Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (review)

If, as the opening line of Thomas Kavanagh's Enlightened Pleasures suggests, "pleasure lies always to the dark side," scholarship on the eighteenth century's relationship with pleasure has begun to bring it back into the light (1). Since the mid-1990s scholarship on both France and Britain has evaluated pleasure's role in the intellectual and aesthetic developments of the Enlightenment, and Enlightened Pleasures is a valuable addition to this field. Kavanagh's study thoughtfully attends to the multiple forms of cultural production through which a new understanding of pleasure was articulated and represented in eighteenth-century France: the novel, the visual arts, philosophical writing, and erotic theater. No longer condemned as a debilitating vice that preyed on the Christian soul, and emboldened by a materialist philosophy that promoted a union of the body and mind, pleasure was critical to the Enlightenment project of achieving a heightened understanding of the world through the senses. This understanding and its benefits were, Kavanagh contends, both personal and communal. As the Enlightenment came to challenge Christian and Cartesian idealism, "the senses and their pleasure moved to the center not only of how the individual might know the world but how society might achieve concord within it" (8).

Grounding this new understanding of pleasure in what he argues is the Enlightenment's union of the classical philosophies of Epicureanism and Stoicism, Kavanagh analyzes the ways in which so many of the period's writers and artists sought to provide their audiences with representations of pleasure enriched and made safe by Stoic reason and control. As he argues from the outset, conceptualizing the century's pursuit of pleasure in terms of "Epicurean Stoicism" brings properly into focus the Enlightenment's reconciliation of these once oppositional philosophies while also avoiding the negative association of the more common libertinage with a self-interested hedonism directed solely at the satisfaction of sexual desires. The book's eight main chapters fall chronologically into two sections, the first of which takes up material primarily from the 1740s, the decade in which Kavanagh locates the merging of Epicureanism and Stoicism in literature and the visual arts. Offering the delights of pleasure at a safe remove while extending the experience of one to a collective body of readers and viewers, novels and paintings became primary vehicles for the pursuit of Epicurean Stoicism. Depicting pleasure was not without its challenges, and this central concern of Enlightened Pleasures is perhaps most forcefully articulated in the book's opening chapters, in which, through close readings of single texts (Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, Le Guerrier philosophe; Jacques Rochette de La Morlière, Angola, histoire indienne; Anon., Thérèse philosophe), Kavanagh investigates the various ways midcentury authors attempted to close the gap between pleasure as a representation and as a lived experience. Chapter 4 shifts focus to the visual arts, evaluating François Boucher's paintings in light of the aesthetic theory of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos. Du Bos's Critical Reflections, Kavanagh maintains, had a decisive influence on both the Rococo's promotion of the spectator's pleasure as the end aim of artistic production and Boucher's own development of "a new way of painting directly for the senses" (89–90).

Midway through the century (and at the midpoint of the book), the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrives to challenge both the Enlightenment and its valorization of pleasure, initiating a reaction against the guiding principles of the previous decades: "As civic community replaced mystical body, as sensation became the docile acolyte of sentiment, and as complicity with modernity became the most grievous sin, Rousseau's religion of liberty set the stage for a new shaming of pleasure" (103). Yet, considering Rousseau's final retreat into his own world of isolation, Kavanagh finds this challenge to pleasure to be "deeply paradoxical" (103). To illustrate Rousseau's transformation from the author of the Discourses to the author of the Reveries, Kavanagh presents a compelling juxtaposition of two...