The Autonomy of Pleasure: Libertines, Licence, and Sexual Revolution by James A. Steintrager (review)

Something like twenty years after first reading volume 1 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, I still have not forgotten that “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”¹ But Foucault leaves the tantalizing idea of bodies and pleasures wholly unanalyzed, and we are left to wonder what such a rallying point might be. Pursuing his métier as a literary, social, and intellectual historian, James A. Steintrager responds in a brilliantly formed study of a period that strove to realize the autonomy of pleasure: eighteenth-century French libertinage. The Autonomy of Pleasure: Libertines, Licence, and Sexual Revolution forms a decisive corrective to the hopes of naive readers of Foucault. Rather than an unsubjected body, somehow pure in its pleasures, what he uncovers is a social, textual, and practical system. Pleasure, Steintrager shows, will always be socially mediated.

Eighteenth-century libertinage was a textual and literary construction, a system of communication that Steintrager understands in terms of auto-poiesis, a term borrowed from biology and used “to designate systems that reproduce themselves out of their own elements and determine their own borders” (6). He also borrows from Barthes’s idea of writing as a closed system “where communication is bound by the text and takes place within the text” (69). This is not to say that Steintrager has written a work dominated by theory. The clearest and most compelling image of what is intended here is given in a paradigmatic example. The Marquis de Sade’s infamous Les cent vingt journées de Sodome proceeds according to an “algorithm” and unfolds as an isolated, self-perpetuating, and self-determining system. At the very center stands the absolute and uncompromising demand for libertine pleasure, subordinated to nothing, subordinating everything. Yet this text is not unique; instead, it is the culmination of a widespread and emerging tendency during this era to consider pleasure as an autonomous system of communication and action. Libertinage was not a mere textual phenomenon but a system of actions, an ethos for those such as Sade who lived according to its principles.

Steintrager’s argument draws on an impressive range of source material, from Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid, through the Renaissance, to Bloch and Krafft-Ebing, into the twentieth century, to near-contemporary sources. But the majority of the work is dedicated to a detailed reading of eighteenth-century French libertine fiction, from the early “novels of seduction” to the late works of “la foutromanie [fuckomania].” The usual suspects are all here: Crébillon, Duclos, d’Argens, Mirabeau, and so on. And Sade. Of course Sade. Steintrager also shows mastery of a library of lesser-known texts. The book traverses this terrain and develops its argument in a series of interrelated thematic studies, covering the literature on sexual postures, beginning from ancient sources until figures such as Bloch; architecture and spaces of libertinage, including petites maisons (apartments kept by aristocrats for libertine activities), convents, brothels, and harems; sodomy; the clitoris and its social function; the orgasm, particularly the female orgasm, faked and otherwise; and aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of race. The developing list of what pleasure is shown to be autonomous from becomes impressive: religion, morality, politics, beauty, intimacy, nature, and philosophy.

Much of the lifting to carry this argument is achieved through the trope of pleasure progressively freed from teleological paradigms, ideas of proper function, and the supposedly “true” end of sex: reproduction. This trope appears relatively often in the book, most obviously in relation to sodomy but also in the “discovery” of the clitoris and in the female orgasm. Steintrager similarly emphasizes pleasure’s autonomy from morality and, less obviously, from philosophy insofar as they are governed by teleological rationality. Pleasure emerges as an end in itself.

For the most part Steintrager shows pleasure’s autonomy to be...