Social Contract, Masochist Contract

Fayçal Falaky

Description

Theorization of sensual desire was not uncommon in the eighteenth century; like many materialists of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected imperatives founded on metaphysical suppositions and viewed the senses as the only valid source of philosophical knowledge. In Social Contract, Masochist Contract, Fayçal Falaky demonstrates that what distinguishes Rousseau is that the foundational measure on which he bases his materialist philosophy is a sexual instinct endowed, paradoxically, with the same sublime, self-abnegating attributes historically associated with Christian, metaphysical desire. To understand the aesthetics of Rousseau's masochism is, Falaky argues, to understand how ideals of Christian morality and spiritual ennoblement survived the Enlightenment, and how God died, only to be repackaged in new fetishes. Whether it is the imperious mistress of his erotic fantasies, the Arcadian nature of his philosophical reveries, or the sublime Law designed to elevate the citizen from enslaving appetite, Rousseau's fetishes herald the new regulative Ideals of the modern secular state.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. Vague Inquietudes and Uncertain Desires

2. Rebirthing the Past

3. Machinating (and Confessing) the Mekhane

4. Sculpting Desire

5. Social Contract, Masochist Contract

Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• France

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438449913
• Langue: English

Extrait

SOCIAL CONTRACT, MASOCHIST CONTRACT
SOCIAL CONTRACT, MASOCHIST CONTRACT

Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau
Fayçal Falaky
Cover art: La vierge corrigeant l’Enfant Jésus devant trois témoins by Max Ernst Museum Ludwig, ML 10056; Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c003490 © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Falaky, Fayçal, 1977–
Social contract, masochist contract : aesthetics of freedom and submission in Rousseau / Fayçal Falaky.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4989-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. 2. Masochism. 3. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title.
B2137.F35 2014
320.1 1—dc23
2013012060
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Heather and Zayd To my parents, Abbes and Aïcha
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Vague Inquietudes and Uncertain Desires
Chapter 2. Rebirthing the Past
Chapter 3. Machinating (and Confessing) the Mekhane
Chapter 4. Sculpting Desire
Chapter 5. Social Contract, Masochist Contract
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
I owe this book to the support and encouragement of many people. I wish to thank Emily Apter for her invaluable guidance and readings of earlier germinations of this book. I would also like to express my gratitude to Bassem Shahin, Masano Yamashita, Christophe Litwin, Jeppe Nielsen, and Xavier Blandin. Your insights, good humor, and friendship have sustained me over the course of this journey. My sincere appreciation also goes to my students, friends, and colleagues at Tulane University: Jean-Godefroy Bidima, Linda Carroll, Thomas Klingler, Felicia McCarren, Elizabeth Poe, Vaheed Ramazani, Oana Sabo, Toby Wikström, and Jeanny Keck. Thank you for enriching my life and my thinking and for providing a congenial environment within which to teach and research. I am particularly indebted to Michael Syrimis for becoming a mentor of sorts and I am grateful to Michael Wiedorn and Matthew Francis for providing invaluable advice and feedback on my work. The publication of my manuscript was made possible through a generous grant from the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. I am grateful to Carole Haber for her support. At SUNY Press, thanks go to Michael Rinella, Rafael Chaiken, and Jenn Bennett for their editorial guidance. I am also much indebted to the anonymous readers whose comments and suggestions have been extremely valuable. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for their love and forbearance. I would especially like to thank Heather for her boundless support and for painstakingly polishing my incurable English. Without her, this book would not have been possible.
Parts of chapter 4 appeared as “Rousseau’s Theatrical Reform: ‘l’utile et l’agréable’ in the Lettre à d’Alembert and Julie, ” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 47, no. 3 (2011): 262–74. Some of the material from chapter 5 appeared as part of an essay, “Reverse Revolution,” in Rousseau and Revolution, ed. H. R. Lauritsen and M. Thorup (London: Continuum, 2011), 83–97.
Abbreviations OC Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Œuvres complètes . Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1959–1995). TP Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens. Thérèse Philosophe: Ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Père Dirrag et de Mademoiselle Eradice. Ed. Florence Lotterie (Paris: Flammarion, 2007). LR Denis Diderot. La Religieuse . Ed. Robert Mauzi (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). TN Denis Diderot. The Nun . Trans. Russell Goulbourne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). CC Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Correspondance complète . Ed. R. A. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1965–1998). E Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Emile, or On Education . Trans. Allan David Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). C Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes. Ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, Trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995). RJJ Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Ed. and trans. Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990). LD Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater. Ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004). SD Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy. Ed. and trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993). R Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières. Ed. Christopher Kelly. Trans. Charles E. Butterworth, Alexandra Cook, and Terence Marshall. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000). J Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Julie, or the New Heloise. Ed. and trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997). SC Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Social Contract, Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript. Ed. and trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994).
Introduction
Plus tard je compris cette sensation, en lisant les œuvres de J.-J. Rousseau.
—Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Choses vécues (1888)
I n a police report dated August 3, 1764, the Inspector Marais writes that whips and floggers have become common features of every bawdy house in Paris. These tormenting devices, he notes, have become the treatment of choice for incapacitated lechers (“paillards refroidis”) and are particularly privileged by the members of the clergy. 1 Marais adds that he has seen many religious men show up in these houses only to be ceremoniously trounced, whipped with brooms and switches until their bodies were dripping with blood. Such are also the interior decoration, the clientele and the bloody streams depicted in Le Catéchisme libertin, an instruction manual for newly initiated prostitutes, published in 1792 and ascribed to Théroigne de Méricourt, the Amazon-like heroine who through the text seems less emblematic of liberty than the libertine of the French Revolution. Here again, we encounter a list of whips big and small, knotted and straight, adorned for the occasion with ribbons red, white, and blue. “Now that patriotism is fashionable, we must fuck patriotically,” says the manual. 2 And the whips’ victims are likewise described as impotent clients (“fouteurs à la glace”) who need assistance to be aroused or odd johns who can’t help but find in this humiliating cruelty the beginning and end of “a more sensual jouissance .” 3 It is in the interest of the procuress to learn how to guess and reckon the men who desire such fancies, unless, that is, the habit does an Abbot make. “Abbots,” according to Le Catéchism e, “have a decided propensity for the whip; there are some who need to be bound and tied from side to side, and who are satisfied only when their buttocks are mortified and skinned and blood is trickling along their thighs.” 4
If Marais’s reports offer at times as much of a titillating read as Le Catéchisme libertin, it is because moral surveillance therein takes the same form and arguments as the voyeuristic gaze of pornographic literature. Both genres partake in a process of unveiling and revealing, of shedding light on the hidden corners of society’s underbelly as well as the darkest recesses of the human heart. Under this all-seeing gaze, the priest is stripped of his clothes and what in a more solemn and sacred context may have appeared to be a scene of humility and penitent mortification takes, in this light, the form of what readers would have perceived as a strange sexual aberration. About a century later, in an attempt to define this behavior, Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term masochism after Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and described it as a peculiar perversion “in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused.” 5 Krafft-Ebing justifies his denomination by the fact that Sacher-Masoch was not only afflicted by said perversion but he was also its “literary champion.” The author of Venus in Furs, however, was not the only writer to warrant the psychiatrist’s scrutiny. After Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing turns his attention to the author of the Confessions, but applies, this time, a corrective to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s self-diagnosis: “It is interesting and worthy of mention that one of the most celebrated men was subject to this perversion and describes it in his autobiography (though somewhat erroneously).” 6 Rousseau supposed that his peculiar sensuality was connected to flagellation, but it was, the psychiatrist contends, merely related to his impulse to be subjected to and humiliated by a woman. Whipless, Rousse