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Petite-Maîtrise : The Ethics of Libertine Foppery Peter Cryle ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING ACHIEVEMENTS of so-called poststructuralist thought has been to establish the understanding that marginal positions are nonetheless positions in some proper sense. Disruptive or subversive figures are themselves enfolded, as Derrida might say, within orderly spaces of representation. That is one reason why postcolonial and gender studies, for example, have come to speak of the Other, with a capital "O". They analyze racist, sexist, and homophobic discourses in order to understand the semiotic work done by such figures as the Negro, the Whore, the Homosexual. But a significant secondary effect of such analysis— perhaps the more important in the long run—is to point to the diversity of practices and persons that are gathered together and yet paradoxically hidden by capitalized denomination. This kind of analysis can be extended to the figure of the Libertine. In France and elsewhere, it has long been possible to construct the Libertine as a kind of heroic villain. Reprobatory talk is marshalled around a limited set of literary figures, most notably Molière's Don Juan, Laclos 's Valmont and Merteuil , and a whole series of characters in Sade's novels. The very same discursive dynamic has made those figures available for heroic roles in narratives of moral and sexual liberation, for the Libertine is a figure of profound ambivalence, both hostage and standard-bearer in an unending battle. In this essay, I want simply to take the figure of the heroic Libertine as known. It will avail us little to rehearse the indignant diatribes and the hortatory tributes that surround and shape it. In the place of all that talk, for the sake of summary generalization, I offer just one text as an exemplum. Luce Irigaray's "'Françaises', ne faites plus un effort" does not actually take one of the standard positions in the old moral debate, but manifests all the better for that the assumptions shared by both sides. The title of "'Françaises', ne faites plus un effort" speaks to (French) women, but the enunciative fiction in the body of the text is an address to "maîtres-libertins." In that sense, the text is a both a call to defiance and a performance of interrogation. The parodie title evokes the revolutionary pamphlet , "Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains" embedded in Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir, thereby effectively giving Sade's 62 Winter 2003 Cryle novel emblematic status as a representation of gendered libertinism. Yet Sade's Dolmancé, the master of ceremonies in La Philosophie dans Ie boudoir and the fictive author of the pamphlet, is not named in Irigaray's text, and is thus denied hero status. He is simply interpellated as one of a whole class of such characters. Interpellation, it should be noted, stops short of denunciation: the master libertines are not allowed here to be the object of the indignation that their own transgressive program anticipates and perhaps requires. Rather, they are disrespectfully interrogated by a womanly figure who stands on the edge, or at the end, of one of their typical scenes.' Those scenes, as Irigaray calls them, are didactic exercises in which an accomplished male instructs a young woman in the art of pleasure. With "une autorité souveraine," Dolmancé and his fellow "instituteurs immoraux" alternate between lectures in libertine philosophy and demonstrations of bodily practice. The young woman is not made to suffer, and is not a victim in the Dworkinian sense.2 The fact is, however, that her pleasure is not truly her own. It is, one might say, exacted from her, as the master regularly compels her to programmatic "orgasm," always produced on cue. The woman is both patient and pupil, and libertinism is all the more masterful for being systematically magisterial. One of the defining traits of the libertines' art, Irigaray suggests, is its seriality . She talks about it in psychoanalytical terms as repetition compulsion, pursued to the point of exhaustion. Mastery cannot help performing itself repeatedly, and is therefore, under interrogation, made to appear dialectically as a form of weakness. But a comparable thematic observation can be made...

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