Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake?On Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's "Pornocracy" Today

In Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times, the nineteenth-century father of mutualism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, defines an ideal marriage as "the union of force and beauty," which embraces "an absolute pact of devotion" that allegedly "immunizes" men and women "against all crime and felony."¹ In contrast, a concubinage "formed solely in view of pleasure … is the habitual resort of parasites, of thieves, of forgers and assassins." While fulminating a neotraditional view of marriage may seem hypocritical for the author of What Is Property?, Proudhon's Pornocracy pamphlet is worth revisiting insofar as it dramatizes a fantasy that aligns female circulation and the authority granted magistrates to arrange marriages (a governmental intrusion that Proudhon compares, predictably, to pimping) with the bankers' power to commoditize debt and profit through financial speculation and thus promote a "promiscuity" of value that he lambasts under the rubric of bankocracy. Keeping in mind how his atavistic moralism lives on today, the contributors to this special issue employ Proudhon's anxious pornocracy fantasy as a lens for amplifying the contradictions in contemporary situations where sexual economies reflect, threaten, or resist prevailing political-economic rationalities.

PLEASURE FOR PLEASURE'S SAKE

Writing during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, Proudhon vehemently responds in Pornocracy to Jenny D'Hericourt's and Juliette Lambert's criticism of his moral philosophy by proclaiming his commitment to women's truest contentment in the household where they sit across from their husbands as equals. "Marriage in the purity of its idea is," for Proudhon, "an absolute pact of devotion. Pleasure figures only as secondary: all exchange of wealth that produces the man against the joys that procure the woman, all voluptuous commerce, is combined, in order not to be mutual prostitution. It is thus," as Proudhon insists, "that marriage becomes for spouses a cult of conscience, and for society the very organ of justice." The implications of this claim extend well beyond matrimonial harmony, since Proudhon depicts traditional marriage as a mise- en-scène of social stability. Mutual devotion between man and woman, in accordance with their different virtues, force and beauty, founds a society that promotes reciprocal respect and thereby defends itself against individual, civil, and economic decadence.

Proudhon scorns "pleasure for pleasure's sake" as a bohemian and libertine exercise that "subordinate[s] law to the ideal, in the decadent manner of idolatrous polytheists"; and in this way, as he says, presumably addressing his feminist critics, "you accord perfectly with the modern bohemian, for whom the maxim is, as you know, art for art's sake," with its corollaries, "which enter naturally into your catechism: power for power, war for war, money for money, love for love, jouissance for jouissance."

While Pornocracy preeminently showcases Proudhon's preoccupation with pleasure unmoored from marital devotion, he also directs his ire at Barthelemy Proper Enfantin, social reformer and a founder of Saint-Simonianism, who, as Stefan Mattessich notes, influenced Proudhon's feminist critics as well as Second Empire reforms. In his introduction to the translation of selections from the unfinished Pornocracy pamphlet, Mattessich highlights the intensity of Proudhon's indignation regarding the "technocratic bent in Enfantin's conviction that magistrates should arrange, and not simply ratify, marriages"—in other words, to assess "the aptitude of the spouses [and] their mutual suitability … according to a science … [of] their sympathies and their antipathies" (85, cited by Mattessich in this volume). Such a science reifies "more intimate aspects and values of personhood," thereby facilitating what Proudhon calls a form of "national prostitution" or "amorous democracy" that transforms people into "producers of their own pleasures and agents of their own oppression."

Another prominent symptom of Saint-Simonian decadence, in Proudhon's view, was the so-called law of the Triad, which, as its label suggests, assumes the necessity of a third term in credit operations that "will come from the Bank of France, authorized by the State, from joint stock banks, equally authorized, from privileged stockbrokers, etc." The danger is that providers of credit services assume a "right to discounts, to charges, to commissions, or...