The Autonomy of Pleasure: Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution(Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law-unto-itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also examines the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

About the Author :
James A. Steintrager is professor of English, comparative literature, and European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Review :
The Autonomy of Pleasure is an important work that adds richly to our understanding of libertine literature in eighteenth-century France and, more generally, of the culture of pleasure that emerged in aristocratic and leisurely social circles. James A. Steintrager's interpretation of libertinage is innovatively different from existing scholarship, weaving suggestively and cogently between the eighteenth-century context and the present.--Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota Steintrager's original and persuasive study of the Marquis de Sade and the uses of Sade will be as stimulating to historians of sexuality, sex, and sexology as it will be to scholars and students of eighteenth-century French literature. The Autonomy of Pleasure will also appeal to historians of visual culture with its excellent reproductions of eighteenth-century engravings, surrealist photographs, and movie stills.--Kate Tunstall, University of Oxford