The Autonomy of Pleasure

Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-15158-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 408 Seiten, Format (B × H): 236 mm x 165 mm, Gewicht: 698 g

Reihe: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous and potentially horrific.

Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law-unto-itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also examines the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steintrager, James

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Whose Sexual Revolution?1. A Thousand Modes of Venery: Coital Positions as Actions and Communications2. Voluptuary Architecture: Organizing3. Sodomy and Reason: Making Sense of the Libertine Preference4. "the obscene organ of brute pleasure": Social Functions of the Clitoris5. The Fury of Her Kindness: What Should a Libertine Know About Orgasm?6. Color and Caprice: The Politics and Aesthetics of Interracial Relations7. Canonizing Sade: ErosNotesIndex

Über Autor(innen)

James A. Steintrager is professor of English, comparative literature, and European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine.