Henry Martyn Lloyd

The discourse of sensibility: the knowing body in the Enlightenment

This chapter introduces the problematic addressed by this volume by contextualising the object of study, the eighteenth-century’s body of sensibility, and the discourse within which this object was constructed. It was in terms of this knowing body that the persona of the eighteenth-century knowledge-seeker was constructed. This chapter has two major purposes. First, in order to situate the individual chapters in their broader intellectual context, it outlines four major components of the discourse of sensibility: vitalist medicine, sensationist epistemology, moral sense theory, and aesthetics, including the novel of sensibility. Second, this essay elaborates those general claims collectively supported by the chapters, drawing together what they contribute to questions of the emergence of the discourse, and key elements at stake within the discourse itself. Four major themes are apparent: First, this collection reconstructs various modes by which the sympathetic subject was construed or scripted, including through the theatre, poetry, literature, and medical and philosophical treaties. It furthermore draws out those techniques of affective pedagogy which were implied by the medicalisation of the knowing body, and highlights the manner in which the body of sensibility was constructed as simultaneously particular and universal. Finally, it illustrates the ‘centrifugal forces’ which were at play within the discourse, and shows the anxiety which often accompanied these forces.

“Je n'ai jamais vu une sensibilité comme la tienne, jamais une tête si délicieuse!”: Rousseau, Sade, and Embodied Epistemology

Rousseau preceded Sade: Rousseau (1712–1778) published most of his major works in two remarkably fecund years, 1761–1762; Sade (1740–1814) published most of his major texts between 1791 and 1801; thus there are roughly 30 years separating the two. We know that Sade owned Rousseau’s major works and Sade mentions Rousseau as an important author, calling Julie, or the New Héloïse a “sublime book” which will “never be bettered.” Yet the two oeuvres are startlingly different, especially in their affects. In fact they seem to be the exact opposite of one another. So it is startling and perhaps somewhat controversial to claim that the Sadean oeuvre is in fact highly proximate to Rousseau’s. This is what I shall do in this paper. More specifically, I shall argue that Sade’s oeuvre constitutes a series of precise engagements with Rousseau on many different levels, including at the level of fundamental epistemology. In addressing the relationship between Rousseau and Sade I do not seek to deemphasise the very substantial relationships between Sade and other key figures in his intellectual context. While I will discuss aspects of Sade’s thought that are drawn from Condillac and d’Holbach, much has also been written about other figures in his context from whom he drew a great deal: Helvétius and La Mettrie are perhaps the most obvious examples. Sade’s oeuvre has most often, and most naturally, been read in the context of the “Radical” or “Libertine” Enlightenment. While much is left to be said here, this paper seeks to reconstruct the relationship between Sade and perhaps the most famous critic of the “Libertine” Enlightenment. The most obvious proximity between Rousseau and Sade is in their epistolary novels: between Julie, or the New Héloïse and Sade’s now littleread Aline et Valcour. In contrast, this paper will focus on questions of philosophical anthropology and theories of embodied epistemology, notions which are imbricated with – which in an ontological sense may be said to underpin – their respective literary projects. At this level Rousseau and Sade agree on what they disagree on, and to do this a very great deal of agreement is first required. Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) is the tale of the initiation into libertinage of the young and virginal Eugénie by a trio of libertines led by irrepressible philosopher-hero Dolmancé. The text, in the style of much of Sade’s writings, is made up of philosophical harangues

Sensibilité, Embodied Epistemology, and the French Enlightenment

This chapter reconstructs the theory of knowledge as it operated in the French Enlightenment. It does so initially by questioning the extent to which epistemology was divided between ‘British empiricism’ and ‘Continental rationalism’, and by showing that in the discourse of sensibility, if the theory of knowledge was ‘first philosophy’, then it was so in terms largely set by Enlightenment vitalism. Building on these initial points, the chapter opens with an examination of the interaction between medical vitalism and sensibility, where the latter is understood as both a passive and an active power of the living body. Here, I begin to tease out, not what is continuous between Locke and the French Enlightenment, but what was added to Locke’s thought by the period. In the second section, I examine the implications of this understanding of the body of sensibility for what has been called the period’s ‘philosophical particularism’ and for its practice of science. Here, the body of sensibility was constructed as always particular. The ability of the theory of sensibility to constitute a unifying ground within a discourse which produced a proliferation of particularity is the focus of this section. The chapter moves from considering the body of sensibility as the object of knowledge to considering it as the subject that knew.

