Introduction: Libertine Bodies or the Politics of Baroque Corporeality

If you enter the word libertine in Google Images, you will most likely, depending on your country of residence, stumble upon dozens of pictures of women exhibiting their own qualities as lovers. You would then, on your quest for academic knowledge, perhaps meet Martine, "une fille hard" ("a girl who likes its rough"), a voluptuous blonde posing in transparent dress in her private living room somewhere in Eupen, a small town in the Eastern part of Belgium. You would be able to see pictures of movies like Le libertin (2000), "une comédie sans costumes" ("a comedy without costumes") directed by Gabriel Aghion and described by James Travers as a "daring attempt to combine the lavish historical drama (for which French cinema is particularly renowned) with bawdy farce" (Travers). Or you might be tempted to buy a "robe libertine" or to order a DVD copy of the erotic film Lady Libertine (1984), the front cover of which praises the film with the simple but effective phrase "great nudity."

But most likely you would also stumble upon portraits of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF director accused of forcing Nafissato Diallo, a housekeeper in one of New York City's major hotels, into oral sex. Even though the charges were dropped, this highly publicized event brought about an endless string of speculations on the libertine networks of which Strauss-Kahn would have been a part. This led eager journalists to investigate his visits to the high-profile erotic club Les Chandelles in Paris or his participation in festive erotic events in Lille (France), where French captains of industry invited politicians like Strauss-Kahn to enjoy the beautiful women of a network operating in the north of France and Belgian cities such as Doornik and Renaix.

Suddenly the word libertine seemed to be everywhere, as the press eagerly speculated on the existence of a semi-aristocratic hidden network of high-profile libertines taking their inspiration from an imagined eighteenth-century universe of wigs, powdered faces, and voluptuous cleavages. The word itself underwent a far-reaching semantic hyperinflation as it became a synonym for échangiste (the French word for swinger). Hence, the word libertinism became-incorrectly-synonymous with "libertinage." In some newspaper articles on the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, Ron Paul was even incorrectly described as a "libertine," while the journalist of course meant "libertarian," a political position commonly associated with a conservative perspective on economy and property rights and an emphasis on individual freedom in social and ethical matters.

From a historical perspective, this all-too-easy association of the word libertinism with a joyous sexual life and an explicit pornographic imagination is problematic, as many studies have shown (for an extensive bibliography on this issue, see Jean-Pierre Cavaillé's Les Dossiers du Grihl). These same studies have shown that we should not imagine the libertine posture was confined to the eighteenth-century universe of the Marquis de Sade and his contemporaries. Rather, it is a practice or a position-both intellectual and physical-aimed at the liberation of the individual mind. It is an attitude that one could describe as profoundly modern, an attitude in which the individual living in the ever-shifting early modern world-a world that one could describe as fundamentally "baroque"-shapes himself (libertinism generally being a male privilege) and his surrounding world by living his life as an experiment. Libertinism, as Cavaillé rightly points out in his illuminating article "La polémique anti-libertine et anti-libertaire contemporaine: catholiques, libéraux, libertariens," is all about freedom, the use, or rather the abuse (as the word libertinism had a fundamental negative connotation), of your individual freedom:

On a d'abord taxé de libertinage ou de libertinisme l'exercice de libertés indues, jugées négatives, excessives, délétères, en tous les domaines, religieux et moral d'abord, mais aussi politiques et en fait dans toutes les relations sociales qui requièrent l'obéissance et la soumission aux normes.

The words libertinage or libertinism were first used to describe the execution of inappropriate freedoms...