Social Contract, Masochist Contract

Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau

Fayçal Falaky

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438449913
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Vague Inquietudes and Uncertain Desires

[Men] have a secret instinct which leads them to look for distractions and occupations elsewhere, which derives from their feelings of constant wretchedness. And they have another secret instinct, remaining from the greatness of our original nature, which tells them that happiness lies only in repose, not frantic activity.¹

—Pascal, Pensées (1664)

This secret instinct is the first principle and the necessary foundation of society.²

—Voltaire, Remarques (premières) sur les Pensées de Pascal (1728)

There is in Voltaire’s comment a faint and strangely inverted parallel to Pascal’s notion of divertissement. If man is naturally predisposed to enjoy the amusements of life, is not Pascal’s supposed religious impulse a diversion from the instinct’s primary and sexual purpose? As Voltaire quips a sentence later: “I do not know what our first parents did in paradise, but if each of them had made their own person the sole object of their respective thoughts, the propagation of mankind would have been seriously jeopardized.”³ Pascal—the “sublime misanthrope” as Voltaire called him—may have been the moral and intellectual foil to the Epicurean enlightenment.⁴ In this regard, however, he was also its obverse mirror image.

For Pascal, as for Christians in general, human life is the field of finite illusion and the real is the City of God, man’s original and eternal abode. The virtue of man is to fix his sight and thoughts on the heavenly thereafter that lies in store and to pray with unflinching and undistracted devotion, lest his yearning be diverted and corrupted from its celestial journey. In this view of the world, Christ the Lord is also Christ the Healer and through him alone, says St. Augustine, could the patient soul recover from its fallen alienation.⁵ Over the course of the eighteenth century, the figure of the médecin philosophe will not only take the place of the Christus Medicus, he will also give diversion and alienation a whole new physiological meaning. Under the new medical gaze, religious inquietude went from being the expression of man’s need for divine grace to becoming a perverted sexual instinct that strayed from the path prescribed to it by nature. Likewise, the chaste and fervid believer, once a model of righteous zeal, became perceived as “un fou à retento semine”;⁶ a repressed prude who consoles the starved and disquieted body through the delusions of a hysteric imagination. Such is the case, says the Baron d’Holbach, of all the pious vestals who “give to their God, whom they depict with the most charming traits, the affection which they are not allowed to offer to fellow human beings.”⁷ Unlike the mystic who seeks deliverance from the deceptions of the flesh, redemption, for the médecin philosophe, consists in releasing the body from the bondage of delusive idolatry. The cure entailed shifting the gaze from the transcendental to the mundane. It also meant inverting the theological dichotomy between the illusory and the real, between the way of error and the way of truth.

Ironically enough, however, no one depicted this metaphysical diversion of the senses more lucidly and more consistently than the man who would emerge as the Enlightenment’s own sublime misanthrope—Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ever since his Pauline illumination on the road to Vincennes, Rousseau experienced a moral and intellectual revelation that would eventually lead to his break with Diderot and the circle of free-thinkers he acquainted at d’Holbach’s coterie, and to his self-imposed exile from what he deemed the corrupting effects of society. From the standpoint of the philosophes, Rousseau seemed to be yet another disgruntled hermit reciting a tired litany against the depravity of the world. He lamented the corruption of manners that prevailed in Paris, inveighed against the immorality of theater and actors, and like a prophet on a mountaintop, endeavored to set people back on the path of a lost virtue. The author of the Confessions, however, was not exactly a reincarnated St. Augustine. The elitist and mocking atheism he encountered in the coteries may have pushed him to take up the cause of moral uprightness and sever all ties with his former associates, but Rousseau did not cease for this reason to continue speaking their language, and the kind of moral refuge he sought and proposed was less the promise of divine salvation than the chimerical illusions of deviated sensuality. “There are people,” he writes, “to whom everything great appears chimerical, and who in their base and vile reasoning will never know what effect even a mania for virtue can have upon the human passions” (E, 402; OC IV, 527).

