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

materialist arguments masquerading as Christianity, to accept as spiritual exercises a series of increasingly sexual acts, culminating with an orgasm the pupil mistakes for a transport of religious ecstasy.Thérèse is rescued by a family friend, Mme C., who it transpires is cheerfully cohabiting with another priest, the Abbé T. Again, the still virginal but increasingly voyeuristic Thérèse observes them at close quarters, as they alternate between sexual and philosophical intercourse. Eventually, after an interlude conversing with a retired prostitute (a venerable theme, as we shall see), Thérèse finds contentment as the mistress of an intellectual count who bets his library against her virginity that she will be unable to spend two weeks reading the former without volunteering to surrender the latter.Thus, the textual and the sexual intermingle in the novel’s form and content.
     
    By far the best known, indeed infamous, of French Enlightenment pornographers is Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). He is less well known as a philosopher. None of his publications are primarily philosophical in the twenty-first-century sense, although commentators have professed to extract significant philosophical content. This should not surprise – his works are similar in structure to
Thérèse philosophe
: explicit sex interrupted by philosophical argument, or vice versa, depending on your priorities. For example, in his dialogue
La Philosophie dans le boudoir
(1795) the initially virginal Eugénie receives (enthusiastically) a hands-on sexual education from three older debauchees, one of whom breaks off mid-orgy to read aloud a recently purchased pamphlet, “Frenchmen! One more effort, if you truly wish to be republicans!” This argues for the abolition of capital punishment, on the novel grounds that the crimes for which it was traditionally exacted, calumny, theft, immorality, and murder, are not crimes at all, since entirely natural.This argument is typical of Sade – he categorically rejects the cheerful optimism about human nature we saw in Diderot’s vision of Tahiti, while apparently endorsing the Enlightenment argument that laws of nature should trump the laws of man. Sade’s view of life in a state of nature is at least as bleak as Thomas Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish and short,” and the nastiness is explored in remorseless detail and at prodigious length. Even
Philosophie
, the shortest and most light-hearted of his pornographic works, culminates with Eugénie raping and, by implication, murdering her own mother. The tricky question Sade’s interpreters have never resolved is whether he should be read as a satirist, showing by the blackest of comedy how the Enlightenment project can lead to an abominable conclusion, or whether he sincerely embraces those abominations.
     
    These three examples demonstrate not only that some “philosophical books” were written by actual philosophers, but also the intimacy of the synthesis of philosophy with pornography widespread in the literary undergrowth of the French Enlightenment.
     
    A Deeper Exploration
     
    One way of understanding the surprising connection between pornography and philosophy is to explore their shared history. The history of pornography, however, raises questions of definition which go beyond the scope of this chapter. Firstly, I shall make no attempt to distinguish pornography from erotica; secondly, I propose to understand them both as texts and images intended to produce sexual arousal. This is a conscious oversimplification, even for twenty-first-century pornography. It may be criticized as excluding some material, or including too much, or as resting on a fundamentally wrong-headed approach. Matters become far worse when we go back in time. It has been argued that the word “pornography” is a nineteenth-century neologism. 8 Of course, we could say with US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart that we know pornography when