 1740 that ‘‘the turning point or the acceleration manifested itself . . . , as if the materialist arguments had suddenly become particularly up-to-date, useful, and topical.’’58 In this intellectual climate, the absence of French translations of De rerum natura may reflect a reluctance to undertake the conjugation of the delights of Lucretian poetry with the objects of materialist science as they come to be configured by the end of the century. While discreet references to De rerum natura do appear with regularity in texts published both before and after 1740, the difficulty of negotiating this (growing) divide is already tangible in Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s references to Lucretius in the Re´flexions critiques sur la poe´sie et la peinture of 1719. As Dubos describes the situation: Everyone reads and rereads Virgil, and few people make of Lucretius their favorite book. . . . Compare the number of translations of Lucretius with the number of translations of Virgil in all the civilized languages, and you will find four translations of the Aeneid for every one translation of the poem De rerum natura.59

In the Re´flexions, Dubos testifies to what he reads as the lack of popularity of De rerum natura while claiming that ‘‘the true means of knowing the value of a poem will always be to consult the impression that it makes.’’60 As he goes on to assert, ‘‘One must examine whether it is pleasing, and to what extent it pleases and binds its readers to it.’’61 Dubos’s description may at first seem to solidify the privileged status of De rerum natura as a delightful piece of poetry, full of verve and energy. Yet, in the context of his presentation of De rerum natura as a work of philosophy vitiated from within by ‘‘bad reasoning’’ and (as he claims at the beginning of the Re´flexions) infrequently read or enjoyed by the public, it becomes difficult to specify the nature of the faculty (critical or sentimental) that should ultimately regulate judgment of the poem in Dubos’s terms.62 While he affirms, in his discussion of De rerum natura, that condemnation of Lucretian materialism as philosophy should not necessarily affect readers’ relationship to the work as poetry, his argument that ‘‘the public judges the part of the value of his poem that falls under the domain of poetry’’63 is undermined by his initial supposition that ‘‘one only reads this work with deliberation,’’ in the absence of a characteristically poetic ‘‘pleasure in being moved.’’64 As a work that pleases few, and convinces fewer, De rerum natura occupies an uneasy place in the evaluative schema set up by Dubos. What might it mean, in view of the extreme am-

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bivalence surrounding this account of the reception of De rerum natura during the Enlightenment, for the work to ‘‘bind’’ (attacher) its eighteenthcentury readers in the way it once did des Coutures, as physics and poetics all at once? In fact, the development of eighteenth-century materialist thought— alongside the movement toward physiology as a privileged source of explanatory rubrics for the ordering of the human subject (what Foucault names ‘‘an intensification of the body’’)65 —coincides broadly with a sharp turn away from an engagement with the long-standing consideration of voluptas as the central and transfiguring effect of Lucretian science. The Lucretian investment in the model of the voluptuous reader—materially imbricated in the process of textual consumption—turns out to be at odds with an ‘‘enlightened’’ focus on materialism, not as practice, but as ontology. As ‘‘matter’’ comes to assume a key place in discourses around human subjectivity, its effects come to appear more determinate (particularly where pleasure is concerned), if not more constraining. Moreover, while literature may remain a site of subjective ‘‘play’’ or autonomy where the experience of readers is concerned, this experience no longer tends to be configured as substantially transformative—or as necessarily active. To read for bodily effect—for pleasure—is to read thoughtlessly, distractedly, and even superstitiously. Late eighteenth-century translations of Lucretius bear witness to this gradual process of divestment whereby both the material nature of the reading body and the potentially material effects of the poetic text become substantially deradicalized. In this context, fascination with Lucretian voluptas in its constitutive and lyric modes can only appear as the index of an unenlightened misreading. It should come as no surprise, then, that by the middle of the eighteenth century it is an ardent critic of Lucretian materialism, the Cardinal Melchior de Polignac (1661–1741), who devotes his magnum opus, the Anti-Lucretius, to a final struggle with De rerum natura as a pleasurably ‘‘binding’’ narrative. Polignac seeks gradually to undo the ties that, pace Dubos, might otherwise function to shackle the voluptuous Epicurean to his pernicious doctrine. By the time Polignac’s monumental response to Lucretius appears in print, however, its assumptions about the power of figure—coupled with scientific explanation—to transform readers’ pleasurable apprehension of the material world appear to miss what for more secularly oriented philosophes becomes the point of both poetic and analytical textual production.66 The Anti-Lucretius thus stands as a symptom of an ongoing transformation. This poem paradoxically marks the onset of a gradual move away from an understanding of the mechanism of voluptas,

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ineluctably tied to figura, as a privileged means of rendering bodily matter perceptible to itself.

3. The Anti-Lucretius: Polignac and the pleasure of the text Polignac, like Lucretius in the legend of his untimely end, is said to have been at work on his poem while upon his deathbed: ‘‘He added several lines to it only three days before his death.’’67 Although Bougainville, the translator of the nine books of Latin hexameter that make up the Anti-Lucretius, writes that ‘‘never . . . had any book had such a dazzling reputation in advance of its publication,’’ Polignac would not live to see his massive text published.68 Inspired by the author’s long-standing interest in Cartesian metaphysics as well as by a suspicion of Lucretian materialism at least in part the product of Polignac’s conversations with Pierre Bayle, the Anti-Lucretius had circulated in manuscript form among the cardinal’s numerous friends and connections well before its 1747 publication in Latin. The poem constitutes an attack on Epicurean doctrine as transmitted through Lucretius—and on the centrality of voluptas to this doctrine in particular—buttressed by an energetic defense of Cartesian science. By the time the Anti-Lucretius appeared in print, however, the Cartesianism to which Polignac weds himself in his polemic against Lucretius was falling out of fashion, and the metaphysical ‘‘esprit de syste`me’’ that characterizes his adherence to Cartesian thought was under attack in more enlightened quarters. The very genre in which he had attempted his investigation of materialism—the Latin ‘‘poe`me didactique’’—was, in Dubos’s terms at least, practically a guarantee of unpopularity. In this context, the Anti-Lucretius can be read as the product of an understanding of scientific knowledge—and of the role of verse in the restricted dissemination of this knowledge—that was no longer fully operative by the time of the didactic poem’s publication toward the middle of the century. If the vigor of Polignac’s critique testifies to the extent to which he considered Lucretian science a threat to ethical judgment broadly speaking, the dated quality of the work itself confirms that Polignac’s response to this threat no longer resonated in the highly privileged and hypercultivated circles that he frequented. (The failure of the Anti-Lucretius to capture the spirit of the times as both science and poetry also emphasizes the relative speed with which transformations in the reception of De rerum natura had come about.) As Bougainville puts it, ‘‘What reception can such a work hope for in an age, where the tongue of ancient Rome is little cultivated, where an

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Cardinal de Polignac, from the frontispiece of the 1747 edition of the AntiLucretius; Courtesy of Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections, University of Southern California

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absence of religion reigns, where the abuse of wit is called reason, where plays on words become decisions and paradoxes principles?’’69 Polignac’s poem, imbued with the conviction that it is in verse that the struggle against Lucretian materialism may be won,70 stands as a monument to forms of interpretive practice that were beginning to appear oldfashioned by the mid-eighteenth century. More specifically, his belief—as a man of science and as a theologian—that the success of his epistemological project depended on the poetic stimulation of his reader’s enjoyment, had already come to seem quaint, if not misguided, by the 1740s and 1750s, as Voltaire points out in his review of the poem. Voltaire wraps up his evaluation of the Anti-Lucretius with characteristic sarcasm: ‘‘Where the physical sciences are concerned, it appears to me that the author has wasted much time and many lines in refuting the declension of atoms, and the other absurdities with which the poem of Lucretius is overrun. This is using all the machines of war to destroy a hut.’’71 A little later, he concludes, ‘‘One can ornament with beautiful verses the husk of these truths, but to plumb their depths we need calculations, and not poetry.’’72 If Lucretian science hardly seems worthy of the effort Polignac had taken to dismiss it, Polignac’s critical project is itself, according to Voltaire, a fundamentally misguided one: ‘‘Poetic genius can get no hold on it.’’73 For Voltaire, the question of materialism is one that is best addressed in scientific language, not in verse; the pleasure of the reader might have been better served by pitying Epicurus, rather than condemning his scientific practice. Voltaire seeks to personalize what, for Polignac as for Lucretius, remains a problem of figura—the connectedness of the knowledge of atomic forms to figures of speech as perceived by an ideal reader. Lucretius and Polignac share a refusal to locate this reader’s pleasure (or interest) in the subjective movement of sympathy toward an author-figure. In this sense, the proem to the second book of De rerum natura, in which Lucretius limns the absolute detachment of the Epicurean philosopher, suggests an approach to textuality that resists tropes of personhood as privileged sites of affective identification in order to highlight the pleasures of substance itself as inherently, freely interesting. It is this approach that Polignac responds to philosophically, and that Voltaire subsequently derides as unworkable. For Polignac, the concept and practice of voluptas, with which he begins his critique, pose a series of formal, material, and theological problems from which the individual movement of sympathy remains very much abstracted. As is the case for Lucretius, affect is not a matter primarily of persons, but of atomic form or material substance.

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Voltaire, in his review of the Anti-Lucretius, thus reads against the grain of the work as Polignac and his translator initially define it. Both Polignac and Bougainville, in the latter’s lengthy ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire’’ prefacing the 1749 translation, place reiterated emphasis on the significance of the Anti-Lucretius as a specifically and necessarily poetic response to the rhetorical charms of Lucretian materialist doctrine.74 In this sense they consider Lucretius’s claims for the force of his writing as important ones that demand a response. Bougainville writes, in a passage worth quoting at some length: In order to scatter the clouds with which a seductive poet had veiled the truth, we needed a poet who could joust with him and avail himself of the same arms. As the heart almost always makes the final decision, even in the domain of the mind, in vain would he strive to persuade us, if he did not know how to delight. In spite of its beauty, in spite of the interest that we have in knowing it, truth is only too often forced to decorate itself with ornaments that are unfamiliar to it. These ornaments are even more necessary to it, given that falsehood has no need of them, since the latter flatters our passions, and offers itself armed by Lucretius with all the graces of poetry, with all the trickery of style, with all the subtlety of reason. One could only reduce this enchanting voice to silence by opposing to its melodious sounds others that are no less harmonious. It was not enough to expose with clarity the proof of the true doctrine, to present them methodically, and to make all of their weight felt.75

In the opening passages of the ‘‘Discours,’’ Bougainville depicts Lucretius and Polignac as each engaging in a specific production of materiality by means of their writings. In what is in fact a rather Lucretian gesture on the part of Bougainville, knowledge is initially rendered in an effort to concretize itself in and through matter. Bougainville structures the competing philosophies of the two great poets—Lucretius and Polignac—as contrasting substances, where Lucretius’s dissolving clouds of atoms are played against the ‘‘heft’’ of Polignac’s Cartesian method. More specifically, however, Bougainville reads both Lucretius and Polignac as engaged in a contest of seduction, with readers’ hearts as the ultimate spoils. Lucretian materialism, the brainchild of a ‘‘seductive poet,’’ beckons to us alluringly, threatening to disarm her conquests instantaneously with her adroit flattery of their passions. If Lucretian error is a siren, charming us with a song that cannot be muted, then personified Polignacian truth (le vrai) has no choice but to imitate its rival, taking on the latter’s artificial graces in an attempt to gain equal advantage in an unequal struggle. The odds are stacked against ‘‘the true

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doctrine,’’ however, since as it turns out error is in fact more spontaneously alluring than truth can ever be—even without the supplemental glamour with which Lucretius has cannily endowed his seductive doxa—so that truth must appear all the more deliberately adorned in order to win our attention or approval. Truth has, paradoxically, more need of artifice than error ever will, with readers’ affections hanging in the balance. At stake here is not a scrupulous weighing of one method against another: Lucretius’s ‘‘nuages’’ seem to resist any attempt at quantification even as they dissipate around us. Instead, truth and error—both sensually inviting—seek to win readers’ hearts (instead of their minds), to engage our physiological responses to beauty, rather than our intellectual grasp of method. If the gorgeous song of error can never be drowned out, then truth must be made to sing harmoniously as well. While no ‘‘true’’ doctrine can lead to the final silencing of the Lucretian siren—whose appeal, it seems from this passage, is remarkably enduring—Polignac may at least intervene to rescue those readers who would otherwise follow their passions to their own demise (as did Lucretius himself in swallowing the poison that drove him mad). Accordingly, Bougainville describes Polignac as ‘‘full of his subject . . . he knew how to reunite the eloquence of language with that of argument; . . . with the charm of a style that is always pure, sometimes ornate, occasionally sublime, how to interest his reader, to please and to convince him.’’76 Bougainville does not entirely sustain the reading of Polignac’s work with which he begins, since, even as the poem’s first translator and a clear admirer of the cardinal as a homme de lettres, he is already highly conscious of the extent to which the metaphysical thrust of the poem might appear problematically quaint to a mid-eighteenth-century audience. Fifty pages into his extensive introduction, he admits that ‘‘as a bit of Physics’’ Polignac’s text is nothing but ‘‘curious,’’ thereby implicitly dismissing the lengthy expositions of Cartesianism that form a large part of the subject matter of the Anti-Lucretius.77 For Polignac himself (as for Lucretius), however, the lyric and scientific elements of the Lucretian philosophical projects cannot be uncoupled from one another in this way, particularly given that the cardinal elects to follow Lucretius quite closely in presenting the aim of his text as fundamentally conversive in nature. If readers of the Anti-Lucretius are to rediscover a Cartesian metaphysics as everywhere palpable in the substance of their own experiences, it is the lyric presentation of the ‘‘truth’’ that will give the impetus to the process of transforming the very stuff of perception itself.78 Polignac accepts Lucretius’s dictum—that without the

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honeyed draught the wormwood of philosophy will not go down—but inverts the terms structuring the process of conversion as the latter is set up in De rerum natura. Polignac’s reader is to move from materialism to theology, in effect tracing Memmius’s trajectory in reverse. In keeping with his explicit goal of winning back those who have been corrupted by an early exposure to materialist thought and practice, Polignac thus defines the relationship between the Anti-Lucretius and De rerum natura isomorphically, beginning with an address to Quintius, Memmius’s counterpart. Where Memmius was turning away from an anxiety-driven and metaphysically vexed religious ideology in his reading of Lucretius, however, Quintius is portrayed as reluctantly abandoning a life of material pleasures and worldly voluptas. Each addressee is in his own right interpellated poetically so that he might better direct his attention to the prospect of his own philosophic transmutation. Quintius, like Memmius, is in search of a ‘‘calm’’ that will appease ‘‘this soul that is troubled by passions’’; he will emerge from his encounter with this lyric philosophy a changed man.79 In other words, Polignac takes Lucretius’s seductive method seriously enough to reproduce its governing mechanism in the figure of Quintius. God himself is to lend ‘‘force’’ to Polignac’s verse, so that the reader may be troubled out of his contemplation of the ‘‘delicious groves’’ so pleasingly invoked by Lucretius.80 Polignac’s task is complicated, however, by the necessity of acknowledging the legitimacy of both religious devotion and philosophical critique in the shaping of his exemplary, devout reader. ‘‘I am meditating a great project, Quintius,’’ he starts out, ‘‘I will speak of God. What being in the universe is comparable to the Creator, to the King of the universe?’’81 Lucretius’s invocation to Venus leaves the goddess as the preeminent divinity in a poetic universe imbued with pleasure, but Polignac’s ‘‘Creator’’ shares his power with ‘‘reason’’—two just and eminently virtuous sovereigns whose rightful rule has been undermined by the allegorized intervention of Lucretian voluptas. ‘‘Voluptuousness,’’ writes Polignac, ‘‘freely taking flight, usurped the empire where reason reigned with the Divinity.’’82 Throughout, Quintius is both extolled for his potential attachment to truth— including scientific truth—and constantly enjoined to turn the focus of his thoughts toward God. Like Lucretius, Polignac understands his poem as participating directly in the experience of his reader as both an incipiently theological and an exquisitely physiological subject: ‘‘Your happiness is the object of my efforts; I groaned to see you seduced by appearances, flying to your demise on the wings of pleasure.’’83 If Polignac sees the rational

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contemplation of authentically philosophic principles as a potential source of austere delight, however, the measured enjoyment of reason alone does not suffice to enable the kind of transformation that is necessary for Quintius to rediscover a lasting happiness: ‘‘Philosophy does not have the right to create events: it can only take advantage of them, or endure them.’’84 Philosophy, for Polignac, emphatically does not possess the kind of creative or transmogrifying power with which Lucretius wishes to imbue it. The transformation that Polignac sees as the end of his poem—the awakening of Quintius to his true nature—is operable by and through God alone. Poetry, ‘‘the muses,’’ and philosophy must remain subordinate to the divine. This does not mean, however, that Polignac neglects or denies voluptas as the most powerful effect of Lucretian dogma; on the contrary, he locates the voluptuous subject of Epicureanism at the very center of a struggle between a Cartesian perspective on philosophical knowledge (eminently reconcilable with theology) and the Lucretian one. The symptoms of the Epicurean contagion initiated by exposure to Lucretian doctrine are, as Polignac describes them, predictably dire: ‘‘In vain would this heart softened by luxury, and already vanquished by delight, beg for succor from constancy.’’85 The cure for the feminine ‘‘softness’’ brought on by such delight is in the return to the virtuous constancy of faith, but this attachment to God is in no sense devoid of its own particular pleasures. Polignac places voluptas itself under the sign of the divine, so that the attributes that Lucretius finds in material substance—infiniteness, autonomy, free enjoyment— may eventually be resituated as characteristics of the perfectly devout subject. In other words, Polignac understands the transfigurative aim of Lucretian philosophy as a fully legitimate one when relocated within a rigorously theological context, and he goes so far as to acknowledge the valid role of voluptuous pleasure in the reconversion of Quintius to the virtuous practice of faith. He writes, ‘‘Yes, I will admit it without pain; the sovereign good is pleasure; but pleasure taken from the true source: pure, solid, immense, inalterable pleasure.’’86 At this point it becomes clear that the conflict between a theologically oriented metaphysics and Lucretian atomism as staged by Polignac is being recast as a struggle over the mechanism of voluptas itself. Polignac’s ‘‘pure pleasure’’ in fact figures for him as significantly more substantial than the fleeting material satisfaction promoted by Lucretius. ‘‘But what is the pleasure [of the Epicureans]? A breeze, a shadow, a fleeting spray of water, a light boat with which the waves play, a fire that glows and is extinguished.’’87 Like Bougainville, Polignac limns theology and Lucretian materialism as two substances, the one much hardier (and harder) than the

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other. If anything, the ‘‘pure’’ pleasure of belief is more solidly palpable— more material, even—than its Epicurean counterpart. ‘‘From the breast of the Divinity flows a river of delights: he inundates the possessors of this abiding good; and the love that such an object inspires has charms that you have no idea of, voluptuous Mortals.’’88 Polignac dwells extensively on the transfigurative aim of Lucretian philosophy, but portrays De rerum natura as ultimately falling far short of its mark. In his reading, Lucretian voluptas is dissipative rather than constant, finite rather than eternal. Lucretius is setting his voluptuous readers, as Polignac depicts them, up for failure—luring them into a trap from which, in their wilting softness, they will be unable to emerge, as if lulled into a contentment very near to death. As Polignac sees it, the docile Epicurean subject is obliged by doctrine to undergo a transformation, but one which will paradoxically result in a desubstantiation of this subject as a thinking and desiring being: ‘‘Penetration, force, the reach of his mind, will be useful merits; his ideas will be fantasies, his reasoning sophistry, & his discourse mere sound.’’89 Polignac suggests that the atomic form of objects as they present themselves to perception may in fact constitute a kind of seductive illusion, a disguise of the true nature of the real: ‘‘Perhaps the atoms of which your soul is the result are combined in such a way that everything that displays itself to his eyes, displays itself in a form that disguises it.’’90 If he persists in situating voluptas in the ephemeral movements of atoms, Quintius will have effectively misplaced his pleasure, and will be left to search ineffectually for the enduring substance of his delight: the constancy in which the material world, as Lucretius depicts it, is sadly lacking. ‘‘Epicurus is thus the enemy of society; his doctrine bears no fruit in the form of real benefits. The magnificent promises with which he nourishes the avid credulity of his disciples reduces itself to the pompous exaggeration of a futile pleasure.’’91 Polignac longs to help Quintius, for whom this process of subjective dissolution is not yet complete, to rediscover ‘‘pleasure taken from the true source.’’ In order to do this, Quintius will have to realize that what Lucretius sees as the materiality of atomic matter is lacking in the very solidity necessary to undergird true enjoyment. Once this conversion has been undergone, Quintius will be in a position analogous to that of the Lucretian reader, Memmius, as he discovers the principles of things with greater and greater pleasure—an enjoyment inaugurated by and cultivated in poetry. Where Lucretius envisions De rerum natura as a honey-coated goblet, Polignac describes the Anti-Lucretius as the melody of a nightingale singing to his mate.92 As the female bird sits upon the nest, her ‘‘partner’’

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‘‘enchants her day and night with the tenderness of his tones. From the bottom of her nest she listens to him with rapture: the charms of the harmony support her in her constancy: she hardly feels the disgust engendered by assiduity.’’93 In this image, the sweet tenderness of the song provokes and embodies the pleasure of constancy (the central attribute of divine substance as Polignac reads it). In order to induce the change in perception that is the object of his poetic undertaking, Polignac demonstrates how the attributes that Lucretius assigns to atomic matter—from freedom to gravitas—are in fact only effectively substantiated in the figure of God. To do this, he presents the Lucretian universe (and the pleasure that derives from it) as fundamentally immaterial, while shifting what Lucretius describes as the primary attributes of matter onto God himself (and, by extension, onto the devout subject). In effect, Polignac acknowledges Lucretius’s claims for atomic particles as they have already been described—they move freely, must be infinite in number, and are fundamental to our perceptions—but reassesses these qualities as divine rather than material ones. After a discussion of the impermanence of Epicurean pleasure as Lucretius defines it, Polignac writes, ‘‘Happy, rather, happy is he for whom religion grounds his hopes and regulates his conduct! Everything that happens is in his eyes as if it were no more, like an illusion made in sleep. He tramples with a calm step both that which is good and that which is evil. . . . Nothing finite is capable of disturbing him.’’94 Here the still-voluptuous believer reappears as transfigured by faith; his perception of matter is altered, so that it is belief itself—and the subject of this belief—that takes on the characteristics of the Lucretian atom, also ‘‘unshakable’’ in its substance. Accordingly, in book two of the Anti-Lucretius focusing on Epicurean atomic theory, Polignac lays the groundwork for making the figural connection between his Cartesian God and the Lucretian corpora prima the object of explicit comparison. He describes the Lucretian atom as ‘‘the Divinity himself: you make for yourself a God of an atom, without thinking about it.’’95 Since, for Epicurus, atoms are infinite and eternal, why does he not simply admit that they are necessarily divine in their substantive attributes—‘‘little gods’’? ‘‘Epicurus only supports his innumerable atoms because he thinks that they are without a creator, but if they are without a creator, why are they only infinite in number? Why not give them knowledge, a power without limits? Why not make of each one of them a divinity?’’96 According to Polignac, if Lucretius has imbued philosophy with a power it should not have—the pleasing seductiveness of matter as word—he is manifestly worthy of censure, but not because he has misunderstood what

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is at stake in the act of addressing his delighted reader. In fact, Polignac’s Lucretius is so successful at what he has set out to do that he is portrayed as having always already succeeded in his aims. Quintius, as he is depicted at the outset of the Anti-Lucretius, is on the verge of a complete conversion to the Epicurean cause. If Lucretius has written a dangerous text, then, it is because his vision of an actively voluptuous pleasure—one that is truly unshakable in its foundations and authentically free in its movements—should be possible only from within a theological context. The notion of an active pleasure, unconstrained, threatens God’s status as the ultimate guarantor of meaning within the material universe. Only God must be able to recall the reader to himself (‘‘give yourself finally to yourself ’’97) as a substantial but free body. In criticizing the axiological bent of the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure as a true good, Polignac does not argue that voluptas is a fundamentally passive attribute of material bodies that are in fact bound by other forces beyond their control. (In fact, much of the first book is consigned to alarmist depictions of a society in which voluptuousness has run rampant, to the detriment of all lasting social bonds.) Instead, he simply reassigns the qualities of Lucretian substance—as well as the capacity to guarantee an everlasting pleasure—to God, who in turn secures the exquisite materiality of a legitimately free perception for devout believers. We might thus read Polignac as attempting not so much to decenter Lucretian voluptas as to coopt its powers in the service of a more specifically orthodox epistemology. Poetry, wedded to a material theory of perception, remains the privileged instrument of the reconversion that he is advocating. The Lucretian project is uniquely powerful, in Polignac’s terms, but also dangerously misguided in its trajectory. In the Anti-Lucretius, the autonomous voluptas that Polignac reads Lucretius as legitimizing is established as the enduring counterpart, not of a ‘‘return’’ to matter, but of the genesis of faith. Once the process of conversion has been initiated by the wresting of Quintius away from the Lucretian hypothesis, he may now explore the delights of an authentic knowledge of ‘‘true principles’’: ‘‘Few know how to taste a happier pleasure, that of tracing these waters to their source, of finding their origin, of penetrating all the way to the unquenchable reservoirs that produce them.’’98 This ostensibly Cartesian subject shares the reward enjoyed by the Epicurean reader—unending pleasure inaugurated by and in the text as the result of a substantial shift in perception—but the guarantee of his conversion is provided by God, rather than in the voluptuous freedom of figura. Ultimately, though, the distinction between the Cartesian God and the Lucretian atom becomes fully one of substance, with God having taken

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on all the imaginable attributes of being in general. In the conclusion to the poem, Polignac explains: I say the only Being: the others do not merit this name. They have hardly emerged from nothingness; they cling to nothingness everywhere; their qualities are not so much attributes as they are absences. And he who is, whose nature is to be, who is alone eternal, alone immovable, who can alone fulfill your desires, will he not be an object worthy of your heart?99

Where Lucretius has placed his voluptuous atom, Polignac will reinstate God. But for both authors, doctrine is presented as taking shape in its effects on a reader. As Polignac imagines it, his poem has both assisted in ‘‘giving birth’’ to Quintius and begun to nourish this reader in his development. While God may have rendered the rest of the physical world dreamlike in its insubstantiality, the poem itself is nonetheless ultimately figured as constitutive of a ‘‘new’’ body, that of the converted Quintius, who will incorporate its parts. ‘‘I will stop here, Quintius: you are just born; still in the cradle, you would not be strong enough for such solid food. While waiting for the constant practice of virtue to make you ready to eat heartily, content yourself with this light nourishment that my hand offers you today.’’100 The poem finds its purpose in the reassembled body of a delighted reader. From a strictly Polignacian perspective, we might say that there are two possible responses to the dangers posed by the Lucretian text. On the one hand, restrictions on the dissemination of the poem could serve to curtail its potentially damaging effects. If De rerum natura is threateningly effective in inducing in the bodies of its readers an actively voluptuous pleasure, then the gradual eradication of the text itself will cure the spread of the disease. On the other hand, those who have had the misfortune of being exposed at an early age to the Lucretian fallacy, as Quintius has, require immediate treatment. This treatment, to be successful, must take a poetic form, and should address itself directly to the responses that Lucretius seeks to produce, first deconstructing and subsequently reproducing them in an acceptably theological context. For the mid-eighteenth-century readers like Voltaire who questioned the raison d’eˆtre of the Anti-Lucretius, however, the archaic quality of Polignac’s project—acknowledged by both Voltaire and, implicitly, Polignac’s own translator101—derives not only from the poem’s dependence on an outdated Cartesian metaphysics, but from the invocation of the figure of the voluptuous reader as the material fulfillment of a poetic project of conversion. This project, for all its embeddedness in an orthodox theological discourse, intimately resembles Lucretius’s own attempts to inter-

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vene textually in the embodied experience of his reader in order to produce a transformation in this reader’s perceptual organization as a thinking subject. For Polignac, the outcome of the change he wishes to engender would be no less pleasurable than Lucretius’s version promises to be, and no less a guarantee of a joyous autonomy vis-a`-vis other determinist discourses that place strict limits on voluptas. Far from seeking to reconfigure his reader in the form of a disembodied cogito, Polignac’s Quintius rediscovers free will as a form of voluptuous independence in the poetic context of a reawakened faith. Polignac remains deeply committed not only to a vision of poetry as materially transfigurative, but to an understanding of God (and the devout subject) as both substantial and sensuously free. This is not to imply that Polignac is secretly a materialist despite himself, but rather to suggest that his understanding of the place of poetic discourse in the material (or, in Polignac’s terms, substantial) configuration of perceiving and feeling subjects is similar to that deployed by Lucretius. Polignac identifies the Lucretian project as a radical intervention in readers’ perceptions of the real, and seeks to counter the Lucretian argument by inducing in Quintius a different sort of pleasure: enduring rather than ephemeral, ‘‘constant’’ rather than eminently promiscuous. Either way, the substance of the self may be radically altered, for both Lucretius and Polignac, as a function of poetic form.

4. Three translations: the deradicalization of matter and the undoing of the voluptuous subject By the time a series of translations of Lucretius begin appearing in France in the late 1760s, Polignac’s quasi-Lucretian understanding of the involvement of the material subject in the discursive forms that reveal this subject to himself had effectively ceased to guide enlightened readers in their engagement with De rerum natura. While the appearance of new editions of Lucretius coincides with a growing interest in narratives of the human person as physiological in nature, the figure of the voluptuous reader, so crucial to earlier readings of the Lucretian project, all but disappears. Instead, the introductions to these translations invoke the exemplary philosophic reader as a fully dematerialized entity, abstractly rather than materially invested in the consumption of texts. To the extent that Lucretius’s poem is presented in these works as an early incarnation of scientific materialism, it is no longer understood as poetically vested in the production of voluptuous reading bodies. On the contrary, while the enlightened philosophic reader may take pleasure in the formal beauties of the Lucretian verse, this pleasure becomes

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coded as a fundamentally disinterested one, with no disruptive effects on an organic level. The poetic and philosophic qualities of De rerum natura are thus no longer seen as potentially working in tandem with one another to imbue discourse with the power to intervene in the material constitution of the real as perceived by a delighted reader. Instead, ideal students of the Lucretian oeuvre should feel detached, as they read, from the notion of pleasure as the free movement of bodies in space, corporeally felt. Matter, whether atomically constituted or not, comes to function as a determinist, rather than an independently voluptuous, principle. As a result, if the act of reading is to have any meaningful effect at all on prospective enlightened readers, the latter must be trained to understand their engagement with texts as founded in the free assent of dematerialized subjects—subjects who are not constrained in their judgment by the symptoms of physiology. Selfknowledge, the privileged task of the thoughtful lecteur, demands the consolidation of an ostensibly unified subject as the primary effect of the act of reading philosophy. Of the three translations of De rerum natura that I will examine together here, La Grange’s has indisputably met with the most success.102 As C. A. Gordon mentions in his brief discussion of La Grange’s work, this translation, unlike those of Panckoucke and Le Blanc de Guillet, remained in print for over sixty years. Sponsored by the baron d’Holbach and written with the encouragement of Diderot, the volume itself is expensively designed and well-produced, and includes an attractive series of engravings by Binet that illustrate various moments in the Lucretian argument. Yet, compared to Polignac’s critique, with its massive paratextual apparatus, La Grange’s text is a model of austerity. The ‘‘avertissement’’ by the translator that prefaces the presentation of the poem is relatively brief, and gives an account of the sources used in the production of the translation as well as biographical information on Lucretius and Memmius. La Grange eschews any sustained intervention in the debate around the ideological contentiousness of the poem as a philosophical system in favor of a bibliographical account of the numerous references used in the preparation of the translation. Clearly, the motivating factor in this project is not pleasure alone. Instead, La Grange’s own emphasis in the ‘‘avertissement’’ is firmly on the incredibly painstaking nature of the work involved in the process of developing a dependable and fully annotated French version of De rerum natura, ‘‘a work that was lacking in our literature.’’103 Any sense of immediacy that the poem itself, rendered here as prose, might be designed to evoke is deflected by La Grange’s introductory narrative of the tremendous labor involved in pro-

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ducing this edition of Lucretius’s text. The image of unreflective pleasure characteristic of the Epicurean readers chastised by Polignac is replaced by a description of the pains borne by the dedicated student of philosophy. The focus of the ‘‘avertissement’’ is on labor as a necessary component of good scholarship, so that readers of La Grange’s work can be confident, after having perused the introduction, that no effort, however excruciating, was spared in the attempt to provide them with as authoritative as possible a version of Lucretius’s poem.104 La Grange begins the ‘‘avertissement’’ with a somewhat brusque dismissal of the work of the two seventeenth-century French translators, the abbe´ de Marolles and the baron des Coutures, who preceded him. He disapproves of the former for the ‘‘barbarous style’’ in which he writes, while the latter ‘‘did not better satisfy the desires of men of letters.’’105 As a result of this deficiency in the French scholarly tradition, ‘‘We were thus reduced to the commentators, a tiresome and often fruitless resource.’’106 An assiduous perusal of the poorly conceived existing French translations of De rerum natura thus represents only the very beginning of La Grange’s exertions, since he subsequently imposes on himself the duty of reading every important scholarly commentary on Lucretius, including Gassendi’s voluminous study of Epicureanism, made up of ‘‘three volumes in-folio, written in long Latin periods, some of which extended to a page.’’107 La Grange describes this research as ‘‘fastidious work,’’ although ‘‘we were often compensated by the enlightening information that we were aware of having gained from this fatiguing reading.’’108 Of all the commentators whose editions he has consulted, he praises Thomas Creech’s well-known and well-respected seventeenth-century English translation as the most useful, above all for its clarity and success in developing ‘‘the order and logic [l’enchaıˆnement] of the ideas of Lucretius.’’109 However, La Grange adds, ‘‘Despite this assistance, how many difficulties still persisted!’’110 The fatigue of the preparatory research turns out to be minor compared to the challenges posed by the scholarly revision of the poem itself, with all of the unwitting transpositions, mistaken interpolations, and problematic versification still present in even the best available editions. The delight that Polignac recognizes as at once the object and the aim of the Lucretian project is nowhere to be found in this description of La Grange’s engagement with a corpus notable mainly for the difficulties that it poses for scholarly readers.111 The idea that De rerum natura might represent a threat to these readers in exposing potential disciples of Epicurus to the addictive sensation of languorous voluptas seems unthinkable in the context of La Grange’s description of his unstinting and

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single-minded devotion to his research, the value of which tends to be presented as increasing with the translator’s own feelings of displeasure. La Grange, throughout the ‘‘avertissement,’’ extols his presentation of Lucretian argument for its abstract transparency and his rendering of Lucretian prose style for its clarity, even if he does recognize the importance of maintaining the lyrical ‘‘elegance’’ of what remains after all a work of poetry.112 Moreover, in opposition to Polignac’s reading of De rerum natura as allegorizing a specifically Epicurean understanding of substance as ethereal, vaporous, and highly dissipative, La Grange stresses the coherence of Lucretius’s logic over the ‘‘matter’’ that makes up the content of his work: In the end the arguments of each book, that in a philosophical poem are not a matter of indifference, were worked over with the greatest care. If they sometimes exceed the meter, it is because we aim less to indicate the subject matter treated by the poet, than to follow the thread of the poem and to show its logic, so that the six arguments reunited might function as an analysis of the doctrine of Epicurus.113

The Lucretian oeuvre as La Grange presents it is internally divided, riven by a split between style and method. If for Polignac, the poetic language of De rerum natura functions simultaneously as a scandal at the heart of the text and as its defining mechanism, for La Grange ‘‘philosophy,’’ stripped of figure, becomes the final truth that Lucretius seeks to impart to his readers. This vision of the text as problematically divided against itself is in fact already visible in the engraved frontispiece to the translation, which shows the figures of Lucretius, quill in hand, and Apollo Musagetes at his lyre. At their feet appear two putti draping with flowers a bust of Cybele—the Great Mother discussed by Lucretius in book two of the poem. While Lucretius and Apollo are rendered side by side, in theory at least participating together in the composition of De rerum natura, they are both staring pointedly in opposite directions, mirroring each other in their distraction but neither seeing nor interacting with one another in any other way. Lucretius may be represented in this image as poetically inspired, but the object of his concentration lies somewhere off the page, away from the bust of Cybele and Apollo, as well as from the attendant amours. This depiction of authorial distraction is nonetheless entirely consonant with La Grange’s perspective as he explains it in the ‘‘avertissement.’’ Not only is Lucretius as philosopher presented as at odds with the poetry of his own text, but it is in the ‘‘argument’’ or logic of the poem that its perlocutionary forcefulness is said to lie, rather than in its graceful deployment of figures of speech. In contrast,

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whereas Polignac may have understood the amalgamation of lyric and materialist science undertaken by Lucretius as deeply problematic (given the necessarily competing epistemological claims of religious faith on the fidelity of exemplary readers), he is nonetheless consistent in his consideration of this conjunction as standing at the origin of a dangerous power: namely, the capacity of all readers to understand their own enjoyment of the poem as an alteration in the very faculty of perception itself. In this sense, La Grange’s introduction, while clearly more sympathetic than Polignac to materialism as a denotative system, has little patience for the Lucretian insistence on the experience of the Epicurean text as always at once abidingly voluptuous and profoundly philosophical. Because voluptas appears here in a primarily prosthetic relation to philosophy—as an artificial appendage of sorts—the poem must appear caught in an internal contradiction that can only be resolved by the regulation of reading as philosophical technique. La Grange’s clearest formulation of the Lucretian project as ineluctably conflicted from within is given in a footnote he provides to the invocation of Venus in the first book. He writes: In general one must distinguish in Lucretius a double character, that of the poet and that of the philosopher. Just as ancient philosophers had two doctrines, the one—public, external, and exoteric—that they recounted to the people, the other—secret, internal, and esoteric—that they reserved for their own disciples, so did Lucretius, as a poet, appear to adopt the theological concepts of his time, while as an Epicurean philosopher he armed himself against them and fought them with all his might. Without this distinction, several moments in the poem become unintelligible.114

While the notion of the ‘‘double doctrine’’ is a commonplace in the history of classical philosophy, La Grange’s reference to it in this passage effectively reduces the poetry of De rerum natura to a way of manipulating ‘‘bad readers’’ who remain ignorant of Epicurean thought by virtue of their inability to see beneath the rhetorical surface of the text. For Polignac figura functions to initiate readers into the materialist doctrine of voluptas by introducing them to pleasure as the primary effect of Epicurean physics (and ethics). For La Grange, on the other hand, the poetry of De rerum natura is a lure for those unskilled in the scholarly technique of reading as decoding—a method valorizing the discovery of truth through the disciplined interpretive penetration of semantic artifice. Without the distinction between form and content that enables La Grange to portray Lucretius as the author of a philosophical narrative in which the body of the putative reader is considered

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first and foremost as an idea, De rerum natura becomes philosophically unintelligible. The ability to decipher the Epicurean position depends for La Grange upon the reader’s willingness to refigure style as an elaborate feint, and the invocation to Venus itself must be read (if we are to take La Grange’s footnote seriously) as nothing more than a nod in the direction of popular opinion, a self-conscious supplement enabling the text to pass muster with a public defined mainly by its own credulity. Where the orthodox critique of Lucretius envisions the cordoning off of Epicurean doctrine in an effort to protect unwary readers from its influence, this enlightened promotion of De rerum natura as an important scholarly resource relies upon the deradicalization of the invocation to Venus as an injunction to a particular reader awaiting conversion. The invocation, with its petition to the divinity as an allegory of earthly pleasure, here becomes unreadable in terms of the logic of the poem as a whole. Instead of seeing the invocation as a poetic enactment of doctrinal principles—an enactment made possible by the presence of figura in nature itself—La Grange understands it as an empty gesture to an uncomprehending populace. Readers’ bodies, for La Grange, may or may not be the product of purely material forces. Yet the meaningfulness of the act of interpretation nonetheless depends for him upon the successful dematerialization of a reader’s initial response to a text. This process of dematerialization, by which the flesh is abstracted into logic, takes place through the institutionalization of painful scholarly discipline, expressed in La Grange’s account of his work as a researcher on behalf of a larger philosophical community. (Pain operates as the martyrization of matter into reason.) Pleasure can only function within this framework, for those unlucky enough to be distracted by it from their labor, as a form of intellectual constraint.115 Voluptuous readers fall victim to their own physiology. Panckoucke’s ‘‘traduction libre,’’ while a much less impressive work of scholarship than La Grange’s edition of De rerum natura,116 shows even more clearly than La Grange’s introduction how a philosophical emphasis on embodied perception as an explanatory principle may operate in tandem with a methodological approach to reading as an experience of dematerialization. Panckoucke’s somewhat vaguely defined empiricism conjugates an emphasis on the ‘‘objet sensible’’ as the source of knowledge with an account of the reading subject as ideally abstracted, self-consistent, and unified within the act of perception—all of the things that Lucretius’s voluptuous reader is not. For Panckoucke, matter has become not a site of free movement, but the locus par excellence of constraint. The act of reading serves for him not as

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an intervention in the autonomous circulation of sensations and perceptions through things and words but as a means of verifying what is already there. Panckoucke begins his introduction by acknowledging the extreme scandalousness of Lucretius’s attempt to present a strong critique of theology—‘‘no philosopher, in fact, had ever spoken of the Gods with more audacity’’117—and immediately connects the severity of Lucretius’s condemnation of religio to his seriousness as a thinker: ‘‘This theology could impart joyous images to the always tender and facile imagination of Poets; but it could only wound the severe reason of a philosopher as sublime as Lucretius.’’118 Here, the effeminate and promiscuous tendencies that Polignac saw as an intrinsic part of the incorporation of Epicurean doctrine into the bodies of its readers are relegated to the camp of poetry, where facility is prized over substance (and truth). Panckoucke then goes on to outline the aim of his translation in the paragraph that follows: I have constructed this translation with all of the freedom that one must make use of, when one wishes to render an ancient and very obscure philosophy clear and intelligible: most of the people who read Lucretius seem only to care about the elegant descriptions, the various picturesque tableaux, and several moral maxims; it is these bits that they love to cite, but I thought it better to concentrate more on the basis of the ideas, on the body of the system. Lucretius should not be regarded as an author who is only pleasant and elegant, but as a profound and sublime Philosopher who holds the most general views on nature, who comes to terms with his object with one glance, and who deduces with much art and method the explanation of the phenomena and the principles that he has established.119

In this passage the distinction insisted upon by La Grange between Lucretius the philosopher and Lucretius the poet is rethought as a difference in reading strategies. The ‘‘body’’ that is the object of Panckoucke’s interest is the abstract corps of system itself, and if ‘‘art’’ is employed by Lucretius in the development of his method, it is in the service of an accurate description of corporeal phenomena, rather than in the production of them. Reading Lucretius for pleasure results in a fragmented, frivolous, disjointed understanding of the principles at stake in the text, an understanding driven by an interest in the precious display of ‘‘bits’’ for acclaim rather than in the synthetic comprehension of the project as a whole. The philosophical reader will read with disciplined systematicity, in full knowledge of the fact that the ‘‘truest’’ philosophy is that which succeeds in dissolving the very materi-

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ality of figure itself as the latter is presented in poetic description. As Panckoucke explains, ‘‘[truth] alone is eternal, immovable, clear, intelligible, and perhaps the attribute that serves to make it most easily recognizable, is that, as soon as it is present, it appears with so much clarity that there is no need either to point it out or to remark upon it.’’120 Truth stands outside of the process of designation itself, so that it is recognizable not by its substance, strictly speaking, but by its clarity. The matter of the written word (read by Lucretius as functioning analogously to the atomic corpora prima) disappears to pave the way for a fully transparent vision of philosophical authenticity. Panckoucke, in the critique of atomism that prefaces his translation, rejects entirely Lucretius’s notion of matter as the substantial embodiment of the principle of freedom. For Panckoucke, substance can only be understood as the site of a profound subjection, ‘‘because everything that is matter or a body is compelled and bound by necessary and unchangeable physical laws.’’121 This theorization of matter as at the very origin of the human experience of constraint has two important consequences. On the one hand, the free subject of philosophy becomes a dematerialized subject, so that truth may be localized either as perfectly substantial (‘‘I feel this’’) or as transparent yet perfectly discursive (‘‘It is known’’), with a firm separation between the realm of sensation and that of figuration. In Panckoucke’s terms, ‘‘the mind does not always follow the movements of the body, it does not share its circumstances.’’122 On the other hand, matter becomes less and less vulnerable to transmogrification by discursive means and thus comes to function as a genuine substratum, a degree zero beyond which no text can go. From this perspective, the more the human subject is understood as at least in part materially constituted (i.e., determined), the more crucial it is that the domain of matter remain recognizably distinct from that of discourse, particularly philosophical discourse, so that some freedom of judgment (situated, now, entirely within the text as a discursive product, rather than within the body of the reader as a material entity) may be preserved. Matter, accordingly, functions as a conservative principle, resisting change and systemic disruption. This placement of matter over and against free will spells the downfall of voluptas as a generatively philosophic force, but it also allows for a much greater tolerance where the production of ‘‘dangerous’’ texts is concerned. In keeping with the insistence on the separation of res and verba so fundamental to Panckoucke’s undertaking, it becomes possible to imagine a strong critique of the censorship of texts like De rerum natura stemming from their perceived or imagined effects, since these effects can now be consid-

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ered as either fully immaterial or merely as reflections of that which was already present to begin with. Censorship cannot in theory gain purchase on real experience as it is felt by embodied readers now that matter is understood as diverse, but not freely and actively productive in the same way that thought has become.123 In pursuing this line of argument, Panckoucke must deny the existence of the clinamen as an attribute of matter, since the notion of a freedom born in matter—not to mention pleasure as a response to this freedom—is untenable according to his definition of the nature of substance: ‘‘Nothing is more marked, more absolute, than the empire of the mind over matter.’’124 The voluptuous reader, from this perspective, is once again a figure of submission rather than an exemplar of autonomy. It certainly remains possible, in this view, to read a text and be overcome with the sensation of pleasure, but this pleasure is not philosophically meaningful as anything other than a sign of a gross misunderstanding of the very nature of representation. What becomes of the lyricism of Lucretian materialism according to this schema? We might expect that it would remain repressed, but in fact it merely loses its potency as an intervention in the construction of the perceiving subject. Panckoucke has very little use for the formal precision of the Lucretian poem: ‘‘It is this philosophical and systematic part that I have worked on with the most care; I have always dedicated myself particularly to giving the meaning rather than the terms, the ideas rather than the phrases.’’125 Panckoucke identifies the Lucretian tendency to repeat key concepts—part of the Epicurean ethic of memorization as a form of intimate attachment to the text—as a deplorable one: ‘‘I thus thought it best to do away with the repetitions, to abridge or to condense the ideas to render them with more clarity.’’126 He reads the ‘‘words’’ of the poem, taken in the form of a ‘‘flux,’’ as unfortunately deferring, to no real end, the development of philosophical thought; the lyric qualities of the text serve as so much extraneous matter to be swept aside in the pursuit of knowledge. In this way he prepares the ground for Le Blanc de Guillet’s failed attempt at a verse translation of De rerum natura. Once the poem is stripped to its bare bones as little more than an early entry in the ongoing history of the progress of materialism, it becomes more and more difficult to perceive the utility of its translations as contributions to enlightened science, particularly when the doctrine of atomic flux had already become an archaic one.127 The last translation of Lucretius’s poem to be undertaken in preRevolutionary France, Le Blanc de Guillet’s 1788 De la nature des choses, accordingly struggles with the difficulty of situating the Lucretian project

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within the enlightened context. ‘‘It is only tremblingly that we dare expose this Translation to eyes that are as enlightened as those of our Age,’’ begins Le Blanc de Guillet. ‘‘Never has the taste for Science been more widespread; never has the flame of reason, of experience, illumined a brighter day. It seems that it is not under such circumstances that one should reproduce ancient errors.’’128 At this particular historical moment, while Le Blanc de Guillet confirms the rise of empiricist science—in both popular and academic contexts—as an important sign of the spread of enlightenment in France, his deployment of tropes of ‘‘illumination’’ is not much more than a cliche´. His rhetoric is of interest, nonetheless, for the way in which it reveals the status of Lucretian doctrine as threatened, rather than shored up, by developments in scientific knowledge. According to Le Blanc de Guillet, with the growth of an interest in quasi-materialist scientific practice, a harsher light has been cast upon De rerum natura, which has taken its rightful place among a variety of competing systems, all more or less ‘‘believable,’’ but none meriting sustained attention on the part of discerning readers. Le Blanc de Guillet thus decides to focus his energies on rendering his translation in verse—‘‘this is what we based ourselves on in order not to abandon this enterprise’’129 —since the scientific value of the text seems to him difficult to pinpoint. He therefore accepts as given the distinction between poetry and philosophy that marks both Panckoucke’s and La Grange’s earlier efforts, and initially presents the poetic value of Lucretius’s effort in what might at first be read as almost Polignacian terms. Lucretius can be beautifully and delightfully persuasive, according to Le Blanc le Guillet, since he knows so well how to temper the inherent aridity of his topic with the formal pleasures of verse. As a result, ‘‘The enthusiasm of the Poet overtakes his reader, and the latter, amusing himself at the same time as he is instructed, neglects without perceiving it that which can only instruct without delighting.’’130 Nonetheless, unlike Polignac, Le Blanc de Guillet remains firmly convinced of the innocuous nature of the text in its relationship to readers. ‘‘We could not even fear that the Work would be dangerous,’’ he affirms.131 If there is no longer any reason to dread the effects of Lucretian doctrine on the unsuspecting, this is not only because, philosophically, Lucretian materialism has been revealed to be ‘‘of a completely revolting absurdity.’’132 As Le Blanc de Guillet discloses, ‘‘we see it only as it should be seen today, as a literary Production, more esteemed than known, and which merits it.’’133 Here Le Blanc de Guillet reveals first the self-evident quality of the separation between materialist science and poetic discourse as he conceives of

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them; the absurdity of Lucretian science, he affirms, should have absolutely no effect on our reading of the poetry. In this understanding of the split between figure and content he is far from alone. Dubos in his Re´flexions was already working his way toward this perspective, in claiming that the best judges of De rerum natura as a poetic object are those readers who respond to it sentimentally (rather than philosophically).134 What is notable about Le Blanc de Guillet’s formulation is the way in which he arrives at an understanding of the process of reading itself as potentially divorced from the materiality of either perception or sensation. De Guillet explains his position in a long footnote: How could a metaphysical system [be dangerous], of which few minds are in a condition to follow the developments and to grasp the consequences? The only Books I know that are truly dangerous and harmful to Society, are those that can inflame fiery passions before the moment that Nature prescribes, and render them more fiery after this moment. If some great harm has come to an Individual because of a Book, it is poor reasoning, or, which unhappily is all too possible, it is a sign of incredible bad faith, to say that, for this alone, the Book is to be condemned; because, on this principle, it would be necessary to condemn the Gospel, which has led so many Martyrs to the scaffold.135

In this note Le Blanc de Guillet delimits the category of ‘‘dangerous books’’ in what has become, for modern readers, a familiar fashion. Under the rubric of ‘‘truly dangerous Books’’ he appears to be including primarily pornographic texts—those volumes that can ignite the fires of lust in a way that may precede but nonetheless always mirrors the effects of nature. Pornography thus becomes, in this reading, the one domain where the conjunction of matter and discourse remains an active one. Voluptas, here portrayed as mechanical and even obscene, can have no material function vis-a`-vis either theory or poetry that is not somehow improper. De rerum natura, as a literary production, may elicit our measured approval (despite its self-evident absurdities), but it does not change the material configurations of our bodies as expressions of our subjective ‘‘natures.’’ To believe otherwise would be to fall into a particularly hypocritical trap (a mistake typical, as Le Blanc de Guillet suggests, of theologians). Importantly, any link between the materialist Lucretian project and the devout Polignacian one has now been fully obscured, since the very notion of the power of texts to sway readers is limned, by Le Blanc de Guillet, as illegitimately superstitious (and unenlightened) in origin.

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The fully orthodox subject and the authentically voluptuous reader of Lucretian materialism are miraculously reunited, in Le Blanc de Guillet’s discourse, as the remnants of an earlier and more credulous age. If Le Blanc de Guillet is arguing here in favor of a world in which literary texts would be allowed to escape regimes of censorship, he is doing so at the expense of a vision of materiality as itself incorporating, in its figures, the possibility of an exquisite and substantial liberty. Poetry may circulate freely, but it has momentarily lost its power to transform the matter of our experience, where figura is no longer a privileged form of pleasure. Voluptas and voluntas have been split apart, so that good readers give their assent before entering into the text, resist being carried away, and remember that their delight comes always at the expense of their (free) will. For La Grange, Panckoucke, and Le Blanc de Guillet, the experience of bodily pleasure implies a form of constraint to which the reasoned assent of the philosophic reader provides a privileged counterpoint. Where, for Lucretius, engagement with the materialist poem may free the reader precisely by making tangible the aleatory substance of our pleasures, for these late-Enlightenment critics, reading per se is framed as the potential locus of a different kind of ‘‘formal’’ enjoyment, one in which the body can participate only nugatorily, as a sign of the (eventually pornographic) submission of readers to the textual matter that they apprehend. In the eyes of Lucretius’s late-eighteenth-century French translators, the more material the human subject appears, the less materially engaging the process of reading becomes, so that materialism may gradually emerge as the study of the ‘‘real’’ bodies that the poetic text, at least, cannot hope to touch in any authentically transfigurative way. Lucretius’s poem, in this context, serves as a kind of test case, but not in the sense that its reception should be read as an index of increasing secularism. Instead, De rerum natura, so long viewed as seductively conversive in its physiological effects, comes to function as a crucial site for the production of a reader whose ‘‘material’’ experience is no longer shaped fundamentally by acts of reading—no longer dispersed among and through these processes. Where philosophy is not endowed with the power to move us through enjoyment, pleasure comes to be located somewhere beyond the capacity to reflect and to consent. And with the demise of the atom as a free figure, inspiring voluptuous delight both in its form and in its motion, comes the demise of figural language as an explicitly material force.

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2.

Reading for Pleasure in the French Enlightenment: The Self-Possessed Reader and the Decline of Voluptas

Old, very old tradition: hedonism was repressed by almost all philosophies; one finds the call to hedonism only in the work of those who are marginal, Sade, Fourier; for Nietzsche himself, hedonism is a form of pessimism.1 —Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte

The power of Lucretius to incite the passions of his readers seems to be on the wane in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In presenting to a cultivated audience a Lucretius stripped of his intimately suasive force, the translations of De rerum natura that appear in the 1760s reflect a significant transformation in Enlightenment understandings of the ways in which relationships between bodies and texts—both poetic and philosophic—should be ordered. Increasingly, attempts both to legitimate sensory pleasure, as one means of apprehending the world, and to regulate the engagement of readers with the written word, as a technique for shaping human subjectivity, come to revolve around the notion of self-possession. The model of the self-possessed reader—as opposed to that of the Lucretian voluptuary—is one that explicitly excludes voluptas as the proper outcome of reflection and casts suspicion on the power of figura to intervene significantly in the experience of the reading subject. While self-possessed readers may react with enjoyment to a text, they are no longer susceptible to contagious contamination by voluptuous delight. With the advent of self-possession as a legitimating mode of reading, the groundwork is laid for the decline of voluptas as a privileged, if heavily contested, site for the encounter of literature and materialist philosophy during the eighteenth century. This chapter, in analyzing how Enlightenment debates around reading also constitute speculations on the proper role of pleasure in shaping human perceptions, investigates the development of the discourse of self-possession as a powerful response to the troubling possibilities raised by the invocation of voluptas as a form of reading that insistently connects the philosophical and the figural. 59

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1. Reading dangerous books: libertine texts and Lucretian pleasures In the eyes of many Enlightenment readers, Epicurean philosophy and libertine practice intermittently intersect in the perilous act of reading for pleasure. For critics of the ‘‘mauvais livre,’’ the licentious novel and the irreligious treatise engage in a joint project of perverse conversion that finds its most compelling formulation in Epicurean doctrine. As the bishop of Chaˆlons describes this double strategy of seduction on the part of impious authors, ‘‘Some of them, in licentious writings, flatter the imagination of corrupt youth, & insinuate impiety with voluptuousness; others, with writings that seem to exude nothing by humanity and good will, deceive honest souls.’’2 According to the Bishop, because the category of dangerous books encompasses a variety of genres, including ‘‘serious’’ as well as ‘‘frivolous’’ texts, all readers should consider themselves threatened by this wide-ranging campaign to win them over. He proceeds to characterize the atheist project as materializing at the moment of two specific conjunctions. First, he suggests, ‘‘licentious books’’ stage the production of pleasure as a function of its theorization. In its investigation of ‘‘man, his nature, his freedom, the passions that rip him apart, the necessary longings of which he is ashamed,’’ this ‘‘dreadful philosophy’’ succeeds in reproducing and disseminating these ‘‘passions’’ and ‘‘longings’’ through communities of readers.3 Second, the diffusion of these nefarious ideas works through the amalgamation of literature and philosophy in diverse images of sensual delight. ‘‘Ultimately,’’ writes the Bishop, ‘‘there are hardly any works published that can be read without danger, and religion has almost as many enemies, as the world of literature has philosophers; and since the corruption of the human heart does not make these pernicious works appealing enough, they are ornamented with everything that can heighten their seductiveness . . . and scandalous tableaux are strewn there in great profusion.’’4 Although the bishop recognizes the importance—indeed, the necessity—of philosophy per se— the ‘‘pernicious works’’ to which he refers are to be condemned because, rather than perfecting man’s nature, they ‘‘pretend to give man his freedom, in offering him no other guide, than the law of his passions.’’5 Such a law reenacts, in its transmission, the pleasures that it recommends. The reading of these books represents a ‘‘delight,’’ a form of ‘‘glory,’’ and a ‘‘seduction’’ in itself, and all this before the lessons are ‘‘applied’’ in the world by a reader.6 While materialist philosophy as it is rendered here and elsewhere is, like the symptoms of libertinage, both ubiquitous and dispersed—everywhere vis-

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ible and still difficult to pin down—De rerum natura nonetheless tends to serve as its locus classicus. According to Benoıˆt Sinsart in the 1756 antimaterialist treatise entitled Recueil de pense´es diverses sur l’immate´rialite´ de l’aˆme, Lucretius remains the ‘‘oracle of materialists’’7 who have ‘‘embraced . . . the system of Epicurus.’’8 Sinsart’s response to what he sees as the increasing dissemination of materialist writings is, like that of the Bishop, an unequivocal one: ‘‘May this horrible philosophy, which only works to plunge us into the most dangerous of errors, perish forever!’’9 And if the Lucretian heritage is, in the words of Sinsart, an attachment to ‘‘volupte´’’ as ‘‘the only good toward which one should progress ceaselessly,’’ the libertine novel is the symptomatic literary performance of this commitment.10 Just as, in the invocation to Venus, Lucretius places at the center of his philosophical project the conversion of his reader to an earthly ethic of voluptas, the romanciers libertins (and their critics) regularly remind their readers of the inflammatory possibilities that lie latent in the about-to-be-opened novel. (The honeyed coating of Lucretian doctrine becomes here the flame that sets readers of the libertine novel afire.) Moreover, Lucretian philosophy has in common with libertine literature an interest in the reading subject—or, indeed, the subject tout court—as rigorously externalized. The libertine, under the device ‘‘larvatus prodeo,’’ is preoccupied with the construction and perpetuation of an artificial self, a concatenation of masks or masking gestures that facilitate the seduction and mastery of an other.11 The Lucretian philosopher, similarly enjoined to resist love as a form of ideological mystification, understands the matter of the self as, at least at the level of the atom, impenetrable—so that it is the outward flux of atomic bodies (rather than the inward trajectory of self-examination) that holds the key to the secret of experience. Materialists and libertines abandon the search for truth as a means to ‘‘satisfy the heart.’’12 Instead, they attend, idolatrously, to the movements of the body. Their works prefigure the turn to dissipation as an evaporation of the subject: a burning up or dissolution of bodily matter in the pleasure of readers. Thus, ‘‘Materialism and libertinage respond to one another.’’13 Eighteenth-century critics of ‘‘dangerous books’’ attest at length to the threat posed by the interweaving of the material body with figura—a connection that takes place at the intersection of libertine literature and materialist—or, more specifically, Epicurean—philosophy. And it is in the reiterated production of volupte´—as theory and practice—that this doubled strategy of contagion is commonly represented as locating its beginnings. The conflation of the pornographic and the philosophic (or scientific), evoked in the category of ‘‘livres philosophiques,’’ reflects, for writers like the

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bishop of Chaˆlons, not necessarily a shared subject matter (in that ‘‘frivolous’’ and ‘‘serious’’ books may speak of different things) but a shared emphasis on readerly pleasures as the key to a shift in the organization of subjectivity. Readers of ‘‘bad books’’ move from virtuous to vicious, soul to body, and heart to mask in their pursuit of enjoyment.14 Yet, while critics of ‘‘mauvais livres’’ tend to imagine this common aim as constitutive of the discourse of materialism generally, the conceptualization of libertine ‘‘pleasure-reading’’ as a significant intervention in the production of a larger materialist philosophical project remains relatively specific to the time, a generic phenomenon now seen as particularly representative of the eighteenth century.15 The kind of seductive textual delight that the bishop of Chaˆlons characterizes as a typical effect of the consumption of materialist philosophy, for instance, is scrupulously guarded against in the late-Enlightenment materialism of the baron d’Holbach, who writes with some disdain of those thinkers who ‘‘prefer the delirium of their imagination and their gratuitous conjectures to laborious experiments, which would alone be capable of extracting nature’s secrets from her.’’16 The bishop’s fulminations notwithstanding, eighteenth-century France does not in fact witness the phenomenon that he describes in his Lettre as imminent: namely, the lasting triumph of a materialist discourse wherein libertine or obscene literature, empiricist science, and materialist philosophy are conjoined in the collective attempt to stimulate readers. The individual specificity of these various discursive fields instead tends to increase, rather than decrease, as the century proceeds, and the question of readerly ‘‘affect,’’ for philosophers and scientists, begins to translate as a primarily aesthetic problem (rather than as a crucial element in the production of philosophical writing, for instance).17 The Epicurean pleasure-reader, for whom voluptas as a mode of dangerously transfigurative poetic experience remains inexorably connected to the theorization of pleasure as materialist object, continually loses ground, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to a subject who understands the act of reading as one aimed at self-discovery or self-consolidation, and corporeal pleasure as a fixed or inherent set of responses rather than as a textually engaged condition.18 Reading, in the terms of this developing perspective, is instrumentalized as a means to develop a ‘‘proper’’ sense of self. As I will show in what follows, both ‘‘enlightened’’ readers and more conservative commentators like the bishop participate equally in the general movement away from voluptuous engagement with figure and toward a model of reading based in acts of sympathetic yet judicious appreciation—often of character rather than of poetic language per se.

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The classically materialist perspective on reading—criticized as ‘‘dangerous’’ for its roots in an Epicurean fascination with voluptas as an enduringly philosophical concept—is subject to regular disavowal in the theories of the reader that, as Natalie Ferrand has shown, multiply in France in the 1760s (at the same time that the translations of Lucretius discussed in the last chapter begin to appear). Furthermore, this gradual exclusion of voluptas from new ways of thinking about the act of reading during the Enlightenment, in favor of an interiorized model of self-possessed appreciation, is matched by a transformation in ideas about pleasure more generally. In the midst of attacks on materialism as enabling the dissemination of voluptas across genres and populations, the concept of voluptuous pleasure becomes more frequently coded as defining a natural yet essentially unphilosophical condition—a ‘‘feeling’’ that derives from generic bodily experience. The infectious properties of voluptas can thus be neutralized within a discourse of regularized disinterestedness that requires an abstraction of the reader from the text as the governing condition of enjoyment. The sensation of voluptuous pleasure, while still potentially dissipative or distracting, becomes incommunicable by virtue of its primary identification with the brute matter of an unreflective body. Voluptas may still be felt, yet is no longer subject to transmission through figuration (at least where ‘‘good’’ readers are concerned). Presupposing as it does the continuous and in no way selfconscious fascination of a specifically embodied subject with the substance of perception, voluptas is thereby transformed, by the end of the century, into the least philosophical of pleasures. The question of how best to regulate and define the act of reading, as it occurs across genres and communities, is raised repeatedly in a series of essays that appear in France in the second half of the eighteenth century.19 Louis-Se´bastien Mercier’s Discours sur la lecture (1764) and Louis BollioudMermet’s Essai sur la lecture (1765) both represent attempts to outline reading techniques at least nominally applicable to an impressively wide spectrum of possible readers.20 Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet stress the ubiquity of print matter—‘‘this flood that threatens today to drown the human spirit’’21— alongside the expansion of reading publics, and in so doing situate their treatises in the context of a modern print culture overrun by books and distinguished by a new promiscuity of taste. ‘‘Taste is not arbitrary,’’ writes Mercier, ‘‘but it has become so in this century.’’22 Despite their differences in tone—Mercier tends toward gravity where Bollioud-Mermet opts for a lighter and more immediately engaging style—the two authors jointly present the question of definition, where the effects of reading are concerned,

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as a particularly urgent one for their contemporaries. If reading has an everlarger role to play in revealing what Mercier refers to as ‘‘the innate right of nature,’’ its techniques must be made subject to regularization.23 For both of these authors, the act of reading is at once the site of great individual freedom—each reader ‘‘taking a book, sits at his ease as if at a tribunal’’24 — and a moment when the character, mind, and ‘‘heart’’ of this reader are made precariously available for marking or inscription by the thought of another. The reading process thus takes place at a crux of sorts, a moment when readers as conscious subjects may either become more vividly recognizable to themselves as a result of their activity or slip into a state of intense ‘‘distraction,’’ overcome by an inability to acknowledge and regulate the proper boundaries of the self. Looking outward toward their reading matter, readers continuously reexamine and reshape what they may find within themselves.25 Reading is closely connected for these two authors to the project of developing a subject—a self-possessed individual in whom social duty and intimate acts of reflection (‘‘me´ditation’’) may meaningfully and powerfully intersect. Their essays match narratives of individual development with prescriptive advice for a more general public, and both authors put the greatest possible pressure on the question of ‘‘instruction’’ by imagining a young man, of ‘‘an age where reason is not yet entirely formed,’’ as the ideal recipient of their guidance.26 This figure is shown hovering between youth and adulthood, on the point of acquiring both a character and an occupation— ‘‘a softened wax,’’ as Bollioud-Mermet writes, ‘‘ready to take on the form that one wishes to impress upon it.’’27 The young man must be taught, then, not so much to respond to what he reads, as to make proper use of his reading material in an attempt, first, to divulge the ‘‘truth’’ of his nature to himself, and, then, to consolidate this newly discovered subjectivity as unchanging but active in the world—able to engage in acquisition (of knowledge, judgment, or taste) while nonetheless remaining somehow the same. The successful accomplishment of this trajectory depends at every step on the strict management of pleasure as an effect that must be subordinated to the careful manipulation of the book for the specific profit of readers who seek to make what they read intimately their own—to suck the marrow from each volume, to invoke the terms of Bollioud-Mermet. While the act of reading is initially transfigurative for readers in that it serves as a catalyst for the emergence of a fully consolidated subject into the arena of public life, it can only do so as a result of engendering toward the myriad pleasures

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of the text a position of objective disinterestedness—an appreciation for the general utility of reading as first and foremost a means of repetitively legitimizing the authoritative judgment of the self-conscious individual. In the form of a ‘‘secret conversation’’ [entretien secret], a phrase used to great effect by both authors in their portrayals of the relationships binding readers to text, reading gradually reveals reading subjects to themselves as objects, in order that they might more fully master and lay claim to their selves. When pleasure occurs for these readers, it is reliably symptomatic— discreetly but systematically managed by a reason that is invested with the abstracted power of regulation. While these readers may indeed enter with delight into the perspectives or even the feelings of the authors whose works they read, they must do so only in order to confirm the power of the reading subject to recognize itself in the labor of others. (Sentimental identification may thus be permitted readers who make use of it to affirm the legitimacy of their interests; proper readers will be able to select the locus of identifications correctly, according to ‘‘nature,’’ in order to rediscover themselves fully in the representation of others.28) Good readers’ carefully planned excursions across the topography of others’ minds—‘‘reading regulated according to our duties or our instruction’’29 —may serve to expand the territory of their worldly knowledge, but these excursions must ultimately return them to a sense of their own independence. Moreover, the charms of pleasure-reading, where readers are easily distracted from themselves, should be understood as divorced from the rigors of acquiring knowledge, since the latter can only be the outcome of a process of reasoned self-mastery. Poetry and fiction must accordingly be strictly policed—not for a generic ability to reveal too much, but for a tendency to subject what is natural to alteration through discursive depiction. These genres intervene in the natural order, rather than objectifying it. While engagement with these and other figural modes of writing including literature is not forbidden ideal readers, such engagement is always, like pleasure, excessive by virtue of the easiness of its appeal. It is not part of the training of the subject to self-knowledge, even while enjoyment of figure may remain a ‘‘natural’’ human characteristic. If the individual is properly self-aware, the turn to figure serves primarily as a kind of momentary suspension of the subject—a brief relaxation of discipline that confirms the excessiveness of such appreciation where reason is concerned. Delight does no real good precisely by doing no harm. The philosophical pleasures of voluptas, in the meantime, have lost both their honeyed sweetness and their sting.

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2. Mercier’s Discours sur la lecture: revealing a primitive independence Mercier’s essay, with its Rousseauist overtones, is marked by a certain suspicion vis-a`-vis the potential effects of reading, despite his acknowledgment, with a quote from Cicero, that ‘‘books are constantly with us.’’30 He does not share Bollioud-Mermet’s relatively unguarded enthusiasm for an act that the latter initially characterizes as ‘‘the sweetest bond, and the one most necessary to society.’’31 Mercier’s extreme reluctance to appear to endorse what he sees as the excessively voracious consumption of print matter in eighteenth-century culture is immediately evident in the caution with which he poses his introductory questions: ‘‘Does reading perfect the human spirit, does it nourish genius more than reflection, is it useful, is it harmful? This is what I propose to examine.’’32 The reliability of reading as a mechanism of perfectibility depends for Mercier on the willingness of readers to discover an essentially prediscursive self in the course of their encounters with an array of texts chosen in part for their lack of infringement on the ‘‘primitive freedom’’ of the individual.33 In keeping with Mercier’s emphasis on the cultivation of an ideal of interiority and transparency in the act of reading, ‘‘la lecture’’ is defined from the outset of the essay as based around ‘‘a secret conversation, that we hold with a man who is more experienced or more amiable than we, with the goal of instructing or delighting ourselves.’’34 While this invocation of dulce et utile is admittedly a conventional one, the stress laid on the ‘‘secrecy’’ of the interchange between reader and author is a marker of the extent to which what is at stake for the reader is the principle of what Mercier calls elsewhere ‘‘independence.’’35 To read properly entails first cultivating a sense of autonomous singularity— grounded in the manifestation of an internalized natural law (‘‘law of nature’’36)—that will allow readers to take their proper place within a public arena where this singularity might otherwise be threatened by the heady confluence of objects, discourses, and individuals characteristic of ancien re´gime social life. Mercier describes the desired trajectory in the following fashion: ‘‘It is necessary for each one of us to know himself and to know those who are like him, to understand the ties that bind us to society, to be aware of our duties and to fulfill them.’’37 For Mercier, the legitimate task of the book is to reveal, without modifying, the ‘‘original genius’’ of the reader.38 Books are dangerous precisely because they may intervene forcefully to alter this ‘‘primitive trait.’’39 Reading has the power to ‘‘change our natural character,’’ writes Mercier, ‘‘& this

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evil is very great, because one is good only in oneself.’’40 The kind of continual metamorphosis that the critics of ‘‘mauvais livres’’ deplore—where reading becomes a primary scene of communication and infection—is also the subject of intense prohibition by Mercier, who proposes regular periods of contemplative meditation as a corrective to reading-induced distraction. Even though reading may expose us to an array of perspectives and experiences, it is the constant task of readers to recognize themselves in what they read, as subjects whose defining quality should be understood as preceding all textual intervention. Any deviation from this labor is strictly policed. Thus, ‘‘The lack of all reading matter is no doubt harmful, but it is one hundred times less so than this blind urge to open a thousand pamphlets and to take on all the misguided ways that they praise.’’41 In the second part of the essay, dedicated to a discussion of reading technique, Mercier explains how the impressionable young man to whom he addresses his advice might arrive at a sense of self-mastery that is also a sense of ‘‘identity’’ or self-sameness: I would like to do away with those pitiful barriers that prevent the flight of genius, to give back to it its primitive freedom and natural independence. I would like to proscribe that useless and embarrassing science, that science of words that tries to pass as true science. I would like to accustom the young man early on to the exercise of his own strengths, to teach him to choose among that immense crowd of books of every color and every species, only those that can truly instruct him; to save him precious time, to spare him dangerous readings. I would like to inspire in him the courage to ignore that which he can only know by imposing on his mind a burden that is of much less use in life than it is for the practice of vain ostentation. Thus, full of respect for human knowledge, which makes up our glory, my goal is to give him the key to it, to guide him along the way, so that he can distinguish in a glance that which is proper for him and that which is not, relative to his taste and to his duties.42

If reading as a discrete process produces a kind of freedom, here, it is the freedom to articulate a stable subjectivity through repeated acts of distinction among textual objects. ‘‘Advanced’’ readers will be able to identify almost instantaneously their proper relationship to any given set of arguments, subjects, or writerly techniques. In a more general sense, this practice of triage—where individual preferences and duties eventually become so clearly demarcated that books may be judged in a ‘‘glance’’—helps return readers to an autonomy that is, somewhat paradoxically, always innate and

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pretextual. Reading, far from being based in a moment of conversion or transformation where the readers intimately experience themselves as literally moved in their substance by the text, is founded in the ability to judge for oneself, where the separation between self and a futile ‘‘science of words’’ is paramount. As Mercier points out later on, good readers should be careful to follow the perusal of texts with periods of meditative reflection, since ‘‘Reading inspires in us the wit of others, reflection gives us back our own. The man who has read, speaks; the man who has reflected, thinks.’’43 If reading is the arena where the self exercises its mastery, each encounter with texts nonetheless poses the threat of distraction—an instant of forgetting—against which private moments of reflection may function as a necessary prophylactic. Good reading techniques—as opposed to ‘‘bad books’’—are accordingly founded on the preservation of a rigorous disjunction between discursive and natural domains—a rupture that makes of each text an opportunity for readers to demonstrate their ongoing attachment to the propriety and authority of a natural, sentimental order that is both outside of language and the only legitimate object of writing. ‘‘The best writer,’’ confirms Mercier, ‘‘is not he who surprises us; it is he who seems to put before our eyes that which was hidden in the folds of our soul.’’44 As readers develop, they learn to position the autonomous exercise of their judgment in relationship to a larger framework governed by a constant and universal natural law. Their singular rationality thus takes on meaning and is authorized as one possible expression of the interdependence of ‘‘nature and sentiment’’—an interdependence that may be reenacted in books, but predates the latter’s participation in human experience.45 Although they should also imitate nature, the best books provide an occasion for the demonstration of the primacy and enduring vigor of that which is natural. ‘‘It is not enough that a fiction should be touching,’’ claims Mercier, ‘‘it must have a hold on truth: it can never alter the nature from which it is derived.’’46 Mercier presents the relationship of the book to a reader’s self-formation as governed by a logic of rediscovery, where the function of reading is not so much the positive one of configuring the relationship of the reader to a world beyond the text as the negative one of ensuring that the reader gradually come to an awareness of the gulf between books, constantly proliferating, and the self, naturally consolidated in the objectifying act of rational judgment. As Mercier describes this movement: There is an age where reason is not yet formed; where, just out of infancy, a young man goes down an accidental path. His mind should follow the

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Reading for Pleasure in the French Enlightenment 69 informed guide that his readings prescribe for him. These books are necessary to him, because he does not possess a judgment that weighs and decides, this taste, this necessary curb on an ardent and unregulated imagination, this capacity that is the happy gift of a more advanced age; it is thus time to study models and to follow the lessons of his masters. But when reason has arrived at the moment when it shines with its own brightness, when his soul is developed, he is then as he will one today appear to be: he should move forward, he has the right to listen to what his reason tells him, to approve what it asserts, to rectify what it condemns, to submit for his own examination that which others have examined and decided before him. This privilege is the most lovely that a thinking being can have, & if he goes astray, at least he will have walked on his own; he will retrace his steps, if his heart is true; he should find the path of truth without help, or this truth will be useless to him.47

We read, then, in order to learn to free ourselves from the tyranny of the text. Books should ultimately teach us how to do without the services that they render us, services that threaten to destabilize our sense of the absolute priority of an objective and nondiscursive world in eliciting judgment, sympathy, and action. In keeping with this sense of the superfluity of the written word for the ‘‘thinking being,’’ Mercier, throughout the essay, remains as fascinated by projects of elimination—the burning of books, the decimation of vast libraries, the depiction of semiliterate or illiterate societies—as he does by notions of reading as a form of self-cultivation. ‘‘Let us advance again, and without fear that we are daring too much, banish boldly [from our library] everything that is false or too detailed.’’48 In effect, Mercier performs, in the reiterated narrating of acts of rigorous selection among volumes, the same independence from the text that he privileges as a sign of the very best readers. Good reading is predicated on instances of recognition, not transformation, of the discerning self. It is in the context of this continuously reinforced principle of separation—where nature is never to be subjected to discursive modification or intervention—that Mercier’s interest in procedures of sentimental identification should be understood. Within the framework of the strictly regulated divide between reader and reading matter, sentimental readers may yet respond to what they read through identification—with a character, a turn of phrase, or an authorial voice—but only in order to confirm the inevitable logic of the return to self-possession. This is why it is more desirable, from Mercier’s perspective, not to read at all than it is to read too much, since

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excessive reading may threaten to exhaust the reader’s strength and thereby entail the haphazard dispersal of the reader’s affective responses across a variety of potentially inappropriate figures.49 ‘‘Better to suffice unto ourselves,’’ he writes, ‘‘than to put ourselves in danger of only seeing through the eyes of others: that we be proud of a wise ignorance, & seek only that which is naturally and inalterably beautiful and good.’’50 The experience of sentimental identification, rather than being the prerogative of the novice reader, functions as the outcome of a process of training wherein readers must learn to recognize that which is truly—or rather, naturally—their own. In fact, Mercier concludes his treatise with a laudatory invocation of the reader whose heart ‘‘becomes touched and inflamed by the narrative of a generous action,’’ as if to imply that the pleasures of this type of sensory response represent the well-deserved reward of the student who correctly executes the program that has just been laid out.51 But this moment of ‘‘tenderness’’ is nonetheless the final proof of a readerly virtue that is innate and not the product of books themselves. If ‘‘one only finds in the work what is already in oneself,’’ as Mercier affirms at the very beginning of the essay, the act of identificatory reading always works primarily as a reiterated gesture of selfconsolidation—a momentary testing of the abstracted power of the reading subject that shores up the legitimacy of its boundaries. This means that any given reader’s capacity for comprehension and thus identification is always already inscribed in a natural order that will be not so much altered through exposure to texts as made more salient—more readily objectified—by this exposure. As a result, for those who are lacking in ‘‘innate taste,’’ the game is lost before it has begun. In the books that Mercier recommends, ‘‘There are a thousand qualities that only reveal themselves to a beautiful soul, to a sensitive man, who is morally disposed toward virtue.’’52 Ultimately, for the sentimental reader, gifted with a ‘‘beautiful soul,’’ the moment of identification becomes a confirmation of the eminent visibility of nature’s sublime goodness and thus of the absolute contingency of language, always in excess of this visibility. Reading renders the natural order perceptible to readers, but does so as a result of the thoroughgoing instrumentalization of that which is read, so that the role of the book is to become, in effect, a symbol of its own superfluity. The development of a mature reason should eventually work to make the mediating function of the text unnecessary: ‘‘That which reflection does not produce in an instant, cannot be produced in whole months; reflection is luminous and rapid, it compares and combines with speed, or it remains buried in the clouds that obscure it.’’53

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It makes sense, then, that Mercier remains extremely concerned, throughout the essay, with strategies of reading that seem to threaten the instrumentality of the text. If the book no longer functions as a means, but as an end in itself, the separation between reader and reading matter upon which ‘‘useful reading’’ depends becomes destabilized. Pleasure-reading menaces the formation of a stable self as a function of the discerning deployment of reason. The very desire to read for pleasure, where the book is held up as an endless source of delight, implies the possibility of a problematic contiguity linking reader to text. From Mercier’s perspective, the book may be a contingent locus of enjoyment, in that pleasure may be the accidental by-product of instances of self-recognition, but it must not operate as a primary stimulus in and of itself. The act of reading for pleasure, then, should itself be fully objectified as a condition of self-mastery. Any book that aims to produce pleasure as the privileged sign of its consumption must be perused with extreme self-consciousness. Mercier sees the French nation as a whole as providing a handy example of the difficulties that befall readers who have lost their self-possession to the charms of an enchantingly pleasant style—charms embodied in a writerly technique that aims only to please. Rather than exhibiting a voluntary love of truth, ‘‘The French are all, more or less, enslaved by words: we only ask today for terms that are sweet, fluid, for grace and softness in our language, as if we had to put into song all the verses in our tongue.’’54 Where pleasure dominates, language ‘‘enslaves’’ the reader, in an inversion of the natural order. Pleasure may be a symptom of the act of reading, but it cannot be its impetus, when the goal of the reader is self-discovery. One of the consequences of this point of view is that the experience of enjoyment slowly becomes fully separated from the analysis of this enjoyment; pleasure taken in the text is set against knowledge of the self with the latter prioritized as establishing the value of the activity undertaken by the reader. If pleasure in the act of reading—without objectification or instrumentalization of the book as somehow ‘‘applicable’’ to experience— militates against self-mastery, the production of sustained enjoyment as the desired outcome of reading can no longer be simultaneous with ‘‘reflection’’ or meditation as gestures of self-consolidation. More and more, the only legitimately instructive pleasures become those of objectification itself. Thus, ‘‘if the study of science does not elevate all characters, it perhaps becomes for the majority the first, the truest, and the most solid of pleasures.’’55 A self-possessed appreciation for useful knowledge is set up against what appears to be a narcotized delight in language. An excessive fascination with

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the (superfluous) text is moreover the sign of a failure to take a symptomatic enjoyment in the scrutability of nature as an object of study: ‘‘Lazy sybarites, who fear the bother of the lightest form of reflection, who develop a spirit of nostalgia, will you always need books to amuse and distract you in your indolence? You peruse them nonchalantly, & you neglect the most beautiful of all, that of nature!’’56 While the attitude expressed here seems to depend upon the devalorization of all representation as a form of ‘‘distraction,’’ it also results in the privileging of certain styles of writing—and certain readers’ responses—across a hierarchy of genres. If philosophical or scientific reading delivers the most ‘‘substantial’’ pleasures as a consequence of its utility, the delights of sentimental identification presuppose the rigorous policing of reader response to ensure that the proper forms of recognition will take place as a precondition of appreciation. While, in the first mode, the book is instrumentalized for the sake of applicability, in the second, it is the very person of the reader that must be fixed in place—‘‘naturally’’ identifiable as the beginning and end of feeling. For the critics of ‘‘mauvais livres’’ with whom this essay begins, the Epicurean ethic of voluptas, as it is textually transmitted to eighteenth-century readers, is grounded in the privileging of readerly delight, the dangerous commingling of body and word, the blurring of generic distinctions, and the nonobjectification of the book. The figure of Mercier’s self-possessed reader is established upon sustained and conscious resistance to all of these principles. The ‘‘secret conversation’’ of which reading is meant to consist, for Mercier, is based in the precise situating of the singular ‘‘nature’’ of the reader as at once a prediscursive reality and an objectifiable abstraction. In reading, ‘‘One interrogates authors, but these authors have spoken relative to their views, to their prejudices, to the circumstances in which they find themselves; one runs the risk of espousing, without wanting to, the little passions that dominate them.’’57 ‘‘Good’’ readers must therefore be inoculated against infection by the ‘‘little’’ authorial preoccupations that reduce the encounter with the text to an experience of flux and intersubjective movement. Readerly singularity, identified by Mercier as ‘‘natural,’’ only takes on legitimacy when it is positioned within and subsumed by a set of universal laws—in other words, when it is axiologically stabilized. ‘‘Listen rather to those who walk in silence toward the peaceful flame of reason, . . . who, compassionate like Socrates, sweet & firm, great & simple, show us what we are, console us, teach us our duties, and reveal to us the goal of our being.’’58 Pleasure, in this system, must always offer itself as subject to potential censure, even when it is ‘‘naturally’’ symptomatic of a refined or

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heightened sensibility. Mercier describes poetry, for instance, as ‘‘too attractive not to hide some danger,’’ and insistently cautions the modern reader against the idolatrous charms of a more purely figural language.59 Poetry, while intrinsically different from philosophy in its capacity as ‘‘too touching to be refused,’’ must remain under the surveillance of reason: ‘‘Unhappy is the lot of the poet who is not a philosopher.’’60 By this Mercier emphatically does not mean that the projects of poetry and philosophy ought to resemble one another. He has already established that the disappearance of generic distinctions is a sign of moral corruption, where ‘‘different genres overstep their limits imperceptibly,’’ and ‘‘we adopt brilliant futilities out of disgust.’’61 Instead, he reads philosophy as providing a necessary check on poetry’s ability to enchant the reader, since poetry works not through the instrumentalization of language, but, on the contrary, by means of its titillating deployment as a kind of ‘‘charm.’’ For poets in particular, then, ‘‘the sweetness, the amenities, the graces of their style, should reflect their thoughts, as lively as they are strong, and as strong as they are true.’’62 In the curriculum that forms the conclusion to the essay, Mercier takes care to begin (characteristically) with a series of exclusions. He pictures a man confronted by an enormous library, a solitary reader overwhelmed by an endless availability of printed materials. In response to this image of one reader’s helplessness, Mercier proposes that even this massive agglomeration of knowledge—these ‘‘literary abysses’’—can be reduced to a mere handful of books without a significant loss for the eager student of humankind.63 He first dismisses nearly all of metaphysics—‘‘Flee these profound studies’’— and most historical writing as tortuous, nontransparent, and unintelligible from a ‘‘reasonable’’ perspective. If his ideal readers are to limit themselves to texts that will not ‘‘tyrannize’’ them, they would do well to confine themselves to the perusal of those ‘‘elementary books, that lend themselves to reflection.’’64 Poetry and literature may be too intrinsically adorable to exclude entirely from consideration, but these genres nonetheless pose serious risks to the readers whom they solicit. ‘‘Give yourself up to its seductive charms, but do not abandon yourself.’’65 While ‘‘amiable poets are made for beguiling us in our leisure,’’ readers must be careful to keep a safely analytical distance from the materiality of poetic language, with its enchanting and enfeebling powers: ‘‘May their brilliant and animated expressions not mislead you.’’66 Similarly, novels that depart from verisimilitude to explore the domain of the extraordinary are to be avoided at all costs. In their insistence on the representation of fantastical images, they too ‘‘impose’’ too much on the readers’ obligation to find within themselves an internalized truth—a

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form of wisdom most susceptible to revelation through meditation. The discipline of physics, on the other hand, is singled out for special praise by Mercier: ‘‘Nothing expands the human mind, nothing gives us a more magnificent notion of the author of nature, than examination of the admirable laws that govern his august works.’’67 Nature as abstracted object of knowledge makes a worthy subject of study, and the physical sciences furnish readers with an exemplary model of the application of reason to the world, submitted ready-packaged for inspection. But the most legitimate use of writing—as well as the ultimate reward delivered up to ‘‘good’’ readers—is to be found in works that delineate the authentic moral character of humankind. Under the sign of self-mastery, the careful appreciation of these texts allows readers to emerge from the restricted confines of their shifting passions to gaze upon themselves as if upon a well-ordered landscape. First and foremost, the desired outcome of reading should be construed as the instrumentalization of a precise yet deconcretized idea of the ‘‘natural’’ self— revealed in texts, but unalterable and hence inalienable through them: ‘‘He often does not himself know what he is: reflection teaches it to him . . . the mind seizes more than he can see; his sight becomes too feeble for his intelligence, which takes flight and glides freely: nothing stops it.’’68

3. Bollioud-Mermet and the marketplace of ideas Where Mercier’s fundamental suspicion of the excesses of the written word leads him to question the utility of reading as always a potentially unnatural act, Bollioud-Mermet has no such qualms. His Essai sur la lecture is also an e´loge to a pleasure that, in Bollioud-Mermet’s terms at least, is universally shared. ‘‘Everyone reads,’’ he writes.69 His attitude toward the readerly enjoyment of any given text thus appears much more flexible—and, in his emphasis on literacy as a general social good, more recognizably modern— than does Mercier’s. But, while Bollioud-Mermet is more tolerant of pleasure-reading as a common practice than is Mercier, the former’s acceptance of this social fact is predicated upon a demonstration of the power of any given text to produce symptomatic responses in the reader as considerably muted. The act of reading, for Bollioud-Mermet, is inscribed within a practice of free exchange among authors and readers—‘‘a commerce in ideas and sentiments.’’70 Bollioud-Mermet’s attachment to reading as, by and large, a sign of human progress is based upon a strict hierarchy of reading practices, where reading for ‘‘simple relaxation’’ is sharply distinguished from ‘‘serious study.’’71 The latter provides the basis for both the advancement of science

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and the cultivation of ethical behavior, but, if this kind of reading makes possible the triumph of knowledge over ignorance, it does so at the expense of the capacity of print to intervene forcefully and unpredictably in the perceptions of the judicious reader. In the second section of the essay, where Bollioud-Mermet outlines his proposed cursus, he portrays the relationship of readers to the book as defined by a principle of autonomy. Reading, in this context, can and should be exercised for the pure ‘‘profit’’ of they who undertake it. The movement, begun in Mercier’s Discours, toward the construction of ideal readers as figures whose power and authority increase in proportion to the degree that they are abstracted from sensation—neutralized images of disembodied judgment—is fully accomplished here. Bollioud-Mermet characterizes the interaction of readers and reading matter as one where readers, instead of finding a ‘‘natural’’ freedom within the book, uncover their autonomy in an act of pure domination of the text—an object that they can now take or leave as they please. The book is to be consumed in the service of personal enrichment, so that the text becomes a source of spiritual revenue for the disciplined individual. Ironically, given that Bollioud-Mermet inveighs so forcefully against the maniacal accumulation of volumes in his De la bibliomanie, he ultimately advocates in the Essai sur la lecture not a disavowal of excessive consumption per se, but an amplification of the intensity of each act. Every book carefully read becomes proof of the ability of the reader to transform text into profit. Bollioud-Mermet divides the audience for his essay into two publics, the first composed essentially of pleasure-readers—‘‘those worldly individuals who only read in order to have a pleasant occupation’’—and the second of young men seeking instruction before deciding upon a profession.72 Like Mercier, he understands reading as playing a crucial role in managing the proper relationship of readers to an external world, particularly in the sense that the act of reading can help cultivate natural gifts that will eventually enable the entrance of young men into the arena of civic duty. BollioudMermet’s exemplary reader is a man on the cusp of adulthood, gifted with the precious yet inherently fleeting qualities of ‘‘docility’’ and ‘‘suppleness’’ that make him especially amenable to guidance.73 Bollioud-Mermet’s advice should ideally work to prevent this impressionable figure, on the one hand, from falling into a deplorable otium that will spell the end of any worthwhile study, and, on the other, from recklessly and promiscuously pursuing a series of interests unsuitable to him. Excessive curiosity—a kind of intellectual inconstancy—is just as dangerous, according to Bollioud-Mermet, as sloth.

