Le Corps érotique au XVIIIe siècle: amour, péché, maladie (review)

The libertine novel, though a central thread of Mladen Kozul's exploration of the erotic body, is far from its sole focus. Rejecting the idea of an eighteenth century that delineates increasingly specialized areas of knowledge, Kozul instead posits a hybrid hypertext that constructs and codifies representations of the body and its eroticization across religious, medical, and fictional discourse. The works at the legitimized end of this corpus lend cultural authority to their common language and imagery, but at the same time they are threatened by their relationship to writings at the licentious, erotic extreme of the spectrum, potentially inciting the very sensations that they aim to repress. Kozul takes issue with Foucault's 1976 Histoire de la sexualité, suggesting that the author glosses over this hybridity by defining libertine literature as lying outside discourses of power. He argues that the act of suppression in fact confers authority on censored texts, and cites this as evidence of a shift towards fiction as a locus of power, through which subversive imaginative representations insidiously infect readings of their more legitimate counterparts. His evidence is impressively wide-ranging, well marshalled, and convincing. Eleven thematic chapters move confidently among medical treatises, theological commentary, and libertine fiction, exploring the articulation of images of the body in a cross-section of texts ranging from Louis Tronson's Examens particuliers: essai sur la formation du prêtre (1690) to Jacques Boileau's Histoire des flagellants (1732), via Voltaire, Prévost, and Laclos, as well as the more obvious candidates Boyer and Sade. The first section focuses on the eroticization of the body in religious contexts, analysing quasipornographic representations of religious ecstasy, explicit theological disputes over the sexuality of Christ and the adultery of the Virgin Mary, and the ambiguous shared ground between seduction and conversion. The second half of the monograph deals with the influence of a growing body of medical knowledge on these discussions, with particular attention paid to how theories relating to the humours were employed to explain both outward manifestations of religious fervour and the physical expression of sexual excitement. Merely setting out these myriad examples would suffice to demonstrate Kozul's major hypothesis of genre porosity, but his lucid commentary also carefully draws out the more subtle implications of a model in which the verbalization of the erotic body slides between science, doctrine, and obscenity, its provocative potential voilé or overt but always present. While Kozul's decision to elide the terms 'libertine novel' and 'erotic novel' might initially seem worthy of contention, the distinction comes to be irrelevant in the context of his argument for generic flexibility. Ultimately, Kozul reveals libertine writings as merely the more explicit face of an underlying discourse of eroticism that pervades even the most staid and sententious works of the period. Like the libertine himself, articulating and acting on the desires repressed by the masses, the erotic novel is not so much polemical as it is truthful, and in Kozul's reading it is for this very reason that it could not be allowed to gain legitimacy.