Natural Law, and the Law and Voice of Nature

This chapter reconstructs the key features of natural law theory as it was extant to the late eighteenth-century French context using theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Rousseau, Diderot, and Boucher d’Argis. It shows that by the middle of the century, the tradition had incorporated within it moral sense theories which had earlier been criticisms of it. The chapter includes a discussion of the difference in the period between references to the “law of nature,” which was known largely by reason, and the “voice of nature,” which was known by sensibility and was largely inseparable from the moral sense. This chapter will outline the philosophical context for the remainder of the part and Sade’s critique response to the tradition.

The Problem of Sade

This chapter outlines the problem that Sade’s oeuvre poses to historians of the Enlightenment, a problem formed by the difficulty of reconciling Sade’s thought with its philosophical context, that of the French Enlightenment and particularly Enlightenment humanism. The chapter outlines and dismisses the two dominant approaches that scholars have generally used: either Sade is simply dismissed as not worthy of serious study, or by contrast, Sade is elevated to such an extent that his work becomes the meaning of the entire Enlightenment. The problem of Sade is exacerbated by the uses his work was put to in the twentieth century, particularly by the French avant-garde, and following them by much contemporary theory and criticism which has not seriously engaged with his philosophical ideas.

Sade’s Philosophical “System”

This chapter introduces the major themes of Sade’s philosophical “system.” Of particular importance here is the relationship between philosophy and literature: Sade’s philosophical “system” is imbricated with his literary/aesthetical project. The chapter situates the book as a whole within the field of Sade studies. This book revises two of the most significant idees recues within the literature: first, that the violence in Sade is only to language, and so Sade only has intentions apropos of writing; second, that Sade, insofar as he is a philosopher, is a philosopher of unreason or irrationality or is avant la lettre a theorist of something like Freud’s Id.

Heart and Head, Love and Libertinage, in Histoire de Juliette

This chapter develops the previous two chapters into a detailed reading of the status and critique of moral sense theory in Histoire de Juliette. It reconstructs Sade’s own “theory of pleasant feelings” (theorie des sentiments agreables.) The chapter focuses on Sade’s analysis of the relative pleasures of the heart and the head, that is, the pleasures of virtue and love as compared to those of libertinage. The chapter includes a coda to Part III, which examine Sade’s aesthetics of the abhorrent—his deliberate aestheticisation of the abject, grotesque, disgusting, violent, and shocking—as an important part of his response to eighteenth-century moral sense theory’s aesthetics of the good and the beautiful.

Rousseau’s Knowing Heart, Sade’s Knowing Body

This chapter continues to focus on eighteenth century’s theories of “natural” morality. It begins to reconstruct Sade’s critique of moral sense theory by focusing on the particular nature of Sadean sensibility. The chapter uses Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine to look firstly at Sade’s confusing of the pleasure/pain binary and at his epistemology of intensity, before then looking at his ambidextrous response. The chapter shows that in response to Rousseau’s epistemology based on the sensibility of the uncorrupted heart, especially as it is found in the “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” Sade establishes an epistemology of bodily sensibility and of sensory intensity.

Against the Dialectic of Enlightenment; or, How Not to Read Kant Avec Sade

The conclusion situates the book within the broader revisionist trends in Enlightenment Studies and makes clear its challenge to the ways in which Sade is often deployed in contemporary “Continental” Philosophy and Critical Theory. The book’s reconstruction of Sade’s philosophical “system” makes clear the inadequacy of understandings of the period that have located Sade as the “dialectical” other to Kant. The specific targets of this conclusion are Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, and those who have deployed the Kant avec Sade trope. The conclusion demonstrates that such uses of Sade cannot withstand sustained scholarly attention to Sade’s actual philosophy.

Sade’s Theory of Libertine Askesis

Sade’s oeuvre is fundamentally didactic. This includes his infamous One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and his Philosophy in the Bedroom. Where these works exemplify his pedagogy Sade’s express theory of affective pedagogy, his libertine askesis, is given in detail in Histoire de Juliette. This chapter reconstructs Sade’s theory of libertine askesis. It first discusses the methods of training, then the five stages of Sade’s libertine self-cultivation. The chapter includes a discussion of the problem of insensibility and of Sadean apathy, the meaning of which has caused quite a bit of confusion among commentators.