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While those who have given themselves over to laziness will never serve any useful function in society—they are ‘‘useless members’’ of a civic body74 —those who are drawn in too many directions at once will inevitably be distracted from their chosen professions. A proper choice of curriculum is thus the key to enabling young men to articulate their natural talents with an appropriate set of social obligations. The development of proper reading techniques is crucial to proper socialization, where socialization means the assumption of duties that correspond in some sense to natural inclinations. ‘‘Nature would give out her gifts in vain, if we neglected to cultivate them.’’75 Bollioud-Mermet places much more emphasis than Mercier on reading as a form of acculturation, in a way that may seem to suggest an enlightened willingness to embrace the power of books to shape the subjectivity of readers in a useful fashion. But this focus on reading as a significant form of sociability—and as a privileged mode of communication—itself depends upon the reduction of the book to an object of intellectual exchange and a subsequent accrual of power to the reader as a fully autonomous agent. Similarly, the capacity to experience pleasure in reading is seen by BollioudMermet less as a threat—although he includes a requisite warning against books that are overly voluptuous—than as a brief moment of suspension, a lapse in the continuing consolidation of a disinterested reading subject. The experience of pleasure is coded as undesirable mainly to the extent that it intimates the momentary failure or absence of judgment in the reader. Bollioud-Mermet opens the body of his essay with a panegyric to the delightful utility of reading in a society committed to the perfectibility and hence the transmissibility of human knowledge. As human beings have moved away from what he refers to as primitivism (‘‘primitive notions’’) and into a process of ‘‘enlightenment’’ [e´claircissement], they have developed ever more sophisticated methods of written description—methods that allow for the communication of painstakingly acquired wisdom across generations and thus become the enabling condition of social progress.76 The diachronic movement of texts across epochs may be a sign of the advancement of knowledge, but it is also, in this context, material evidence of a natural human need for systems of intellectual exchange. Bollioud-Mermet initially presents reading as nothing other than the sweetest of social bonds—a form of innately satisfying mutuality that conjugates self-interest with pleasure. If it is agreeable to know what one’s fellow men are thinking, it can be even more pleasant to communicate one’s thoughts to others. While this image of the unrestrained, collectively gratifying circulation of ideas and feelings as the foreordained consequence of the spread of literacy

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seems to gesture toward the possibility of textual exchange as an arena free from (overt) regulation, such a conclusion is soon shown by the author himself to be misleading. For, as Bollioud-Mermet points out, while the practice of writing has long been subject to a whole variety of pedagogical constraints—the subject of instruction by ‘‘so many famous Authors’’77— reading has somehow not been similarly configured as an ‘‘art’’ that must be carefully imparted to those who wish to benefit from it. As a result, most readers engage in the activity of reading without profiting from their engagement, ‘‘without getting from this exercise the benefits and the pleasure that it ought to produce.’’78 What appears as a natural state of exchange among literate subjects in the first paragraph of the essay is soon revealed as requiring ‘‘a certain labor,’’ the end-product of the gradual implementation of a specific set of techniques.79 Reading must then be ‘‘methodical, thoughtful, and well digested’’ if it is to do the work of transmission for which it was apparently designed.80 While Bollioud-Mermet ultimately grants to his readers more freedom than Mercier is willing to bestow upon them, he envisions this relative autonomy as part of an explicit program of normalization and standardization of reading strategies across populations of readers. Pleasure-reading may go on, within this framework (and BollioudMermet liberally acknowledges that it will), but its effects on readers as a social body will be minimized. Those who read purely for pleasure are de facto excluded from participation in the advancement of knowledge, since they are seen as having abstained, if only for a little while, from the labor of self-consolidation upon which the social and intellectual recognition of the freedom of the individual depends. Bollioud-Mermet’s regulatory project, in Essai sur la lecture, is based upon the division of readers into two distinct categories. If reading is both the cause and the effect of human perfectibility—‘‘The more the sciences are perfected, the more progress literature will make, and the more credit the use of books will obtain’’—some types of reading constitute more salient contributions to this process than do others.81 ‘‘But to make clear in an orderly fashion the way in which one commonly undertakes this exercise,’’ writes Bollioud-Mermet, ‘‘& and the means by which one might undertake it better, it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of readers: those who have no goal other than amusement, or simply occupying themselves, & those who seek in their readings instruction and serious study.’’82 While reading for ‘‘amusement’’ may produce a variety of physiological responses in the individual reader, Bollioud-Mermet is less concerned than Mercier with policing the contagious symptoms of readerly delight, since

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the sensation of pleasure, for Bollioud-Mermet, cannot, by its very nature, impinge upon the authority of judgment. The consequence of his strict separation of the reading public into two groups is the transformation of pleasure-reading into a ‘‘harmless’’ diversion, with no necessary social consequences. Sociability itself will soon be revealed as dependent, as in Mercier’s treatise, on the accomplishment of the conscious labor of self-mastery. Many readers read poorly because they read distractedly, but in doing this they are primarily hurting themselves, rather than contributing to a more general process of social decadence. In Bollioud-Mermet’s description of the attraction of ‘‘bad books’’ as ‘‘certain books that exude only licentiousness alongside the most refined voluptuousness,’’ he outlines the trajectory by which readers move from legitimate pleasures to forbidden ones:83 ‘‘Imperceptibly the bait of pleasure exerts its appeal.’’84 The list of bad books that he retails represents the preferred reading material of ‘‘men of the world’’ and, perhaps unsurprisingly, of women—two classes of people who value pleasure (‘‘recreation’’) above all else.85 In his condemnation of men and women who seek out ‘‘suspect’’ books as privileged sources of enjoyment, Bollioud-Mermet seems less interested in the existence of ‘‘bad books’’ per se (as a sign of social corruption, for instance) than he does in the fact that the over-production of ‘‘mauvais livres’’ results from the tendency to mistake pleasure for an authoritative form of judgment. Thus, ‘‘the number of bad books surpasses that of good ones’’ because of a generalized over-valorization of feminine preferences in reading material. Where ‘‘a sex that sets the tone everywhere’’ is concerned, ‘‘the delicacy of sentiment and the fine taste that are attributed to them, have acquired for them the capacity of deciding the fate of works of wit.’’86 This prioritization of women’s tastes is harmful precisely because it involves mistaking enjoyment for the capacity to produce meaningful judgments. Among women, it is the most delightful book, rather than the most ‘‘legitimate’’ or ‘‘profitable’’ (two adjectives used over and over by Bollioud-Mermet) book, that is deemed most worthy of praise: ‘‘That which has the advantage of pleasing them is soon given credit.’’87 The struggle against ‘‘mauvais livres’’ depends, for Bollioud-Mermet, not on a system of censorship, but on the universalizability of judiciousness as a principle of evaluation. Readers must be enjoined, in other words, not to mistake their delight for a legitimate assessment of the value of any given text. In the case of bad readers, ‘‘it is not to usefulness that one aspires: it is to a fantastical pleasure. Everything that can procure this pleasure is well-received.’’88 Once the quest for ‘‘pure’’ pleasure is established as fully subordinate to the cultivation

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of discernment, however, the delight of any given reader ceases to carry grave social consequences. Bad books, in Bollioud-Mermet’s system, may indeed have nugatory effects. They stimulate a ‘‘happy delirium that causes one to forget the lessons of an austere reason and the cares of serious affairs, and that deafens one to the voice of duty.’’89 But ‘‘good books’’—and most notably poetry—can also produce such symptoms in those who read them with pleasure. For the reader of poetry, ‘‘Its melody and its movement cause the heaviness of the soul and the caprices of mood to dissipate, divert us from our work and painful cares, calm anxieties, suspend, at least for a time, the perception of the evils that are inseparable from human life.’’90 Pleasure, as a space of dissipation, in both cases stimulates a feeling of suspension from the ‘‘serious’’ work of the human, a rupture with society as the domain of action and the site of ethical obligation. ‘‘It is a kind of magic to which it is so sweet to surrender oneself !’’91 The taxonomy of effect, in Bollioud-Mermet’s systems, is of less import than the repartitioning of readerly attitudes within an instrumentalized hierarchy of use, so that it is just possible to imagine a fully ‘‘disinterested’’ reading of even the worst books (although most readers remain vulnerable to the seductions of the latter). In other words, if both good and bad books can engender similar responses, it is crucial for the critic to ensure that the magical feeling of suspension characteristic of poetry, for instance, is understood as properly subordinate to the construction of a sensation of autonomous choice vis-a`-vis-books in general. ‘‘Imperceptibly instructive books, like amusing works themselves, have multiplied. Every subject has been written about. He [the reader] is free to choose.’’92 Thus, reading can be envisioned (in contrast to other modes of representation, such as oratory) as key to the enactment of human freedom: Reading . . . is freer, more calm, less passionate. The reader, emancipated from the human respect, the flattery, and the impetuousness of oratory, often not even knowing the Author of the work he reads, judges it more equitably, more healthily, in a manner that is less suspect. Nothing hinders him from examining it closely, weighing everything in a mature fashion, feeling the beauties and the imperfections equally, even from rereading it several times, whether he wishes to clarify his suspicions, or whether he seeks to engrave more deeply in his memory the objects of his reading.93

The essence of the act of reading is here linked to the production of equitable and ‘‘healthy’’ judgments, a process that implies a disinterested weighing of the various qualities of the text, and is situated at the opposite end of the

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spectrum of readerly reactions from the enchanting ‘‘diversion’’ engendered by poetry. ‘‘If one wishes to profit completely [from reading], one must join reflection to attention,’’ explains Bollioud-Mermet.94 The ‘‘secret conversation’’ also cited by Mercier in his description of the act of reading is now relocated, in the Essai sur la lecture, in a context that gives a new resonance to the notion of profit through study. Reading, for Bollioud-Mermet, is at once a secret conversation—the excavation of interiority—and ‘‘a commerce in ideas and sentiments.’’95 The internalization of reading as an act of self-discovery has as its correlate the insertion of the book into an economy of the intellect, where the text can be reconfigured as a variety of common currency. In the first section of his essay, Bollioud-Mermet imagines the relationship of the pleasure-reader to the author as structured around a form of mutuality where the book itself becomes the vehicle of exchange. According to this model, the attraction of the self-conscious reader to the poetic force of the text is subsumed within an abstracted transactional economy whereby the book regains its usefulness as a form of profit. In the second part of the essay, Bollioud-Mermet works to position the act of ‘‘serious’’ reading as a potential contribution to a mode of social progress. He describes books as ‘‘weapons with which it is necessary to furnish oneself before the joust, & without which one would not be able to triumph over either ignorance or error.’’96 This ‘‘triumph’’ is the task of the erudite, methodical reader, whose duties, attitudes, and social value are thus distinguished from the activities of the pleasure-reader; the latter require less particular attention, according to Bollioud-Mermet, since their effects are arguably of less significance for the community of readers (and nonreaders) as a whole. The sensations produced by pleasure-reading, while still affecting in this framework, no longer constitute a meaningful intervention in the formation of social subjects. It is the reading of ‘‘serious books’’ that represents the privileged origin of shifts in practices. The authors of such books intend to ‘‘exercise your judgment, . . . test your taste; & this discussion is not the least significant result of reading. It is important to learn to judge well, in order to know how to act well.’’97 Similarly, the man of letters knows how to turn everything to his profit, where less sophisticated readers might be content simply to remember what they have read. In Bollioud-Mermet’s examination of this more erudite mode of reading, the extraordinary attentiveness of the ideal reader generates a new economy of knowledge that is based less on shared ideas than on

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the complete instrumentalization of book—and author—as the objects of a process of consumption, defined in the following terms: Constant and faithful, he [the author] does not change; you will find him always the same, jealous of your trust and ready to serve you. Liberal and disinterested, he will give you everything he owns. He aspires only to enrich you with his acquisitions and his discoveries. What am I saying? He takes his zeal to the point of nourishing you with his substance. He aims to unite himself intimately with you, & to attract you to him. . . . All of these Authors who, where you are concerned, do so many different duties so well, who have dedicated their nights to you, who illuminate you with their light, who make you the recipient of their secrets, these same Authors worthy of being your master in so many ways, choose you however for their Judge. They voluntarily become your clients and your tributaries. They seek your esteem and your approbation, & fear less your censure than your indifference. In submitting themselves to your critique, they do you another service. . . . The technique of reading carefully accustoms you to feeling precisely, to distinguishing the excellent from the mediocre, & the solid from the frivolous.98

For the erudite or enlightened reader addressed in this passage, reading as a mode of exchange becomes reading as a perfected form of acquisition (resulting from the total ingestion of the volume in question). As in Mercier’s treatise, enforced self-mastery, in the form of a disciplined application to the text, is presented as required for the development of the ability to exercise a mature and disinterested judgment. But, where Mercier understands this mastery as in its origins a gesture of delimitation, emerging from the readers’ awareness of their own distance from their reading matter, Bollioud-Mermet graphically portrays the outcome of attentive reading as a transfer of power and substance from the text to the reader. The book thus becomes instrumental to an accumulation of potency that establishes erudite readers as subjects capable of endless ‘‘enrichment’’ through knowledge while always remaining recognizable to themselves as uniquely themselves; if anything, their critical autonomy only increases with the heightening of their ability to ‘‘feel’’ more precisely. Bollioud-Mermet depicts the book as participating in a relationship structured around the complete submission of the authorial voice to the appreciation of the discerning reader. The development of the capacity for critique is also the development of the right to understand the book as a ‘‘service’’ done on behalf of the self and others. The trajectory toward self-possession, for the reading subject, becomes the right to a form of possessive ownership liable to infinite temporal extension.

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4. The vicissitudes of pleasure and the end of voluptas In the concluding paragraph of his essay, Bollioud-Mermet remarks once more on the intense gratification involved in the activity of reading, ‘‘Oh! how sweet it is to give oneself up to such a pleasant, legitimate and useful exercise.’’99 For both Bollioud-Mermet and Mercier, however, the force of this pleasure is fully legitimized only to the extent that it is yoked to the instrumentalization of the book. Mercier’s young male student radically circumscribes his choice of reading matter in order to avoid being distracted from the task of reshaping the self into yet another object of potential study. Similarly, for the erudite reader described in the last section of BollioudMermet’s Essai sur la lecture, the pleasures of the text are tied to those of critical judgment as a mode of possession, where possession is figured as the capacity to engage in the accumulation and incorporation of knowledge by the dispassionate self. While the question of ‘‘effect’’ is still significant for these two authors—in that, for each of them, novice readers must initially subject their somatic responses to careful management—good reading is nonetheless defined, by Bollioud-Mermet as well as Mercier, as the absence of a fully interested engagement in that which is read. Furthermore, these two commentators portray the pleasures of the intellect as deriving primarily from acts of objectification, so that the contagiousness of textual delight, which the bishop of Chaˆlons describes in his Lettres pastorale, becomes a matter of bad technique on the part of the inexperienced student. If the voluptuous ethic of the Epicurean reader functions as the beˆte noire of theologians like the Bishop, this ‘‘dissipative’’ way of reading is equally outside the pale for Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet. As I will discuss in the conclusion to this chapter, the shift toward an emphasis on disinterested self-possession as the most effective method of ingesting texts coincides with a more general disavowal of voluptuous pleasure in favor of models of authoritative appreciation like those promoted in the two treatises on reading I have examined here. Thus, we see voluptuousness, as a semantic and a conceptual category, undergo a strange reversal of fortune during the Enlightenment. The notion of voluptas begins to lose its classical status as a mode of enjoyment most pointedly, if problematically, associated with a materialist ethical program. Instead, voluptuous pleasure becomes a ‘‘pure’’ sensation—discernible but otherwise unproductive where reading subjects are concerned.100 Along the way, it is the delights of what might be called jouissance—with its strong connection to a dialectics of possession and loss—that take up a more prominent position within discussions of pleasurable apprehension as a philo-

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sophic mode. The sensation of voluptuousness, insofar as it represents an experience that is never fully objectifiable by a self-possessed reasoning subject, tends to remain rigorously excessive to thought—always superfluous to the activities of cognition. In the Encyclopedia, for instance, the positioning of voluptuousness within a range of styles of pleasurable feeling (including ‘‘plaisir,’’ ‘‘de´lice,’’ and ‘‘jouissance’’) might at first appear to be riddled with considerable ambiguity. On the one hand, the entry on volupte´ provides the following categorization of the term: ‘‘We commonly understand by voluptuousness all love of pleasure that is not directed by reason; & in this sense all voluptuousness is illicit; pleasure can be considered relative to the man who has this feeling, relative to society, & relative to God. If it is opposed to the welfare of the man who feels it, or to that of society, or to the commerce that we should have with God, then it is criminal.’’101 Voluptuousness, according to this definition, is illicit precisely to the extent that it is not under the authority of reason. It is the aspect of pleasure that, because of its insistent materiality, is regularly experienced as a kind of criminally ungovernable excess of feeling—both ‘‘too much’’ (corps) and ‘‘not enough’’ (esprit) at once. The critique of voluptuousness that is developed in the long discussion of volupte´ in this entry focuses both on this sensation’s grossly corporeal aspect as a purely physical fulfillment and on its ‘‘shadowy,’’ ephemeral contingency as a pleasure that is perversely not substantial enough to give lasting delight. Volupte´ combines, then, the most material elements of human existence—the desires and passions of one body for another body—with a certain superfluity that renders it the most fleeting of satisfactions. As the entry explains, ‘‘reason should be the mistress of it, should regulate it, the senses are her ministers, & thus whatever delights we hope for in good food, in the pleasures of life, in scents and in music, if we do not approach these things with a tranquil soul, we will be deceived, we will trick ourselves with a false happiness, & we will take for pleasure its own shadow.’’102 Voluptuousness comes into being where illusion—‘‘the shadow of pleasure’’—meets the substance of the body and its desires. It is that which is most excessive and most natural at once, so that, in the entry on ‘‘plaisir, de´lice, volupte´,’’ the latter term may be distinguished from the other two first by its status as ‘‘entirely sensual,’’ but secondarily as an idea that ‘‘seems to designate in the organs of the body something delicate that refines and heightens taste.’’103 Voluptuousness, rooted as a faculty in the organs of the body itself, is nevertheless something that rarefies, transforms, and surpasses them. It is the capacity—or wish—of the body to exceed itself repeatedly yet concretely, and therefore fundamen-

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tally denotes ‘‘excesses, which are linked to softness, debauchery, and libertine behavior.’’104 It signifies the baseness of the body as an effect of superfluity—a shadow that is also the most earthly and profane of elements. This rendering of voluptuousness as an inherently unlawful pleasure would not at first seem to accord particularly well with Diderot’s own portrayal of the voluptuary, in the Encyclopedia’s entry for voluptueux, as he ‘‘who loves sensual pleasure: in this sense, every man is voluptuous, more or less.’’105 It is nonetheless possible to find in the universalizing neutrality of Diderot’s description a kinship with the depiction of voluptuous sensation generally as most basically an illegitimate or illicit form of enjoyment. In Diderot’s definition, which is concerned far more with retailing the positions of the voluptuary’s critics (‘‘ill-humored types who deserve to be shut up in the Petites-Maisons’’) than it is with painting the portrait of the voluptuary himself, voluptuousness functions as the degree zero of corporeality.106 To have a body is, in effect, to be in some way or another voluptuous. This approach to the problem of pleasurable sensation effectively dissociates the quality of volupte´ as far as possible from individual persons; voluptuous experience is consigned to a perceptual category of absolute generality. Where volupte´ in its more classically scandalous aspects tended to be associated with the proliferation of differences—in taste, in delight, in apprehensive sensation—volupte´ in its most acceptable modern mode appears to designate the flat universality of a bodily experience oriented toward pleasure in its least particular form. Voluptuousness in Diderot’s entry becomes, resonantly, that which is not pain—an entirely ubiquitous sensibility that is shared among all humans (and perhaps among all feeling bodies as well). He writes, ‘‘Those who teach I don’t know what austere doctrine that causes us to worry over the sensitivity of the organs that we have received from a nature that wishes that the conservation of the species and of ourselves be an object of pleasure; & over the array of objects that surround us & that are destined to appeal to this sensitivity in a thousand agreeable ways, are ill-humored types who deserve to be shut up in the Petites-Maisons.’’107 This characterization, in highlighting volupte´ as an abstractly ‘‘common’’ form of sensuousness, erases entirely the philosophical and theological baggage that still attaches to the term in the entry from the Encyclopedia devoted specifically to it—an entry that begins with a discussion of the social and intellectual heritage of Epicureanism. Volupte´, here, emerges as the opposite of self-possession when the latter is considered as the defining consciousness of the individual. Voluptuousness is that which grounds all human experience as a mode of embodiment.

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For Diderot, it is really the term jouissance, and not that of volupte´, that most visibly conjugates the inherent pleasures of sensibility with the possessive delight expressed in a savoir technique that takes the body as its privileged object. Thus, in the entry on jouissance, ‘‘Jouir means to know, to experience, to feel the benefits of possession.’’108 For Diderot, jouissance—as one variety of voluptuous apprehension—is the locus of a pleasure that transcends and subsumes corporeality by resituating it in the context of a discerning enjoyment that very much resembles Bollioud-Mermet’s account of erudite appreciation. Jouissance first originates in the discovery and subsequent possession of the feminine beloved as a manifestation of the desiring, masculine self: ‘‘Among the objects that nature offers on all sides to our desires; . . . is there one that is more worthy of our pursuit, of which the possession & the jouissance can render us as happy, as of the being who thinks & and who feels as you do.’’109 Unlike volupte´, however, jouissance should not be understood as a type of sensory perception generalizable across any population (even the most ‘‘primitive’’) by its very nature. Instead, this form of pleasure needs to be examined within the context of a diachronic narrative movement chronicling the development of a particular kind of human sociability. Jouissance, for Diderot, entails the progressive engendering of a desire for the other through the gradual and always discerning objectification of the beloved body; as a result, this body can become a vehicle for, consecutively, preference, esteem, and merit. In the entry on jouissance, Diderot increasingly subjects the experience of this kind of pleasure to a thorough historicization that is necessarily absent from his description of volupte´. While ‘‘savage’’ men and women may know the completion of sexual intercourse as a moment of ‘‘delirium’’ that enables the full subordination of reason to instinct, the capacity for jouissance appears as a sign of sophistication, contingent upon the exercise of a certain taste. Diderot describes the moment when jouissance comes into its own: But when woman began to discern, when she appeared to pay attention to her choice, & when, among several men over whom the gaze of passion played, there was one who stopped her, who could flatter himself with her preference, who believed himself to communicate to the heart that he esteemed the esteem that he had for himself, & who saw pleasure as the reward of some merit or another; when the veil that modesty threw over her charms left to the inflamed imagination the power of disposing of them as it wishes, when the most delicate illusions came together with the most exquisite feeling, in order to exaggerate happiness, the soul was seized with

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The faculty of jouissance is in this passage revealed to be dependent upon the deployment of attention in the service of a specific choice. Jouissance is born in the movement of a once perfectly materializable pleasure—the unthinking enjoyment of the voluptuary—into the domains of history, axiology, and reason. Delight will henceforth be reconfigured as symptomatic—‘‘a reward’’—rather than working as a determining cause of corporeal events. Finally, the experience of jouissance depends upon a recognition of the ‘‘nature’’ of the desiring self in the abstracted body of the other, a body that then becomes the privileged object of a process of possessive incorporation. In sum, we witness here the ordering of heterosexual desire around the disavowal of the beloved as an ineluctably physical body, just as we witness in Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet the ordering of reading around the disavowal of the text as an ineluctably figural body. Moreover, we are again confronted with the suggestion that the full objectification of sensory pleasure can in and of itself be the most consuming of all delights. Paradoxically, it seems that when the experience of voluptuous enjoyment—here limned as a form of ‘‘primitivism’’—is severed from the act of discerning theorization and relocated as part of a savage past, it is the act of theorization itself that comes into its own as the most transcendent and the most elemental of all passions. As Bollioud-Mermet describes it, ‘‘It is important to aim to see everything, if possible, in each object, & to consider it in all of its aspects to know it better. . . . The diverse observations that are the result of this examination enrich our domain, expand our faculties, and heighten our pleasures.’’111 If, in the Encyclopedia, voluptuous pleasure is no longer quite the stuff from which masterful thinkers are made, then reading for this pleasure can be philosophically legitimate only to the extent that the delight resulting from this act is subsequently made subject to analysis.112 In this way the interest of Diderot in an anatomization and narrativization of pleasure rejoins the concerns of the bishop of Chaˆlons, since both writers seek to put into place techniques of discernment that come to regulate the circulation of voluptuous sensations among texts and readers. In his 1749 Lettre pastorale, the Bishop worries that, ‘‘We see the dissemination . . . of a kind of contagion and something like an odor of death. . . . I am speaking of this crowd of

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impious and licentious Books, that from the Capital spill out into the Provinces, & there destroy Religion and morals.’’ He adds, ‘‘Neither the condemnations of the Church, nor the severity of the Laws, are enough to stop their spread.’’113 The Bishop fears that neither church nor state will hinder the dissemination of this contagion. Yet the figure of the self-possessed reader may represent a more effective, if subtler, form of prophylactic. The Bishop is apprehensive that the spread of impiety will confirm the inseparability of the analysis of pleasure from its cultivation in the bodies of communities of readers. But the gradual, enlightened instrumentalization of delight in the person of the self-possessed ‘‘jeune homme’’ in fact widens the rupture between reading as a somatic event and reading as the accrual of knowledge to an abstracted subject. The voluptas of the Epicurean intellectual is available, within this new framework, to be gradually subsumed within the drive for possession as a desire for a complete or authentic pleasure of ownership—of an object, a feeling, a person, or a text. The naturalization of voluptuous sensation—once a constitutive element of the libertine project in its connection to philosophic enlightenment—results in the demise of the voluptuous reader as the subject of reflection, in addition to the progressive erasure of voluptuousness as a labor of the mind. Accordingly, the modern vision of hedonism as the perfect absence of intellection is ultimately made possible by the erasure of the figure of the voluptuous philosopher from the scene of reading—an erasure perhaps devoutly wished by the bishop of Chaˆlons, but—ironically—fully imagined in the Encyclopedia.114 Yet this disappearance did not occur uncontested. As I will show, neo-Lucretian materialists like Julien Offray de la Mettrie and the marquis de Sade, in their efforts to reclaim the voluptuary for philosophy, provide readings of the relationship between delight and thought that engender the ire of enlighteners and theologians alike.

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3.

‘‘Flowers Strewn on the Way to Volupte´’’: La Mettrie and the Tropic Body of the Epicurean Philosopher

La Mettrie’s machine-man has often served as a figure of determinist constraint, steeped in the robotic satisfactions of the literal.1 Brought into being in 1747 by ‘‘Monsieur Machine’’ (as La Mettrie was dubbed by his contemporaries), this creature seems to foretell the advent of a dystopian modernity ordered around the perfect instrumentalization of the body and its pleasures. In both his mechanistic passivity and his compulsive verve for sex, Lamettrian man thus appears to define an enlightened discourse of the human through a spectacular embodiment of its limits, a capacity he shares with other machines of his period, but which he manages to allegorize in a particularly telling way, as an unmistakable marker of what Jessica Riskin has called the ‘‘simultaneous enactment of both the sameness and incomparability of life and machinery.’’2 For modern readers accustomed to their robots and their cyborgs, the figure of machine-man—an uncanny automaton, sexy android, and atomist superhero all in one—could easily seem eerily prescient, were it not for the unfortunate fact that La Mettrie refuses to explain precisely how he works. As he affirms toward the beginning of his treatise, ‘‘Man is a machine constructed in such a way that it is impossible first of all to have a clear idea of it and consequently to define it.’’3 If we would like to know exactly how the human mechanism operates, La Mettrie intimates, we must look outside of treatises, and in so doing ‘‘ignore the history of all the futile opinions of philosophers.’’4 From La Mettrie’s point of view, man-a-machine could just as well be man-a-mushroom.5 This eighteenth-century protocyborg turns out to be ‘‘an image and not . . . an explanatory principle.’’6 In other words, he is nothing but a trope. Faced with this unlikely tropological turn in the midst of what has been so regularly limned as the rigor of determinism, critics have struggled with questions of intellectual provenance as the key to understanding machineman’s inner workings (and, by extension, the nature of the relationship between Enlightenment materialism and its modern incarnations). This task 88

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has been complicated by the fact that, generally speaking, La Mettrie’s prose style is characterized more by divagation than by analytic transparency, while his extreme fondness for paradox renders what his contemporaries perceived as his philosophical radicalism more or less impervious to exact critical translation. Critics Kathleen Wellman and Ann Thomson have argued, in this context, in favor of La Mettrie’s persistent eclecticism, and thus for the fundamental humanism of his philosophical vision as a French enlightener (albeit one excluded from participation in the intellectual mainstream of his day). Ann Thomson explains that, ‘‘The materialism of La Mettrie proposes itself as a lesson of humility, and, fundamentally, humanity.’’7 For Wellman, ‘‘In light of his [La Mettrie’s] critique of mechanism, the use of mechanical analogies is perhaps best considered as simply a reflection of the common descriptive language of the experimental tradition of the eighteenth century.’’8 On the other hand, Dalia Judovitz reads La Mettrie as proposing a materialism that is ultimately reductionist in its impulses, and sees him as essentially following in the Cartesian tradition, despite his rejections of the metaphysical underpinnings of Cartesian thought. In Judovitz’s words, ‘‘The legacy of the Cartesian ontological blueprint proves to be extremely significant to La Mettrie’s efforts to bring back the human in the guise of a machine within the framework of a natural world defined in materialist and mechanist terms.’’9 Ultimately, though, these questions of paternity may be as slippery as those surrounding the originary or defining mechanism of machine-man himself. The elliptical figure of machine-man as he is portrayed by La Mettrie has remained surprisingly resistant to easy positioning within critical genealogies, however weighted with proleptic significance he has become. Moreover, this resistance appears to derive in large part from La Mettrie’s unwillingness to present the figure of machine-man in any sort of causal framework, or as the necessary end-product of a developing human subjectivity. Unlike Condillac, whose statue-man takes shape incrementally within a diachronic textual order, built up from the outside in, La Mettrie gives machine-man neither point of origin nor internal organization per se. Instead, he offers up machine-man to us as pure figure, whether he is defined as ‘‘metaphor’’ or as ‘‘the exterior form of a body’’ (to take the alternatives presented by Dumarsais in the 1730 treatise Des tropes).10 At the origins of modernity as a regime of bodily control there appears to lie a particularly constraining formalism.11 Scholars of machine-man, whether critical of or sympathetic to what they see as La Mettrie’s larger project, have not yet fully accounted for the

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extraordinary tropiness of their object of study. Nor has it become clear what the relationship might be, in La Mettrie’s writing, between this materialist figure of relative constraint (or, in Foucauldian terms, docility) and the rhetorical techniques of extreme liberty that characterize the Lamettrian oeuvre.12 What could it mean, in the context of a seemingly dogmatic Enlightenment materialism, for a theory of physiological determinism to be founded in a trope?13 More specifically, what does the figural status of machine-man suggest about the relationship between the automaton as an important crystallization of a radically embodied subject and materialist philosophy as intimately involved in forms of literary practice and, indeed, literary style? How can we conjugate La Mettrie’s easy deployment of figure with the critical tendency to read into machine-man an enduring construction of the human subject as thoroughly constrained by its own substance?14 For what, as readers, is machine-man meant to prepare us? I will suggest here that, in order to understand what is at stake for La Mettrie in the peculiar materialization of the human subject that he so foresightedly introduces, we must take La Mettrie’s tropological science very seriously as such. In other words, recognition of the figural nature of machine-man is crucial to understanding the role he plays in La Mettrie’s reconceptualization of material subjectivity. For La Mettrie, the mechanical body of machine-man may in fact function as the tropic body par excellence: a style or mode of being fully realizable only through an investment in literary practice and, not coincidentally, literary pleasures. From this perspective, critical resistance to acknowledging the positioning of machineman within a discourse of figure could also be described as a resistance to understanding literary practice as itself authentically invested in the material constitution of subjects, a resistance already present in Descartes (as La Mettrie implicitly recognizes) and remarkably persistent. Ultimately, I am proposing that, once we see machine-man as fundamentally and formally tropic in constitution, we must turn to the domain of literature to see how his substance comes into being—to realize, in effect, how he works. If we do this, we will discover the literary text as the site where Lamettrian machinic constraint dissolves reiteratively into a series of contingent pleasures, producing a subject that is at once textual, substantial, and autonomous. For La Mettrie, literature is both the space of an enactment of matter—since, as he explains, we first come to recognize the nature of our own physical substance through an encounter with tropes—and the arena where compulsion provokes dissolution, where the hard body of machine-man becomes the porous body of the voluptuous philosopher. As La Mettrie suggests in his

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writings on literature, in order to begin to understand all aspects of our experience as fully materializable, we must begin thinking figurally. This shift entails not just a reformulation of what machine-man himself is meant to signify as an emblem of materialism, but a reevaluation of his current place at the center of La Mettrie’s oeuvre. To make sense of machine-man, we must look first at La Mettrie’s relationship to specifically figural modes of writing and reading. The interconnectedness, during the eighteenth century, of materialist philosophy and new forms of literary practice—obscene or pornographic forms in particular—has not gone unremarked by historians and literary scholars. Margaret Jacob’s article ‘‘The Materialist World of Pornography’’ and Leo Braudy’s essay ‘‘Fanny Hill and Materialism’’ both have broken new ground in this regard, in showing how, as Jacob puts it, ‘‘the universe of the bedroom created by the materialist pornographers stands as the analogue to the physical universe of the mechanical philosophers.’’15 Braudy and Jacob see philosophical materialism as either shoring up or, in Jacob’s case, enabling diverse literary investigations of embodiment. For Jacob, pornographic texts render legible the political effects of mechanical materialism in depicting a social order characterized primarily by the free circulation of atomized, erotic bodies through private spaces. For Braudy, a reading of L’Homme-machine clarifies the status of Fanny Hill as ‘‘a detailed polemic in support of some of the most advanced philosophic doctrines of its time.’’16 Yet in both cases the bond linking the literary staging of subjectivity to the philosophical investigation of substance is represented as relatively unproblematic. The pornographic presentation of delighted bodies comes to seem a natural corollary to the presumptions of Lamettrian (or, more generally, mechanical) materialism regarding the ‘‘proper’’ relationship of corporeal substance to minds and souls. As a close examination of La Mettrie’s writings on the significance of a materialist ethic of volupte´ to lived human experience shows, however, for Monsieur Machine, material substance does not simply await our perception of it, but can and must be effectively conjured into being. Rather than reaffirming the naturalness of the connection between the erotic or atomic subject and particular techniques of representation, La Mettrie can instead be read as interrogating the relationship of the substantial, philosophic body to the literary text. He accomplishes this not by questioning the vraisemblance or empiricist precision of figural representation, but by casting doubt upon the apodictic legitimacy of philosophic knowledge. In his writings on pleasure and literary production—including, most notably, the libertine essay La

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Volupte´—La Mettrie recasts the domain of literature as the space in which the contradictions raised by attempts to construct a philosophic body (that is nonetheless made of matter) can be productively worked through. In this strengthening of the materialist significance of literary writing at the expense of a more conventionally philosophic approach, he generates a striking image of the embodied philosopher as freed from determinism through the literary reenactment of formal constraints. For La Mettrie, the material body is not just made in literature, but made free therein. The compulsive reapparition of the machinic figure in La Mettrie’s theoretical investigations of substance, I will maintain, derives from his commitment to an original literary materialism with Lucretian roots. In the epistemological framework he develops in his playful explorations of aesthetics, literature functions as the arena where material substance is produced and transfigured through a process of dissolution that is brought on by a readerly engagement with poetic forms and their effects on matter. In the end, it is the tropic text that presents us with the only possible ‘‘solution’’ to what La Mettrie will go on to depict as the lived contradiction of the autonomy of the material subject. The bulk of this chapter will thus be devoted to an investigation of La Mettrie’s positioning of materialism, in La Volupte´, as definitively originating in a specific set of literary attachments. First, though, I will attempt to show how La Mettrie’s focus on the figural dimensions of matter leads to a recentering of the project of materialist philosophy generally around techniques of reading and writing that highlight an investment in tropic language or figures of speech.

1. Atomism and figural bodies: machine-man works through Lucretius La Mettrie’s attention to the connections between matter and figure makes sense in the context of what seems to have been his consistent, sympathetic engagement with Epicurean materialism. Standing at the juncture of physiological determinism and a radical secularism, situated between trope and substance, the constrained body of machine-man resembles, in certain respects, the Epicurean atom. This does not mean that La Mettrie adheres to an Epicurean theory of the material soul (for he does not), but that the matter of which he sees machine-man (and, indeed, the universe) as being made partakes of the absolute uniformity, the perfect motility, and the figural ‘‘irreality’’ characteristic of atomic substance. ‘‘The human body is a machine which winds itself up,’’ La Mettrie explains, ‘‘a living picture of perpetual motion.’’17 Within this uniformly constituted ‘‘machine,’’ there can be no

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fundamental variation in the basic stuff of which it is composed: ‘‘Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that there is in the whole universe only one diversely modified substance,’’ he writes.18 Insofar as this corporeal machine is emphatically not animated by anything outside of itself, it must be internally regulated by a principle intrinsic to it. It thus remains a ‘‘hard’’ body, retaining a certain material consistency even when dissected into smaller and smaller pieces. ‘‘Each tiny fibre or part of organised bodies moves according to its own principle whose action does not depend, like voluntary movements, on the nerves,’’ La Mettrie contends.19 Similarly, the atom of Epicurus is mobile, tough, and very, very solid; by its nature, it cannot be cut up or divided into pieces. As Lucretius explains, ‘‘[Atoms] are not compounds formed by the coalescence of their parts, but bodies of absolute and everlasting solidity. To these nature allows no loss or diminution, but guards them as seeds for things.’’20 The resistant indivisibility of the atom—impenetrable by any other substance and wholly selfidentical—grounds Epicureanism as a philosophy of supremely hard, albeit resolutely invisible, atomic bodies. The impermeability of the atom in turn works to generate a philosophy of rigorous exteriority, where the excavation of the ‘‘insides’’ of things yields not the metaphysical secret of their motility but the discovery of layers of sameness: For Epicurus as for Lucretius as for La Mettrie, matter resembles itself all the way down. These hard bodies are the fundamental building blocks of all existence (the Lucretian semina rerum). They are indeed ‘‘naturally’’ constrained in their movements—in the sense that all atoms, left undisturbed, follow a downward course—but they are intrinsically and unpredictably mobile as well—thanks to the arbitrary yet regular intervention of the clinamen. The extreme constraint exemplified by the vertically falling atoms thereby throws the slightest deviation that they make from their prescribed paths into sharp relief, and ultimately gives rise to a material world defined not as the perfect instantiation of regularity, but as the perceptible embodiment of invisible and persistent processes of recombination and dissolution. As they bounce around the ‘‘void,’’ atoms are constantly coming together in diverse and often ‘‘irregular’’ (or simply unsustainable) ways. While there are specific laws governing these combinations—Lucretius cautions that ‘‘it must not be supposed that atoms of every sort can be linked in every variety of combination’’—the universe tends toward a state of flux that renders every form but that of the atom itself impermanent.21 Yet, rather than grounding an understanding of matter as merely a chaotic and destructive force, the doctrine of constant atomic flux ultimately also serves as the basis for a the-

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ory of perception (and ideation) as beholden to the endless motion of things in the world. Atomic movement makes thought possible since, in a completely material universe, the very capacity to form ideas can only be attributable to transformations in substance. The hard ‘‘seed’’ of the atom engenders an environment in which every body larger than the atom itself is only perceptible by virtue of the fact that it has always already begun to dissolve—to throw off, or ‘‘discharge,’’ its own atoms. Lucretius explains: But since I have taught of what manner are the beginnings of all things, and how, differing in their diverse forms, of their own accord they fly on, spurred by everlasting motion; and in what way each several thing can be created from them, now I will begin to tell you what exceeding nearly concerns this theme, that there are what we call idols of things, which may be named, as it were, films or even rind, because the image bears an appearance and form [speciam ad formam] like to that, whatever it be, from whose body it appears to be shed, ere it wanders abroad.22

In this passage, the act of perceiving an object becomes a form of contact predicated on the ‘‘shedding’’ of an atomic ‘‘rind.’’ In our sensual apprehension of the world, we respond to and participate in the perpetual atomic motion that Lucretius describes; our perceptions are generated in and through the movement of substances against our organs. This total materialization of perception extends all the way to the act of ideation itself. When we imagine bodily forms or shapes, we are in effect materially perceiving a ‘‘skin’’ that has flown through the air toward us: ‘‘And when they move nimbly with exceeding lightness, as I have shown ere now, any one such subtle image stirs our mind; for the mind is fine and of itself wondrous nimble.’’23 The very air, here, proves to be saturated with ideas waiting to come into contact with our senses. As a result, the difference between sign and substance begins to appear eminently collapsible: every object produces its own ‘‘subtle image’’ as a material remnant, and every idea must be embodied in order to reach our minds. To imagine a body is to be touched by its substance and in this moment of contact to experience a certain material plasticity in response. The very denseness of the tiny atom thus produces larger, potentially sensate bodies (concatenations of atoms) that are intensely porous not only in their ability to dissolve, but in the capacity to ‘‘take in’’ other bodies through acts of perception. Moreover, the hard, impermeable ‘‘seed’’ of the atom grounds a universe in which all perceptible signs are entirely interwoven with the substance of the things they represent—insofar as to have an idea of a thing is to be

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‘‘touched’’ by some part of that thing. Thought itself, in this framework, may be understood as entirely material in nature. This is true not because all ideas are predictably determined by material processes, but because a rigorous materialism demands an acknowledgment of figures of thought—and speech—as themselves substantial. Or, in La Mettrie’s terms, ‘‘there is in the whole universe only one substance diversely modified.’’ While the Epicurean atom is itself a trope, it also participates in the creation of a universe where every trope must have a body. Even wholly imaginary or impossible bodies—Lucretius gives the example of centaurs—are in some sense substantial, since they result from the accidental joining together of two ‘‘skins’’ as the latter rush through the air. A consistent materialism gives rise to a world—either nightmarish or exquisitely pleasurable, depending on the extent to which we are willing to be reassured by the Lucretian argument—in which every image is in one way or another real. La Mettrie’s scientific materialism is not atomistic in any strict sense, and he is not explicitly beholden to Epicurus or to Lucretius for the image of the machine-man per se. But his deep investment in the philosophic and poetic legacy of a Lucretian Epicureanism is visible in his consistent attachment to the set of themes that constitute the central preoccupations of De rerum natura. Among these are included a sustained engagement with voluptas as both critical and aesthetic principle, and, as I am focusing on here, a fascination with literary figure as a materially productive mode.24 While words themselves remain for La Mettrie ‘‘arbitrary signs,’’ the repositioning of substance at the center of thought (in the form of the imaginative faculty) means that figuration itself can be productively worked through as an intervention in matter.25 As he affirms, ‘‘These words and the figures they represent are so closely linked in the brain that it is quite rare for us to imagine an object without the name or sign attached to it.’’26 Conversely, if machine-man is at least in part a figure of constraint, the very fact that moments of constraint can be figured might give rise to the possibility of their imaginative transfiguration as a consequence of radical materialism. Figures, in their capacity as substance, announce a small deviation—a ‘‘turn’’—in the midst of matter. The unsystematic textual production of a machine-man that La Mettrie engages in can therefore stand both for the incarnation of a fully materialized universe—a world of one, and only one, substance—and as a sign that, from here on out, we should pay careful attention to the deployment of tropes in their very material effects on us. The experience of material constraint in the form of this substantiated figure could in theory (and without paradox) also engender the prospect of free material transformation

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(or dissolution), just as the ‘‘hard body’’ of the Lucretian atom produces the fungible and porous body of the Lucretian subject. If figure is inseparable from substance, the very ‘‘picture’’ of constraint might bring into being the possibility of voluptuous spontaneity. Nonetheless, La Mettrie only hints at such a possibility in L’Homme-machine, preferring instead to focus on the unpredictability and variability of our experience as embodied persons (always inherently subjected, in one way or another, to the vicissitudes of our materiality). He seems not so much concerned with the potential literariness of his object (machine-man), as he is with attaching this object to an empiricist rhetorical position originating out of a rejection of all philosophical knowledge that cannot be derived from sensory perception. In L’Hommemachine, the figural status of machine-man as a focus of study seems to be at odds with the skeptical empiricism professed by the author as a philosophical position, a tension that only adds to the difficulty of comprehending exactly how machine-man could be said to ‘‘work.’’ Yet this tension turns out to be a constitutive part of the labor of philosophy, as La Mettrie sees it, even though it cannot be resolved therein. It is in fact through a recognition of the profound uneasiness of claims to philosophic truth that the material power of tropic language finally makes itself felt, again and as if for the first time.

2. Figural philosophy and La Mettrie’s tropic turn La Mettrie’s insistence on the revisionist tropiness of the materialist body overpowers any systematic explanation of physiological functioning that he might otherwise have given in the L’Homme-machine, and in this way produces a reshaping of the project of natural philosophy in a direction that his short treatise alone does not fully explore. We might, however, reasonably expect La Mettrie’s positioning of figure at the center of his critical materialism to have effects on his practice as a writer more generally, and indeed La Mettrie’s corpus, foregrounding as it does wit and stylistic agility at the seeming expense of ‘‘reason,’’ is especially difficult to read methodically. This unwillingness to sacrifice figural ambiguity to structural regularity is absolutely characteristic of La Mettrie’s style across his entire oeuvre, and it is already fully visible in L’Homme-machine. La Mettrie may not dwell for long on the precise effects of machine-man’s tropiness in the latter essay. But this reticence can be understood as the necessary outcome of a profoundly skeptical vision of natural philosophy as a fundamentally apodictic genre that can at best maintain an unsteady relationship to any hypothesis of

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substantial figures, given that figuration tends to exist, from a conventional perspective at least, as a highly problematic supplement to truth. Moreover, La Mettrie is careful to distinguish, in L’Homme-machine and elsewhere, between ‘‘the art of Aristotle or Descartes’’ and ‘‘that of Euripides and Sophocles’’ as constituting different ‘‘applications’’ of the imagination.27 The reintroduction of figural undecidability to the project of philosophy implies, from this perspective, a correlative transformation in generic practice. This means first that La Mettrie’s philosophy requires his reader to assume a flexible responsiveness to figure that would ordinarily seem to counter the putative aim of empiricist philosophical knowledge (to make accurate ‘‘physical observations’’28). Second, philosophy on its own cannot entirely fulfill the demands made on readers by the presentation of materialism as a critical process of reconfiguring the world as matter. Accordingly, even when he fully assumes the role of a doctor and a scientist, La Mettrie’s empiricism remains rather disarmingly inflected by the kind of thoroughgoing pyrrhonism that caused one of his many eighteenth-century critics to remark: ‘‘A Philosopher establishes something. La Metrie [sic] establishes nothing, and undermines all that has already been established.’’29 This typically Lamettrian dislike of analytical specificity—of firmly ‘‘establishing’’ something— makes good sense in the context of his investment in rhetorical figure as a fundamental element of the materialist project, a perspective according to which an obsessive attention to reasonable precision must invariably miss the point. La Mettrie’s intense engagement with the material forcefulness of the trope explains in part the complexity (along with what often seem to modern readers the contradictions) inherent in his various portrayals of the status of philosophical knowledge, an issue to which he was extremely attentive throughout his career as an intellectual and as a provocateur. When he writes in L’Homme-machine that ‘‘All the windy learning which inflates the balloon-like brains of our haughty pedants is therefore nothing but a mass of words and figures,’’ it is tempting to read him as if he were suggesting that we can move away from figure in order to establish the legitimacy of philosophical truth-claims on firmer ground.30 But La Mettrie is not simply calling for a retreat to sensory perception as the tentative foundation of our limited knowledge of the real. He is cautioning against the professional, scholarly misuse of language to conjure an impression of apodicticity that is both immaterial and prefigural. As he points out in the Discours pre´liminaire, which he wrote to serve as the ‘‘authoritative’’ introduction to his Oeuvres philosophiques, when philosophy is conceived of as outside of figure, it inevi-

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tably becomes a discourse with no possible effects—a kind of pure experience of things.31 As long as we sustain an understanding of philosophy as the search for a fully legitimizable truth, then philosophical knowledge cannot be reasonably comprehended as a set of discursive practices, since its dependence on ‘‘arbitrary signs’’ must render this truth either unreachable or impossible to transmit once it is apprehended. To introduce figure is necessarily to introduce paradox—and the movement of contradiction—into even the most rigorous of arguments. But, as La Mettrie emphasizes, figure is more or less inescapable. He writes, for instance, in Syste`me d’E´picure that ‘‘philosophy is only a science of fine words.’’32 The outcome of this chain of reasoning is finally not the lasting consecration of empiricist science as the origin of all legitimate knowledge—although the hypotheticalism of the canny empiricist appeals strongly to La Mettrie as the most viable form of the intellectual modesty that he consistently recommends. We must first understand that truth per se is unattainable (as Aram Vartanian emphasizes in his discussion of La Mettrie’s writing) and then that philosophy, as such, is incommunicable, insofar as it represents an attempt to avoid what cannot be avoided in the form of figure. Reading La Mettrie in this way allows us to appreciate what is at stake in the remarkable description of philosophic knowledge that appears in his Discours pre´liminaire: As for the infection [communication], or if you prefer, the contagion that is feared, I do not believe that it is possible. Each man is so strongly convinced of the truth of the principles with which he has been filled and even gorged during his childhood, and his self-respect depends so much on maintaining them without faltering, that even were I as determined as I am indifferent, I could not, even with all of Cicero’s eloquence, convince anyone that he was wrong. The reason is simple. What a philosopher considers to be clear and proven is obscure and uncertain, or rather untrue, for those who are not philosophers, particularly if they are not made to become philosophers.33

Philosophy, in this Discours, is at first presented as having no imaginable relationship to what we might now call the formation of subjects. The disjunction between theory and praxis (in the form of moral, political, and religious custom) is represented by La Mettrie as not only inevitable but absolute, and philosophy can function as a result only as a sort of extended voyeurism visa`-vis the natural world. The philosopher is inevitably ‘‘enslaved’’ to nature as the sole guarantor of epistemological authenticity. Any claims that these thinkers may make as delighted observers of natural processes therefore lit-

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erally fail to matter. ‘‘I think I have proved that remorse is a prejudice created by education and that man is a machine despotically governed by absolute fatalism,’’ La Mettrie affirms. ‘‘I may be mistaken and I am willing to believe so. But suppose, as I sincerely believe, that it is philosophically true; what does it matter?’’34 While critics have tended to focus on the last part of the Discours, which includes a call to philosophical action that rings much truer to a modern understanding of the project of enlightenment as grounded in the transformation of subjects through the dissemination of scientific or philosophical knowledge, to do so is to ‘‘cut short,’’ as Falvey puts it, ‘‘the enumeration of the superficial obscurities of his [La Mettrie’s] style, and to insist on the cleanness and the clarity of the clues that he has given as to the structure of the text.’’35 But, if we understand La Mettrie to be a writer with a strong interest and investment in precisely these ‘‘superficial obscurities’’ as a function of his philosophical practice (rather than as a series of more or less inexplicable mistakes), a very different picture not only of his oeuvre, but of ‘‘enlightened’’ materialism itself emerges.

3. Literature and La Mettrie’s tropic bodies The positioning of a discourse of figural substance as the de´nouement of La Mettrie’s reiterated attempts at a complete materialization of knowledge allows his engagement with literature to be resituated at the heart of his philosophical practice. Indeed, it is in his explorations of a specifically literary aesthetic that we find the form (or figure) of the Lamettrian subject to emerge most clearly. We receive with his analyses of eighteenth-century literary culture a demonstration of the way in which the seemingly routinized formalism of machine-man—in his ‘‘mechanical’’ outline of subjectivity— can become the lived experience of agency as a mechanism of tropic language. Particularly toward the end of his relatively brief career, La Mettrie’s writing seems increasingly to bear witness to a gradual movement away from natural philosophy toward literature as the practical embodiment of his materialism.36 Rather than considering this movement as a frivolous digression from his more ‘‘serious’’ work as a natural philosopher, I see it as central to an acknowledgment of the radical and deeply historical quality of La Mettrie’s critical project. On the one hand he is working out of an Epicurean tradition that highlights the position of the poetically inclined reader in the consumption of materialist theory and its lived incorporation into experience. On the other, as I will show, he transforms this focus into an aesthetic practice that reunites what might now be called libertine formalism

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with a highly mobile philosophy of substance. While La Mettrie remains interested throughout his career in exploring the means by which science is always tropically inflected (or infected), he also gradually becomes committed, as a Lucretian materialist, to an understanding of literature as continually shaping and reshaping readers’ experiences of themselves as substantially embodied subjects. If, as he explains in the Syste`me d’E´picure, the work of philosophy is essentially destructive in nature—a labor of extirpation—it is the work of tropic or poetic production that may begin to fill the space left by the progressive erasure of prejudice that the philosopher undertakes. In Syste`me, he writes of his own experience with philosophy: ‘‘That soft tender substance, on which the seal of error had been so deeply imprinted, is today blank and has retained no trace either of my colleges or of my pedants. I have been courageous enough to forget what I had been weak enough to learn; it is all crossed out (what luck!), all erased and all pulled up by the roots.’’37 Even though readers may substitute for the anxieties provoked by pedantry the delights of sensual experience as this process of upheaval nears completion, these delights are unreliable in themselves and may produce remorse in those who are no longer able to indulge in them. The most sustaining and substantial pleasures are ultimately literary ones: ‘‘Delicious reminiscence, enjoyable books, delightful philosophical poetry, artistic taste, charming friends, you who make reason itself speak the language of the Graces, never leave me.’’38 By the time La Mettrie has relocated his nonsystematic ‘‘syste`me’’ as part of an explicitly Epicurean philosophical heritage, machine-man has been completely reformulated as trope-man, even in the author’s representation of his own lived experience.39 While L’Homme-machine is often read as dogmatically manifestic, heavily invested in the formation of ‘‘docile bodies,’’ La Mettrie concerns himself, in this text, less with the question of dressage than with the work of obliteration (and the chastening of philosophical presumption) that he describes so neatly in the Syste`me (first published less than two years before his death). La Mettrie may indeed see the discourse of natural philosophy as opening a space for this kind of skepticism—in this sense he does remain indebted to the Cartesian project—but he seems also to view the discursive arena occupied by the professional philosopher as an inhospitable place for the constructive, tropic labor that may follow upon the admission of pyrrhonism. Unlike the scholarly treatise, characterized by what La Mettrie tends to present as a (risible) commitment to high seriousness, the literary text can provide a flexible space for the making of a fully materialist subjectivity through the deployment of a fully materialist language. As Lucretius suggests in De

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rerum natura, it is in the consumption of poetry that materialist and tropic forms of substance reunite in the sensations of the reader. In keeping with this approach to literature as a site of pleasure, La Mettrie most explicitly poses the question of subject formation—the ways in which matter may interact with perceptions to form human subjectivities—in a text that has often been viewed as a literary ‘‘bauble’’ tangential to his scientific and philosophic practice: the short essay variously entitled La Volupte´, L’E´cole de la Volupte´, and finally (and perhaps most famously), L’Art de jouir.40 In her 1996 edition of L’E´cole de la Volupte´, Ann Thomson describes this brief piece

‘‘Frontispiece from the 1747 edition of La Mettrie’s L’E´cole de la Volupte´’’

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as ‘‘a light text that seems to have amused its author, who was attached enough to it to rework it several times.’’41 While each version of La Volupte´ traverses a variety of generic positions—including those typical of the conte galant, the literary critique, and the philosophical essay—the breathy and occasionally aphoristic prose style that La Mettrie employs in this work evokes the formal yet fantasmagorical space of the libertine novel much more than that of the scientific treatise. Moreover, as if to underscore this particular lien de parente´, in the first two versions of the piece, La Mettrie explicitly situates his writing within a literary frame of reference defined in relationship to the works of Voltaire and Cre´billon, as well as to those of now lesser known libertine authors including the playwright Saint-Foix, the poets Bernard, Bernis, and Gresset, and the essayist Moncrif, author of the aristocratic conduct manual Essais sur la ne´cessite´ et sur les moyens de plaire, among other writers. While La Volupte´ is indeed self-consciously ‘‘frivolous’’ in tone, this essay nonetheless establishes a domain, inflected by the language and preoccupations of libertine literature, wherein the labor of La Mettrie as Epicurean homme de science can come to fruition in the production of a Lucretian philosophic subject of pleasure. We should not read La Mettrie’s medical training and lifelong interest in physiology as incompatible with—or overpowering—his attachment to what may now seem to us the rather precious formalities of the libertine conte. Rather than projecting La Mettrie’s commitment to medicine back into his literary tastes—and making of the libertine novel or tale a labor of dissection—we can instead see in his corpus a full recuperation of the literary as a crucial site for the exploration of matter as substantial and figural all at once (and even, as most substantial where it is most figural). In La Mettrie’s later work, the literary essay remains, as a consequence of the Lucretian modulations of Lamettrian scientific materialism, a valorized space for the production of a materialist self.42 While this prioritization may now seem counterintuitive, it saturates the discursive realm of libertinage, as discussed in the previous chapter, and is only undone with difficulty and over time. The heroine of Baret’s salacious 1757 novel Mademoiselle Javotte, for instance, can still testify to the affiliation between the literary practice of voluptuousness and the labor of recreating a self along libertine lines by making a reference to De la volupte´ (which she classifies as a novel!). As she explains, ‘‘The novels of MM. Lametterie [sic], Diderot and Cre´billon helped me to complete a comprehensive and rapid course in voluptuousness [volupte´]; I owe them the art of refining and creating pleasures, of replacing the senses with the mind and reality with imagination.’’43 For La Mettrie as for Mademoiselle Javotte, where materialist theory still

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functions to free up the philosophical imagination to consider new forms of subjectivity that work tropically rather than ‘‘rationally,’’ it is literature that inaugurates these forms as livable and productive. In what follows, I will develop a reading of La Volupte´ that aims to show how this process might work.

4. La Volupte´ and the materialist subject La Mettrie deploys before his reader, in La Volupte´, a variety of bodies, all defined through an oscillation between moments of voluptuous constraint and equally voluptuous dissolution. He demonstrates repeatedly how the troped and formal body of constraint may become, in literature, the sensuously and momentarily free body of the lover-reader, and in this sense uses the conventions of libertine literary writing to extend into a lived, materialist aesthetic the Epicurean dialectic regulating relationships among solid and dissolute bodies (where weighty atoms produce mobile and flexible ‘‘skins’’ that subsequently inflect perception in specific but not necessarily predictable ways). As the essay advances through a variety of positions, a new kind of philosophic body emerges from within the literary field that La Mettrie cordons off in the initial paragraphs of this text—a body distinguished not only by its attachment to specific sets of aesthetic practices, but by its complete material penetrability. The ‘‘hard’’ body of machine-man becomes in La Volupte´ the porous body of the Epicurean litte´rateur, and in this progressive movement the thoroughly poetic effects of the kind of monistic materialism later developed by La Mettrie in L’Homme-machine are first rendered palpable. La Mettrie shows in La Volupte´ that the materialist philosophic body must be considered an exquisitely receptive one, in the sense that a constantly renewed attentiveness to matter is what allows this body to (re)constitute itself as such, briefly but reiteratively, before dissolving into pleasure. The experience of this receptiveness must also be understood as both substantial and poetic—as an absolute openness to figure in its material and literary forms. The role of the materialist philosopher thus involves a commitment to the reproduction of this condition of receptivity in as many (figural) modes as possible, so that what may have seemed the impenetrable substance of ‘‘real’’ bodies gradually morphs into a series of flexible and infinitely changeable images of pleasure.44 Accordingly, where La Mettrie in L’Homme-machine has appeared to many critics to privilege the phallic eroticism of the robotic jouisseur, spewing sperm, in La Volupte´ he reveals himself to be more fundamentally concerned with imparting to his readers what he

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regularly presents as the feminized pleasures devolving from a tropic experience of interpenetrability, where one body may become another by first imagining it as a figure. The voluptuous philosopher, then, makes delight out of constraint by rendering him- (or, as is increasingly the case by the end of the text, her-) self as available for penetration by the representations of things. Like many of La Mettrie’s works, La Volupte´ takes a hybrid form— bringing together poetry, philosophical musings, sexology, literary criticism, love letters—and is more or less unsystematic in structure.45 It revolves around the exploration of a kind of epistemological Cythera, a realm at the interstices of literature and philosophy where reason is silent and all language imbued with voluptuous sensation. In this investigation of a space of pure pleasure—a domain imagined here as the product of an intense engagement with literary texts—La Mettrie returns most insistently to the project of both narrating and reproducing a voluptuous philosophic subject (‘‘le philosophe voluptueux’’)46 whose manifold apperceptions the essay repeatedly conjures. Like De rerum natura or Montesquieu’s Le Temple de Gnide, another one of La Mettrie’s manifest inspirations, the text opens with an invocation. But, where Montesquieu asks the muses to endow his portrait of Venus’s temple at Gnide with ‘‘that charm and that sweetness that I once felt,’’47 La Mettrie invokes first a beloved mistress (in the dedication) and then those ‘‘happy children of voluptuousness,’’ authors and poets whom ‘‘love himself has taken care to form.’’48 While Montesquieu’s allegory of pleasure revolves around a topography of place, La Mettrie looks first toward literary language to shape his voluptuous figures. He is more interested in the subjective effects of discourse—form turned inwards—than in the objectification of feeling through the allegorical mapping of affect. Although everything about the introduction to this essay seems to announce it as an agreeable diversion of sorts, La Mettrie’s focus on style—and on pleasure as a function thereof— is consistent (through Lucretius) with what will become his very Epicurean emphasis on happiness as the summum bonum of philosophy. Elsewhere, La Mettrie demonstrates the centrality of delight to a materialist apprehension of the world. Here, he produces that delight. Just as La Mettrie describes Le Temple de Gnide as a pure expression of Montesquieu’s philosophical thought—‘‘It is thus that a wise man sometimes dares open on his own a school of voluptuousness. Eh! who else indeed should teach mortals the secret of happiness? Disciples of Epicurus, come forward and pay homage to a master more worthy of you’’—La Volupte´ may be understood, in its very philosophical diffidence, as a kind of materialist practicum.49 The two invoca-

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tions with which the text begins—to a lover and to those poets of voluptuousness who practice what they preach—conjure the intermingling of literature and sensation. In good libertine fashion, La Volupte´ is both descriptive—including a series of reasonably explicit accounts of heterosexual sex—and hortatory, ‘‘a discourse about sex and an incitement to practice it.’’50 In early versions, the body of the essay is dedicated to ‘‘Madame la Marquise de ***’’ (although this dedication does not appear in L’Art de jouir), while the work is depicted in the dedication as an ode to this absent beloved and the pleasures she once inspired: ‘‘It is thus that a tender and afflicted heart seeks to assuage the pains that your absence causes it.’’51 In the dedication ‘‘to my dear friend,’’ La Mettrie initiates the reader into a moment of exquisite tension—where the embodied and substantial pleasures of erotic love are in the midst of disintegrating into the simulacral and nostalgic delights of discourse. As he will show later on, however, the full experience of materialist voluptas transforms what seems to be an inevitable movement toward decay and forgetfulness (where texts and bodies appear to have squared off against one another) into a generative mutual engagement. It is within the cross-pollination characteristic of voluptuous sensation—where the idea of an absent loved one can evoke a response even more tumultuous than her physical presence—that a materialist subject will come into being. Not unlike L’Homme-machine, the text of the essay itself begins with a series of sweeping rhetorical gestures meant to clear the discursive arena to prepare for the emergence of this subject. In the first paragraph, La Mettrie rejects both the technical approaches of those he calls ‘‘beaux esprits’’ (pure nominalists, who are interested only in the manipulation of rhetoric) and the pallid efforts of the ‘‘servile imitators’’ (facile copycats who neglect the centrality of feeling to the production of tropic language). He begins by dismissing—‘‘be gone from here’’—all authors who work to divorce sensation from representation, substance from the deployment of figure, in their feeble attempts to induce pleasure in their readers.52 His affectionate evocation of a more genuinely voluptuous aesthetic, rendered as a panegyric to its practitioners, follows on the heels of this recusation of the methods of the ‘‘vile herds’’ who fail to warm adequately to their subject. Poets predominate in the list of those writers to whom La Mettrie describes himself as indebted, but he nonetheless locates his stylistic ideal at the intersection of lyric poetry and philosophy. As he writes of the poet Gresset, ‘‘More of a poet than Fontenelle, be as much of a philosopher as he is; melt the ice of his ideas, without making them lose any of their accuracy; go on and animate, give life to objects, even the most

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fantastical: the voluptuous imagination awaits its triumph in you.’’53 The warm ‘‘animation’’ of ideas in poetry begins with their materialization as the pleasures of a ‘‘voluptuous imagination’’; here, as in Lucretius, Epicurean voluptas finds its most specific expression in poetic language as a form of delight. The lineage of the essay as La Mettrie understands it is thus both classical and modern (Cre´billon fils and Fontenelle appear alongside Catullus, Lucretius, and Ovid), literary as well as philosophical (St. E´vremond and Montaigne are described as ‘‘my two philosophers’’), and—despite La Mettrie’s early condemnation of ‘‘obscenity’’—coherently libertine in emphasis.54 In La Mettrie’s presentation of the works of these and other authors, philosophical libertinism is shown as working in tandem with a discursive flexibility according to which the production of texts is always deeply imbricated in the production of pleasure—feminine pleasure in particular. Furthermore, La Mettrie places the libertine tradition he has outlined not under the sign of seduction per se (although he does not deny that libertine works may function seductively) but under that of voluptuous pleasure as experienced by a woman reader, so that his canon can eventually constitute itself as acting in the service of feminine erotic response. Working out of the list he has established in the first pages, La Mettrie goes on to show how his imagined reader’s erotic receptiveness to literature, far from making up a kind of intellectual passivity, may in fact provide the basis of a materialist philosophical position vis-a`-vis the matter of experience. The eroticized feminine reader who is both the addressee and the object of this prose is being prepared for a transformation, by the end of the essay, into the subject of philosophy itself. Crucially, this ideal receptiveness is heightened by and formed in figure, as La Mettrie explains, and not simply as a response to the ‘‘unveiling’’ or offering up of nature ‘‘naked and in varying attitudes.’’55 Attentiveness to tropic language becomes the distinguishing characteristic that separates ‘‘obscene and dissolute’’ authors from ‘‘masters of the purest voluptuousness.’’56 Where the former strive to reveal everything—‘‘without pity, they tear away the gauzy veil’’57—the latter ‘‘know how to modify infinitely thousands of the most pleasant ideas, thousands of the most diverse sentiments, without losing themselves in a metaphysical voluptuousness.’’58 He continues in a typically headlong way: In order to please [readers] to such a degree, to ravish hearts, fine and delicate thoughts, a richness of expression, happy turns of phrase, a boldness of the pen, sublime features, all of the beauties of nature must be heightened by those of art; the former and the latter must seem, if I may say so, surprised

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In this passage, striptease becomes style. The aesthetic practice of the ‘‘master of voluptuousness’’ reveals a natural world of constantly reconfigured surfaces. In the reunion of nature and art, deeply inflected by classicism, that is described here, those ‘‘happy turns of phrase’’ have been expertly regrafted onto the natural object whose beauties they both conceal and foreground. While La Mettrie cautions against ‘‘affectation,’’ which he deplores, he nonetheless describes a natural world within which the formal prettiness of style magically rematerializes as an intrinsic part of nature itself: ‘‘amiable nudities taking on new graces from the industry with which they are hidden.’’60 Rather than suggesting that we turn to nature to discover our true pleasures, La Mettrie grants to the voluptuous author the power to disclose a domain in which matter and figure are inseparable from one another (an arena of infinite pleasures for the discerning reader, who cannot help but respond physiologically to this revelation). The most material and substantial pleasures, then, are to be found in the commingling of nature and design. Indeed, the infinite Epicurean diversity of the natural world is only to be discovered through the intervention of figure: ‘‘Yes, the art with which they respect modesty, is the art of making it disappear; under the seductive veil, with which their objects are ingeniously covered, they make more conquests, than those who, showing everything as it is, leave nothing to be desired.’’61 While La Mettrie does make an initial effort to demonstrate that his voluptuous aesthetic is derived from specific sets of pleasures in particular—namely the relatively ‘‘virtuous’’ ones of heterosexual love—this assertion more or less dissolves in the face of his investment in voluptas (in its myriad forms) as allowing a certain privileged access to the astonishing variety of experience: ‘‘The empire of love recognizes no other limits, than the limits of pleasure,’’ he proclaims.62 La Mettrie’s assertion here is far from being a reduction or distillation of love to its basest or ‘‘brute’’ elements. Instead, we might read it, in context, as a rearticulation of the reliance of his materialism on figure as a privileged device for making known to readers the unending fungibility of sensation. This passage, in La Volupte´, directly follows a description of the scenes of homosexual love in Petronius, a portrayal that reveals literature as a primary locus of expansive erotic delight. La

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Mettrie points out that, if homosexuality should be considered ‘‘a resource for those confronted with the boring uniformity of pleasures, that inconstancy prefers to vary,’’ it is not because erotic love between men is natural, preexisting its own representation.63 Rather, it is in reading Petronius that readers may develop an embodied receptivity to the figural beauties of the eroticized boy: ‘‘What naı¨ve and touching graces offer themselves to us at every moment! How he tells the story of the Pergamene schoolboy!’’ La Mettrie exclaims.64 As he continues later in the essay, ‘‘It is thus that art adds to nature, and makes her infinitely variable.’’65 For La Mettrie, the profound multiplicity of Epicurean nature and its inherent pleasures, what Deleuze calls ‘‘the pluralism essential to this philosophy of Nature,’’ first makes itself visible in the form of a literary inheritance.66 By the time La Mettrie has finished his opening catalogue—a materialist canon for the discerning voluptuary—the ambitions of the essay have become more clear. If he is helpfully drawing up a reading list, it is not because he is indulging in a systematic delineation of voluptuous taste; this project is anything but encyclopedic. Instead, even though he affirms that ‘‘voluptuous authors’’ must ‘‘feel’’ voluptuousness in order to ‘‘paint’’ it, for the voluptuous reader and philosopher, the ‘‘paintings’’ themselves take priority over the sensations that they repetitively induce.67 In fact, it is the ability to recognize the sensuousness of (literary) representation that is the defining characteristic of La Mettrie’s materialist voluptuary. In a section that confirms the significance of literariness for La Volupte´ as an account of sensation, La Mettrie follows a passage in praise of Cre´billon fils with his own scenes of pastoral libertinage. After urging the libertine novelist on—‘‘Keep going, dear Cre´billon, finish the pictures that enchant the universe’’—he presents his readers with a series of more or less graphic examples of the kind of ‘‘completion’’ to which he is referring.68 Tircis and Sylvanire, Sylvie and Damon, Me´lis and his beloved, Nicette and her shepherd—each couple that La Mettrie describes embodies at once a generic or narrative convention (including the eclogue, the elegy, the seduction scene, and the libertine coming-of-age tale) as well as a particular moment in the experience of romantic love: Tircis is delighted at the sight of her sheep grazing among those of Sylvanire; Damon pines for the favors of Sylvie; and the beloved of Me´lis gives herself up to him, but sadly withholds her own pleasure in order to conserve her power over her partner. In the fourth scenario, featuring Nicette, we return again to the pastoral idyll, this time in a more explicit mode, as ‘‘two children of different sexes, left to live peacefully together’’ enter puberty ‘‘without education, and as a result without prejudices, giving

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themselves up, without remorse, to a mutual sympathy.’’69 This boy and girl, presumably brother and sister, are filled with amorous desires but still too immature to understand how to make appropriate use of their newfound emotions; they are in possession of neither a theoretical framework by which to ‘‘order’’ their sensations nor a practical understanding of how to satisfy their longings. Were it not for their mutual discovery of a schema of representation within nature itself, they would remain entirely unable to make sense of their own physiologies. It is only the capacity of the natural world to present an image of itself to them that eventually enables them to understand the ‘‘chaos’’ that is their initial experience of embodiment. First, the shepherd gazes at the shepherdess with a new eye: Entirely occupied with his new being, he seeks to decipher the chaos of his nature; he feels, he desires, without really knowing what he feels, nor what he desires; he only glimpses, through the desire he has to be happy, the power that he has to become so. His confused desires form a veil, that hides from his sight the happiness that awaits him. Console yourselves, young shepherds, the flame of love will soon dissipate the clouds that delay those beautiful days. The pleasures after which you sigh, will not always be unknown to you; nature will offer you the image of them everywhere; she is attentive to the well-being of those who serve her. Two animals will couple in your presence; you will see the birds caressing one another on the branch; everything will make of love a living lesson for you. What reflections will be born from this new spectacle!70

Here the shepherd’s desires are represented as largely illegible to him until they are ‘‘naturally’’ re-presented as a ‘‘living lesson.’’ Rather than being established on the putative transparency of the body and its demands, this model of an emergent erotic subjectivity is based on the capacity of nature itself to produce, in a series of analogies, ‘‘the image of them everywhere.’’ Bodily sensation becomes a ‘‘veil’’ that cannot be removed before the reading of nature’s ‘‘lesson’’; it is only in witnessing the ‘‘image’’ of love that erotic feeling can be deciphered. Instead of using examples from nature to prove the naturalness of human desire, this particular twist on a birds-andbees tale renders the images themselves the source of an ability to find bodily pleasure in erotic love. La Mettrie shows in this passage how voluptuousness comes into being through the spectacular, textual representation of nature and the body. Pleasure is born in the moment that the universe comes alive as figuration.

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A little further on, after this description of the shepherd’s entry into voluptuousness as conjuring a natural world where even the birds are sexy, the same process is rendered in equally striking terms where Nicette, the shepherdess, is concerned. Initially ignorant as to the function of her clitoris—‘‘that bud which, barely opened, wishes to be plucked’’—she is recreated as an erotic subject as she contemplates her own genitalia in the reflective water of a pond.71 La Mettrie writes, ‘‘She had already seen her pretty face in the wave: the same mirror would allow her to contemplate her secret charms that she had no knowledge of.’’72 For the shepherdess, the very organs of her body are incomprehensible as such—indeed, unknown—until they are reflected back at her in nature’s ‘‘mirror’’; in its reproduction as a reflection her body becomes fully visible and palpable to her. Ultimately, what both Nicette and her beloved come to ‘‘see’’ in this erotic mirror is the full involvement of ‘‘natural’’ matter in figuration. Not only are this boy and girl presented as only having access to the complete materialization of their own bodies through figure—whether this access is construed as theoretical or practical—but the very matter of which they consist remains unrevealed to them prior to its representation as a form. Creatures of pastoralism as high artifice, in their voluptuous delirium they are finally able to recognize the array of analogies provided for them in the natural universe, where ‘‘instinct’’ lies in the ability to remake matter as a panoply of reflected signs.73 This emphasis on the tropic qualities of the natural world—visible throughout the first section of La Volupte´—allows La Mettrie to work through the question that philosophy alone as he describes it does not ever adequately resolve: namely, how can the materialization of the human subject as a substance result in anything other than an experience of constraint? Indeed, how can this process of materialization—as it is depicted within the discursive arena of natural philosophy—have any consequences at all for the lived experience of a body? Or, in Epicurean terms, how may the solid matter of the atom produce a subject who is, in an atomic mode at least, productively and freely dissolute? These questions situate themselves at the intersection of philosophical knowledge and literary ‘‘sensations.’’ And, as La Mettrie both confirms and demonstrates in La Volupte´, the answers to them can only lie in the recognition of matter itself as the stuff of figure. As the essay shifts from literary criticism to a discussion of volupte´ as a way of being in the world, La Mettrie’s commitment to voluptuousness as the capacity for figuration—a capacity imbued in matter—enables him to map out, through literature, a very specific analytical trajectory. As the argument

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develops, it moves away from a notion of material embodiment viewed as a form of determinism (the ‘‘hard body’’ of the machine) into material embodiment understood as a form of flexibility (the porous, receptive body of the voluptuary). On the one hand, the account that La Mettrie gives of four couples as four particular incarnations of erotic enjoyment is interwoven with a discussion of voluptuousness as a movement that cannot be willed: ‘‘Alas! yes, our sweetest sentiments are involuntary, as are our thoughts,’’ he writes.74 On the other, La Mettrie simultaneously presents voluptuous pleasure not as a pure experience of subjection—an ‘‘impression’’ on the matter of the body to which we must react—but as the movement out of material constraint into a state of material plasticity (or flexibility), a movement that is produced in an acknowledgment of the radical tropiness of matter itself.75 In other words, freedom, for La Mettrie as a Lucretian materialist, is vested in the ability to trope on substance as a form of constraint. Literature, as an inherently figural discourse, thus becomes the space where the relative autonomy of the materialist subject can be made most visible. And voluptuousness becomes the most characteristic attribute of the materialist philosopher. As La Mettrie puts it, ‘‘Everything is voluptuousness for a man of wit.’’76 La Mettrie’s depiction of the four couples, culminating in Nicette’s initiation into erotic anatomy, introduces readers of La Volupte´ to a literary world pulsing with erotic sensation, a world from which they are to emerge transformed both philosophically and materially: ‘‘Surrounded by voluptuousness, admirer of all phenomena that strike his senses, nothing troubles him.’’77 To this end, La Mettrie describes voluptuousness as both a form of experience (uniquely tied to literary production) and an epistemological stance. The examples of the first section—positioned to evoke desire and curiosity in the reader—are followed by a discussion of the nature of the voluptuary in his specific relationship to the materiality of his senses. La Mettrie writes: Our senses are the seat of pleasure. . . . It is only in the senses that pleasure should be sought out; the most delightful sensations of the mind, are only less acute pleasures. But voluptuousness needs to be looked for at a greater remove; it often escapes us, if we expect it only from our senses. If the latter are necessary for voluptuousness, they do not suffice; imagination must supply what is missing from them. It is imagination that gives everything its value; it warms the heart, helps it to form desires and inspires the means to satisfy them. In examining pleasure, which it reviews, so to speak, the micro-

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Voluptuousness appears to lie in the art of self-deception through the use of the imagination to heighten material enjoyment. It is distinct from ‘‘simple’’ pleasure per se [plaisir], in that voluptuousness must involve a moment of re-presentation of sensation to the subject of these sensations. In the act of reproducing sensory perception through the mechanism of the imagination, pleasure is not only augmented but transfigured. While pleasure alone is experienced as a form of bodily constraint—an instance of ‘‘the empire of the body’’ as La Mettrie describes it a little later on—voluptuousness constitutes a release from the sensation of pleasure as subjection, a subjection defined as a condition where ‘‘the nerves are as tense as they can be, without causing pain.’’79 With voluptuousness—namely, the discovery of sensory delight in processes of figuration—the organization of the body determines neither the extent nor the degree of the accompanying sensations. Nonvoluptuous pleasure is intrinsically linked to the physiological conformation of the body and for this reason is vulnerable to processes of bodily decay, including senescence, illness, and the varied symptoms of debauchery. Voluptuousness, on the other hand, is not dependent on such bodily configurations, even though it remains inherently material in its effects as in its causes. The imagination, the bodily faculty of re-presenting matter in the mind, governs the movement from pleasure as sensation to voluptuous delight as a reiterative representation of these sensations, a constant material troping.80 In the voluptuous subject, pleasure—initially produced in sensations of constraint—is figured, and thereby transformed into a state of receptive flexibility, enabling the experience of a potentially constrictive materiality as a form of freedom (if not one stipulated as choice, precisely). ‘‘The voluptuary alone, in the shadow of voluptuousness, brings together all illusions; only he delights in all his ideas, he calls them, he awakens them, and caresses in a sense those that please him, according to the desires of his lubricious imagination: not that I know how the imagination mixes its colors; but the image of pleasure that is the result, seems to be pleasure itself.’’81 If voluptuousness begins with the sensation of pleasure as a binding of the body—a tension or tickling of sorts—it is during the subsequent figuration of this

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moment of constraint that this pleasure comes to participate in the epistemological and ethical projects of materialism. Voluptuousness becomes a way of apprehending the real—materially—that reunites the subjective delight of sensation with the potential for free self-transformation into a series of substantial ‘‘ideas.’’ Where reason is infinitely vulnerable—to seduction, manipulation, and the vicissitudes of embodiment generally—voluptuous perception makes of these vicissitudes a delectable form of engagement with the multifariousness of substance. If La Mettrie begins this essay with an account of his literary influences, it is because literature may serve as a model for the trajectory whereby that which seems to constrain us—our desires and pleasures—becomes, as tropes, a source of enjoyment. La Mettrie’s turn to literature is thus both heuristic—in that it teaches us how voluptuous perception might work—and symptomatic—in that it functions by extending and playing upon this very mode of perception. In keeping with his emphasis on the experience of pleasure as gradational and various in nature, La Mettrie progressively exposes voluptuousness as a materialist art of being that is also a positioning of the philosophic subject vis-a`-vis a natural world. ‘‘The voluptuary, sensitive to all, wishes to miss nothing, and does not miss anything. To be happy, he has only to want to be so.’’82 This affirmation applies, for La Mettrie, not only to the domain of erotic love, but to that of knowledge more generally. ‘‘Pleasure is the essence of man, and of the order of the universe. . . . [Man] is distinguished in this universe by his mind; delicate inclinations, a purified taste, in refining his sensations, in doubling them, in a way, through reflection, have made of him the most perfect, that is to say the happiest of beings.’’83 The world of this voluptuary may appear to modern readers as exquisitely—perhaps painfully—artificial, but it is in fact the coherent product of a materialism that envisions the animation of the trope as an emancipation of the human subject. Toward the middle of his essay, La Mettrie attempts an encapsulated description of voluptuous experience; this experience is, for him, located in the reunion of a philosophical enjoyment of nature and a literary appreciation of figure with a libertine delight in eroticism as an active incitement to the further production of tropic perceptions. The passage describing this happy intersection is worth quoting at some length, since its very syntax demonstrates how figural language may produce an infinite dissipation of sensations through and among a series of animated natural elements. The voluptuary as grammatical subject dissolves into a series of metaphors, and in this way finds contentment (erotic and philosophic). La Mettrie writes:

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With the sudden exclamation of que dirai-je enfin? (‘‘what am I saying?’’), La Mettrie pulls himself up short in this portrayal of the voluptuary as chiastically interjected into nature—containing the natural in his heart but also contained within it. This paragraph-long sentence is not so much unfinished—there is no resolution to the introductory clause—as it is necessarily unending. To depict voluptuous sensation adequately, as La Mettrie is pointing out, the entire universe would have to be troped. This project involves not so much a mining of nature for the knowledge that it may produce as an understanding that matter comes alive in its infinite susceptibility to figuration. Substance, troped, metonymically animates all that it touches. If Lamettrian materialism enables us to imagine a figure that is also a substance—insofar as nothing is thinkable for La Mettrie that is not also substantial—then the enduring construction of figure from substance may function as further proof of the endless, delirious circulation of matter of which the voluptuary delightfully partakes. In this way, we discover in La Volupte´ the philosophy of the subject that is implicitly gestured toward in L’Hommemachine. The flourishing metonymy that we encounter here, whereby the

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figuration of one object inspires the transmogrification of another, adjacent one, is the ‘‘secret’’ mechanism through which machine-man might transform himself. Moreover, as a trope himself, he figures this transformation even as he inaugurates it. In the midst of all this, the voluptuary indeed remains machinic, in the sense that his sensations are nominally self-regulating without the intervention of reason or even thought. Moreover, La Mettrie’s attempt to found a philosophic subject on sensation (even when this subject appears in the guise of an object of reflection) works to support his attack on the notion of the disembodied cogito. As La Mettrie explains toward the end of the essay, ‘‘all the movements of our machine, lead to love, and from love to voluptuousness; we are beings organized for happiness.’’85 The faculties that we may understand as guided by reason—and in this sense as expressions of a potentially immaterial will—are described by La Mettrie as in fact so perfectly imbricated in a self-sustaining matter that any transcendent or insubstantial force is completely evacuated from them. Voluptuousness, as a sixth sense, ‘‘forbids the use of speech, of sight, and of thought even, that it changes into sentiment: it annihilates the soul with all of the senses, of which the latter is the principle, or the aim.’’86 In this way each person is in thrall to voluptuous sensation, just as machine-man seems in thrall to his mysterious mechanism. Reason, as a result, is fully under the control of pleasure, which leads it by the reins, to use La Mettrie’s terms. But the commitment of the voluptuary to tropic forms of delight produces an enactment of subjectivity as most exquisitely amenable to multiple transfigurations—and most ‘‘free’’ from ‘‘trouble’’—precisely where it appears most constrained. Figuratively speaking, this subject is one that is constantly in the process of dissipating under pressure, expanding the limits of sensation into a kind of liquid satisfaction with all things (a satisfaction that is also, in its own way, a partaking of and in them). Two lovers in the midst of intercourse dissolve into one another, in an overflow of delight that also structures the relationship of the voluptuary to the ‘‘external’’ world more generally: ‘‘Pleasure seeks them at the limits of their selves, and, not content with the paths already open, it makes passage-ways through every pore . . . like those springs that, constrained by the narrow pathways through which they wind, and not content with an opening as big as they are, burst out and come to light in a thousand places: such is the impetuousness of pleasure.’’87 It is the essential fluidity of the voluptuous subject—engendered first by the ‘‘release’’ of the trope— that allows the ‘‘idea’’ of beauty to be as stimulating (or as liquifying) as the ‘‘substance’’ of this beauty. Not only is the sensation of voluptuousness itself

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a liquid one—La Mettrie writes often of the ‘‘distillation’’ of volupte´ throughout the body, drop by drop—but the voluptuary is repeatedly portrayed as serially progressing through sensations in a process of corporeal liquefaction. ‘‘The idea of you follows me everywhere, and takes the place of you: the idea of beauty is worth beauty itself, and is often even more seductive. Sweet memory of past pleasures, never leave me! With what sweet and soft voluptuousness do I feel myself penetrated! Powerful gods, can the organs of the body withstand such happiness?’’88 As volupte´ suffuses the body, the most intimate substance of the voluptuary dissolves into figurally induced pleasure. The lover, in this passage, becomes his memories even as he calls them to mind, just as readers may become the ‘‘matter’’ of the text they peruse even as they ‘‘imagine’’ what they read. The voluptuary is indeed all of nature, although La Mettrie’s nature encompasses memory, and its correlate—literature. In their receptivity to tropes in all of their metamorphoses, voluptuous philosophers move through these domains as they move through their pleasures, fluidly.89 The notion of volupte´, in La Mettrie’s essay, takes on Lucretian resonance both as an ideal (in literary and philosophical terms) and as a sensation to be cultivated. But La Mettrie also suggests a reinterpretation of the figure of the Epicurean voluptuary that is not simply a reiteration of Lucretian principles. If the voluptuous subject is first defined through a receptivity to dissipation—the experience of fungibility that emerges from the persistent troping of constraint—the erotic quality of this experience might initially seem more or less contingent to its positioning in relationship to a classically Lucretian vision of materialism. Indeed, the insistent sexualization of this receptivity might instead appear rooted in a characteristically modern fascination (pace Foucault) with locating the secret of voluptuous existence within sexuality, a sexuality that must always be sought out, even as it saturates all dimensions of the subject. But the quotation from Lucretius that adorns the frontispiece of the version of the essay entitled L’E´cole de la volupte´—‘‘Aeneidum genitrix/Hominum divumque voluptas etc.’’—calls to mind another reading of La Mettrie’s preoccupation with erotic physiology. In addition to the direct quote that appears in the epigraph to L’Ecole de la volupte´, La Mettrie makes several references to Lucretius in the body of La Volupte´. First, he urges his friend Fre´ron to undertake a translation of De rerum natura, suggesting that ‘‘you should show yourself to be more Epicurean, than the author himself.’’90 In the last third of the text, he exclaims, ‘‘Pleasure, (oh! would that I had the art of Lucretius to invoke you ceaselessly!).’’91 In a more general sense, La Volupte´, even in the absence of the

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quotation that frames L’E´cole de la volupte´, is clearly written with Lucretius’s invocation to Venus (as both the source of voluptas generally and the specific inspiration for De rerum natura) in mind. (The addition of the epigraph thus serves to make perfectly transparent what would have already been implicit to eighteenth-century readers at all familiar with Lucretius.) In this context, the very use of the term volupte´ retains a particularly Epicurean resonance of which La Mettrie is obviously aware. Given this framework, we might see La Volupte´ as not only an extension of a philosophy of pleasure with Epicurean overtones but as a response to very precise limits set by Lucretius on the power of the poetic trope. In this vein, it becomes possible to read La Mettrie’s eroticization of the voluptuary as an engagement with the Lucretian affirmation of the inherent failure of tropic perception in one domain in particular, that of erotic love. Lucretius’s discussion of love comes at the end of book four of De rerum natura, and is in many senses a pessimistic one. While Lucretius situates his reading of erotic desire in the context of an analysis of other forms of what will appear, to La Mettrie, as paradigmatic experiences of material dissolution—including dreaming, and imaginative or hallucinatory perception— his depiction of intercourse is remarkable for the way in which it posits the desiring imagination as necessarily limited by strict constraints placed on the nature of substance. Erotic desire, Lucretius suggests, involves a form of false consciousness. Even though lovers may seek to possess one another wholly, he argues, this wish can never be fulfilled, since the ‘‘body’’ that each sees and desires is nothing more than a simulacrum, an image of itself produced by the dissipation of atoms characteristic of all things. Because the ephemeral bodies of erotic perception, in Lucretius, cannot be taken in or ingested in the same way that food or drink may be, the lover’s desire somehow to consume the substance of the beloved is doomed to futility. ‘‘Therein there is hope that from the same body, whence comes the source of their flame, the fire may in turn be quenched. Yet nature protests that all this happens just the other way; and this is the one thing, whereof the more and more we have, the more does our heart burn with the cursed desire.’’92 We may long to stabilize the inherently tropic image of the beloved by imbibing it within us, but this longing can only be based on a misreading of the nature of corporeal form itself as wholly available for our possession and consumption. As Lucretius explains, ‘‘For meat and drink are taken within the limbs; and since they are able to take up their abode in certain parts, thereby the desire for water and bread is easily sated. But from the face and beauteous bloom of man nothing passes into the body to be enjoyed save delicate im-

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ages.’’93 Lucretius’s solution to this dilemma is the severe regulation of erotic desire, preferably in the form of a disciplined promiscuity.94 If the simulacrum of another body cannot be possessed, the Epicurean lover may train himself, at least, to avoid generating such a need in the first place. ‘‘But it is best to flee those images, and scare away from you what feeds your love, and to turn your mind some other way, and vent your passion on other objects, and not to keep it, set once for all on the love of one, and thereby store up for yourself care and certain pain.’’95 Yet La Mettrie, with his insistence on the materialist power of figural description, envisions another set of erotic—and philosophic—possibilities for the voluptuary. Far from understanding sexual desire per se as that element of subjectivity that may be disclosed or unlocked by an increasingly intimate focus on bodily sensation, La Mettrie proposes a figural understanding of matter that succeeds in opening up even the domain of erotic experience to transformation through the plasticity of the trope. Where Lucretius sees sex as the proof of a limit to processes of dissipation—the resistance of the beloved to possession produces an unhappy awareness of material constraint in the lover—La Mettrie extends the full pleasure of dissolution into the act of sexual intercourse. In fact, he figures dissolution itself as a kind of infinite interpenetrability, so that sex becomes coded as a recurring demonstration of an extreme facility for penetration, even as every other form of experience comes to sound much like sex. If love emerges, as La Mettrie’s essay proceeds, as the most significant test of the mutual penetrability of subjects, it is because love seems even to Lucretius to consist in the experience of substance as perfectly resistant to an innate human desire for the possession of one person by another. But for La Mettrie the invocation of such a desire is not only inadequately materialist—in the sense that it implies a fascination with an inaccessible region of the self that can be neither figured nor quantified—it underestimates the power of tropic substance to enable a perfect interweaving of one subject with another. In La Mettrie’s terms, the constraints that seem to bind desire dissolve in the moment of being figured. This process is dramatically visible in the initial presentation of La Volupte´ in the form of a love letter—‘‘the story of our love’’—that is but an inadequate substitute for the physical presence of the beloved marquise. As the essay proceeds, the ‘‘image’’ or idea of the beloved’s beauty comes to serve not only as a sufficient stand-in for her physical proximity, but as nominally preferable to her very presence. The mental conjuring of past pleasures, for the voluptuary, produces a sensation that surpasses even the initial stimulus. La Mettrie, in working around what Lu-

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cretius sees as an insuperable limit to the capacity of the subject for transformation through pleasure, has indeed become ‘‘more Epicurean, than the author himself.’’96 La Mettrie’s tropic materialism revises the Lucretian significance of erotic desire as a definitive experience of material constraint. In La Volupte´, voluptuousness enables the opening up of the erotic subject precisely to the sensation of full material penetrability that Lucretius deems unrealizable. La Mettrie writes, ‘‘It is thus that everything ravishes, everything enflames a sensitive and loving heart; each beauty throws it into ecstasies, each inanimate being speaks to and moves it, each part of creation fills it with voluptuousness.’’97 The moment when the materialist subject constitutes itself through sensation is also the moment of its dissolution into and across recurring figures of speech. The interpenetration of one person by another, a phenomenon presented by Lucretius as materially impossible, is thus perfectly sustainable for La Mettrie, as long as matter is properly understood as infinitely generative of figures that are, in their own right, substantial. To be open to figure is thus to be receptive to substances in their extraordinary and ceaselessly transfigurative variety. The obsessive representation of erotic desire as constraint—facing down the absence or flight of the beloved—may furthermore be resolved by its very figuration as such. While La Mettrie does not deny that it is desirable to be endowed with ‘‘vigorous organs’’ that may render the experience of sexual pleasure more readily (and frequently) attainable, physical prowess is thus hardly the defining characteristic of the voluptuary.98 He explains, ‘‘Even more happy are they whose lively and lubricious imagination keeps them always in anticipation of pleasure! Examine their eyes, and judge, if you can, whether they are going to pleasure, or coming from it. . . . See how they care for [the remains of their pleasure], cherish them, prolong them; their state is so charming, that they float, so to speak, on its delights.’’99 Voluptuousness gradually comes to be defined, here, as the capacity to reflect on pleasure as a moment of figural interpenetration ‘‘where the soul seems to leave us, to pass into the adored object,’’ a capacity that in itself reproduces the experience of penetrability in the philosophic voluptuary.100 ‘‘With what sweet, soft voluptuousness, do I feel myself penetrated!’’ exclaims La Mettrie. What was for Lucretius an acknowledgment of the limits posed by embodied substance—the beloved as an object that can never be appropriately consumed by another body— becomes for La Mettrie an affirmation of the ability to dissolve such limits by troping on them, so that the embodied forms of the lovers may indeed be entirely saturated with one another.

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If the materialist voluptuary as La Mettrie describes him here has any ethical obligation to his fellow humans, then, it is to articulate and propagate the condition of tropic receptivity that comes to define him in his privileged relationship to matter. Hence La Mettrie’s fascination, in this essay, with the feminine orgasm as both an important instantiation of enjoyment in penetrability and a paradigmatic moment in the materialist production of voluptuous autonomy out of constraint. Women, as La Mettrie describes them in La Volupte´, have generally been obliged to cultivate particularly tropic pleasures in that they are considerably less likely than men to be able to perceive their own bodies as ‘‘simple’’ or unmediated sites of sensory experience. ‘‘Why is it, love,’’ he asks, ‘‘that the gift of feeling has not been given to all women, with that of pleasing? The happiness of loving, or delighting in that which one loves, should it not always bring great pleasure, to she who has the ability to inspire it?’’101 While the suggestion in this passage is that feminine insensibility may be innate, elsewhere in the text La Mettrie makes it clear how, before they may accede to pleasure, women must negotiate a regime of feminine virtue that requires the performance of resistance as a sign of its social effectiveness. As a result, the women he portrays in this essay tend to acknowledge their bodily experience as necessarily constrained (for social reasons, if not ‘‘natural’’ ones) and thereby more readily conditioned to an openness to figure as a legitimate source of delight. Thus, if Lamettrian voluptuousness, unlike ‘‘mere’’ pleasure, ‘‘needs to be looked for at a greater remove,’’ women’s distance from the experience of automatic sensual enjoyment that may often seem to typify masculine sexual response makes them excellent candidates for a voluptuous education.102 This means that women occupy a crucial position in the Lamettrian schema, although La Mettrie argues neither for their release from the strictures of virtuous femininity nor for a recognition of their status as ‘‘inherent’’ or a priori voluptuaries (the fact of their greater insensibility to sensation notwithstanding). Instead, he simply evaluates feminine virtue as constructed through women’s enforced acquiescence to certain constraints that, in regulating their behavior, reliably engender social dependence and the anxiety that follows from such dependence. ‘‘Shall I speak of the respectable woman who fears giving herself up to the object of her passion? She grants to the idea of her lover, more than she gives the man; why? It is because, she says, with the idea of you, I do not fear indiscretion or lack of constancy, and that I imagine it, in a word, just as I would like you to be.’’103 But it is precisely virtuous or ‘‘respectable’’ women’s institutionalized reliance on mediated

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pleasures—and their unwillingness to prioritize bodily sensation over its ‘‘idea’’—that may also provide an important model for masculine voluptuaries in their reincarnation as tropically receptive material subjects. Not only does La Mettrie suggest that voluptuous men have an obligation to seek out and stimulate feminine pleasure wherever possible—in effect wresting the delights of dissolution from the performance of habituated constraint that is feminine virtue—but he affirms that these men should shape their own pleasures as much as possible in the mold of women’s. The reiterated scenes of feminine orgasm that appear throughout the essay therefore have an evidentiary function. They render legible the relationship between the restrictions placed on the virtuous feminine subject and the dissolute enjoyment that these restrictions may engender as they are reflected and worked upon. Moreover, they also serve to demonstrate suggestively the pleasures of interpenetrability for men. The voluptuous philosopher, in his masculine form, is enjoined to seek out those moments of interpenetrability—the disintegration of objects into their images—that may arise from reiterated troping on the ‘‘fact’’ of bodily constraint. Voluptuousness should emerge, for him, as readily from reflection on the mediated pleasures of another’s body as it may from the contemplation of nature (to take one example) as an eroticized and fundamentally figural space. He is thus obligated to pursue feminine orgasm not only as a lesson in tropic materialism but as a way of heightening the voluptuous pleasures he may take in witnessing (and representing to himself ) his lover’s passage from constraint to dissolution. To clarify this point, La Mettrie includes in his essay two scenes of seduction narrated in the first person. In the first, he labors to bring his beloved, Ce´phise, to orgasm, and, in the second, he convinces Philis, who is ‘‘innocent,’’ to abandon herself to ‘‘a joy, that doubles, in being shared.’’104 The remarkable description of Ce´phise’s (ultimately successful) attempt to ‘‘reach the happy limit of her pleasures’’ is inaugurated by her remark that ‘‘you do not yet know my bliss, I want all of my soul to pass into yours.’’105 Although the narrator and Ce´phise have already ‘‘sacrificed’’ four times ‘‘to tender love,’’ Ce´phise, ‘‘all afire,’’ remains in a state of intense agitation.106 The narrator is called to a fifth sacrifice, and fears that a sixth will be demanded of him, but resolves ‘‘to put everything to work, to calm that which one loves, and to bring pleasure to an amiable object, that receives new charms, from the vivacity with which she desires enjoyment!’’107 This effort is finally successful: ‘‘Ce´phise . . . , seeing the great interest that I was taking in the culmination of her pleasures . . . , the animated, urgent air with which I was encouraging

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her, with which I presided over the struggle, . . . , then, with a sweet, soft voice, her gaze dying into mine, said, ‘Come quickly, dear love, come into my arms, so that I might expire in yours’.’’108 Just as the narrator’s pleasure is quickened by the sight of Ce´phise’s ‘‘vivacious’’ desire for jouissance, Ce´phise’s orgasm is generated by the scene of her partner’s labor on behalf of her delight. In both cases, it is in the act of figuring to oneself the sensation of constraint that voluptuous pleasure occurs, a mutually tropic pleasure first vigorously produced as a result of Ce´phise’s initial renunciation of her own enjoyment in favor of that of her lover. (She starts out claiming that ‘‘pleasure would corrupt her happiness.’’109) Furthermore, the ethic that is being espoused by the narrator in these passages is one of unstinting devotion to feminine voluptuousness as itself absolutely predicated upon the perfect commingling of souls and bodies that La Mettrie has set up as an ideal. The privileging of interpenetrability as the desired outcome of a voluptuous materialism means for La Mettrie a dedication to feminine orgasm as a philosophical principle. In the much briefer scene with Philis, a similarly gradual process of seduction through the reiterated presentation of erotic images in language is enacted. ‘‘Each being addresses you, will you be deaf to these voices?’’ he asks his female readers.110 (Philis, predictably, also succumbs to this appeal.) Throughout these scenes, La Mettrie’s insistence on the textual and ‘‘reflected’’ quality of erotic delight renders the voluptuary as mobile and effervescent, but this mobility and this effervescence are in the end grounded in a thorough materialization of figure itself in the sensations of the voluptuous subject. The persistent figuration of material or embodied conditions of constraint thus can become for La Mettrie not an escape into idealism but a way of putting into practice what he will later formulate as a materialist ethic whose neatest expression is initially found in the pleasure of Ce´phise, reluctant yet in her very reluctance mindful of her own delight. ‘‘Do you know why I still have some respect for men?’’ La Mettrie asks in Syste`me d’E´picure. ‘‘Because I seriously believe them to be machines. . . . Materialism is the antidote to misanthropy.’’111 Voluptuousness is in its nature contagious, since it is a product of the infinite porousness of things, and the voluptuary sees the communication of his pleasure to others as a constituent part of its cultivation. In becoming machinic in this context, men and women become voluptuous forms of themselves—libidinously free in the very moments when they may seem the most determined. Despite his emphasis on the erotics of voluptas, with La Volupte´, La Mettrie is in no sense initiating his reader into a materialist science of sexology. His

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emphasis on feminine sexual pleasure is not, strictly speaking, technical; while he understands voluptuousness to be contagious, it is not reproducible through gesture and does not constitute so much a form of applied knowledge as a means of generating and transforming material perceptions. Moreover, he gently derides the work of physicians who gravely seek to explain the mechanics of sexual desire to the ignorant. ‘‘Glance at the Tableau de l’amour conjugal,’’ he remarks, ‘‘and all the works of those doctors who, loving nature more than they know her, have looked for pleasure in the most serious research. With what ingenious skill does love profit from the very ignorance of the mortals whom he instructs!’’112 Instead, La Mettrie reads in women’s voluptuous enjoyment an invitation to explore the endlessly various manifestations of erotic sensation. These manifestations become a way of representing embodiment to oneself so that the perceptible limits of the individual body undergo a series of shifts into and through the figures by which the latter are portrayed. Furthermore, La Mettrie suggests that men may profit from the feminine example in this regard, an example that conjugates the troped delights of reflection (since women do not always come by their pleasures easily in a society where feminine chastity is subject to intense regulation) with an engaged availability to the desired other in order to produce what he describes as the willingness to exchange bodies and souls. Accordingly, the final pages of La Volupte´ are devoted to an account of how a woman may seduce her sleeping beloved, ‘‘an unconscious lover.’’113 Here the shepherdess waits and watches, as the narrator did with Ce´phise, while the pleasure of her partner enfolds before and beneath her. ‘‘Listen to his sighs in attentive silence,’’ La Mettrie urges, ‘‘count all of his movements, and your pleasures will be born from your reflections on his delight.’’114 The complete physical passivity of the male partner, in this account, heightens the intensity of his response even as it increases the transitivity of his sensations. As La Mettrie puts it, ‘‘the same heart, (be sure of it) the same soul will communicate the same fires to both of you, fires all the more ardent, in that he will not be distracted from you by yourself.’’115 Consciousness becomes, for the waking lover, a form of distraction from the absolute communicability of sensation as an interpenetration of bodies and souls. Where Lucretius points to dreams and visions as examples of the fungible materiality of perception—ever receiving new shapes, as atoms collide and recombine—La Mettrie sees the seduction of the sleeper as a perfect expression of the porousness of the voluptuous body, even at the moment of its greatest constraint. In ending his essay with scenes of role reversal, in

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which the masculine dreamer takes on the position earlier ascribed to the feminine partner in intercourse, La Mettrie seems to suggest that it is in the partial feminization of the male body—as constrained and penetrable, a site of scopic pleasure for the shepherdess even as it remains possessed of a certain voluptuous autonomy—that authentic voluptuousness may materially consist. If materialist philosophers are necessarily voluptuaries, fascinated by the natural world as a materialization of their tropologies, these voluptuaries are neither entirely masculine nor fully feminine in their pleasures—but somewhere shuttling delightedly between the two. The philosophe voluptueux precedes and prefigures machine-man in La Mettrie’s corpus, even as he, in a sense, outlasts him. La Mettrie continued to rework La Volupte´ throughout his brief career. In 1751, the year of his death, both a German translation and a newly reconfigured version of the essay (entitled L’Art de jouir) appeared in print in Berlin. If we take La Mettrie’s focus on the philosophic voluptuary of La Volupte´ seriously in its effects on his materialism, the persistent tropiness of machine-man, which has often bedeviled those who would read him as the personification of a regulatory epistemology of the docile body, becomes free to emerge as his most salient characteristic. Machine-man may indeed function, for La Mettrie, as a mechanism to move readers from one position to the other, but he nonetheless invites us, in this context, not to an ever greater regularization of embodiment, but to a figuration of constraint as a prelude to the dissolution of sensation across ever proliferating chains of tropes. Read within the framework of La Mettrie’s work on more poetic pleasures, machine-man may come to represent an attempt to disseminate the very receptivity that La Mettrie proleptically lauds in La Volupte´, a receptivity inaugurated in troping forms, and trained through an investment in literature as the apotheosis of a re-materialization of the human subject. If these connections have gone largely unremarked in the writing that La Mettrie’s most famous treatise has long reliably engendered, it is through an unwillingness, perhaps, to recognize the literary field as that which may make matter knowable first as an incarnation of figure. In forgetting the voluptuous precursor to machine-man, we tend also to lose sight of what is for La Mettrie the effective imbrication of material processes of perception specifically in literary experience. In this context, we are in danger of missing his insistence on the ongoing engagement of literature with the material production of subjects. The intensity of this connection as La Mettrie portrays it opens up a space not just for the rethinking

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of the limits of the body (as troping ‘‘machine’’), but for a reevaluation of the status of the feminine vis-a`-vis the project of philosophy. In La Mettrie’s terms, the formulation of embodiment as a ‘‘scientific’’ problem of location and quantification provides inadequate grounds for reflection on the voluptuous experience of bodies as forms that may—and do—dissolve and recombine, figures for whom a recognition of limits is also an embrace of the transformability of perceiving substance into the very objects that it perceives. Literature, as a crucial scene of bodily dispersal and reconstitution, thus becomes the site of a complex negotiation between masculinity and femininity, interpenetrability and possession, autonomy and constraint as fully material events. In reminding us that the most formal pleasures are also the most dissolute, La Mettrie positions literary enjoyment at the conjunction of philosophy and science, where the Lucretian inheritance meets the libertine imagination, and tarries there.

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4.

‘‘I Resist It No Longer’’: The´re`se philosophe and the Compulsions of Enlightened Literary Materialism

The philosophical The´re`se, eponymous heroine of the novel commonly attributed to the marquis d’Argens,1 brings to vivid life the joys of materialist doctrine as an incitement to erotic expression. She has accordingly come to function, in modern criticism, as a feminine counterpart to machine-man— his ideal companion in the voluptuous delights to be derived from the practice of a rigorous materialism. Like La Mettrie’s creation, she comes into being at the juncture of philosophy and literary figure. Her pleasures, too, appear to serve a proselytic purpose. A success in its day, the novel’s cheerful insistence on the naturalness of erotic desire has continued to strike contemporary scholars as both enlightened and forward-looking. The´re`se philosophe, published less than a year after L’Homme-machine, presents the first-person narration of the protagonist’s development as an experimental site for working through the principle that ‘‘the soul has no will . . . and is determined only by sensation and matter.’’2 From the opening paragraphs of the text, in which The´re`se begins to recount her life story to her lover, the heroine collapses materialist philosophy into pleasure in a way that La Mettrie appears to anticipate, if just barely. With her natural penchant for masturbation, her voyeurism, and her sexual curiosity, The´re`se acts out, for the edification and enjoyment of her readers, materialist praxis as the indulgence of voluptuous compulsion.3 Where La Mettrie leaves the precise mechanism of his machine-figure open to speculation, however, The´re`se insists strongly on empirically verifiable processes of cause and effect as providing the structural logic for her tale, so that her goal as a narrator becomes the exposure of the intimate recesses of her (materialist) ‘‘heart’’ as ‘‘an incontestable proof ’’ of the philosophical point she has to make. As The´re`se describes it, her account becomes instructive—and erotic—insofar as it displays and systematizes her most intimate perceptions. She confirms from the outset that, in her tale, ‘‘Her entire soul will be developed in the details of the small adventures that have led her, as if despite herself, step by step to the pinnacle of voluptuous126

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ness.’’4 The´re`se thereby seems to complement machine-man by offering what he, in his abstraction into pure metaphor, cannot provide: a how-to manual for the philosophically inclined in which literary fiction becomes the arena for an enactment of materialist doctrine in a series of erotic tableaux meant to spark readerly desire. She thus appears to serve handily as an illustration and extension of the principles of a materialism whose reinvention as literary writing seems destined to take an ineluctably pornographic form. Moreover, the satisfactory resolution of The´re`se’s adventures in the cultivation of a state of durably sensual bliss suggests a happier set of compromises—between ‘‘le bon sens,’’ as d’Argens refers to it here and elsewhere,5 and ‘‘perfect happiness’’—than those achieved by machine-man in his quasi-dystopian solitude. The´re`se quite meticulously and successfully transforms her practice of radical materialist philosophy into, among other achievements, sexual contentment, upward social mobility, and the acquisition of an extensive library of pornographic literature. Where machine-man is situated at the margins of philosophy, The´re`se seems thoroughly and contentedly at home in the domain of the obscene. The philosophical The´re`se makes a likely match for La Mettrie’s automaton insofar as both figures actively incorporate the tenets of a materialism preoccupied, in each case, with a libertine eroticism. In their presumed relationship as supplements to one another—he philosophic, she fictional—her feminine volubility expands and doubles back upon his masculine terseness. Yet The´re`se’s post hoc status as an exemplary figure of ‘‘enlightened’’ French thought more generally has had relatively little in common with the position regularly assigned to machine-man. La Mettrie’s disturbingly hybrid creature tends to be invoked as evidence of the disruptive emergence, from within the uncanny reconfiguration of man as machine, of a troubling determinism. The figure of The´re`se, on the other hand, has been subject to strategic recuperation not just as a porte-parole of Enlightenment ideals—in her role as what Darnton calls a ‘‘free-loving, free-thinking female philosophe’’—but as a forerunner of modern figures of feminine sexual emancipation.6 Unlike machine-man, then, who functions most often as a site of disavowal—‘‘the outlaw of the republic of letters’’7—the philosophical The´re`se has gradually taken up a place at the center of a discourse of enlightenment, where this discourse is presented as a specifically feminine instantiation of Kant’s ‘‘exit from . . . self-incurred immaturity.’’8 Catherine Cusset, for instance, sums up the thrust of The´re`se philosophe in the following terms: ‘‘A pornographic novel that gives advice to both men and women, fights prejudices, and increases its readers’ sexual and philosophical knowledge for

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the good of society truly participates in the project of the Enlightenment.’’9 In his essay on the novel that appears in the Ple´¨ıade edition of The´re`se, Pierre Saint-Amand is equally explicit about the protagonist’s involvement in the elaboration of an expressive freedom that saturates the heroine’s narrative voice as well as her philosophical project. As he describes her apotheosis at the end of the novel, ‘‘The affirmative, enlightened [e´claire´] discourse does not cease: she insists on the philosophical message of her tale. . . . Her narrative ‘I’ manifests its authority and lays claim to its ‘lasciviousness.’ The´re`se contemplates her positive becoming.’’10 From this perspective, The´re`se not only enacts the process of enlightenment as the renewal of epistemological and ontological possibility. She also demonstrates the connection between the development of an abstracted and theoretically ‘‘neutral’’ egalitarianism—at least at the level of the atomic body—and the concretization of this more or less ineffable idea in the textual expression of feminine sexual enjoyment.11 In this way she becomes the sexy representative of a materialist literature that seems to revel in taking a flexible approach to the hard bodies of mechanist philosophy. As Saint-Amand puts it, ‘‘[D’Argens] braves censorship in order to put forward a form of writing capable of inventing a lexicon, a grammar, images and forms. He makes it possible to recognize in this writing its philosophical elevation, its capacity to represent the turbulence of things—thus, life itself.’’12 This presentation of The´re`se as the freely lascivious heroine of a seductive literary materialism tends, however, to necessitate a shift of focus away from precisely the philosophical point that The´re`se learns, from her mentors, to argue and to recognize in her experience: namely, that the embrace of materialism is based in a theory and practice of bodily action as thoroughly and perfectly constrained. ‘‘I repeat to you, bilious censors,’’ The´re`se exclaims at the end of her account, ‘‘we do not think as we wish. . . . Reason enlightens us; but it does not determine us.’’13 The´re`se’s freedom, to the extent that she acknowledges it, devolves entirely from her ability to narrate the systematic compulsiveness of her pleasures. The latter remain, nonetheless, both untrammeled by doctrine and equally unavailable for mastery by will. We may be tempted to read The´re`se’s claim to erotic ‘‘selfsufficiency’’ as ungeneralizable to the bodies of other women (and men), or as fully deriving from her specific decision not to be penetrated by her lovers, in order to spare herself the horrors of childbirth as they are depicted in the first pages of the novel. But, by the end of the tale, she is entirely overcome even in these forms of resistance, insofar as she confirms in the last episode the absolute ‘‘triumph’’ of the Count over her ‘‘philosophy.’’ ‘‘Yes,

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dear lover! . . .’’ she cries out, ‘‘I am completely yours, strike me, I no longer fear your blows.’’14 If there is freedom of willed choice available in this novel, it does not emanate from the person of The´re`se, who ends up demanding her own sexual defeat at the hands of the Count, even as she begs him to penetrate her. ‘‘ ‘Are you determined?’ ’’ he asks her, punningly. As it turns out, she cannot but respond to this question with anything other than an enthusiastic ‘‘ ‘Yes!’ ’’ since her intellectual defenses have previously been undermined by exposure to obscene literature and pornographic engravings. At disparate moments in the text, the engagement with figure in diverse modes—as word or as image—is in fact regularly shown to be fatal to feminine reason, where philosophy is rigorously defined in opposition to the thought of ‘‘those sorts of automatons accustomed to think with the organ of another, who only do such and such a thing because they are told to do it.’’15 To read The´re`se’s sexual happiness as a free or authentic expression of feminine desire is to elide the rupture around which the novel organizes itself (the diremption of intellection and passion that Jean Mainil calls ‘‘a fissuring, within the argument [of the novel], of the body of woman, placing the latter, as in the example of The´re`se’s mother, ‘in the difficult and necessary position of renouncing pleasures forever’ ’’ if she is to remain autonomous.)16 This chapter emerges from an attempt to juxtapose what appear to be the contradictions generated by the presentation of materialist philosophy in The´re`se philosophe—where ‘‘reason’’ becomes the freedom to articulate a situation of absolute bodily constraint—with the desire of critics to comprehend this novel as at least in part the story of the exercise of feminine sexual choice in the service of an ideology of enlightenment. Why, when her masculine counterpart machine-man can still be read as automated jouisseur—a precursor of the robot—might the figure of The´re`se evoke the advent of feminine liberation? If The´re`se philosophe can indeed be understood as the account of a ‘‘positive becoming,’’ even in the face of its rigorous determinism, I will argue, it is because the novel successfully leaves open a space for the performance of autonomous critique as a condition of emancipation from doctrines of all kinds (or, as The´re`se herself puts it, from ‘‘prejudice’’ in general).17 But the author of The´re`se philosophe envisions this movement toward readerly autonomy very differently from the way in which La Mettrie understands the dissolution of constraints in the philosophic encounter with the libertine literary text. Where La Mettrie sees a voluptuous engagement with figure as the origin of an embrace of a potentially transfigurative materialism, d’Argens presents the independence of critical judgment as

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contingent upon and based in the spontaneous debasement of figural forms of representation. Figure gradually reveals itself, for d’Argens, as a site of constrained and nonphilosophical movement. The various fissures that seem to threaten the stability of the philosophical system that the novel attempts to put in place—the tension between critical thought and bodily constraint, between an objective apprehension of phenomena and pornographic delight—are ultimately resolved, in the final episode, by The´re`se’s demand to be penetrated, in contradiction to her principles, after a decisive encounter with the volumes and images of her lover’s erotic library. In his position as a witness to the spectacle of The´re`se in the throes of obscene compulsion, the Count is allowed a moment of thoroughly philosophic choice, a choice that depends upon his willingness to resist his own compulsive desire to penetrate his partner. D’Argens, by structuring a narrative of feminine development as the gradual acknowledgment of determinism, thus retains the possibility of critical autonomy vis-a`vis such an acknowledgment not in spite but because of his presentation of the pleasures of figure as fully constrained. The salacious tableaux in The´re`se philosophe indeed serve to establish the need for thinking through the conjunction of philosophy and pornography as a crucial one for materialist thought, but they do so in order to confirm the construction of obscene literary representation as an arena from which judgment must be forcibly wrenched. Philosophy, here, positions itself in the momentary—and necessarily reiterated—resistance to pornographic figure, even as it defines itself in seeming complicity with this form of representation.18 If readers of The´re`se philosophe can envision the novel as a site of emancipation (or feminine self-possession), the latter is purchased at the price of the eventual estrangement of the eroticized female body—and the narrative that evokes this body—from the critique that they jointly serve to make possible. Like the story she tells, The´re`se is caught by and in the figures that compel her.

1. Compulsion and compliance: posing the problem of feminine philosophy The narrative events of The´re`se philosophe seem designed to have a cumulative effect. Yet these events are also underwritten by a logic of return and remembrance, so that The´re`se is presented as both in the midst of becoming a materialist and (simultaneously) as always already ‘‘philosophical’’ at heart. The novel opens with the adult The´re`se’s remarks to her lover, the Count, who has enjoined her to write the story of her youthful adventures. While

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The´re`se hesitates momentarily before beginning, worried that her skills as a writer are not up to the task and that the tale of her development will necessitate the betrayal of various confidences, she embarks on her account with the same phrase that she will later address to the Count in a more explicitly sexual context: ‘‘Ah well! my dear benefactor, I can resist no longer,’’ she proclaims, ‘‘let us write [e´crivons].’’19 Her story as she tells it takes the form of four main episodes, interspersed with philosophical and exegetical commentary.20 As The´re`se affirms throughout, ‘‘Example and precepts are excellent masters for forming the heart and the mind!’’21 The story of her ‘‘formation,’’ while it is in theory addressed only to the Count, is also designed to initiate the sexual and philosophical development of other readers (a possibility that is in turn framed as a return to natural origins analogous to that which brought the narrative into being). ‘‘If it is true that [example and precepts] give us nothing and that each one of us has within him the seeds of all that he is capable of, it is certain at least that they serve to develop these seeds and to help us perceive the ideas and the sentiments to which we are susceptible.’’22 Ultimately, the episodes that The´re`se recounts collectively generate a diachronic accumulation of erotic intensity. Yet the narrative also explores specific (and sometimes contradictory) mechanisms for configuring the relationship between, on the one hand, sexual practice as the compulsive acting-out of natural desires and, on the other, the constraints consistently placed upon this practice by religious dogma, philosophical principle, noncompliant partners, and, finally yet paradoxically, the autonomous exercise of individual choice. The tale oscillates, in other words, between The´re`se’s ostensible desire to move forward—to develop— and the necessity that she recognize this development as determined from the outset. The philosophical truths of which The´re`se describes her life as ‘‘incontestable proof ’’ are rooted in her initial acknowledgment of human passions as both unrestrainable and irresistible. The multiplicity of postures and figures invoked here is produced according to certain laws that are not the product of any human intervention.23 ‘‘Stupid mortals!’’ The´re`se begins her account. ‘‘You think you have the power to extinguish the passions that nature has instilled within you, they are the work of God.’’24 The story of The´re`se’s education is accordingly ordered around her gradual recognition of her own erotic desires as irrepressible—as well as exceedingly liable to stimulation through the contemplation of obscene images (whether real or imagined).25 From the age of seven on, The´re`se proves to be the possessor of a highly ‘‘voluptuous’’ temperament, and despite all of her efforts to act

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in compliance with what her confessor calls the ‘‘principles of virtue,’’ she is unable to resist her need to masturbate. During one moment of erotic reverie, ‘‘excited by the fore-runners of pleasure, I was incapable of any other thought; hell opened beneath my gaze would not have had the power to stop me.’’26 The´re`se herself describes the pleasures of the flesh as physiological movements that are essentially unfree or compelled, even though the compulsive force that provokes them is generated from within the subject who experiences such movements, rather than from an identifiable external source. ‘‘From this knowledge acquired by reason,’’ she writes, ‘‘there results what we call will and determination. But this will and this determination are as perfectly controlled by the degrees of passion or of desire that agitate us as a weight of four livres necessarily determines the side of a scale with no more than two livres. . . .’’27 What appear to be freely made individual choices are in fact the products of a universal natural principle that is the same for all human beings, ‘‘because nature only acts through one principle.’’28 The´re`se does not arrive at her desire to masturbate through education, and she cannot be made to sublimate this desire through parental or priestly admonition. Her experiences of sexual delight as a young woman, then, are marked by an unhappy shuttling between two forms of compulsion: the one, unavoidable, exerted upon her will by her ‘‘nature,’’ and the other, unsuccessful, enacted upon her body by the religious and social institutions that attempt to govern her behavior. Her accession to philosophy is grounded in a recognition that the institutional and dogmatic pressures brought to bear upon her passions can only serve to confirm the strength of these passions, regardless of her capacity to understand this inherent force as proper to her. The´re`se’s first lesson—in her position as a young proto-philosopher—is thus one in the absence of human freedom, considered from both a ‘‘biological’’ and a social point of view. Furthermore, her sense of her own radical lack of agency vis-a`-vis the nature of her desires is linked to a preliminary encounter with figure in the form of a highly metaphoric explanation proffered by her confessor of the dangers of masturbation. This discourse, rather than stifling the impulses to which it obliquely refers, serves to kindle them in a spectacular fashion.29 Through the same mechanism of figural contagion that La Mettrie invokes as a potential source of intensely philosophical satisfactions, The´re`se finds herself fully inhabited by the tropic language of the priest, and transformed, despite herself, into someone whom she does not recognize or ‘‘know.’’ Notwithstanding her desperate attempts at an internally consistent piety, a picture of a snake—conjured by the confessor to

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evoke the threat posed to women by the penis—fills her mind. ‘‘This charming serpent painted itself unceasingly on my soul,’’ she writes, ‘‘and lingered there in spite of me, whether awake or asleep. Sometimes, all agog, I thought I was touching it, caressing it . . . and at the height of my ecstasy or of my dream, always marked by a voluptuous shivering, I almost no longer knew myself.’’30 Throughout her passage from a state of sexual innocence to one of philosophical sophistication, The´re`se preserves an extreme responsiveness to the expressive rendering of bodies in literature and painting. Her disorienting experience of erotic stimulation as an involuntary reaction to the aesthetic representation of things is reiterated at the end of the novel, this time in a clearly pornographic, rather than a religious, context. By the end of her account, she has become able to articulate this compulsive reactivity for what it is—a ‘‘sweet natural longing.’’31 As a girl taught to believe in the freedom of her own will, however, she is at first unable to understand herself as compelled and struggles, at the expense of her health, to purge herself of the effects of these tropes on her imagination. It is not until she meets the man and woman who will become her mentors, Abbe´ T—— and Mme C——, that The´re`se is able to extricate herself fully from the world of the convent and finally begin her unofficial—and clandestinely pursued—education in the principles that will come to characterize her philosophy. In the company of Mme C——, she at first becomes aware of what she describes as a sensation of newfound intellectual clarity. ‘‘The murkiness of my mind was dissipating: little by little I became used to thinking, to reasoning consequentially.’’32 This dispersal of cloudy, unsystematized thoughts coincides with a reevaluation of her relationship to the forms of institutional coercion that she has observed and undergone in the convent. She learns from the Abbe´ that the priest Dirrag, whom she had spied upon as he engaged in intercourse with her friend E´radice, is ‘‘a cheat, an unhappy man who lets himself be carried away by the force of his passions.’’33 The Abbe´ also teaches The´re`se a technique for moderating ‘‘the excess of her desires’’: she may masturbate as much as she pleases, but must be careful never to penetrate herself with her finger in doing so.34 This interdiction, unlike the one delivered by her earlier confessor, is presented as a happy compromise between the requirements of her individual temperament and the demands of a patriarchal society (in which the hymen retains its synecdochic function as the invisible yet material vehicle of feminine value on the marriage market). In the course of acquiring this new discipline, both practical and theoretical in its injunctions, The´re`se discovers, through her observations of the Abbe´ and Mme C——, that truly philo-

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sophical thought—the ‘‘consequential’’ reasoning to which she refers— occupies a shifting, ambivalent, yet socially and analytically privileged position in the relationship it sketches for itself to the fully determined material world. Philosophy, for The´re`se and her mentors, is grounded in the ability to think for oneself, even as the idea of willed autonomy is simultaneously revealed as illusory; ‘‘[God] has given me reason so that I may make use of it,’’ proclaims the Abbe´, ‘‘so that I may guide myself.’’35 This fragile and paradoxical freedom—the possibility of ‘‘guiding’’ oneself even though one is only truly directed by one’s inclination toward pleasure, understood as such or not—is presented as a function of the ability to sustain a state of physiological equilibrium, so that any given individual passion does not overwhelm the processes of cognition of the person concerned. Intellection takes place in the momentary absence of bodily compulsion—in an interval of ‘‘balance’’ from which thought, carefully cultivated, may briefly emerge. ‘‘People who know how to think,’’ according to the Abbe´, should also be those ‘‘whose passions are in such balance that they are not subjugated by any given one.’’36 The philosophical perspective outlined by the Abbe´ begins with acknowledgments of the ineluctable nature of material organization—so that temperament functions generally as a form of perfect constraint on ‘‘will’’— and of the redundancy of reason as a mode of self-determination. This point of view is subsequently developed into an attempt to carve out a limited but crucial arena within which autonomous thought and choice may at least appear to be possible (if only for a select few). If the philosophical among us are in theory no less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of embodiment than the most ignorant, they are on the other hand better equipped than others to manage the effects deriving inevitably from their status as beings made up of matter. Philosophy thus finds its intellectual and social origins in the contingent management of constrained bodies. It makes possible and is in turn made possible by the practice of prophylactic techniques—gestures that temporarily hold at bay the forces of physiology in an effort to gain a momentary purchase on the philosophical subject as an independent and selfdirected entity. A recognition of human action as fundamentally constrained is therefore both necessary for philosophy to begin its work and insufficient for the accomplishment of its labor. As the Abbe´ makes clear, the sensation of constraint that is characteristic of embodiment has to be systematically purged—effectively placed at a distance from the philosopher—in order for lucid self-guidance to begin. The´re`se overhears the Abbe´’s description to Mme C—— of one way to perform this evacuation (depicted by the Abbe´

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in scatological terms), during one of the couple’s morning trysts. ‘‘I am worth nothing,’’ begins the Abbe´: when I have not done the job that affects my imagination the most vividly. Other ideas are not clear and always become absorbed, confused, in this one. I had already told you that while in Paris I occupied myself almost entirely with reading and the most abstract sciences, when I felt the needle of the flesh goading me, I had a little girl ad hoc as one has a chamber pot for pissing into, in whom I would do this duty once or twice. . . . Then my mind calmed, my ideas clarified, I would sit down to work again. And I maintain that any man of letters, any man of the cabinet, who has a bit of temperament, should make use of this remedy that is as necessary to the health of the body as to that of the mind. I would make a further claim: I imagine that any honest man who knows his social duties should make use of it, in order to assure himself that he will not be too greatly stimulated to depart from these duties by debauching the wife or daughter of his friends, or of his neighbors.37

Here the Abbe´ portrays himself as deriving his ability to reason well—to engage his mind in abstract thought—from the ‘‘use’’ he makes of a compliant girl, who serves quite literally as a receptacle for the source of his ‘‘confusion.’’ His philosophical turn of mind makes it possible for him to operate upon the girl in this way—in that it allows him to recognize and indulge his compulsions thoroughly without employing hypocritical forms of ideological mediation. Yet his philosophy also enables his subsequent movement into the domain of mental tranquility and intellectual clarity, a domain from which the girl, at least, is formally excluded by virtue of the service she performs. The Abbe´, as a philosopher, requires the acting out of pleasure— intercourse as preventative medicine—in order to be able to pass into the regime of philosophy—thought as the brief mastery of desire. Moreover, he demands the exhibition of his lack of freedom in another body—that of the girl who briefly exorcises his sensation of compulsion by serving as its most abject example. She has even less agency, is even more grossly physiological both in her status and her function, than the Abbe´ in this encounter. Despite her powerlessness, however, much remains at stake in her absolute sexual availability to this ‘‘man of letters.’’ The philosopher’s manipulation of the girl’s passive body as chamber pot produces not just the possibility for intellectual labor but a guarantee of social order, since her acquiescence to the Abbe´’s desires spares the wives and daughters of others from debauchery.

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If the Abbe´ sets up ‘‘abstract science’’ as accessible only after the act of penetrating a thoroughly compliant—or, rather, a fully compelled— feminine body, this way of formalizing the entrance into philosophy remains, as the Abbe´ himself points out to Mme C——, problematic where women philosophers are concerned. ‘‘ ‘Presently you will ask me, perhaps, Madame, . . . how women and girls should act in this situation. They have, you say, their needs as do men, they are shaped from the same clay, but they cannot make use of the same resources.’ ’’38 The solution, as the Abbe´ describes it, to the problem of the absence of garc¸ons ad hoc for women to dispose of, is in effect the internalization of the entire process of purgative intervention, so that the bodies of feminine philosophers function simultaneously as evacuatory vessels and as desiring agents. They are accordingly enjoined to take up ‘‘those ingenious instruments named dildos.’’39 Women, like men, should act penetratively to think philosophically, but they must do so with their own bodies as the objects of this action. Instead of imagining a reversal of the relationship between the philosophe and his fille ad hoc that would take the possibility of an autonomous feminine philosopher into account, the Abbe´ simply posits a mechanism allowing women to play both roles at once. The reader will only later discover that women’s very need to be penetrated—a desire most reliably evoked by the engagement with figure, in fact—must be read as a sign of their relative dissociation from the domain of philosophy, since it is a desire that can never be fully projected onto the compliant body of another (unlike the desire to penetrate). This need for penetration—natural or acquired, assuaged by the use of the dildo or not—is consistently an index of women’s inability to extricate themselves fully from the space of physiological compulsion. The´re`se learns from the Abbe´ to put into practice a masturbatory technique that will enable her to continue her philosophical education, but she is notably unable to prevent herself from almost immediately violating his interdiction on penetration. Hidden in a corner, watching the Abbe´ and Mme C—— without their knowledge, The´re`se cannot help but imitate their actions, taking on as she does so both masculine and feminine roles and becoming, in her loss of self-possession, once again compulsively, mimetically machinic. ‘‘I became the mechanical imitator of what I saw; my hand did the work of that of the Abbe´; I imitated all the movements of my friend. . . . Always perfectly imitative of what I saw, without thinking for a moment of the prohibition of my directeur, I in turn plunged my finger in.’’40 The´re`se’s propensity for being overcome by the images of pleasure—her voluptuous responsiveness to desire as it is performed before her—makes

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her, unlike her friend Mme C——, reiteratively unable to comply with the Abbe´’s principles, despite the ‘‘air of truth’’ that she ascribes to them.41 The´re`se’s relationship to the ‘‘attitudes’’ from which pleasure may be derived— including figural ones, such as the metaphoric positioning characteristic in The´re`se of religious narratives of sensual delight—confirms the point, on the one hand, that it is matter, not reason, that effectively compels us. On the other, her involuntary reactivity poses a crucial problem for the Abbe´’s philosophical system as he delineates it to The´re`se and to Mme C——. While the ability of the philosopher to begin thinking clearly depends upon the full deference of the fille ad hoc to the pleasure of her partner, this deference, although necessary for the consumption (and presumably production) of philosophy, cannot be guaranteed. The fille, unlike the chamber pot, is fully available for sexual manipulation only as an object in theory. In practice, though, the difficulty of stipulating the complete and utter compliance of any body to be penetrated is one that cannot be entirely neglected by the materialist philosopher, since the contingency of this compliance is liable to destabilize philosophical thought at its very point of origin—in bodily matter. Moreover, the threat of this destabilization creates a framework in which the full realization of a feminine sexuality, so recently promoted by the Abbe´ as a remedy for The´re`se’s state of physiological disequilibrium, must be revealed as posing its own set of problems for the institutionalization of feminine compliance as the basis of philosophical production. Both The´re`se’s reactivity (vis-a`-vis figure) and her attempts to conform to the Abbe´’s injunction can potentially result in her unavailability to serve either as a good pupil or as an object ad hoc, as a recipient of instruction or as a pot in which to piss. Where Mme C——, also (mostly) resistant to penetration, promises to ‘‘follow exactly the solidity of [the Abbe´’s] principles,’’ The´re`se, in her voluptuous cravings and her commitment to masturbation, can neither make such a vow nor serve as an unresisting vessel into which sexual passion may be expelled. The encounter with the Abbe´ leaves The´re`se (and the reader) with the question: How can matter be the locus of both physiological compulsion and sexual compliance, an unyielding resistance to ‘‘education’’ and an infinite malleability? Moreover, how can the momentary evacuation of this compulsion into the body of another be consistently secured, in the face of such a resistance? The third part of the narrative, in which The´re`se travels to Paris and is there taken up by a well-to-do prostitute named Bois-Laurier, represents an attempt to explore the thorny problem of feminine acquiescence, as it has been raised by the Abbe´’s pedagogical stance vis-a`-vis The´re`se and Mme

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C——, in detail. This section has generally received the least attention in the scholarly literature on The´re`se, presumably because the collection of obscene vignettes of which it consists seems to interrupt the progressive movement of the narrative without making the kind of explicitly prescriptive points proffered by the Abbe´. As Anne Richardot writes, ‘‘The story of la Bois-Laurier has often been seen as an interpolation compromising the unity of the text.’’42 Robert Darnton describes this section as a reversion to ‘‘a form of female sexual dialogue that had become developed in such standard works as L’Acade´mie des dames, L’E´cole des filles, and Aretino’s Ragionamenti’’ and therefore does not include it in his English translation of The´re`se.43 While recent critics, such as Richardot and Cusset, have taken up the episode with Bois-Laurier both in its transitional function, as a ‘‘moment of passage that leads the heroine out of erotic passivity’’44 and as a potentially radical representation of feminine complicity, it has nonetheless tended to preserve its status, even in these readings, as a kind of narrative hiatus, a series of set pieces built around the anatomical anomaly of the narrator, Bois-Laurier, whose vagina is ‘‘blocked’’ by an unusually thick hymen. Indeed, if the novel is understood as organized around a progressive movement toward emancipation—rather than as an increasingly complicated negotiation between physiological compulsion (as a function of the very act of narration) and the desire for a philosophically grounded autonomy of willed action—the central position occupied by the encounter with BoisLaurier can seem at odds with the more obviously pedagogic thrust of the remaining three-quarters of the text. But if this episode is read as a continuation of the exploration of feminine compliance initiated by the Abbe´ in his discussions with The´re`se and Mme C——, its emphasis on the forms of debasement generated by confrontations with feminine impenetrability becomes part of an argument around the formal necessity, philosophically speaking, of the moment of (heterosexual) penetration. The´re`se’s account of her sojourn in Paris opens with the death of her mother and her subsequent attachment to Bois-Laurier—a connection, suspect from the outset, that leads to the heroine’s attempted rape by a prospective client. While The´re`se’s resistance to the advances of Bois-Laurier’s acquaintance R—— is based in principle, however, Bois-Laurier’s own impenetrability is physiologically, and not analytically, generated. ‘‘Nature,’’ she explains, ‘‘capricious with respect to me, has placed insurmountable obstacles along the path to pleasure that makes a girl become a woman.’’45 Between them, the two women run the gamut of noncompliance. From the ‘‘natural’’ resistance of Bois-Laurier to the nascently philosophical refusal of

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The´re`se, their shared inability to acquiesce to penetration troubles the series of connections traced by Abbe´ T—— in his discussion of expulsive sexual acts as the guarantors of both reason and social harmony. Where the Abbe´ imagines the obscene manipulation of bodily matter as a privilege of his status as a man of letters, The´re`se and Bois-Laurier call into question the malleability of corporeal substance in the service of philosophy, social stability, and even pleasure itself. Bois-Laurier’s profession—coupled with her impenetrable hymen—gives her privileged access to a world where masculine sexual delight is always highly vulnerable to moments of extreme de´faillance.46 The stories with which she entertains (and instructs) The´re`se invariably produce in the younger woman not arousal, but hilarity.47 ‘‘There never was a spectacle more horrifying and at the same time more laughable,’’ remarks Bois-Laurier, aptly, of her encounter with three monks, although the description applies to much of her experience with masculine sexual desire, which is inevitably rendered in her accounts as both capricious and fragile in its impulses.48 Bois-Laurier’s inviolable hymen thus functions to reveal the innate vulnerability of philosophy to the divagations characteristic of embodiment. Could matter, this section seems to suggest, be the source not only of compulsive pleasures but of an equally compulsive resistance to pleasure, such that the emergence of rational thought out of a certain clarity of impulse and action is constantly threatened by the failure of substance to reflect or respond adequately to desire? The reader discovers, in perusing the various anecdotes that form BoisLaurier’s story, that this incorporation of supremely noncompliant organs into the feminine body—the resistant hymen of Bois-Laurier on the one hand, the resistant ‘‘will’’ of The´re`se on the other—poses a serious problem for philosophy as such. Bois-Laurier regales The´re`se with stories of clients who are impotent or otherwise made out to be ridiculous, dependent upon singing, farting, and flagellation for their sexual enjoyment. If Bois-Laurier admits to The´re`se that she is obliged to her for having ‘‘opened her eyes to the mysteries that generated all the unhappiness in my life,’’49 her state of ignorance is at least in part due to the fact that her partners, in contrast to The´re`se’s mentors, are uniformly less than philosophical in the discourses and postures that they take up. The resistance to penetration emblematized in Bois-Laurier’s very anatomy reduces her clients to abject states of obscene compulsion (and confusion). Her first partner stares pointedly into her derrie`re with his lorgnette, seemingly without being able to achieve an erection. In the last anecdote she recounts, her visitor is plunged into darkness when Bois-Laurier blows out, with a fart, the candle he has been holding to her

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posterior. The three monks whom she is hired to entertain ‘‘throw themselves upon me like three famished bulldogs,’’ although the ‘‘instrument’’ of her first partner is soon reduced to ‘‘the humiliating resource of spitting at the nose of the oyster that he could not swallow.’’50 In contrast to the exchanges between the Abbe´ T—— and Mme C——, these scenes are not repeatedly characterized as edifying for those who appear in them. Exemplary instances of ‘‘caprice,’’51 they end with the extinguishing of light and vision by a fart and the deflection of both desire and narrative by the ‘‘immoderate laughter’’ of The´re`se, laughter that obliges Bois-Laurier to bring her story to a sudden end.52 The troubling impenetrability of the two women in the third section of The´re`se reveals a weakness in the philosophical system that the Abbe´ has attempted to formalize as originating in the momentary evacuation of compulsion into the figure of the compliant prostitute. Where Bois-Laurier’s morphology throws her clients into obscene or hilarious attitudes, The´re`se’s contraceptive practice ultimately renders her equally unfit for ‘‘service’’ as a fille ad hoc, even after she has resisted the Abbe´’s injunctions by penetrating herself. The final episode of the novel is dedicated to brokering a solution to what has in effect become an impasse: If philosophy depends upon feminine compliance, even as it serves to facilitate or render visible various forms of feminine resistance to masculine desire, how can even the momentary exit from compulsion on the part of the philosopher ever be assured? This problem is solved through a return to the physiologically generative mechanism of figural representation, a mechanism that has already been demonstrated as producing in The´re`se (and in Mme C——) a predictably involuntary forgetfulness of principle. The Count, The´re`se’s final lover and, as she puts it, her benefactor, not only manipulates the power of figure to ensure her compliance, but transmutes this innate material force, latent in representation, into a lasting guarantee of his relative autonomy vis-a`-vis her own reiterated compulsions. This is to say that he puts The´re`se’s education to good use by directing it toward the production of a pornographic novel, a narrative figuring of her experience that will generate ad infinitum both the moment of her thorough surrender to machinic impulses and the possibility, ensured by The´re`se’s ‘‘defeat,’’ of a relative freedom of act and judgment on the part of the philosophically minded reader (including, here, the Count himself ). Unlike the Abbe´, the Count does not seek a simple gesture of physical compliance to his obscene desires. He waits for The´re`se to articulate her physiological compulsions fully to him, in accordance with the exemplary

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obscene texts and images that he has lent to her for this purpose. This act of articulation first allows the Count to make the transition toward philosophical detachment, in that it permits him to distinguish his maturity of judgment from his partner’s helpless capitulation to the word and the images that accompany it. But it also allows a textual product—in this case, the obscene novel itself—to be substituted for the compliant body of the feminine partner. The narrative of The´re`se philosophe, far from being the fortuitous product of a ‘‘happy’’ union, is called into existence at the Count’s behest as the catalyst for both feminine compulsion and the subsequent launching of masculine philosophy in opposition to this compulsion. The space has been cleared, by the end of the novel, for philosophy finally to come into being. It does so, however, not in conjunction with more figural forms of representation, but in implicit distinction to these forms. The Count, in effect, establishes an equivalence between the fully compelled feminine body and the obscene novel, and then reaffirms his autonomy by refusing to be caught in the compulsive mechanisms characteristic of both. Philosophy stands in need of pornography, he seems to be arguing, in order to confirm, over and over again, what it is not. The scene is set for the Count’s seduction of The´re`se when, after meeting her at the Ope´ra and subsequently inviting her to live with him at his property outside of Paris, he proposes a wager. While she agrees to accompany him to his retreat ‘‘comme amie,’’ The´re`se has hitherto hesitated to permit him the favors that the Abbe´ instructed her to refuse—in the name of honor, sexual propriety, and, indeed, social stability—to all men but her husband.53 After a narrow escape from the clutches of Bois-Laurier—for whom The´re`se represented a potential source of revenue as well as edification—the heroine is once again in the position of a pupil. ‘‘You know my fears, my weaknesses, my habits,’’ she declares to the Count. ‘‘Let time and your advice act.’’54 It is clear, at this point, that her philosophical education is still incomplete. Moreover, her resistance to the Count, who is extolled as a man of generosity and wisdom, generates a renewed set of narrative tensions around the problem of her unwillingness to comply with his wishes, an issue that cannot remain unresolved if The´re`se is to avoid impoverishment. After trying, without success, to reason with her, the Count has his libertine library brought to the country from Paris and makes the following proposition: If The´re`se can remain for fifteen days without masturbating, he will give to her his extensive collection of obscene books and images. If she is unable to restrain herself—to ‘‘faire divorce au manue´lisme,’’ as he puts it—she will then be obliged to offer up her virginity to him.

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The´re`se accepts the bet, but soon finds herself overcome by the contemplation of the texts and images that the Count has, in his foresight, had brought to her room. Aroused beyond her ability to contain herself, she cries out: ‘What! . . . even the gods find happiness in a bounty that I refuse. Ah! my dear lover, I resist it no longer. Appear, Count, I do not fear your dart: you can pierce your beloved; you can even choose where you would like to strike, it is all the same to me, I will suffer your blows with constancy, without murmuring; and, to ensure your triumph, look! I put my finger in place.’55

The Count, who has been hiding behind the door, watching everything, enters on cue, falls into her arms, and penetrates her. At the last possible minute, however, when ‘‘frenzy seemed to have banished the philosophy of man master of himself,’’ he withdraws and ejaculates into her hand.56 As he explains ‘‘in poorly articulated words,’’ ‘‘ ‘I will not use, The´re`se, all of the rights that I have come into with you: you fear becoming a mother, I will respect you; the great delight is approaching; put your hand on your vanquisher, as soon as I extract it.’ ’’57 Almost miraculously, the Count not only ends by acknowledging The´re`se’s fear of maternity, but opts even in a moment of extreme passion to abide by what he presumes to be her wish to avoid pregnancy. The Count, in enabling The´re`se to lose her bet happily, displays what has already been established by the Abbe´ as a wholly philosophical power to enforce absolute compliance as a means of evacuating his own desires onto and into her. In this sense, his proffering of a wager is not a libertine retreat into the domain of subterfuge and ruse, but a continued working through of the scenario that the Abbe´ has presented as a necessary precondition of philosophical activity: namely, the opportunity to stage the extreme powerlessness of another body in order to emerge momentarily from the manufactured scene of compulsion into a situation of willed intellectual clarity. The Count makes use of The´re`se’s naturally imitative response to figure in order to prepare, for himself, a moment of choice; he ensures, in his judicious selection of texts and images for her consumption, that her compulsive physiological response will coincide entirely with his need for compliance, thereby bridging the gap that was opened by the Abbe´ between masculine injunction and feminine imitation. In this sense, he transforms in a spectacular and effective fashion the hygienic recommendations of the Abbe´ to the man of letters by reinserting the transition from compliance (incarnated in an abjectly hyperpenetrable feminine body) to semiautono-

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mous reason (coded as a form of masculine detachment) into the act of intercourse itself. Even as The´re`se desires with all her might that he violate her carefully inculcated principles, he resists her, and, in so doing, engenders for himself the possibility of a fleeting yet philosophically determined freedom. He chooses not to give in to the ‘‘frenzy’’ that threatens to overcome them both.58 Her machinic reaction to the pleasures of figure is thus fully responsible for his ability to resist these pleasures, as well as for his capacity to do so in a way that remains entirely within a philosophic calculus— grounded in the expulsion of bodily impulse—as already established by the Abbe´. When the Count waits for The´re`se to announce her desire for him— ‘‘Appear, Count, I do not fear your dart!’’—before penetrating her, he effectively reconfigures the problem of her compliance as one that may be resolved by the articulation, not of her consent, but of compulsion itself. In fact, The´re`se does not so much agree to his demands as represent herself as being fully incapable of any sustained choice vis-a`-vis these demands: ‘‘it is all the same to me, I will suffer your blows with constancy.’’59 Through this pronouncement, the Count, as he puts it, acquires a ‘‘right’’ to her person, but one that he subsequently (and philosophically) elects not to use to its fullest extent. Rather than forcing The´re`se to serve the function of receptacle for the substance of his passions, he confirms that her assertion alone of his right to penetration is enough to generate, for him, a moment of relative autonomy in the decision not to benefit from this right. In this context, he not only enjoys, in theory, the fact of her complete compliance with any desires that he may invent, but uses, in practice, the articulation of her compulsion to take up a philosophical position outside of this articulation. Instead of positing the difference between freedom and unfreedom (or philosophy and its opposite) as one of bodily states or conditions, the Count manipulates the power of the obscene figure to transform this distinction into one that may henceforth be discursively, rather than physiologically, produced. The´re`se’s verbal acknowledgment of ‘‘defeat’’ enables his momentary self-mastery, regardless of whether penetration in fact takes place. Of course, this strategy can only be successful if the Count himself resists the desire to surrender to the fascination exercised by the obscene figures that he deploys, a resistance that is dependent upon his capacity to understand pornographic images not as invitations to imitation, but as objects of contemplation and exchange. It is in the study of these figures—as depictions of compulsion and feminine defeat in which he is never entirely implicated and from which he may struggle, pleasurably, to extricate himself—that his

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position as a man of letters becomes fully visible. He achieves his status as philosopher both in making thoughtful use of the potentia of obscene representation and in consistently picturing himself at a certain critical distance from this unwilled responsiveness. He awaits the moment of interpellation by figure as a final confirmation of his own ability to resist its call. The´re`se’s involuntary compulsions ultimately bestow upon him the right to enjoy— but, more importantly, to evaluate—their effects. It makes sense, then, that the Count should ask of The´re`se that she repetitively confirm her status as ‘‘determined’’ by in effect asking her to write an obscene novel that is addressed to him, and that ends with the complete account of her penetration by him. The perusal of this work will give him the opportunity to test his skills as critic and to reassert, in this way, his mastery of the discursive terrain. In describing her tale as consisting of ‘‘the details of the small adventures that have led her, as if despite herself, step by step, toward voluptuousness,’’ The´re`se reiterates the central role of constraint in producing the meaning of her narrative where she is most intimately concerned.60 Her acquiescence to the project of writing her experiences as a gradual discovery of voluptuous compulsion serves to anticipate and rehearse her inevitable ‘‘defeat’’ at the hands of the Count. Her narrative can thus function on its own as the occasion par excellence for the evacuation of constraint that is first portrayed by the Abbe´ as at the origin of philosophical understanding. In this way, The´re`se’s story allows for the emergence of a materialist perspective as one enabling a circumscribed (but potent) autonomy on the part of a judicious reader—a reader who, like the Count, appreciates the forcefulness of obscene figures as energetically pointing the way toward a philosophical ‘‘elsewhere.’’ The domain of philosophical and critical emancipation is established in the resistance to figural representation. The novel affirms the thoughtful reader’s momentary independence from figures in their most troubling and unmanageable effects, effects that are always (albeit pleasurably) visited upon other bodies. Like the Count, authentically philosophical readers can expect to reveal the contingent freedom and rectitude of their judgment in the very moment when they would otherwise seem most likely to be undone by ‘‘frenzy.’’ The dynamics characterizing this relationship between reader and text— where pornography founds philosophy in the detached evaluation of bodies compelled by images of pleasure—are given apt visual expression in the frontispiece to an edition of The´re`se philosophe possibly dating from around 1780.61 In this engraving, a naked man gazes up at and gestures toward the allegorical figure of philosophy as he copulates with a naked woman who

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lies beneath him. An inscription beneath the couple reads ‘‘Man embraces voluptuousness out of taste; he loves philosophy out of reason.’’ This image, rather than portraying the reinsertion of a Lucretian voluptas into the philosophic scene, neatly alludes to the inevitable marginalization of a voluptuous subject that can no longer be said to be, in itself, constitutively philosophical. In the frontispiece as in the body of the text, voluptuous ‘‘taste’’ lays the groundwork for the movement into reason as a movement beyond—even if first established in—the compliant body. Readers of The´re`se philosophe may be in a bodily sense ‘‘bound’’ to voluptas—a tie evoked in this engraving by the garland of flowers linking the male to the female figure—insofar as they inevitably participate in the involuntary constraints visited upon them by the matter of which they are composed. Yet, even in the graphic depiction of this bondage, the novel suggests that there must exist an alternative to it. Taste and reason collude in the distancing of the former from the space of thought. The´re`se philosophe ultimately suggests that readers may find their freedom from the compulsive effects of figure even—and especially—in the most insistent articulation of these effects. Accordingly, it is the reiteration of The´re`se’s ‘‘I no longer resist’’ that readers may discover their own refusal to be compelled in a similar fashion. Compulsive desires become the privileged domain of an obscene literary practice that is necessary—but alien—to philosophy. The elaboration of this schema in the final scene of the novel—a scene that returns to the image, with which the text began, of The´re`se writing out the terms of her full compliance with the Count’s desires—provides the reader with the means of retrospectively reevaluating the only other depiction of penetrative heterosexual intercourse included in The´re`se’s account: the seduction of the penitent E´radice by her priest and confessor Dirrag. This episode, recounted at length, makes up the second section of the narrative and gives the novel its subtitle, Me´moires pour servir a` l’histoire du P. Dirrag, et de Mlle E´radice. While the legibility of this encounter as a commentary on the appropriate place of figure vis-a`-vis philosophy is heightened in its juxtaposition with the last scene of the text, the episode also stands on its own as an attack on the involvement of religious dogma in a suspect reliance on figurative language. The unacknowledged dependence of the Church on the power of the trope stems from a refusal of the discursive transparency characteristic of a truly philosophical perspective and allows for the illegitimate use of the power of this mode of representation on the part of the unscrupulous. As a result, The´re`se’s recollection of the moment of priestly seduction that she witnesses plays the role of a negative example in her intel-

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lectual and sexual development, although her contemplation of this act of intercourse inspires in her the kind of imitative response that characterizes her voyeurism from the beginning of the novel. As The´re`se looks on, Dirrag, in a successful attempt to manipulate the pious and beautiful E´radice, persuades her to submit to his desires while pretending to mortify and purify her body in the service of God. The´re`se, who has been enjoined by E´radice to observe the scene from a hiding place, describes her friend’s response to penetration by an instrument that the priest has described as a hardened length of ‘‘the cord of Saint-Francis’’ (but which is, as The´re`se soon realizes, in fact Dirrag’s penis): ‘‘Ah! father!’’ cried E´radice. ‘‘What pleasure spurs me on! Yes, I am enjoying celestial happiness; I feel my spirit entirely detached from matter: chase away, my father, chase away everything impure that remains in me. I see . . . the . . . an . . . gels; push forward . . . forward . . . Ah! . . . Ah! . . . good . . . saint Francis! Do not abandon me; I feel the cor . . . the cor . . . the cord . . . I can’t take anymore . . . I am dying.’’ The priest, who also was experiencing the approach of that sovereign pleasure, stammered, pushed, huffed and panted. Finally, the last words of E´radice gave the signal for his retreat: and I saw the proud serpent once again humble, crawling, leave its sheath covered in foam. Everything was promptly put back into place, and the priest, letting his robe fall, regained, with shaky steps, the prie-Dieu that E´radice had abandoned.62

Dirrag, in this scene, dupes E´radice into submitting to his ministrations by emphasizing to her the absolute separability of (obscene) body and (devout) mind. The sexual sensations that she experiences as a result of penetration are transmuted, by means of his rhetorical agility, into what she perceives as a mode of spiritual enjoyment. With her back turned toward him and unable to see what he is doing, E´radice believes herself to be penetrated by the saintly cord. In effect, though, she is seduced by the powers of pure metaphor, just as The´re`se herself has already been overcome by erotic passion at the thought of the ‘‘serpent’’ that her confessor has invoked to warn her against masturbation. This act of intercourse between E´radice and Dirrag is structured as the inverse of the one that cements the bond between The´re`se and the Count at the end of the novel. In a sense, Dirrag makes use of the same strategy as does the Count—expertly deploying a series of figures before his conquest to initiate in her a voluptuously involuntary enjoyment—and reveals him-

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self, in this way, to be fully aware of the power of the trope to evoke heightened physiological responses. The ‘‘hypocrisy’’ that pervades their union—ending in the denunciation of Dirrag by E´radice and her new lover, also a priest—is not, then, entirely the product either of his specific goal or of the tactics that he uses to achieve it. The sexual act that takes place between Dirrag and his penitent is later revealed to be unnatural—criminal, even, in that any resulting pregnancy might have needlessly endangered E´radice’s health and reputation—because of the fact that E´radice is given no opportunity or reason to understand the extent to which she is actually compelled in the nature of her reactions to the priest’s words. In the ostensibly ‘‘pious’’ context of the convent, where she must remain perfectly unable to articulate her absolute physical compliance to his will, it is instead Dirrag who is completely overcome—and involuntarily transformed—by the strength of his own passion. The small distance that he is forced to place between himself and his partner in fact renders him a helpless spectator of the phallic instrument that transmits his desire, a kind of mediating agent that briefly seems, to The´re`se, to have attached itself to the body of E´radice herself. Penetrative intercourse cannot serve, for Dirrag, the philosophical purpose that it does for the Abbe´ or the Count because such intercourse cannot be openly acknowledged by either the priest or his partner as an event that demonstrates the fact of feminine compulsion. Without this acknowledgment, Dirrag is reduced at the moment of climax to a pathetic figuration of his own unappeasable need; he becomes simultaneously a master of the art of persuasion and a satyr, frothing at the mouth. As for his penitent, she is commanded in her encounter with Dirrag to ‘‘forget yourself,’’ but this injunction is presented as emanating from a divine source rather than from Dirrag himself: ‘‘ ‘God only wants the hearts and minds of men’ ’’ he explains to her, and not their bodies.63 As a result, E´radice portrays herself not as overwhelmed by the force of the priest’s rhetoric but as, in her own right, a potential source of the power that originates, throughout The´re`se philosophe, from the figuration of persons as exempla. In E´radice’s words, ‘‘Let my example, my dear The´re`se, . . . produce in you, as a first miracle, the power to detach your mind entirely from matter by means of the great virtue that is meditation, in order to place itself in God alone.’’64 Thus E´radice, castigated by The´re`se for her vanity, becomes perhaps the sole example of a woman, in the novel, who claims as her own the ‘‘miraculous’’ power to figure, vis-a`-vis another person’s mind and body, as a transformative example. But in this sense she provides a false model, as The´re`se soon discovers. E´radice is in fact constrained by her (and others’)

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passions in a way that she is prevented from recognizing, and her sense of her spiritual agency as the source of her exemplary status is quickly shown to be fully illusory. Her body serves Dirrag as a receptacle without her being able to articulate this function as such—or even to comprehend the tenor of her response to this form of manipulation. Where The´re`se knows herself to be compelled by the Count and voices this compulsion to him as a sign of her absolute, voluptuous compliance, E´radice persists in her belief that her meetings with her confessor will result in her becoming a ‘‘great saint,’’ vested with miraculous powers. For E´radice, it is Dirrag who serves as the mechanism—a term used by the priest himself to describe the function of meditation—to enable her privileged connection to the divine.65 ‘‘ ‘The saintly man is coming,’ ’’ she remarks to The´re`se, ‘‘ ‘and God with him; hide yourself in this little room, from which you will be able to hear and to see how far divine bounty will extend in favor of a vile creature, by means of the pious efforts of our director.’ ’’66 Although the Abbe´ T—— will later emphasize the danger that an accidental pregnancy would pose to the penitent in this case, it is Dirrag, rather than E´radice, who bears the brunt of his reliance on deception to satisfy his lust. E´radice learns of the priest’s trickery only because she has taken up with a young monk, whose ‘‘natural member’’ replaces Dirrag’s ‘‘fake cord’’ in repeated acts of ‘‘amiable application.’’67 ‘‘The elegance of this demonstration made her feel that she had been grossly duped,’’ and she decides to take her vengeance on him, with the assistance of her lover.68 While Dirrag indeed derives a considerable sexual pleasure from his rendezvous with E´radice, he is transformed in the course of these meetings into a monstrous, ludicrously salacious figure, fully in the grip of his own poorly articulated desires. ‘‘Imagine a satyr, his lips dripping in foam, his mouth gaping, gnashing his teeth, gasping like a bull that bellows . . . ; he held his raised hands four fingers away from the rump of E´radice . . . : his spread fingers convulsed and took on the shape of roast chicken feet.’’69 Because he is unable to press himself against his partner without giving away his actual position, Dirrag is reduced to gesticulating lasciviously over her body while gazing obsessively at the ‘‘cord’’ that connects him to her. He is, unlike E´radice, fascinated by the means of his penetration of her, and stares fixedly at the fake ‘‘cord’’ that he can never fully insert into her body. The care he takes not to lose sight of this conduit of ‘‘intromission’’ causes The´re`se, watching from her hiding place, to remark that ‘‘it would have been to difficult to guess to which of the two actors this peg, to which they both appeared equally attached, belonged.’’70 Dirrag’s insistence on the figural transforma-

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tion of the phallus into holy relic seems thus to have resulted, ironically, in his quasi-detachment from it. He appears on the verge of bestowing upon his partner the very authority that he is prevented from claiming. But his distance from the instrument of penetration only increases the intensity of his physiological participation in the act of figuration. As the act reaches its culmination, the body of the priest is itself transfigured in The´re`se’s eyes into a giant letter ‘‘S,’’ as if to emphasize the extent to which the investment of his body in the discursive figures of his passion has succeeded in transforming him. He has become, by failing to reserve for himself a position outside of the compulsions exerted by his own rhetoric, entirely absorbed in the figural economy, while E´radice is at the same time allowed (at least in theory) to preserve the illusion of her autonomy. ‘‘His posture was such that he almost formed, from the head to the knees, an ‘S’ whose belly came and went horizontally between the buttocks of E´radice.’’71 His positioning in this encounter remains, throughout the episode, a striking contrast to that of the Count in his seduction of The´re`se. The priest fails to guarantee the compliance of his partner, and leaves himself open to incorporation into the regime of compulsion that should otherwise naturally govern the obscene display of the feminine body at the very moment of penetration.72

2. D’Argens, La Mettrie, and the Lucretian inheritance The combined writings of d’Argens and La Mettrie have sometimes been used by literary scholars to demonstrate the relative seamlessness of a materialist discourse in the moment of its dramatic reemergence onto the French intellectual scene toward the end of the 1740s. But The´re`se philosophe, in its resistance to a Lucretian conjoining of figure and reason as equal participants in the project of philosophy, exposes a rift at the very heart of this discourse. Further evidence of such a rupture remains visible some decades after the publication of The´re`se in d’Argens’ proclaimed adherence, in La Philosophie du bon sens, to a presentation of Epicurus that explicitly works to diminish the unpredictable power of language to move a delighted reader. ‘‘It is well to remark first of all,’’ writes d’Argens, ‘‘that we mean by volupte´ the tranquility of the mind and the health of the body.’’73 In La Philosophie we encounter the familiar insistence that Epicurean materialism must be stripped of its scandalous potency for an enlightened materialism to make legitimate use of it. The renegotiation of the relationship between figure and philosophical thought that is undertaken here thereby becomes attached to a rethinking of the place of Epicurus within philosophical history. Dubbed by

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Casanova himself an ‘‘e´picurien de´termine´,’’ d’Argens has been likewise characterized by Pigeard de Gurbert as ‘‘the only one, during this age that has nothing but the word ‘pleasure’ on the tip of its pen, to develop a philosophical conception of pleasure in the context of a modern Epicureanism.’’74 Yet d’Argens’s recuperation of Epicurus is also involved in a refusal of the deployment of Lucretian materialism as a specifically figural hedonism.75 In placing himself within a tradition of exegetical commentary on Epicurus that emphasizes the necessary primacy of reason over and against an ethic of voluptuous delight, d’Argens implicitly rejects the Lucretian presentation of textual pleasure as a privileged point of entry into materialist philosophy. Reason, for d’Argens, is made available through a gesture that removes man from the experience of pleasure as physiological constraint. He is accordingly horrified by La Mettrie’s theorization of rational thought as ultimately in the service of voluptas—a reversal of the natural order of things that enables poetic or literary forms of enjoyment to be privileged over what necessarily become the fruitless rigors of analytic labor. D’Argens describes the Lamettrian corpus as made up of ‘‘the most horrible opinions, and as far removed from those of the philosophy of which he called himself the disciple as darkness is different from light.’’76 His dismissal of La Mettrie, far from being merely strategic, may be read as an index of the methodological and epistemological divide separating a philosophical materialism openly involved in the tropes that constitute it from one that seeks to sublimate or elide the inevitability of this connection. This crucial distinction imposes, in La Philosophie, the explicit repositioning of Epicurean doctrine within a delicate articulation of reason as at once part of and distinct from an ethic of voluptas.77 In this context, the treatment of figure (and femininity) in The´re`se philosophe might be read as laying the groundwork for d’Argens’s later attacks on Lamettrian materialism as not only digressive and murky but delusional in style and content. Moreover, the fatal linking of voluptuous pleasure and compulsion so insistently returned to by the novel recurs as a focus in d’Argens’s reading of Epicureanism, a reading that works to reaffirm the abject status of a more explicitly figural voluptas when confronted with the judicious exercise of reason. In the extremely vigorous critique of La Mettrie that d’Argens includes in his translation of Ocellus Lucanus’s Sur l’univers, he ends by asserting that La Mettrie never had ‘‘the slightest notion of philosophy,’’ since ‘‘his sentiments are directly opposed to those of all the philosophes.’’78 ‘‘It is instead among certain Theologians that one should place La Mettrie,’’ he remarks, before proceeding to include the doctor at the head

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of a list of seventeenth-century Jesuit priests who, according to d’Argens ‘‘teach that it is permitted to kill a King.’’79 This attempt to throw into question La Mettrie’s status as a philosopher (and fellow Epicurean)—by underlining the latter’s ideological kinship with a canon of Jesuit corruption— makes of d’Argens’s erstwhile colleague a figure reminiscent of a scientifically inclined Dirrag (portrayed in The´re`se philosophe as the very model of a depraved Jesuit). La Mettrie is here implicated by d’Argens in a mode of argumentation that, always excessive and fantastically obscure, disregards reason in favor of base political calculation, or, as in the case of La Mettrie’s writings on ethics, simple ‘‘madness.’’80 The author of what d’Argens calls a ‘‘fraudulent novel’’81 slandering the renowned scientist and philosopher Albrecht von Haller, La Mettrie resembles more a ‘‘Molinist theologian’’ than a philosophical thinker.82 His reason is faulty, his education is nonexistent, and his judgment is seriously impaired. For d’Argens, ‘‘La Mettrie is thus not an Epicurean.’’83 Not unlike Dirrag, he finds himself, in d’Argens’s account, irredeemably tangled in figure, unable to construct a reasoned argument for want of the ability to discriminate among his own ideas. His ‘‘style demonstrates the drunkenness of his soul,’’ writes d’Argens.84 This condemnation of La Mettrie takes place in the context of a rehabilitation of Epicurus that follows, in its general outlines, in the tradition of efforts to recuperate Epicurean voluptas as consonant with (and indeed subordinate to) an inherently ‘‘virtuous’’ philosophic practice combining rational philosophical inquiry with the pursuit of a durable earthly happiness.85 D’Argens reiterates his perspective on Epicurean doctrine in La Philosophie du bon sens (although he shortens the attack on La Mettrie to a much briefer footnote in this work), where he describes the Epicurean ideal as consisting ‘‘of tranquility of mind, that is to say of wisdom, of prudence, of virtue, of good faith; but it is impossible that a man, without these qualities, could remain calm and free from remorse.’’86 For d’Argens, the yoking of the ideals of reason and virtue to that of voluptas culminates in the exclusion from the Epicurean ethic of what he refers to as ‘‘this violent passion that drives us to satisfy our unfettered desires, without any care for reason.’’87 The (mis)characterization of voluptuous pleasure as the refusal of rational judgment may have enabled the embrace of Epicurean thought by libertines (such as La Mettrie) in an attempt to justify their debauchery, but this affiliation unjustly dishonors the Epicurean legacy, according to d’Argens. The corrupted voluptas of the libertine apologist is in fact more a form of ‘‘furor’’ than one of pleasure. While d’Argens does leave room, in this championing of a less frenetic enjoyment, for earthly satisfactions, it is the parsing of volup-

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tas by reason that makes of Epicurean voluptuousness a philosophical object. Rational discrimination among pleasures enables their pursuit in moderation, a moderation essential to the sustained preservation of mental and corporeal equilibrium in the philosopher. This judicious rehabilitation of reason visa`-vis voluptuous delight, while it participates in a long tradition of efforts to recuperate Epicurus as an ethical thinker, has the effect of making invisible—or rather, incomprehensible—the Lamettrian reading of Lucretian voluptas as both intrinsically figural and inherently philosophical in its own right (that is to say, as a form of writing that is simultaneously poetic, apodictic, and ethical in its aims). Reason comes into existence, here, in defining and policing the limits of bodily enjoyment, limits that the contemplation of figure, in The´re`se, blurs and, ultimately, erases. The vehemence of d’Argens in consigning La Mettrie to the asylum and to the gallows—he likens the doctor both to a madman and to a criminal—is not merely rhetorical. It reveals the rift between a materialism that sees figuration as the consummation of the pleasures of philosophy and one that finds there the very origins of a compulsion that demands surveillance (if not retribution).

3. Conclusions: reactive bodies and transparent philosophies The poetic articulation of a compulsively voluptuous enjoyment in The´re`se philosophe establishes, for the judicious reader, the possibility of a relative critical autonomy that is made pleasantly available through the spectacle of a compliant feminine body thrown into disorder by the effects of figure. If there seems to exist, in this context, the opportunity for a passage between the domain of philosophy and that of obscene or pornographic literature, this movement remains, in the conceptual framework established by this novel, contingent upon a sharp differentiation of the effects of these respective fields. This differentiation makes possible an analytical freedom on the part of the philosopher even as it justifies and perpetuates The´re`se’s joyful articulations of constraint. While the undoing of feminine principle by figure—upon which the de´nouement of the novel depends—has not been the focus of much critical commentary in the recent recuperation of The´re`se philosophe as a quintessentially ‘‘enlightened’’ textual production, this silence may be due in part to the way in which the independence of the critic visa`-vis the obscene text is built upon the inevitability of The´re`se’s capitulation to the power of representation. In this sense, the mise en sce`ne of a subjective response to figure works to reveal both the compulsions of the body and

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the potential autonomy—relative and fragile as this may be—of the exercise of good judgment in reaction to these compulsions. The materialism of The´re`se philosophe can thus be qualified as a materialism that, even in its insistence on the powerlessness of the will to intervene effectively in the compulsive reactivity of the body, nonetheless leaves room for the written articulation of philosophical thought as producing the possibility of a freely chosen response in those who consume it. Literature, from this perspective, becomes the site of the rearticulation and regeneration of physiological compulsion, but provides, in itself, no respite from or inherent valorization of the labors of description. If Jean M. Goulemot has suggested that the pornographic novel may be considered, in a sense, the ‘‘pedagogical novel par excellence,’’ the lesson that is learned in The´re`se philosophe is one that depends upon the removal of literature from the space of instruction for its successful transmission.88 Such a removal tends moreover to be formalized in and carried through the bodies of women, the sexual ‘‘defeat’’ of whom conveys—in its own peculiarly forceful fashion—the triumph of a nonfigural philosophy. Reading across the twin figures of The´re`se, mechanically inclined even as she presages the emancipation of the philosophical thinker, and machineman, consigned to remain an uncanny emblem of determinism, we witness a moment not of conjunction, but of divergence. Where machine-man gestures toward a uniquely literary materialism as a condition of his emergence, The´re`se appears to anticipate, in her acquiescence to the Count’s request that she write her story, the advent of pornography as a privileged—yet abject—site for the figural intervention in matter. Pornographic discourse, The´re`se might agree, appears to assume fully the power of figure to move bodies against their will, even as it retains a strong, quasi-empiricist investment in the depiction of a world saturated by the senses. This power comes to imply the annihilation of the very possibility of a knowledge that tends toward the critical apprehension of the world as an investment in a collective freedom. In this framework, Jean Goulemot may well describe the erotic novel as the ‘‘negation of the moral world . . . , the brutal affirmation of the reality of the physical world,’’ an ‘‘affirmation’’ putatively aimed at ineluctably putting into motion the body of a reader.89 The´re`se suggests that it is in pornography in particular that the dangerous connection between matter and figure can be preserved and acknowledged, so that, if pornographic writing may seem ‘‘real’’ in a way that other literary forms do not, its success in this regard is a sign not of its total discursive transparency but

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of the tropic qualities latent in the ‘‘brute’’ matter with which it pretends to work.90 However, these qualities must be, as the novel never ceases to make clear, momentarily purged of some of their perlocutionary forcefulness if they are to become the stuff of which enlightenment is made. When the linking of matter to trope—rewritten as compulsion—becomes mainly a pornographic phenomenon, it signals the potential marginalization of figure more generally, where philosophical knowledge is concerned. From this perspective, if The´re`se indeed learns to participate in philosophy, it is not by virtue of her self-expression, at the end of the novel, as a thoroughly pornographic subject of fiction. Rather, the materialism of which the author of The´re`se is a proponent requires what it reads as her total compliance, through and in figure, to make its specifically philosophical freedoms more visible. The´re`se becomes the object of a critical discourse that subsumes her unruliness into the production of an ephemeral moment of intellectual clarity, in which the full extent of her subjection to constraint is made explicit for the pleasure of her readers. The literary field, this novel seems to predict, is not the site where matter is known, but where its most obscure compulsions are reiteratively made palpable. The study and classification of these compulsions thereby becomes dependent upon the desire to resist interpellation by them, or, even, to deny their power outside of the circumscribed domain of the obscene. Eighteenth-century materialism may indeed find one of its most compelling formulations in the (pornographic) novel, but, as The´re`se philosophe persuasively suggests to its readers, it must henceforth find its freedoms elsewhere.

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5.

Dynamism and Disinterest: The Materialist Reader and Diderot’s Dream

If there is one eighteenth-century materialist whose work appears to stand at the juncture of literature and philosophy—a writer who most impressively seems to occupy the space where the pleasures of figure intersect with a dynamic and hedonic materialist science—it is Denis Diderot. Not coincidentally, Diderot has also often been read as an exemplary Enlightenment inheritor of the Lucretian legacy, as well as perhaps the most crucial translator of a potentially archaic materialism that he animates anew with playfulness and flexibility. As Jeffrey Mehlman has put it, ‘‘Lucretius, Diderot, Serres: . . . it is the prodigious spiral of discursive energy circulating through that genealogy that promises to yield—feedback or apre`s-coup—interpretative possibilities that we are only beginning to gauge.’’1 On the one hand, Diderot makes consistent use of Lucretian materialism as a source of philosophic and scientific inspiration. He regularly situates his reflections on the nature of sentience and substance within a framework that hews faithfully enough to Lucretius for Jacques Roger to have affirmed, in his monumental study of the biological and physical sciences in early modern France, that ‘‘the most profound source of Diderot’s thought and his vision of the world is always and forever the philosophy of Epicurus and of Lucretius.’’2 On the other, Diderot regularly turns, in his literary works, to Lucretius as the originator of an intricate and richly poetic materialist thematics. In his short stories as well as in his novels, he foregrounds and fictionalizes the Lucretian preoccupation with atomic flux and the arbitrary movement of particles, with the perceptions of the dreamer and the insistence of waking desires. Diderot is, in short, an Epicurean who is easy for us moderns to love: a witty transgressor and a bricoleur who delights in what Deleuze refers to as the Epicurean turn toward ‘‘the positivity of Nature, Naturalism as a philosophy of affirmation, . . . sensualism bound to the joy of the diverse.’’3 Given the intensity of his engagement with Epicurean materialism—and his dedication to the articulation of this materialism in literary terms—it seems that Diderot ought to stand at the center of this project. In fact, as I 155

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will attempt to show, Diderot expresses at various moments a deeply ambivalent relationship to Lucretianism as a set of philosophical commitments that privilege not just the poetic rendering of matter but what might be called the latter’s perception in figural terms. In this chapter, I will discuss Diderot’s reworking of Lucretius as underscoring the necessarily problematic status of Epicureanism in the context of an enlightened or modern materialist epistemology as Diderot presents it. Diderot, I hope to demonstrate, makes fascinating use of Epicurean materialism as an explanatory technique, but in so doing must leave behind a Lucretian focus on the conversive power of poetic speech as engendering a meaningfully philosophic relationship to materiality.4 In this sense, Diderot translates Epicureanism for a philosophical modernity that remains suspicious of the transformative effects of form on bodies. While Diderot delights, particularly in his dialogues, in the manipulation of figure as a communicative device, he also works to strip figural language of what is for Lucretius its specifically materialist power to shift the parameters of readers’ perceptions—to make materialist subjects entirely out of fictions, rather than to unearth them there. Although Diderot remains interested in the possibility of an epistemological motility—the movement through and among forms of sensation and experience—that is also dear to Lucretius, for Diderot it is philosopher-critics, rather than hedonic readers, who have privileged access to this particular method for grasping the nature of things.5 The figure of the critic, with his ability to detach himself momentarily from the concrete determinants of experience, can pursue natural and material diversity as a powerful sign of his disinterest. His recognition of the multiplicity inherent in nature derives from a momentary disengagement from sensibility as a series of specific constraints on the ability of the individual to perceive a variety of sensations.6 The possibility of subjective transformation thus becomes, for Diderot, a form of skill or expertise, rather than primarily an instance of poetic responsiveness that initiates a materialist mode of awareness. (While the figure of the pleasure-reader retains for Diderot her capacity to scandalize and to transgress, her disruptiveness tends to be portrayed as originating in the ‘‘natural’’ resistance of the body to formal doctrines rather than in her specific knowledge of bodies in general.) It is true that at moments in Diderot’s work, we witness a kind of universalization of Epicureanism as an apt expression of the basic nature and desires of human beings. Yet it is paradoxically within the framework of this universalization that a materialist poetics—taken as a means of persuasion—loses its explicitly philosophical effectiveness and be-

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comes first and foremost a reflection of natural processes, rather than their point of origin.

1. Diderot and the Epicurean infant In his article from the Encyclopedia on ‘‘e´picure´isme,’’ Diderot writes of Epicurus that he was ‘‘the only one among the ancient philosophers who was able to reconcile ethics with what he took as authentic human happiness, and his precepts with natural appetites and needs; thus he had and will continue to have a great number of disciples. One becomes a Stoic, but one is born Epicurean.’’7 With this remark, Diderot inverts a celebrated comment made by the ancient philosopher Arcesilaus concerning the irreversibility of the turn or conversion to Epicurean doctrine. Arcesilaus, head of the Platonic Academy during Epicurus’s lifetime and a rival, is described in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers as having explained the remarkably persistent dedication of Epicurus’s disciples to their master’s teachings in the following terms: ‘‘Men may become eunuchs, but eunuchs may never again become men.’’8 For Arcesilaus, the ideological passage over to Epicureanism involves a transformation that, once effected, cannot be undone. As the seventeenth-century libertine critic La Mothe le Vayer puts it in his reading of Arcesilaus’s commentary, Arcesilaus ‘‘meant to say that the voluptuousness of Epicurus rendered men so effeminate, that they became incapable of returning to a less dissolute way of life.’’9 This change is both unnatural—in that it represents an attack on masculine potency—and irrevocable—in that it strips the disciples of Epicurus of the ability to return to their original, unaltered states. Diderot, who in his discussion of Epicurus is concerned with revealing the natural appropriateness of the Epicurean lesson to human beings in general, reverses the direction of the ‘‘turn’’ as Arcesilaus conceives it in order to establish Epicureanism as the very foundation upon which human experience is built.10 Any conversion to Epicurean philosophy would constitute, in the schema established by Diderot, a return to the origins of experience, albeit a return that enables a delightful rediscovery of the pleasures inherent in the domain of the infantile, the bodily, and the immediate. Epicureanism as a doctrine, far from representing a perversion of the natural order of things (as it seems to do for Arcesilaus), stands for Diderot at the beginning of all human knowledge—but also as a limitation on that knowledge, the boundary beyond which knowledge cannot legitimately progress. Where Arcesilaus is concerned with the Epicurean eunuch, emasculated by his debauchery, Diderot celebrates what might be called the

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Epicurean infant, a being whose naturally voluptuous tendencies have not yet been corrupted by the application of artificially constructed abstractions (in the form, for instance, of false causes) to experience. The human who is born Epicurean, as Thomas M. Kavanagh highlights in his analysis of Diderot’s Epicureanism in Esthetics of the Moment, takes shape as a figure not across expanses of time, but in what Kavanagh describes as ‘‘the Epicurean moment.’’ The insights of Epicureanism thus emerge from directly within experience—and are designed to return its disciples to a kind of pure materiality that can only be grasped in passing, as if by accident. ‘‘Men of genius, like Epicurus,’’ Diderot writes, ‘‘lose little time; their activity applies itself to everything; they observe and instruct without even perceiving it; and this enlightenment [ces lumie`res], acquired almost without effort, is all the more estimable, because it is relative to objects in general.’’11 Diderot’s Epicureanism derives as explanatory principle from the absence of self-consciousness that makes possible this practice of ‘‘observation without perception.’’ Epicurus is remarkable for his ability to develop and transmit a set of philosophical precepts without, in effect, being aware that he is doing so. In this sense, he closely resembles the dreaming philosopher of Le Reˆve de d’Alembert, who similarly is able to teach without being conscious of his actions. In both cases, Epicureanism as a system becomes most accessible to the philosopher during those times when the subject of knowledge is closest to a kind of unmediated experience—sensation without apprehension. This knowledge is then miraculously transmitted to disciples eager to begin the project of excavation—the collecting of ‘‘seeds of knowledge that long have lain hidden in the depths of the soul’’—that will enable the momentary liberation of the voluptuous subject from the constraints of other dogma.12 The figure of the genial Epicurean philosopher thus has direct access to diverse modes of experience without the danger of becoming mired in them. Epicurean individuals, on the other hand, tend to be preanalytical in their attachment to the ‘‘natural’’ pleasures that make them up. In this sense, to the extent that our pleasures are made with us—embedded in our bodily experience—we are indeed all born Epicurean. We are born this way, however, only in preparation for becoming something else. The emphasis placed on the logic of return in Diderot’s depiction of Epicurus can provide a framework for understanding Diderot’s presentation of the philosophical function of materialist critique at other moments in his corpus. First, Diderot tends to read atomic dynamism—the capacity for movement and transformation that resides in material bodies13 —as a quality inherent in nature itself, where Lucretius presents this dynamism as a natural

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effect of poetry on and in substance. The link between form and experience (so crucial for neo-Lucretians like La Mettrie) becomes attenuated here, so that the Diderotian materialist is more likely to find himself at odds with the kinds of precious figuralism that for Lucretius and for neo-Lucretians like La Mettrie most reliably evoke sensations of voluptuousness in those who consume such figures. Moreover, the voluptuous reading subject— valorized by Lucretius as the object and proof of his doctrine’s material suasiveness—no longer stands at the center of the Epicurean project as Diderot understands it. It is instead philosopher-critics—potentially transcendent in their ability to reveal readers to themselves—who come to embody most fundamentally the quality of mutability as well as the capacity to make matter known without being fully determined by it. Where the infant, the dreamer, and the pleasure-reader, like the pure voluptuary, can become too caught in their experiences to schematize them without assistance, Diderot’s philosopher-critics are able to stage the disruptiveness of matter without being irredeemably bound by this same attribute. Instead, they take on the motility that for Diderot is characteristic not only of material substance itself but of such figures as the artist and of the actor.14 Genuinely philosophical materialist thinkers, as Diderot depicts them in his article on Epicureanism, exemplify what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe describes in his essay on Diderot as ‘‘the natural gift—the gift of nature . . . the gift of mimesis: gift of nothing, in effect . . . ; gift of nothing other than the aptitude to present, that is to say to substitute oneself for nature herself, to make of oneself (the) natural, in order, with the help of nature’s inherent power, to supplement the latter’s inability to bring to term, to effect that which it cannot make work—that for which its energy . . . does not suffice.’’15 Voluptuous readers, in this relationship, may function as bodies to be labored over, but they are no longer privileged participants in the relationship between the philosopher and a natural world that serves as the object of their distraction and their delight. My goal in this chapter is thus to elucidate the effects of Diderot’s specific recuperation of an Epicurean-Lucretian thematics not just on the relationship of Diderotian materialism to the problem of figural representation but on the role played by the delighted reader in the transmission of materialist knowledge more generally. In a juxtaposition of his discussion of reading from the E´loge de Richardson (written in 1761) and his presentation of materialism in Le Reˆve de d’Alembert (written in 1769), I will argue that Diderot diverges significantly from the neo-Lucretianism articulated by his fellow materialist La Mettrie (whom he denigrates with some vehemence in the

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Essai sur les re`gnes de Claude et de Ne´ron). Diderot resists embracing the perlocutionary force of figure as the origin of philosophic truths. Moreover, he substitutes for the persona of the exquisitely responsive reader16 —around whom an earlier Lucretian tradition tends to circulate obsessively—that of the critic and writer, who productively and publicly exposes the variety of natural phenomena through the display of diverse worldly talents and pleasures. In making these claims, I am not, however, attempting to deny the importance of the literary text in Diderot’s articulation of a materialism that remains wedded to exposing the fundamental dynamism of natural processes. In fact, it is consistently in the representation of the literary arena as a primary site for the challenging of orthodoxy of all sorts—including philosophical dogma—that Diderot makes visible the power of materialism as a ‘‘return’’ to experience in a more immediate mode. In a demonstration of the fundamentally disruptive power intrinsic to material bodies, Diderot renders the literary text a privileged space for the undoing of formal constraint. As Pierre Hartmann explains: Far from putting fiction in the service of theory, Diderot makes of the former the most apt mode for the deployment of the latter. Fiction is not for him what it is generally for his successors, a literary ornament and the rhetorical engine of a preconceived thesis, but instead becomes the proper vector of philosophical investigation and the most appropriate means for the exploration of the real. It is because only fiction, for Diderot, is fully heuristic that it is so difficult to isolate purely speculative works in his corpus. Inversely, if the boldest speculation is always inseparable, with Diderot, from literary expression, it is because there is for him no authentic literature other than the speculative.17

Philosophy, as Hartmann points out, stands in need of literature in order to make itself known as a form of emancipation, so that literature enables the philosophical articulation of what Hartmann earlier describes as a ‘‘superior freedom, which is none other than thought deploying itself without constraint across the full expanse of its registers.’’18 Diderot’s use of literary language as the field within which a certain intellectual liberty may be expressed indeed evinces a profound attachment to literature that Hartmann, for one, reads as uncharacteristic of philosophy in general. Yet Diderot nonetheless breaks with a Lucretian tradition of understanding the engagement with poetic form as the point of origin of a philosophical intervention in matter and material experience. Diderot, in his particular rehabilitation of the Lucretian legacy, delights in the representa-

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tion of material bodies in the various states of flux to which they are subject. However, he leaves behind what is for La Mettrie the characteristic Lucretian focus on formal constraint as an inducement to heightened voluptuousness (along with the systematic cultivation of this voluptuousness in order to attain of a certain freedom of perception). Literature, for Diderot, frees the reader to feel, and, in feeling, to recognize both the reactive susceptibility of the body to specific forms of discourse—so that readers can be ‘‘seduced’’ by what they read—and the capacity of this responsive substance to ‘‘trouble’’ the categories imposed on it by more abstract forms of thought. Diderot accordingly excels in the rendering of the human person as both object of curiosity—as Foucault famously argues in his analysis of Les Bijoux indiscrets19 —and as site of profound disruption—as modeled in Le Reˆve de d’Alembert—but departs in both of these portrayals from the figure of the Lucretian poetic body, which can be neither regulated from outside nor insurgent from within.

2. The E´loge de Richardson and the material reader In the E´loge de Richardson, written as the title suggests in praise of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Diderot evokes in lushly compelling prose his experience as an eighteenth-century reader.20 Diderot begins by differentiating Richardson’s novels from other writings that may be categorized in the same genre: ‘‘By novel, we have understood until this day a tissue of chimerical and frivolous events, the reading of which posed a danger for taste as well as for morality. I would like to find another name for the works of Richardson, which elevate the mind, touch the soul, and exude everywhere a love of the good, and which we also call novels.’’21 In a rhetorical move that echoes the period’s most orthodox critiques of the potential harm caused by novel-reading, Diderot distinguishes Richardson’s oeuvre as unusual in that his writings lack the genre’s most emblematic attribute: namely, the ability to corrupt readers with superficial yet seductive prose. Diderot goes on to portray Richardson’s novels, and Clarissa in particular, as ideal instruments for the propagation of virtuous impulses in a rapturously receptive audience. ‘‘With each line,’’ writes Diderot, ‘‘he renders the fate of oppressed virtue preferable to that of vice triumphant.’’22 Moral readers of Richardson will no doubt suffer thanks to their sympathy for the innocent victims of predatory libertines, but in suffering will ultimately discover the pleasures of commiseration, of sincere feeling, and of participation in a community of like-minded fellow enthusiasts. These readers will emerge from

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the experience of reading Richardson in a state of fatigued satisfaction— their rectitude affirmed, their fortitude tested, their hatred of injustice strengthened. Diderot acknowledges that the frivolous and dissipated individual—the libertine reader, in other words—will find no enjoyment in Richardson’s work, but, after all, ‘‘it is not for this man whom he writes, it is for the tranquil and solitary man.’’23 Ideal readers of Richardson are steeped in sympathy and easily moved to tears: ‘‘Happy are those who are able to cry!’’ Diderot exclaims.24 They are also exquisitely prone to sentimental identification with virtuous characters and to passionate dislike for those who are dissolute or dishonest. They substitute themselves for the suffering heroine or hero and lose themselves in the text, only returning reluctantly to their senses—and to their solitude—at the end of the book. ‘‘After reading,’’ writes Diderot, ‘‘I resembled a man at the end of a day that he had spent doing good.’’25 Diderot’s focus on sympathetic identification in the E´loge runs counter to the Lucretian investment in philosophers who can seem remarkable for their lack of even the most rudimentary feelings of commiseration. The man who placidly watches the victims of a shipwreck drown from the comfort of the shore as a proof of the effectiveness of his philosophical commitments is clearly a far cry from the reader who finds himself addressing aloud the characters in the novel he is perusing in order to warn them away from danger. On the other hand, Diderot is fascinated, in the E´loge, by the capacity of the reader to ‘‘forget himself,’’ as David Marshall describes it in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy. And, in these moments of forgetting that may be delightfully prolonged by the act of reading, Diderot describes himself not only as entering into a kind of communion with the passions in all of their multiplicity—‘‘I had heard the true discourses of the passions’’—but as acquiring a range of experience. This passage of the reading subject through scenes that he takes pleasure in mistaking for real does seem close to the Lucretian emphasis on poetic perception as a kind of pleasure in motion, particularly since the Lucretian reader also discovers material experience through the engagement with the poetic text as, in some sense, wholly real. But the ability of readers to transform themselves through the encounter with poetic speech is not the same, I would argue, as the ability of a reader to ‘‘lose’’ himself (or later in the E´loge, herself ) momentarily in the book. Diderot in fact goes to great lengths, at the beginning of the essay, to emphasize that the passionate sentiments that readers may uncover in Richardson are striking for the degree to which they are eminently ascertainable by readers not as outside of their prior experience but as fundamentally their

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own. Thus, the world of Richardson is real because it is immediately recognizable to readers as such: The world where we live is the setting; the basis for his dramas is true; his characters have all possible reality; his personalities are plucked from the milieu of society; his incidents from the morals of all polite nations; the passions as he paints them are such that I feel them in me; these are the same objects that move them, they have the energy that I know them to have; the hardships and the afflictions of these characters are of the nature of those that threaten me ceaselessly; he shows me the general course of things that surround me. Without this art, with my soul bending itself painfully in imaginary directions, the illusion would only be momentary, the impression feeble and quickly passing.26

The forcefulness with which Richardson is able to act upon his readers is proportionate to their ability to locate themselves immediately within the Richardsonian schema, albeit in the form of another ‘‘persona.’’ Accordingly, Diderot goes on to describe himself as finding in the character of Clarissa a particularly compelling figuration of his own penchants and interests. While Diderot as a reader in this sense gives himself up to Richardson as a result of such moments of recognition—and thereby immerses himself entirely in a fictional setting that convincingly possesses the air of reality—he does so in order to rediscover himself eventually within the world that is proffered to him by the novelist. The responsiveness of the reader is calibrated to the basic yet profound familiarity of the context that he has had presented to him. In the passage that follows his discussion of the authenticity of the Richardsonian rendering of social reality, Diderot writes that ‘‘Richardson sows in [readers’] hearts seeds of virtue that lie calmly dormant there.’’27 This figure of speech is the same as that with which he describes the capacity of the Epicurean philosopher to come to an understanding of truth by gathering the ‘‘seeds of knowledge’’ that may lie dormant in his ‘‘soul.’’ In both cases, this process bears fruit—for the benefit of human happiness in the case of the philosopher, and in the service of virtuous action in the case of the reader—thanks to a cause that appears to be accidental or haphazard. The ‘‘seeds of knowledge’’ come into being as a result of ‘‘accidental glances’’ and develop ‘‘sooner or later,’’ while the ‘‘seeds of virtue’’ await an occasion that ‘‘shakes’’ them awake and makes them blossom into good deeds. But, where both figures are concerned, the implantation of the seeds is made possible because of the environment within which they are sown, which is

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either a priori hostile (in the case of the dissipated or frivolous individual) or welcoming (in the case of the virtuous man or woman) to their eventual germination. The seeds may require a form of stimulation that cannot be predicted in advance in order to produce recognizable consequences, but they do not owe their existence to chance. As in his discussion of Epicurus, Diderot invokes with the figure of the seeds lying still in the readerly heart the notion of a double return to origins.28 Readers of Richardson eventually rediscover long after having finished the novel the forgotten effects of their encounters with the text, but this rediscovery is always a demonstration of the prevailing moral atmosphere (characteristic of their ‘‘hearts’’) that made these effects possible in the first place. Readers’ recollections of the work’s effects on them are also a reaffirmation of their virtuous status—a status that is necessarily determined in advance. Within this schema, sympathetic identification with another human being is not, as it is for Lucretius, a perverse or oppressive ideological mechanism that conceals a desire to coopt and dominate other human beings. Instead, the process of identification serves as an expression of something real—the moral climate or ‘‘weather’’—that lies within the person. For Lucretius, to sympathize is to make of specific desires (for sexual pleasure or for immortality) a metaphysical bondage. For Diderot, the sympathetic ties that are formed to one character or another become the material expression of an ideal that finds its origins within the very nature of the reader (or of the philosopher). In the first paragraphs of his essay, Diderot makes clear that the means by which Richardson’s writings ‘‘work’’ upon those who consume them is distinct not only from the degenerative effects of the libertine text on those whom it aims to corrupt but from what he refers to as the more abstract forms of representation typical of earlier moralists. ‘‘Everything that Montaigne, Charron, La Rochefoucauld and Nicole have put into maxims,’’ he asserts, ‘‘Richardson has put into action.’’29 If the movement toward sentimental identification so expertly cultivated by Richardson engenders a more forceful response on the part of the reader than any maxim is able to do, it is because, Diderot continues, the latter genre is too mired in its own generality to be particularly effective as a device to compel the reader’s response. ‘‘A maxim is an abstract, general rule whose application is left up to us. It does not imprint on its own any sensitive [sensible] image on our mind: but he who acts, we see him, we put ourselves in his place and at his side; we are passionately for or against him; we unite ourselves to his role, if he is virtuous; we distance ourselves with indignation from it, if he is unjust and vicious.’’30 Diderot reads abstraction, here, as a feeble device for the

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representation of sentiments and bodies, since abstract principles cannot ‘‘touch’’ the subject in the same way that the portrayal of literary characters in action may do.31 Whereas abstractions cannot predetermine the relationship of the reader to the modes of good conduct that they articulate, the Richardsonian novel intervenes directly in the reader’s sensory apparatus. It does so, however, in order to make visible the natural tendency of this reader toward the specific kinds of behavior that are so convincingly modeled in the text. Readers of Richardson, as Diderot paints them in the opening passages of the essay, can neither choose nor move among their sympathetic attachments; these attachments are forced upon them, both by the skill of the author and according to their own preexisting susceptibilities. Abstractions thus represent failed attempts at intervention in the movements of real bodies. Characters, on the other hand, through their likeness to these bodies, can predictably compel the latter to reveal their natural inclinations. Diderot imbues the very substance of the reader’s person with mimetic (rather than transformative) capability. Readers discover, in being ‘‘moved’’ by their encounters with Richardson’s novels, resemblance in substance. If Diderot makes the Richardsonian novel seem to offer its readers a form of immediacy that is in certain ways superior to that of nonfictional experience—since the latter is less reliable than Richardson in its rendering of authenticity and deceit—he nonetheless makes it clear that expert readers of Richardson cannot simply remain captive to the ‘‘impressions’’ that the novel consistently inscribes upon them. It may appear in the initial paragraphs of the essay that there can be no ‘‘bad’’ readers of Richardson, given that this particular author’s novels operate so effectively that they appear to strip ‘‘good’’ readers of any interpretive agency whatsoever. Yet Diderot goes on to reveal that the value of Richardson’s novels lies not just in their ability to mark their readers in specific ways, but in their capacity to guide these readers toward a form of ‘‘disinterest’’ [de´sinte´ressement] that at first may seem at odds with the profoundly overdetermined attachment to virtue with which Diderot begins. Virtuous action, as it turns out, involves both a moment of (self-)recognition that prefaces the mapping of sympathetic identification onto specific characters and a sacrifice of the self on behalf of another.32 Virtue as an ideal thereby demands of its acolytes not just a strongly felt set of preferences but the ability to transcend all such preference in the moment of impartial judgment. Richardson’s writing not only compels his readers to prefer virtue to vice—‘‘with each line he renders the fate of oppressed virtue preferable to that of vice triumphant’’—it enables these readers to assess in a measured and reasonable way the same characters who

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have so inexorably ordered the objects of their sentiments from the beginning of the engagement with the text. ‘‘If I know, in spite of the interests that may trouble my judgment, how to distribute my contempt and my esteem according to the measure of impartiality, it is to Richardson whom I owe this,’’ explains Diderot.33 Readers of Richardson move from compulsion—the ‘‘perpetual agitation’’ of those who cannot help but identify with what they read—to judicious spectatorial disengagement and back again in the course of their reading. Thus, while the world of Richardson is unimaginable in the terms of the moralists whom Diderot makes reference to in the second paragraph of the essay, the abstraction of these writers may nonetheless be perfectly reproduced from within the framework established by Richardson: ‘‘A man of wit who reads with reflection the works of Richardson, rewrites the majority of the moralists’ sayings, but with all of these sayings he would not rewrite one page of Richardson.’’34 The sympathetic rendering of detail generates its own form of abstraction that is at once utterly unlike and exactly the same as that of the classical moralists as Diderot describes them. This abstraction—which allows for the drama of self-recognition to play out even in the absence of any form of self-interest—is the ‘‘secret’’ supplement that literature brings to nature and a confirmation of the self-sufficiency of the natural order of things prior to the intervention of literary description in experience. It also makes possible the phenomenon of ‘‘observation without perception’’ that is characteristic of Diderot’s Epicurus. ‘‘Good’’ readers of Richardson are thus authentically compelled by the novels that they read, but the object of this compulsion is the abandonment of their self-interest in a way that will enable them to reproduce the vigorously ethical critical acumen of Richardson himself. The Richardsonian novel, unlike the ‘‘bad’’ novels that corrupt and distract those who consume them, forces readers to give themselves up to the text in such a way that they are obliged to recognize the precisely Richardsonian nature of their moral and ideological commitments. Good readers of Richardson’s works should in fact be persuaded by these works to resist all other forms of suasion that might subsequently be applied to them. As Diderot points out, ‘‘If Richardson has set out to evoke interest, it is on behalf of those who are unhappy. In his work, as in the world, men are divided into two classes: those who experience delight [jouissent] and those who suffer. It is always with the latter that he associates me; and, without my perceiving it, the sentiment of commiseration is exercised and fortified.’’35 Ultimately, ideal readers of Richardson learn from their relentless movement through a vari-

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ety of lifelike scenes, their consistent acquisition of experience, and their tireless contemplation of realistic detail, to embody in their own lives a principle of self-sameness. They become more and more like themselves even as they gain more and more knowledge of that which is unlike them. Diderot writes: Thanks to this author, I have loved those who are like me more, loved my duties more; . . . I have had for the wicked nothing but pity, . . . I have developed more commiseration for the unhappy, more veneration for the good, more care in the use of things in the present, more indifference as to things in the future, more contempt for life and more love for virtue. . . .36

Good readers as they are depicted here find out from Richardson how to ‘‘love’’ that which resembles them, only losing themselves in the novel as a preparation for supplementing their preexisting sympathies. They are compelled into motion—and into identification with other characters who may initially appear unlike them—in order to come to recognize themselves in that which does not move and hence resists more frivolous forms of suasion. The figure of the naturally good reader, in the E´loge, is staged against those of a series of bad readers who fail, in various ways, either to complete the first compulsive movement toward identification or to enter into the dynamic relationship with the text that characterizes the persona of the engaged and reflective critic. Diderot writes that ‘‘The more beautiful one’s soul is, the more exquisite and pure one’s taste, the more one understands nature and loves truth, the more one esteems the works of Richardson.’’37 Yet this attachment to nature and truth is hardly, as Diderot recognizes, universal. In reality, ‘‘frivolous and dissipated’’ readers who are unable to find pleasure in the Richardsonian portrayal of detail are actually more ‘‘common’’ and representative figures than their virtuous, solitary counterparts. Readers who fail to become invested in Richardson—and who are displeased with what they find in these novels—are painted by Diderot as typical members of a dissipated society. They are ‘‘led on by a thousand distractions, . . . the day does not have enough hours among its twenty-four for the amusements with which [they are] accustomed to fill them.’’38 Not only are these readers unable to become invested in the particular empirical details with which Richardson is concerned—the ‘‘pains, cares, movements’’ that are necessary to ‘‘make the smallest business succeed, to finish a trial, conclude a marriage, bring about a reconciliation’’—they do not subsequently manage to find in Richardson’s accounts a source of transcendent moral or philosophical meaning.39 Where ideal readers of libertine erotica,

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according to La Mettrie, understand figure as in itself a privileged natural phenomenon, good readers of Richardson, for Diderot, will derive ‘‘secret’’ significance from the expert transformation of nature into poetic imagery by the author or painter. Richardson, according to Diderot, revisits daily life in order to imbue it with sense, while the Lamettrian sensualist locates in nature itself the intrinsically poetic organization of the real. Bad readers of Richardson, then, are unable to perceive Richardsonian detail as anything other than itself. This detail does not present itself to them, naturally, as a means of overcoming self-interest. Mired in superficial egotism, they are immune to the inherent pleasures of plot and character, and prefer their novels, like their tragedies, abridged. They remain unaffected by descriptive precision and interested only in the gist of the matter. In other words, their ideal form would appear to be the very maxims that Diderot begins by dismissing; they seem to crave a distillation of literary representation into pure abstraction. Good readers, on the other hand, suspend their personal investment in the continuation of an ‘‘interesting’’ narrative in order to take an even greater delight in the compulsive outpouring of their sympathies at the moments when the text evokes their sentimental involvement. They move in the act of reading between a pleasure so great that it erases any sense they might have of the novel as unreal and a feeling of disengagement from things in their generality. In this way, they are always able to return from their journeys through the novel to find themselves again. ‘‘Frivolous’’ bad readers, who fail at every possible moment to be interpellated by their book, ultimately find both rivals and counterparts in overly engaged readers, who situate themselves too completely within the text. Diderot evokes toward the conclusion of the essay the ending of a friendship between two women of his acquaintance as a result of the unwillingness of one to become invested in Clarissa even when confronted with the hyperinvolvement of the other in the same work. ‘‘Were not two friends set at odds,’’ writes Diderot, ‘‘without any of the means that I employed to bring them back together bearing fruit, because one despised the story of Clarissa, before which the other had prostrated herself !’’40 The overly identified figure—presumably Madame d’E´pinay, an accomplished author and Diderot’s friend—pens a letter to Diderot that portrays her erstwhile ‘‘amie’’ as supremely insensitive to the novel as sympathetic portrait. This friend is represented as a skeptical and shallow reader who laughs at Clarissa’s phrasemaking and remains unmoved by the passages that, to Diderot’s correspondent, seem capable of wringing tears and laments from ‘‘rocks, walls, the unsensing and cold paving-stones on which I walk.’’41 Madame d’E´pinay

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writes to Diderot that she would prefer to see her own daughter dead than to know that she shared this insensitive way of thinking and feeling. As Diderot comments regarding his correspondent’s impassioned declaration of her ‘‘aversion’’ to the woman who was once her intimate, ‘‘There is, as we see, in matters of taste, as well as in religious affairs, a sort of intolerance that I condemn, but from which I protect myself only by an effort of reason.’’42 Here Diderot reaffirms the importance of the judicious ‘‘effort of reason’’ that enables him to negotiate more successfully than the letter-writer between the poles of frivolity, on the one hand, and overinvestment, on the other. As he points out in the beginning of the essay, sentimental involvement should produce impartiality as a privileged effect of virtue, rather than obscuring judgment with ‘‘transports.’’ As for his overly sentimental correspondent, she emerges from her reading of Clarissa with the grief-stricken impression that ‘‘nature is covered by a thick veil of crepe.’’43 The more rationally inclined reader, on the other hand, will discover nature transfigured through its rerendering as truth in Richardson’s prose. If Diderot’s own judicious engagement with Richardson emerges in the final pages of the essay as legitimate in a way that his correspondent’s, as a form of intolerance, is not, the final paragraph of the E´loge makes clear that it is the figure of the author, rather than that of the reader, who serves as the ultimate guarantor of his own writings’ sublime veracity. In the last sentences of the essay, Diderot depicts his authorial genius [ge´nie] as suffocated as a result of his fascination with Richardson’s oeuvre. Diderot paints himself, in the final moment of the E´loge, as suffering from both the condition of overly invested readers—entirely lost in the prose they peruse—and subject to a kind of dissipation as a result of his chronic fascination with the ‘‘ghosts’’ of Richardson’s prose. The dangers of sentimentality and frivolity converge here to swallow up even the most ideally constituted of readers— who subsequently leave behind them nothing but the immortal ‘‘statue’’ of the original author himself. Diderot writes: The genius of Richardson has stifled that which I had. His ghosts wander ceaselessly in my imagination; if I wish to write, I hear the lament of Clementine, the shadow of Clarissa appears to me, I see Grandison walking before me, Lovelace troubles me, and the pen falls from my fingers. And you, sweeter specters, Emily, Charlotte, Pamela, dear Miss Howe, even as I converse with you, the years of work and the harvest of laurels passes by, and I advance toward the end of things, without attempting anything that can recommend me to the ages to come.44

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Diderot ends his reflections by depicting the total recuperation of the reader into the persona of the author. Despite what appears earlier in the essay to be his success in achieving self-recognition as a result of his attachment to the text, he is finally, in his role as nothing more than a reader of Richardson, reduced to a silence that is filled only by quasi-hallucinatory visions. Paradoxically, given his admiration for Richardson as engendering virtuous action in those who read him, Diderot suggests that it is only as authors that readers acquire any permanent legitimacy as such. Even what has initially been portrayed as his authentically and productively involved analysis of Richardson devolves by the end of the E´loge into a ghostly conversation that threatens to transform Diderot as reader into a spectral participant in an imaginary dialogue, his impressions worthy of nothing other than the compassion of those who will one day peruse his essay. Readers, in this passage, become by definition figures of dissipation, whose ‘‘work’’ inevitably prefigures nothing more than their own demise.45 The engaged nostalgia of reading subjects for the experiences proffered them by reading matter is rewritten in the conclusion to the E´loge to stand for the complete disappearance of these subjects into the text. Diderot, as a lecteur, becomes merely one ghost among others—insubstantial in his willingness to find himself in the words of another. In her book Success in Circuit Lies, Rosalina de la Carrera suggests, through a compelling analysis of the figure of the reader in Diderot’s oeuvre, that it is the Pre´face-annexe to La Religieuse, rather than the E´loge, that should be considered ‘‘the text in which Diderot most fully articulates his theory of fiction.’’46 For de la Carrera, Diderot’s theory of the reader involves both a set of strategies for reading and an active effort to render the reader susceptible to the effects of fiction(s) on his person; the E´loge, as a discussion of these effects rather than an attempt to put them into practice, only tells half the story—and the less crucial half, at that. De la Carrera sees Diderot as elaborating, in his novels and dialogues, a materialist theory of fiction in which the reader’s mind and body are brought into play as the text is both absorbed and transformed through the act of reading. As she puts it, ‘‘The kind of relationship [Diderot] seeks to construct between author and reader is one in which neither is in a position of mastery with respect to the other; Diderot seeks to destabilize the position of both the reader and the author.’’47 He does this not only by allowing readers to participate consciously in their own seduction by the text, but by rendering the author himself as yet another fictive character (particularly in the Pre´faceannexe, where the character Diderot works to displace the author-figure

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Diderot as the mechanism of narrative production). Ultimately, de la Carrera claims, ‘‘Diderot’s texts do not merely act on the reader. Rather they position him in such a way that he must interact with them. . . . Not only does the reader at times take an active role in extending or completing parts of the narrative structure, but he also becomes an active participant in ‘conversations’ with the figures who are portrayed in them. Rather than feeding the reader a content that can be consumed passively, then, the texts . . . teach him to be an active practitioner of literature, history, and natural philosophy.’’48 The E´loge gestures toward the necessity of this kind of ‘‘active’’ (and judicious) consumption, but falls short as a means of inducing such consumption. Yet in the resistance of the E´loge to an ‘‘abstract’’ notion of form—and in Diderot’s privileging of sympathetic character over figure—we can nonetheless begin to see what is at stake for Diderot in the establishment of his own, modern materialist approach to the intersection of fiction and philosophy. Sympathy and seduction, here, are at odds with abstraction, on the one hand, and critique, on the other. In going on to set up the ideal materialist reader as one who can, as de la Carrera aptly suggests, ‘‘not only . . . understand the workings of nature from a materialist perspective, but eventually . . . use this perspective to move natural philosophy in new directions,’’ Diderot departs from a classically figural materialism which regards the mimetic responsiveness of the body to other ‘‘realistic’’ representational bodies with some suspicion and thus cannot hold up character as the most effective means for inducing contact with the reader’s person (and, eventually, with his mind). Diderot’s model requires readers, to the extent that they are to be active, not just to react to those characters most like them but to see the production (rather than the consumption) of texts as the proper end of philosophical labor. Accordingly, ideal Diderotian readers should end up duplicating—after having passed through the stage of mimetic identification—the critical practice exemplified by Diderot himself as a sign of their eventual distance from the illusions activated by fiction. Good reader-critics, then, not only search for ‘‘likeness’’ in their reading matter but aim to reproduce and reanimate themselves in that which they write. Their bodies may be touched by their reading matter, but it is not at the moment of being ‘‘touched’’ that they are transformed. Instead, physical contact is presented as the beginning of a journey toward a recuperation of the passive reading body by philosophical writing. This process is both put into motion—and fully carried out—in the famous dialogue Le Reˆve de d’Alembert, which transforms the ‘‘theory’’ of the E´loge into a new form of materialist practice.

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3. Le Reˆve de d’Alembert and the pulverization of forms The E´loge de Richardson, written in the style of a personal reflection on the art and act of reading, might initially appear to have little connection to Diderot’s somewhat later and much more celebrated interventions in the development of a dialogic literary materialism with what Johan Schmidt calls an ‘‘Epicurean-Lucretian’’ focus.49 Of these latter works, Le Reˆve de d’Alembert is among the most vividly original and perhaps most explicitly Lucretian in its expression of a radically materialist perspective on subjectivity and the embodied person.50 Where the E´loge traffics at least in part in cliche´—when the novel becomes a stimulus for corruption—Le Reˆve de d’Alembert displays a delight in the provocative dismantling of various philosophical orthodoxies. Yet, not unlike the E´loge, Le Reˆve de d’Alembert (which remained unpublished during Diderot’s lifetime) locates its analytical origins in the substitution of character for abstraction and the concomitant replacement of figural outlines with living bodies. Moreover, Diderot’s development of an experimental materialist discourse around the human subject remains dependent, in Le Reˆve, on the outcome of a reckoning with the figures of ‘‘bad’’ readers, in particular those who go about their task either too lightly, on the one hand, or too fervently, on the other. In this sense the establishment of theoretical knowledge in Le Re´ve requires the cultivation of reading strategies similar to those involved in the production of an authentic engagement with Richardson’s novels in the E´loge. Le Reˆve tests the limits of philosophy using the same methods by which the E´loge determines the proper work of literary representation. Moreover, Le Reˆve articulates an undoing of formal abstraction as part of an attempt to animate matter as ‘‘character.’’ This process mirrors Diderot’s depiction in the E´loge of the ways in which novelistic personae should be manipulated in order to induce responsiveness in a particular kind of reader. The figure of the materialist philosopher becomes responsible for initiating the graphic transmutation of form into representational bodies—a procedure that is necessary in order to stimulate a sense of self-recognition in his interlocutors. The diversity of matter, in the dialogues, gradually becomes mapped onto the diversity of living persons. Nonetheless, a specifically philosophical understanding of substance, as it comes into being by the end of the dialogue, can only be the product of a very precise way of reading, one that does not consistently return to the moment of unthinking identification as a means of making sense of what is real. Philosopher-critics generate their method of reading in distinction to the highly identified forms of interacting with representations that they put

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into place—modes of reading that will have originally served as proof of the truth of materialist knowledge. Because of the dynamism and disruptions inherent in matter (and thus in the bodies of readers generally), it is only philosophers who can ultimately access, via their specific deployment of expertise, the domain of knowledge that transcends the extreme particularity of the material world. Philosopher-critics find in their own resemblance to one another—and in their difference from other, poorer readers—the origin of their authority as interpreters of matter. The dialogue entitled Le Reˆve de d’Alembert is framed by two shorter dialogues also composed in 1769.51 The first, Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot, places two interlocutors (named ‘‘Diderot’’ and ‘‘d’Alembert’’52) in a conversation about the nature of material substance. In a critique of the ‘‘metaphysico-theological claptrap’’ that is depicted as having long informed attempts to define thought and feeling as qualities incompatible with brute matter, Diderot counters his friend d’Alembert’s cautious dualism with a dynamic materialism according to which, in an echo of claims made twenty years earlier by La Mettrie, ‘‘There is no longer more than one substance in the universe, in man, in the animal.’’53 In the second dialogue, the most figurally involved and innovative of the three, ‘‘Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse’’ relates to the doctor ‘‘The´ophile de Bordeu’’ the philosophical musings that she has heard ‘‘d’Alembert’’ utter in the midst of an agitated sleep. In the final dialogue, Suite de l’entretien, the figures of Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse and Bordeu are reunited for a conversation that revolves around sexual reproduction and an attempt to work through, in a coherently materialist fashion, an ethics of pleasure. The three dialogues move from a relatively formal discussion of the philosophical legitimacy of a materialist monism to a playful exploration of interspecies reproduction that verges on the obscene. Taken as a group, the three sections of Le Reˆve display an increasing preoccupation with the specificity of responsive material bodies at the expense of what might be regarded as classical or orthodox philosophical practice. ‘‘Here is a doctrine that cannot well be preached to children,’’ Mlle. de l’Espinasse ultimately remarks of Bordeu’s theories regarding the nature of pleasure.54 In addition, the increasing interest of the participants of the dialogues in individual narratives of embodiment—and the capacity of the dialogues to absorb modes of feeling that radically diverge from that of philosophical lucidity—might well be described as literary. As Wilda Anderson confirms, ‘‘The text must induce in the reader the active-and-reactive state whose experience would be the most informative tactic Diderot could summon.’’55 This inventive ‘‘literariness’’ is nonetheless

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accompanied, in the three dialogues, by a negotiation of the participants’ relationships to poetic language in which all techniques of apprehending substance in its multifarious representations are not created equal. The first section of Le Reˆve, the Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot, revolves around Diderot’s efforts to demonstrate to his conversational partner d’Alembert that the quality of sensibility, far from requiring an immaterial principle ‘‘that differs essentially from matter’’ to explain its existence, is in fact inherent in matter itself. There is no need, in other words, to posit an immaterial soul (for instance) in order to make sense of the ‘‘active sensibility’’ that is characteristic, according to Diderot, of human beings, animals, and even plants. In the opening paragraphs of the dialogue, d’Alembert first frames the question of the nature of sensibility in the context of a distinction between a man and a statue. This differentiation is both ‘‘material,’’ in that the human being and the marble figure consist of distinct substances, and aesthetic, in that the statue is not simply a material object—a body in and or itself—but a representational figure that makes one body (a man) out of another (a block of marble). D’Alembert asks how, given the idea of material sensibility that Diderot is propounding, it would be possible to distinguish between the statue made of stone and a living man made of human tissue. In fact, Diderot points out, the difference between the two is minimal: ‘‘One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.’’56 As Diderot goes on to explain, the perfect fungibility of substance makes it possible to imagine what d’Alembert initially describes in terms of a process of aesthetic creation—the rendering of ‘‘organic’’ life out of ‘‘inorganic’’ matter—as a transformation in the most literal of senses as well. Given that all matter is imbued with sensibility in one form or another, the passage from aesthetically animated marble to naturally animated human body becomes not only realizable, but part of the fabric of everyday experience: ‘‘common.’’ In order to prove this point, Diderot envisions himself grinding down the marble of the statue into a kind of powder, mixing this powder with soil, allowing the resulting mixture to putrefy and, after a certain amount of time has passed, sowing seeds in it. Having eaten the plants that have grown out of the soil imbued with the dust from the marble, he will have, in effect, made the statue itself part of his living flesh. As Suzanne L. Pucci describes this transposition, ‘‘Diderot’s text involves the stone’s decomposition, which through the process of earth’s destruction and assimilation, becomes in the text not metaphorically but literally continuous with human flesh and blood.’’57 Marble not only represents flesh, it may be made to become it. The aesthetic form that is d’Alembert’s original statue-man is destroyed so

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that it may be taken up by the very body of his interlocutor, in a process that renders nature itself (as embodied in the figure of Diderot) the most skilled of artists. But the statue that d’Alembert originally posits in the Entretien is not, it soon becomes clear, just any statue. D’Alembert has a specific figure in mind, one which he names as the ‘‘chef d’oeuvre of Falconet’’ (perhaps a reference to the work Pygmalion exhibited in the Salon of 1763).58 Diderot, in his rendering of the marble of the statue into his own flesh, is described by d’Alembert as ‘‘pulverizing’’ Falconet’s figure, an act which is acceptable, according to Diderot, because ‘‘the statue has been paid for, and Falconet cares little for our present considerations.’’59 The pulverization of the form of the statue by the character Diderot serves to introduce a discussion of the nature of substance itself, which is revealed to be diverse (in that no one ‘‘molecule’’ resembles another), unified (in that natural processes are all interconnected), and mobile (in that material particles are in a state of constant circulation). In order for this discussion to take place, however, the statue must first be completely stripped of its formal status as an aesthetic object—a status that d’Alembert insists upon even in the face of resistance from his conversational partner. Falconet’s statue must be purchased—rendered fungible like other kinds of matter by becoming subject to exchange—and then brutally pounded into an ‘‘impalpable powder.’’60 In the course of this work of destruction, as Pucci has pointed out, the statue goes from being referred to as a ‘‘chef d’oeuvre’’ (by d’Alembert) to being represented as a mere ‘‘block of marble’’ (once Diderot has in theory taken ownership of it). Where d’Alembert describes the object in question as the supreme accomplishment of a particular artist, Diderot demotes it from ‘‘statue’’ to ‘‘block’’ in the space of two sentences. The exchange begins: Diderot.— . . . I take the statue that you see here, I put it in a mortar, and with great blows of the pestle . . . D’Alembert.—Carefully, please: it is the master-work of Falconet. If it had been a piece by Huez or by another . . . Diderot.—It’s of no concern to Falconet: the statue has been paid for, and Falconet cares little for our present considerations, and nothing for the considerations to come. D’Alembert.—Go ahead, pulverize it. Diderot.—When the block of marble has been reduced to an impalpable powder, I then mix this powder with humus or fertile earth. . . .61

As the conversation proceeds, Falconet’s work is gradually divested of its formal properties in preparation for its reanimation in the body of the char-

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acter Diderot. But the disappearance of the statue as an aesthetic object— and its subsequent reappearance under the guise of Diderot himself as a ‘‘sensing being’’—entails more than the reduction of the figure of Pygmalion to a handful of dust that can subsequently serve as a fertilizer for plants. The stony form of the statue is reanimated not just as any body, but as the specific body of Diderot as a ‘‘character’’ in the dialogue. Thus we rediscover in the first section of the series of dialogues a process analogous to that which is evoked in the opening paragraphs of the E´loge. The statue—of which the title is never mentioned even though d’Alembert insists upon naming its creator—is effectively rematerialized by its embodiment as the character Diderot in the same way that the maxims of Montaigne, Charron, La Rochefoucauld, and Nicole are represented as ‘‘put into action’’ in their realization through the protagonists of Richardson’s novels. For matter to come into being as an active and unifying principle it must first be ‘‘pulverized’’ as form—a form that, in the case of Falconet’s ‘‘chef d’oeuvre,’’ remains perfectly abstract by virtue of the fact that it is not given a name—in order to be subsequently revivified as (literary) character. It is only once this project of revivification has been undergone that the author can be certain that the communication of specific truths (whether moral, in the case of Richardson, or philosophical, in the case of Le Reˆve) will ‘‘take.’’ The full internalization of representational figures—contingent upon their demise as formal objects—allows for the eventual transmission of knowledge to the responsive bodies of readers.62 The transformation of the statue from anonymous aesthetic object into embodied literary persona prefigures the transition from the Entretien to Le Reˆve proper, even as the sketchily animated interlocutors of the first dialogue become the more fully realized characters of the second. Where Diderot belatedly evokes a context for the conversation that is being recounted, in the Entretien, by having d’Alembert take his leave from his friend at the very end of the exchange, the setting of Le Reˆve comes vividly into view within the first pages. The doctor Bordeu sits with Mlle. de l’Espinasse at the bedside of d’Alembert, who has fallen into a restless and feverish sleep upon the conclusion of his meeting with Diderot. In the hope that Bordeu will be able to alleviate d’Alembert’s physical and mental agitation, Mlle. de l’Espinasse is reading to the doctor her transcription of what she describes as d’Alembert’s illness-induced ravings. ‘‘When he lay down,’’ she explains, ‘‘instead of going to bed as he usually does, since he sleeps like a baby, he began tossing and turning, throwing his arms into the air, pushing aside his covers, and speaking out loud.’’63 In the opening lines of the second section,

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the reader of Le Reˆve has already moved with the characters from a reasonably formal (and structurally conventional) conversation between two philosophers to a scene that is at once intimate—the second dialogue takes place in d’Alembert’s bed chamber—and imbued with a certain affective resonance. Mlle. de l’Espinasse is concerned for d’Alembert’s physical (and mental) health, and has called for Bordeu in her anxiety. Le Reˆve starts up where the Entretien ends—with the ‘‘fleshing out’’ of literary characters as exquisitely sensate in their material specificity. Bordeu’s first gesture, after approaching d’Alembert’s bedside, is to take his pulse. ‘‘The pulse is good . . . ,’’ he affirms, ‘‘a little weak . . . the skin damp . . . breathing easy.’’64 Instead of recapitulating the transformation of form into embodied matter with which the Entretien begins, then, the participants in the second dialogue find themselves free to take up the problem of subjectivity, which is formulated at first in the context of d’Alembert’s murmured, halting questions regarding the unity of the individual consciousness. Mlle. de l’Espinasse, in communicating to the doctor the notes that she has taken, tells Bordeu that d’Alembert has begun by asking himself, ‘‘For I am certainly one, and could not doubt it. . . . But how does this unity come about?’’65 In presenting these reflections through the mediating voice of Mlle. de l’Espinasse, who ostensibly understands nothing of what has been said to her, the author Diderot links d’Alembert’s meditation on the nature of subjectivity to the problem of interpretative expertise on the part of a receptive audience. As in the E´loge, Diderot thus passes from a discussion in the Entretien of the material animation of character(s)—with their power to induce a response on the part of the attentive reader—to an analysis of reading strategies (as at the origin of specific epistemological positions) in Le Reˆve proper. The second dialogue becomes a protracted negotiation among different modes of reading—ranging from Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s initial lack of comprehension to Bordeu’s capacity to understand ‘‘marvelously’’ everything that is being to communicated to him of d’Alembert’s ramblings.66 The narrative that began with Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s abstracted exchange has been given a body—several bodies, in fact, all of which approach the evidence with which they are presented from different angles and with different techniques. Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s uncomprehending concern is juxtaposed with Bordeu’s judicious calm, while the body of d’Alembert acts out the argument that it is unconsciously vocalizing in a series of physical gestures.

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Diderot, as author of the dialogues, seems at first to suggest that the reader of his work might in effect ‘‘learn how to read’’ by following the example of Mlle. de l’Espinasse, who makes the journey from total ignorance to the embrace of a materialist relativism through the course of the second section. Not coincidentally, Mlle. de l’Espinasse is also depicted as a highly animated character both in her verbal reactions to the other participants in the dialogue and in her particular attachment to d’Alembert as an embodied person. In narrating what she has overheard, she articulates d’Alembert’s mumbled monologues with the physical responses that she observes in him and thereby produces an account in which the sleeping d’Alembert becomes the source both of abstract philosophic argument and of a kind of material evidence of this argument’s effects. Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s accentuated animation implies that she might function as a privileged point of identification for potential readers of the dialogue, but, as an excessively ‘‘identified’’ reader herself, she also stages the limits of this approach as a mechanism for the production of philosophical knowledge of any kind. With her changing perspectives and her heightened reactivity, Mlle. de l’Espinasse in fact models, in the second dialogue of Le Reˆve, a series of distinct methods for reading, each one of which ends in failure (in that it is revealed to be ineffective in advancing ‘‘understanding’’ per se). The fate of Mlle. de l’Espinasse as a reactive character makes visible the means by which Diderot deploys the embodied literary persona in order to give meaning to a materialist universe that is predicated upon the destruction of transcendent forms. Matter, in the Entretien as in Le Reˆve, only takes definitive shape in the form of a persona with whom it is at least in theory possible to identify. Nonetheless, while the animation of matter as character operates to display the perfect motility and fungibility of substance (which may travel from one form to the other), this animation, as Mlle. de l’Espinasse unwittingly makes clear, does not in itself provide the basis for the generation of philosophical knowledge. In fact, it may impede the generation of such knowledge by making it impossible for readers to respond rationally, rather than affectively, to the representations that are presented to them. As it turns out, it is only the philosopher-critic who can make use of the ‘‘fact’’ of animation in such a way as to tame its potentially disruptive effects. Mlle. de l’Espinasse thus serves, in her various attempts at ‘‘explaining’’ d’Alembert’s remarks to herself and to Bordeu, as a negative model against which the access of philosopher-critics to a privileged way of reading—and to an even more privileged form of resemblance to their fellows— can be made obvious.

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Mlle. de l’Espinasse begins by simply reading out loud to Bordeu her transcription of d’Alembert’s seemingly hallucinatory ramblings, an act that she prefaces by affirming the utter incomprehensibility of that which she is about to say. Bordeu, to her surprise, not only professes to follow the logic of d’Alembert’s commentary but wagers that he will be able to complete d’Alembert’s sentences for him. ‘‘If you succeed,’’ she proclaims, ‘‘I promise you . . . I promise you to take you for the craziest person in the world.’’67 After Bordeu goes on to win the impromptu bet, she exclaims, ‘‘I’m at a loss; it was exactly that, and almost word for word. I can thus now assure all the world that there is absolutely no difference between a doctor who is awake and a philosopher who is dreaming.’’68 While Mlle. de l’Espinasse is portrayed here as having great personal and physical sympathy for d’Alembert, she lacks the interpretive sympathy that Bordeu demonstrates so handily when asked to ‘‘flesh out’’ the remarks of his friend the dreamer. At first she is able only to parrot the words of d’Alembert without finding in these words any form of self-recognition (whereas Bordeu immediately identifies the ‘‘sense’’ of what he hears). As Mlle. de l’Espinasse asks Bordeu, after she has read out the first sentences of her transcription: Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.— . . . Doctor, do you understand anything of this? Bordeu.—Marvelously well. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—How lucky you are. ‘‘My difficulties perhaps derive from a false notion.’’ Bordeu.—Is it you who is speaking? Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—No, it’s the dreamer.69

While Bordeu is able to engage so intensely with d’Alembert’s remarks that he can complete the latter’s sentences without difficulty, Mlle. de l’Espinasse initially situates herself entirely outside of the discourse that she is articulating. She is perfectly insensitive to its meaning on an analytical level, and takes it for a kind of madness. Although she remains unconsciously receptive to d’Alembert’s state—her body reacts to his gestures without her being able to comprehend the ‘‘sense’’ of her own responses—she is unable to recognize her conscious self in d’Alembert’s words. Bordeu, on the other hand, is able to acquire as a result of Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s ‘‘innocent’’ depiction of the events in which she has participated, a full understanding of their significance. He sees, as Mlle. de l’Espinasse does not, that she has witnessed a scene of masturbation on the part of the dreaming d’Alembert. While she is profoundly affected by what she observes—‘‘I watched him carefully and I was moved without knowing why, my heart was beating, and it was not

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from fear’’—she cannot make meaning of her own sensitivity.70 Instead, she unwittingly narrates the limits of her own interpretive capacity. As the dialogue unfolds, however, Mlle. de l’Espinasse is able to place herself more precisely within the conversation in which at first she functions as no more than a ventriloquist. The initial signs of a shift in her attitude come after she manages to ‘‘translate’’ d’Alembert’s comments on the nature of material change—a passage containing an explicit reference to Epicurus—into an explanatory figure used by Fontenelle in the Entretiens sur la pluralite´ des mondes. This moment occurs after she asks the doctor to define one of d’Alembert’s terms for her. ‘‘Doctor,’’ she asks, ‘‘what is the sophistry of the ephemeral?’’ Bordeu responds: ‘‘It is that of a short-lived being that believes in the immutability of things.’’ The dialogue goes on: Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—The rose of Fontenelle that said that in the memory of roses a gardener had never been known to die? Bordeu.—Precisely; that is superficial and profound. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Why don’t your philosophers express themselves with the grace of this one [Fontenelle]? We would understand them. Bordeu.—Frankly, I don’t know if this frivolous tone is proper for serious subjects.71

At this moment, Mlle. de l’Espinasse makes the transition from a lack of cognitive understanding that is almost total—although her aptitude for learning is evident in the very fact that she has managed to transcribe d’Alembert’s remarks in the first place—to a form of interpretive perception that might be called ‘‘figural.’’ She clearly values Fontenelle’s formulation of d’Alembert’s knotty philosophical usage for the style in which the former is transmitted, and, as soon becomes clear, for the middle ground that it occupies between a mode of expression that is perfectly transparent (and thus produces no discernible effect) and one that is so obscure as to be impenetrable. Fontenelle manages with his turn of phrase to rewrite what appears to be d’Alembert’s ‘‘unreason’’ [de´raison] as an affecting figure of speech, and thus to open up the possibility of understanding to Mlle. de l’Espinasse, who responds, in the first instance, to its beauty.72 The turn to Fontenelle subsequently serves to introduce the section of the dialogue that critics have distinguished for the elegance with which it deploys a figure chosen by Mlle. de l’Espinasse to illustrate the nature of cognition and the unity of the self—that of the spider. As Mlle. de l’Espinasse asserts, ‘‘Look, doctor, I will explain myself with a comparison; comparisons represent the reason of women and of poets. Imagine a spider . . .’’ [ellipsis Diderot’s].73

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But while Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s attachment to figure is indeed typical of both women and poets (including Lucretius), the positing of figure as an explanatory device (that appears to awaken the critical intelligence of the feminine interlocutor in the dialogue) does not represent a solution to the problem of understanding in general. In fact, it is through a demonstration of the limits of such an attachment that a more fully philosophical style of reading will eventually be able to emerge within the context of an exchange between the doctor and his eager interlocutor. As the conversation continues, Mlle. de l’Espinasse and Bordeu explore in further detail the relationship of bodily sensibility to the problem of the unified self. Their analyses of the nature of perception—and of the distinction to be made between cognitive and bodily responsiveness to sensations—lead them inevitably to a discussion of the effects that aesthetic modes of representation may have on individuals. This section of the conversation produces a strong acknowledgment of self-recognition on the part of Mlle. de l’Espinasse, who is moved by Bordeu’s depiction of excessive sensibility to produce a sudden avowal of resemblance. Bordeu remarks: What is a sensitive [sensible] being? A being abandoned to the discretion of the diaphragm. A touching word strikes his ear? a singular event strikes his eye? and suddenly all at once the interior tumult rises up, all the threads of the network are set in motion, the shudder that passes through, the horror that seizes him, the tears that flow, the sighs that suffocate, the voice that falters, the origin of the network knows not what becomes of it; no more sang-froid, no more reason, no more judgment, no more instinct, no more control. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—I recognize myself. Bordeu.—The great man, if he has been unhappy enough to receive such a natural disposition, will occupy himself relentlessly with weakening it, with dominating it, in order to render himself master of his movements and to conserve for the origin of the network all of its empire. Thus he will be self-possessed in the middle of great dangers, he will judge coldly but reasonably. Nothing that can serve his perspective, meet his goals, will escape him; he will be difficult to surprise; he will be forty-five years old, a great king, great minister, great politician, great artist, above all a great actor, great philosopher, great poet, great musician, great doctor; he will reign over himself and over all that surrounds him. He will no longer fear death. . . . The sensitive beings and those who are mad are on the stage, he is in the audience; it is he who is the wise man.

