"I resist it no longer": Enlightened Philosophy and Feminine Compulsion in Therese philosophe

The obscene novel Thérèse philosophe demonstrates the reliance of enlightened forms of judgment on the construction of literary language as at the origin of a constrained, corporeal reactivity toward which women are specifically inclined. The narrative of Thérèse philosophe confirms the conjunction of philosophy and literature as a crucial one for materialist thought, but in doing so presents the literary sphere as an arena from which critical self-mastery must always be forcibly wrenched. Philosophy, here, positions itself delicately in the momentary—but infinitely reiterated—resistance to the pornographic image, even as it defines itself in seeming complicity with this mode of representation.