As we shall see in this chapter, it is precisely this demystifying knowledge, proper to the medical gaze of the enlightened philosopher, that separates the Christian devotee from the masochist. Although they both submit to the same moral conduct of self-denial and self-sacrifice, they do so on opposite ledges of an unbridgeable epistemological chasm. The disciple of Christ justifies his self-denial on the divine ends it serves, the masochist, on the other hand, grounds his in the sensationist episteme of Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) culture. It is by exploring this shift that we can understand the seeming paradox of Rousseau’s “sensitive morality” or that dualistic admixture of sensuality and virtue that he terms, among other things, “the voluptuousness of an angel.” If this paradox is a clue to Rousseau’s self-portrait in Le Persifleur as a protean who is at times “austere and devout” and others “frank libertine,”⁸ it is also, as we shall see, what makes the Confessions read like a heterogeneous narrative, a hybrid cross of St. Augustine and Thérèse Philosophe.

BETWEEN DEVOTION AND LUST

Of all the libertine novels of the eighteenth century, the kind—to quote Rousseau—that were “read with only one hand,” Thérèse Philosophe is arguably the most infamous.⁹ Published anonymously in 1748 and attributed to Boyer d’Argens ever since Sade’s Histoire de Juliette, Thérèse is presented as the memoir of the eponymous nun who witnessed the “inside story” of the notorious 1731 scandal involving Catherine Cadière, a devout penitent from Toulon, and Father Girard, the Jesuit rector accused of exploiting his role as spiritual director to sexually seduce her. By exposing, in intricate detail, the sexual indiscretions of confessor and confessee (presented in the text through the anagrams of Dirrag and Éradice), Thérèse Philosophe follows the footsteps of the anonymous L’Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux (1741), Meusnier de Querlon’s Histoire galante de la tourière des carmélites (1745), and La Morlière’s Les Lauriers ecclésiastiques (1747), libertine novels that combined erotic and religious imagery in the aim of sexually arousing the reader as well as unmasking the hypocrisy of the clergy’s repressive attitude toward sex. Unlike its predecessors, however, Thérèse Philosophe’s irreligion goes beyond the anticlerical critique. If the Marquis de Sade notes his approval of Boyer’s novel and distinguishes it as “the sole work to have agreeably combined lust with impiety,” it is because beyond the motif of clerical lubricity or duplicity, Thérèse Philosophe proposes to unveil the very sexual instinct that lies behind religious passion.¹⁰

It is precisely this realization that sets Thérèse on the path to becoming philosophe. Thanks to the mentorship and education of Madame C … and l’Abbé T …, two enlightened figures who save her from Dirrag’s influence, Thérèse learns that the zealous feelings she and Éradice had devoted to God were but the sublimation of a repressed natural impulse. Recalling the secretly watched “spiritual exercises” through which the confessor’s flagellations and penetrations moved the penitent but ecstatic Éradice closer to the heavens, Thérèse writes:

I can only remember that at least twenty times I was about to throw myself at the feet of my spiritual director and beg him to treat me as he was treating my friend. Was I moved by devotion? Or was it a movement of lust? It is still impossible for me to tell which it is.¹¹

Although the question remains coyly unanswered, Thérèse’s mise à nu of the “mystical scenes” leaves no doubt as what the force driving her desire may have been. Thérèse may have sought to emulate her sister’s virtue and receive in turn the same kind of treatment, but as her description of these “spiritual exercises” makes clear, things at the convent are not always what they seem. The cord of Saint Francis with which Dirrag flagellates and penetrates Eradice is, of course, nothing else but his erect penis, and the ecstatic self-annihilation before God proves to be but her metaphysical rendering of sexual plenitude: “You have seen how our good director introduced it into me. Well, I can assure you that I felt it penetrate into my very heart. If my devotion were any more perfect, I would have forever passed into the kingdom of heaven [je passais à jamais dans le séjour des Bienheureux].”¹²