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182 Voluptuous Philosophy Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—God preserve me from the company of this wise man! Bordeu.—It is because you have not worked to resemble him that you will alternate between violent pain and violent pleasure, that you will pass your life laughing or crying, and that you will never be more than a child. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—I am resigned to it.74

At the beginning of this passage Bordeu portrays sensitive beings as in thrall to their own reactivity, a reactivity that may be engendered by both events and words (without apparent distinction). Furthermore, the tumultuous responsiveness that characterizes an excessive sensibility is the defining attribute of ‘‘mediocre beings’’ for Bordeu, since it impedes the exercise of rational evaluation by the ‘‘origin of the network’’ or mind.75 The overly sensitive individual is tyrannized by a kind of interior motility—Bordeu will go on to refer to Mlle. de l’Espinasse as having a ‘‘mobile soul’’—that makes all forms of judiciousness impossible.76 Self-regulation can only be brought about by a determined act of self-mastery on the part of the thinking being. Otherwise, the sensitivity of the ‘‘threads’’ of the network effaces the capacity of the mind to judge events. Yet it is in Bordeu’s characterization of the ‘‘mediocre’’ person—rather than in the portrait that he paints of the ‘‘cold’’ great man—that Mlle. de l’Espinasse, importantly, recognizes a portrait of herself. Her unhesitating exclamation of identification, in reaction to Bordeu’s derogatory rendering of the condition of extreme sensibility, suggests that both her physical responsiveness to d’Alembert’s agitation and her ‘‘tropic’’ responsiveness to graceful imagery may be categorized as potential symptoms of her natural excessiveness. Not only has she reacted to d’Alembert on a purely emotive level, without betraying (at least initially) even a rudimentary understanding of why she is responding as she does to his gestures, but her fondness for figure (‘‘all the reason of women and poets’’) is of the same ‘‘mediocre’’ (or indeed, ‘‘frivolous’’) order as her unthinking attachment to the spectacle of her friend’s living body. She willingly asserts herself as lacking in the capacity for judgment that detachment—either from modes of representation (such as the book or the theater) or from other human beings—provides. Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s sensibility seems to be at the origin of both her frivolity—her eager approval of style over substance in the case of Fontenelle—and of her extreme investment in events and images, an investment that she is unable to manage effectively in order to govern her judgment. Both of these forms of involvement are shown in Bordeu’s response to be unreliable techniques for apprehending phenom-

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ena: Mlle. de l’Espinasse has been a bad reader. As Bordeu points out further on, ‘‘How many times have you not blushed, in reading, at the transports that you have felt in the theater, and vice versa?’’ ‘‘This has happened to me,’’ she admits to him.77 As Bordeu makes clear in his response to Mlle. de l’Espinasse, an authentically philosophical understanding is based in the ability to distance oneself from the excessive animation that typifies sensitivity. Philosophers thus stand in need of sensitive beings in order to provide the bodily evidence for their knowledge, but they must remain disinterested in these beings as a sign of their expertise.78 For her part, Mlle. de l’Espinasse embraces, in this exchange, the character of the Epicurean infant, who is shaped by her sensations but is unable on her own to attain the state of ‘‘observation without perception’’ that distinguishes philosophers from other human beings. Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s position is accordingly the opposite of that of the ideal philosopher as Diderot describes him in ‘‘e´picure´isme.’’ She might be said to experience the condition of ‘‘perception without observation’’ as she is buffeted by the array of her own sensations from one affective extreme to the other. Mlle. de l’Espinasse can thus function as an object of evaluation, but cannot, without an intense dedication to the kind of self-cultivation that Bordeu recommends, form authoritative judgments regarding the causes of her own reactivity. As Bordeu comments, ‘‘It is not the sensitive being such as yourself, it is the cold and calm being like me who has the right to say: This is true, this is good, this is beautiful. . . . Fortify the origin of the network, this is the best thing that we can undertake.’’79 Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s judgment is undone by the disruptive dynamism of her own corporeal ‘‘network’’; she is at the mercy of her motility—a condition for which she nonetheless shows little interest in actively seeking a cure. The doctor’s diagnostic powers, then, do not extend to the conversion of Mlle. de l’Espinasse to a more reasonable position, even though she professes to be frightened by his insistence that an extreme sensitivity can eventually, by allowing ‘‘involuntary’’ sensations to overwhelm the cognitive capacity of the individual, lead to suicide. Despite her seeming willingness to accept what Bordeu terms her infantile, precritical status, Mlle. de l’Espinasse does display, before the end of the dialogue, a changed method of approach to texts and to objects. She learns and progresses, in other words, although she never quite occupies the space that Bordeu has defined as that of the consummate expert: the ‘‘great king, great minister, great politician, great artist, great actor, great philosopher, great poet, great musician, great doctor.’’ In her last effort to explain the

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way in which perception operates—and to make sense of the difference between a ‘‘true’’ account of things and a poetic rendering of fact—she urges Bordeu ‘‘not to complicate the question with [the] figural style’’ that he has been deploying.80 She seems here to have moved from being a reader easily charmed by Fontenelle’s gracefulness of expression to claiming a position as an interpreter of phenomena who seeks the very clarity of explanation that she had derided earlier on. She continues, in an effort to sum up what is at stake in their discussion: ‘‘I would say that each person has his own eyes, and that each person sees and narrates differently. I would say that each idea inspires others, and, according to his way of thinking or his character, he seizes upon ideas that represent the fact in a rigorous manner, or introduces associated ideas into the mix.’’81 This turn to ‘‘rigor’’ represents a departure from Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s attachment to ‘‘grace’’ at the beginning of the dialogues. In her last contribution to the dialogue as a philosophical exchange, she maps the material diversity of response that fascinates Bordeu onto the diversity of judgment and ‘‘character’’ [caracte`re] typical of the world. The figural mode of representation that she responds to at the opening of the dialogue resolves itself here into a taxonomy of character that fits neatly with Diderot’s sense of what a novel (for instance) should do. Instead of being limned in a variety of pleasant or charming ‘‘comparisons,’’ human subjectivity is presented as defined in relationship to an idea of natural difference that is the product of a materially based theory of perception. Some readers are more adept than others at their work, just as certain of us are more inclined toward ‘‘rigor’’ (and relative truthfulness) and others toward flights of fancy. The accurate representation of human life would then have to take into account the perceptual diversity that is characteristic of humankind in general. The study of matter henceforth can become a study of character, and, by association, characters. The reader of Le Reˆve should by now be able to make use of this framework in order to understand the dialogue itself as performing—across the animated body of its own characters—the variety of judgment that Mlle. de l’Espinasse sees as the foundation of experience in general. This conclusion brings with it the demise of abstraction as a device for the representation of material ‘‘truth.’’ ‘‘And abstractions?’’ d’Alembert asks Bordeu shortly after Mlle. de l’Espinasse has concluded. ‘‘There are none,’’ his friend responds. ‘‘There is only habitual reticence, ellipses that make propositions more general and language more rapid and commodious.’’82 But, despite the turn of all three interlocutors toward the ‘‘fact’’ of material difference as a positive value, Mlle. de l’Espinasse does not emerge from this

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discussion as the possessor of an analytic prestige that has hitherto eluded her. For, even in the absence of abstraction, it remains possible for Bordeu to privilege resemblance as the source of an epistemological authority, and it is in this domain that she continues to fall short. She has reached the limits of her interpretive capacity in correlating the diversity generated in substance with the diversity visible in persons, but this discovery does not, as it turns out, serve to make of any body a philosophical body. Bordeu comments, ‘‘A quality that several actions have in common engendered the words vice and virtue; a quality common to several beings engendered the words ugliness and beauty.’’83 It is through material resemblance that moral and aesthetic judgment comes into being, as well as, it turns out, understanding itself. As he prepares to leave, Bordeu affirms, ‘‘For the sole reason that no man resembles another perfectly, we never understand one another precisely, we are never precisely understood; there are degrees of everything; our discourse is always more or less than our sensations.’’84 While a ‘‘perfect’’ comprehension of one individual by another may not be imaginable in terms of the epistemological framework that has been put into place, a relative understanding remains at least thinkable. But this relative understanding is in turn based upon a resemblance that is itself a ‘‘common quality of being.’’ When abstraction per se is acknowledged to be an illusion, the only possible source of philosophical knowledge is in a recognition of material resemblance among individuals. It is precisely this kind of resemblance that Mlle. de l’Espinasse is unable to share with her two interlocutors. She remains lacking in the magical interpretive sympathy that appears in the beginning of the dialogue to link d’Alembert to Bordeu (who finds himself the ideal interpreter of what looks to Mlle. de l’Espinasse like incoherence). Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s implicit rejection of the poetic perceptiveness with which she begins does not imply her accession to the form of resemblance that makes a waking doctor the mouthpiece of a dreaming philosopher. As Diderot has shown in the E´loge, a recognition of the diversity of persons is not enough to constitute the right to authoritative judgment. This recognition must be coupled with the affirmation of a common judiciousness, an affirmation that poses material difference as a privileged object of understanding, but not as its origin. The ‘‘pulverization’’ of abstraction through materialist critique ends with the rediscovery of (relative) sameness in material difference itself, but this rediscovery implies the expert deployment of detachment when necessary. Philosophy may take shape in the manipulation of ‘‘character’’ as evidence—the giving of ‘‘a body, a form, a reality, an idea’’ to discourse—but is not completed by this manipulation

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alone.85 The dialogue accordingly succeeds in staging a series of events upon its characters in order to reanimate them as the examples that give its narrative a material body, in the same way that d’Alembert narrates (in his very dreams) his corporeal reactivity as evidence: ‘‘Nothing should be lost that can be useful. Mademoiselle, if you could collect it [my semen], put it into a flask and send it in the morning to Needham.’’86 The dialogic form allows philosophers to envision themselves as animated specimens, even in their least ‘‘collected’’ moments. The body is always susceptible to becoming the object of philosophical examination, once the promising student has been adequately instructed in methods of reading. But Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s insistence upon her own receptivity prevents her from locating herself as an object of study from which judgment may eventually derive, even as it appears at first glance to constitute her value as a pupil.87 The poetic responsiveness of Mlle. de l’Espinasse dissolves into the proliferation of material difference, and from this proliferation philosophical judgment must subsequently be, as Bordeu points out, gradually and laboriously excavated. Figure may be obliged in this narrative to take on a natural body (for it to be made sense of ), but the body is no longer, in this context, figural by nature. Literary representation retains, in Diderot’s schema as it is mapped out in Le Reˆve, a privileged position as the ground across which the joyous and disruptive motility of matter may be tracked. The hedonically responsive reader like Mlle. de l’Espinasse, who enters into rather than masters the material that she is reading, becomes proof of the riotous potential contained in substance—but does not, in and or herself, provide the means of apprehending this quality. Easily moved to laughter and to tears, she reaches her limits as a reader by the end of the second section. As the figure of the (Epicurean) infant, she allows philosophers to understand the boundaries of their discursive domain, even as she confirms the explanatory power of their language. But Diderot’s insistence on the animation of real sensing bodies—at the expense of what he sees as the static frigidity of a superficial formalism—ultimately reasserts the supplemental function of figural representation in the face of dynamic matter in motion. Diderot makes of Le Reˆve a powerful statement of the rupture that characterizes the recuperation of Lucretius by eighteenth-century materialists. His materialism, even in its most Lucretian moments, remains formally impotent as a means of intervening in the constitution of substance itself. He presents—in the place of the Lucretian investment in self-transformation as a product of the engagement with matter as both thing and figure—the dialogue as a search for resemblance (however relative and unstable such a resemblance might be).

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In this sense, he resists, even in Le Reˆve, the capacity that remains latent in fiction (rather than in philosophy per se) to transfigure what appears to be the natural order of things. The destructive power that the insistently figural aspect of the Lucretian legacy comes to represent, for Diderot, becomes more fully visible in the description he gives of La Mettrie in the Essau sur les re`gnes de Claude et de Ne´ron. Diderot writes of La Mettrie, dead almost thirty years before the publication of the essay: La M*** is an author without judgment, who spoke of the doctrine of Seneca without understanding it. . . . Whose gross sophistry, dangerous in the gaiety with which he seasons it, hides a writer who has not the first ideas of the true foundations of morality, of that immense tree of which the top touches the sky and the roots penetrate to the depths of hell, where everything is linked, where modesty, decency, manners, the smallest virtues, if there is such a thing, are connected as the leaf is to the branch that one dishonors in stripping; whose chaotic reasoning and extravagance can be witnessed without disgust only by those feckless readers who confuse jokes with evidence, and to whom one has proven everything when one has made them laugh; whose principles pushed to their final contradictions would overthrow law, excuse parents from the education of their children, shut up in the Petites-Maisons the courageous man who struggles unthinkingly against his disordered desires, would grant immortality to the evil man who abandons himself without remorse to such desires; and whose head is so troubled and whose ideas are so detached from one another, that on the same page a sensible assertion abuts a crazy one, and a crazy assertion abuts a sensible one, so that it is as easy to defend him as it is to attack him. La M***, dissolute, impudent, clown, toady, was made for the life of the court and the favor of great men. He is dead as he should have died, victim of his intemperance and madness; he killed himself in ignorance of that which he professed.88

In this passage, La Mettrie embraces in his philosophical writing all of the qualities that have tended during this period to characterize ‘‘corrupt’’ novels as they are portrayed by their critics. He replaces evidence with laughter, order with chaos, virtue with delirium. He is at once superficial and capable of inducing massive social upheaval through the dissemination of his writings; he is both a sycophant to kings and a nefarious influence on the powerless. Logic, reason, and sense are neglected, in his work, in favor of a flagrant disregard for coherence that makes any form of critique difficult to conceive of. He not only fails to follow the rules of argument, he throws into question

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their very applicability. His prose is both impossible to understand and all too clear in the effects that it seeks to engender in those who read it. His thought is atomized, dispersed, and aims to render society in its likeness—to undo the ties that connect human beings to one another even as he undoes the conceptual links that make cognition possible. Diderot in this passage effectively purges from his history of materialism the legacy of Lucretianism as a voluptuously figural doctrine. La Mettrie becomes the Epicurean infant run amok, who somehow has grown to think himself a theoretician. As Diderot goes on to point out, ‘‘I only grant the title of philosopher to he who exerts himself constantly in pursuit of truth and in the practice of virtue.’’89 This quest is founded upon the capacity not just to understand the limits of what philosophy is capable of but to respect the organic coherence of the natural object—a coherence that must be reflected, in one way or another, in the prose that aims to make sense of it. The Lucretian interest in and emphasis on the production of pleasure in representation becomes, in Diderot’s critique, the privileging of the laugh before the argument, the outstripping of logic by the frivolity of the author and his audience. La Mettrie is endowed with the ability, so often seen as typical of the dissolute novelist, to produce corrupt behaviors simply by offering up his pandering (if disjointed) descriptions of them. (In this sense his philosophy takes on what will become one of the common characteristics of pornography.) The power of his sophistry derives from the joyousness with which he communicates it; all of his disruptive potential is contained, not within the arguments themselves, but within the means by which he ‘‘seasons’’ them—privileging taste over substance. If his ignorance is the death of him, it might also be, Diderot threatens, the death of philosophical practice as a means of enlightenment—both of the self and of the other. It is the ‘‘enemies of philosophy’’ itself who seek to include La Mettrie among those who legitimately desire the advancement of truth and, Diderot suggests, the improvement of the human condition. For Diderot as for so many others, at the outer limit of the materialist tradition stands once again the image of philosophers thrown into physiological disorder by their encounters with writing. The genealogy runs from ancient to modern: Lucretius driven insane by love and poison, La Mettrie ‘‘victim of his [own] intemperance,’’ and ultimately, as I will discuss in the final chapter of this account, the marquis de Sade, ‘‘the madman of Charenton.’’

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6.

‘‘A Fallacious and Always Perilous Metaphysic’’: The Sadean Critique of Sentiment and the NeoLucretian Novel

While for Lucretius the materialist subject is crafted from the ‘‘pleasant honey’’ of poetic speech, for the marquis de Sade it is the novel that serves as both scene and guiding mechanism of this construction. Recent scholarship has emphasized the permeation of the Sadean literary corpus by the characteristic tropes of what Caroline Warman, in her study of the intellectual origins of Sade’s philosophical pornography, terms ‘‘sensationist materialism.’’1 While the staged encounter of two putatively divergent discursive forms—the fictive and the didactic—has long been acknowledged as central to Sade’s technique, critics including Warman and Philippe Mengue have shown how the Sadean engagement with the ‘‘great tributary of naturalist thought,’’ as Mengue puts it, can be understood to determine not only the content but the narrative form of Sade’s oeuvre.2 Like Lucretius and La Mettrie, Sade privileges figure in the transmission of a materialist inheritance. Unlike those who come before him, he places the novel at the center of this labor of dissemination. Literature, for Sade, becomes a space of conversion where materialist subjects can be made and remade, ad infinitum.

1. Sade’s novel materialism Affirming the significance for Sade of a materialist philosophical tradition has recently helped scholars to bolster claims for the author’s seriousness—as well as to demonstrate the connections linking proto-pornographic modes of representation to scientific ones. Yet the renewed attention paid to Sade as a materialist has also involved a shift of emphasis away from the historically overdetermined function of the Sadean novel as a uniquely privileged site for the stimulation of corporeal responsiveness in readers. Studies of the productive intermingling of natural philosophy and literature in Sade’s work have instead tended to rely upon an understanding of these two fields as essentially disjunctive endeavors.3 Within the framework of this assumption, for Sade’s writing to preserve its claims to truth—and its analytical merit as 189

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philosophy—the figural and fictional qualities inherent in the novel as a literary genre must eventually be subsumed by what Warman, for one, calls the ‘‘textual reality and immediacy’’ of the points that Sade is trying to make. Critical interest in Sade as a materialist has contributed in this way to the instrumentalization of the specifically literary nature of Sade’s writing. Moreover, this instrumentalization tends to be legitimized as itself typical of a philosophical project that appears in its own right to refashion narrative, constantly and spectacularly, into a vehicle for more abstract principles. In its guise as a veridical expression of materialism, the Sadean prose style thus can appear designed to impress an ‘‘extratextual’’ or ‘‘literal’’ reality upon its reader, while the author himself is presented as reconfiguring the novel form into the embodiment of a philosophical truth that transcends or explodes the limits normally imposed by fiction on itself. The basic aim of Sade’s materialist arguments—‘‘to ring-fence language to such an extent that it carries its own guards’’4 —and his systematic deployment of literary language to achieve this aim seem from this perspective to entail a thorough, self-conscious violation of the norms upheld in and by narrative convention. Literature ultimately becomess indentured to philosophy and its more noble purposes. Yet the marginalization of specifically literary questions (around genre, for instance) in the evaluation of Sade’s contributions to eighteenth-century intellectual history partially obscures the ways in which Sadean materialism involves a detailed and critical response to the Enlightenment philosophical corpus upon which it draws. This response, I will argue, is rooted in the recentering of literature—and of the novel in particular—at the heart of the materialist project. In fact, Sade’s prioritization of the novel as an exemplary materialist genre can be shown to derive from his rereading of Enlightenment natural philosophy as anything but a static set of truth-claims to which a reader may or may not choose to ‘‘adhere.’’5 The recontextualization of Sade’s philosophical literature within the larger discursive context of eighteenth-century materialist thought has sometimes made the classically Lucretian deployment of figure that informs this specific use of the novel difficult to see, even if the repositioning of Sade’s work has productively served to counter a long-standing scholarly tendency to highlight the exceptional singularity of the Sadean oeuvre as, for better or worse, defined according to a dialectics of transgression. On the one hand, the careful framing of the Sadean project as indebted to the technical vocabulary of mid- to late-Enlightenment materialist science usefully confirms the philosophical legitimacy of Sade’s intervention in the articulation of modern secularism

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on a broad scale. But it simultaneously limits the scope of this intervention to the preconstituted discursive domain of an ‘‘enlightened’’ natural philosophy that Sade can be seen as, to a large extent, simply inheriting. Moreover, the reinsertion of Sade’s novels into the arena of Enlightenment materialist philosophy can function generally to draw attention away from the forcefulness of Sade’s critical engagement with traditions of materialist thought as themselves constantly involved in theorizations of the person that are always historically and politically inflected—not only changing over time but actively engaged with the generation and regulation of specific social contexts at precise moments. In accordance with Epicurean theories of multiple causation, Sade vigorously questions notions of timeless truthfulness as expressed in the writings of his recent literary and naturalist forebears even as he draws upon their rhetorical energies to underscore the power of a materialist rhetoric to induce novel sensations.6 Throughout his corpus, Sade emphasizes the investment of philosophies of matter not just in shaping persons, but in forming and transforming social practices. In their interest in the effects of theory on material bodies, Sade’s characters reiterate the argument that transformations in science can only be fully understood in the context of the latter’s connections to changes in sociability. More crucially, however, the choice by Sade of the novel as a space for working through the implications of this claim is in no sense an innocent one. The novel, as Sade describes the form, is the genre most directly and explicitly concerned with the translation of ‘‘matter’’ into persons and practices, even (or perhaps especially) when the transfigurative powers of literary representation remain unrecognized by readers. It is thus only from within the novel that an authoritative materialist critique of the shifting forms of human sociability may be launched. In this sense, Sadean materialism can be said to make use of, for instance, forms of d’Holbachian or d’Argensian materialism, but in reintroducing the ‘‘aesthetic’’ problem of genre to a science of matter and the body Sade in effect fully reconfigures the preoccupations of his source texts. The central concern for Sadean libertine philosophers becomes not the relative veracity or ‘‘reality’’ of their claims about the nature of matter, but the way in which the novel has served and will continue to serve as a domain for the reproduction of truths that are at once material and social. Sade, in his involvement with a naturalist philosophical tradition extending back at least to Lucretius, is committed to a vision of the novel as the arena for the production of a materialist subject—of thought, action, and

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language—because he understands this genre in particular as setting the stage for the construction of identity in general. This means, first, that the novel represents for Sade the site where a materialist critique of the metaphysical structures that work to generate a shared or communal sense of personhood (such as love and religious belief ) may have the greatest effect, since the novel, considered as a form, has tended not just to reflect but to sustain and propagate these structures. In Sade’s view, it has often done this covertly and illegitimately by presenting as a ‘‘natural’’ remedy for human anxieties a sentimental metaphysics that serves only to exacerbate these anxieties. From the novel’s inception, as a result, it has operated not only as a formal or generic category but to make possible the manipulation of human vulnerability in the service of political and religious domination. The materialist attack on the terrors and injustice nourished within metaphysics (whether theological or political) must therefore take place in the novel itself since it is here, according to Sade, that the groundwork is laid for the transmission of these terrors and this injustice at both the individual and the social level. In Sade’s refashioning of the history of the genre, the ethic of sentimentality, which disseminates itself through techniques of identification that we would now call literary, is not just a response to the existential terror that enables systems of domination to be sustained, but an efficient method for cultivating this terror as the basis for what it means to be human. Any authoritative attempt to stipulate the possibility of a materially—as opposed to metaphysically—organized subject can thus initially only come from within the literary work, where, in Sade’s terms, the model for human subjectivity was first effectively consolidated. This suggests that, from Sade’s point of view, any individual understanding of what constitutes a person is wholly a product of literary representations of persons. Sade is in fact willing to take this argument to such extremes that transformations in subjectivity generally come to depend for him upon a revision, not a transcendence or a refusal, of literary practice in particular. In this context, there is no extratextual space toward which the materialist novel may effectively gesture, prior to the deconstruction of the metaphysical subject from within. Sade, here, remains a disciple of Lucretius in that he recognizes the material power of figural language to build selves from the ground up, but he situates the Lucretian attack on a metaphysical politics of fear squarely in what would now be called the realm of literary history and aesthetics. The novel becomes the site of an intensive labor of critical appraisal, for Sade, because in his eyes it has come to function (albeit clandestinely) as the setting for a crucial labor of creation wherein sympathetic feeling—and sentimental identification—

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appear as natural and inevitable, at the origin of individuals and of their connections to one another. The materialist subject of the Sadean novel, then, requires both a program of critique and a program of reconstruction in order to come into being. First, the figure of the sentimental individual that has long been naturalized in literary and political practice must be exposed as an ideologically motivated construct, designed to promote and to reify inequalities among persons. Then, drawing from Lucretius, Sade writes the materialist philosophical tradition as itself a novelistic endeavor, so that the novel as a genre may take on what was in De rerum natura the function of poetry in its privileged status as physiological and tropic effect. It is in the context of these two revisions of literary and philosophical history that Sade undertakes the task of shoring up—and putting into action—a newly materialist conception of subjectivity. The materialist subjects envisaged by Sade, not unlike the Epicurean reader to whom Lucretius addresses himself, look toward pleasure as a potential source of freedom from constraint, but only when this pleasure is arbitrarily, rather than systematically, generated. Furthermore, they seek this pleasure not in interactions with real persons, but in the dissolution of ‘‘character’’ into a series of formal components that are textually produced. While this interpretation of the Sadean mise en sce`ne of the figure of the reader may seem to recapitulate the flight into an analytically meaningless ‘‘textualism’’ that for critics like Mengue mars so many readings of Sade’s work, in the context of the prolonged and intensive Sadean attack on the metaphysics of sentimentality this turn toward delight in literary forms always represents a political, as well as a philosophical and an aesthetic, move. Throughout the encounter with the Sadean novel, the massive machinery of the text is put into motion in the hopes of producing a seemingly random moment of slippage—or e´garement—where the reader responds, unpredictably but freely, to the shifting fantasmatic possibilities raised by the collapse of all affective response. The novel here becomes architectonic. It is a structure built around preventing and destroying sentimental identifications with persons—this is the labor that the Sadean libertines violently undertake in systematically breaking down their victims—and then translating a generic desire for sympathetic resemblance into a contingent responsiveness to literary language as a system through which the reader might aimlessly and delightedly wander. Sade thus enjoins libertine readers and potential disciples not to mimic or to enact in any way the characters he represents in his works—this would

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be to capitulate to the temptations posed by sentimentality as an illegitimate mode of identification—but to dissolve, to slip momentarily away from themselves, within the act of reading.7 The horrific violence that continues to shock contemporary readers of Sade is put to use, as in Lucretius’s example of the Epicurean philosopher who calmly watches a shipwreck from the tranquillity of the shore, to engender in the reader a sensation of freedom that a sentimentalized culture renders unreachable in any other form.8 It is in this context that the famous declaration made by Juliette to her lover Madame de Donis takes on its full meaning. Juliette proclaims, ‘‘If from immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure than that to be had from eating a good dinner, slender though this pleasure may appear in the light of its price, you ought to treat yourself to it without an instant’s hesitation.’’9 However brutal this affirmation appears, it is not meant as an incitement. To read it in this way would be to sentimentalize Juliette’s claim, thereby treating it as an authentic expression of personhood that is ultimately meant to resonate within a similarly constituted reader. Juliette’s libertine calculus is instead designated, within the narrative, as a critical response to the governing metaphysical system that, in insisting upon its own universality and inevitability, reliably constitutes a form of tyranny over individual natures: ‘‘Completely demolish this fictitious link,’’ exclaims Juliette to Madame de Donis a few sentences later, ‘‘remove yourself completely from its influence, convince yourself that between your self and some other self no connection whatever exists.’’10 In this chapter, I begin by examining Sade’s presentation of the history of the novel in his essay Ide´e sur les romans. As I will show, Sade is deeply influenced by Lucretius in his understanding of the work that the novel has historically been meant to do on its readers. He presents the genre as born in and addressing itself quite directly to the twin ‘‘metaphysical’’ anxieties— expressed as a superstitious fear of the divine and as a sentimental desire for the beloved—that for Lucretius as well as for Sade are symptomatic of the unenlightened, pre-materialist apprehension typically engendered in humans by a sensation of helplessness in the face of death. In the second part of the chapter, I use a reading of two moments from the Histoire de Juliette—the critique of sentimental love delivered by the libertine comte de Belmor in his address to the Socie´te´ des amis du crime and the advice proffered by Juliette to her friend Madame de Donis in response to the latter’s desire for ‘‘a theory . . . principles . . . rules’’ to guide her in the practice of libertinage—to show how the production of a materialist subject is predicated upon the gradual eradication of a sentimentalization of character within the frame-

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work of the novel as a genre.11 In the final section of this analysis, I examine some of the limitations that accrue to Sade’s revisionist project in the context of a literary (and, Sade would claim, political) culture that remains deeply sentimental, rather than materialist, in its approach to texts—and to Sade’s writings in particular. As Sade does not tire of pointing out, a society in which techniques of identification had been successfully abjured would be a society in which the ‘‘enlightened’’ political subject would cease to exist entirely. Yet, in Histoire de Juliette, Sade seems to remain deeply (and rightly) pessimistic regarding the possibility of such a transformation taking place. His rendering of the Enlightenment thus becomes a portrayal of an age that paradoxically styles itself as empiricist even as it witnesses the consolidation of a profound anti-materialism on an intellectual and a social level. Read through the lens of this pessimism, Sade’s attempt to remake the novel in a thoroughly Lucretian mode serves as both a reproach to those who fail to conjugate materialist theory with literary practice and as a retreat into nostalgia for less profoundly or consistently sentimental forms and epochs. His literary Epicureanism, situated at the juncture of the figural and the concrete, seems nonetheless destined to function in the eyes of the sentimental reader—whom figure may affect, but inevitably fails to ‘‘move’’ in the absence of the enticements of character—either as an inducement to violence or as a facile and dangerous aestheticization of that which so often seems meant to render us most touchingly ‘‘human’’ in the first place— namely, our sympathies.

2. Sade’s Ide´e sur les romans and the literary origins of the Lucretian subject The extent of Lucretius’s influence on Sade is visible not only in the latter’s philosophic materialism, but in his literary criticism. Sade’s theory of the novel, as he develops it in Ide´e sur les romans, intertwines an Epicurean suspicion of desire (whether theologically or sentimentally expressed) as a mechanism of oppression with a Lucretian fascination for figural representation as a productively materialist device.12 In the Ide´e, Sade’s attempt at a genealogical narrative of the development of the novel is rooted in an analysis of human subjectivity as structured by two fundamental drives: ‘‘Man is prey to two weaknesses,’’ Sade writes, ‘‘which derive from his existence and characterize it. Wheresoever on earth he dwells, man feels the need to pray, and to love: and herein lies the basis for all novels. . . .’’13 In singling out religious faith and sentimental longing as similarly constituted and interre-

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lated ‘‘weaknesses,’’ Sade adheres to a taxonomy that finds a particularly incisive expression with Lucretius. At the end of the fourth book of De rerum natura, Lucretius presents the pain caused by romantic love as similar in quality to the metaphysical anxiety that he reads as both stemming from and giving rise to a superstitious belief in the power of the gods to regulate human affairs. Following Epicurean doctrine, Lucretius (like Sade) depicts this mode of belief not only as a form of ignorance but, fundamentally, as an expression of the terror instilled in humans by the misguided recognition of their own powerlessness and mortality—their inherent puniness in the midst of an enigmatic, and seemingly unknowable, universe. As he goes on to explain in book 5 of De rerum, ‘‘even now there is implanted in mortals a shuddering dread, which raises new shrines of the gods over all the world.’’14 These gods, whose bodies take on ‘‘bulk’’ and materiality in dreams, are thought by humans to have ‘‘far excelled in happiness, because the fear of death never harassed any of them.’’15 On the one hand, they are imagined as immortal because they appear, in their oneiric guise as embodied forms, to be supremely powerful and therefore potentially immutable. Thus, in Lucretius’s words, early men and women ‘‘gave [the gods] everlasting life because their images came in constant stream and the form remained unchanged.’’16 On the other, the ineffable force that the gods seem to possess derives from humankind’s discovery of the vulnerability and mutability of material bodies in general, and of human bodies in particular. ‘‘For indeed when we look up at the heavenly quarters of the great world, and the ether above set with twinkling stars . . . ,’’ Lucretius writes, ‘‘then into our hearts weighed down with other ills this misgiving too begins to raise up its wakened head, that there may be perchance some immeasurable power of the gods over us, which whirls on the bright stars in their diverse motions.’’17 This disquieting sense of human weakness is born in the sort of unreflective movement of fear and doubt that De rerum natura is intended to remedy. As Lucretius suggests, we can heal the anxiety induced in us by the unknown through a fully philosophical acknowledgment of the concomitance of our malleability—otherwise understood as our mortality—and our delight. In fact, it is the inherently tranquil ‘‘majesty’’ of the gods that signals their utter separateness from the motility and fragility of human concerns. As Lucretius points out in book three, ‘‘Nay, indeed, to link the mortal with the everlasting, and to think that they can feel together and act one upon the other, is but foolishness. For what can be pictured more at variance, more estranged in its connexion and inharmonious, than what is mortal linked in union with the immortal and everlasting . . . ?’’18

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In a suggestive juxtaposition that resonates throughout Sade’s work (and through the French libertine tradition more generally), Lucretius foreshadows his attack, in book five of his poem, on the pain-inducing, fantasmatic transfiguration of divine immutability into a source of ‘‘endless’’ power over humans with what would become his famous critique of the hopeless desire for possession expressed in romantic love.19 Toward the end of book four, Lucretius writes: Just as when in a dream a thirsty man seeks to drink and no liquid is granted him, which could allay the fire in his limbs, but he seeks after images of water, and struggles in vain, and is still thirsty, though he drinks amid the torrent stream, even so in love Venus mocks the lovers with images, nor can they sate their body, though they gaze on the beloved body with all their eyes, nor can they with their hands tear off ought from the tender limbs, as they wander aimless over all the body. Even at last when the lovers embrace and taste the flower of their years, when the body has a foretaste of its joy and passion is on the point of sowing the woman’s furrows, eagerly they clasp and mingle the moisture of their mouths, and pressing lip on lip breathe deeply; yet all for nought, since they cannot tear off ought thence, nor enter in and pass away, merging the whole body in the other’s body; for at times they seem to strive and struggle to do it; so eagerly are they locked in the fetters of love, while their limbs are loosed and slackened by the force of their delight.20

The joys of erotic desire, here, are commingled with the torment that proceeds from the inevitable realization that the beloved can never be wholly incorporated into the body of the lover. Rather, even the most intimate of unions will be haunted by the insubstantiality of the ‘‘images’’ that are the origin and object of desire.21 Love, not unlike superstition, becomes an illusion born of the desire for constancy—the tortured dream of immutability—that harasses those who have not yet discovered a materialist cure for the distress caused by the urge to absorb and be absorbed by another body. As Lucretius confirms, ‘‘For if the object of your love is absent, yet images of her are at hand, her loved name is present to your ears. But it is best to flee those images, and scare away from you what feeds your love, and to turn your mind some other way.’’22 Both the beloved object and the gods become perceptible to us not so much through an interaction with their ‘‘real’’ substance—although the desired body may be touched and manipulated in a way that the divine body may not—as through encounters with their images. Love, in this sense, closely resembles a dream. Consequently,

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the effort to plumb the depths of the beloved object is as vain as the attempt to decipher the whims of the gods. Neither desire can be satisfied, since both originate in the need to know and possess that which is fundamentally separate from the desiring subject. In the case of the besotted paramour, ‘‘the sore gains strength and festers by feeding . . . , unless you dissipate the wounds by new blows, and heal them while still fresh, wandering after some wanton, or else can turn the movements of the mind elsewhere.’’23 The self-conscious practice of promiscuity functions as a remedy for the urge to incorporate the beloved into the self—a craving that inevitably results in the painful surrender of the lover to the tyranny of an illusion. Similarly, the materialist critique of religious belief serves to forestall capitulation to the terrible fantasy of divine caprice. Lucretius submits his attack on sentimental and religious superstition in the substance of a poem, a genre meant to solicit multifarious pleasures in the reader, and does so in order to demonstrate the necessity of eradicating an ethic of constancy in its function as a means of propagating (divine and human) power over others. This ethic—projected outward as a means of explanation—generates the fantasy of a humanlike god, capricious in his interests but immortal in his form. Projected inward as a mechanism of satisfaction, it engenders a need for sexual possession as the guarantee of the power of the lover to absorb the other into the self. In the context of this critique, Lucretian poetry becomes a salve for the wounds inflicted upon us by theology and love. Sade, for his part, takes up the novel as the genre most appropriate to the Lucretian task, but he does so in a manner that situates this genre both as necessary ‘‘remedy’’ to the anxieties surrounding the hopeless desire for constancy and as a point of origin for these anxieties. Historically, according to Sade, the genre has tended to work not only as an expression of the (superstitious) need for constancy but as the mechanism through which this desire is, as if by magic or even divine intervention, brought into being in the first place. Sade begins his essay with a definition—‘‘We give the name ‘novel’ to any work of imagination fashioned from the most uncommon adventures which men experience in the course of their lives’’—and a brief etymology of the word ‘‘roman.’’24 But the first section of the Ide´e is essentially devoted to the question of the genre’s genealogy—or ‘‘filiation.’’ As Sade explains, popular opinion locates the origin of the novel in Greece and its subsequent development with the Moors, from whom it was passed into Spain and finally to the French troubadours. Yet this narrative of the novel’s movement,

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as if self-propelled, among cultures and nations is not, for Sade, an entirely convincing one. He writes: Although I respect this theory of the novel’s line of descent, and although there are even parts of it I subscribe to, I none the less can in no wise adopt it literally. Is it not, in fact, difficult to accept without reservation in an era when travel was so infrequent and communication so sporadic? There are customs, habits, and tastes which cannot be transmitted; inherent in all men, they are a part of man’s make-up at birth. Wherever man exists, inevitable traces of these customs, habits, and tastes can be discovered.25

The putatively universal ‘‘taste’’ for which the novel seems to provide the written evidence, in this framework, is not culturally specific, but an intrinsic part of what it means to be human. The origins of the novel form, in this sense, are to be found in collective human experience generally. This does not mean, however, that the novel exists in a space outside of the vicissitudes that typify sociability in its cultural specificity. In fact, the genre turns out to be ‘‘natural’’ to humankind in the same way that culture itself might be said to be a natural element of our existence. The novel, as an expression of a mode of being that is inherently human, functions as both a ‘‘biological’’ and a social fact—an innate idea of sorts, but one generated collectively, rather than singularly. With his references to ‘‘inherent tastes’’ and ‘‘inevitable traces,’’ Sade rhetorically links the enduring attachment to novels with what in another context might appear as the inevitability of religious faith. As it happens, the birth of the novel turns out to be, for Sade, inextricably bound to the coming into being of religion as an epistemological mechanism—a privileged means of making sense of the world in its relationship to human experience. He continues: Let there be no doubt about it: it was in the countries which first recognized gods that the novel originated; and, to be more specific, in Egypt, the cradle of all divine worship. No sooner did man begin to suspect the existence of immortal beings than he endowed them with both actions and words. Thereafter we find metamorphoses, fables, parables, and novels: in a word, we find works of fiction as soon as fiction seized hold of the minds of men.26

In this passage, novels become the site at which superstitious belief is materialized; they become the ‘‘evidence’’ of divine embodiment that perpetuates the fiction of faith. But the urge to concretize the fables of religious doctrine in the framework of the novel is only the effect generated by a cause that is,

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in itself, much more powerful than the individual cult that is its expression. The ‘‘spirit of fiction’’ of which the novel is the emblem also entails the materialization of the fictional in the very minds and persons of men. Novels play a triple role, according to this schema, in organizing behavior. First, they are symptomatic of an anxious and artificial relationship to worldly phenomena, of a ‘‘suspicion,’’ as Sade puts it, that all is not as it seems. (Accordingly, the human tendency to have faith in fictions may be manipulated by the powerful and the unscrupulous as a way of consolidating their authority.) Second, they generate certain traits—thereby leaving real traces of their presence—in populations: fictions may ‘‘seduce’’ and ‘‘frighten’’ those who are exposed to them. Finally, and most crucially, they constitute in and of themselves a means for perceiving actions, events, and persons; as a genre, they form subjects in ‘‘seizing hold’’ of minds (and, in the Sadean case, bodies). Thus, while Sade is interested in the ways in which readers (or believers) may be beguiled through the adroit use of language to persuade and to daunt, the very fact that the novel can function in this fashion at all is due to the success with which the spirit of fiction has already fully shaped those to whom its works are addressed. Without subjects who are innately prone to incorporate their beliefs as fiction—both in the animation of godly figures who act upon the world as if they were women and men and in the materialization of desires and fears in written form—the novel would have no social or political purchase. As Sade sees it, however, fiction brings a new mode of subjectivity into being even as it serves as the primary locus for the expression of the two metaphysical anxieties particular to this subjectivity: namely, the fear of god and the fear of the loss of the beloved (both, following Lucretius, transpositions of a deeper fear of change and mortality generally). It is in its generative capacity that the novel as narrative category should be understood as potentially universalizable: ‘‘There were, therefore, novels written in every language and in every country of the world, the events and styles of which were modeled both after the customs of the country and opinions commonly held therein.’’27 Sade maps out, in the Ide´e, a social history in which the novel is at once template (for the construction of subjectivity around a fantastical belief ), symptom (of the anxiety surrounding this belief ), and mechanism (for the propagation of the political structures to which belief gives rise). While the novel originally participates in the manifestation to humans of that which is sacred (itself necessarily a fiction, in Sade’s reading), the fear of which this manifestation is one expression makes itself known with equal force in the sphere of the secular. Sade,

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like Lucretius, yokes faith to love as interrelated urges to immortalize an object that is, in essence, mutable. The novel according to Sade (in the form of the spirit of fiction) has always served to render livable—to incarnate—a specific mode of perception. Even in its function as a tool of priestly hypocrites and those who are blinded by love, then, this genre retains its connection, however tenuous, to the project of materialist philosophy, since both the novelist and the natural philosopher seek in a sense to concretize their discursive positions in the responses of social bodies. Yet the early novel, with its chimerical glamour, panders to the very anxieties it has brought into being. It propagates fear by reiteratively fetishizing an ethic of constancy (either in the case of the divinity, to whom we seek recourse from the ravages of history, or in the case of the beloved, whose fidelity the novel is meant to enshrine). Sade thus remains very close to Lucretius in his reading of love and faith as similarly pernicious, and similarly fantasmatic. As he explains: Man has written novels in order to portray beings whom he implored; he has written novels to sing the praises of those whom he loves. The former, dictated by terror or hope, must have been somber, full of exaggeration, untruths, and fictions. . . . The latter are full of niceties and sentiments. . . . But as man prayed, and as he loved, wheresoever he dwelled on the face of the earth, there were novels, that is, works of fiction, which at times depicted the fanciful objects of his worship, and at times those more concrete objects of his love.28

Faith, nourished by the fear of death as well as by a futile desire for immortality (or eternal coherence), is generated in even as it generates fiction. Likewise, the need to memorialize the beloved object—to ensure at least the image of constancy through the permanence of an inscription—extends the reach of fiction into the sphere of the secular. Where love is a mode of belief, belief can become a form of love. For pre-Sadean man, the superstitious fear of death that marks ‘‘his worship’’ is paralleled by the superstitious fear of infidelity that characterizes ‘‘his love.’’ Sade’s novels return again and again to the ‘‘fictions’’ of religious faith and sentimental attachment as underpinning nefarious and oppressive political systems that never fail to leave their adherents mortified and riddled with anxiety. Yet Sade shows, in the Ide´e, how the novel itself has not only played an important role in sustaining these systems, but has in effect called them into existence to begin with. The instantiation of the fictional spirit in real bodies has tended to produce subjects who willingly relinquish the pleasures

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of mutability in exchange for an inevitably broken promise of perpetual sameness. Moreover, because the desire for constancy necessarily engenders a fear of change, it also functions as a mechanism of control, intimately linking the fortunes of the beloved object (whether God or fellow human being) to that of the self. If the early creators of persuasive fictions have in common with materialists an understanding of the power of figure to transform bodies, the former have tended, unlike the latter, to make use of this power to obfuscate its origins as well as its effects. In this way they maintain a dubious authority over the very substance of human experience, in both a formally political and a ‘‘personal’’ sense. The task of novel-writing, as Sade sets it for himself, should thus be to produce fictions that intervene directly in the illegitimate cultivation of fantasmatic resemblances— between men and gods, for instance, or between lovers and the objects of their desire—as a solution to the problem of mortality. The radical reinvention of the novel can become, in this framework, the remaking of subjectivity in its most material dimensions. Sade, in his libertine fiction, sets out to do nothing less than to redirect what he reads as the (re)generative potential of the novel vis-a`-vis perceptions. In his hands, the genre will no longer be destined to revolve around anxious gestures of memorialization founded in an ideologically overdetermined fear of the mutability of the human subject and the malleability of desired objects. Instead, the novel may be reconstructed to function as the mise en sce`ne—and the mise en œuvre—of a newly materialist epistemological position that locates pleasure not in sameness but in the movement of tropes through bodies. For Sade, the first step in this reconfiguration of the novel as the scene of a revolution in subjectivity is to deface and disrupt the mechanism by which ‘‘sameness’’ has historically been propagated: namely, the fostering of sentimental identification(s) among persons. The novelist, as Sade describes him, should aim to upset these networks of fictional resemblances even as he propagates feelings of interest in his readers. On the one hand, his primary goal is ostensibly therapeutic, rather than descriptive. On the other, as Sade shows, it is in the precise rendering of the multifariousness of nature that the reader may initially be led, gently, into the practice of inconstancy so characteristic of the Sadean libertine as well as of the Lucretian philosopher. ‘‘Remember,’’ Sade enjoins the prospective novelist, ‘‘that I am walking close beside [your heroes] in every region to which you take them.’’29 As this declaration suggests, ideal readers of the Sadean novel should interact with characters in general as invitations to a kind of infinitely refracted doubleness—evidence of their own motility—rather than as dramatic proof of

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the authenticity of their inherent sympathies. Good writerly technique, in this context, depends upon the continuous deferral of even the most convincingly ‘‘natural’’ movements toward identification. In accordance with this project, Sade reminds us, at the very end of the Ide´e, that: I have no wish to make vice seem attractive. Unlike Cre´billon and Dorat, I have not set myself the dangerous goal of enticing women to love characters who deceive them; on the contrary, I want them to loathe these characters. ’Tis the only way whereby one can avoid being duped by them. And, in order to succeed in that purpose, I painted that hero who treads the path of vice with features so frightful that they will most assuredly not inspire either pity or love. In so doing, I dare say, I am become more moral than those who believe they have license to embellish them. The pernicious works by these authors are like those fruits from America beneath whose highly polished skins there lurk the seeds of death. This betrayal of Nature, the motive of which ’tis not incumbent upon us to reveal, is not done for man. Never, I say it again, never shall I portray crime other than clothed in the colors of hell. I wish people to see crime laid bare, I want them to fear it and detest it, and I know no other way to achieve this end than to paint it in all its horror.30

In this bit of instructional advice, which makes specific reference to the feminine readers of his work, Sade is being both disingenuous and deadly serious. Of course, Sade’s description of himself as a good moralist—with only the best interests of feminine virtue (and chastity!) at heart—is hardly consistent with his profound commitment to the development of an ideological critique aimed precisely at dismantling the stability and internal coherence of the deeply sentimentalized categories of virtue and vice that he manipulates here. But Sade’s assertion that ‘‘I have no wish to make vice seem attractive’’ is in no sense at odds with this very critique. As he points out, what Sadean fiction does not do—in fact, what it is still often portrayed as quite stunningly successful in not doing—is to develop and maintain the possibility of readerly identification with characters in order to inscribe a moral lesson permanently in the minds, and on the bodies, of these readers—in effect, to ‘‘seize hold’’ of the reader’s person with prose. It is this refusal to operate possessively—to coopt the imagination through what may seem traditionally literary mechanisms of ‘‘enticement’’—that, paradoxically enough, can make the Sadean novel so difficult to read, since, as Sade recognizes, the sentimental cultivation of similarities between character and reader underpins not just the ‘‘conventional’’ technique of the novelist but

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a political and religious culture itself organized around the propagation of sympathetic identities in its subjects. As he insists in the passage cited above, Sade works to forestall identification with his morally (and sometimes physically) repulsive libertine characters wherever possible.31 If readers are to learn from these characters in any sense—to be meaningfully swayed by their philosophies—the latter must be established from the outset as absolutely and formally unlovable, impenetrable to sympathetic affect. Otherwise, when confronted with the possibility of feeling sentimental longing for a fictive person, typical readers would inevitably fall back into the domain of myth, anxiety, and delusion from which the libertine text should aim to pull them. The ideal readerly response to the sometimes violently distasteful acts of the Sadean libertines may thus be disgust, or it may indeed be pleasure—but it should not be, as Sade obsessively reiterates throughout his novels as well as in the Ide´e, affective surrender. Readers’ bodies may react to their encounters with Sade’s work, but they should not conclude from this reaction that the act of inscription carries with it the power to make an indelible mark on them in either a material or a psychological sense—to reveal or otherwise determine the precise moral quality of their sensations. Matter, Sade never tires of pointing out, is tougher, more transiently composed, and a more radically philosophical principle than that. In readers’ resistance to seduction lies their commitment to an ethic of inconstancy. The moment these readers give themselves up to the lure of identification, they become unable to think through the ways in which such forms of identification always function ideologically, as modes of possession, and constitute responses, not to the subjectivity of an ‘‘other’’ who is otherwise unknowable, but to the fear of death. In this sense, Sade’s ‘‘fictional’’ materialism must be read not simply as a translation of scientific principles, nor even as a particularly forceful attempt at persuasion of a reading public by means both literary and philosophical, but as a technique for the progressive (re)fashioning of the human subject into one of genuinely materialist pleasures, rather than one of infinitely regressing desires. In harnessing its power to the Lucretian materialist project, Sade turns the traditional function of the novel as he understands it—to purvey fiction as a mode of perception—against itself. The Sadean materialist novel, as it is reframed in the Ide´e, is at odds with the history of the genre as an arena wherein sentimental personhood—oriented around a series of metaphysical yearnings that may never, by their very nature, be fully satisfied—finds a point of origin as well as a kind of false solace for needs that are both artifi-

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cially generated and universally felt. This massive rearticulation of the genre’s purpose as a productively materialist rather than an oppressively ‘‘superstitious’’ narrative form involves more than just the rethinking of a literary mode as particularly well-suited to the expression of an empiricist philosophical bent.32 The remaking of the novel as a medium for the formation of materialist subjects hinges upon a recognition of the centrality of the form to the production of social relationships more generally. The figure of the sentimental reader, as Sade describes her, is not only fatally circumscribed in her approach to texts, but is also the characteristic subject of a sociopolitical system in which fictive resemblances are cultivated as a means of exerting power in predictable yet nefarious ways. Likewise, the lover’s anxious desire for his beloved, a ‘‘need’’ he experiences in response to a profound metaphysical uneasiness regarding his position within a mutable universe, becomes a means both for exerting control over the object of this desire—who is expected somehow to incarnate an impossible constancy— and a sign of ontological ‘‘weakness’’ that is vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful in the service of their own interests. As I will show, the task set by Sade for the novel, in the sociopolitical context that he diagnoses as typical of his period, is thus a dual one. First, in preparation for transformation as a materialist and a libertine, the reader must willingly undergo the eradication of any lingering sentimental impulses. This work of effacement depends for its success upon the satisfactory performance of a proleptic gesture of withdrawal from the cultural and political institutions that structure an ‘‘enlightened’’ society. It is only after both this retreat and the ideological transfigurations accompanying it have taken place that the process of forming the materialist subject may begin in earnest.

3. The critique of identification: making way for literary materialism in the Sadean novel Despite the fact that the novel has typically been used, as Sade explains in the Ide´e, to cultivate a sentimental response in its readers, the instrumental role played by the genre in regulating human experience more generally makes it central to Sade’s Lucretian project of refashioning perception into pleasure. This refashioning requires and depends upon, as in De rerum natura, an openness to the conversive powers of form for which neither argument nor narrative can adequately prepare the reader in advance. The Sadean libertine first emerges out of an attempt to destroy the reader’s ‘‘characteristic’’ desire for resemblance—one that historically has been stoked, for Sade, by

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narrative.33 Instead of the Sadean novel being built around the display of an individual’s progression toward knowledge—or into a kind of maturity, whether Kantian or something else—the form is thus designed to move readers fully and immediately out of sentimental habits of perception and into libertine, anti-superstitious ones. At the very beginning of the Histoire de Juliette, Juliette herself performs this willingness to be struck (rather than, strictly speaking, seduced34) by the attractions of an idealized libertine form, incarnated by Madame Delbe`ne, abbess of the convent where Juliette is cloistered. As Juliette writes of her first mentor, ‘‘She revealed herself to our eyes, lovely as Venus, that sea-risen goddess who exacted homage from the Greeks. It were impossible to be better formed, to have a skin more white, more sweet, to have more beauteous curves, forms better pronounced. . . . Stirred by such a quantity of wonders, . . . you may be very certain that I yielded.’’35 In a process that recalls the opening lines of Lucretius’s poem, Juliette’s erotic interest in this human Venus, whose bodily outline ‘‘stirs’’ her, signals the young woman’s absolute availability to philosophical conversion. ‘‘ ‘One moment, . . .’ ’’ exclaims Delbe`ne in response to her pupil’s enthusiasm for instruction, ‘‘ ‘we had best introduce a little method into our pleasures’ madness; they’re not relished unless organized.’ ’’36 In keeping with this methodological principle, Delbe`ne rapidly shows herself to be as concerned with instilling in her charges the delights of critique as she is preoccupied with multiplying opportunities for amorous encounters. She begins by advocating the act of physical and ideological withdrawal—through the cultivation of a series of specific critical attitudes—that is so crucial to the enduring success of the libertine transfiguration as Sade portrays it.37 ‘‘ ‘The fundamental tenet of my philosophy, Juliette . . . ,’ ’’ she remarks, ‘‘ ‘is scorn for public opinion. You simply have no idea, my dear one, to what point I am contemptuously indifferent to whatever may be said about me.’ ’’38 Juliette’s libertine lessons thus begin with a retreat from sociability as an expression of conviction that is not only public but, fundamentally, shared. The role of the Sadean novel as a specifically political intervention in the formation of desentimentalized, materialist subjects is not immediately articulated in the Histoire de Juliette, either by Juliette herself or by her various mentors. The specific social effects of the libertine relationship to narrative—a relationship that will be explicitly outlined in the middle part of the novel—are nonetheless implied from the beginning of the text in the formal positioning of the characters vis a` vis readers. For an eighteenth-century audience, steeped in a literary culture that both glorifies and denigrates the

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novel as a privileged locus for the propagation of affect, Sade’s profound refusal to indulge the reader’s desire for sympathetic attachment to literary character as a ‘‘natural’’ expression of subjectivity would have suggested, on its own, a dedication to the cultivation of very particular perceptual responses in his audience. The Sadean obsession with the novel as a site for the production of social relationships, for better or for worse, would thus already have been, as I have suggested in chapter 2, a familiar one to readers of the period.39 Yet the potentially generative function of the novel as a political instrument does not typically make itself visible, either in Sade’s literary theory or in his libertines’ formulations of their own practice, in the form of an ‘‘acting out’’ on the part of any given reader. In fact, this kind of reaction is for Sade a manifestation of a problematically mystificatory faith in the ability of discursive systems to compel those who ‘‘believe’’ in their power to engender resemblances among persons. (Juliette, for instance, is never the object of this kind of compulsion, strictly speaking, whereas her sister Justine always is, since the hapless Justine reads everything that she is told through the lens of sentimental identification, helplessly extrapolating sympathetic characters from the various banalities that her persecutors carelessly deploy before her.) With his often deeply disturbing preoccupation with characters who are nothing if not unsympathetic, Sade seeks to intervene in the production of readerly experience through the engagement with literary forms of personhood. He increasingly comes, in the Histoire de Juliette, to render embodied subjectivity itself as just one formal possibility among others—an outline that may never quite be filled in, just as his characters are depicted less as whole individuals and more as suggestive personifications (of vice, virtue, beauty, hatred, and lust, for instance). The presentation of the materialist subject as a function not of affective substance but of style occurs in the first pages of the novel, well before the critique of the politics of sentimentality is demonstrated to be a necessary stage in the ‘‘libertinization’’ of character and reader alike. The necessity of accepting such a critique is, however, obvious from the start. As in De rerum natura, readers’ resistance to conventional modes of ideological cooptation predetermines their receptivity to the materialist project. ‘‘ ‘Social ordinances in virtually every instance,’ ’’ affirms Madame Delbe`ne, ‘‘ ‘are promulgated by those who never deign to consult the members of society, they are restrictions we all of us cordially hate, they are common sense’s contradictions: absurd myths lacking any reality save in the eyes of fools who don’t mind submitting to them.’ ’’40 Sade addresses himself to those who indeed ‘‘mind’’ such submission, of which fiction functions as the original engine, and sets

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for himself the task of writing a novel that does not depend upon the reader’s willingness to give in to the absurdity of literary ‘‘myth.’’ The attack on sentimentality as a discourse of ‘‘restrictions’’ receives its fullest articulation midway through the novel, after the protagonist Juliette acquires a professional libertine credential of sorts through her initiation into the Sodality of the Friends of Crime. On the evening of his inauguration, the man who is to become the new president of this society, the comte de Belmor, delivers a recapitulation of the two-pronged Lucretian attack that also appears in the Ide´e. When Juliette first meets him at a dinner arranged by her friend Noirceuil, Belmor produces a discourse on the necessity of ‘‘ ‘destroy[ing] every last vestige of Catholicism’,’’ ‘‘ ‘concurrently proclaim[ing] atheistic systems’,’’ and, ultimately ‘‘ ‘entrust[ing] to philosophers the education of our youth.’ ’’41 As Belmor’s diatribe makes clear, the success of this project would be dependent upon the widespread dissemination of antireligious texts throughout society: ‘‘ ‘Print, publish, distribute, give out, everywhere display those writings which propagate incredulity, unbelief, and for fifty years prosecute and put to death every individual, without exception, who might think to reinflate the balloon’,’’ he declaims.42 But this violent refutation of religious belief as ‘‘weigh[ing] upon nations like a plague’’ is only the first stage in the uprooting of superstition more generally. In a further prolongation of the libertine critique of metaphysics, Belmor’s inaugural speech to the Sodality takes ‘‘love’’ (and sentimental love in particular) as its target. He begins: The word love is used to designate that deep-seated feeling which propels us, as it were despite ourselves, toward some foreign object or other; which provokes in us a keen desire to become united to it, to ever lessen the distance between it and ourselves . . . which delights us, ravishes us . . . renders us ecstatic when we achieve that union, and which casts us into despond, which tears us asunder, whenever the intrusion of external considerations constrain us to rupture this union. If only this extravagance never led to anything more serious than pleasure intensified by the ardor, the abandon, inherent in it, it would merely be ridiculous; but as it leads us into a certain metaphysic, which, confounding us with the loved object, transforming us into it, making its actions, its needs, its desires quite as vital and dear to us as our own— through this alone it becomes exceedingly dangerous, by detaching us from ourselves, and by causing us to neglect our interests in favor of the beloved’s; by identifying us, so to speak, with this object, it causes us to assume its woes, its griefs, its chagrins, and thus consequently adds to the sum of our own.43

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Belmor’s discourse elaborates upon and continues the work that the novel in which he appears has already been undertaking. He defines love as characterized by a metaphysical faith in resemblance, a faith that he defines as generated in the conviction that unification with the beloved object is not only desirable but sustainable. Were amorous desire to constitute nothing more than a momentary need to be possessed—to abandon the self to the other—it would be more risible than dangerous. Yet sentimental love as it is both practiced and understood, Belmor contends, brings into being a metaphysics—of which the privileged mechanism is identification—that is both wrong in its founding assumptions and ‘‘perilous’’ in the possibilities that it opens up.44 The cultivation of sentimental desire, for Belmor, depends upon the constant intensification of anxiety around the object of sentimental attachment. On the one hand, the lover is vulnerable to any harm that may be visited upon the beloved. On the other, the very need for identification—as a confirmation of an innate resemblance—constitutes the beloved as always merely a potential source of amatory delight, since this need can by definition never be satisfied. In this context, ‘‘ ‘the nearer I come to the day when happiness shall be mine, the greater shall be the store I set by it, and the worse shall become the fatal terror of losing it.’ ’’45 From here on out, Belmor’s speech quickly devolves into a harangue that is unstinting in its misogyny, with the latter firmly grounded in the Lucretian portrayal of seduction as an oppressive form of deception historically practiced by women on men. Despite Belmor’s insistence that both female and male libertines will find in his words strategies for self-protection, it is clear that he, like Lucretius, understands women as the privileged objects of an idolatry that has generally functioned to the specific detriment of their male lovers. It is women who, in Belmor’s words, have had the opportunity to ‘‘become gods’’ through the propagation of the imaginary bonds of sentiment.46 Belmor urges his audience to resist this insidious form of tyranny by relentlessly concretizing what appears to an intoxicated lover to be the divine immateriality of the idealized beloved, a critical effort that should in theory take place postcoitally to ensure a certain clarity of vision. ‘‘ ‘The romping over with,’ ’’ it becomes possible to consider the object of desire in a more dispassionate light.47 ‘‘ ‘Here’,’’ he proclaims, ‘‘ ‘in this moment of calm and weariness, here is the opportunity for a scientific survey; as Lucretius says, let’s have a glance into the backstage of life.’ ’’48 Belmor continues: Well, we shall find her, this celestial object we were enthralled by, entranced by, we shall find her endowed with the same desire, the same needs, the

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210 Voluptuous Philosophy same shape of body, the same appetites, afflicted by the same infirmities as all the other creatures of her sex; and cold-blooded examination dispelling the ridiculous enthusiasm that drove us toward this object, in no particular different from all the rest of its kind, we shall see that in having it no more we lack nothing that cannot be replaced.’49

Sexual difference, here, is invoked in its most abjectly material forms—in the illnesses and physical compulsions that all women appear to share with one another. (Later on, Belmor remarks in a similar vein on the particular horror of pregnancy as a form of monstrosity; ‘‘ ‘Gravid and stark naked’,’’ he confirms, ‘‘ ‘it is thus the entire sex ought to be shown to its admirers, since they have a liking for the grotesque and the horrible.’ ’’50) The idealization of women as a group constitutes an especially onerous form of credulity—‘‘gallantry was born from the womb of ignorant superstition’’51—and must be remedied by the contemplation of the object of sexual longing in her most naked and, presumably, most disgusting aspect. These evocations of distaste for the very flesh of the feminine body may at first seem insufficiently materialist—in the sense that they appear to replace the sentimentalized glorification of woman’s sublime virtue with what could be considered an equally sentimentalized denigration of the offensiveness of feminine physicality. Belmor’s denunciation of femininity may in this sense appear akin to those modern forms of misogyny that rely upon rigidified notions of difference in order to justify women’s exclusion from public—and hence political—life. Yet what is perhaps most remarkable, from a contemporary perspective, about these particular expressions of gynophobia, is that they do not in fact go on to function as a means to establish shared marks of sexual distinction—among them, what seems initially to be represented by Belmor as the collective abjection of women—as the basis for a reification of sociopolitical privilege along gendered lines. In other words, they do not link hatred for women as a sex to their status as the bearers of a ‘‘difference’’ that then becomes the ineradicable sign of their natural inferiority. Women’s bodies may be repugnant, but they hold no real clues in themselves to women’s collective nature as a sex. For, in Belmor’s system, the hatred that men feel for women is entirely and necessarily reciprocal.52 ‘‘ ‘What I have said of women, my brothers,’ ’’ he exclaims, ‘‘ ‘may also be applied to men. Our defects are just as serious as theirs, and they are as unluckily moored to us as we to them, the putting on of any shackle is a folly, every bond is an attempt against the physical liberty which is our due, and which we ought to enjoy here on earth.’ ’’53 Belmor’s representation of

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femininity as a purely ‘‘material’’ set of qualifications—including a capacity for eliciting specific, visceral forms of disgust—thus in no way devolves into the production of collective forms of identification around these very qualifications. In fact, the opposite is true. The ‘‘reduction’’ of sexual distinction to what may appear to be its most elementally material forms—a pregnant body, an ‘‘apron of matted hairs hanging untidy between those . . . thighs’’54 —renders physical femininity not as the origin of a shared identity but as the failure of the body to evoke any meaningful resemblance among individuals at all. Gender, at its most unforgivably material, becomes a formal question. It is a series of shapes, colors, and smells that banish the ‘‘enchantment’’ of identification as a response to a resemblance that has been revealed, by the offensive specificity of the body itself, to be utterly fantasmatic. A similar process takes place in the contemplation of masculine forms, which are in their own right just as likely as feminine ones to produce either disgust or its Sadean concomitant, pleasure. Gender, in the Sadean universe, emerges from the libertine attack on sentimentality as a stylistic rather than an identitarian problem, since the embodiment of the material attributes of sex—an ‘‘apron’’ of hairs or a flaccid penis, the curve of a waist or a ‘‘well-molded’’ breast—can no longer conjure up the specter of an enduring ontological sameness that makes sexual difference imaginable as a rational system for ordering power. When gender is reduced to its most material signifiers, it becomes, in the Sadean framework, part of a larger attempt to formalize the body more generally, so that the organs and qualities that once appeared to speak to us—to suggest spurious resemblances where there are none—now suggest nothing personal at all about those who exhibit them, but function simply as one variation amid a host of others. The figural attributes of the body—its curves and crevices—become in this context, like poetic speech itself, significant only insofar as they stand as both the source and reflection of another’s pleasure— namely, that of the (potentially libertine) reader. Sade, through Belmor, invites us to imagine physical being as an arrested moment of permutation, an instance of stasis in transformation that both induces and mirrors the reactions of ideal Sadean readers as they contemplate the beautiful or horrifying bodies arrayed before them. The materialization in graphic prose of the no longer sentimental subject, then, does not aim to ‘‘fix’’ this subject in place as an object of study. Instead, it opens up the pleasures of the reader to a hitherto undreamed malleability, since in Sade, the more successfully materialist individual libertines manage to render themselves, the more exquisitely fungible their own embodied, perceptual experiences are understood

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to become. This is what bestows upon the libertine protagonists of Histoire de Juliette their strange inviolability, even as they give themselves up to many of the same forms of violence that they visit upon their unlucky, nonlibertine partners. If the Sadean libertines seem to be constantly engaged in taking their victims to pieces—dismantling, dismembering, and dissecting them with an apathetic zeal—they do not exempt themselves from the dangers (and delights) of unrestrained sexual violence. Their surprising collective failure to die of such pleasures, however, is due to what are presented as the regenerative effects of their materialism, even as the inevitable sentimentality of their victims reads as a resistance of these victims’ very bodies to the transfigurations that the libertines seek out on their own behalf. Despite having been severely beaten and had boiling oil dripped onto her ass, Juliette can affirm following her ordeal that ‘‘by the tenth day I was so well mended that I looked to be, if anything, in better condition than before.’’55 The libertine body, whether feminine or masculine, is as tractable in its contours as in its pleasures. Belmor’s haranguing critique of sentimentality not only suggests the necessity of rethinking embodiment as a fixed sign of subjectivity, but couches this project in a rhetoric of transformation that is distinctly political. The sentimentalization of femininity, for Belmor, produces not only masculine anxiety but a particularly oppressive form of subjugation analogous to that spawned in and by religious belief: ‘‘ ‘The love of women is like unto that of God’ ’’ proclaims Belmor. ‘‘ ‘In either case, we feed upon illusions. In the former, we wish only to love the spiritual, making abstraction of the corporeal, in the second, we ascribe a body to a spirit; and in both, we tumble to our knees before fictions.’ ’’56 If sentimental love clearly contributes, in this analysis, to the solidification of particular social arrangements, the Sadean attack on sentimentality ought to make thinkable a new kind of political subject: one that finds in ‘‘obedience’’ to what Sade calls ‘‘the fundamental laws’’ of nature a substantial and sustained form of freedom.57 The Sadean critique of love as ideological enslavement thus takes its proper place alongside the condemnation of religion as severely impinging on the right of individuals to exercise their will in the pursuit of satisfaction. The removal of these modes of servitude, which have so far—according to Belmor— marked human history, should and does result in the creation of new sociopolitical possibilities. (The destruction of Catholicism, for instance, would ‘‘ ‘ensure France’s health and happiness forever,’ ’’ just as the destruction of love ensures the happiness of the individual.58) But the emergence of a newly materialist political subject depends, as Belmor implies in the passage

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quoted above, upon the coming into being of a new form of representation that can forestall and, eventually, eradicate the desire to ‘‘tumble to our knees’’ before the figures it invokes. The spheres of the fictional and the political, as Sade explicitly maintains in the Ide´e, jointly constitute one another. The task of the Sadean materialist is not to undo this link, but to put into practice, in the act of reading, a ‘‘novel’’ conception of the political person—one based not in vain attempts at self-possession through identification with a beloved object, but in the pursuit of a kind of material tractability that fiction, as it turns out, has the power to confer freely upon readers who have properly prepared themselves. Sade’s footnoted injunctions to ‘‘voluptuous’’ and libertine women to ‘‘profit herefrom, let them not be for nought, our efforts to enlighten you’’ make this point explicitly, and repetitively, at intervals throughout the first half of the novel.59 Belmor concludes his speech to the audience of assembled libertines with the affirmation that love is indeed ‘‘ ‘the absurdest of all follies, the most ridiculous, and doubtless the most dangerous,’ ’’ but his last word on the subject is addressed to Juliette some time after his inauguration.60 In this final remark—which closes the section of the novel on the Sodality—Belmor indicates that the thorough extirpation of sentimental impulses bestows upon the philosopher not the capacity (or even, precisely, the will) to shape the ‘‘real’’ world according to his desires, but the right to withdraw fully into the space of fiction, where his pleasures may henceforth be made completely manifest to him. ‘‘ ‘Oh, Juliette, how delicious are the pleasures of the imagination,’ ’’ he exclaims, ‘‘and how voluptuously one follows out the lines of its dazzling constructions! Ah, dear angel, how little do they realize what we are about, what we originate, what we create during these divine intervals when our fiery souls are plunged utterly into the impure depths of lubricity’.’’61 Belmor proceeds in this context to quote from La Mettrie’s La Volupte´ to make his point: ‘‘ ‘Happy,’ says La Mettrie, ‘happy they whose lively and wanton imagination keeps their senses ever whetted to the foretaste of pleasure!’ ’’62 This citation has engendered speculation over the extent to which the apparently gentle eroticism with which La Mettrie’s essay is imbued can be said to anticipate the destructive apathy of the Sadean libertine. Yet if Sade’s appropriation of La Mettrie is understood as informed by the two writers’ rereadings of Lucretius in particular, the reference to La Volupte´ serves primarily to situate Belmor’s intervention more precisely within the larger context of the classical (and, later, libertine) tradition of materialist reflection on the discovery of freedom in poetic representation.

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‘‘ ‘Truly Juliette,’ ’’ Belmor continues. ‘‘ ‘I sometimes think the reality possessed is not worth the images we chase thereof, and wonder whether the enjoyment of that which we have not, does not much exceed the enjoyment of that which is ours.’ ’’63 La Mettrie, of course, makes a similar point, with his suggestion that the physical presence of the beloved may sometimes fail to evoke the pleasures that a nostalgic fictionalization of this presence can more reliably induce. Reality, as both La Mettrie and Sade reiterate, is not made to be ‘‘possessed.’’ It is the written images of this reality that, in the absence of a faith in the desirability of such possession, may eventually come to shape human experience as infinitely subject to the delights inherent in tropic representation itself. The materialist subject of the Sadean novel is constructed out of the willingness of an imaginative reader to move freely and pleasurably through fiction, where the latter is understood as consistently evoking the possibility of ‘‘enjoyment of that which we have not.’’ The Sadean reader must, first and foremost, be disposed to resist the desire for domination by and selfdefinition in fictions (as part of the futile bid for constancy against which Lucretius, La Mettrie, and Sade all warn). The production of the Sadean materialist subject is thus contingent upon the undoing of other, more innately ‘‘possessive’’ understandings of the relationship of the reader to figural signifiers. This is an undoing that takes place both at once (in that the ideal reader is presumed to embody from the beginning of the novel a receptivity to specific forms of suasive speech) and over time (as we decipher along with Juliette the kinds of critique that allow her receptivity to develop into a new mode of perception). Such a training of readerly response—so that the reader might incarnate what appears to be the kind of free-floating pleasure that, without warning, inhabits the bodies of adherents to libertine philosophy in Sade’s novels—has at times been seen by critics as implying an attempt to evacuate the domain of the real into that of the imaginary.64 At others, it has been portrayed as the forceful imposition of a more authentically materialist reality upon the passive, and perhaps unwilling, figure of the reader as receptive ‘‘learner.’’ In the Lucretian context, though, we might see the move toward ‘‘imagination’’—and Sadean fiction is in a sense the thorough instantiation of the latter as a fully material faculty—as involving the reproduction of this reality in a mode that is both the product of fiction(s) and the creation of new forms of material responsiveness in real bodies. In a culture where power is distributed according to a sentimental logic of resemblance born in and with fictional representation, this novelistic labor of construction is an inherently political one. But it is also config-

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ured, by Sade, as taking place entirely within the sphere defined by the Sadean novel itself. Sade imagines a material freedom in wholly fictional terms. According to this perspective, if the novel has conventionally functioned as a powerful tool of self-consolidation, the refashioning of the genre as a mechanism of dissolution must entail the reformation of human subjectivity itself.

4. Constructing the new materialist subject As she becomes more familiar with the practical and theoretical attacks on the sentimental individual, Juliette also becomes more free to articulate the constructive ‘‘program’’ according to which materialist subjects are brought into being. This program is most concisely laid out in a passage from the fourth part of the novel, where Juliette elucidates to her latest conquest, the beautiful and rich comtesse de Donis, how to fulfill even those of her desires that may be ‘‘far in advance of your means.’’65 Juliette explains: Go a whole fortnight without lewd occupations, divert yourself, amuse yourself at other things; for the space of those two weeks rigorously bar every libertine thought from your mind. At the close of the final day retire alone to your bed, calmly and in silence; lying there, summon up all those images and ideas you banished during the fasting period just elapsed, and indolently, languidly, nonchalantly fall to performing that wanton little pollution by which nobody so cunningly arouses herself or others as do you. Next, unpent your fancy, let it freely dwell upon aberrations of different sorts and of ascending magnitude;66 linger over the details of each, pass them all one by one in review; assure yourself that you are absolute sovereign in a world groveling at your feet, that yours is the supreme and unchallengeable right to change, mutilate, destroy, annihilate any and all the living beings you like. . . . Leave every thing to your imagination, let it pursue its bent and content yourself to follow in its train, above all avoiding any precipitate gesture: let it be your head and not your temperament that commands your fingers. Without your noticing it, from among all the various scenes you visualize one will claim your attention more energetically than the others and will so forcefully rivet itself in your mind that you’ll be unable to dislodge it or supplant it by another. The idea, acquired by the means I am outlining, will dominate you, captivate you; delirium will invade your senses, and thinking yourself actually at work, you will discharge like a Messalina. Once this is accomplished, light your bedside lamp and write out a

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216 Voluptuous Philosophy full description of the abomination [e´garement] which has just inflamed you, omitting nothing that could serve to aggravate its details; and then go to sleep thinking about them. Reread your notes the next day and, as you recommence your operation, add everything your imagination, doubtless a bit weary by now of an idea that has already cost you fuck, may suggest that could heighten its power to exacerbate. Now turn to the definitive shaping of this idea into a scheme [Formez maintenant un corps de cette ide´e] and as you put the final touches on it, once again incorporate all fresh episodes, novelties, and ramifications that occur to you. After that, execute it, and you will find that this is the species of viciousness which suits you best and which you will carry out with greatest delight.67

Juliette divulges the ‘‘secret’’ of this method to the comtesse de Donis as part of a course of action for achieving ‘‘a flawless inward serenity,’’ freeing the conscience entirely from remorse, and undoing the ‘‘fictitious link’’ of human fraternity that prevents the infinite expansion of pleasure on the part of the individual.68 She begins by recommending retreat from social intercourse as a preparation for the freeing up of the imagination, a move that allows the libertine subject of her analysis access first to an experience of sovereignty, in which the world appears to ‘‘grovel’’ at her feet, and then to one of constraint, in which the previously unfettered mind is ‘‘captivated’’ by an idea. This moment of constraint is itself seized upon and transfigured in the act of writing out the scene, which then leads somewhat incidentally to the ‘‘execution’’ of the tableau in question as a verification of the pleasurable force of the idea. Throughout Juliette’s discourse, the object of the libertine reverie—the ‘‘idea’’ that is sought out—is described neither as a person nor, strictly speaking, as a narrative. Instead, Juliette depicts the solitary thinker here as overcome by an e´garement, a divagation or slip that invokes not the delights of self-consolidation, but their opposite—the pleasures of dissolution, of wandering away from the subject at hand. With the rhetoric of ‘‘captivation’’ and ‘‘domination’’ that she deploys, Juliette may initially seem to be suggesting precisely the kind of self-determination through (more or less anxious) gestures of fictionalization that, I am arguing, has been the focal point of Sadean critique from the outset of the novel. Yet the way in which she recommends undertaking this program involves the perfect inversion of sentimental logic as it has been explicated by the comte de Belmor. Not only does the materialist practice counseled by Juliette lead to pleasure, whereas sentimental love both originates in and derives from anxiety, but the materialist propaedeutic as it is outlined here

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aims at the transformation of fiction—in the guise of a captivating ‘‘slip’’— into a perception that fully saturates the senses, in defiance of sentimental attempts to make of perceptual reality what Sade understands as particularly oppressive forms of fictional belief. The sentimentalist bestows a series of imaginary resemblances upon real bodies, and in doing so falls prey to constraints that he cannot recognize; in casting his pleasure in the likeness of another, he limits its scope. The materialist, in Juliette’s program, bestows a real body upon an idea, and in this way multiplies indefinitely the sources of her delight. By redefining her perceptions around the arbitrary movement of her imagination across a series of aberrations or e´garements, she allows herself to be at once captivated by one of these images and pleasurably undone by them. This is the final lesson in her progression toward a moment of material freedom, a release ‘‘from every restraint.’’69 Through the constraint that is visited upon her by the idea of this ‘‘slip,’’ Juliette’s subject achieves a delirious instant of dissolution, in which the self is effectively lost in the intersection of the senses with the series of aberrational tableaux that has been conjured up. This idea is made manifest both through her experience of it as a form of delirium and, subsequently, through its transformation into a fiction of its own. It is given a wholly ‘‘material’’ body—‘‘formez maintenant un corps de cette ide´e,’’ Juliette commands—in the act of its being written. The execution of it, in this framework, is tangential to its transfiguration as text, for, as Belmor has suggested earlier, the commission of the crime in question is in its own way beside the point. This does not mean, however, that reality has been pushed aside, or evacuated from the scene of textual transmission. On the contrary, it has been reconstituted around a fictionalized form of difference, rather than grounded in what is from Sade’s perspective an equally fictionalized, but infinitely more oppressive, economy of absolute sameness. Libertine dreamers achieve, in the intensity of their relationship to the figured ‘‘slip,’’ a momentary escape from the instantiation of personhood in character that will continue to bedevil less determined mortals. This discussion of the Sadean novel as a labor of construction, in which a materialist subject gradually emerges as a function of fiction in its most abstract mode (as a series of ‘‘ideas’’ or ‘‘tableaux’’), may appear to elide the question that has fascinated so many of the critics who have taken up the Sadean oeuvre: If Sade can indeed be said to aim for a political effect in his novels, how is this effect to be translated in material terms? I have argued here that, for Sade, the materialization of his effects in reading bodies implies an intervention not only in the dynamics that structure perception, but in

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the social distribution of power according to a logic of resemblance. This assertion does not fully explain, however, how it is possible to imagine a political space that exists outside of such a logic. The very rejection of sympathetic identification, by Sade, in favor of what seems to be the private enjoyment of movement through tropic forms makes it exceedingly difficult to understand the Sadean novel as addressing itself in any way to the collective dimensions of human experience. Moreover, even if his novels seem to succeed in refashioning reading subjects as they are made in the act of perusing the Sadean text, it is not at all obvious how this refashioning is meant to become the kind of public action that would warrant the appellation ‘‘political’’ in the first place.70 These questions are all the more pressing in that critical responses to Sade, in his role as supreme transgressor of literary and ethical norms, have so often been themselves deeply informed by precisely the kind of sentimentalization that Sade cautions against. For instance, the twentieth-century mythologization of Sade by the surrealists and other members of the avant-garde, as it has been explored by Carolyn Dean in The Self and Its Pleasures, draws heavily on the same religiously inflected ideals of romantic love and self-sacrifice that are ridiculed by Belmor in his diatribe against sentimental devotion. As Dean explains, ‘‘In this romantic imagery, Sade’s ‘love’ for humanity led to self-annihilation, but it also, of course, as with all martyrs, led to immortality. Sade’s writing was the product of a selflessness, of a self-sacrifice, that revealed humanity to itself.’’71 In a similar vein, the inversion of this hagiographic impulse in the form of outrage against what Roger Shattuck has termed one of ‘‘the greatest immoralists capable of stimulating homicidal madness in warped minds’’ is also structured around, on the one hand, the compulsion toward fraternal identification with the Sadean victims, and, on the other, the fear of unchecked identificatory impulses on the part of less ‘‘humane’’—or human—readers. In Shattuck’s words, ‘‘The taboo effect— fascination and revulsion—of such a work can be extremely powerful on some people, particularly among the young, the unbalanced, the criminally inclined. Such minds cannot purge so searing a message.’’72 Both the rehabilitation and the demonization of Sade are dependent upon the thorough resistance of readers to Sade’s own attempts to think through the novelization of matter as something other than an invitation to ‘‘apply’’ figures to more substantial objects as a means of comprehending and possessing them. In the eyes of a sentimental reading public, the Sadean novel must inevitably function less as a specific intervention in political life and more as a failed bid to recreate a kind of perverse Epicurean Garden—striving for a

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perfect separation from the culture of which it is a product—in terms that have come to seem purely aesthetic. Sade’s affirmation, in the Ide´e, that fiction is a habit of perception—a means of shaping the world in both its material and its metaphysical dimensions—becomes, in this context, a retreat into art as an expression of desire. As Simone de Beauvoir writes, ‘‘In choosing eroticism, Sade has chosen the imaginary. . . . It is not in murder that the eroticism of Sade finds its satisfaction; it is in literature.’’73 Ironically, with the inauguration of theories of aesthetic response as an index of our natural sympathies, Sade tends to be salvaged either as an aestheticist avant la lettre or as an exponent of human freedom in its least literal (and most metaphysical) of forms74 —if he is not condemned as a vicious (and often incoherent) immoralist instead. In the last passages of the Histoire de Juliette, Sade seems to anticipate the likelihood of such responses. The final paragraph runs: The company left the following morning; greatest success crowned our heroes for the next ten years. At the end of that space, the death of Madame de Lorsange caused her to disappear from the world’s scene, just as it is customary that all brilliant things on earth finally fade away. Unique in her kind, that woman died without having left any record of the events which distinguished the latter part of her life, and so it is that no writer will be able to chronicle it for the public. Those who might care to attempt its reconstruction will do little else than offer us their dreams in the place of realities, and between the two the difference is immense in the eyes of persons of taste and particularly in the eyes of those who have found the reading of this work of some interest.75

Here the narrator confirms the total disappearance of Juliette from public life—even in narrative form. She vanishes without a trace, leaving no evidence of her passing behind her. In the last sentences of the novel Sade emphasizes once again the danger of making fantasies out of what is real—in opposition to the libertine program, which makes real what appears to be only fantasy. Any ‘‘reconstructions’’ of the portions of Juliette’s progress that remain unnarrated at the end of the work, he seems to be suggesting, will inevitably succumb to the sentimental economies of representation against which Juliette herself has struggled. Because of this struggle’s remarkable singularity, however, and because she aims with her fellow libertines to undermine the very possibility of a legitimately communal response to fiction, Juliette’s exploits are destined to find no other narrator. They are unrepresentable before a public, insofar as any public that imagines itself as such must continue to demand from writers the presentation of ‘‘dreams in the

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place of realities.’’ In the finality of Juliette’s demise, Sade suggests that his era, far from incarnating the libertine materialism of his heroes, will find their story unreadable in any but sentimental terms. On the other hand, the doubly circumscribed audience toward which Sade ultimately gestures, the ‘‘persons of taste’’ who have found the work to be of ‘‘interest,’’ does not constitute itself around invocations of resemblance. Instead, it is defined through its own distinctiveness—expressed in this paragraph as a heightened capacity for differentiation as a means of critique. While it can be argued that Sade invokes a mode of sociability in this last sentence, it is a heavily restricted one, distinguished ultimately by a poetic nostalgia—for the brilliant things that fade away—that fatefully structures the preoccupations, both textual and political, of those who practice it. In this way readers, whose ‘‘interest’’ disposes them to consider themselves interpellated by the work, are invited at the end of the novel to engage in the kind of ‘‘affective reminiscence’’ that, as Jean Salem has argued, characterizes the Epicurean disciple. As Salem explains, ‘‘the soul has the power to rehearse and . . . to memorialize affect: in ruminating on the evils that the body has forgotten . . . , in anticipating unhappiness and sorrows that have not yet occurred but that it fears already, it possesses the fearful power of multiplying pain. It can and should, therefore, give itself up to the work of representing and making present the pleasures that it and the body have already felt in action.’’76 In his account of Juliette’s death, Sade imagines precisely this kind of reminiscence—the endless reworking of experience through text—as the beginning of a new kind of political culture, even as he seems to understand that, to readers trained to recognize only themselves in what they read, his attempt at a Lucretian rewriting of the novel will come across either as an encouragement to violence or as an escape into a particularly sterile nostalgia. At the same time as he offers up Juliette’s narrative of her life as the site of a renewed Epicurean sociability—and as a profoundly transformative instrument—he suggests that the Lucretian novel carves out a space from which the successfully transfigured reader can never be released ‘‘back’’ into an anti-materialist society. In the context of the novel-as-Garden, Sade may indeed succeed in destroying sentimental identification as a political technique, but he also appears to recognize that, once this destruction has been affected, any public recognition of its collective necessity is effectively impossible. Sade attempts the resurrection of a Lucretian poetics—and the reconstitution of an Epicurean community through this resurrection—even as he narrates its demise as a shared politico-philosophical framework.

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If it is only in our engagement with the literary text that, according to Sade, we can reform our notion of the person, it is also the very literariness of this engagement—its slippery, arbitrary e´garements—that makes it, like the Epicurean atom itself, invisible. His heroines and heroes, for all of their power, must always find hiding places for themselves. Sade shows definitively how the Lucretian resistance to interiority may paradoxically come to be reconfigured as a quest for ever more secure forms of withdrawal. His libertines do not so much seek out an audience for their narratives as strive to become the witnesses of their own tales. They long to be taken hold of by the fictions that they have had presented to them and that they, in their turn, represent back to their comrades. In this way, Sade initiates a new stage in the transmission of the Lucretian ethos as invariably suffused with a nostalgia for a moment when the poetic had not yet been stripped of its purchase on the real, a moment that is irretrievable, since it is only through literature and in literary terms that it can be imagined. The Lucretian search for the materialist pleasure of the trope thus becomes, in Sade’s corpus, a fascination with looking back, not only to the physical delights that may have come before, but to texts that have represented these pleasures as something more than just fictions. Sade intimates that the return to Lucretius must make its way through the thorough articulation of pornography with philosophy, of figure with person, of body with the spirit of fiction, but he also announces that the nature of this project has devolved from a scandal into a reverie. Sade, for the era that he ushers in, replaces Lucretius in his status as transgressor, and in doing so, his oeuvre effaces that which it seeks to memorialize. Where once was the De rerum natura, the ‘‘boldest work that any mortal had ever dared compose,’’77 now there are only Justine and Juliette.

