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

Thomas Kavanagh has written extensively on eighteenth-century France, on its libertine literature and esthetics, and on its culture of gambling. His latest book provides him with another intriguing, elusive object of inquiry, creating an original oeuvre that provides a different narrative of the Age of Voltaire, away from the pessimistic version of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, or the idealistic version of Ernst Cassirer. Kavanagh returns to what he would call the original “French story” of the French Enlightenment, his preferred preoccupation: pleasure. He does so by probing the classical heritage of this notion in the eighteenth century. It is what he calls the Enlightenment’s new Epicureanism that Kavanagh meticulously examines in this rich, concise book, not the libertinage perceived more commonly as sexual licence but the recasting of it as an exceptional synthesis of Epicureanism and Stoicism. This book is divided into eight chapters covering a variety of known and under-studied texts (Jourdan, Mirabeau), the visual arts, and the erotic theatre, a welcome addition.

Chapter 1 offers a new reading of a turbulent, little-known memoir-novel, Le Guerrier philosophe by Jean-Baptiste Jourdan. This hard-to-follow novel (a detriment to this chapter that opens the book) narrates a story that establishes, Kavanagh argues, the primacy of the experience of love, of “the evanescence of pleasure” (16). The characters are repeatedly confronted with the renunciation of Stoic principles, with reason.

Chapter 2 is devoted to La Morlière’s oriental tale Angola. The tale relates a story about “coupling,” understood as “a practice of pleasures sought and found within a conviviality” (34). Kavanagh unveils the various tools with which the novel inspires pleasure, especially the mirroring apparatus that reverberates all the way to the reader. Comparing Rousseau’s Julie and Angola in that light, the author stresses the differences of ideology between the two novels. Fantasies and pleasure are substituted by Rousseau with the imagination and sentiment.

In his next chapter, Kavanagh studies a perfect novel for his thesis, Thérèse philosophe. Nowhere in libertine literature is the Epicurean philosophy better articulated. The character of the Abbé who becomes Thérèse’s mentor is of the essence. His Spinozan speech with its distinctive precepts determines the course of the erotic education of the heroine. Kavanagh examines the various parts of Boyer d’Argens’s loose narration and follows Thérèse’s trajectory from fear to full consciousness of pleasure, realized as “exchange with another” (65). Pleasure is then transformed as volupté.

Considering the role of pleasure in the visual arts, Kavanagh devotes an entire chapter to the eighteenth century’s primary suspect, François Boucher. But it is by way of Abbé Du Bos that Boucher’s innovation about the depiction of pleasure is studied. Kavanagh shows how Du Bos, radically putting the viewer’s pleasure first, creates the conditions for the success and marketability of Boucher’s productions. It is also from Du Bos’s Critical Reflections, according to the author, that Boucher will derive a technique of representation of pleasure that is immediate and intense. Reviewing a number of the artist’s paintings, Kavanagh replaces Boucher expertly within the sensationist aesthetics that makes him a more complex painter of rococo, rescued from Diderot’s harsh judgement. He becomes instead the great manipulator of colour and form, the magician of plaisir pur.

In that new landscape, chapter 5 considers the inescapable case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kavanagh recognizes the challenge in the face of Rousseau’s “shaming of pleasure” and its substitution by liberty (103). What will be the positioning of the author of the Confessions vis-à-vis this emerging “legitimacy of pleasure” (103) in the century? To resolve this dilemma, he reconsiders Rousseau’s philosophy through the concept of “eudemony” (well-being), where the alliance of pleasure and happiness appears more credible. The challenge of this chapter was to wrestle with Rousseau’s...