If Éradice cannot recognize an orgasm even while experiencing one, it is because her obsession to reach a purely spiritual existence renders her oblivious to the desires of her body. Following the confessor’s dictum that “it is by forgetting the flesh that we can unite with God,” Eradice confuses her lustful needs with a spiritual hunger and facilitates, thus, her manipulation and abuse by the libidinous priest.¹³ Set against this foggy backdrop of corruptive ignorance, Thérèse’s eventual enlightenment becomes, ironically enough, a story of salvation. In the beginning of her memoirs, Thérèse writes that at the precocious age of nine, she felt “an uneasiness, longings whose object I did not know”;¹⁴ and after being caught masturbating in her sleep and sent to the convent by her alarmed mother, she too came to regard the nascent impulses of puberty as the awakening of an ardent faith in God.¹⁵ Unlike Eradice, however, the fortunate and timely intervention of Madame C … and l’Abbé T … saves Thérèse from Dirrag’s clutches, and the education she receives from them soon disabuses her of her error. Under their philosophical guidance as well as the wise and exemplary demeanor of their sexual relationship, she learns to identify the source of her uncertain longings and to embrace sexual pleasure as a natural need no different than thirst or hunger. In the midst of another secretly observed erotic scene which parallels and contrasts with the one watched in the convent, the dialogue on which she eavesdrops this time is of a completely different order. Here, metaphysical concerns and aspirations are brushed off as ridiculous chimeras good only to keep the credulous populace in check, and since the transparent discourse of her enlightened protectors does not resort to obscure metaphors or euphemisms (the penis, for example is no longer a malicious serpent as Thérèse had learned from her first confessor), the body’s pleasures are presented to her in their concrete reality. By dissipating thus the veil of ignorance that characterizes religious jargon and explaining instead the “mysteries” of sexual pleasure through a rational analysis of the mechanisms and springs of the body, Madame C … and l’Abbé T … teach Thérèse to understand the desires of her body and as such, in the spirit of Kant’s Aufklarung, to start thinking for herself: “je commençais peut-être à penser pour la première fois de ma vie” (TP, 129).¹⁶

THE GAZE OF THE PHYSICIAN-PHILOSOPHER

By defining sexual desire as first and foremost a physiological disposition, Thérèse Philosophe adopts and restates in novelistic form the kind of mechanical materialism advocated by immediate predecessors such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie. In L’Homme-Machine, published a year earlier in 1747, La Mettrie posited that matter was capable of self-movement and affirmed consequently that life could be maintained without the need for mysterious forces or spirits. According to this view, the human body is “a machine which winds itself up,”¹⁷ and the soul is a mere fiction, a grand word like “spirituality” or “immateriality” fabricated by metaphysicians to denote the very physical faculty of the brain’s imagination.¹⁸ If the true philosopher, according to La Mettrie, ought also to be a physician, it is because he relied on material empiricism alone. Whereas the metaphysicians’ and the theologians’ investigations are based on a priori and unsubstantiated beliefs, the physicians, he writes, are guided instead by experience and observation:

Physicians have explored and thrown light on the labyrinth of man; they alone have revealed the springs hidden under coverings [les ressorts cachés sous des enveloppes] which keep so many marvels from our gaze. They alone, calmly contemplating our soul, have caught it a thousand times unawares, in its misery and its grandeur, without either despising it in one state or admiring it in the other. Once again, these are the only natural philosophers who have the right to speak on this subject. What could the others, in particular the theologians, tell us? Is it not ridiculous to hear them shamelessly pronouncing on a subject they are incapable of understanding, from which, on the contrary, they have been deflected by obscure studies that have led them into a thousand prejudices and, in a word, fanaticism, which adds to their ignorance of the mechanism of our bodies?¹⁹

Behind the external integument (the enveloppes), one is not bound to find another-worldly (and fictional) primum motum but rather the automatisms of our own corporeal matter.²⁰ Taking up the same metaphor to talk about her education under Madame C … and l’Abbé T …, Thérèse says:

Oh, how example and precept are great instructors in forging the heart and the mind! If it is true that they give us nothing and that each one of us has within him the seed of all of which he is capable, it is nevertheless certain that they serve to develop these seeds and to make us perceive the ideas and sentiments to which we are susceptible, and which, without the examples, without the lessons, would remain buried and shackled under their coverings.²¹

Whereas the image of the stripped fruit calls to mind the erotic unveiling of Thérèse’s own body, it is also a metaphor for her own philosophical self-germination.²² To disenvelop is to develop. It is the ability to self-reflexively master the matter where the divine soul was once thought to reside.

It is, in fact, through the eyes of La Mettrie’s physician-philosopher that Thérèse recounts the events she had seen and the feelings she had experienced in the convent. “Through the ironic distance of the disabused narrator,” notes Florence Lotterie in her introduction to the novel, “Thérèse analyses Dirrag’s manoeuvers and sexual machinations in the greatest detail. She unveils a fundamental duplicity and, in doing so, affirms the demystifying ...