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Conclusions

I have attempted to show, in this book, how the rhetorical techniques regularly recognized as central to Enlightenment materialisms—techniques built upon the assumption of an extradiscursive reality that is brought by readers to texts—are in fact constructed in conversation with a classically informed Lucretian materialism that undertakes a very different kind of engagement with its audience. In De rerum natura, Lucretius does not appear to derive his position on matter from the idea that there must exist a fundamental and unbridgeable gap between material substance and the means used to represent this substance to readers. Instead, he sees an engagement with poetic language—and the material pleasures that this language produces in his readers’ bodies—as the starting point in the development of a materialist point of view. The Lucretian perspective—wherein figure and substance are intimately conjoined, rather than inherently distinct from one another— persists as a philosophical legacy in eighteenth-century France and shapes the period’s discussions of the role of literature in forming and moving readers. For neo-Lucretians of the age, the investment of philosophy in the human condition is initially revealed in each reader’s physiological responsiveness to poetic forms, not in looking beyond this responsiveness toward something more legitimately ‘‘real.’’ I have hoped, in analyzing materialist thought as a field of debate and struggle during this period, to highlight the problem of materialism’s poetic effects as one that is central to the making of matter as an object of modern philosophical, and, ultimately, scientific investigation. In doing this, I have sought to challenge readings of the Enlightenment as the moment when the desiring body invents a clear and potentially transparent language in which to express its most insistent demands—or when the world of substances triumphs momentarily over one of mystification. The emergence of a modern or ‘‘enlightened’’ materialism coincides with the development of ways of reading about bodies that confirm and reconfirm the rupture between substance in its multifarious forms and literature in its equally various represen222

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tational modes. This rupture is neither inevitable nor wholly natural to human experience, however. Instead, it is something that must be taught to readers, if they are to read well and properly. As all of the materialist thinkers whose works I have examined here suggest, it is the novel, with its particular attachment as a form to the stimulation of affect, that becomes a privileged site for carrying out the kind of instruction that will ensure that readers feel themselves both deeply identified with and, ultimately, detached from the bodies that are presented to them in words. Where does this leave Lucretius? In his book on Lucretius and the Modern World, W. R. Johnson has suggested that the figure of Lucretius had to be ‘‘shaved, perfumed and powdered’’—stripped of his radical materialist vigor—in order to enter modernity. Johnson writes, ‘‘Secular humanism could not allow one of its earliest and most eloquent spokesmen to join in its progress towards modernity without castigating his unfortunate excesses. That (excessive, authentic) Lucretius even Diderot relegated to posthumous publication because in the world of the good bourgeois the poet of the DRN has to be expurgated in order to flourish inside the canon.’’1 Johnson eloquently describes the figure of the ‘‘melancholy Lucretius’’ that comes to haunt modern readings of the De rerum natura—a figure whose despair ultimately overwhelms his philosophy and, it is assumed, drove the poet to suicide. ‘‘By and large,’’ Johnson suggests, ‘‘too many readings of the poem (its readers were now mostly in Academe) continued to be tinged with the sad legend of the saddest pagan who had cut himself off from cosmic comfort and paid the price for it both in this life and in the centuries that followed his death.’’2 Johnson reads Lucretius’s strong critique of metaphysics—and of its concomitant forms of belief—as an ongoing threat to what he calls the ‘‘spiritual or cosmological hopes’’ of modern scientists and philosophers. I am suggesting in this book that, his Epicurean resistance to religious dogma notwithstanding, it is in fact Lucretius’s notion of a poetically voluptuous philosophy—a philosophy that depends upon pleasure in reading to put itself in motion—that has, somewhat paradoxically, become hard for us to read. In writing this, however, my intent is not to celebrate the Lucretian understanding of the interconnectedness of figure and matter as the solution to particularly modern ills (of disciplinary specialization, for instance, or of the marginalization of literary knowledges). Nor does Lucretius appear to provide a vision of the body politic (in any of its forms) that might be recuperable in the modern context. As I discuss in the chapter on Sade, Lucretian materialism lacks a conception of the embodied self—as an identity to be

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claimed, for instance, or even as a fixed or autonomous form of understanding—that can readily intersect with modern notions of political subjectivity. On the other hand, Lucretius’s poem, as revisited by Sade and La Mettrie, can inspire a reading of gender—and of the individual body as a concatenation of pleasures and sensations—as at once fully material, highly formalized, and almost entirely fluid in its bodily incarnations. This conception of the embodied subject often takes refuge in pornographic forms of representation, post-Enlightenment. As the basis for a political project, however, it has tended to seem doomed either to irrelevance or to creeping aestheticization, as Sade himself affirms. In rereading the history of the demise of a certain kind of voluptuous philosophy, then, I am in part telling the story of an authentic failure. This failure is, on the one hand, interesting for what it indicates to us about the successful emergence of a materialism that did not look to poetry—or to literature more generally—for its origins. Following the Enlightenment, the domain of literary figure tends to represent something that must be kept at bay, if we are to study matter in its true or real effects on us. But the disavowal of Lucretian materialism that is an important, if rarely acknowledged, part of what it means to become enlightened also involves a disavowal of the ways in which our experience of matter is always, whether we recognize it or not, vulnerable to that which can seem most alien to substance: namely, figure, rhetoric, style. As Lucretius intimates, freeing ourselves from what can be the crushing burden of dogma—theological and philosophical—does not mean embracing a world in which the only legitimate modes of representation are fully transparent ones—forms of prose that allow the reality of substances and bodies to shine through the language that depicts them. Instead, Lucretius and his eighteenth-century readers imply that our responses to highly formal poetic and literary devices can be both visceral and formative. For Lucretius, acts of reading can serve to make us up—to constitute and reconstitute our bodies in their persistent, intimate reactivity to language. He and his followers demonstrate, then, how a full understanding of ‘‘the body’’—or rather, the experience of embodiment— must include a recognition of the real force—and seductiveness—of the trope. To know matter is to conceive of figure in all of its effects. ‘‘And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed on far beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole.’’3

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Notes

Introduction 1. Kant, 63. 2. Ernst Cassirer writes in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: ‘‘Needless to say, following Kant’s achievement and the intellectual revolution accomplished by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it is no longer possible to return to the questions and answers of the philosophy of the Enlightenment’’ (xi). As Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert points out in his introduction to La Philosophie du bon sens by the marquis d’Argens, ‘‘L’orthodoxie veut qu’entre le rationalisme du XVIIe sie`cle et la critique kantienne, les philosophes des Lumie`res aient joue´ le roˆle d’interme´diaires dociles, e´largissant l’emprise de la raison sur des domaines jusqu’ici de´laisse´s . . . et pre´parant l’ave`nement d’un rationalisme adulte, c’est-a`-dire kantien. Le verdict kantien a ici valeur de ve´rite´ re´ve´le´e: Qu’est-ce que les Lumie`res? La sortie de la minorite´’’ (Philosophie du bon sens, 27). All translations into English are my own unless otherwise indicated. In citations from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of French texts, spelling and punctuation have not been modernized. 3. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 164. In a brief introductory essay appearing in Eˆtre mate´rialiste a` l’aˆge des Lumie`res, Jean Ehrard proclaims that ‘‘la vocation du [dix-huitie`me] sie`cle est mate´rialiste’’ (23). For further discussions of the centrality of materialist philosophy to French Enlightenment intellectual life—as well as to eighteenth-century narratives of enlightenment—see in particular Blumenberg’s magisterial study of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and, more specifically, Franck Salau¨n’s helpful account of the rise of French materialism in L’Ordre des mœurs. Ann Thomson’s Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie’s Discours pre´liminaire, explores the impact of La Mettrie’s materialist writings on the general philosophical culture of the period. Robert Mauzi, Jacques Roger, John S. Spink, Aram Vartanian, and Ira O. Wade have all made essential contributions to scholarly understanding of the abiding significance of a materialist philosophical legacy for the development of, in Spink’s terms, ‘‘French freethought.’’ Olivier Bloch and Caroline Warman have also given nuanced accounts of the relationship between materialism and diverse forms of libertinism. For more literary approaches to the various permutations of materialism during the eighteenth century, see the work of Marc Andre´ Bernier, Catherine Cusset, Robert Darnton (in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France), Anne Deneys-Tunney, and Anne C. Vila as well as the two collections of essays edited by Roy Porter and Marie

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226 Notes to Page 2 Mulvey Roberts (Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century) and by G. S. Rousseau (The Languages of Psyche). For more general perspectives, see Friedrich-Albert Lange’s history of materialism in his classic Histoire du mate´rialisme et critique de son importance a` notre e´poque (recently reedited in French translation), as well as Bernard Pullman’s account of the history of atomism in Atome dans l’histoire de la pense´e humaine. 4. Michel Foucault provides an exemplary statement of the significance of the notion of ‘‘the Enlightenment’’ for discourses of the modern in his essay ‘‘What is Critique?’’ He writes, ‘‘Even if it is relatively and necessarily fuzzy, this epoch is, of course, designated as a moment in the formation of modern humanity, ‘Aufkla¨rung’ in the broad sense of the term to which Kant, Weber, and so forth, referred, a period without a fixed date, with multiple entries because one can define it just as well by the formation of capitalism, the constitution of the bourgeois world, the establishment of the state system, the foundation of modern science with all its correlative techniques, the organization of an opposition between the art of being governed and that of not being governed in such a manner. The relationship of historicophilosophical labor to this period is privileged because it is there that these relations among power, truth, and the subject that it is concerned with analyzing appear in some way, raw and at the surface of visible transformations’’ (392). For further explorations of the connections between the rise of the eighteenth-century discourses on sensing or embodied matter and the onset of modernity, see Blumenberg; Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, vol. 1; Margaret Jacob’s article ‘‘The Materialist World of Pornography’’; Dalia Judovitz’s The Culture of the Body; Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex; Jean Mainil’s Dans les re`gles du plaisir; and Jeffrey Mehlman’s Cataract: A Study in Diderot. The work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment is also, in a sense, a discussion of the position of the Enlightenment as a materialist age and the effects of this materialism on modern philosophy. 5. Historians of the body, often following Foucault, regularly present the eighteenth century as an age preoccupied by the mechanization, materialization, and codification of a human subject that is gradually coming into being both as an object of scientific knowledge and as the abstracted generator of such knowledge. While the Enlightenment remains a privileged space for the elaboration of the rift between what Michel de Certeau describes in L’e´criture de l’histoire as the ‘‘sujet suppose´ savoir lire’’ and an ‘‘objet suppose´ e´crit,’’ the epistemological origins of this rupture are often ascribed to Descartes (L’e´criture de l’histoire, 10). Dalia Judovitz, in her study of the relationship of early modern and pre-Revolutionary forms of embodiment to a ‘‘genealogy of modernity,’’ affirms that ‘‘The rise in eighteenth-century France of materialism, a set of doctrines concerning nature and the world that affirm the primacy of matter, attests to the legacy of Cartesian physics, particularly as regards its mechanist and automatist account of the human body’’ (The Culture of the Body, 135). The Enlightenment, then, becomes an elaboration on the revolution enacted by and through the Cartesian subject. ‘‘Within this definition of subjectivity becomes perceptible an entirely new way of constituting human agency as an expression of thought alone, while the body is forcefully disenfranchised of the abil-

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Notes to Pages 2–5 227 ity to act, since its materiality can neither inform nor act upon the mind,’’ Judovitz confirms (134–35). 6. Reflections on the Novel, 110. 7. Syste`me de la nature, 44–45. 8. Syste`me de la nature, 13. 9. Syste`me de la nature, 44–45. 10. Syste`me de la nature, 40. 11. Syste`me de la nature, 21. The phrase ‘‘rapports fictifs’’ appears in the ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire’’ to the Syste`me de la nature, an introduction perhaps written by d’Holbach’s secretary, Naigeon. D’Holbach opens the Syste`me by proclaiming, in a similar vein, ‘‘Les hommes se tromperont toujours quand ils abandonneront l’expe´rience pour des syste`mes enfante´s par l’imagination’’ (37). 12. The close ties between science and literature during this period have recently given rise to many excellent studies of the interconnectedness of what later come to be understood as distinct fields. See in particular the work of Wilda C. Anderson, Julia V. Douthwaite, Marie-He´le`ne Huet, Jessica Riskin, Mary Terrall, and Anne C. Vila. 13. Encyclope´die, 10:189. 14. Along similar lines, Voltaire’s famous dictum from the Dictionnaire philosophique—‘‘La superstition met le monde entier en flammes; la philosophie les e´teint’’— leaves the place of literary representation vis-a`-vis the apparent crisis of belief to which he is referring entirely up for grabs (Dictionnaire philosophique, Naves and Benda, eds., 624). 15. Encyclope´die, ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire,’’ 1: xli. Thus, Robert Darnton refers to the Encyclopedia as the period’s ‘‘supreme work’’ in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclope´die (4). 16. I am particularly indebted, in this formulation of the productive imbrication of figure in matter, to the groundbreaking work of Judith Butler and Daniel Tiffany. Erich Auerbach also provocatively addresses this question, in relationship to Lucretius, in his essay ‘‘Figura.’’ 17. For a useful and provocative account of the importance of processes of ‘‘invention’’ to literature generally, see Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (discussed briefly below). 18. Pierre Hartmann, in his book Diderot: la figuration du philosophe, writes of the classically antagonistic relationship of philosophy to what he describes as ‘‘toute forme de repre´sentation,’’ and, in particular, to the fictional or imaginative aspects of figure (12). In an etymological tour de force, he affirms: ‘‘En tout e´tat de cause, la figure a parti lie´ avec ce vieil ennemi de la philosophie qu’est la rhe´torique, qui consiste a` orner le discours de figures re´pute´es captieuses. D’ailleurs, ‘figure’ et ‘figurer’ proviennent de l’e´tymon qui se rencontre dans ‘fingere’, qui signifie ‘fac¸onner’: modeler une forme, ou composer son visage comme fait un acteur, un hupokrite`s. La statuaire . . . , c’est ars fingendi, qui se dit aussi, par de´rivation, de la poe´sie comme art de composer des vers. L’infinitif ‘fingere’ a donne´ feindre, le supin ‘fictum’ a engendre´ fiction. Aux yeux du philosophe, la fiction n’est jamais

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228 Notes to Pages 6–9 qu’une feintise, une tromperie sur le re´el comme il existe des tomperies sur la marchandise. Imaginer des fictions et s’y complaire, c’est jusqu’a` Nietzsche faire œuvre anti-philosophique par excellence’’ (12). In fact, Lucretian materialism makes a complex use of figure both as a structural condition of matter and as a central element of philosophical writing per se. Nonetheless, the importance of figure for Lucretius is a key part of the scandal so long evoked by De rerum natura, a text regularly portrayed as inordinately and troublingly suasive in its figural language. 19. Until recently, few systematic examinations of French eighteenth-century neo-Epicureanism existed, despite the body of scholarly work focused on seventeenth-century neo-Epicurean thought in France, a corpus that includes, for instance, Jean-Charles Darmon’s excellent Philosophie e´picurienne et litte´rature au 17e sie`cle en France. The lack of an overarching account of the influence of Epicurean philosophy on eighteenth-century French intellectual life in part reflects the fragmentary nature of the Epicurean tradition itself; in the absence of great rehabilitators like Gassendi, the construction of a coherent narrative around the transmission of Epicurean doctrine becomes particularly challenging. But this lack is also a function of the diffusion of Epicurean motifs throughout elite culture during the eighteenth century, so that an ‘‘enlightened’’ Epicureanism emerges as both ubiquitous and difficult to situate precisely. For a series of articles on specific permutations of eighteenth-century Epicureanism in France, see the special issue of Dix-huitie`me sie`cle, no. 35 (2003) on ‘‘L’e´picurisme des Lumie`res’’ edited by Anne Deneys-Tunney and Pierre-Franc¸ois Moreau. 20. Epicurean atoms are not only figures (figurae) in themselves, they share with tropes a characteristic instant of deviation, a turning that Epicurus refers to as the clinamen and that is likewise present in the etymology of ‘‘trope’’ as a ‘‘turn’’ away from the straight or true sense of a word. 21. Foucault, ‘‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumie`res?’’ 1390. 22. In the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire writes in the article on ‘‘Enthusiasm’’ that ‘‘la raison consiste a` voir toujours les choses comme elles sont’’ (Dictionnaire philosophique, Naves and Benda, eds., 182). Further on, he situates the act of rational perception and representation in the context of poetic creation: ‘‘Comment le raisonnement peut-il gouverner l’enthousiasme? c’est qu’un poe`te dessine d’abord l’ordonnance de son tableau; la raison alors tient le crayon. Mais veut-il animer ses personnages et leur donner le caracte`re des passions, alors l’imagination s’e´chauffe, l’enthousiasme agit; c’est un coursier qui s’emporte dans sa carrie`re; mais la carrie`re est re´gulie`rement trace´e’’ (182). 23. Essai sur la lecture, 7. 24. In his discussions of eighteenth-century models of the nervous system, Figlio claims that ‘‘the idea of psychological integrity and of the apparent indivisibility of the personality . . . informed the view of the nervous system as a homogeneous totality. The unity of consciousness became the metaphorical guiding principle of physiological analysis, so that physiologists even into the nineteenth century adopted the premise that the wholeness of the sense of self implied a unity in the organ of mental phenomena’’ (179). Figlio persuasively demonstrates how the

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Notes to Pages 9–18 229 notion of the mind as a unified whole could determine the nature of anatomical investigation, thereby revealing the imbrication of scientific knowledge in metaphorical models. At the same time, as Figlio points out, ‘‘Scientific knowledge rested upon the observation and generalization of phenomena, and upon the use of a value-neutral language to describe them’’ (184). 25. Thus, for Condillac, the domain of the imagination—a faculty that is fundamentally linked both to pleasure and to the capacity for transformation—is distinguished from that of analytical thought in that the latter functions as the limit of the former. He writes, ‘‘[L’imagination] est une abeille qui fait son tre´sor de tout ce qu’un parterre produit de plus belles fleurs. C’est une coquette, qui, uniquement occupe´e du desir de plaire, consulte plus son caprice que la raison. . . . Bien assure´e de son empire, elle exerce son caprice sur tout. . . . Quoiqu’elle alte`re tout ce qu’elle touche, elle re´ussit souvent, lorsqu’elle ne cherche qu’a` plaire; mais hors de-la`, elle ne peut qu’e´chouer. Son empire finit ou` celui de l’analyse commence’’ (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 54). 26. D’Holbach, Syste`me de la nature, 43. 27. In his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, Condillac asserts, ‘‘Or un amas de matie`re n’est pas un; c’est une multitude’’ (15). 28. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 2–3. 29. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 29. 30. Bernier, Libertinage et figures du savoir, 58. 31. Hartmann, Diderot: La figuration du philosophe, 13. 32. Epicureanism in general—often stripped of its characteristically Lucretian preoccupation with figural effect—goes on to play a crucial role in the development of modern materialisms. Notably, Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘‘Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,’’ takes Democritean and Epicurean materialist thought as its subject.

1. Voluptuous Figures: Lucretian Materialism in Eighteenth-Century France 1. ‘‘Il suffit de remarquer que le sujet de la pense´e doit eˆtre un. Or un amas de matie`re n’est pas un; c’est une multitude’’ (Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 15). 2. ‘‘L’ouvrage le plus hardi qu’aucun mortel ait jamais ose´ composer’’ (Traduction libre de Lucre`ce, i). 3. For instance, Adrienne Redshaw insists, in her article ‘‘Voltaire and Lucretius,’’ that ‘‘the inspiration of the poem was so profoundly anti-religious as to make it totally unacceptable in a theologically-oriented culture’’ (20). While this claim needs to be qualified, especially given the effervescence of interest in Epicureanism that occurred in France in the seventeenth century, there is little doubt that Lucretius remained, throughout much of the eighteenth century, a philosopher primarily associated with the scandal of atheism. 4. Schmidt, Diderot and Lucretius, 191. 5. Diderot, ‘‘Voluptueux,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 8: 446.

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230 Notes to Page 18 6. The place of Lucretius’s De rerum natura in the context of French Enlightenment philosophy generally has in fact proven rather difficult to determine with much precision. From the 1760s on, the flourishing of French materialist thought in the writings of Diderot, Claude-Adrien Helve´tius, and the baron d’Holbach (among others) does appear to coincide with growing philosophical attention to Lucretius’s didactic poem and in particular to the Epicurean critique of religious superstition outlined therein. Panckoucke’s 1768 ‘‘free translation’’ of De rerum natura was published in completed form in the same year as was the better-known prose translation undertaken at the urging of Diderot by the translator La Grange, employed as a tutor in the d’Holbach household. Two decades later, Le Blanc de Guillet’s verse translation of Lucretius’s poem came out, although this attempt failed to meet with the success of La Grange’s prose version, which remained in print well into the nineteenth century. Yet, prior to the appearance of these three editions of the poem, the most recent French translation available had been published in 1685 by the baron des Coutures. For a bibliography of translations of Lucretius, see Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius. Moreover, while De rerum natura was unquestionably read and discussed extensively in France during the eighteenth century, it was nonetheless rarely the subject, in print, of sustained and explicit intellectual engagement. In fact, the most lengthy French treatment of De rerum natura to appear during the first half of the eighteenth century is an ambitious Cartesian critique of Lucretian thought, composed in Latin verse by the cardinal Melchior de Polignac and entitled in French translation the Anti-Lucre`ce (1747). By 1768, as La Grange writes in the ‘‘avertissement’’ preceding his new scholarly translation of De rerum natura, it seemed obvious that ‘‘une traduction de Lucre`ce etait un ouvrage qui manquait a` notre litte´rature’’ (5). Still, the influence of De rerum natura on French natural philosophy of the eighteenth century, even as it can with hindsight appear ubiquitous, is often more implicit than selfevident. It is in fact only with difficulty that the materialist philosophes succeeded in explicitly conjugating the pleasures of Lucretian lyricism with the presentation of empiricist philosophy as, in Condillac’s terms, ‘‘ni une proposition vague, ni une maxime abstraite, ni une supposition gratuite; mais une expe´rience constante, dont toutes les conse´quences seront confirme´es par de nouvelles expe´riences’’ (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 9). Peter Gay writes of enlightened responses to Lucretius, ‘‘It is a plausible reading of the Enlightenment to say that Lucretius had no real hold over it: deists and atheists alike repudiated his atomism and his teaching that the world arose by chance; no one, except perhaps La Mettrie, accepted his hedonism without modification’’ (The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism, 103). The ambiguity surrounding the reception of Lucretius in eighteenth-century France has accordingly given rise to an impressive variety of contemporary scholarly assessments of this reception. The uncertainty surrounding the ways in which Lucretius might legitimately be read during the eighteenth century—as early secular empiricist? as ethicist? as poet?—remains visible in the difficulties faced by contemporary scholars in assessing the status of De rerum natura vis-a`-vis eighteenth-century

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Notes to Page 18 231 French natural philosophy. Critical approaches to this problem run the gamut from Johan Schmidt’s claim that the poem ‘‘became a sort of bible’’ to philosophers who ‘‘must have read [Lucretius’s] text, above all, for its scientific and philosophical content’’ (188) to C.-A. Fusil’s assertion that ‘‘a` l’unanimite´ les philosophes ont raille´ l’atomisme de Lucre`ce’’ (‘‘Lucre`ce et les philosophes du XVIIIe sie`cle,’’ 196). Fusil also points out, in an echo of a remark first made by the abbe´ Dubos, that the absence of new translations of De rerum natura throughout much of the eighteenth century may instructively be compared to the publication of between twenty-five and thirty editions of Virgil during the same period. In a more recent article, Wolfgang Fleischmann similarly concludes, ‘‘It is not possible to find a single Enlightenment figure whose central philosophic guide was Lucretius. . . . Enlightenment authors liked the poetry of Lucretius and took from it, for their own use, whatever they liked best. In this sense, and in no other, is it possible to speak unequivocally of a debt of the Enlightenment to Lucretius’’ (643). George Depue Hadzsits, in Lucretius and his Influence, sums up: ‘‘France was more favorably minded toward Lucretius and the Epicurean philosophy than any other country in Europe, but even there a very considerable tolerance and enlightenment left Lucretius’ position an ambiguous one’’ (322). 7. In the edited collection Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, Roy Porter begins his article ‘‘Enlightenment and Pleasure’’ with the assertion that ‘‘It is a presupposition of this book that pleasure came into its own in the eighteenth century’’ (1). In a somewhat similar vein, Catherine Cusset has written that, in eighteenth-century France, ‘‘The new value bestowed upon pleasure provides for the beginning of the modern novel’’ (5). 8. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 55. 9. Anne Vila has extensively and expertly documented this process of somaticization or physiologization in Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. In Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, Jessica Riskin discusses the ‘‘naturalization of moral subjects and the moralization of natural subjects’’ in the context of eighteenth-century scientific discourses of sensibility. Dalia Judovitz gives an eloquent exposition of the Enlightenment mechanist materialization of the body as a form of diremption in The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. In a somewhat different mode, Anne Deneys-Tunney has described the eighteenth century as ‘‘L’aˆge d’or de la litte´rature, ou` les mots faisaient corps et ou` les corps e´taient sensibles’’ (E´critures du corps: De Descartes a` Laclos, 324). Unlike Vila or Riskin, for instance, Deneys-Tunney sees philosophers and novelists as undertaking fundamentally distinct tasks: ‘‘Le corps peut eˆtre re´duit a` une signification intelligible, mais il n’est jamais compris par le philosophe comme un syste`me de signifiance’’ (70). In distinction to Deneys-Tunney, I am interested here in the ways in which both philosophy and literature depend on strategies of reading that govern the individual’s approach to bodies and figure. Rather than seeing philosophy and literature as constructing distinct objects of study, I consider these two discursive forms as eventually proposing, by the end of the Enlightenment, distinct experiences of these objects.

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232 Notes to Pages 18–21 10. For a discussion of the image of the automaton in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, as well as an analysis of the place of the automaton in the discourse of the literary more generally, see Catherine Liu’s Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton. 11. In Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric, Daniel Tiffany has shown how discourses of material substance emerge at the conjunction of lyric and scientific knowledge; he eloquently demonstrates the ‘‘the inherently figurative character of Western materialism’’ (9). I am beholden to Tiffany’s argument in that I am claiming here that Lucretian materialism is based in the systematic production of this conjunction in the body of a delighted reader—as textual and material effect. Yet the Lucretian relationship to pleasure as the experience of a transformation that is both poetic and substantive is ultimately disavowed, I argue, by the Enlightenment as part of the inauguration of a rupture between literature and philosophy as techniques of perceiving and/or shaping substance. 12. In The Culture of the Body, Judovitz sees the emergence of Cartesianism in the seventeenth century as entailing ‘‘the progressive virtualization of the body, its schematization, mechanization, and ultimate spectralization’’ (169). I read this dual process of materialization and ‘‘virtualization’’ as staged in the figure of the reader. In my view, Lucretian materialism, as a critical philosophical site for the construction of the act of reading in its relationship to substance, thus has an important role to play in the working through, during the eighteenth century, of debates around the nature of embodiment. 13. I will return to the problem of ‘‘figure’’ or figura (as Lucretius understands it) at length later on. Lucretian materialism posits the atomic figura as a privileged locus of the imbrication of the reader in the poetic text. Erich Auerbach, in an influential essay, has discussed the originality and significance of the Lucretian manipulation of figura; see Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. 14. ‘‘Je suis encore e´tonne´ qu’au milieu des dissipations du monde, et des e´pines des affaires, il ait pu e´crire un si long ouvrage en vers, dans une langue e´trange`re, lui qui aurait a` peine fait quatre bons vers dans sa propre langue’’ (Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 414). The Latin title of the Anti-Lucre`ce as given in the 1747 edition is Anti-Lucretius sive de Deo et Natura. Howard Jones presents a helpful introduction to Polignac’s magnum opus in ‘‘An Eighteenth-Century Refutation of Epicurean Physics: The Anti-Lucretius of Melchior de Polignac (1747).’’ For a close reading of the poem and an account of Polignac’s milieu, see C.-A. Fusil’s L’AntiLucre`ce du Cardinal de Polignac: contribution a` l’e´tude de la pense´e philosophique et scientifique dans le premier tiers du XVIIIe sie`cle. For textual commentary on Polignac’s poem as expressing ‘‘frightened awareness of how pervasive the poet and poem it challenges [Lucretius’s De rerum natura] had become in the modern world, how well that poem answered the evolving modern temper,’’ see W. R. Johnson, Lucretius and the Modern World, 88–94 (93). Gordon gives a brief discussion of Polignac’s poem in A Bibliography of Lucretius. 15. The attempts made by translators of Lucretius to separate out the scientific or ethical import of the poem from the pleasure that its reading might occasion are

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Notes to Pages 22–25 233 part of the gradual reconfiguration as pornographic of texts in which this separation cannot be properly effectuated—for which the pleasure of reading remains, literally, material. For instance, Jean M. Goulemot has defined the pornographic text as a text that one reads because of ‘‘un de´sir qui n’est pas celui de lire, le fortifiant meˆme (mais par quels moyens?), sans pouvoir, au demeurant, le satisfaire. . . . Sans volonte´ excessive de provoquer, le roman pornographique sera analyse´ ici comme le roman meˆme, mis a` nu, re´ve´le´, en un mot, dans son e´pure’’ (8). In the Lucretian text, the desire to read is precisely the desire to experience material embodiment fully, in all of its effects. The rupture with which Goulemot is working in this definition— between reading about bodies and being embodied—is one that Lucretian science works to heal. The development of the novel as a distinct genre is nonetheless, as Goulemot seems to be implying, dependent on the inauguration of this rupture as at the origin of both the scientific and the literary fields. 16. Jean Salem, in his study of Epicurean ethics, writes, ‘‘Assure´ment, c’est une e´thique d’extreˆme urgence que nous a propose´e E´picure: il faut, sans plus tarder, nous mettre a` l’e´cole du bonheur en e´tudiant la philosophie et, de`s lors, ne plus songer a` quitter cette e´tude’’ (Tel un dieu parmi les hommes: l’e´thique d’E´picure, 35). 17. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2: 655. 18. Cicero, On Moral Ends, 30. 19. ‘‘On se re´cria sur le mot de volupte´; les gens qui en e´taient de´ja` gaˆte´s en abuserent; les ennemis de la secte s’en pre´valurent, & ainsi le nom d’e´picurien devint tre`sodieux’’ (Encyclope´die, 17: 458). 20. ‘‘Faire sur quelques esprits peu en garde, des impressions tre`s-dangereuses, & les conduire a` des e´garemens funestes’’ (Batteux, La Morale d’E´picure, 8–9). 21. DRN, 1: 7–9. 22. DRN, 1: 22–23. 23. For an analysis of the place of poetic language in De rerum natura, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 140–91 and 484–510. Nussbaum contends that attention to literary technique is a crucial part of the method of the Hellenistic moral schools, including those of the Epicureans and the Stoics. She writes, ‘‘Literary and rhetorical strategies enter into the methods at a very deep level, not just decorating the arguments, but shaping the whole sense of what a therapeutic argument is, and expressing, in their stylistic concreteness, respect for the pupil’s need’’ (486). 24. DRN, 1: 943–50. 25. DRN, 1: 947. 26. For a discussion of the importance of reading (and rereading) in the transmission of Epicurean doctrine, see Salem, Tel un dieu parmi les hommes, 39–44. Salem explains how ‘‘En se repaissant de l’e´tude des dogmes fondamentaux de l’e´picurisme, l’e´le`ve imprimera toujours davantage en son aˆme le sceau des ve´rite´s premie`res et se constituera peu a` peu ce que nous appellerions aujourd’hui volontiers une grille d’interpre´tation du re´el. Partant, il acquerra dans le domaine pratique la faculte´ de jouir a` titre maximum de plaisir’’ (42). 27. DRN, 1: 933–34.

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234 Notes to Pages 25–29 28. DRN, 3: 10–13. 29. Minadeo, 106. 30. DRN, 2: 1–4. 31. DRN, 2: 7–9. 32. The marquis de Sade will develop this aspect of Epicurean thought at great length toward the end of the eighteenth century, as I will discuss in chapter 6. 33. DRN, 2: 20–23. 34. DRN, 2: 62–66. 35. Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, 1. 36. This narrative of origins, often taken out of context, is widely cited during the eighteenth century; its influence is visible, among other places, in Rousseau’s Second Discourse. 37. DRN, 1: 73. Tellingly, for Lucretius the problem of translation is one that cannot pass without comment, since his choice of words to convey the Epicurean doctrine must be precisely calibrated according to their effects on the reader: ‘‘Nor does it pass unnoticed of my mind that it is a hard task in Latin verses to set clearly in the light the dark discoveries of the Greeks . . . ; yet your merit and the pleasure of your sweet friendship . . . lead me to watch through the calm nights, searching by what words, yea and in what measures, I may avail to spread before your mind a bright light’’ (1: 136–44). If Memmius’s freedom is contingent on his pleasure, then this pleasure is in turn contingent on Lucretius’s ability to produce specific aesthetic reactions in his audience. 38. DRN, 2: 1013–23. 39. While the truths that Lucretius seeks to impart may be in a sense ‘‘new,’’ the pleasure of the Epicurean text operates primarily not through the sequential linking of moments of reasoned assent to argument, however innovative, but in what Lucretius portrays as the free joy of recognition or remembering. This delight in repetition, which marks the formal structure of the poem, instead of functioning as a form of conditioning, paves the way for the emergence of a truly independent material subject. Interestingly, Epicurus is known for his unwillingness to cite other philosophical authorities. Bayle claims that ‘‘il n’y rapporte les paroles d’aucun auteur, il ne cite personne’’ (174). In his resistance to citing other authors, however, Epicurus paradoxically inaugurates a regime of citationality in which the pleasures of recognition are paramount. 40. Plato, Phaedrus, 18. 41. In his study of lyric substance and the history of materialism, Daniel Tiffany writes, ‘‘Western materialism therefore depends, paradoxically and irremediably, on the equation of materiality and invisibility (insofar as atoms are permanently beyond the reach of our natural sense). Further the invisibility of matter in atomist doctrine explains the dependence of atomic physics on the regime of analogy’’ (44–45). 42. DRN, 2: 67–71. 43. DRN, 2: 221–24. 44. Motte, ‘‘Clinamen Redux,’’ 265.

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Notes to Pages 30–33 235 45. For a reading of Lucretius’s presentation of the clinamen as in itself a swerve (away from Democritus) in which ‘‘the text illustrates the phenomenon it describes,’’ see Motte, ‘‘Clinamen Redux,’’ 265. 46. See Derrida, ‘‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,’’ 7–8. 47. DRN, 2: 256–58. 48. DRN, 2: 847. 49. In Alfred Ernout’s French translation of De rerum natura, Ernout writes in his note to this passage, ‘‘Les mss. donnent en fin de v. 257 voluptas et 258 voluntas, ce qui ne peut gue`re se de´fendre. J’avais d’abord adopte´ la correction de Lachmann: v. ` la re´flexion, j’ai pre´fe´re´ suivre 257 potestas, 258 voluntas, qui s’appuie sur le v. 286. A Lambin qui invertit l’ordre final et lire: v. 257 voluntas, v. 158 [sic] voluptas, d’apre`s le texte du v. 172 du l. II.’’ Pleasure, in Ernout’s description, is reinserted into the system, but in a subordinate position. In his introduction to the translation, Ernout vigorously reaffirms the binding force of pleasure as an ‘‘inherent’’ characteristic of bodies, impervious to change: ‘‘Du reste, il est probable que les gens qui se re´clament d’E´picure pour se livrer aux plaisirs de la chair n’en auraient pas moins, sans cet appui, mene´ la meˆme existence, et ce n’est pas E´picure ou Lucre`ce qui les y a conduits, il leur fournit seulement une apparente excuse et une manie`re de justification’’ (xviii). 50. DRN, 2: 847. 51. DRN, 3: 14–17. 52. Derrida, 8–9. 53. Thus, Jeffrey Mehlman’s fascinating study of the Lucretian influence on the atomist materialism of Diderot describes the genealogy that founds his analysis in the following terms: ‘‘Lucretius, Diderot, Serres: beyond the science(s) they have drawn upon—might Serres not have found all the thermodynamics he needed in Diderot’s machine . . . a` vapeurs?’’ (32). In contrast to the fundamentally emancipatory thrust of the stochastic universe of Diderot and Lucretius, Mehlman portrays reductive mechanical materialism—represented for him by Helve´tius and Bentham—as ‘‘regulated by a pleasure principle’’ (98). This regulation ultimately has a regressive, rather than a liberatory, effect, since commitment to the pleasure principle would imply a turning away from the active diversity that Mehlman sees as the inheritance of Lucretius. I have tried to show so far how readerly pleasure, in De rerum natura, could instead be considered (on its own terms) an active opening up to combinatorial possibilities—both material and textual—in theory unavailable to those who refuse pleasurable engagement with the Epicurean text. For Lucretius, the pleasure of repetition is not binding, but contains within it the anticipation of incremental (atomized) movement toward diverse forms of transfiguration. 54. W. R. Johnson takes up the problem of the durability of the legend of what he calls the ‘‘melancholy Lucretius’’ in Lucretius and the Modern World. 55. ‘‘Il montre sensiblement que l’objet de nos plus ardens souhaits est une fin contraire a` noˆtre fe´licite´. . . . Il e´tablit d’une puissante maniere les premiers corps ou atoˆmes, pour principes de cette vaste immensite´; il de´crit e´legamment leurs concours,

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236 Notes to Pages 33–36 leurs liaisons, leurs mouvemens, leurs poids & leurs figures differentes’’ (Des Coutures, iii–xvii, italics added). 56. ‘‘Sur ces maximes, qui depuis ne m’ont paru que trop certaines, je m’attache a` ce Philosophe’’ (Des Coutures, xvi). ˆ me ou le syste`me des mate´rialistes soumis aux seules lumie`res de la rai57. Dufour, L’A son (Avignon, 1759). Quoted in Franck Salau¨n, L’Ordre des mœurs, 27. 58. Salau¨n, L’Ordre des mœurs, 43. 59. ‘‘Tout le monde lit et relit Virgile, et peu de personnes font de Lucre`ce leur livre favori. . . . Qu’on compare le nombre des traductions de Lucre`ce avec le nombre des traductions de Virgile dans toutes les langues polies, et l’on trouvera quatre traductions de l’E´neide de Virgile contre une traduction du poe`me De natura rerum’’ (Dubos, 65–66). 60. ‘‘Le ve´ritable moyen de connoıˆtre le me´rite d’un poe`me sera toujours de consulter l’impression qu’il fait’’ (Dubos, 363). 61. ‘‘Il faut examiner s’il plaıˆt, et a` quel point il plaıˆt et il attache ceux qui le lisent’’ (Dubos, 363). 62. Dubos, 362. 63. ‘‘Le public est juge de la partie de son poe`me qui est du ressort de la poe`sie’’ (Dubos, 363). 64. ‘‘On ne lit son ouvrage que de propos delibere´’’ (Dubos, 65). 65. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 107. 66. Fusil, in his analysis of the Anti-Lucretius, describes the poem as ‘‘le testament d’une glorieuse e´poque . . . un dernier et magnifique combat livre´ a` des forces qui s’organisent et grossissent tous les jours’’ (10). While the Anti-Lucretius was reprinted several times and translated into French, English, and Italian, its success in France at least seems to have been mixed. In the Journal de Tre´voux the poem is described as having had better luck abroad than in the French context: ‘‘Les e´trangers s’en occupent et le savent par cœur. Ce n’est pas le seul exemple qui prouve que nous prodiguons nos richesses sans en user’’ (quoted in Fusil, ‘‘L’Anti-Lucre`ce du Cardinal de Polignac,’’ 136, note 4). Fusil writes that, after 1780, the Anti-Lucretius ‘‘reste longtemps oublie´’’ (139). Voltaire, in his review in the Dictionnaire philosophique, is already quite clear about the poem’s antiquated effect. 67. De Boze, ‘‘E´loge de M. le cardinal de Polignac,’’ 14–15. In his ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire,’’ Bougainville implies that the poem was still in draft form upon the author’s death. He describes how Polignac gave the manuscript to his friend the abbe´ de Rothelin for reworking and presumably eventual publication: ‘‘C’e´toit lui donner une grande marque de confiance, mais en meˆme temps le charger d’un pe´nible fardeau. . . . Des additions sans nombre, e´crites sur des feuilles volantes, formoient plus de trois mille Vers Se´pare´s du texte meˆme’’ (lxx). The Anti-Lucretius thus resembles De rerum natura not only as a deathbed production, but in its status as a ‘‘rough’’ draft of sorts. It is aporetic by nature, both soliciting and requiring readerly intervention. 68. Bougainville, ‘‘Epistre dedicatoire,’’ vi.

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Notes to Pages 38–39 237 69. ‘‘Quel accueil un tel ouvrage pouvoit-il espe´rer dans un sie´cle, ou` la Langue de l’ancienne Rome est peu cultive´e, ou` l’irre´ligion triomphe, ou` l’abus de l’esprit est appelle´ raison, ou` les bon mots sont devenus des de´cisions & les paradoxes des principes?’’ (‘‘Epistre dedicatoire,’’ n.p.). 70. Fusil returns to the rhetoric of the pharmakon in his portrayal of the AntiLucretius, ‘‘les deux poe`mes devaient, dans sa pense´e, former un ensemble inse´parable, le poison et l’antidote’’ (15). 71. ‘‘Il me paraıˆt que l’auteur a perdu beaucoup de temps et beaucoup de vers a` re´futer la de´clinaison des atomes, et les autres absurdite´s dont le poe`me de Lucre`ce fourmille. C’est employer de l’artillerie pour de´truire une chaumie`re’’ (Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 417). 72. ‘‘On peut orner de beaux vers l’e´corce de ces ve´rite´s; mais pour les approfondir il faut du calcul, et point de vers’’ (Dictionnaire philosophique, 417). 73. Dictionnaire philosophique, 417. 74. Bougainville’s focus wavers somewhat, however, toward the end of his introduction. While he at first highlights the importance of the Anti-Lucretius as an alluringly poetic response to Lucretius’s seductive materialism, in the second part of the ‘‘Discours’’ he claims that ‘‘Un Philosophe doit surtout eˆtre clair. . . . Il a besoin de soutenir par une me´thode simple & naturelle l’attention des Lecteurs’’ (lv). With this assertion Bougainville effectively contradicts his argument in the first paragraph of the essay, where he privileges the ‘‘melodiousness’’ of the work above its clarity. This ambivalence is typical of what seems to be Bougainville’s growing hesitation, as the introduction proceeds, among readings of the Anti-Lucretius as 1) a primarily philosophic response to Lucretius in which a series of apodictic claims are made regarding the physical organization of matter, 2) a primarily moral essay, in which Polignac expounds a series of ethical principles, and 3) an aesthetic appeal to the ‘‘hearts’’ of readers who might otherwise be unconsciously swayed by materialism. Ultimately, Bougainville seems most drawn to the second reading, even though he begins the ‘‘Discours’’ by emphasizing the third. For Polignac and Lucretius, Bougainville’s attempt at a separation of physics, ethics, and aesthetics into separate domains would be philosophically untenable, since neither writer understands these three domains as mutually exclusive. 75. ‘‘Pour dissiper les nuages dont un Poe`te se´ducteur avoit obscurci la ve´rite´, il falloit un Poe`te qui puˆt entrer en lice avec lui & se servir des meˆmes armes. Comme le cœur de´cide presque toujours, meˆme dans ce qui est du ressort de l’esprit, en vain pre´tend-on nous persuader, si l’on ne sc¸ait nous plaire. Malgre´ la beaute´ du vrai, malgre´ l’inte´reˆt que nous avons a` le connoıˆtre, il n’est que trop souvent force´ de se parer a` nos yeux d’ornemens e´trangers. Ces ornemens lui devenoient encore plus ne´cessaires, depuis que l’erreur qui n’en a pas le meˆme besoin, puisqu’elle flatte nos passions, s’offroit arme´e par Lucre`ce de toutes les graces de la Poe´sie, de tous les artifices du style, de toutes les subtilite´s du raisonnement. On ne pouvoit re´duire au silence cette voix enchanteresse, qu’en opposant a` ses sons me´lodieux des sons qui ne le fussent pas moins. Ce n’e´toit point assez d’exposer avec clarte´ les preuves de

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238 Notes to Pages 40–44 la ve´ritable Doctrine, de les pre´senter avec me´thode, d’en faire sentir tout le poids’’ (Bougainville, ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire,’’ v–vi). 76. ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire,’’ vi. 77. ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire,’’ li. 78. Polignac preserves in his writing an emphasis on notions of substance and substantiality. On the one hand, he repeatedly invokes images of solidity, immensity, and hardness in his poem, but he also redefines the nature of ‘‘real’’ substance in such a way as to reveal Lucretian matter as fundamentally insubstantial in its ephemerality, changeability, and softness. I will take up Polignac’s portrayal of metaphysics and Lucretian atomism as substantially distinct (and materially different) later in this chapter. 79. Polignac, Anti-Lucre`ce, 1:25. 80. AL, 1: 25. 81. ‘‘Je forme un grand projet, Quintius: je vais parler de Dieu. Quel eˆtre dans l’univers est comparable au Cre´ateur, au Roi de l’univers?’’ (AL, 1: 23). 82. ‘‘La Volupte´ prenant un libre essor a usurpe´ l’empire ou` la Raison re´gnoit avec la Divinite´’’ (AL, 1: 28). 83. ‘‘Votre bonheur est l’objet de mes efforts; je ge´missois de vous voir se´duit par l’apparence, voler a` votre perte sur les aıˆles du plaisir’’ (AL, 1: 75). 84. ‘‘La Philosophie n’a pas le droit de cre´er les e´venemens: elle ne sc¸ait qu’en jouer, ou les supporter’’ (AL, 1: 59). 85. ‘‘Envain, ce cœur amolli par le luxe, & de´ja` vaincu par les de´lices, implorerat-il le secours de la constance’’ (AL, 1: 60). 86. ‘‘Oui, je l’avouerai sans peine; le souverain bien, c’est le plaisir; mais le plaisir puise´ dans sa ve´ritable source, le plaisir pur, solide, immense, inalte´rable’’ (AL, 1: 64). 87. ‘‘Mais qu’est-ce que ce plaisir? Un souffle, une ombre, une eau fugitive, un fable leger dont les flots se jouent, un feu qui brille & s’e´teint’’ (AL, 1: 64–65). 88. AL, 1: 65. 89. ‘‘La pe´ne´tration, la force, l’e´tendue de son esprit, seroient des qualite´s vaines: ses ide´es, des chime`res; ses raisonnemens, des sophismes, & ses discours, des sons’’ (AL, 1: 48). 90. AL, 1: 48. 91. ‘‘E´picure est donc l’ennemi de la socie´te´: nul avantage re´el n’est le fruit de sa doctrine’’ (AL, 1: 52). 92. AL, 127. 93. AL, 1: 127. 94. ‘‘Heureux, au contraire, heureux celui dont la Religion fonde l’espe´rance & re`gle la conduite! Tout ce qui passe, est a` ses yeux comme s’il n’e´tait plus, comme une illusion du sommeil. Il foule d’un pied tranquille & les biens & les maux; il me´prise e´galement les faveurs & les outrages de la fortune. Rien de fini n’est capable de l’e´branler’’ (AL, 1: 63–64). 95. ‘‘C’est la Divinite´ meˆme: vous vous faites, sans y penser, un Dieu d’un atome’’ (AL, 1: 130).

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Notes to Pages 44–50 239 96. ‘‘E´picure ne soutient ses atomes innombrables, que parce qu’il les suppose sans auteur; mais s’ils sont sans auteur, pourquoi n’ont ils d’infini que le nombre? Pourquoi ne leur donne-t-il pas une connoissance, un pouvoir sans bornes? Pourquoi ne fait-il pas de chacun d’eux une divinite´?’’ (AL, 1: 130). If the Lucretian atom is reworked here as a divinity in miniature, is it not also possible to envision the Cartesian God as in some sense an immense atom: endlessly free and infinitely voluptuous in its effects? 97. AL, 1: 26. 98. AL, 1: 125–26. 99. AL, 2: 317–18. 100. AL, 2: 319–20. 101. Panckoucke mentions the Anti-Lucretius in the introduction to his ‘‘traduction libre’’ of De rerum natura. He initially appears to praise it, calling it an ‘‘ouvrage e´crit avec autant de solidite´ que d’agre´ment,’’ but then lists at some length the ‘‘erreurs grossieres’’ that the Cardinal uses to refute Lucretius’s ‘‘erreurs absurdes.’’ These ‘‘erreurs grossieres’’ include some of the Cardinal’s Cartesian assumptions about the nature of space and matter, the material organization of animals and plants, and the necessity of preformation. Panckoucke ends his list with an ‘‘&c.,’’ thereby calling into question the profession of enthusiasm with which he begins. 102. Fusil writes of the other two translations that appeared around the time of La Grange’s, ‘‘La meˆme anne´e, quelques mois avant Lagrange, Charles Panckoucke avait publie´ a` Amsterdam une traduction franc¸aise du De Natura Rerum qui n’e´tait qu’une paraphrase fantaisiste. Leblanc de Guillet en a donne´ une mauvaise traduction en vers’’ (195, note 1). 103. La Grange, Traduction nouvelle, avec des notes, 5. 104. Gordon describes La Grange as ‘‘a library addict who killed himself by overwork at the age of 37,’’ implying with this portrayal that La Grange’s emphasis on intellectual activity as a form of hard labor may be overdetermined. It is, however, significant that a poem that is portrayed by Polignac as so pleasantly seductive as to induce in its readers a form of voluptuous stupor would have become, for La Grange, a source of seemingly unending travail! 105. Traduction nouvelle, 5. 106. Traduction nouvelle, 6. 107. Traduction nouvelle, 6–7. 108. ‘‘On en a souvent e´te´ de´dommage´ par les lumie`res qu’on reconnaıˆt avoir tire´es de cette fatigante lecture’’ (Traduction nouvelle, 7). 109. Traduction nouvelle, 7. 110. Traduction nouvelle, 7. 111. La Grange also scoffs at the notion that Lucretius would have died as a result of having swallowed a love potion. In the place of a more voluptuous image of the poet, he puts a figure of anomie and disappointment. ‘‘Il est plus probable, ou qu’il se tua dans un acce`s de fre´ne´sie, ou que l’ennui d’une vie trouble´e sans cesse par le de´lire & la douleur, le de´termina a` y renoncer’’ (Traduction nouvelle, 13). 112. Traduction nouvelle, 9.

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240 Notes to Pages 50–54 113. Traduction nouvelle, 9–10. 114. ‘‘En ge´ne´ral il faut distinguer dans Lucre`ce un double caracte`re, celui de poe`te & celui de philosophe. De meˆme que les philosophes anciens avaient deux doctrines, l’une publique, externe, exote´rique qu’ils de´bitaient au peuple, l’autre secrete, interne, e´soterique qu’ils re´servaient pour leurs disciples particuliers: de meˆme Lucre`ce, comme poe`te, paraıˆt quelquefois adopter les ide´es The´ologiques de son tems, tandis que comme philosophe E´picurien, il s’arme contr’elles & les combat de toute sa force. Sans cette distinction, plusieurs endroits de son poe`me deviennent absolument inintelligibles’’ (Traduction nouvelle, 319, note to book 1, verse 2). 115. Cf. the definition of ‘‘le plaisir’’ in Grimod de la Reynie`re’s 1784 Re´flexions philosophiques sur le plaisir, ‘‘Le plaisir est une sensation que l’on e´prouve, mais que l’on ne de´finit pas. Comme une vapeur le´ge`re, il s’envole de`s qu’on veut l’analyser. L’Homme du monde en jouit sans le connoıˆtre; le Philosophe le connoıˆt, & ne peut l’approfondir. Il semble eˆtre d’une nature qui re´siste a` la re´flexion & se soustrait a` l’examen’’ (75). Pleasure is figured here as the absence of the very possibility of reflection. For Lucretius, pleasure inaugurates thought and frees up its mechanism. It occurs in the reader as the conjunction of both figura—the atom—and figure. 116. For a detailed account of Panckoucke’s biography, as well as his involvement in the commercial, cultural, and intellectual life of the Lumie`res, see Suzanne TucooChala’s Charles-Joseph Panckoucke et la librairie franc¸aise 1736–1798. Panckoucke, an extremely prominent publisher and businessman during the second half of the eighteenth century, was closely affiliated with the encyclope´distes. Tucoo-Chala describes Panckoucke as ‘‘pour la France et l’Europe, le vulgarisateur des Lumie`res officielles ou clandestines . . . Il est d’autre part le vulgarisateur de l’œuvre encyclope´dique dont la diffusion l’a accapare´ pendant vingt-trois ans de sa vie. Cette e´norme enterprise a fait de ce libraire le dernier grand e´diteur de l’Ancien Re´gime’’ (253). 117. ‘‘Aucun philosophe, en effet, n’a jamais parle´ des Dieux avec plus d’audace’’ (Traduction libre de Lucre`ce, i). 118. ‘‘Cette the´ologie pouvoit preˆter des images riantes a` l’imagination toujours tendre & facile des Poe`tes; mais ne pouvoit que blesser la raison se´ve`re d’un philosophe aussi sublime que Lucre`ce’’ (Traduction libre, ii–iii). 119. ‘‘J’ai fait cette traduction avec toute la liberte´ dont on doit se servir, quand on veut rendre claire & intelligible une philosophie ancienne & tre`s-obscure: la plupart des personnes qui lisent Lucre`ce semblent ne faire cas que de quelques e´le´gantes descriptions, de quelques tableaux pittoresques, de quelques maximes de morale; ce sont ces morceaux sur-tout qu’elles se plaisent a` citer, mais j’ai cru devoir m’attacher davantage au fond des ide´es, au corps du systeˆme. Lucre`ce ne doit point eˆtre regarde´ comme un auteur simplement agre´able & e´le´gant, mais comme un Philosophe profond & sublime qui renferme les vues les plus ge´ne´rales sur la nature, qui embrasse son objet d’un seul coup d’oeil, & qui de´duit avec beaucoup d’art, de me´thode, l’explication des phe´nomenes, des principes qu’il a e´tablis’’ (Traduction libre, iii–iv). 120. ‘‘[La ve´rite´] seule est e´ternelle, immuable, claire, intelligible, & peut-eˆtre que le caractere qui peut servir a` la faire reconnoıˆtre le plus aise´ment, c’est que de`s

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Notes to Pages 54–56 241 qu’elle se pre´sente, elle paroıˆt avec tant de clarte´ qu’on n’a pas besoin de la de´signer ni de la faire remarquer’’ (Traduction libre, vi–vii). 121. ‘‘Tout ce qui est corps ou matie`re est soumis & enchaıˆne´ par des loix physiques, ne´cessaires, immobiles’’ (Traduction libre, xxxi). 122. ‘‘L’esprit ne suit donc pas toujours les mouvements du corps, il ne partage pas ses situations’’ (Traduction libre, xxxvii). 123. Thus, the free circulation of texts replaces the free circulation of atomic elements. As a major publisher of the writings of some of the best-known philosophes, Panckoucke was critical of the role of censorship in the regulation of his industry. In an article published in 1789 in the Observations et Me´moires sur la Physique, sur l’Histoire naturelle et sur les arts et me´tiers, he writes, ‘‘Je suis tellement ennemi de la censure, que je serais en e´tat de de´montrer qu’il ne peut exister un e´tat libre sans la liberte´ de la presse’’ (quoted in Tucoo-Chala, 437). He did believe, however, that the state should play a role in the protection of commercial interests: ‘‘Ceux qui ne savant pas distinguer la ligne de demarcation qui se´pare la liberte´ de la licence, ont e´te´, sont et seront toujours les seuls ennemis de la liberte´’’ (quoted in Tucoo-Chala, 437). 124. ‘‘Car rien n’est plus marque´, plus absolu que l’empire de l’esprit sur la matie`re’’ (Traduction libre, xxxix). 125. ‘‘C’est cette partie philosophique & syste´matique que j’ai sur-tout travaille´e avec le plus de soin, je me suis toujours beaucoup plus attache´ a` rendre le sens que les mots, les ide´es que les phrases’’ (Traduction libre, iv). 126. Traduction libre, iv. 127. By this point, Epicureanism considered as a theory of the materiality of the soul had been long out of fashion. In his article ‘‘Quelques re´flexions sur le concept d’aˆme dans la litte´rature clandestine,’’ Aram Vartanian writes, ‘‘Qu’un torrent d’atomes puˆt, rien que par ses qualite´s d’imponde´rabilite´ et de mobilite´, constituer l’aˆme et produire toute la varie´te´ des comportements qu’on observe chez les animaux et chez les hommes, voila` une hypothe`se qui devenait, avec le temps, de plus en plus incompre´hensible aux be´ne´ficiaires des progre`s scientifiques promus par Galile´e, Descartes et Newton’’ (150). 128. ‘‘Ce n’est qu’en tremblant qu’on ose exposer cette Traduction a` des yeux aussi e´claire´s que ceux de notre Sie`cle. Jamais le gouˆt des Sciences n’a e´te´ plus re´pandu; jamais le flambeau de la raison, celui de l’expe´rience, n’y ont porte´ un jour plus pur. Il semble que ce n’est pas dans de pareilles circonstances qu’on doit reproduire d’anciennes erreurs’’ (De la nature des choses, xi). 129. ‘‘Voici sur quoi l’on s’est fonde´ pour ne point abandonner cette entreprise’’ (De la nature des choses, xi). 130. ‘‘L’enthousiasme du Poe`te gagne son Lecteur; et celui-ci, s’amusant en meˆme temps qu’il s’instruit, ne´glige insensiblement ce qui ne peut que l’instruire sans l’amuser’’ (De la nature des choses, lxxviii). 131. De la nature des choses, lviii. 132. De la nature des choses, lvii.

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242 Notes to Pages 56–61 133. ‘‘Nous ne l’envisageons encore que comme il doit l’eˆtre aujourd’hui, comme une Production litte´raire, plus estime´e que connue, et qui me´rite de l’eˆtre’’ (De la nature des choses, lviii). 134. Dubos’s position becomes more difficult to decipher, however, when he simultaneously maintains that De rerum natura is remarkable precisely for the way in which most readers fail to cathect onto it either as lyric or as science. 135. ‘‘Comment pourrait l’eˆtre d’ailleurs un systeˆme me´taphysique, dont peu d’esprits sont en e´tat de suivre les de´veloppements et de saisir les conse´quences? Je ne connais de Livres vraiment dangereux et nuisibles a` la Socie´te´, que ceux qui peuvent allumer des passions fougueuses avant le moment prescrit par la Nature, ou les rendre plus fougueuses encore apre`s ce moment. S’il est arrive´ quelque grand malheur a` quelque Particulier a` l’occasion d’un Livre, c’est mal raisonner, ou, ce qui malheureusement n’est que trop vraisemblable, c’est eˆtre d’une insigne mauvaise foi, que de dire que, par cela seul, ce Livre est condemnable; car, sur ce principe, il faudrait condamner l’E´vangile, qui a conduit tant de Martyrs a` l’e´chafaud’’ (De la nature des choses, lviii).

2. Reading for Pleasure in the French Enlightenment: The Self-Possessed Reader and the Decline of Voluptas 1. ‘‘Vieille, tre`s vieille tradition: l’he´donisme a e´te´ refoule´ par presque toutes les philosophies; on ne trouve la revendication he´doniste que chez des marginaux, Sade, Fourier; pour Nietzsche lui-meˆme, l’he´donisme est un pessimisme’’ (Barthes, Le plaisir du texte, 91). 2. ‘‘Les uns, par des E´crits licentieux, flattent l’imagination d’une Jeunesse corrompue, & insinuent l’impie´te´ a` la faveur de la volupte´; les autres, par des E´crits qui semblent ne respirer que l’humanite´ & la bienfaisance, font illusion aux Ames honneˆtes’’ (Le Clerc de Juigne´, Lettre pastorale, 6). 3. Le Clerc de Juigne´, Lettre pastorale, 11. 4. ‘‘Enfin, a` peine paroıˆt-il un nouvel Ouvrage qu’on puisse lire sans danger, & la Religion compte presqu’autant d’ennemis, que la Litte´rature compte de Philosophes; & comme si la corruption du cœur humain ne donnoit pas encore assez de vogue a` ces pernicieux Ecrits, on les orne de tout ce qui peut en augmenter la se´duction; . . . & l’on y e´tale avec profusion ces tableaux scandaleux’’ (Lettre pastorale, 6). 5. Lettre pastorale, 9. 6. Lettre pastorale, 7. 7. Sinsart, Recueil de pense´es diverses, 371. 8. Sinsart, Recueil de pense´es diverses, 367–68. 9. ‘‘Pe´risse a` jamais cette affreuse philosophie, qui ne tend qu’a` nous plonger dans la plus dangereuse des erreurs!’’ (Recueil de pense´es diverses, 376). 10. Recueil de pense´es diverses, 369. 11. See Elena Russo’s article ‘‘Sociability, Cartesianism, and Nostalgia in Libertine Discourse’’ for both a perspective on this self as a ‘‘negation of nature’’ (387)

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Notes to Pages 61–62 243 and a reading of libertine literature as caught in nostalgia for a seventeenth-century discourse of the presocial Hobbesian subject. I agree with Russo that libertinage is backward- rather than forward-looking, but see this attitude as conditioned at least in part by libertine attachment to an Epicurean understanding of the social whereby nostalgia (or poetic remembrance of past pleasures) functions as part of an ongoing attachment to figura as a crucial mode of materialization. 12. Le Clerc de Juigne´, Lettre pastorale, 22. 13. Lasowski, Preface, xxix. This correspondence may have powerful public effects if its expression is not monitored. Certain eighteenth-century critics understand Epicureanism as a libertine philosophical tradition to be directly linked to the ‘‘social disease’’ of decadence. As the physician Albrecht von Haller puts it in his condemnation of La Mettrie, ‘‘l’expe´rience nous a appris que le libertinage de l’E´picure´isme, assez approchant de celui de l’Athe´isme, contribua, autant que toute autre cause, a` la de´cadence de Rome; lors que l’impudicite´ des deux sexes n’ayant plus de bornes, entraina l’extinction de presque toutes les Familles Nobles. . . . La dissolution des mœurs enflammera un Pe`re pour sa Fille; un Fre`re pour sa Sœur: Ils ne trouveront nulle re´sistance, & bien-toˆt ces passions violents & de´nature´es produiront dans chaque Famille les inimite´s les plus implacables’’ (13–14). For Haller, Epicureanism is libertine practice. 14. For critics of materialism, the pleasure that readers experience as a result of the perusal of materialist texts is dangerous not just because it prefigures possible actions, but because, in and of itself, this delight constitutes a transformation in readers’ perceptions. (It is not solely proleptic.) The act of reading is already a form of dissipation, even if it does not produce ‘‘vicious’’ behavior. Thus, for Massillon, in an early attack on ‘‘mauvais livres,’’ the process of reading can be described as inaugurating on its own a change in the relationship between the reader and the ‘‘world.’’ ‘‘Comment ne pas oublier le Seigneur . . . ,’’ he asks, ‘‘que tous les objets qui frappent vos sens, vous occupent et attachent uniquement; que vos lectures ne vous rappellent que des objets capables d’e´garer l’imagination; que les frivolite´s, les inutilite´s dont sont remplis vos livres, se communiquent a` votre esprit, l’empeˆchent de se fixer sur les choses se´rieuses, et lui font une fatigue de tout ce qui demande quelque attention?’’ (Discours, 6). For Massillon, the reading of ‘‘frivolous books’’ leads inevitably to the reading of ‘‘lascivious’’ ones; the question of action is posed later. 15. For an example of this perspective on ‘‘philosophical pornography’’ as a singular generic phenomenon, linked to the rise of enlightenment, see most famously Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. Darnton writes, ‘‘Copulation and metaphysics—nothing could be further from the modern mentality or closer to the libertine outlook of the eighteenth century’’ (91). Jean M. Goulemot describes this conjunction, and its temporal specificity, in this way: ‘‘Rappelons que le XVIIIe sie`cle est bavard et volontiers pe´dagogue: son roman pornographique n’e´chappe pas aux tentations du discours. On comprendra que les adaptations modernes du roman pornographique l’alle`gent de ces interminables pe´roraisons’’ (96). 16. D’Holbach, Syste`me de la nature, 1, 43.

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244 Notes to Pages 62–63 17. As Michel Delon puts it in his article ‘‘La marquise et le philosophe,’’ ‘‘The Enlightenment cultivates the intersection of literary and scientific discourse, at the same time as it defines the specificities of each and solidified what would henceforth be their irreconciliable divergence’’ (66). Jean Mainil, for his part, confirms the turn on the part of science from questions of effect (and affect) to questions of specialization. He writes, ‘‘Au XIXe sie`cle . . . , le discours me´dical disputera au roman obsce`ne moins un effet ne´faste de lecture qu’un savoir spe´cifiquement et exclusivement me´dical qu’il tente de faire reconnaıˆtre et circuler’’ (29). Perhaps due in part to this movement toward compartmentalization, which allows science to emerge as a discourse independent of readers’ responses, studies of the eighteenth-century outcry against ‘‘mauvais livres’’ tend to focus on the novel, rather than on what were at the time thought to be the equally nefarious effects of certain kinds of natural philosophy. Georges May’s Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe sie`cle, and in particular the chapter ‘‘La Proscription des romans,’’ remains a classic reference in scholarship on the condemnation of novel-reading. For a more recent aperc¸u, see Henri Coulet’s ‘‘Le Topos du roman corrupteur dans les romans franc¸ais du XVIIIe sie`cle’’ in L’E´preuve du lecteur: Livres et lectures dans le roman d’ancien re´gime. 18. As Natalie Ferrand confirms in her discussion of ‘‘le plaisir de lire,’’ ‘‘Mis a` part dans l’espace libertin, le plaisir ne peut eˆtre le seul effet d’une lecture. Il peut eˆtre le premier, mais doit aussitoˆt changer de nature, se sublimer, et changer de nom: s’appeler ‘pense´e’, ‘sentiment’, ‘connaissance’ ’’ (108). I am claiming in this project that Epicurean materialism—and, by extension, ‘‘l’espace libertin’’—does not require this gesture of sublimation, but should not as a result be understood as advocating a hedonism ultimately best enacted ‘‘outside of ’’ literature. Rather, the Epicurean tradition and its libertine variants are organized around a valorization of readerly pleasure as the privileged moment when ‘‘feeling’’ is transformed in figure. This understanding of pleasure is itself sublimated, in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the marginalization of voluptas in the scene of reading, and especially that of philosophical reading. 19. In addition to the two treatises discussed below, Diderot’s famous E´loge de Richardson is written in 1761—as I discuss at length in chapter 5—and Louis Bollioud-Mermet’s De la biliomanie is published in the same year. 20. In this sense, these essays differ from those condemning ‘‘mauvais livres’’ in that the authors do not take as their primary goal the restriction of reading publics, but instead seek to regulate an activity that they see as increasingly ubiquitous. On the other hand, Bollioud-Mermet’s De la bibliomanie, published a few years before Mercier’s Discours, addresses the problem of obsessive book collecting, a malady presumably restricted to those wealthy enough to afford the cultivation of excess in this respect. The goal of De la bibliomanie, as Bollioud-Mermet points out, is censure rather than legitimization or standardization. While the problem of excess recurs in the two essays I am examining here, it does so in the context of the authors’ attempts to outline ways of reading that can, in theory, apply to broader publics. 21. Mercier, Discours sur la lecture, 241.

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Notes to Pages 63–66 245 22. ‘‘Le gouˆt n’est point arbitraire, mais il l’est devenu dans ce sie`cle’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 245). 23. Discours sur la lecture, 240. Bollioud-Mermet proceeds further in the discourse of universalization than does Mercier. For the former, it is possible to claim: ‘‘Tout le monde lit. C’est l’occupation ou l’amusement ordinaire de la vie’’ (9). 24. Discours sur la lecture, 236. 25. Claude Labrosse, in Lire au XVIIIe sie`cle: La Nouvelle He´loı¨se et ses lecteurs, discusses the ways in which eighteenth-century readers vividly narrate the engagement with fiction in particular as an experience of ‘‘transformation’’ and even ‘‘revolution’’ (91). As Labrosse explains it, ‘‘En ses œuvres et en ses tropes, l’ecriture de fiction est militante et proselyte, elle s’entend comme la musique de l’e´thique’’ (92). The treatises on reading that I am concerned with here argue that the ‘‘revolutions’’ that reading may engender should be understood according to a logic of return to the origins of the self, a logic that is similarly invoked by readers of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se (published in 1761). Labrosse emphasizes how certain readers describe the novel as producing ‘‘la naissance et la reconnaissance de dispositions e´thiques et affectives posse´de´es mais oublie´es’’ (41). In this way, the experience of reading is involved in the construction of a subjectivity that predates fiction, even as it depends upon the latter for its emergence. 26. Discours sur la lecture, 273. 27. Bollioud-Mermet, Essai sur la lecture, vi. 28. Rather than seeing what Reinhard Wittmann has called ‘‘sentimental’’ and ‘‘hermeneutic’’ reading as opposed to one another, Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet suggest that the possibility of ‘‘empathetic’’ identification is itself grounded in the objectification or the instrumentalization of the text as a means of self-discovery. Hermeneutic reading, undertaken for the edification of the reader, simply renders this objectification explicit, insofar as it is dependent upon the conscious distancing of the reader from the subject matter of the text in question. Nonetheless, sentimental reading, at least in Mercier’s and Bollioud-Mermet’s terms, also requires the abstraction of the self from the matter of the text so that identification may be experienced as such. For a discussion of the ‘‘revolution’’ in reading that produces the sentimental reader, see Reinhard Wittmann’s ‘‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’’ Wittmann sees ‘‘escapist’’ sentimental enjoyment as different in kind from forms of controlled appreciation as ‘‘an autonomous artistic practice,’’ while I am arguing here that these two modes of reading are conjoined for Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet. For these authors, both escapist sentimentalism and judicious appreciation depend initially on the ability to abstract the self from the effects of the text so that the position of readers vis-a`-vis their reading matter can be correctly identified. 29. Discours sur la lecture, 271. 30. Discours sur la lecture, 235. Mercier was friendly with Rousseau and remained so even after the latter’s rupture with the group around the Encyclopedia. Hermann Hofer writes in his introduction to Louis-Se´bastien Mercier, pre´curseur et sa fortune, that ‘‘Of all the disciples of Rousseau, [Mercier] was the most persistent in defending

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246 Notes to Pages 66–67 against his enemies and detractors the man he considered his teacher [maıˆtre]’’ (13). On the most general level, Mercier’s lengthy career as a man of letters was marked, not unlike that of Rousseau, by idiosyncracy and a certain fondness for paradox. In an article on Mercier’s La Ne´ologie, Daniel Rosenberg describes him as ‘‘a writer who criticized book learning, a republican who promoted the ‘despotic’ prerogative of the author, an idealist fascinated with the materiality of everyday life, a modernist who praised the ancients, and an academic opposed to the Academy’’ (368). For a reading of Mercier as iconoclast, see Jean-Claude Bonnet’s essay ‘‘La Litte´rature et le re´el’’ in Louis-Se´bastien Mercier (1740–1814): Un He´re´tique en litte´rature. Bonnet describes Mercier as ‘‘le rejeton le plus re´solument critique’’ of his age (11). 31. Essai sur la lecture, 1. 32. ‘‘La lecture perfectionne-t-elle l’esprit humain, nourrit-elle le ge´nie plus que la me´ditation, est-elle utile, est-elle nuisible? C’est ce que je me propose d’examiner’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 239). 33. Discours sur la lecture, 272. 34. ‘‘Un entretien secret, que nous formons avec un plus habile ou plus aimable homme que nous, dans la vue de nous instruire ou de nous amuser’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 240). 35. Discours sur la lecture, 272. 36. Discours sur la lecture, 286. 37. ‘‘Il importe donc a` chacun de nous de se connoıˆtre & de connoıˆtre ses semblables, de savoir les rapports qui nous lient a` la socie´te´, de sentir ses devoirs & de les remplir’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 271). 38. Discours sur la lecture, 240. 39. Discours sur la lecture, 240. 40. ‘‘Changer notre caractere naturel; & ce mal est tre`s grand, car on n’est jamais bien que soi-meˆme’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 269). 41. ‘‘La privation de toute lecture est nuisible sans doute, mais elle l’est moins cent fois que cette ardeur aveugle d’ouvrir mille brochures & de prendre insensiblement tous les travers dont elles font l’e´loge’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 261). 42. ‘‘Je voudrois ane´antir ces entraves indignes qui arreˆtent le vol du ge´nie, lui rendre sa liberte´ primitive & son inde´pendance naturelle. Je voudrois proscrire cette science futile & embarrassante, cette science de mots qu’on taˆche de faire passer pour la science ve´ritable. Je voudrois accoutumer de bonne heure un jeune homme a` l’exercice de ses propres forces, lui enseigner a` ne choisir dans cette foule immense de livres de toute couleur & de toute espece, que ceux qui peuvent ve´ritablement l’instruire; lui me´nager un tems pre´cieux; lui e´pargner des lectures dangereuses. Je voudrois lui inspirer le courage d’ignorer ce qu’il ne sauroit savoir sans charger sa teˆte d’un fardeau, qui est beaucoup moins fait pour l’utilite´ de la vie que pour une vaine ostentation. Ainsi, plein de respect pour les connoissances humaines, qui font notre gloire, mon but est de lui en donner la cle´, de lui en applanir la route, afin que re´lativement a` son gouˆt & a` ses devoirs, il distingue du premier coup d’oeil ce qui lui convient de ce qui ne lui convient pas’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 272).

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Notes to Pages 68–71 247 43. ‘‘La lecture nous inspire l’esprit d’autrui, la me´ditation nous rend le noˆtre propre. L’homme qui a lu, parle; l’homme qui a me´dite´, pense’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 290–91). 44. ‘‘Le meilleur e´crivain n’est pas celui qui nous e´tonne; c’est celui qui semble nous remettre sous les yeux ce qui e´toit cache´ dans les replis de notre ame’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 244). 45. Discours sur la lecture, 241. 46. ‘‘Ce n’est point assez qu’une fiction soit touchante, il faut qu’elle tienne a` la ve´rite´: puise´e dans la nature, elle ne doit jamais l’alte´rer’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 285). 47. ‘‘Il est un aˆge ou` la raison n’est point encore forme´e; ou` sorti de l’enfance, un jeune homme conduit ses pas au hazard. Son esprit alors doit suivre le guide e´claire´ qui lui prescrit ses lectures. Les livres lui sont ne´cessaires, parce qu’il n’a pas ce jugement re´fle´chi qui pese & de´cide, ce gouˆt, ce frein ne´cessaire a` une imagination ardente & peu re´gle´e, cette invention qui est le don heureux d’un aˆge plus avance´; c’est donc le tems d’e´tudier des modeles & de suivre les lec¸ons de ses maıˆtres. Mais lorsque la raison est parvenue a` ce moment ou` elle brille dans son e´clat, que son ame est de´veloppe´e, il est alors ce qu’il doit paroıˆtre un jour: qu’il s’e´lance dans la carriere, il a droit d’e´couter ce que sa raison lui dicte, d’approuver ce qu’elle avoue, de rectifier ce qu’elle condamne, de soumettre de nouveau a` son propre examen ce que d’autres examinerent & de´ciderent avant lui. Ce privilege est le plus beau d’un eˆtre pensant, & s’il s’e´gare, du moins il aura marche´ de lui-meˆme; il reviendra sur ses pas, si son cœur est droit; il doit trouver le sentier de la ve´rite´ sans secours, ou cette ve´rite´ lui seroit inutile’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 273). 48. ‘‘Avanc¸ons donc encore, & sans craindre de trop oser, retranchons hardiment tout ce qui est faux ou minutieux’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 275). 49. Where for Lucretius reading begins as a consummate act of pleasure, for Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet reading must be understood first as an instance of labor. Both authors indicate that pleasure should be considered as a symptomatic and contingent response to texts, rather than the causal mechanism driving their consumption. 50. ‘‘Suffisons-nous plutoˆt a` nous-meˆmes que de nous mettre dans le danger de ne voir que par les yeux d’autrui: faisons gloire d’une sage ignorance, & cherchons seulement ce qui est beau & bon par sa nature inalte´rable’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 275). 51. Discours sur la lecture, 294. 52. ‘‘Il y a mille traits qui ne se re´velent qu’a` une belle ame, a` un homme sensible, qui a des dispositions morales a` la vertu’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 237, note b). 53. ‘‘Ce que la re´flexion ne produit pas dans un instant, elle ne le peut avec des mois entiers: elle est lumineuse & rapide, elle compare & combine avec ce´le´rite´, ou elle reste ense´velie dans les nuages qui l’offusquent’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 282, note a). 54. ‘‘Les Franc¸ais sont tous, plus ou moins, esclaves des mots: on ne demande aujourd’hui que des termes doux, coulans, de la grace & de la mollesse dans le lan-

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248 Notes to Pages 71–74 gage, comme s’il s’agissoit de mettre en chant tous les vers de la langue’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 259, note a). 55. ‘‘Si l’e´tude des sciences n’e´leve point tous les caracteres, elle devient peuteˆtre pour le plus grand nombre le premier, le plus vrai & le plus solide des plaisirs’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 237). 56. ‘‘Sybarites paresseux, qui redoutez la geˆne de la plus le´gere me´ditation, qui vous formez un esprit de re´miniscence, vous faudra-t-il toujours des livres pour amuser & distraire votre indolence? Vous les parcourez nonchalamment, & vous ne´gligez le plus beau de tous, celui de la nature!’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 261). 57. ‘‘On interroge des auteurs, mais ces auteurs ont parle´ relativement a` leurs vues, a` leurs pre´juge´s, aux circonstances ou` ils se trouvoient; on court risque d’e´pouser sans le vouloir les petites passions qui les dominoient’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 256–57). 58. ‘‘Ecoutez plutoˆt ceux qui marchent en silence au paisible flambeau de la raison, . . . qui, compatissans comme Socrate, doux & fermes, grands & simples, nous consolent, nous apprennent nos devoirs, & nous de´couvrent le but de notre eˆtre’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 285). 59. Discours sur la lecture, 282. 60. ‘‘Malheur au poe`te qui n’est point philosophe’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 283). 61. Discours sur la lecture, 253. 62. ‘‘La douceur, l’ame´nite´, les graces de leur style, doivent re´pondre a` leurs pense´es, aussi vives que fortes, aussi fortes que vraies’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 282). In his essay De la litte´rature et des litte´rateurs (1778), Mercier elaborates forcefully on this point. ‘‘Comment ne pas reconnaıˆtre,’’ he asks, ‘‘que le style est l’empreinte de l’aˆme et qu’il ne s’apprend point, qu’il ne s’imite point?’’ (54, quoted in Bonnet, 20). 63. Discours sur la lecture, 275. 64. Discours sur la lecture, 279. 65. ‘‘Livrez-vous a` ses attraits se´duisans, mais ne vous y abandonnez pas’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 281). 66. Discours sur la lecture, 282–83. 67. ‘‘Rien n’agrandit plus l’esprit humain, rien ne nous donne une ide´e plus magnifique de l’auteur de la nature, que l’examen des loix admirables qui re´gissent ses augustes ouvrages’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 286). 68. ‘‘Il ignore souvent lui-meˆme ce qu’il est: la me´ditation le lui apprend. . . . l’esprit embrasse alors plus qu’il ne voit; sa vue devient trop foible pour son intelligence, elle prend l’essor & plane en liberte´: rien ne l’arreˆte’’ (Discours sur la lecture, 290). Mercier’s position on the benefits of reading as a form of instrumentalization allows literary writing to be valorized as the domain of self-revelation even as this formal privilege is shown to be a consequence of the configuration of literature itself as redundant. The literary field comes into being insofar as it is caught between its fundamental interest for readers as the mise en sce`ne of the subject, and its equally fundamental superfluity. 69. Essai sur la lecture, 9. 70. Essai sur la lecture, 52–53.

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Notes to Pages 74–79 249 71. Essai sur la lecture, 59. 72. Essai sur la lecture, iii–iv. 73. Essai sur la lecture, vi. 74. Essai sur la lecture, ix. 75. ‘‘La nature de´partiroit en vain ses dons, si l’on ne´gligeoit de les cultiver’’ (Essai sur la lecture, viii). 76. Essai sur la lecture, 3. 77. Essai sur la lecture, 5. 78. Essai sur la lecture, 5–6. 79. Essai sur la lecture, 7. 80. Essai sur la lecture, 7. 81. ‘‘Plus les sciences se perfectionneront, plus les lettres feront de progre`s, & plus l’usage des livres s’accre´ditera’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 9). 82. ‘‘Mais pour observer avec quelque ordre la manie`re dont on s’acquitte commune´ment de cet exercice, & les moyens qu’il faudroit prendre pour s’en mieux acquitter, il convient de distinguer deux sortes de lecteurs: ceux qui n’ont pour objet que l’amusement, ou la simple occupation, & ceux qui se proposent dans leurs lectures l’instruction & l’e´tude se´rieuse’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 9–10). 83. Essai sur la lecture, 19. 84. ‘‘Insensiblement l’amorce du plaisir attire’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 19). 85. Essai sur la lecture, 20. 86. ‘‘La de´licatesse de sentiment, la finesse de gouˆt qu’on lui attribue, lui ont acquis la faculte´ de de´cider du sort des ouvrages d’esprit’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 20–21). 87. ‘‘Celui qui a l’avantage de lui plaire est bientoˆt accre´dite´’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 21). 88. Essai sur la lecture, 23. 89. ‘‘Heureux de´lire qui fait oublier les lec¸ons d’une raison austere, le soin des affaires se´rieuses, & qui rend sourd a` la voix du devoir!’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 22). 90. ‘‘Sa me´lodie & son mouvement dissipent l’engourdissement de l’ame, les caprices de l’humeur, de´lassent des travaux & des soins pe´nibles, calment les inquie´tudes, suspendent, du moins pour un temps, le sentiment des maux inse´parables de la vie humaine’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 36). 91. ‘‘C’est une sorte de magie a` laquelle il est si doux de se livrer!’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 36). 92. Essai sur la lecture, 3–4. 93. ‘‘La Lecture . . . est plus libre, plus tranquille, moins passionne´e. Le Lecteur affranchi du respect humain, de la brigue, & de l’impe´tuosite´ de l’action oratoire, ne connoissant pas meˆme souvent l’Auteur de l’ouvrage qu’il lit, en porte un jugement plus e´quitable, plus sain & moins suspect. Rien ne le de´tourne d’examiner de pre`s, de tout peser avec maturite´, de sentir e´galement les beaute´s & les imperfections, enfin de relire a` plusieurs fois, soit qu’il veuille e´claircir ses doutes, soit qu’il ait dessein de graver profonde´ment dans sa me´moire les objets de sa lecture’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 44–5).

