Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink by Dave Monroe, Fritz Allhoff, Gram Ponante Read Free Book Online

detection by customs officers. 2 Perhaps the euphemism “philosophical books” worked the same way – hiding the explicit and salacious in a tedious-sounding category censors would be quick to overlook. However, reality is considerably stranger. Firstly, many of the ideas which the French censor found too controversial were in some respect philosophical, such as challenges to the authority of the monarchy or the Catholic Church. But that does not explain the classification of overt pornography as philosophical. Secondly, although some of the works fit happily into modern categories, whether as respectable Enlightenment classics or disreputable libertine smut, many others are hopelessly hybridized: improbable marriages of philosophy and pornography.
     
    Closer inspection of some individual works and their authors may make the situation clearer. Denis Diderot (1713–84) was one of the giants of the French Enlightenment. Best known as the principal editor and contributor of the
Encyclopédie
, a 35-volume treasury of scientifically and politically progressive thought, and as the author of works disseminating innovative philosophical ideas, he was also responsible for
Les Bijoux indiscrets
(1748). 3 This novel concerns one “Sultan Mangogul” (a thinly veiled caricature of Louis XV), who acquires a magic ring with which he may command women’s genitals to speak. The central conceit, that the women’s lower lips speak truths their upper lips disavow, is not original to Diderot, and may be traced back to the thirteenth-century fable “Le Chevalier Qui Fist Parler les Cons.” 4 Despite its apparent misogyny, this idea has been appropriated by feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray as a positive metaphor for the subtleties of female communication. 5 Diderot’s excursions into the erotic were not restricted to his youth. At the opposite end of his career he published
Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
(1772).This fictional work expands the description of Tahiti by the explorer Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (1729–1811) into a utopian vision of free love, and a powerful statement of the Enlightenment myth of the “noble savage”: that life in a state of nature would be free and blissful.
     
    The philosophical writings of Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens (1704–71) were almost as numerous as those of Diderot, but are now little read. His principal claim to literary immortality may be
Thérèse philosophe
(1748), a sexually explicit work he never publicly acknowledged. The title translates as “Thérèse, Philosopher” and may allude to an early Enlightenment manifesto,
Le Philosophe
(1743), 6 attributed to César Chesneau Dumarsais (1676–1756) and later reworked by both Diderot and Voltaire. Dumarsais presents an ideal of the (male) philosopher: committed to reason, which he follows wherever it leads, impatient with religious superstition and conventional morality, conscious of how subject he is to external causes, but determined to understand their influence upon him. Argens’s novel concludes with a similar statement of Enlightenment values:
     
[W]e do not think as we like. The soul has no will, and is only influenced by the senses; that is to say by matter. Reason enlightens us, but cannot determine our actions. Self-love (the pleasure we hope for or the pain we try to avoid) is the motivating force for all our decisions. . . . There is no religion for God is sufficient unto Himself. 7
     
    However, Thérèse acquires these insights from primarily sexual experience.Withdrawn from her convent by a mother concerned that celibacy is fatally weakening her constitution, she first seeks refuge with a celebrated divine, Father Dirrag, an anagrammatic allusion to Jean-Baptiste Girard (1680–1733), a Jesuit whose alleged seduction of a female pupil was a recent scandal. Dirrag is revealed to Thérèse as a hypocrite – she eavesdrops as he persuades a naive (or concupiscent) pupil, through