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250 Notes to Pages 80–83 94. ‘‘Si l’on veut se procurer un profit complet, il est indispensablement ne´cessaire de joindre les re´flexions a` l’attention’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 52). 95. Essai sur la lecture, 53. 96. Essai sur la lecture, 60–61. 97. ‘‘Exercer votre jugement, . . . e´prouver votre gouˆt; & cette discussion n’est pas le moindre fruit de la lecture. Il est expe´dient d’apprendre a` bien juger, afin de savoir bien faire’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 94). 98. ‘‘Constant & fidele, il ne change point; vous le retrouvez toujours le meˆme, jaloux de votre confiance & dispose´ a` vous servir. Libe´ral & de´sinte´resse´, il vous donne tout ce qu’il possede. Il n’aspire qu’a` vous enrichir de ses acquisitions & de ses de´couvertes. Que dis-je? Il porte son zele jusqu’a` vous nourrir de sa substance. Il tend a` s’unir intimement a` vous, & a` vous attirer a` lui. . . . Tous ces Auteurs qui, a` votre e´gard, exercent si utilement tant de diffe´rents ministeres, qui vous ont consacre´ leurs veilles, qui vous e´clairent de leurs lumieres, qui vous font confident de tous leurs secrets, ces meˆmes Auteurs dignes d’eˆtre vos maıˆtres a` tant de titres, vous choisissent cependant pour leur Juge. Ils deviennent volontairement vos clients & vos tributaires. Ils recherchent votre estime & votre approbation, & craignent moins de votre part la censure que l’indiffe´rence. En se soumettant ainsi a` votre critique, ils vous rendent un nouveau service. . . . La me´thode de lire avec examen accoutume a` sentir finement, a` distinguer l’excellent du me´diocre, & le solide du frivole’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 91–94). 99. ‘‘O! qu’il est doux de s’adonner a` un exercice si agre´able, si le´gitime & si utile!’’ (Essai sur la lecture, 123). 100. Pre-Revolutionary definitions of volupte´ reliably begin with its connection to Epicurus. Thus, the Dictionnaire de Tre´voux defines volupte´ in the following terms: ‘‘Ce mot dans le langage des anciens Philosophes signifioit, plaisir, de´lectation, e´motion agre´able qui chatouille l’aˆme: c’est une douce agitation & un emportement agre´able. E´picure faisoit consister le souverain bien dans la volupte´’’ (468). In this definition, voluptuousness is a sensation that confuses the distinction between soul and body by traversing the boundary between the physical and the spiritual aspects of being. In modern definitions, the emphasis is squarely on the materiality of volupte´, both as a sensation deriving from the body and as a response to material objects in their concreteness. In the Larousse, volupte´ accordingly becomes ‘‘Impression extreˆmement agre´able, donne´e aux sens par des objets concrets, des biens mate´riels, des phe´nome`nes physiques, et que l’on se plaıˆt a` gouˆter dans toute sa ple´nitude.’’ 101. ‘‘On entend commune´ment par volupte´ tout amour du plaisir qui n’est point dirige´ par la raison; & en ce sens toute volupte´ est illicite; le plaisir peut eˆtre conside´re´ par rapport a` l’homme qui a ce sentiment, par rapport a` la socie´te´, & par rapport a` Dieu. S’il est oppose´ au bien de l’homme qui en a le sentiment, a` celui de la socie´te´, ou au commerce que nous devons avoir avec Dieu, de`s-lors il est criminel’’ (Encyclope´die, 17: 459). 102. ‘‘La raison doit en eˆtre la maıˆtresse, elle en doit eˆtre la regle, les sens n’en sont que les ministres, & ainsi quelques de´lices que nous espe´rions dans la bonne chere, dans les plaisirs de la vie, dans les parfums & la musique, si nous n’approchons

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Notes to Pages 84–86 251 de ces choses avec une ame tranquille, nous serons trompe´s, nous nous abuserons d’une fausse joie, & nous prendrons l’ombre du plaisir pour le plaisir meˆme’’ (Encyclope´die, 17: 458). 103. Encyclope´die, 12: 689. 104. Encyclope´die, 12: 689. 105. ‘‘Qui aime les plaisirs sensuels: en ce sens, tout homme est plus ou moins voluptueux’’ (Diderot, ‘‘Voluptueux,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 8: 446). 106. Diderot, ‘‘Voluptueux,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 8: 447. 107. ‘‘Ceux qui enseignent je ne sais quelle doctrine austere qui nous affligeroit sur la sensibilite´ des organes que nous avons recue de la nature qui vouloit que la conservation de l’espece & la noˆtre fussent encore un objet de plaisirs; & sur cette foule d’objets qui nous entourent & qui sont destine´s a` e´mouvoir cette sensibilite´ en cent maniere age´ables, sont des atrabilaires a` enfermer aux petites-maisons’’ (Diderot, ‘‘Voluptueux,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 8: 447–48). 108. ‘‘Jouir, c’est connoıˆtre, e´prouver, sentir les avantages de posse´der’’ (Diderot, ‘‘Jouissance,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 7: 575). 109. ‘‘Entre les objets que la nature offre de toutes parts a` nos desirs; . . . y en a-t-il un plus digne de notre poursuite, dont la possession & la jouissance puissent nous rendre aussi heureux, que celles de l’eˆtre qui pense & sent comme vous’’ (Diderot, ‘‘Jouissance,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 7: 575–76). Georges Benrekassa, in his article on Diderot’s entry, describes the Diderotian conception of jouissance as ‘‘la possession de la possession’’ (12). Jouissance, for Diderot, represents a metaphysically complete form of enjoyment—one that may obviate the legal or social conventions of ownership to become a kind of pure possession. The philosophical privilege that accrues to jouissance in Diderot’s account has been remarkably enduring, even though the concept takes on, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts, very different resonances. (In Pleasure of the Text, for instance, Roland Barthes takes up jouissance as, in contrast to plaisir, a disruptive force that works to destabilize the domain of the doctrinal, the known, the acquis.) For a brief contemporary genealogy of jouissance, particularly in its relationship to feminist work on pleasure, see Jane Gallop’s ‘‘Beyond the Jouissance Principle.’’ Gallop is interested in the reification of jouissance in Anglophone approaches to French theory. As she writes, ‘‘When jouissance itself becomes a principle, we must ask what is beyond that principle, what disrupts it or is suppressed by it’’ (113). I would suggest that, for Diderot, jouissance as principle is already fully imbricated in a semantic history of possession that, for Barthes and Gallop, this same term is serving to unsettle. 110. ‘‘Mais lorsque la femme commenc¸a a` discerner, lorsqu’elle parut mettre de l’attention dans son choix, & qu’entre plusieurs hommes sur lesquels la passion promenait ses regards, il y en eut un qui les arreˆta, qui put se flatter d’eˆtre pre´fe´re´, qui crut porter dans un cœur qu’il estimait l’estime qu’il faisait de lui-meˆme, & qui regarda le plaisir comme la re´compense de quelque me´rite; lorsque les voiles que la pudeur jeta sur les charmes laisse`rent a` l’imagination enflamme´e le pouvoir d’en disposer a` son gre´, les illusions les plus de´licates concoururent avec le sens le plus exquis, pour exage´rer le bonheur; l’aˆme fut saisie d’un enthousiasme presque divin;

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252 Notes to Pages 86–88 deux jeunes cœurs e´perdus d’amour se voue`rent l’un a` l’autre pour jamais, & le ciel entendit les premiers serments indiscrets. Combien le jour n’eut-il pas d’instants heureux, avant celui ou` l’aˆme tout entie`re chercha a` s’e´lancer & a` se perdre dans l’aˆme de l’objet aime´! On eut des jouissances du moment ou` l’on espe´ra’’ (Diderot, ‘‘Jouissance,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, Encyclope´die, 7: 577). 111. Essai sur la lecture, 54. 112. The marginalization of reading for pleasure as a practice thus inevitably stimulates a flood of discourse concerning the phenomenon itself, since it is only through the continuous discursive repositioning of pleasurable sensations that the authority of the intellectual to read with critical enjoyment can be recuperated. Moreover, as Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet suggest, the more readers see pleasure as quantifiable, the more they tend to take pleasure in the very gesture of quantification. 113. Le Clerc de Juigne´, Lettre pastorale, 4. 114. Jean-Pierre Dubost emphasizes ‘‘hedonism’s profound indifference to rationality’’ in his article ‘‘Libertinage and Rationality: From the ‘Will to Knowledge’ to Libertine Textuality.’’ He writes, ‘‘Delight and pleasure in the highest degree lie beyond willpower and reflection, and hedonism, which inevitably forms the basis of the whole system of libertinage, praises passivity above all else’’ (72).

3. ‘‘Flowers Strewn on the Way to Volupte´’’: La Mettrie and the Tropic Body of the Epicurean Philosopher 1. The 1747 treatise L’Homme-machine, in which La Mettrie’s scandalous automaton made his debut, has accordingly come to suggest the ultimate realization of modern materialism as a symptomatic expression of the processes of regularization described by Michel Foucault as ‘‘projects of docility’’ (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault portrays machine-man in the following terms: ‘‘La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul and a general theory of dressage, at the centre of which reigns the notion of ‘docility’, which joins the analysable body to the manipulable body’’ (136). The notion of Lamettrian man as paradigmatic symptom of modernity is however already expressed in Aram Vartanian’s important presentation of L’Homme-machine in La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea. Vartanian writes, ‘‘Since the basic ideas of l’Homme machine have become so broadly diffused and so completely absorbed into the main currents of modern thought, the book itself may be said today to concern chiefly the historian’’ (132). Later in his career Vartanian offers a different reading of La Mettrie’s treatise as ascribing to humanity the active power to know itself in Science and Humanism in the French Enlightenment. 2. Riskin, ‘‘The Defecating Duck,’’ 610. 3. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 5. ‘‘L’Homme est une Machine si compose´e, qu’il est impossible de s’en faire d’abord une ide´e claire, et conse´quemment de la de´finir’’ (La Mettrie, L’Homme-machine, in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1: 66). 4. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 5. ‘‘Laissons-la` l’Histoire de toutes les vaines opinions des Philosophes’’ (HM, 67).

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Notes to Pages 88–90 253 5. In a particularly ripe passage, La Mettrie affirms his ateleological understanding of human existence: ‘‘Perhaps he [man] was thrown by chance on a point of the earth’s surface without anyone being able to say how or why, but simply that he has to live and die, like mushrooms which appear from one day to the next’’ (Machine Man, 23). ‘‘Peut-eˆtre a-t-il e´te´ jette´ au hazard sur un point de la surface de la Terre, sans qu’on puisse savoir ni comment, ni pourquoi; mais seulement qu’il doit vivre et mourir; semblable a` ces champignons, qui paroissent d’un jour a` l’autre, ou a` ces fleurs qui bordent les fosse´s et couvrent les murailles’’ (HM, 93). 6. Thomson, ‘‘L’Homme-machine, mythe ou me´taphore?’’ 371. 7. Thomson, ‘‘L’Homme-machine, mythe ou me´taphore?’’ 375. 8. Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, Enlightenment, 181. Leonora Cohen Rosenfeld, in her 1941 study From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie, takes a perspective similar to Wellman’s on the problem posed by the title of L’Homme-machine. Rosenfeld writes, ‘‘By human mechanism La Mettrie merely understood the inclusion of human activity in natural phenomena. To take the charge too literally would render the thesis internally meaningless. Obviously the author did not conceive of man as a pure automaton when he went on to extol his faculty of imagination and sing the praises of his capacity for education through the senses’’ (144). 9. Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity, 145. 10. Dumarsais writes, ‘‘Qu’est-ce que donc que les figures? Ce mot se prend ici lui-meˆme dans un sens figure´. C’est une me´taphore. Figure, dans le sens propre, c’est la forme exte´rieure d’un corps. Tous les corps sont e´tendus; mais outre cette proprie´te´ ge´ne´rale d’etre e´tendus, ils ont encore chacun leur figure et leur forme particulie`re, qui fait que chaque corps paraıˆt a` nos yeux diffe´rent d’un autre corps; il en est de meˆme des expressions figure´es. . . .’’ (Dumarsais, Des Tropes, ou des diffe´rents sens, 64). 11. For a discussion of the use of specific figures of speech in structuring scientific argument, see Jeanne Fahnestock’s Rhetorical Figures in Science. 12. Francine Markovits has identified this disjunction as undergirding an ‘‘economy of contradiction’’ in La Mettrie’s work (Markovits, ‘‘La Mettrie, l’anonyme et le sceptique,’’ 83). Markovits emphasizes La Mettrie’s commitment to an extreme diversity of style as well as his willingness to explore a variety of (often contradictory) philosophical positions simultaneously. ‘‘Tantoˆt dans le meˆme ouvrage, La Mettrie fait discours: Machiavel et Anti-Machiavel, ou l’Ouvrage de Pe´ne´lope, en pre´sentant une fausse syme´trie, nous donne la clef du double discours de La Mettrie,’’ she writes (86). 13. Wellman characterizes La Mettrie’s determinism as ‘‘intriguing rather than dry and despairing’’ (La Mettrie, 223). She continues, ‘‘He recognized that even though there is no other scientifically supportable conclusion that human beings can come to about their own existence and capacities, it is not and cannot be a standard or principle by which human beings act’’ (223). In this chapter I will examine the apparent contradiction that troubles Wellman—the gap between a determinist science and the subjective resistance to constraint—as one inaugurated in La Mettrie’s

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254 Notes to Pages 90–95 work and thought at the level of style. The ‘‘problem’’ of constraint is both raised as a formal question and resolved as one. 14. In an example of this reading of Lamettrian materialism, Michel Onfray, in his own L’Art de Jouir, starkly reiterates the ‘‘natural’’ connection between matter and forms of constraint in his description of machine-man. He asserts, ‘‘The body is a machine for pleasure and for suffering, and it is possible to manipulate its functions’’ (241). 15. Jacob, ‘‘The Materialist World of Pornography,’’ 164. 16. Braudy, ‘‘Fanny Hill and Materialism,’’ 36. 17. Machine Man, 7. ‘‘Le corps humain est une Machine qui monte elle meˆme ses ressorts; vivante image du mouvement perpetuel’’ (HM, 69). 18. Machine Man, 39. ‘‘Concluons donc hardiment que l’Homme est une Machine; et qu’il n’y a dans tout l’Univers qu’une seule substance diversement modifie´e’’ (HM, 117). 19. Machine Man, 27. 20. De rerum natura, 1: 612–24. 21. DRN, 2: 700. 22. DRN, 4: 45–53. 23. DRN, 4: 745–48. 24. La Mettrie published his Syste`me d’E´picure toward the end of his life. He claims in this collection of philosophico-literary fragments to be producing a ‘‘Project for Life and Death worthy of crowning an Epicurean system,’’ and his fondness for Epicureanism as a theory of pleasure is evident throughout this work (La Mettrie, The System of Epicurus, 104). In his article ‘‘La Mettrie et le Syste`me d’E´picure,’’ Andre´ Comte-Sponville argues for the significance of La Mettrie’s commitment to Epicureanism to an understanding of his work, even in the context of the eighteenthcentury author’s strong attachment to hypotheticalism and philosophical heterodoxy. According to Comte-Sponville, ‘‘Certainly, La Mettrie clearly sees the fragility of these [Epicurean] theories . . . ; but, even hypothetically, it [Epicureanism] is obviously the system he prefers and under the aegis of which, without dogmatism . . . , but also without hesitation, he chooses to place himself ’’ (113). 25. Machine Man, 13. In L’Homme-machine as in other parts of his corpus, it is clear that for La Mettrie the engagement with materialism, rather than foundering in determinism, opens up new possibilities for the imagination in particular as a creative faculty profoundly rooted in substance. In a famous passage from L’Hommemachine, La Mettrie writes, ‘‘I always use the word ‘imagine’ because I believe that everything is imagined and that all the parts of the soul can be properly reduced to imagination alone, which forms them all’’ (Machine Man, 15). ‘‘Je me sers toujours du mot imaginer, parce que je crois que tout s’imagine, et que toutes les parties de l’Ame peuvent eˆtre justement re´duites a` la seule imagination, qui les forme toutes’’ (HM, 81). 26. Machine Man, 14. ‘‘Ces Mots et ces Figures qui sont de´signe´es par eux, sont tellement lie´es ensemble dans le cerveau, qu’il est assez rare qu’on imagine une chose, sans le nom, ou le Signe qui lui est attache´’’ (HM, 81).

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Notes to Pages 97–99 255 27. Machine Man, 17. 28. Machine Man, 39. 29. Seigneux de Correvon, ‘‘Pre´face,’’ viii. 30. Machine Man, 14. ‘‘Tout ce savoir dont le vent enfle le Ballon du cerveau de nos Pe´dans orgueilleux, n’est donc qu’un vaste amas de Mots et de Figures . . .’’ (HM, 81). 31. The Discours pre´liminaire was placed at the head of the edition of La Mettrie’s collected works that was published in 1750 and has sometimes functioned, for critics, as a particularly striking example of the author’s tendency toward conceptual inconsistency. This short essay is at once deeply programmatic—it appears meant to constitute an explicit formulation of the role played by materialist philosophy in both sustaining and combating religious and political orthodoxies—and strangely lacking in analytic coherence. (On the other hand, John Falvey’s description of the last part of the Discours as ‘‘difficult to comprehend in its details because of the strange mixing of explicit and boldly frank affirmations with obscure and ambiguous allusions’’ might apply to much of La Mettrie’s critical writing [Falvey, ‘‘La politique textuelle du Discours pre´liminaire,’’ 41].) For a close reading of the themes of the Discours and a helpful account of the circumstances leading up to its production, see Ann Thomson’s Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie’s Discours pre´liminaire. 32. The System of Epicurus, 102. ‘‘La Philosophie n’est de meˆme qu’une Science de belles paroles’’ (Syste`me d’E´picure, in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1: 368). 33. Preliminary Discourse, 156. ‘‘Quant a` la communication, ou si l’on veut, a` la contagion que l’on craint, je ne la crois pas possible. Chaque homme est si fortement convaincu de la ve´rite´ des Principes dont on a imbu, et comme abreuve´ son enfance; son amour propre se croit si inte´resse´ a` les soutenir, et a` n’en point de´mordre, que quand j’aurois la chose aussi fortement a` coeur, qu’elle m’est indiffe´rente, avec toute l’Eloquence de Ciceron, je ne pourrois convaincre personne d’eˆtre dans l’erreur. La raison en est simple. Ce qui est clair et de´montre´ pour un Philosophe, est obscur, incertain, ou plutoˆt faux pour ceux qui ne le sont pas, principalement s’ils ne sont pas faits pour le devenir’’ (Discours pre´liminaire, in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1: 23. 34. Preliminary Discourse, 155. ‘‘J’ai cru prouver que les remords sont des pre´juge´s de l’e´ducation, et que l’Homme est une Machine qu’un fatalisme absolu gouverne impre´rieusement: J’ai puˆ me tromper, je veux le croire: mais suppose´, comme je le pense since`rement, que cela soit philosophiquement vrai, qu’importe?’’ (Discours pre´liminaire, 21). 35. Falvey, ‘‘La politique textuelle,’’ 28. 36. In an essay that usefully traces the trajectory of La Mettrie’s various engagements with aesthetics, John Falvey describes this tendency in the following terms: ‘‘La Mettrie is not usually thought of as an artist, yet as one of the most misunderstood and maligned thinkers in his own age, he exemplifies the case of a creative writer . . . forced to create by an inward compulsion. . . . Nor is he usually thought of as a source of aesthetic notions, but it becomes clear from his several accounts of

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256 Notes to Pages 100–101 the nature of writing that he is talking about the need felt by certain men to exteriorise themselves in the form of a created symbol’’ (Falvey, ‘‘The Aesthetic of La Mettrie,’’ 397). I differ from Falvey in seeing La Mettrie’s engagement with ‘‘exteriorization’’ through aesthetic consumption and production as consistently and intimately connected to his materialism as a doctrine of substance. This is true, I would argue, even when La Mettrie is styling himself as frivolous. In this context, I also understand La Mettrie’s relationship to the creative arts, and to literature in particular, as defined not so much by a unique need for self-expression as by an understanding of tropes (or figures) as themselves formative where subjects are concerned. 37. The System of Epicurus, 107. ‘‘Cette Substance molle et tendre, sur laquelle le cachet de l’erreur s’e´toit bien imprime´, rase´ aujourd’hui, n’a conserve´ aucuns vestiges, ni de mes Colle´ges, ni de mes Pe´dans. J’ai eu le courage d’oublier ce qu j’avois eu la foiblesse d’apprendre; tout est raye´, (quel bonheur!) tout est efface´, tout est extirpe´ jusqu’a` la racine: et c’est le grand ouvrage de la re´fle´xion et de la Philosophie; elles seules pouvoient arracher l’yvroie, et semer le bon grain dans les sillons que la mauvaise herbe occupoit’’ (Syste`me d’E´picure, 375). 38. The System of Epicurus, 111. ‘‘De´licieuse re´miniscence. Lectures agre´ables, Vers charmans, Philosophes, Gouˆt des Arts, aimables Amis, vous qui faites parler a` la Raison meˆme le langage des Graces, ne me quittez jamais’’ (Syste`me d’E´picure, 381). 39. Blair Campbell maintains, in an article ‘‘La Mettrie: The Robot and the Automaton,’’ that ‘‘If La Mettrie was concerned to empty man of his individuality in his L’Homme-machine, he was no less concerned to replace it in such works as La Volupte´ and L’Art de jouir. Here he invites the man-machine to redirect his attention; to turn away from externals, away from his socio-biological machine shop, in order to look inward’’ (566). 40. A first version of this essay, apparently entitled La Volupte´, appeared in 1746. This edition is extremely rare. In his article ‘‘The Aesthetics of La Mettrie,’’ John Falvey refers to the first version as L’E´cole de la Volupte´ (1746), rather than La volupte´, and claims that ‘‘The first known edition of La Volupte´ is La Volupte´ par M. le Chevalier de M**, capitaine au re´giment Dauphin,’’ published in 1747. In accordance with the suggestions made by Ann Thomson in her recent annotated edition of L’E´cole de la Volupte´, I am assuming that the publishing history of the text is as follows: La Volupte´ (first published in 1746), L’E´cole de la volupte´ (first published in 1746), L’Art de jouir (first published in 1751). In the analysis that forms the body of this chapter, I am relying on the version of La Volupte´ that appears in Francine Markovits’ edition of the Oeuvres philosophiques. This version of the essay is somewhat longer than L’E´cole de la volupte´, and significantly more developed than L’Art de jouir. It appeared in many of the posthumous editions of La Mettrie’s Oeuvres philosophiques, including the Amsterdam editions of 1753, 1764, and 1774 and the Berlin editions of 1764, 1774, and 1796. The frontispiece that is reproduced here is from a 1747 edition of L’E´cole de la volupte´ that is bound together with a libertine fable entitled Les Trois volupte´s. This pairing foregrounds the poetic and the libertine influences visible in La Mettrie’s essay. A later version of L’Art de jouir, appearing after the Revolution,

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Notes to Pages 102–105 257 is bound with a salacious faux-medical treatise entitled De la propagation du genre humain; this particular coupling reinserts La Mettrie’s work into a quasi-scientific (and indeed quasi-pornographic) context, a linkage that La Mettrie strains to undo in his essay. Ann Thomson emphasizes the ‘‘style pre´cieux’’ of L’Art de jouir in her article on jouissance in La Mettrie and Sade, ‘‘L’Art de jouir de La Mettrie a` Sade.’’ 41. Thomson, ‘‘Commentaire,’’ 198. 42. The titles La Volupte´ and L’E´cole de la volupte´ underscore the essay’s participation in an Epicurean philosophico-literary tradition that took seriously the Epicurean placement of voluptas at the center of an ethical, philosophical, and poetic project. 43. Baret, Mademoiselle Javotte, 64. 44. An early model for this process might in fact be found in the figure used by Lucretius to represent the experience of love as a form of habituation; ‘‘Nothing,’’ Lucretius writes of the cumulative effects of custom on amorous fancy, ‘‘can resist the continually repeated impact of a blow, however light, as you see drops of water falling on one spot at long last drill through a stone’’ (DRN, 4: 1284–87). The ‘‘light blows’’ of habitual constraint initiate the process of dissolution in penetration, just as the hardness of the stone both resists and disintegrates into the water that is falling on it. 45. For a usefully systematic account of the structural order of L’E´cole de la volupte´, see Falvey, ‘‘The Aesthetics of La Mettrie,’’ 434–37. 46. La Mettrie, VOL, 130. 47. ‘‘Ce charme et cette douceur que je sentais autrefois’’ (Montesquieu, Le Temple de Gnide, n.p.). 48. ‘‘Heureux enfants de la volupte´ . . . que l’amour a pris soin de former luimeˆme’’ (VOL, 89). 49. ‘‘C’est ainsi qu’un sage ose quelquefois ouvrir lui-meˆme une e´cole de volupte´. Eh! quel autre en effet doit apprendre aux mortels le secret d’eˆtre heureux? Disciples d’E´picure, accourez tous, et rendez hommage a` un maıˆtre plus digne de vous’’ (VOL, 124). 50. Jean-Pierre Dubost, ‘‘Libertinage and Rationality,’’ 63. Dubost uses this formula to describe libertine techniques of representation that ‘‘compel the logos to represent at the same time the ‘knowing about’ and the ‘knowing how’ ’’ (63). La Mettrie is interested in this philosophico-literary tradition both as a domain where theory and praxis come together and as a particular intervention in the (erotic) history of the materialist subject. 51. ‘‘C’est ainsi qu’un cœur tendre et afflige´ cherche a` soulager les maux que lui cause votre absence’’ (VOL, 87). It is possible that ‘‘Madame la Marquise’’ is meant to refer to Gabrielle-E´milie de Breteuil, marquise du Chaˆtelet, scientist, scholar, and translator of Newton’s Principia Mathematica. La Volupte´ has as its epigraph ‘‘Scribere jussit amor,’’ while L’E´cole de la volupte´ opens with the famous quotation with which De rerum natura begins: ‘‘Aeneidum genetrix,/Hominum divumque voluptas.’’ This epigraph not only inscribes the essay in the Epicurean tradition, but

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258 Notes to Pages 105–108 makes of it an explicit echo of Lucretius’s poem, rewritten in an eighteenth-century style galant. 52. VOL, 89. 53. ‘‘Mais plus poe¨te que Fontenelle, sois aussi philosophe que lui: fonds la glace de ses ide´es, sans qu’elles perdent rien de leur justesse; animes enfin, donnes la vie aux objets, meˆme les plus fantastiques: l’imagination voluptueuse attend de toi son triomphe’’ (VOL, 91). 54. VOL, 94. Many scholars have commented on the difficulty of establishing the French libertine tradition as a ‘‘consistent’’ or systematic one. Jean-Pierre Dubost writes that ‘‘It is not possible . . . to speak about a libertine ‘philosophy,’ but only about a literary universe of libertinage, mostly to be found in the form of narratives’’ (56). I see the canon that La Mettrie outlines in La Volupte´ as libertine not just in the sense that this canon develops from within an investigation of erotic representation as a secularizable form of savoir technique, but in that the texts that La Mettrie lists tend to stage the conjunction of poetic and philosophic knowledge as a privileged site of subjective pleasures. 55. VOL, 96. 56. VOL, 95. 57. VOL, 95. 58. ‘‘savent, sans se perdre dans une volupte´ me´taphysique, modifier a` l’infini, mille ide´es les plus agre´ables, mille sentiments divers!’’ (VOL, 100). 59. ‘‘Mais pour plaire a` un tel point, pour enlever les cœurs, pense´es fines et de´licates, richesse d’expressions, tours heureux, hardiesse de pinceau, traits sublimes, il faut que toutes les beaute´s de la nature soient releve´es par celles de l’art: il faut que les unes et les autres, soient, si l’on me permet de parler ainsi, comme surprises de se trouver rassemble´es, sous un meˆme point de vue, avec tant de charmes. Il faut donc sentir soi-meˆme, par quelle inimitable adresse, on dit mieux les choses, en les supprimant; comment on irrite les desirs, en aiguillonnant la curiosite´ de l’esprit, sur un objet en partie couvert, qu’on ne devine pas encore, et qu’on veut avoir l’honneur de deviner!’’ (VOL, 100–1). 60. VOL, 100. The aesthetic ideal, here, is less the virtuous coquetry of the early sentimental novel, where a certain ‘‘reasonable’’ simplicity tends to inform the portrayal of nature, than the stylized allegories of Montesquieu’s Le Temple de Gnide, where the figures of classicism come to life as elements of an eroticized ‘‘natural’’ landscape. 61. ‘‘Oui, l’art avec lequel ils me´nagent la pudeur, est l’art de la faire disparoıˆtre: sous le voile se´ducteur, dont leurs objets son inge´nieusement couverts, ils font plus de conqueˆtes, que ceux qui montrant tout a` de´couvert, ne laissent plus rien a` de´sirer’’ (VOL, 100). 62. ‘‘L’empire de l’amour ne reconnoıˆt d’autres bornes, que les bornes du plaisir’’ (VOL, 98). This is a sentence that the Marquis de Sade will later refer to, in his own, better-known efforts to write the coming together of matter and form in the perverse body of the Lucretian libertine. 63. VOL, 98.

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Notes to Pages 108–112 259 64. ‘‘Que de graces naı¨ves et touchantes s’offrent de toutes parts! Comme il raconte l’histoire de l’e´colier de Pergame!’’ (VOL, 97). 65. ‘‘C’est ainsi que l’art ajoute a` la nature, et la fait varier a` l’infini’’ (VOL, 117). 66. Deleuze, ‘‘Lucre`ce et le simulacre,’’ 362–63. 67. VOL, 95. 68. VOL, 103. 69. ‘‘Ces deux enfants de diffe´rent sexe, qu’on laisse vivre seuls paisiblement ensemble . . . Sans e´ducation, et par conse´quent sans pre´juge´s, livre´s sans remords a` une mutuelle sympathie’’ (VOL, 106). 70. ‘‘Tout occupe´ de son nouvel eˆtre, il cherche a` de´brouiller le cahos de la nature; il sent, il desire, sans trop savoir ce qu’il sent, ni ce qu’il desire; il entrevoit seulement par l’envie qu’il a d’eˆtre heureux, la puissance qu’il a de le devenir. Ses desirs confus forment un voile, qui de´robe a` sa vue le bonheur qui l’attend. Consolez-vous, jeunes bergers, le flambeau de l’amour dissipera bientoˆt les nuages qui retardent vos beaux jours. Les plaisirs apre`s lesquels vous soupirez, ne vous seront pas toujours inconnus; la nature vous en offrira partout l’image; elle est attentive au bien eˆtre de ceux qui la servent. Deux animaux s’accoupleront en votre pre´sence; vous verrez des oiseaux se caresser sur une branche; tout vous fera de l’amour une lec¸on vivante. Que de re´flexions vont naıˆtre de ce nouveau spectacle!’’ (VOL, 106–7). 71. VOL, 107. 72. ‘‘Elle avait de´ja` vu son joli visage dans l’onde: le meˆme miroir va lui servir, pour contempler des charmes secrets, qu’elle ignoroit’’ (VOL, 107). 73. While La Mettrie presents this particular scene of sexual awakening as at least in part a matter of images, the framing of the essay as a whole registers the latter’s involvement with the explicitly literary and poetic presentation of such images. For d’Argens, as well as for other critics of the Lucretian figuralism to which La Mettrie attaches himself, the erotic text shows a marked tendency first to become conflated with—and then to be overwritten by—the obscene image. In La Volupte´, on the other hand, La Mettrie preserves a characteristically Lucretian attention to figures of speech as eliciting the power of the image in general to induce pleasure. 74. ‘‘He´las! oui, nos sentiments les plus doux sont involontaires, comme nos pense´es’’ (VOL, 105). 75. We might think of La Mettrie’s voluptuous subject as materially similar in certain ways to the ‘‘matter’’ of plastic itself, particularly as it is described by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Barthes writes, ‘‘Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement’’ (97). 76. ‘‘Tout est volupte´ pour un homme d’esprit’’ (VOL, 113). 77. ‘‘Entoure´ de volupte´s, admirateur des phe´nomenes, qui frappent le plus ses sens, rien ne le trouble’’ (VOL, 119). 78. ‘‘Ce n’est donc que dans les sens qu’il faut chercher le plaisir, les sensations d’esprit les plus agre´ables, ne sont que des plaisirs moins sensibles. Mais la volupte´ veut eˆtre recherche´e plus loin; elle nous manqueroit souvent, si nous ne l’attendions que des sens. S’ils lui sont ne´cessaires, ils ne lui suffisent pas; il faut que l’imagination supple´e a` ce qui leur manque. C’est elle qui met le prix a` tout; elle e´chauffe le cœur,

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260 Notes to Pages 112–114 elle l’aide a` former des desirs, elle lui inspire les moyens de les satisfaire. En examinant le plaisir, qu’elle passe, pour ainsi dire, en revue, le microscope dont elle semble se servir, le grossit et l’exagere: c’est ainsi que la volupte´ meˆme, cet art de jouir, n’est que l’art de se tromper, comme faisoit cette femme dont parle Montaigne, qui regardoit son amant avec une loupe, pour grossir son point de vue. Ah! si je me trompe, en augmentant le plaisir de mes sensations et mon bonheur, puisse´-je me tromper toujours ainsi!’’ (VOL, 112). 79. VOL, 112. 80. La Mettrie thus plays off the Cartesian definition of the imagination as a faculty rooted, unlike the understanding, in the body. Descartes writes, ‘‘imagining is merely the contemplating of the shape or image of a corporeal thing’’ (Meditations, 65). For Descartes, this means that ‘‘the power of imagining that is in me, insofar as it differs from the power of understanding, is not required for my own essence, that is, the essence of my mind. For were I to be lacking this power, I would nevertheless undoubtedly remain the same entity I am now’’ (93). Because of its connection to the body, Descartes excludes the imagination from playing a constitutive role in establishing the thinking subject; its imbrication in matter renders it contingent to intellection as a necessarily disembodied activity. For an elegant reading of the way in which Descartes positions the imagination in the Meditations, see Judovitz, The Culture of the Body, 83–107. In La Volupte´, La Mettrie resituates the imagination as the defining mechanism of the voluptuous philosopher; this move enables him to envision an embodied subject that comes into being in the act of representing embodiment to itself. 81. ‘‘Le voluptueux seul, a` l’ombre de la volupte´, re´unit toutes les illusions; seul il jouit de toutes ses ide´es, il les appelle, il les re´veille, et caresse en quelque sorte celles qui lui plaisent, au gre´ de son imagination lubrique: non que je sache, comment l’imagination broie ses couleurs; mais l’image du plaisir qui en re´sulte, paroıˆt eˆtre le plaisir meˆme’’ (VOL, 117). 82. ‘‘Le voluptueux sensible a` tout, ne veut rien perdre, et ne perd rien. Pour eˆtre heureux, il n’a qu’a` vouloir’’ (VOL, 117). 83. ‘‘Le plaisir est de l’essence de l’homme, et de l’ordre de l’univers. . . . Il est distingue´ dans l’univers par son esprit; un choix de´licat, un gouˆt e´pure´, en rafinant ses sensations, en les redoublant en quelque sorte par la re´flexion, en a fait le plus parfait, c’est-a`-dire le plus heureux des eˆtres’’ (VOL, 119). 84. ‘‘S’il se promene, le plus beau lieu, le chant des oiseaux, un ciel serein et tempe´re´, un air rempli du parfum des fleurs, un bosquet impe´ne´trable aux rayons du soleil, ou` l’on gouˆte la double volupte´ d’eˆtre au frais et de lire Chaulieu, le gazon le plus fin, le plus touffu, qu’on foule avec sa maıˆtresse, dans un endroit du bois si e´carte´, que les regards profanes n’y peuvent pe´ne´trer; la plus belle vue, la plus belle alle´e, celle ou` Diane se promene elle-meˆme avec toute sa cour; le lever de l’aurore, et du soleil, la magnifique couleur de pourpre, qui se jouant dans le brun des nues, a` son couchant, forme la plus superbe de´coration; les rayons argente´s de la lune, qui consolent les voyageurs de l’absence du soleil; les e´toiles, qui semblent autant de diamants, dont l’e´clat est releve´ par le fond bleu, auquel elles sont attache´es: ces nuits

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Notes to Pages 115–116 261 plus belles que les plus beaux jours, qui re´pandent leur rose´e, pour de´salte´rer la terre, et leurs pavots, pour de´lasser les mortels fatigue´s, et endormir les maris jaloux: ces nuits vertes, plus belles encore, que forment les arbres touffus des foreˆts, nuits qui inspirent les plus douces reˆveries, ou` l’ame contente, recueillie, se caressant ellemeˆme, enchaıˆne ses pense´es volages, dans les bornes charmantes de l’amour: ombre impe´ne´trable aux yeux des Argus, ou` il suffit d’eˆtre seul, pour desirer d’eˆtre avec vous, Ce´phise, et d’eˆtre avec vous, pour eˆtre heureux; que dirai-je enfin? il faudroit de´crire l’univers; toute la nature est dans un cœur qui sent la volupte´’’ (VOL, 118). 85. ‘‘Tous les mouvements de notre machine, conduisent a` l’amour, et de l’amour a` la volupte´, des eˆtres organise´s pour eˆtre heureux’’ (VOL, 135). 86. ‘‘Interdit l’usage de la parole, de la vue, et de la pense´e meˆme, qu’il change en sentiment: il ane´antit l’ame avec tous les sens, dont elle est le principe, ou la fin’’ (VOL, 129). 87. ‘‘Le plaisir va les chercher jusqu’aux extreˆmite´s d’eux-meˆmes, et ne se contentant pas des voies ouvertes, il se fait des passages au travers de tous les pores, . . . : semblable a` ces sources, qui resserre´es par l’e´troit tuyau, dans lequel elles serpentent, ne se contentent pas d’une issue aussi large qu’elles-meˆmes, creˆvent et se font jour en mille endroits; telle est l’impe´tuosite´ du plaisir’’ (VOL, 131). 88. ‘‘Votre ide´e me suivant par-tout, me tiendroit lieu de vous-meˆme: l’ide´e de la beaute´ vaut la beaute´ meˆme, et souvent est encore plus se´duisante. Doux souvenir de mes plaisirs passe´s, ne me quittez jamais! De quelle douce et molle volupte´, je me sens pe´ne´tre´! Dieux puissants! se peut-il que les organes du corps suffisent a` tant de bonheur?’’ (VOL, 109). 89. Peter Cryle, in his book The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France, sees La Mettrie’s preoccupation with ‘‘the flow of warm desire’’ as evidence of an emergent concern with circulation in erotic and scientific texts (53). The fascination with substance rather than figural anatomy, for Cryle, is a mark of both the gradual naturalization and the interiorization of desire (as something that circulates between bodies). In my reading of Lamettrian materialism as heavily inflected by Epicureanism, I do not see ‘‘substance’’ and ‘‘form’’ as in any sense opposed to one another. Instead, I read La Mettrie, through Lucretius, as engaged with an Epicurean theory of matter (both hard substance and rigorously externalized form) that negotiates a passage between the two. Cryle’s argument about circulation—and its relative thematic newness during the eighteenth century—is extremely convincing, but I maintain that it is important to acknowledge, in this context, the ways in which classical Epicurean philosophy reunites figure and circulatory movement within matter as a substance. This synthesis is nonetheless increasingly disavowed in what becomes, in accordance with the analysis presented by Cryle, an ever more insistent focus on the excavation of brute substance as animated from the inside by sentiment, ideation, soul. La Mettrie delights in blurring these antinomies. 90. VOL, 92. 91. ‘‘Plaisir, (eh! que n’ai-je l’art de Lucrece pour t’invoquer sans cesse!)’’ (VOL, 124).

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262 Notes to Pages 117–122 92. DRN, 4: 1086–90. 93. DRN, 4: 1090–96. 94. This is Sade’s solution as well, albeit in the context of the novel, as I will discuss in chapter 6. 95. DRN, 4: 1063–67. 96. VOL, 92. 97. ‘‘C’est ainsi que tout ravit, tout enflamme un cœur sensible et amoureux; chaque beaute´ l’extasie, chaque eˆtre inanime´ lui parle et le remue, chaque partie de la cre´ation le remplit de volupte´’’ (VOL, 122). 98. VOL, 108. 99. ‘‘Mais plus heureux encore, ceux dont l’imagination vive et lubrique tient toujours les sens dans l’avant-gouˆt du plaisir! Examinez leurs yeux, et jugez, si vous pouvez, s’ils vont au plaisir, ou s’ils en viennent. . . . Voyez comme ils me´nagent [les restes de leur plaisir], les che´rissent, les prolongent; leur e´tat est si charmant, qu’ils planent, pour ainsi dire, sur ses de´lices’’ (VOL, 108–9). 100. VOL, 109. 101. ‘‘Pourquoi faut-il, amour, que le don de sentir n’ait pas e´te´ accorde´ a` toutes les femmes, avec celui de plaire? Le bonheur d’aimer, de jouir de ce qu’on aime, ne devroit-il pas toujours faire gouˆter le grand plaisir, a` qui a le pouvoir de le procurer?’’ (VOL, 110). La Mettrie is not alone in this reading of feminine insensibility; compare, for instance, Denis Diderot’s description of feminine anorgasmia in ‘‘Sur les femmes’’ (the first version of which appears in 1772). However, La Mettrie, unlike Diderot, is interested in exploring the vexed feminine relationship to pleasure as potentially productive of a legitimately materialist stance vis-a`-vis the inherent complexity of perception. Diderot, in his essay, tends to deplore women’s lack of sensitivity as both pathological and enigmatic. 102. VOL, 112. 103. ‘‘Parlerai-je de cette femme respectable qui craint de se livrer a` l’objet de sa passion? Elle accorde a` l’ide´e de son amant, plus qu’a` lui-meˆme; pourquoi? C’est, lui dit-elle, que je n’ai a` craindre avec votre ide´e, ni indiscre´tion, ni inconstance, et que je la suppose en un mot, telle que je voudrois que vous fussiez’’ (VOL, 105). 104. VOL, 121. 105. ‘‘Tu ne connois point encore mes transports, je voudrois que toute mon ame passaˆt dans la tienne’’ (VOL, 115). 106. VOL, 115. 107. ‘‘Mettre tout en œuvre, pour calmer ce qu’on aime, et faire jouir un aimable objet, qui rec¸oit de nouveaux charmes, par la vivacite´ avec laquelle il desire la jouissance!’’ (VOL, 115). 108. ‘‘Ce´phise . . . voyant le vif inte´reˆt que je prenois au succe`s de ses plaisirs, . . . l’air e´leve´, anime´, dont je l’encourageois, . . . alors, moins agite´e, d’une voix douce et d’un regard mourant, enfin, dit-elle, . . . ah! viens vıˆte, cher amant, viens dans mes bras, que j’expire dans les tiens’’ (VOL, 116). 109. VOL, 115.

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Notes to Pages 122–126 263 110. ‘‘Chaque eˆtre vous adresse la parole, seriez-vous sourdes a` sa voix?’’ (VOL, 120). 111. System of Epicurus, 103. ‘‘Savez-vous pourquoi je fais encore quelque cas des Hommes? C’est que je les crois se´rieusement des Machines. . . . Le Mate´rialisme est l’antidote de la Misantropie’’ (Syste`me d’E´picure, 369–70). 112. ‘‘Jetez les yeux sur le tableau de l’amour conjugal, et sur tous les ouvrages de ces physiciens, qui aimant plus la nature, qu’ils ne l’ont connue, ont cherche´ le plaisir dans les plus se´rieuses recherches. Avec quelle inge´nieuse adresse, l’amour profite de l’ignorance meˆme des mortels qu’il instruit!’’ (VOL, 126). La Mettrie’s reference here is to the Tableau de l’amour conside´re´ dans l’e´tat du mariage by Doctor Venette, first published around 1687. In the words of Jean Mainil, ‘‘Le texte de Venette constitue ne´anmoins un des plus anciens documents me´dicaux en langue franc¸aise a` parler avant tout du corps, d’un corps qui se libe`re peu a` peu de ses entraves the´ologiques mille´naires’’ (120). A work of enduring popularity, Venette’s Tableau was reprinted and reedited throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into the twentieth. For an approach to the Tableau informed by Foucault, see Mainil’s chapter ‘‘Savoir me´dical et pratiques sexuelles sous Louis XIV: Le Tableau de l’amour conside´re´ dans l’e´tat du mariage du Docteur Venette’’ in Dans les re`gles du plaisir. 113. VOL, 132. 114. ‘‘E´coutez ses soupirs dans un silence attentif, comptez tous ses mouvements, et vos plaisirs naıˆtront de vos re´flexions sur les siens’’ (VOL, 133). 115. ‘‘Le meˆme cœur, (soyez-en suˆres) la meˆme ame vous communiquera les meˆmes feux, feux d’autant plus ardents, qu’il ne sera pas distrait de vous par vousmeˆmes’’ (VOL, 133).

4. ‘‘I Resist It No Longer’’: The´re`se philosophe and the Compulsions of Enlightened Literary Materialism 1. For a helpful overview of attempts to attribute an author to the novel and a presentation of the publication history, see Franc¸ois Moureau’s ‘‘Pre´face’’ to The´re`se philosophe. After discussing the attribution to d’Argens, Moureau raises the possibility that the author might be the Austrian spy La Serre. For further treatment of the attribution problem, see also Pascal Pia’s ‘‘Pre´face’’ to his 1979 edition of the novel, Raymond Trousson’s introduction to The´re`se philosophe in Romans libertins du XVIIIe sie`cle, and Pierre Saint-Amand’s brief account in the essay ‘‘Boyer d’Argens’’ that appears in Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe sie`cle. 2. ‘‘L’aˆme n’a de volonte´ . . . que par les sensations, que par la matie`re’’ (The´re`se philosophe, 966–68). 3. Robert Darnton renders explicit the presumed connection to La Mettrie. He writes, ‘‘The´re`se talked the same language as Diderot, d’Holbach, and La Mettrie. Her story appeared in the same year as La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine, and it made the same point: in copulation as in gravitation, everything could be reduced to the identical principle, matter in motion’’ (103). Similarly, in his article ‘‘John Cleland and the Marquis d’Argens,’’ Barry Ivker writes, ‘‘La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine

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264 Notes to Pages 127–128 (1747), which may well have provided the philosophic basis for D’Argens’ novel, also manifests the same mixture of philosophy and badinage and almost identical arguments in justifying ego satisfaction at the expense of what society labels moral obligation, remorse, duty and self-sacrifice’’ (146). Despite Ivker’s claim here, The´re`se’s mentors in fact reiterate to her at several points that ‘‘The laws established in each region, to strengthen the ties of society, must be respected: he who infringes upon them must be punished, because, as it is example that restrains poorly ordered men with bad intentions, it is true that the punishment of a criminal contributes to the general tranquility’’ (968). 4. ‘‘Son aˆme tout entie`re va se de´velopper dans les de´tails des petites aventures qui l’ont conduite, comme malgre´ elle, pas a` pas, au comble de la volupte´’’(TP, 873). 5. La Philosophie du bon sens, first published in 1737 but reworked by the marquis d’Argens throughout his intellectual career, is a kind of critical compendium, influenced by libertine materialism as well as by Lockean empiricism, outlining ‘‘all the reasons capable of making men see what precautions they should take before giving credence to certain opinions’’ (63) and addressed to an ‘‘amiable person’’ (62). Toward the end of La Philosophie, d’Argens offers a defense of Epicurean ethics, in conjunction with a scathing attack on La Mettrie, as I will discuss. 6. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, 114. In his ‘‘Pre´face’’ to The´re`se, Philippe Roger describes the heroine in the following terms: ‘‘C’est une fille des Lumie`res, elle joint un cœur tranquille a` un esprit droit. . . . Elle n’est jamais objet, toujours sujet’’ (24). 7. Assoun, ‘‘Lire La Mettrie,’’ 30. 8. Kant, ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’ 59. 9. Cusset, No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment, 103. Cusset also sees the novel as exposing a contradiction at the heart of what she calls ‘‘the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment’’: namely, the incompatibility of reason with desire as a form of compulsion. She writes of the final episode with the Count, ‘‘The Count, in using the power of the image as his main argument, is the first enlightened and ‘wise’ protagonist to admit, almost openly, that the power of the image is stronger than that of reason. The Count therefore recognizes the failure of the Enlightenment, or at the least of rational argument, in the domain of desire’’ (112). My argument differs from Cusset’s in that I understand this scene to put into action the capacity of reason to formulate a pornographic domain from which it may then reveal itself to be independent. In other words, reason produces precisely the disjunction that Cusset describes as its contradiction. 10. Saint-Amand, ‘‘Notice,’’ 1298. 11. Peter Cryle, in Geometry in the Boudoir, takes a measured approach to this issue in emphasizing the connection of moments of feminine intimacy (and shared knowledge) to instances of masculine control, not only in The´re`se philosophe, but in other early modern ‘‘courtesans’ dialogues.’’ In Dans les Re`gles du plaisir . . . , Jean Mainil gives a detailed and fascinating analysis of the way in which the figure of The´re`se is caught between an abstract recognition of feminine erotic specificity and

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Notes to Pages 128–131 265 the tendency of the novel to present vaginal penetration as the sole mechanism by which femininity is confirmed and validated. Moreover, Mainil writes, ‘‘La femme reste finalement prise entre le role de ‘pot de chambre pour pisser’ et celui d’apprentie philosophe a` qui on enseigne une e´galite´ the´orique qui n’a jamais cours dans les exercices pratiques’’ (169–70). I am indebted to Mainil’s explorations of these tensions, and see The´re`se philosophe as offering the reader a means of resolving them through the final abjection of The´re`se vis-a`-vis her lover. This moment, brought about by the consumption of erotic images and figures, allows a space for critical autonomy to emerge on the part of the reader as well as on that of the Count, as I will explain below. 12. Saint-Amand, 1298. 13. ‘‘Je vous le re´pe`te donc, censeurs atrabilaires, nous ne pensons pas comme nous voulons. . . . La raison nous e´claire; mais elle ne nous de´termine point’’ (TP, 966–68). 14. ‘‘Oui, cher amant! . . . je suis toute a` toi; frappe-moi, je ne crains plus tes coups’’ (TP, 966). ` ces espe`ces d’automates accoutume´s a` penser par l’organe d’autrui, qui ne 15. ‘‘A font telle ou telle chose que parce qu’on leur dit de les faire’’ (TP, 966). 16. Mainil, Dans les re`gles du plaisir . . . , 173. 17. TP, 873. 18. Michel Delon, in an article on The´re`se philosophe and Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir, emphasizes the dialectical relationship between philosophy and pornography that he sees as characteristic of these two texts. He writes, ‘‘The originality of our two texts is not in the affirmation that materialism leads to behavioral freedom or, as in the discourse of the anti-philosophes, to the dissolution of all morality and all society, but in the displacement of philosophy. They do not content themselves with an abstract exchange of arguments, but juxtapose theoretical borrowings with erotic scenes, intellectual debates with physical encounters’’ (85–86). I am arguing that in the case of The´re`se philosophe, the relationship between philosophy and pornographic writing is both intimate and estranged; philosophy needs pornography, here, to show it what it is not. 19. ‘‘Eh bien! mon cher bienfaiteur, je ne re´siste plus: e´crivons. . . .’’ (TP, 873). 20. Pierre Saint-Amand makes the point in his reading of The´re`se philosophe that the major events of the novel progress from a moment of specularity—where The´re`se watches a priest take sexual advantage of a young woman—through a moment of speculation—where The´re`se learns the principles of what will become her materialism from two mentors, Mme. C . . . and Abbe´ T . . . —to an ‘‘effective’’ or practical period encompassing The´re`se’s experience under the tutelage of a Parisian prostitute and her subsequent ‘‘escape’’ into the household of the Count. 21. ‘‘Que l’exemple et les pre´ceptes sont de grands maıˆtres pour former le cœur et l’esprit!’’ (TP, 904). 22. ‘‘S’il est vrai qu’ils ne nous donnent rien et que chacun ait en soi les germes de tout ce dont il est capable, il est certain du moins qu’ils servent a` de´velopper ces

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266 Notes to Pages 131–132 germes et a` nous faire apercevoir les ide´es, les sentiments dont nous sommes susceptibles’’ (TP, 904). 23. Saint-Amand, ‘‘Notice,’’ 1295. 24. ‘‘Imbe´ciles mortels! Vous croyez eˆtre maıˆtres d’e´teindre les passions que la nature a mises dans vous, elles sont l’ouvrage de Dieu’’ (TP, 873). 25. This focus on feminine compulsion becomes a commonplace of pornographic representation. Linda Williams, in her study of pornographic cinema, emphasizes the reliance of hard-core pornography on scenes of what she calls ‘‘involuntary confession’’ (50). She writes, ‘‘The animating male fantasy of hardcore cinema might therefore be described as the (impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in a female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured. It is not surprising, then, that so much early hardcore fantasy revolves around situations in which the woman’s sexual pleasure is elicited involuntarily, often against her will, in scenarios of rape and ravishment. In these scenarios the unwilling victim’s eventual manifestations of pleasure are offered as the genre’s proof of a sincerity that under other conditions might seem less sure’’ (50). I read the interest evinced in The´re`se philosophe for the heroine’s compulsive response to figuration not as an attempt to get at the ‘‘truth’’ of the matter, but as an effort to evacuate this hyperreactivity to representation onto an obscene textual body that is necessarily distinct from that of a reader, who, even if aroused by the images, should emerge from the book confident that he is not fully compelled by them. In bearing witness to the philosophical inappropriateness of The´re`se’s response, readers can be confirmed in their more ‘‘judicious’’ perception of figure, a perception that is subsequently privileged as the source of a mature and critical knowledge. From this perspective, the compelled pornographic body becomes the privileged site of a connection between matter and figure, a connection that must be put aside in order for a reliable, ‘‘truthful’’ knowledge to come into existence in opposition to it. 26. ‘‘Excite´e par les avant-coureurs du plaisir, j’e´tais incapable d’aucune autre re´flexion; l’enfer entrouvert sous mes yeux n’aurait pas eu le pouvoir de m’arreˆter’’ (TP, 879). 27. ‘‘De cette connaissance acquise par la raison, il re´sulte ce que nous appelons la volonte´ et la de´termination. Mais cette volonte´ et cette de´termination sont aussi parfaitement soumises aux degre´s de passion ou de de´sir qui nous agitent qu’un poids de quatre livres de´termine ne´cessairement le coˆte´ d’une balance qui n’a que deux livres. . . .’’ (TP, 880). 28. ‘‘Parce que la nature n’agit que par un meˆme principe’’ (TP, 880). 29. In her reading of The´re`se, Cusset makes a similar point regarding the effects of figure as part of her analysis of the scene of The´re`se’s confession. Cusset is interested in what she calls ‘‘the phantasmatic power of the image’’ as enacting ‘‘the equivalence between interdiction and desire’’ (96). I see this power less as phantasmatic than as vividly physiological. The´re`se experiences here the material force of figure to move bodies, a force that can be invoked in other contexts for philosophical ends, even though it is not in itself philosophical.

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Notes to Pages 133–136 267 30. ‘‘Ce serpent charmant se peignait sans cesse dans mon aˆme, et s’y arreˆtait malgre´ moi, soit en veillant ou en dormant. Quelquefois, tout e´mue, je croyais y porter la main, je le caressais, . . . et dans le fort de mon extase ou de mon reˆve, toujours marque´ par un fre´missement de volupte´, je me connaissais presque plus’’ (TP, 879). 31. TP, 965. 32. ‘‘Les te´ne`bres de mon esprit se dissipaient: peu a` peu je m’accoutumais a` penser, a` raisonner conse´quemment’’ (TP, 904). 33. ‘‘Un fourbe, un malheureux, qui se laisse emporter a` la force de ses passions’’ (TP, 902). The episode with Dirrag, which gives the novel its subtitle, was inspired by a cause ce´le`bre that took place in Toulon in 1731. A penitent, Marie-Catherine Cadie`re (rendered anagrammatically in the novel as E´radice) accused a Jesuit priest, Jean-Baptiste Girard (Dirrag) of seducing and impregnating her, before magically inducing an abortion. In part because Cadie`re’s directeur de conscience after her break with Dirrag was a Jansenist, Nicolas de Saint-Joseph, the affair soon took on national importance in the context of ongoing struggles between Jesuits and Jansenists. Girard was eventually acquitted by the Parlement at Aix, under pressure from the various sides involved, and died two years later in Doˆle. Trousson gives a summary of the case in his introduction to The´re`se. For more information about the involvement of d’Argens in this affair, see also the documents collected in Pascal Pia’s and Philippe Roger’s editions of the novel. D’Argens was in Aix at the time of the trial, and claims in his Me´moires to have spoken to all of the major witnesses in the case. 34. TP, 903. 35. ‘‘Il m’a donne´ la raison pour m’en servir, pour me guider’’ (TP, 918). 36. ‘‘Gens qui savent penser, et dont les passions sont tellement en e´quilibre entre elles qu’ils ne sont subjugue´s par aucun’’ (TP, 923). 37. ‘‘Je ne vaux rien quand je n’ai pas fait la besogne qui affecte le plus vivement mon imagination. Les autres ide´es ne sont pas nettes et se trouvent toujours absorbe´es, confondues par celle-ci. Je t’ai de´ja` dit que lorsqu’a` Paris je m’occupais presque uniquement de la lecture et des sciences les plus abstraites, de`s que je sentais l’aiguillon de la chair me tracasser, j’avais une petite fille ad hoc comme on a un pot de chambre pour pisser, a` qui je faisais une ou deux fois la grosse besogne. . . . Alors l’esprit tranquille, les ide´es nettes, je me remettais au travail. Et je soutiens que tout homme de lettres, tout homme de cabinet, qui a un peu de tempe´rament, doit user de ce reme`de aussi ne´cessaire a` la sante´ du corps qu’a` celle de l’esprit. Je dis plus: je pre´tends que tout honneˆte homme qui connaıˆt les devoirs de la socie´te´ devrait en faire usage, afin de s’assurer de n’eˆtre point excite´ trop vivement a` s’ecarter de ces devoirs en de´bauchant la femme ou la fille de ses amies, ou de ses voisins’’ (TP, 908). 38. ‘‘ ‘Pre´sentement vous me demanderez, peut-eˆtre, madame,’ continua l’abbe´, ‘comment doivent donc faire les femmes et les filles? Elles ont, dites-vous, leurs besoins comme les hommes, elles sont de meˆme paˆte, cependant elles ne peuvent pas se servir des meˆme ressources’ ’’ (TP, 908). 39. TP, 908.

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268 Notes to Pages 136–142 40. ‘‘Je devins machinalement le singe de ce que je voyais; ma main faisait l’office de celle de l’abbe´; j’imitais tous les mouvement de mon amie. . . . Toujours parfaite imitatrice de ce que je voyais, sans re´fle´chir un instant a` la de´fense de mon directeur, j’enfonc¸ai mon doigt a` mon tour’’ (TP, 917). 41. TP, 903. 42. Richardot, ‘‘The´re`se philosophe, les charmes de l’impe´ne´trable,’’ 91. 43. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers, 97. 44. Richardot, 90. 45. ‘‘La nature, capricieuse a` mon e´gard, a seme´ d’obstacles insurmontables la route des plaisirs qui font passer une fille de son e´tat a` celui de femme’’ (TP, 932). 46. The Abbe´, too, suffers from a moment of impotence during one of his conversations with Mme C—. In his case, however, his refusal to penetrate Mme C— (as she asks him to) is absolutely consonant with his philosophical position (according to which penetration would endanger her health and reputation). For the Abbe´, whose status as a man of letters is repeatedly confirmed by The´re`se and Mme C—, his (momentary) impotence serves not to suggest his vulnerability to de´faillance, but to underline his relative detachment. He stands in contrast, in this scene, to Mme C—, who, in defiance of her own principles, has asked the Abbe´ to ‘‘baise-moi comme il faut’’ (914). His body, here, complies with his philosophy, while Mme C—’s does not. 47. The power of figure to excite The´re`se seems contingent on its expression of masculine potency. This emphasis on the intrinsically arousing nature of representations of potency reinforces the connection, in the novel, between figure and the experience of compulsion, since force, in both the image and the experience of penetration, is always pictured as the ability to compel another body. 48. ‘‘Jamais spectacle plus affreux et plus risible en meˆme temps’’ (TP, 952). 49. ‘‘Tu viens de me dessiller les yeux sur des myste`res qui faisaient tout le malheur de ma vie’’ (TP, 932). 50. ‘‘Se jettent sur moi comme trois dogues affame´s’’ . . . ‘‘a` l’humiliante ressource de cracher au nez de l’huıˆtre qu’il ne peut gober’’ (TP, 948–50). 51. TP, 932. 52. TP, 955. 53. TP, 959. 54. ‘‘Vous savez mes craintes, mes faiblesses, mes habitudes. Laissez agir le temps et vos conseils’’ (TP, 960). 55. ‘‘ ‘Quoi! . . . les divinite´s meˆme font leur bonheur d’un bien que je refuse! Ah! cher amant, je n’y re´siste plus. Parais, comte, je ne crains point ton dard: tu peux percer ton amante; tu peux meˆme choisir ou` tu voudrais frapper, tout m’est e´gal, je souffrirai tes coups avec constance, sans murmurer; et pour assurer ton triomphe, tiens! voila` mon doigt place´’ ’’ (TP, 965). 56. ‘‘L’emportement semblait avoir banni la philosophie de l’homme maıˆtre de lui-meˆme’’ (TP, 966). 57. ‘‘ ‘Je n’userai pas, The´re`se, de tout le droit qui m’est acquis: tu crains de devenir me`re, je vais te me´nager; le grand plaisir s’approche; porte de nouveau ta main sur ton vainqueur, de`s que je le retirerai’ ’’ (TP, 966).

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Notes to Pages 143–149 269 58. TP, 966. 59. ‘‘Tout m’est e´gal, je souffrirai tes coups avec constance’’ (TP, 965). 60. ‘‘les de´tails des petites aventures qui l’ont conduite, comme malgre´ elle, pas a` pas, au comble de la volupte´’’ (TP, 873). 61. This engraving is reproduced in the Ple´iade edition of The´re`se, where it appears under the heading ‘‘Gravures de l’e´dition de 1780 [?]’’ (972). In Jean-Pierre Dubost’s ‘‘Note sur les gravures,’’ he writes, ‘‘Like the first edition, the edition catalogued under Enfer 404, of which the illustrations are attributed to Delcroche by Cohen, is not dated. However, the style of the borders and of the figures’ dress . . . suggests that it is a Parisian (or perhaps Genevan) edition from the 1770s or 1780s’’ (1299). In contrast to the rendering of voluptuousness in this image, the engraved editions of La Mettrie’s La Volupte´ tend to feature the allegorical figure of Voluptas reclining alone, without the support or intervention of reason. 62. ‘‘ ‘Ah! mon pe`re!’ s’ecria E´radice. ‘Quel plaisir m’aiguillonne! Oui, je jouis du bonheur ce´leste; je sens que mon esprit est entie`rement de´tache´ de la matie`re: chassez, mon pe`re, chassez tout ce qui reste d’impur dans moi. Je vois . . . les . . . an . . . ges; poussez plus avant . . . poussez donc . . . Ah! . . . Ah! . . . bon . . . saint Franc¸ois! ne m’abandonnez pas; je sens le cor . . . le cor . . . le cordon . . . je n’en puis plus . . . je me meurs.’ ‘Le pe`re, qui sentait e´galement les approches du souverain plaisir, be´gayait, poussait, soufflait, haletait. Enfin, les dernie`re paroles d’Eradice furent le signal de sa retraite: et je vis le fier serpent devenu humble, rampant, sortir couvert d’e´cume de son e´tui.’ ‘Tout fut promptement remis dans sa place, et le pe`re, en laissant tomber sa robe, gagna a` pas chancelants le prie-Dieu qu’E´radice avait quitte´’ ’’ (TP, 891). 63. ‘‘ ‘Dieu ne veut des hommes que le cœur et l’esprit’ ’’ (TP, 885). 64. ‘‘ ‘Que mon exemple, ma che`re The´re`se, . . . ne peut-il ope´rer dans vous, pour premier miracle, la force de de´tacher entie`rement votre esprit de la matie`re par la grande vertu de la me´ditation, pour ne le mettre qu’en Dieu seul!’ ’’ (TP, 884). 65. TP, 885. 66. ‘‘ ‘Le saint homme va venir . . . et Dieu avec lui; cachez-vous dans ce petit cabinet, d’ou` vous pourrez entendre et voir jusqu’ou` la bonte´ divine veut bien s’e´tendre en faveur de sa vile cre´ature, par les soins pieux de notre directeur’ ’’ (TP, 884). 67. TP, 895. 68. ‘‘L’e´le´gance de cette de´monstration lui fit sentir qu’elle avait e´te´ grossie`rement dupe´e’’ (TP, 895). 69. ‘‘Figurez-vous un satyre les le`vres charge´es d’e´cume, la bouche be´ante, grinc¸ant parfois les dents, soufflant comme un taureau qui mugit . . . ; il soutenait ses mains e´leve´es a` quatre doigts de la croupe d’E´radice . . . : ses doigts e´carte´s e´taient en convulsion et se formaient en patte de chapon roˆti’’ (TP, 890). 70. ‘‘Il euˆt e´te´ difficile de deviner auquel des deux acteurs appartenait cette cheville, par laquelle ils paraissaient l’un et l’autre e´galement attache´s’’ (TP, 890). 71. ‘‘Sa posture e´tait telle qu’il formait a` peu pre`s, de la teˆte aux genoux, un S dont le ventre allait et venait horizontalement aux fesses d’E´radice’’ (TP, 891).

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270 Notes to Pages 149–150 72. The lascivious priest of The´re`se may call to mind the impious clergymen and women who figure heavily in the novels of the marquis de Sade. Indeed, much has been made of the fact that Sade, in Histoire de Juliette, describes The´re`se philosophe as a ‘‘charming work by the marquis d’Argens, the only one that displays the goal, without quite attaining it nonetheless’’ (Histoire de Juliette, 591). Yet Sade, rather than taking up where d’Argens leaves off (with a happily penetrative scene of heterosexual union), is interested in precisely those kinds of scenarios that, in The´re`se, function as problematic displays of a compulsiveness that must (in the novel) eventually be regulated by ‘‘reason’’ (i.e., explicit portrayals of the forced seduction of young women by the putative guardians of feminine virtue). I would argue that Sade, unlike d’Argens, sees the novel as making possible a (philosophical) return to the space of voluptuous figure from which the ‘‘sensible man,’’ in The´re`se philosophe, is ultimately seeking to emerge. In this sense, for Sade, d’Argens may indeed be said to ‘‘display the goal,’’ but also, and quite deliberately, to miss it. 73. ‘‘Il est bon de remarquer d’abord que nous entendons par volupte´ la tranquillite´ de l’esprit et la sante´ du corps’’ (D’Argens, La Philosophie du bon sens, 393). 74. Pigeard de Gurbert, introduction to d’Argens, La Philosophie du bon sens, 40. 75. The antagonisms characteristic of the relationship between d’Argens and La Mettrie are rehearsed in the attack on the latter that d’Argens includes in the notes to his translation of an apocryphal Greek text, On the universe (by Ocellus Lucanus). In a letter to Frederick the Great dated November 3, 1761, d’Argens describes his treatment of La Mettrie in this work: ‘‘Lorsque je suis venu a` cet article, j’ai pris le parti de prouver que la Mettrie n’avoit jamais parle´ ni pense´ comme les philosophes, mais qu’en beaucoup de choses il avoit donne´ dans les meˆmes travers que les the´ologiens, & ce qu’il y a de plaisant, c’est que je le prouve sans re´plique’’ (210). A much shorter version of this same critique appears in the last section of La Philosophie du bon sens, as I will discuss. D’Argens and La Mettrie were both part of the group of scientists and philosophers (including, among others, Maupertuis and Voltaire) in residence at the court of Frederick the Great. D’Argens was named director of the class of philosophy of the Berlin Academy and sustained a correspondence with Frederick over the course of twenty-five years. La Mettrie died in Prussia in November of 1751. 76. ‘‘Les opinions les plus horribles, et aussi e´loigne´es de celle du philosophe dont il se disait le disciple que les te´ne`bres sont diffe´rentes de la lumie`re’’ (La Philosophie, 395, note 20). 77. The consequences of this labor of separation are rendered fully palpable in the structuring of the relation between pornographic figure and philosophic choice that takes place so vividly in The´re`se philosophe. The graphic representation of this articulation provides the inspiration for several of the pornographic frontispieces of the novel, with their versions of the celebrated inscription ‘‘Man embraces voluptuousness out of taste, he loves philosophy out of reason.’’ 78. ‘‘Ses sentiments sont directement oppose´s a` ceux de tous les philosophes’’ (Ocellus Lucanus, 260).

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Notes to Pages 151–155 271 79. ‘‘C’est au contraire parmi certains The´ologiens qu’il faut mettre La Mettrie’’ (Ocellus Lucanus, 261). 80. Ocellus Lucanus, 274. 81. Ocellus Lucanus, 245. 82. Ocellus Lucanus, 260. 83. ‘‘La Mettrie n’est donc pas un E´picurien’’ (Ocellus Lucanus, 242). 84. ‘‘Dont le style de´montre l’ivresse de l’aˆme’’ (Ocellus Lucanus, 239). 85. The history of these efforts passes through Gassendi, whose Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri d’Argens refers to, and Bayle, but goes back (as d’Argens points out) to the Stoic Seneca, who deems Epicurean voluptas ‘‘sober’’ in On the Good Life and includes praise of Epicurean precepts in his letters to Lucilius. D’Argens, in the defense of Epicurean ethics presented in La Philosophie du bon sens, cites Gassendi at some length; the latter works to render Epicurean voluptas compatible with an explicitly Christian ethic, and, according to d’Argens, permits voluptas to be understood as, essentially, the absence of pain (rather than the cultivation of pleasure). For a fascinating account of the influence of Epicurean thought on seventeenth-century literature and poetry, see Jean-Charles Darmon’s Philosophie e´picurienne et litte´rature au XVIIe sie`cle: E´tudes sur Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-E´vremond. 86. ‘‘dans la tranquillite´ de l’esprit, c’est-a`-dire dans la sagesse, dans la prudence, dans la vertu, dans la bonne foi; puisqu’il est impossible qu’un homme sans ces qualite´s puisse eˆtre tranquille et exempt de remords’’ (La Philosophie, 393). 87. ‘‘Cette passion violente qui nous porte a` satisfaire nos de´sirs de´re´gle´s, sans avoir e´gard a` la raison’’ (La Philosophie, 394). 88. Goulemot, Ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main, 90. 89. Goulemot, 90. 90. Sadean materialism begins to look obscene from this same perspective, since it embraces this connection rather than sublimating it into the larger project of rational inquiry.

5. Dynamism and Disinterest: The Materialist Reader and Diderot’s Dream 1. Mehlman, Cataract: A Study in Diderot, 32. 2. Roger, Les sciences de la vie, 664. In his compelling study of ‘‘Diderot and Lucretius: the De rerum natura and Lucretius’s legacy in Diderot’s scientific, aesthetic, and ethical thought,’’ Johan Werner Schmidt confirms that ‘‘Diderot as artist and aesthetician admired Lucretius the poet, while Diderot the natural philosopher found some support and evidence for his faith in the Epicurean doctrines of the De natura’’ (195). Schmidt makes use in his work of a reading of Lucretius as ‘‘twosided’’—a scientific observer on the one hand and a poet on the other. He accordingly writes of Lucretius that ‘‘His ability to grasp outright the two-sided character of things (that is, the moving, poetic beauty and the scientific analytic) is the source of the incomparable originality of his poetry, his philosophy, and of his genius’’ (247). This interpretation of the Lucretian project is, I believe, faithful to Diderot’s own reading of Lucretius. But it leaves aside the emphasis on suasion that is so cru-

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272 Notes to Pages 155–156 cial to the classical tradition of commentary on Lucretian materialism—and that provides, for a writer like La Mettrie, a point of philosophical departure. As Schmidt explains, ‘‘Lucretius’s pervasive proselytism in physical science is not the part of his work that moves most, nor did it affect Diderot as strongly as his literary art, his sensitive descriptions and his compassion for the world’s creatures’’ (248). 3. Deleuze, Logique du sens, 377. Elisabeth de Fontenay makes the connection to the Lucretian ‘‘joy of the diverse’’ explicit in her description of Diderot’s style, which she characterizes as one of infinite abundance. ‘‘Si cette e´criture te´moigne toujours de l’unite´ de la nature, c’est paradoxalement, dans le sporadisme et l’e´clatement. Diderot pense comme il dit que la nature produit, inde´finiment, n’importe comment, sans se relire, risquant dans sa ge´ne´rosite´ effronte´e une surabondance pre´caire d’eˆtres et de formes qui se bousculent sans jamais se soumettre a` une fin’’ (17). 4. He thus remains much closer to d’Argens in his reading of the potential effects of materialist writing on a public (however limited) than he does to neoLucretians like La Mettrie or Sade. 5. Aram Vartanian, in his article entitled ‘‘Diderot, or the Dualist in spite of Himself,’’ discusses what he refers to as Diderot’s ‘‘synthesis of two seemingly incompatible positions—materialism and dualism’’ (266). The greatest philosophercritics, as Vartanian points out, are figured in Le Reˆve de d’Alembert as those thinkers who are able to assure their own self-mastery. Vartanian understands Le Reˆve in this context to develop ‘‘a psycho-physiology which, in describing man as the sum of two contrasting centers of force peculiar to his body, reinstates a dualist hypothesis that is now compatible with materialism’’ (254). Vartanian goes on to read the materialist dualism of Le Reˆve as informing Diderot’s aesthetic theory, particularly in the Paradoxe sur le come´dien (1769). I see what Vartanian refers to as Diderot’s dualism as contributing to his movement away from a Lucretian materialism that privileges forms of dissolution at the expense of the kind of self-recognition valorized by Diderot in Le Reˆve. In what follows I will present this movement as strongly prefigured by Diderot’s elaboration of a theory of the reading subject in the E´loge. I read Le Reˆve as recapitulating many of the themes of the E´loge, in a scientific rather than a sentimental register. 6. In this sense, philosophers must be partially distinguished from geniuses, figures who share, in Diderot’s portrayal of them, many of the characteristics of the Epicurean subject as described by Lucretius. The genius is depicted in the Encyclopedia as ‘‘celui dont l’aˆme plus e´tendue frappe´e par les sensations de tous les eˆtres, inte´resse´e a` tout ce qui est dans la nature, ne rec¸oit pas une ide´e qu’elle n’e´veille un sentiment, tout l’anime & tout s’y conserve’’ (7: 582). The qualities of the genius are, however, bestowed upon the individual by nature, and cannot be willed into existence (or otherwise artificially produced). Genius is a ‘‘un pur don de la nature’’ (7: 582). The philosopher, on the other hand, does not and cannot fully partake of the excessive sensibility—and sensitivity—of the genius. ‘‘Ce sont ces hommes qui vont d’observations en observations a` des justes conse´quences, & ne trouvent que des analogies naturelles: la curiosite´ est leur mobile; l’amour du vrai est leur passion; le desir de le de´couvrir est en eux une volonte´ permanente qui les anime sans les

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Notes to Pages 157–158 273 e´chauffer, & qui conduit leur marche que l’expe´rience doit assuˆrer’’ (7: 583). The Epicurean attachment to the sensual malleability of perception informs the experience of both those who are more than merely human (the geniuses) and that which is somehow less (the animal, the infant, the hysterical woman), but it no longer serves as the primary context for understanding the acquisition of philosophical knowledge per se. Philosophers require a movement into another mode—of disengagement—in order to come into being: They are ‘‘animated’’ without being ‘‘heated.’’ 7. ‘‘Le seul d’entre tous les philosophes anciens qui ait su concilier sa morale avec ce qu’il pouvait prendre pour le vrai bonheur de l’homme, & ses pre´ceptes avec les appe´tits & les besoins de la nature; aussi a-t-il eu & aura-t-il dans tous les temps un grand nombre de disciples. On se fait stoı¨cien, mais on naıˆt e´picurien’’ (‘‘E´picure´isme,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, 281; Diderot’s italics). 8. Diogenes Laertius, 4: 43. 9. ‘‘Voulant dire que la volupte´ d’E´picure effeminoit tellement les hommes, qu’ils devenoient incapables de se remettre dans un genre de vie moins dissolu’’ (De la vertu des payens, 202). 10. In his discussion of Diderot’s article on Epicureanism, Thomas M. Kavanagh emphasizes Diderot’s admiration for what Kavanagh refers to as Epicurus’s ‘‘respect for reality in all its chaos’’ (56). Diderot embraces, through Epicurus, the ephemerality and multiplicity of the real, thereby paving the way for the attainment of a ‘‘happiness consonant with [human] nature’’ (Kavanagh, 57). For Diderot as Kavanagh describes him, ‘‘The real value of Epicurus’s thought lies not in the truth value of its cosmology, but in the happiness value of its ethics’’ (47). I am arguing here that in his binding of Epicurean precepts to a notion of ‘‘human nature’’ as potentially universalizable, Diderot in fact places Epicureanism as an epistemological system at the margins of philosophical thinking. Epicureans become the objects of philosophical discourse, rather than its subjects. 11. ‘‘Les hommes de ge´nie, tels qu’E´picure, perdent peu de temps; leur activite´ se jette sur tout; ils observent & s’instruisent sans qu’ils s’en aperc¸oivent; & ces lumie`res, acquises presque sans effort, sont d’autant plus estimables, qu’elles sont relatives a` des objets plus ge´ne´raux’’ (‘‘E´picure´isme,’’ 282). 12. ‘‘E´picure´isme,’’ 282. 13. Wilda Anderson makes use of the term ‘‘dynamism’’ to describing the animating force behind Diderotian materialism in her insightful study, Diderot’s Dream. Anderson writes, ‘‘To give matter the capacity not only to react but to act on its own . . . [Diderot] had to introduce an inherent principle of dynamism’’ (44). Anderson nonetheless disagrees with critics like Jeffrey Mehlman who see Diderot as working within a Lucretian framework, particularly where a dynamic theory of material change is concerned. She asserts that Lucretian chance or spontaneity ‘‘allows change to occur; it is not the principle of change’’ (33, note 19). Thus, for Anderson, ‘‘Diderot certainly knew these earlier authors [Lucretius and Leibniz], but as with so many others, he drew on their notions that, placed in the very differ-

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274 Notes to Pages 159–160 ent epistemological construct he elaborates, result in a picture of the material universe that is emphatically his own’’ (33). 14. The actor’s special ability to incarnate a certain motility is the focus of the Paradoxe sur le come´dien as well as the subject of a vast body of scholarly literature. On Diderot’s dramatic theory and art criticism, see in particular Jay Caplan’s Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder, James Creech’s Diderot: Thresholds of Representation, Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, and Marian Hobson’s The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France. For an especially incisive analysis of the actor’s ability to ‘‘move through’’ personae in its relationship to sensation, see the chapter ‘‘Forgetting Theater’’ from David Marshall’s The Surprising Effects of Sympathy. Marshall is interested in the multiple ways in which Diderot reconciles the figure of the unemotional observer with that of the sensitive enthusiast. This double movement is also visible in Diderot’s depiction, in Le Reˆve de d’Alembert, of the materialist philosopher. Marshall ultimately argues that, far from being contradictory, these two ‘‘tendencies’’ depend upon one another. ‘‘The very illusions and conviction that move the spectator to the point where he thinks he could leave his place must finally remove him: put him in his place. I am suggesting that both the forgetting and the remembering of this position are crucial for Diderot. The spectator must forget theater in order to remember it’’ (130). 15. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Diderot: le paradoxe et la mime´sis,’’ 28. 16. In an interesting essay ‘‘Diderot et la tradition libertine,’’ Franck Salau¨n argues that Diderot, ‘‘qui n’est pas un libertin,’’ profits from the libertine tradition in order to produce a novel that contests the structures that typify the libertine novel. According to Salau¨n, ‘‘Les œuvres de Diderot valorisent . . . la lecture en tant qu’expe´rience individuelle. La lecture individualisante y assume une fonction topique. Ainsi, les Bijoux indiscrets en supposent le code libertin mais ne s’y conforment pas’’ (323). I see Diderot as departing specifically from the eighteenth-century libertine reworking of Lucretius, wherein what appear to be formal textual constraints provide the key to the pleasure of material transformation. Salau¨n reads what he refers to as ‘‘la lecture individualisante’’ as an active mode of textual consumption, whereas the libertine tradition supposes a passive reader. I understand the two strategies invoked by Salau¨n as placing the emancipatory emphasis somewhat differently: The Lucretian libertine finds freedom in the ability of the embodied reader to respond diversely, across forms of perception, whereas the Diderotian individualist locates freedom in the resistance to the constraints of form more generally. In Salau¨n’s words, ‘‘Au livre divertissant, inutile et conformiste, Diderot oppose l’invention incessante et la lecture formatrice. Au livre-autorite´ qui est aussi un topos, il oppose le livre dialogique, et en un sens, socratique. Il re´habilite donc l’imagination de l’e´crivain et du lecteur, et esquisse une structure ouverte a` la place du re´cit plein, fini et limitatif ’’ (325). As I argue in earlier chapters, neo-Lucretians understand this kind of ‘‘finite’’ and ‘‘limited’’ narrative (that for Salau¨n and Diderot appears to require a docile conformity of the reader) as enabling its own ‘‘rehabilitation’’ of the active imagination.

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Notes to Pages 160–161 275 17. Hartmann, 23. 18. Hartmann, 22. Daniel Brewer, in The Discourse of Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury France, similarly focuses on what appears, from a modern perspective, as the destabilizing force of Diderot’s conjoining of the literary with the philosophical. As Brewer explains, ‘‘In the acts of interpretation Diderot performs, critical discourse is pushed to its limits, coming to resemble a dramatic narrative, a powerful story of interpretation. In short, Diderot’s critical discourse comes to resemble a work of art, which self-reflexively and artfully questions any privilege it might enjoy with respect to the object it proposes to interpret. However much he may be of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, Diderot’s writing contains something uncannily contemporary in the critical art of philosophizing it displays. His work pushes Enlightenment critique to its limits’’ (11–12). Jay Caplan, in Framed Narratives, also eloquently teases out the potentially disruptive effects of what he sees as Diderot’s poetic/philosophic dialogism. He writes, ‘‘On a more general level, Diderot’s writings exhibit a continuing struggle between the anarchic or ‘feminine’ demands of individual experience . . . and the centralizing authority of rational abstraction, between ‘nature’ and ‘civilization.’ This shuttling movement, this ‘monstrosity’ may in fact be the figure of textuality in Diderot at whatever level one considers’’ (74). It is the conceptualization of these relations as a ‘‘struggle,’’ I would argue, that distances Diderot from the classical Lucretian position, in which the suasive force of the poetic initiates the reader to philosophy. 19. Foucault remarks, ‘‘Nous vivons tous, depuis bien des anne´es, au royaume du prince Mangogul: en proie a` une immense curiosite´ pour le sexe, obstine´s a` le questionner, insatiables a` l’entendre et a` en entendre parler, prompts a` inventer tous les anneaux magiques qui pourraient forcer sa discre´tion’’ (Histoire de la sexualite´, 101). 20. Rosalina de la Carrera, in her important study of Diderot, contends that it is the Pre´face-annexe to Diderot’s novel La Religieuse, rather than the E´loge, that best maps out both the practical and the theoretical dimensions of Diderot’s theory of the reader. I am interested in the E´loge, here, in part because the date of its publication (1761) makes it roughly contemporaneous with the essays on reading discussed in chapter 2; the E´loge is thus part of the shift away from notions of the classically voluptuous reader that I outline at length in the second chapter. Moreover, the theoretical groundwork for Diderot’s concept of the reader as it is laid in the E´loge— only to be put into practice, as de la Carrera points out, in the Pre´face-annexe— renders explicit the stylistic and generic consequences of Diderot’s movement away from a materialist formalism, on the one hand, and toward a notion of sympathetic character, on the other. I will take up de la Carrera’s analysis of the figure of the Diderotian reader in more detail below. 21. ‘‘Par un roman, on a entendu jusqu’a` ce jour un tissu d’e´ve`nements chime´riques et frivoles, dont la lecture e´tait dangereuse pour le gouˆt et pour les mœurs. Je voudrais bien qu’on trouvaˆt un autre nom pour les ouvrages de Richardson, qui e´le`vent l’esprit, qui touchent l’aˆme, qui respirent partout l’amour du bien, et qu’on appelle aussi des romans’’ (E´R, 1059).

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276 Notes to Pages 161–166 ` chaque ligne il fait pre´fe´rer le sort de la vertu opprime´e au sort du vice 22. ‘‘A triomphant’’ (E´R, 1062). 23. ‘‘Ce n’est pas pour cet homme-la` qu’il e´crivait; c’est pour l’homme tranquille et solitaire,’’ (E´R, 1064). 24. E´R, 1065. 25. E´R, 1060. 26. ‘‘Le monde ou` nous vivons est le lieu de la sce`ne; le fond de son drame est vrai; ses personnages ont toute la re´alite´ possible; ses caracte`res sont pris du milieu de la socie´te´; ses incidents sont dans les mœurs de toutes les nations police´es; les passions qu’il peint sont telles que je les e´prouve en moi; ce sont les meˆmes objets qui les e´meuvent; elles ont l’e´nergie que je leur connais; les traverses et les afflictions de ses personnages sont de la nature de celles qui me menacent sans cesse; il me montre le cours ge´ne´ral des choses qui m’environnent. Sans cet art, mon aˆme se pliant avec peine a` des biais chime´riques, l’illusion ne serait que momentane´e et l’impression faible et passage`re’’ (E´R, 1061). 27. ‘‘Richardson se`me dans les cœurs des germes de vertu qui y restent d’abord oisifs et tranquilles’’ (E´R, 1061). 28. This particular movement of return is very similar to that emphasized by Mercier in his discussion of the utility of reading. As a process, it also recalls the trajectory undergone by the philosophical The´re`se. 29. ‘‘Tout ce que Montaigne, Charron, La Rochefoucauld et Nicole ont mis en maximes, Richardson l’a mis en action’’ (E´R, 1059). 30. ‘‘Une maxime est une re`gle abstraite et ge´ne´rale de conduite dont on nous laisse l’application a` faire. Elle n’imprime par elle-meˆme aucune image sensible dans notre esprit: mais celui qui agit, on le voit, on se met a` sa place ou a` ses coˆte´s, on se passionne pour ou contre lui; on s’unit a` son roˆle, s’il est vertueux; on s’en e´carte avec indignation, s’il est injuste et vicieux’’ (E´R, 1060). 31. As Rosalina de la Carrera puts it in Success in Circuit Lies, ‘‘Fiction is accessible not through abstractions but through the experience that the text activates and the reader undergoes’’ (37). 32. For further discussion of the importance of sacrifice in Diderot’s work, see Jay Caplan’s Framed Narratives. 33. ‘‘Si je sais, malgre´ les inte´reˆts qui peuvent troubler mon jugement, distribuer mon me´pris ou mon estime selon la juste mesure de l’impartialite´, c’est a` Richardson que je le dois’’ (E´R, 1062). 34. ‘‘Un homme d’esprit, qui lit avec re´flexion les ouvrages de Richardson, refait la plupart des sentences des moralistes; et avec toutes ces sentences il ne referait pas une page de Richardson’’ (E´R, 1059–60). 35. ‘‘Si Richardson s’est propose´ d’inte´resser, c’est pour les malheureux. Dans son ouvrage, comme dans ce monde, les hommes sont partage´s en deux classes: ceux qui jouissent et ceux qui souffrent. C’est toujours a` ceux-ci qu’il m’associe; et sans que je m’en aperc¸oive, le sentiment de la commise´ration s’exerce et se fortifie’’ (E´R, 1062).

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Notes to Pages 167–171 277 36. ‘‘Grace a` cet auteur, j’ai plus aime´ mes semblables, plus aime´ mes devoirs; . . . je n’ai eu pour les me´chants que de la pitie´; . . . j’ai conc¸u plus de commise´ration pour les malheureux, plus de ve´ne´ration pour les bons, plus de circonspection dans l’usage des choses pre´sentes, plus d’indiffe´rence sur les choses futures, plus de me´pris pour la vie, et plus d’amour pour la vertu’’ (E´R, 1066). 37. ‘‘Plus on a l’aˆme belle, plus on a le gouˆt exquis et pur, plus on connaıˆt la nature, plus on aime la ve´rite´, plus on estime les ouvrages de Richardson’’ (E´R, 1063). 38. ‘‘Entraıˆne´ par mille distractions, . . . le jour n’a pas assez de ses vingt-quatre heures pour les amusements dont il s’est accoutume´ de les remplir’’ (E´R, 1063). 39. E´R, 1064. 40. ‘‘Est-ce que deux amies ne se sont pas brouille´es, sans qu’aucun des moyens que j’ai employe´s pour les rapproacher m’ait re´ussi, parce que l’une me´prisait l’histoire de Clarisse, devant laquelle l’autre e´tait prosterne´!’’ (E´R, 1070). 41. E´R, 1070. 42. ‘‘Il y a, comme on voit, dans les choses de gouˆt, ainsi que dans les choses religieuses, une espe`ce d’intole´rance que je blaˆme, mais dont je ne me garantirais que par un effort de raison’’ (E´R, 1071). 43. E´R, 1070. 44. ‘‘Le ge´nie de Richardson a e´touffe´ ce que j’en avais. Ses fantoˆmes errent sans cesse dans mon imagination; si je veux e´crire, j’entends la plainte de Cle´mentine; l’ombre de Clarisse m’apparaıˆt, je vois marcher devant moi Grandison; Lovelace me trouble, et la plume s’e´chappe de mes doigts. Et vous, spectres plus doux, E´milie, Charlotte, Pame´la, che`re miss Howe, tandis que je converse avec vous, les anne´es du travail et de la moisson des lauriers se passent; et je m’avance vers le dernier terme, sans rien tenter qui puisse me recommander aussi au temps a` venir’’(E´R, 1073–74). 45. We might also see in this turn toward a kind of dissipation in the conclusion of the essay the definitive return of what is described here as the specter of Lovelace, who ‘‘troubles’’ Diderot. The problematic or ‘‘troubling’’ effects of Lovelace on putative readers remain for the most part unacknowledged by Diderot in the essay itself, but, as Herbert Josephs has pointed out, are nonetheless ‘‘inscribed unconsciously at the borders of his admiration for the seductive narrative genius of Richardson’’ (144). The Lucretian potential of the figure of Lovelace is hinted at, I would argue, in the first sentences of the E´loge, in which Diderot gestures toward the function of the novel as a source of corruption (rather than of virtuous pleasure). In this sense, the Lucretian possibilities inherent in a character like Lovelace—who seeks the undoing of the reader as a stable subject of self-recognition—must be explicitly forgotten by Diderot in order for the role of the author as an expert translator of an authentic nature to emerge. 46. De la Carrera, 37. 47. De la Carrera, 33. 48. De la Carrera, 174.

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278 Notes to Pages 172–175 49. Le Reˆve de d’Alembert has been read as opening up a set of new poetic possibilities for Diderot, rather than as substantively informed by his earlier, and much less daring, writing on the experience of the reader. Wilda Anderson affirms that ‘‘The full applicability of Diderot’s early dynamic materialism became evident only when he transferred his focus from the world of intellectual endeavor, however broadly defined, to the broader sphere of human behavior and interaction. Then Diderot finally took up the challenge he had posed himself at the end of the Reˆve de d’Alembert to redefine la poe´tique in its full material terms’’ (127). I see Diderot’s essay on the act of reading Richardson as already positing a relationship to literary representation that will go on to become the basis of the exploration of subjectivity that occurs in Le Reˆve. 50. Schmidt writes that Diderot ‘‘follows Lucretius closely’’ in Le Reˆve (195). 51. In his introduction to Le Reˆve, Laurent Versini describes this collection of dialogues as ‘‘the summit of the philosophical writings of Diderot’’ (603). 52. The names of the three participants in the dialogues other than ‘‘Diderot’’ refer to contemporaries and friends of the author. While Diderot originally pondered writing a dialogue of the dead in the classical style, he ultimately decided to make use of eighteenth-century figures. Interestingly, in a 1774 version of the dialogue, Diderot replaced the name of Bordeu with that of La Mettrie, a ‘‘mort moderne.’’ Yet in the Essai sur les re`gnes de Claude et de Ne´ron, written between 1778 and 1782, Diderot vigorously denounces La Mettrie, as I discuss below. 53. ‘‘Il n’y a plus qu’une substance dans l’univers, dans l’homme, dans l’animal’’ (RA, 882). 54. RA, 938. 55. Anderson, Diderot’s Dream, 63. 56. ‘‘On fait du marbre avec de la chair, et de la chair avec du marbre’’ (RA, 873). 57. Pucci, Diderot and a Poetics of Science, 132. 58. In her book on Diderot, Pucci gives a fascinating analysis of the positioning of the figure of Pygmalion as a representation of the animation of stone in relationship to Diderot’s recuperation of this animation as ‘‘natural.’’ She asserts, ‘‘the destructive process and the decomposition of the mimetic sculpture is assimilated into the creative process and product of nature as narrated, and as appropriated, by the interlocutor Diderot’’ (137). Diderot, as Pucci discusses, does not give the title of Falconet’s sculpture in the dialogue, an omission that Pucci attributes to the fact that ‘‘to have mentioned the name of Pygmalion would have informed the model of nature’s creative and ‘original’ process with an artistic myth of representation’’ (140). She goes on to demonstrate the ways in which Diderot establishes a parallel between the animation of stone and the production of written speech (rather than of sculptural form). Writing becomes, in Pucci’s words, ‘‘a natural ‘chef d’oeuvre’ ’’ (143). 59. ‘‘La statue est paye´e, et Falconet fait peu de cas de la conside´ration pre´sente’’ (RA, 275). The notion of ‘‘pulverization’’ returns toward the end of the dialogue when Diderot remarks to D’Alembert, ‘‘Bonsoir, mon ami, et memento quia pulvis

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Notes to Pages 175–180 279 es, et in pulverem reverteris’’ (RA, 885). The act of pulverizing the figural body thus serves as a gesture framing the content of the dialogue. 60. RA, 875. 61. ‘‘Diderot.—. . . Je prends la statue que vous voyez, je la mets dans un mortier, et a` grands coups de pilon . . . D’Alembert.—Doucement, s’il vous plaıˆt: c’est le chef-d’oeuvre de Falconet. Encore si c’e´tait un morceau d’Huez ou d’un autre . . . Diderot.—Cela ne fait rien a` Falconet; la statue est paye´e, et Falconet fait peu de cas de la conside´ration pre´sente, aucun de la conside´ration a` venir. D’Alembert.— Allons, pulve´risez donc. Diderot.—Lorsque le bloc de marbre est re´duit en poudre impalpable, je meˆle cette poudre a` l’humus ou terre ve´ge´tale . . .’’ (RA, 875). 62. Rosalina de la Carrera describes this process—which she depicts as one of ingestion, digestion, and distillation—as allowing for the transmission of sensibility among characters and living bodies. 63. ‘‘Quand il a e´te´ couche´, au lieu de reposer comme a` son ordinaire, car il dort comme un enfant, il s’est mis a` se tourner, a` se retourner, a` tirer ses bras, a` e´carter ses couvertures, et a` parler haut’’ (RA, 887). 64. ‘‘Le pouls est bon . . . un peu faible . . . la peau moite . . . la respiration facile’’ (RA, 886). 65. ‘‘Car je suis bien un, je n’en saurais douter. . . . Mais comment cette unite´ s’est-elle faite?’’ (RA, 887). 66. RA, 887. 67. ‘‘Je vous promets . . . je vous promets de vous tenir pour le plus grand fou qu’il y ait au monde’’ (RA, 889). 68. ‘‘J’en suis confondue; c’est cela, et presque mot pour mot. Je puis donc assurer a` pre´sent a` toute la terre qu’il n’y a aucune diffe´rence entre un me´decin qui veille et un philosophe qui reˆve’’ (RA, 890). 69. ‘‘Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.— . . . Docteur, y entendez-vous quelque ` merveille. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Vous eˆtes bien heuchose? Bordeu.—A reux . . . ‘Ma difficulte´ vient peut-eˆtre d’une fausse ide´e.’ Bordeu.—Est-ce vous qui parlez? Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Non c’est le reˆveur’’ (RA, 887). 70. ‘‘Je le regardais avec attention, et j’e´tais tout e´mue sans savoir pourquoi, le cœur me battait, et ce n’e´tait pas de peur’’ (RA, 894). 71. ‘‘Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.— . . . Docteur, qu’est-ce que c’est que le sophisme de l’e´phe´me`re? Bordeu.—C’est celui d’un eˆtre passager qui croit a` l’immortalite´ des choses. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—La rose de Fontenelle qui disait que de me´moire de rose on n’avait vu mourir un jardinier? Bordeu.—Pre´cise´ment; cela est le´ger et profond. Mademoiselle de l’Espinassse.—Pourquoi vos philosophes ne s’expriment-ils pas avec la graˆce de celui-ci? nous les entendrions. Bordeu.— Franchement, je ne sais si ce ton frivole convient aux sujets graves’’ (RA, 896). 72. This particular mode of understanding is styled in the exchange between Bordeu and Mlle. de l’Espinasse as a specifically feminine one. For a further exploration of the (problematic) link between women and figural perception, see Diderot’s essay ‘‘Sur les femmes.’’ In this short piece Diderot demonstrates how the kind of susceptibility to figure that is characteristic of Mlle. de l’Espinasse in Le Reˆve may in

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280 Notes to Pages 180–183 fact be read as a form of pathology (hysteria), even as he deems this susceptibility typical of women in general. At one point in Le Reˆve, Mlle. de l’Espinasse refers to the ‘‘vapors’’ as ‘‘a kind of anarchy that is particular to us [women]’’ (RA, 919). This anarchic relationship to sensation turns out to make the gesture of self-possession impossible to complete. 73. ‘‘Tenez, docteur, je vais m’expliquer par une comparaison, les comparaisons sont presque toute la raison des femmes et des poe`tes. Imaginez une araigne´e . . .’’ (RA, 897–88). 74. ‘‘Bordeu.— . . . Mais qu’est-ce qu’un eˆtre sensible? Un eˆtre abandonne´ a` la discre´tion du diaphragme. Un mot touchant a-t-il frappe´ l’oreille, un phe´nome`ne singulier a-t-il frappe´ l’œil, et voila` tout a` coup le tumulte inte´rieur qui s’e´le`ve, tous les brins du faisceau qui s’agitent, le frisson qui se re´pand, l’horreur qui saisit, les larmes qui coulent, les soupirs qui suffoquent, la voix qui s’interrompt, l’origine du faisceau qui ne sait ce qu’il devient; plus de sang-froid, plus de raison, plus de jugement, plus d’instinct, plus de ressource. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Je me reconnais. Bordeu.—Le grand homme, s’il a malheureusement rec¸u cette disposition naturelle, s’occupera sans relaˆche a` l’affaiblir, a` la dominer, a` se rendre maıˆtre de ses mouvements et a` conserver a` l’origine du faisceau tout son empire. Alors il se posse´dera au milieu des plus grands dangers, il jugera froidement, mais sainement. Rien de ce qui peut servir a` ses vues, concourir a` son but, ne lui e´chappera; on l’e´tonnera difficilement; il aura quarante-cinq ans; il sera grand roi, grand ministre, grand politique, grand artiste, surtout grand come´dien, grand philosophe, grand poe`te, grand musicien, grand me´decin, il re´gnera sur lui-meˆme et sur tout ce qui l’environne. Il ne craindra pas la mort. . . . Les eˆtres sensibles ou les fous sont en sce`ne, il est au parterre; c’est lui qui est le sage. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Dieu me garde de la socie´te´ de ce sage-la`. Bordeu.—C’est pour n’avoir pas travaille´ a` lui ressembler que vous aurez alternativement des peines et des plaisirs violents, que vous passerez votre vie a` rire et a` pleurer, et que vous ne serez jamais qu’un enfant. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Je m’y re´sous’’ (RA, 925). 75. RA, 925. 76. RA, 926. 77. ‘‘Bordeu.— . . . Combien de fois n’avez-vous pas rougi, a` la lecture, des transports que vous aviez e´prouve´s au spectacle, et re´ciproquement? Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse.—Cela m’est arrive´’’ (RA, 926). 78. This split may take place internally as well as externally, so that philosophers may take their own sensitivities as objects of observation and critical pleasure. This rupture is characteristic of Bordeu’s dialogue with Mlle. de l’Espinasse in the third section of Le Reˆve, where he uses the first person to describe masturbation as a natural pleasure. Mlle. de l’Espinasse, on the other hand, is unable to give voice to this particular split as an analytical move; instead, she reads back the words of d’Alembert to Bordeu, admitting as she does so that they are in no way her own. 79. ‘‘Ce n’est donc pas a` l’eˆtre sensible comme vous, c’est a` l’eˆtre tranquille et froid comme moi qu’il appartient de dire: Cela est vrai, cela est bon, cela est beau

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Notes to Pages 184–187 281 . . . Fortifions l’origine du reseau, c’est tout ce que nous avons de mieux a` faire’’ (RA, 926). 80. RA, 932. 81. ‘‘Je dirais que, chacun ayant ses yeux, chacun voit et raconte diversement. Je dirais que chaque ide´e en re´veille d’autres, et que, selon son tour de teˆte ou son caracte`re, on s’en tient aux ide´es qui repre´sentent le fait rigoureusement, ou l’on y introduit les ide´es re´veille´es’’ (RA, 932). 82. ‘‘D’Alembert.—Et les abstractions? Bordeu.—Il n’y en a point; il n’y a que des re´ticences habituelles, des ellipses, qui rendent les propositions plus ge´ne´rales et le langage plus rapide et plus commode’’ (RA, 932). 83. ‘‘Une qualite´ commune a` plusieurs actions a engendre´ les mots vice et vertu; une qualite´ commune a` plusieurs eˆtres a engendre´ les mots laideur et beaute´’’ (RA, 932). 84. ‘‘Et par la raison seule qu’aucun homme ne ressemble parfaitement a` un autre, nous n’entendons jamais pre´cise´ment, nous ne sommes jamais pre´cise´ment entendus; il y a du plus ou du moins en tout: notre discours est toujours en dec¸a` ou au dela` de la sensation’’ (RA, 933). 85. RA, 933. 86. ‘‘Il ne faut rien perdre de ce qui peut avoir son utilite´. Mademoiselle, si cela pouvait se recueillir, eˆtre enferme´ dans un flacon et envoye´ de grand matin a` Needham’’ (RA, 894). 87. Jean Mainil describes this exclusion even more starkly: ‘‘La double interdiction de Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse face a` l’inconscient philosophique et au raisonnement me´dical dont elle rend le de´veloppement possible, est aggrave´e par une troisie`me interdiction: la femme-e´le`ve ne voit goutte a` ce qu’elle a e´crit et a` ce qu’elle transmet au me´decin’’ (145). I see Mlle. de l’Espinasse as modeling a certain progress in her responses. She moves from a reactivity that is entirely noncognitive, to a responsiveness that is primarily figural, to a theory of character. But she does not make the final step into relative detachment that would allow her to position herself as fully philosophical. In the third section of the dialogue, accordingly, she remains self-deprecating and, to a certain extent, naı¨ve. ‘‘Ah!’’ Bordeu exclaims, ‘‘apre`s avoir e´te´ un homme pendant quatre minutes, voila` que vous reprenez votre cornette et vos cotillons, et que vous redevenez femme’’ (RA, 939). 88. ‘‘La M*** est un auteur sans jugement, qui a parle´ de la doctrine de Se´ne`que sans la connaıˆtre . . . dont les sophismes grossiers, mais dangereux par la gaiete´ dont il les assaisonne, de´ce`lent un e´crivain qui n’a pas les premie`res ide´es des vrais fondements de la morale, et de cet arbre immense dont la teˆte touche aux cieux et les racines pe´ne`trent jusqu’aux enfers, ou` tout est lie´, ou` la pudeur, la de´cence, la politesse, les vertus les plus le´ge`res, s’il en est de telles, sont attache´es comme la feuille au rameau qu’on de´shonore en la de´pouillant; dont le chaos de raison et d’extravagance ne peut eˆtre regarde´ sans de´gouˆt que par ces lecteurs futiles qui confondent la plaisanterie avec l’evidence, et a` qui l’on a tout prouve´ quand on les a fait rire; dont les principes pousse´s jusqu’a` leurs dernie`res conse´quences renverseraient la le´gislation, dispenseraient les parents de l’education de leurs enfants, renfermeraient aux

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282 Notes to Pages 188–189 Petites-Maisons l’homme courageux qui lutte sottement contre ses penchants de´re´gle´s, assureraient l’immortalite´ au me´chant qui s’abandonnerait sans remords aux siens; et dont la teˆte est si trouble´e et les ide´es sont a` tel point de´cousues, que dans la meˆme page une assertion sense´e est heurte´e par une assertion folle, et une assertion folle par une assertion sense´e, en sorte qu’il est aussi facile de la de´fendre que de l’attaquer’’ (Essai sur les re`gnes de Claude et de Ne´ron, 1118–19). 89. ‘‘Je n’accorde le titre de philosophe qu’a` celui qui s’exerce constamment a` la recherche de la ve´rite´ et a` la pratique de la vertu’’ (Essai sur les re`gnes de Claude et de Ne´ron, 1119).

6. ‘‘A Fallacious and Always Perilous Metaphysic’’: The Sadean Critique of Sentiment and the Neo-Lucretian Novel 1. In her introductory presentation of this rubric, Warman affirms that ‘‘Sensationist materialism’s first concern is to be the true representation of the way nature works. Any assertion purporting to be true must visibly demonstrate itself to be the case, via experiment or experience. Thus the only permissible framework for reality is one built out of sensation, perception, observation and demonstrable cause and effect. This means that, in the absence of established scientific knowledge, the only reliable gauge of truth is the body, which unwittingly registers everything that happens to it’’ (21). Warman’s exploration, in Sade: From Materialism to Pornography, of the debt owed by Sade to a broader tradition of eighteenth-century materialist thought is both lucid and illuminating, but slightly underplays, in my estimation, the intense involvement of this tradition with problems of narrative form and poetic figuration. 2. Mengue, L’Ordre sadien: Loi et narration dans la philosophie de Sade, 39. Mengue and Warman disagree with one another as to the implications and origins of Sade’s materialism. Mengue derives his understanding of the Sadean materialist project from a reading of the Epicurean notion of ‘‘hasard’’ or chance as organizing the conceptual framework of Sade’s philosophy, while Warman resists the identification of Sadean materialism with Epicurean modes of contingency. I appreciate Mengue’s insistence on the Epicurean lineage of the Sadean system(s), but think both Mengue and Warman give the literary (as opposed, in Warman’s case, to the ‘‘literal’’) aspects of Sade’s thought somewhat short shrift, despite Mengue’s brilliant exploration of the importance of narrative to Sade’s philosophical system generally. In the introduction to his study, Mengue claims that he is in fact seeking to rescue Sade from what he calls the ‘‘primacy of the literary’’ (16). For the purposes of his reading, Mengue initially portrays literary interpretation, unlike philosophical analysis, as fundamentally mired in ‘‘the subjective choice of the commentator’’; moreover, the ‘‘textual position,’’ as he calls it, leads inevitably to an antiphilosophical (and deplorable) ‘‘neutralization’’ of ‘‘all will to knowledge [connaissance]’’ (14–19). I am arguing here that, while the rupture between fiction and ‘‘knowledge’’ was indeed solidified during the eighteenth century, neither Sade nor his fellow Lucretian La Mettrie portray themselves as working within such a rift. In fact, the sustained interest of Lucretian philosophy for both of these authors lies, I would argue, in the way the

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Notes to Pages 189–194 283 Lucretian tradition requires the bridging of this divide in order to make possible the emergence of a materialist truth that is always at once fictive and didactic. For further explorations of the intensity of Sade’s interest in the permutations of eighteenth-century philosophico-literary materialism, see Ann Thomson’s ‘‘L’Art de jouir de La Mettrie a` Sade,’’ Jean Deprun’s series of essays on Sade, and Frances Ferguson’s work ‘‘Sade and the Pornographic Legacy’’ as well as the lengthier exploration of the problems posed in this article that appears in her book Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action. 3. Marcel He´naff provides a particularly bold example of this interpretative trend in his claim, in Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, that the scientific and literary renderings of the body constitute irreconcilable discursive objects. Thus, the Sadean body, ‘‘precise and functional, all of its lyrical flamboyance decanted from it, takes on an unsignifying opacity, not in laying claim to a pre-cultural primitiveness . . . but in short-circuiting two discourses: that of literature by that of science. The body described by science is a material datum: an assemblage of organs, a system of functions; in brief it is an anatomy and a physiology; it is this body that literature cannot take as its general object, much less as its exclusive object, without at the same time renouncing the task of making of it a ‘character,’ that is to say an expressive and narratable being, thus without renouncing its status as literature’’ (Sade, 25). 4. Warman, 119. 5. Even when the narrator, in a Sadean novel, is effectively functioning as a ventriloquist for such claims, she makes clear to her readers that materialism is not so much an expression of truth as a way of acting, through figural language, upon persons in order to alter the norms governing perception. 6. Philippe Mengue discusses the Sadean reliance on multiple causes at length in his chapter ‘‘Chance and truth.’’ Lucretius describes the Epicurean perspective on causation in the following terms: ‘‘For it is hard to declare for certain which of these causes it is in this world; but what can happen and does happen through the universe in the diverse worlds, fashioned on diverse plans, that is what I teach, and go on to set forth many causes for the motions of the stars, which may exist throughout the universe; and of these it must needs be one which in our world too gives strength to the motions of the heavenly signs; but to affirm which of them it is, is in no wise the task of one treading forward step by step’’ (DRN, 5: 527–33). Echoing this affirmation in Juliette, Sade writes, ‘‘Whether or not human knowledge be real or illusory, true or false, it matters little to the happiness of life; but that does not hold in what pertains to religion’’ (39). 7. For a somewhat different perspective on ‘‘dissolution’’ in Sade’s novels, see Julie Candler Hayes’ essay ‘‘Contagion and Containment: Sade and the Republic of Letters’’ in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Hayes suggestively argues that ‘‘Les 120 Journe´es de Sodome stages the disappearance of ‘clear and distinct bodies’ despite what appears to be a paroxistic exercise in classification and control, where competing and asymmetrical sets of familial, affective, ideological, and erotic relational systems criss-cross the categories until, as Buffon said, there are only individuals’’ (255). I am attempting here to read this

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284 Notes to Pages 194–196 focus on dissipation in the context of the Sadean rewriting of the novel as a materialist genre. This gesture is, for Sade, a political one, insofar as it involves an attack on sentimentality as an organizing concept that is at once literary and social in its ramifications. But, as I will show later, the materialist critique elaborated by Sade ultimately presents a nostalgic, rather than radical, remedy for the metaphysical ills it seeks to assuage. Moreover, the Sadean attack on the upholding of a separation between figure and experience tends to end in a retreat into the Epicurean Garden, given his diagnosis of the culture in which he is writing as profoundly and in a sense incurably sentimental. 8. Roger Shattuck, for instance, inadvertently makes use of Sade’s claims about the systematic sentimentalization of the human subject to bolster his own attack on the violence and ‘‘immorality’’ of Sade’s writing. Shattuck writes, ‘‘By manipulating fear and fascination, [Sade] tries to confer holiness on our most deeply polluted impulses, and vice versa. Anyone who does not register a sense of taboo in reading Sade lacks some element of humanity’’ [italics added] (270). Sade would presumably agree with this affirmation, insofar as he understands our sense of humanity in general as a sentimental construct produced within but extending outward from the framework of the novel itself. The Sadean materialist response to this systematization represents an attempt to formulate ‘‘humanity’’ on other grounds, an attempt that Shattuck consistently (mis)reads through the prism of his own sympathetic identifications. 9. Juliette, 642. ‘‘Si trois millions de victimes ne devaient pas, en les immolant, vous procurer une volupte´ plus vive que celle de faire un bon dıˆner, tel mince que fuˆt ce plaisir, eu e´gard a` son prix, vous ne devriez pourtant pas balancer un instant a` vous le donner’’ (Histoire de Juliette, 754). 10. Juliette, 642. ‘‘Brisez totalement ce lien chime´rique; ne lui laissez plus nul empire; convainquez-vous qu’il n’existe absolument rien entre un autre homme et votre individu’’ (Histoire de Juliette, 755). 11. Juliette, 634. 12. In her article entitled ‘‘Mode`les violents et sensations fortes dans la gene`se de l’œuvre de Sade,’’ Caroline Warman examines the predominance of Epicurean thought in the work of Sade; Warman defines Epicureanism primarily as a ‘‘theory of movement’’ for the purposes of her essay. As she points out, Sade was quite familiar with Lucretius, but seems not to have read Epicurus. Alice M. Laborde, in her inventory of Sade’s library at La Coste, emphasizes not only his presumed familiarity with La Mettrie’s corpus—Sade possessed copies of both volumes of La Mettrie’s Oeuvres philosophiques—but his investment in Lucretius. She writes, ‘‘Sade s’inspira largement [de Lucre`ce] dans l’ensemble de ses œuvres tant philosophiques que romanesques’’ (129). 13. Reflections on the Novel, 99. ‘‘L’homme est sujet a` deux faiblesses qui tiennent a` son existence, qui la caracte´risent. Partout il faut qu’il prie, partout il faut qu’il aime; et voila` la base de tous les romans . . .’’ (Ide´e, 37). 14. DRN, 5: 1165–67. 15. DRN, 5: 1179–80.

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Notes to Pages 196–201 285 16. DRN, 5: 1175–76. 17. DRN, 5: 1204–10. 18. DRN, 3: 800–805. 19. This critique, as I argue in chapter 3, undergirds La Mettrie’s attempt to rewrite the union of desiring bodies as an ideal instance of dissolution in constraint, even though Lucretius sees the act of intercourse as both revealing and positing a natural limit to the human desire for transmutability. Sade is similarly inspired by the Lucretian attack on love, but, in many ways, hews more closely to the original Lucretian argument than does La Mettrie (who ultimately seeks a way around the restrictions suggested by Lucretius). Sade develops his response to the Lucretian injunction—be inconstant!—by shaping a materialist novel that will root out sentimental desire as a literary, political, and philosophical category within which subjects have typically been formed. 20. DRN, 4: 1096–1119. 21. With his suggestion that the attempt to ‘‘materialize’’ the beloved body can be partially realized in the latter’s consumption by the lover, Lucretius appears to anticipate the Sadean fascination with the effects of sexual violence, particularly in his portrayal of limbs disintegrating under the pressure of the lover’s need to possess fully the substance of his partner. 22. DRN, 4: 1061–64. 23. DRN, 4: 1068–72. 24. Reflections, 97. ‘‘On appelle roman, l’ouvrage fabuleux compose´ d’apre`s les plus singulie`res aventures de la vie des hommes’’ (Ide´e, 33). 25. Reflections, 98. ‘‘Quoique je respecte cette filiation, et que je m’y soumette quelquefois, je suis loin cependant de l’adopter rigoureusement; n’est-elle pas en effet bien difficile, dans les sie`cles ou` les voyages e´taient si peu connus, et les communications si interrompues; il est des modes, des usages, des gouˆts qui ne se transmettent point; inhe´rents a` tous les hommes, ils naissent naturellement avec eux: partout ou` ils existent, se retrouvent des traces ine´vitables de ces gouˆts, de ces usages et de ces modes’’ (Ide´e, 35). 26. Reflections, 98. ‘‘N’en doutons point: ce fut dans ces contre´es qui, les premie`res, reconnurent des Dieux, que les Romans prirent leur sources, et par conse´` peine les hommes eurent-ils quent en Egypte, berceau certain de tous les cultes. A soupc¸onne´ des eˆtres immortels, qu’ils les firent agir et parler; de`s lors, voila` des me´tamorphoses, des fables, des paraboles, des romans; en un mot, voila` des ouvrages de fictions, de`s que la fiction s’empare de l’esprit des hommes’’ (Ide´e, 35). 27. Reflections, 99. ‘‘Il y eut donc des romans e´crits dans toutes les langues, chez toutes les nations, dont le style et les faits se trouve`rent calque´s, et sur les mœurs nationales, et sur les opinions rec¸ues par ces nations’’ (Ide´e, 37). 28. Reflections, 99–100. ‘‘Il en [des romans] a fait pour peindre les eˆtres qu’il implorait, il en a fait pour ce´le´brer ceux qu’il aimait. Les premiers, dicte´s par la terreur ou l’espoir, durent eˆtre sombres, gigantesques, pleins de mensonges et de fictions. . . . Les seconds, remplis de de´licatesse et de sentiments . . . ; mais comme l’homme pria, comme il aima partout, sur tous les points du globe qu’il habita, il y

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286 Notes to Pages 202–206 eut des romans, c’est-a`-dire des ouvrages de fictions qui, tantoˆt peignirent les objets fabuleux de son culte, tantoˆt ceux plus re´els de son amour’’ (Ide´e, 37). 29. Reflections, 112. ‘‘Songe que je me prome`ne a` leurs coˆte´s, dans toutes les re´gions ou` tu les places’’ (Ide´e, 57). 30. Reflections, 115–16. ‘‘Je ne veux pas faire aimer le vice; je n’ai pas comme Cre´billon et comme Dorat, le dangereux projet de faire adorer aux femmes les personnages qui les trompent, je veux, au contraire, qu’elles les de´testent; c’est le seul moyen qui puisse les empeˆcher d’en eˆtre dupes; et, pour y re´ussir, j’ai rendu ceux de mes he´ros qui suivent la carrie`re du vice tellement effroyables, qu’ils n’inspireront bien suˆrement ni pitie´ ni amour; en cela, j’ose le dire, je deviens plus moral que ceux qui se croient permis de les embellir; les pernicieux ouvrages de ces auteurs ressemblent a` ces fruits de l’Ame´rique qui, sous le plus brillant coloris, portent la mort dans leur sein; cette trahison de la nature, dont il ne nous appartient pas de de´voiler le motif, n’est pas faite pour l’homme; jamais enfin, je le re´pe`te, jamais je ne peindrai le crime que sous les couleurs de l’enfer, je veux qu’on le voie a` nu, qu’on le craigne, qu’on le de´teste, et je ne connais point d’autre fac¸on pour en arriver la` que le montrer avec toute l’horreur qui le caracte´rise’’ (Ide´e, 62). 31. In her article ‘‘ ‘Sex,’ or the misfortunes of literature,’’ Dalia Judovitz confirms that ‘‘The reader’s effort to identify with the protagonists of the novel [The Misfortunes of Virtue] is thwarted from the novel’s inception’’ (176). Judovitz reads Sade as parodically subverting novelistic reality through a ‘‘strategic imitation of previous literary and philosophical conventions’’ that ‘‘upsets the very traditions that it simulates’’ (195). In other words, ‘‘By suspending moral claims, he challenges the limits of novelistic verisimilitude and plausibility’’ (175). I am portraying Sade, here, as less concerned with questions of plausibility than with the problem of (fictive) resemblance as a basis for social relationships generally. The desire for resemblance, following Lucretius, operates as a fiction—like dreams, and visions—but is nonetheless persuasive for all that. The believability of specific similarities among persons is not at issue, since the permeation of men’s minds by fiction generates a faith in resemblance generally. Ultimately, I am arguing that Sade sees the novel itself as fundamentally structuring human perceptions of reality, so that it is only by intervening in the making of novels that persons may be (trans)formed. 32. In fact, even if Sade confirms the novel’s historical attachment to the principles of verisimilitude—to the extent that he proclaims himself unable to forgive any lack thereof ‘‘with what regards customs or a slip with what regards dress’’ (112)— his own writing is remarkable for the extent to which he neglects precise details of appearance, costume, and even affect where his characters are concerned. 33. The feeling of disgust that prefigures this destruction functions, in this context, as a necessary and an intrinsic part of the movement toward other, more Lucretian, pleasures. 34. Juliette mentions that she was ‘‘seduced, corrupted’’ by the women whom she meets at the convent. But the process by which this seduction occurs resembles more the death of Justine by lightning than it does any diachronically organized

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Notes to Pages 206–207 287 narration of persuasion. Juliette does not need to be persuaded, she only needs to be invited to lunch! 35. Juliette, 6. ‘‘Elle parut a` nos regards belle comme la Ve´nus qui fixa l’hommage des Grecs. Il e´tait impossible d’eˆtre mieux faite, d’avoir une peau plus blanche . . . plus douce . . . des formes plus belles et mieux prononce´es; . . . E´mue de tant d’attraits . . . , vous croyez bien que je me rendis’’ (HJ, 183). 36. Juliette, 6. ‘‘ ‘Un instant . . . , mettons un peu d’ordre a` nos plaisirs; on n’en jouit qu’en les fixant’ ’’ (HJ, 183). 37. Roland Barthes, in his brilliant essays on Sade, remarks on the way in which this preparatory isolation finds an equivalent not only in classical poetic technique but in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius de Loyola. ‘‘Cette dicte´e du fantasme,’’ writes Barthes, ‘‘on la retrouve chez Ignace de Loyola, dont l’Exercice spirituel est marque´ des meˆmes protocoles (enfermement, obscurite´, imagination, re´pe´tition)’’ (167). As in the epistemological correspondances linking Polignac’s Anti-Lucre`ce to its own object of critique, the De rerum natura, it is possible to see here yet another point of conjunction between the Epicurean and Catholic traditions. In a similar vein, Angela Carter describes the nature of the Sadean retreat as follows: ‘‘The Sadeian paradise is a model of the world, in its cash-sale structure; and also it is a place of exile from the world, a place of imaginary liberty where the ritual perversions of the libertines contain no element of a taboo freely broken but come to dominate their lives, like the rigid rituals of the Catholic church’’ (83). 38. Juliette, 9. ‘‘ ‘Les premiers principes de ma philosophie, Juliette . . . , sont de braver l’opinion publique; tu n’imagines pas a` quel point, ma che`re, je me moque de tout ce qu’on peut dire de moi’ ’’ (HJ, 186). 39. It is, for instance, a measure of the prevalence and power of this topos that the inscription on the title page of the 1795 edition of La Philosophie dans le boudoir —‘‘Mothers will prescribe the reading of this to their daughters’’—can be readily situated within a complicated series of intertextual references dating back at least to 1738. Jean Deprun explains in the notes to the Ple´iade edition of La Philosophie that this injunction is borrowed from Piron’s play, La Me´tromanie ou le Poe`te (1738), of which Sade owned a copy. Pierre-Sylvain Mare´chal makes reference to the line in his Bibliothe`que des amans (1777), and it appears again, this time as ‘‘Mothers will proscribe the reading of this to their daughters’’ (emphasis mine) in the Fureurs ute´rines de Marie-Antoinette, femme de Louis XVI, a revolutionary pamphlet from 1791. The rendering of the act of reading as in itself a moment of sexual initiation, particularly for young women, is one of the commonplaces of eighteenth-century literature. Thus, Choderlos de Laclos can make reference, in the second preface to Les Liaisons dangereuses, to the use of his narrative as a kind of literary marital aid, the employment of which is dangerous before marriage, but useful afterwards. ‘‘L’e´poque ou` celle-ci peut cesser d’eˆtre dangereuse et devenir utile, me paraıˆt avoir e´te´ tre`s bien saisie, pour son sexe, par une bonne me`re qui non seulement a de l’esprit, mais qui a du bon esprit. ‘Je croirais’, me disait-elle, apre`s avoir lu le manuscrit de cette Correspondance, ‘rendre un vrai service a` ma fille, en lui donnant ce Livre le jour de

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288 Notes to Pages 207–210 son mariage.’ Si toutes les me`res de famille en pensent ainsi, je me fe´liciterai e´ternellement de l’avoir publie´’’ (Laclos, 8). 40. Juliette, 10. ‘‘Des conventions humaines presque toujours promulgue´es sans la sanction des membres de la socie´te´, de´teste´es par notre cœur . . . contradictoires au bon sens . . . conventions absurdes, qui n’ont de re´alite´ qu’aux yeux des sots qui veulent bien s’y soumettre’’ (HJ, 187). 41. Juliette, 500. 42. Juliette, 500. ‘‘ ‘Multiplier, donner, re´pandre, afficher les e´crits qui propagent l’incre´dulite´, et porter se´ve`rement pendant un demi-sie`cle, la peine de mort contre tout individu qui re´tablirait la chimere’ ’’ (HJ, 627). 43. Juliette, 502. ‘‘ ‘On appelle amour, ce sentiment inte´rieur qui nous entraıˆne, pour ainsi dire, comme malgre´ nous, vers un objet quelconque; qui nous fait vivement de´sirer de nous unir a` lui . . . de nous en rapprocher sans cesse . . . qui nous flatte . . . qui nous enivre, quand nous re´ussissons a` cette union, et qui nous de´sespe`re . . . qui nous de´chire quand quelques motifs e´trangers viennent nous contraindre a` briser cette union; si cette extravagance ne nous entraıˆnait jamais qu’a` la jouissance prise avec cette ardeur, cet enivrement, elle ne serait qu’un ridicule; mais comme elle nous conduit a` une certaine me´taphysique qui, nous transformant en l’objet aime´, nous rend ses actions, ses besoins, ses de´sirs aussi chers que les noˆtres propres, par cela seul elle devient excessivement dangereuse, en nous de´tachant trop de nous-meˆmes, et en nous faisant ne´gliger nos inte´reˆts pour ceux de l’objet aime´; en nous identifiant, pour ainsi dire, avec cet objet, elle nous fait adopter ses malheurs, ses chagrins, et ajoute, par conse´quent, ainsi, a` la somme des noˆtres’ ’’ (HJ, 629). 44. Juliette, 503. 45. Juliette, 503. ‘‘ ‘Plus j’approcherai de mon bonheur, plus il se constatera, plus la fatale crainte de la perdre, empoisonnera mes jours’ ’’ (HJ, 630). 46. Juliette, 506. 47. Juliette, 505. 48. Juliette, 505. ‘‘ ‘Saisissons le moment du calme et de l’e´puisement pour la conside´rer de sang-froid; passons un instant, comme dit Lucre`ce, dans les arrie`re-sce`nes de la vie’ ’’ (HJ, 631–32). 49. Juliette, 505. ‘‘ ‘Eh bien! nous le verrons, cet objet divin qui nous faisait tourner la teˆte, nous le verrons doue´ des meˆmes de´sirs, des meˆmes besoins, des meˆmes formes de corps, des meˆmes appe´tits . . . afflige´ des meˆmes infirmite´s que toutes les autres cre´atures de son sexe; et nous de´pouillant a` cet examen de sangfroid, du ridicule enthousiasme qui nous entraıˆnait vers cet objet, entie`rement semblable a` tous les autres du meˆme genre, nous verrons qu’en ne l’ayant plus, nous ne perdons que ce que nous pouvons aise´ment re´parer’ ’’ (HJ, 632). 50. Juliette, 508. ‘‘ ‘Pour se bien pe´ne´trer de toute l’horreur qu’inspire ce sexe, il me semble que ce devrait eˆtre toujours a` nu, et dans cet e´tat, qu’il faudrait l’offrir a` ses sectateurs’ ’’ (HJ, 634–35). 51. Juliette, 506.

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Notes to Pages 210–213 289 52. Be´atrice Fink, in her article ‘‘Ambivalence in the Gynogram,’’ interestingly presents this potential for reciprocity as one source of the ambivalence around women’s status that she reads as a central problem in Sadean prose fiction. Fink writes, ‘‘On rare occasion, however, amidst a network of disquisitions downgrading women on biological grounds and by sophistic argument, we find the equalitarian bias exerted in favor of sexual equality; that is to say, as a mechanism for redressing the inequities of eighteenth-century society with regard to women. This is the point at which all of the ambivalences in the gynogram converge. It is also—and predictably—the point at which utopian paradigms emerge’’ (27). I am presenting this ‘‘equalitarianism’’ as less a function of Sadean ambivalence than a result of the materialist critique of difference as a point of collective identification. In fact, gender as a catachrestic invocation of subjects—what Denise Riley has called ‘‘an increasing sexualization, in which female persons become held to be virtually saturated with their sex which then invades their rational and spiritual faculties’’—has no role to play in a fictional space where ‘‘conventional’’ forms of interpellation are unremittingly styled as illegitimate (8). Gender, for Sade, operates as a purely formal principle, not as a site of identification. This does not mitigate his (or Lucretius’s) misogyny, but it does locate his hatred for women within a more generalized form of disgust meant to combat the sentimentalization of the body, whether masculine or feminine. 53. Juliette, 512. ‘‘ ‘Ce que j’ai dit des femmes, mes fre`res, vous pouvez le rapporter aux hommes. Nos de´fauts sont aussi grands que les leurs, et nous ne me´ritons pas mieux de les fixer; toute espe`ce de chaıˆne est une folie, tout lien est un attentat a` la liberte´ physique dont nous jouissions sur la surface du globe’ ’’ (HJ, 639). 54. Juliette, 510. 55. Juliette, 199. 56. Juliette, 513. ‘‘ ‘Il en est de l’amour des femmes, comme de celui de Dieu, ce sont des illusions qui nous nourrissent dans l’un et l’autre cas. Dans le premier nous voulons n’aimer que l’esprit, abstraction faite du corps; dans le second, nous preˆtons un corps a` l’esprit, et dans tous deux nous n’encensons que des chime`res’ ’’ (HJ, 639). 57. Juliette, 506. 58. Juliette, 501. 59. Juliette, 431. 60. Juliette, 516. 61. Juliette, 522. ‘‘ ‘Oh, Juliette! qu’ils sont de´licieux les plaisirs de l’imagination, et que l’on parcourt voluptueusement toutes les routes que nous offre sa brillante carrie`re! Conviens, cher ange, que l’on n’a pas d’ide´e de ce que nous inventons, de ce que nous cre´ons dans ces moments divins ou` nos aˆmes de feu n’existent plus que dans l’organe impur de la lubricite´’ ’’ (HJ, 647). 62. Juliette, 522. ‘‘ ‘Heureux, cent fois heureux, dit La Mettrie, ceux dont l’imagination vive et lubrique tient toujours les sens dans l’avant-gouˆt du plaisir! ’’ (HJ, 648). Jean Deprun reads this citation as a borrowing that disfigures and ‘‘recreates’’ the meaning of the original. In a description of the passage from L’E´cole de la volupte´ in which

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290 Notes to Pages 214–216 the quotation utilized by Belmor appears, Deprun refers to the atmosphere evoked by La Mettrie’s text as ‘‘de´tendu, euphorique, pacifique. E´ros n’y est en rien associe´ a` Thanatos’’ (748). Sade, according to Deprun, recontextualizes the comment as part of his aggressive and violent nihilism. ‘‘Sade pre´le`ve-t-il maintenant trois lignes de cette page pour les enchaˆsser dans sa propre reˆverie? Leur sens, aussitoˆt, se transforme. C’est un univers de´vaste´, disloque´, brise´, qu’e´clairent maintenant les feux du fantasme. L’irre´el se tapisse de cadavres’’ (748). 63. Juliette, 522. ‘‘ ‘En ve´rite´, Juliette, je ne sais si la re´alite´ vaut les chime`res, et si les jouissances de ce que l’on n’a point ne valent pas cent fois celles qu’on posse`de’ ’’ (HJ, 648). 64. In his chapter ‘‘Staging the Libertine Imaginary’’ from Scenarios of the Imaginary, Josue´ Harari gives an elegant exposition of this perspective. In his analysis of the Sadean project as it is elaborated in Histoire de Juliette, he affirms, ‘‘Writing is therefore the process, the moment, which leads to the real, but which at the same time, by working up the imagination, keeps repulsing the real, almost to the limits of nonexistence. Writing thus holds off reality to the point where the borderline between reality and the imagination becomes meaningless’’ (149). I am attempting with this chapter to reinsert Sade’s writing into a materialist tradition that works precisely on this ‘‘borderline’’ between reality and imagination. Because writing makes experience, in Sadean contexts, there is no written ‘‘escape’’ into fantasm that does not implicate reality. 65. Juliette, 639. 66. The object of the Comtesse’s reˆveries here is the ‘‘e´garement’’—translated here as ‘‘aberrations.’’ This term is repeated twice in the passage, and has an important role to play, I will argue, in determining the aim of this particular exercise. 67. Juliette, 640–41. ‘‘ ‘Soyez quinze jours entiers sans vous occuper de luxures, distrayez-vous, amusez-vous d’autre chose; mais jusqu’au quinzie`me ne laissez pas meˆme d’acce`s aux ide´es libertines. Cette e´poque venue, couchez-vous seule, dans la calme, dans le silence et dans l’obscurite´ la plus profonde; rappelez-vous la` tout ce que vous avez banni depuis cet intervalle, et livrez-vous mollement et avec nonchalance a` cette pollution le´ge`re par laquelle personne ne sait s’irriter ou irriter les autres comme vous. Donnez ensuite a` votre imagination la liberte´ de vous pre´senter par gradation diffe´rentes sortes d’e´garements; parcourez-les tous en de´tail; passez-les successivement en revue; persuadez-vous bien que toute la terre est a` vous . . . que vous avez le droit de changer, mutiler, de´truire, bouleverser tous les eˆtres que bon vous semblera . . . ; laissez a` votre imagination tous les frais de l’e´preuve, et surtout ne pre´cipitez pas vos mouvements; que votre main soit aux ordres de votre teˆte et non de votre tempe´rament. Sans vous en apercevoir, des tableaux varie´s que vous aurez fait passer devant vous, un viendra vous fixer plus e´nergiquement que les autres, et avec une telle force que vous ne pourrez plus l’e´carter ni le remplacer; l’ide´e acquise par le moyen que je vous indique, vous dominera, vous captivera, le de´lire s’emparera de vos sens; et vous croyant de´ja` a` l’œuvre, vous de´chargerez comme une Messaline. De`s que cela sera fait, rallumez vos bougies, et transcrivez sur vos tablettes l’espe`ce d’e´garement qui vient de vous enflammer, sans oublier

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Notes to Pages 216–224 291 aucune des circonstances qui peuvent en avoir aggrave´ les de´tails; endormez-vous sur cela, relisez vos notes le lendemain matin, et en recommenc¸ant votre ope´ration, ajoutez tout ce que votre imagination un peu blase´e sur une ide´e qui vous a de´ja` couˆte´ de foutre, pourra vous sugge´rer de capable d’en augmenter l’irritation. Formez maintenant un corps de cette ide´e, et en la mettant au net, ajoutez-y de nouveau tous les e´pisodes que vous conseillera votre teˆte; commettez ensuite, et vous e´prouverez que tel est l’e´cart qui vous convient le mieux’ ’’ (HJ, 752–53). 68. Juliette, 641–42. 69. Juliette, 639. 70. Frances Ferguson, in her article on Sade, explores Sade’s ‘‘attack on the notion of publicness, which he treated not so much as an alternative to an idea of privacy as the inauguration of a mistaken conception of persons’’ (1). 71. Dean, 168. 72. Shattuck, 273. 73. Beauvoir, 49. 74. As Carolyn Dean writes, ‘‘He emerged as one of the major figures in the surrealist pantheon, at once a prophet, a pioneer, and a martyr to modernity’’ (162). She mentions ‘‘the remarkable staying power of this vision of Sade’’ (163, note 91), particularly in the writing of Gilbert Le´ly, Annie Le Brun, and Jean-Jacques Pauvert. In his prologue to Sade’s Morceaux choisis, Le´ly famously claims, ‘‘Tout ce que signe Sade est amour’’ (quoted in Dean, 163). 75. Juliette, 1193. ‘‘On partit de`s le lendemain; les plus grands succe`s couronne`rent dix ans nos he´ros. Au bout de ce temps, la mort de Mme de Lorsange la fit disparaıˆtre de la sce`ne du monde, comme s’e´vanouit ordinairement tout ce qui brille sur la terre; et cette femme, unique en son genre, morte sans avoir e´crit les derniers e´ve´nements de sa vie, enle`ve absolument a` tout e´crivain la possibilite´ de la remontrer au public. Ceux qui voudraient l’entreprendre, ne le feraient, qu’en nous offrant leurs reˆveries pour des re´alite´s, ce qui serait d’une e´tonnante diffe´rence aux yeux des gens de gouˆt, et particulie`rement de ceux qui ont pris quelque inte´reˆt a` la lecture de cet ouvrage’’ (HJ, 1261–62). 76. Salem, 45. 77. Panckoucke, i.

Conclusions 1. Johnson, 102. 2. Johnson, 133. 3. DRN, 1: 72–74.

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302 Works Cited Sade, Donatien Alphonse Franc¸ois de (marquis). Ide´e sur les romans, suivi de L’auteur des Crimes de l’amour a` Villeterque (1800). Edited by Jean Glastier. Bordeaux: E´ditions Ducros, 1970. Translated as ‘‘Reflections on the Novel.’’ In The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1966. ———. Histoire de Juliette (1801?). Edited by Michel Delon. In Oeuvres. Vol. 3 of Oeuvres. Edited by Michel Delon and Jean Deprun. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1998. Translated as Juliette. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1968. ———. La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795?). Edited by Jean Deprun. Vol. 3 of Oeuvres, edited by Michel Delon and Jean Deprun. Paris: Editions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1998. Saint-Amand, Pierre. ‘‘Boyer d’Argens’’ and ‘‘Notice.’’ In The´re`se philosophe (1748). In Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe sie`cle, edited by Patrick Wald Lasowski. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 2000. Salau¨n, Franck. ‘‘Diderot et la tradition libertine.’’ In L’E´preuve du lecteur: livres et lectures dans le roman d’Ancien Re´gime, edited by Jan Herman and Paul Pelckmans, 317–27. Actes du VIIIe colloque de la Socie´te´ d’Analyse de la Topique Romanesque, Louvain-Anvers, 19–21 mai 1994. Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 1995. ———. L’Ordre des moeurs: Essai sur la place du mate´rialisme dans la socie´te´ franc¸aise du XVIIIe sie`cle (1734–1784). Paris: E´ditions Kime´, 1996. Salem, Jean. Tel un dieu parmi les hommes: l’e´thique d’E´picure. 2nd ed. Paris: J. Vrin, 1994. Schmidt, Johan Werner. Diderot and Lucretius: the De rerum natura and Lucretius’s legacy in Diderot’s scientific, aesthetic, and ethical thought. In vol. 208 of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, edited by Haydn Mason, 183–294. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1982. Seigneux de Correvon, Gabriel. ‘‘Pre´face du traducteur.’’ In Discours sur l’irreligion, Ou` l’on examine ses Principes & ses Suites funestes, by Albrecht von Haller. Lausanne: Franc¸ois Grasset, 1760. Shattuck, Roger. Forbidden Knowledge: A Landmark Exploration of the Dark Side of Human Ingenuity and Imagination. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996. Sinsart, Benoıˆt (dom). Recueil de pense´es diverses sur l’immate´rialite´ de l’aˆme, son immortalite´, sa liberte´, sa distinction d’avec le corps, ou Re´futation du mate´rialisme, avec une re´ponse aux objections de Mr. Cuentz, et de Lucre`ce le philosophe. Colmar: Imprimerie Royale, 1756. Spink, John S. French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. London: Athlone Press, 1960. Terrall, Mary. The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Thomson, Ann. ‘‘L’Art de jouir de La Mettrie a` Sade.’’ In Aimer en France, 1760– 1860, edited by Paul Viallaneix et Jean Ehrard, 315–22. Clermont-Ferrand: Universite´ de Clermond II, 1980.

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Works Cited 303 ———. Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie’s Discours pre´liminaire. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981. ———. ‘‘L’Homme-machine, mythe ou me´taphore?’’ Dix-huitie`me sie`cle 20 (1988): 367–76. ———. ‘‘Introduction’’ and ‘‘Commentaires.’’ In De la volupte´, by La Mettrie, edited by Ann Thomson. Paris: Desjonque`res, 1996. Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Trousson, Raymond. Introduction to The´re`se philosophe. In Romans libertins du XVIIIe sie`cle, edited by R. Trousson. Paris: E´ditions Robert Laffont, 1993. Tucoo-Chala, Suzanne. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke et la librairie franc¸aise 1736–1798. Pau: E´ditions Marrimpouey Jeune, 1977. Vartanian, Aram. La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. ———. ‘‘Quelques re´flexions sur le concept d’aˆme dans la litte´rature clandestine.’’ In Le mate´rialisme du XVIIIe sie`cle et la litte´rature clandestine, edited by Olivier Bloch, 149–65. Paris: J. Vrin, 1982. ———. ‘‘Diderot, or the Dualist in spite of Himself.’’ In Diderot: Digression and Dispersion, edited by Jack Undank and Herbert Josephs, 250–68. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1984. ———. Science and Humanism in the French Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 1999. Versini, Laurent. Introduction to Le Reˆve de d’Alembert. In Oeuvres, vol. 1, by Denis Diderot. Paris: E´ditions Robert Laffont, 1994. Vila, Anne C. Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de. Dictionnaire philosophique. In Oeuvres de Voltaire, vol. 26, edited by Adrien-Jean-Quentin Beuchot. Paris: Werdet et Lequien fils, 1829. ———. Dictionnaire philosophique. Edited by Raymond Naves and Julien Benda. Paris: Garnier Fre`res, 1967. Wade, Ira Owen. The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1938. Warman, Caroline. Sade: From Materialism to Pornography. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2002. ———. ‘‘Mode`les violents et sensations fortes dans la gene`se de l’œuvre de Sade.’’ Dix-huitie`me sie`cle. Spec. issue. L’e´picurisme 35 (2003): 231–39. Wellman, Kathleen. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible.’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Wittmann, Reinhard. ‘‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’’ In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Linda G. Cochrane, 284–312. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

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academic disciplines: specialization of, 2, 61–62, 223–24, 244n17 actor, 159, 181, 183, 274n14 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 226n4 aesthetics, 9, 16, 92, 192, 237n74, 255– 56n36, 274n14 alterity, 11–3 Anti-Lucretius. See Polignac, Melchior de (cardinal) d’Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer (marquis), 5, 15, 126–54, 272n4; La Philosophie du bon sens, 5, 127, 149– 52, 225n2, 264n5, 271n85; and the marquis de Sade, 191, 270n72; rift with La Mettrie, 15, 149–52, 259n73, 264n5, 270n75. See also The´re`se philosophe atheism, 17–19, 22, 229n3 atom, 2, 7, 12, 25, 28–31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 42–46, 54, 58, 61, 103, 110, 117, 123, 128, 155, 158, 221, 228n20, 234n41, 239n96, 240n115, 241n123 atomism, 17, 20, 42, 54–55, 88, 91–96, 226n3, 230–31n6, 235n53, 238n78 Attridge, Derek, 1, 11–12, 227n17 Aufkla¨rung. See Enlightenment automaton, 1, 88, 90, 127, 129, 232n10, 252n1. See also machine-man Barthes, Roland, 59, 251n109, 259n75, 287n37 Batteux, Charles (abbe´), 23 Bayle, Pierre, 36, 234n39, 271n85 Bernier, Marc Andre´, 12, 225n3 Blumenberg, Hans, 2, 225n3, 226n4

body: and identity, 10, 209–12, 223, 260n80; in literature, 6, 10–12, 14, 223, 231n9; in materialism, 3–6, 8–10, 12, 52–55, 88–96, 126–49, 152–54, 172–87, 222–24, 226–27n5, 231n9, 232n12; as secular object, 2–3, 8, 14, 17–20; as signifier, 3, 8, 14, 222; as tropic, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 99, 103–25, 224; and voluptas, 7, 27, 28, 84, 103–25 Bollioud-Mermet, Louis, 245n28, 247n49, 252n112; Essai sur la lecture, 9, 63–65, 66, 74–81, 82, 85, 86, 245n23; De la bibliomanie, 244nn19, 20 Bougainville, Jean-Pierre de, 36–38, 39–40, 42, 236n67, 237n74 Cassirer, Ernst, 18, 225n2 censorship, 58, 78, 128; Panckoucke and, 54–55, 241n123 Certeau, Michel de, 226n5 chamber pot, 135–37, 265n11 character: theory of, 62, 161–71, 172, 175–76, 177, 178, 184–86, 275n20, 281n87, 283n3, 286n32 Cicero, 22–23, 66 circulation, 20, 53, 76–77, 86, 91, 114, 175, 241n123, 261n89 clarity, 39, 49–50, 54–55, 99, 133–35, 139, 142, 154, 184, 209, 237n74. See also transparency clinamen, 28–31, 55, 93, 228n20, 235n45 compulsion: and femininity, 126–49, 152–54, 266n25, 268nn46, 47; and

305

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306 Index figure, 12, 80, 90–92, 126–54, 224, 266n29, 268n47, 270n72; and reason, 126–30, 134–37, 139–49, 152–54, 264n9 Condillac, E´tienne Bonnot de (abbe´), 10, 17, 89, 229n25, 230n6 Creech, Thomas, 49 cyborg, 15, 18 Darnton, Robert, 127, 138, 225n3, 227n15, 243n15, 263n3 Dean, Carolyn, 218, 291n74 de la Carrera, Rosalina, 170–71, 275n20, 276n31, 279n62 dematerialization, 13–14, 19–20, 47–48, 52–54 De rerum natura, 6–7, 14, 95, 101, 104, 116–17, 193, 196, 205, 207, 222–24, 232n14, 233n23, 235n53, 236n67, 242n134, 257–58n51, 287n37; scandal of, 7, 17–19, 60–63, 221, 228n18, 229n3; suasion and, 7, 56, 59, 13, 23– 28, 228n18, 271–72n2; translations of, 13–14, 17–22, 30, 31–35, 47–58, 230–31n6, 235n49, 239n101. See also Lucretius Derrida, Jacques, 30–31 Descartes, Rene´, 21, 36, 42, 44, 45, 46, 89, 90, 97, 100, 226n5, 230n6, 232n12, 239nn96, 101, 260n80 Des Coutures, Jacques Parrain (baron), 32–33, 49, 35, 230n6 determinism, 1, 3, 13, 15, 28–31, 88, 90, 92, 111, 127, 129–30, 153, 253n13, 254n25 Diderot, Denis, 15–16, 33, 48, 84–86, 102, 155–88, 230n6, 235n53, 262n101, 272–73n6, 275n18; dualism of, 272n5, 274n14; E´loge de Richardson, 159, 161–71, 244n19, 272n5, 275n20, 277n45, 278n49; jouissance and, 85–87, 251n109; Lucretius and, 17–18, 155–57, 223, 271–72n2, 273– 74n13, 274n16, 278n50; Le Reˆve de

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d’Alembert, 158, 159, 161, 172–87, 272n5, 272n14, 278nn49, 51, 52, 280n78 difference: materialism and, 12, 184–86, 210–11, 217, 272n3, 273n10, 289n52 dildo, 136–37 dissolution, 22, 43, 61, 90, 92, 93–96, 103, 117–19, 121–25, 283–84n7, 285n19 doctrine: double, 51 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (abbe´), 34–35, 36, 57, 231n6, 242n134 Dumarsais, Ce´sar Chesneau, 89, 253n10 dynamism: in Diderot, 16, 158–59, 160, 172–87, 273–72n13 e´garement, 193, 216–17, 221, 290n66. See also Sade, Donatien Alphonse Franc¸ois de (marquis) empiricism, 18, 21, 27, 52, 56, 62, 91– 92, 96–98, 153, 195, 205, 230n6, 264n5 Encyclopedia, 4, 14, 17–18, 22, 83–87, 157–59, 227n15, 245n30, 272n6 Enlightenment, 3–6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 60– 63, 149, 152–54, 187–88, 190, 195, 205, 225n3, 231n9, 232n11, 264n9; Kantian, 1–2, 4, 8, 13, 127, 225n2, 226n4; Lucretius and, 7, 9–1, 17–22, 31–58, 59, 230–31n6; and modernity, 2, 5–6, 15, 17–22, 88–92, 124– 25, 126–30, 222–24, 226nn4, 5, 244n17, 275n18 entretien secret, 65–66, 72, 80 Epicureans, 27, 29, 233n23, 273n10 Epicurus, 1, 8, 22, 25–26, 27, 31, 32, 38, 43, 44, 49, 93, 95, 104, 149–52, 155, 157–59, 164, 166, 180, 228n20, 234n39, 250n100, 273n10, 284n12 femininity, 42, 78, 106, 120–25, 150, 209–12, 264–65n11, 279–80n72, 289n52 Figlio, Karl M., 9, 228-229n24

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Index 307 figura, 13, 36, 38, 45, 51–52, 58, 59, 61, 227n16, 228n20, 232n13, 240n115, 243n11. See also figure figure: conversive effects of, 7–9, 12, 24–25, 275n18; and embodiment, 3–6, 10, 11–12, 59, 88–25, 222–24, 256n36, 278–279n59; and images, 12, 94–95, 109, 112, 117–18, 121, 129, 130, 131, 136–37, 141–45, 164, 182, 196–97, 214, 217, 259n73, 264n9, 265n11, 266nn25, 29; and materialism, 4–3, 49–52, 88–125, 126–30, 149–52, 222–24, 228nn18, 20; and pleasure, 7–8, 10, 13, 15, 23–31, 103–25, 131–49, 152–54, 266n25, 268n47; and scientific argument, 96– 99, 253n11. See also figura. force. See compulsion Foucault, Michel, 8, 35, 116, 161, 226n4, 226–27n5, 252n1, 263n112, 275n19 Frederick the Great, 270n75 freedom, 66–69; and constraint, 8, 15, 21–22, 52–54, 92, 126–49, 152–54, 274n16; as Enlightenment project, 8, 10; in Lucretius, 23-24, 26, 27, 29–31; and matter, 7, 12, 95–96, 103–14, 110–25; and tropes, 12–13, 16, 95–96, 103–4, 110–25 Garden: Epicurean, 218–20, 284n7 Gassendi, Pierre, 23, 228n19, 271n85 gender, 209–13, 224, 289n52 genius, 66–67, 158, 169, 272–73n6 Goulemot, Jean M., 153, 233n15, 243n15 habituation, 21, 257n44 Haller, Albrecht von, 151, 243n13 Hartmann, Pierre, 13, 160, 227n18 hedonism, 8, 17–19, 59, 87, 150, 230n6, 244n18, 252n114 Helve´tius, Claude-Adrien, 230n6, 235n53

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d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (baron), 3–4, 10, 33, 48, 62, 191, 230n6, 263n3; Syste`me de la nature, 3–4, 227n11 L’Homme-machine, 15, 88–92, 95–97, 100, 103, 105, 126, 252n1, 253n8, 254n25, 256n39, 263n3. See also La Mettrie, Julien Offray de; machineman Horkheimer, Max, 5, 226n4 hysteria, 273n6, 280n72 identification: Epicurean critique of, 25–26, 38; reading and, 11, 13, 65, 69–70, 72, 162–69, 171, 172, 178, 182, 245n28; Sadean critique of, 16, 192–95, 202–15, 218, 220, 284n8, 289n52 imagination, 4, 97, 102–3, 106, 111–12, 117–19, 125, 133, 203, 213–17, 227n11, 229n25, 254n25, 260n80, 290n64 insensibility: feminine, 120, 262n101 Johnson, W. R., 223, 232n14, 235n54 jouissance, 82–83, 85–87, 122, 251n109, 257n40 Kant, Immanuel, 1–2, 4, 8, 13, 127, 206, 225n2 Laclos, Choderlos de, 287–88n39 La Grange, 33, 48–52, 53, 56, 58, 230n6, 239nn102, 104, 111 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 1, 8, 10, 15, 88–25, 126–27, 129, 132, 149– 52, 168, 173, 187–88, 189, 213–14, 224, 225n3, 255–56n36, 257n50, 261n89, 263–64n3, 264n5, 270n75, 272n4, 278n52, 284n12, 285n19; Discours pre´liminaire, 97–99, 255n31; as neo-Epicurean, 87, 88–25, 159, 161, 254n24, 272n2, 282–83n2; modernity and, 88–90, 124–25, 252n1; sex-

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308 Index ual awakening in, 108–110, 120–24, 259n73, 262n101; Syste`me d’E´picure, 98, 100, 122, 254n24; La Volupte´, 92, 100–25, 213, 256n39, 256–57n40, 257nn42, 45, 257–58n51, 258n54, 259n73, 260n80, 269n61, 289–90n62. See also L’Homme-machine; machineman Le Blanc de Guillet (Antoine Blanc), 48, 55–58, 230n6, 239n102 libertinage, 13, 17, 87, 142, 151, 191, 193–94, 197, 225n3, 252n114, 258n62, 264n5; in literature, 8, 91, 99, 102–3, 105–6, 108, 113, 125, 127, 129, 141, 161–62, 164, 167–68, 202, 204–5, 202–21, 243nn11, 13, 244n18, 258n54, 62, 274n16; as style, 13, 60–62, 84, 256n40, 257n50 literature, 6, 8–3, 16, 35, 222–24; and La Mettrie, 15, 90–92, 95–96, 99–25, 256n36; philosophy and, 13, 15, 16, 90–92, 152–54, 223, 275n18, 282– 83n2, 283n3; and Sade, 189–221, 282–83n2, 283n3; science and, 4, 227n12, 232n11, 233n15, 244n17; and resemblance, 12, 165, 193, 202, 205–7, 214, 217–18, 220, 286n31; as supplement, 4, 9, 97, 127, 166–67, 186, 248n68 Locke, John, 10, 264n5 love: romantic, 16, 85–86, 108–9, 192, 195–98, 201–5, 208–9, 212–14, 216, 218, 257n44, 285nn19, 21 Lovelace, 169, 277n45 Lucretius, 6–7, 14, 15, 23–31, 61, 181, 186, 222–24, 228n18, 230–31n6, 235n53, 247n49, 272n6, 283n6; cruelty of, 25–26, 194; reappropriations of, 10, 14, 16, 17–22, 31–58, 116–24, 155–56, 158–59, 164, 189–221, 223, 271–72n2, 273–72n13, 274n16, 275n18, 282–83n2, 284n12, 286n31, 289n52; sex and, 116–19, 197–98,

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257n44, 285nn19, 21. See also De rerum natura lyric, 35, 40–41, 50, 51, 55, 105, 230n6, 232n11, 234n41, 242n134 machine-man, 1, 13, 15, 18, 88–93, 95– 97, 99–00, 103, 115, 124–25, 126– 27, 129–30, 153, 252n1, 254n14, 256n39. See also automaton Mainil, Jean, 129, 226n4, 244n17, 263n112, 264–65n11, 281n87 Marolles, Michel de (abbe´), 49 Marx, Karl, 27, 229n32 Massillon, Jean-Baptiste, 243n14 masturbation, 126, 132–37, 141, 146, 179–80, 280n78 materialism: classical, 11, 222, 261n89; as determinist, 1–3, 13, 15; ethical aims of, 15, 272n3, 273n10, 289n52; figural, 8, 15, 224, 232n11; and figure, 4–5, 49–52, 222–24, 228n18, 261n89, 283n5; history of, 17–22, 186, 189–91, 226n3, 234n41, 272n2; as legacy of the Enlightenment, 2, 5, 15, 18, 33–35, 190–91, 222, 224, 225–26n3, 226nn4, 5, 264n9; mechanist, 1, 88–92, 99, 128, 153, 226n5, 231n9, 232n12, 235n53; nonfigural, 9, 15, 224; as objectification, 2, 11, 13, 14, 15; and pleasure, 7–8; and reading, 3–12, 14, 60–63, 222; as rhetorical strategy, 3–4, 222; and secularism, 2, 4–5, 8, 13, 17–19; sensationist, 189, 282n1; as theory of the human, 2–3, 8, 13, 17–19, 35, 47, 54, 58, 88–92, 110, 124, 157, 161, 172, 231n9; as transformation, 7–9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19–21, 25, 28, 42–43, 47, 95, 113, 115, 118–19, 156–61, 174, 186, 192, 211–12 matter, 2, 11, 15, 35; and movement, 3, 14; reading and, 3–5, 9, 13–14, 19– 20, 161–88, 266n25; and figural representation, 5–7, 10, 12, 13, 44–46,

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Index 309 92–96, 102–25, 130–49, 152–54, 222–24, 228n18, 261n89; as organizing principle, 3–4, 5, 8, 16, 28–31 mauvais livres, 54, 57, 60–62, 67, 72, 78– 79, 243n14, 244nn17, 20 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 155, 226n4, 235n53, 273n13 Memmius, 24, 25, 28, 31, 41, 43, 48, 234n37 Mercier, Louis-Se´bastien, 245n28, 245246n30, 247n49, 248n68, 252n112, 276n28; Discours sur la lecture, 63–74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 86, 244n20 metaphysics, 36, 40, 42, 46, 238n78; critique of, 73, 192–93, 208–9, 223 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat (baron), 104, 258n60 mystification, 222; Lucretius and, 16, 61 neo-Epicureanism, 6–9, 10–13, 15, 16, 87, 88–25, 159, 189–221, 222–24, 228n19, 229n3, 272n4; critics of, 7–8, 60–63, 82–87, 187–88; forgetting and, 13, 16; loss and, 10, 16, 217–20, 224, 284n7 neo-Lucretianism. See neoEpicureanism. novel: function as genre, 2, 102, 140, 141, 153–54, 155, 184, 231n7, 233n15, 286n31; dangers of reading, 6, 60–62, 73–74, 172, 187, 243n14, 244n17; as materialist, 10, 12, 16, 144–45, 151, 189–221, 223, 284n7; sentimental, 161–71, 176, 258n60 pain, 27, 48–49, 52, 84, 105, 112, 118, 182, 196–98, 220, 271n85 Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph, 17, 22, 33, 48, 52–55, 56, 58, 230n6, 239nn101, 102, 240n116, 241n123 penetration, 104, 118–25, 136–39, 143– 44, 146, 148–49, 257n44, 265n11, 268nn46, 47 Phaedrus, 28

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pharmakon, 32, 237n70 philosopher-critic: in Diderot, 156, 159, 172–73, 178, 272–73n6, 274n14, 280n78 plasticity, 94, 111, 118, 259n75 pleasure: definitions of, 82–87, 240n115; as form of freedom, 8, 10, 130–49; and reading, 7–9, 11–12, 14, 15, 35–36, 59, 60–63, 65, 71, 72–74, 74–78, 80, 82, 86–87, 222–24, 232233n15, 234n39, 244n18, 247n49, 252n112; as object of analysis, 10, 14, 85–87, 231n7, 252n112, 280n78; women and, 78–79, 120–25, 126– 30, 251n109, 262n101. See also voluptas poiesis, 5 Polignac, Melchior de (cardinal): AntiLucretius and, 20–21, 33, 35–47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 230n6, 232n14, 236nn66, 67, 239n101, 287n37 pornography, 10, 11, 20, 21, 57, 91, 224, 233n15, 266n25; philosophy and, 130–49, 152–54, 188, 189, 221, 243n15, 264n9, 265n18, 270n77 Pygmalion, 175–76, 278n58 Quintius, 41–47 reader: figure of, 13–14, 16, 47–48, 63– 81, 161–71, 172–73, 178–87, 232n12, 274n16, 275n20, 277n45; responsiveness of, 3–9, 11–13, 14, 28, 31–33, 58, 97, 133–37, 144, 156, 160, 161–71, 172, 176, 181–87, 189, 193, 214, 222–24, 266n25, 281n87 reading: hermeneutic, 3, 245n28; and materialism, 3–4, 18–22, 47–48, 60– 63, 222–24, 233n26; and pleasure, 7–9, 11-12, 14, 15, 18–22, 35–36, 59, 60–63, 65, 71, 72–74, 74–78, 80, 82, 86–87, 222–24, 232–33n15, 234n39, 244n18, 247n49, 252n112, 287–88n39; and self-possession, 9,

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310 Index 14, 59, 63–64, 69–74, 81–84, 87, 130, 161–71, 213, 280n72; and selftransformation, 58, 60–63, 82–87, 245n25; sentimental, 161–71, 245n28 reason, 3, 8, 10, 13, 16; the exercise of judgment and, 9, 63–65, 68–70, 74, 130–49, 179–88; desire and, 264n9, 270n72 resemblance, 173, 178, 181, 185–86, 209–11; in literature, 12, 165, 193, 202, 205–7, 214, 217–18, 220, 286n31 return: logic of, 130, 158, 245n25, 276n28 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 66, 234n36, 245-246n30; La nouvelle He´loı¨se, 245n25 sacrifice, 121, 165, 218, 264n3, 276n32 Sade, Donatien Franc¸ois Alphonse de (marquis), 2, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18, 59, 87, 188, 189–21, 224, 234n32, 258n62, 270n72, 271n90, 272n4, 283n5, 285n19; debt to materialists of, 189– 93, 282nn1, 2, 284n12, 285n21, 289– 90n62; Histoire de Juliette, 194–95, 205–21, 270n72, 283n6; Ide´e sur les romans, 195–205; Ignatius of Loyola and, 287n37; imagination and, 290n64; literariness of, 282–83n2, 283n3, 286nn31, 32; misogyny and, 289n52; modernity and, 291n74. See also e´garement secularism, 8–10, 13, 17–20, 58, 200–1, 223; and science, 2, 4–5, 92 seduction, 10, 23–27, 32–33, 39–41, 43–44, 58, 60–62, 73, 79, 113, 116, 121–23, 128, 141–49, 161, 170–71, 237n74, 239n104; logic of, 106–8, 204, 209, 277n45, 286–87n34 sentiment: critique of, 8, 16, 192–95, 205–15, 284n7, 284n8, 285n19 soul, 62, 70, 85–86, 158, 161, 163, 167, 182, 220, 254n25; materiality of, 43,

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91, 92, 126, 174, 241n127, 252n1, 261n89; voluptas and, 115, 119, 121– 24, 250n100 statue, 89, 169, 174–76, 278n58 subjectivity, 15, 18–22, 35, 59, 62, 64, 67, 76, 89–91, 99–03, 109, 115, 118, 172, 177, 184, 191–95, 200–21, 224, 226n5, 245n25, 278n49 substance, 2–6, 19, 21–22, 24–31, 38– 47, 50, 53, 54, 55, 68, 81, 83, 90–96, 99–00, 103, 105, 110–11, 113–25, 139, 143, 155, 158–61, 165, 172–78, 182, 185–86, 188, 197, 202, 207, 222–24, 232n11, 12, 234n41, 238n78, 254n25, 256n36, 261n89 suicide, 183; Lucretius and, 32, 223, 239n111 swerve. See clinamen sympathy, 38, 69, 161–62, 171, 179, 185, 275n20 Tableau de l’amour conside´re´ dans l’e´tat du mariage, 123, 263n112 taste, 63–64, 67, 69, 70, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 100, 102, 108, 113, 145, 161, 167, 169, 188, 199, 220, 270n77; of poetry, 25, 27, 28, 30 theology, 10, 18, 27, 31, 41–43, 53, 198–202, 224 The´re`se philosophe, 15, 126–49, 150, 151, 152–54, 264–65n11, 265n20, 269n61, 276n28; attribution of, 263n1; inspiration for, 267n33. See also d’Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer (marquis) Tiffany, Daniel, 227n16, 232n11, 234n41 transgression, 13, 19, 23, 190 transparency, 6, 50, 54, 66, 73, 89, 109, 145, 152–54, 180, 222–24. See also clarity trope. See figure Venus, 104; invocation to, 23, 24–25, 26, 30, 41, 51–52, 61, 117, 197, 206

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Index 311 Virgil, 34, 231n6 Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de, 13, 20, 38–39, 46, 102, 227n14, 228n22, 236n66, 270n75 voluptas, 95, 244n18: definitions of, 22– 23, 82–87, 250n100; and the demise of thought, 10, 15, 21–22; Epicurus and, 22–23, 250n100; as ethic, 14, 103–25, 149–52, 257n42, 271n85;

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Lucretius and, 7, 14, 17–22, 23–31, 145; and materialist conversion, 7–9, 12, 24–25, 28, 36–47; philosophy of, 7, 15, 16, 36–47, 57, 59, 60–63, 65, 72, 82–87, 149–54, 223; and reason, 8, 149–52, 269n61; and truth, 7, 9, 49–52; and voluntas, 30–31, 235n49. See also pleasure

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