Joyce's review of _Humanism, Philosophical Essays: A Collection of Essays on Pragmatism_, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, was written at a critical moment in the development of Joyce's fiction (before "The Sisters", before the essay "A Portrait of the Artist," and during Joyce's writing of his aesthetic theory. The review was published in the _Dublin Express_ on November 12, 1903. The diary entries at the end of _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ hint at the fallibilism and (...) reality of experience at the bedrock of Peircean semiotics and the revolutionary style of Joyce. Unfortunately the mocking style of Joyce's review may be why it has not received attention and perhaps why the review has not been included in a recent collection of Joyce's non-fiction writings. Joyce mocks Schiller’s style and thought, which is "prone to stylistic violations such as: vulgarity ... excessively ornate language ... pomposity ... exaggeration ... and avoiding the issue" as Joseph Porrovecchio states in a dissertation on Schiller's rhetoric. Schiller not only provoked Joyce to mock him, he also provoked Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, to rename his philosophy "pragmaticism" adding an "ic" to it to differentiate it from Schiller’s use of the word. This essay shows Joyce knew about Charles Peirce, whose influence was extensive, continuing through Finnegans Wake, as discussed in Roy Benjamin’s The Triptych Vision: Joyce and Peirce. (shrink)

Charles Peirce's semiotics explains James Joyce's Ulysses' cognitive process, as it demonstrates triadic rather than dyadic representation. Joyce parodies the "foolhardy" laws of narrative (Gerard Genette) found in Proust by using mediating representation found in Peircean semiotics, which begins with the "play of musement," otherwise known as abduction (a form of induction). The three part sequence of musement (abduction, deduction, and induction) provides a means of understanding the three-part structure of Ulysses.

This paper is a response to the problematic relation between men's studies and women's studies; it is also a particular response to Harry Brod's discussion of the theoretical need for men's studies programs in his article "The New Men's Studies: From Feminist Theory to Gender Scholarship." The paper argues that a male feminist would be more effective in a women's studies program, that the latter already includes research about the experiences of both males and females. Although future research on both (...) genders is needed, the paper argues that there does not currently exist a gap in theory or in practice in women's studies programs, as Brod claims. The paper argues in favor of both men and women working together to strengthen and broaden women's studies programs in existence and encourages the creation of more programs and more study of gender issues. (shrink)

Ce livre étudie de manière transversale les multiples usages attestés du terme «libertin» chez les auteurs du début de l'époque moderne, rendant ainsi manifeste la diversité des emplois et déplacements d'une invective, qu'il s'agisse de stigmatiser, de s'en revendiquer, ou de s'en protéger.

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the (...) women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism. [Publisher's abstract]. (shrink)

As part of an examination of the role played by Lucretius in French libertinism, this article develops a reading of the 1730 story by Crébillon fils entitled Le Sylphe. The author argues that the French libertine tradition inherits from Lucretius an emphasis on subjection as generative rather than inhibiting; both ancient and more modern forms of Epicurean materialism are heavily invested in the process by which a condition of relative emancipation only emerges from within a state of constraint. Crébillon (...) suggests that the capacity to take pleasure in an experience of dispossession - the loss of self-mastery - is fundamental to a libertine erotics; he portrays the heroine of his short story as possessed by a voluptuous recognition of her own enthrallment to a supernatural being. Through her sexual enjoyment of this supernatural being, she is relieved of the burden of her own humanity, in a process that mirrors the delightful dispossession experienced by the convert to Epicureanism. For Crébillon, it is the literary text itself that is charged with arousing and assuaging erotic passion, and, ultimately, assuming the motility of the Epicurean atom. (shrink)

L'anthropologie pascalienne de la "misère de l'homme sans Dieu" frappe par sa pertinence : aucun apologiste chrétien n'a exprimé avec tant de justesse le point de vue d'un incroyant sur le monde et sur sa propre nature. C'est le point de départ de son argumentation apologétique, que cet ouvrage suit pas à pas, en précisant ses sources cartésiennes et gassendistes, en examinant le statut du sentiment et en restituant la cohérence de la foi de la "seconde nature". Les Pensées constituent (...) l'expression complexe d'une philosophie chrétienne et la cohérence de l'argumentation représente un témoignage privilégié sur le libertinage tel que Pascal le concevait. Le profil intellectuel de son libertin apparaît entre les lignes de l'argumentation apologétique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous--and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment (...) engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law-unto-itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also examines the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond. (shrink)

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of the 18th century writer and libertine Marquis de Sade, in her essay “Must we Burn Sade?”; a difficult and bewildering text, both in pure linguistic terms and philosophically. In particular, Beauvoir’s insistence on Sade as a “great moralist” seems hard to reconcile with her emphasis, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, on the interdependency of human beings and her exhortation to us to promote other people’s freedom, as well as the aspiration of The (...) Second Sex to equal relations between the genders. While earlier scholars addressed the ethico-political implications of Beauvoir’s essay, they insisted that the ambiguity so fundamental in her philosophy is denied by the Sadean hero, and that the Other can never be attained in his system. In this essay, I argue that Sade paradoxically emerges as an ethical model in Beauvoir’s text: as a writer, he assumes the ambiguity of the human condition in the extreme. Further, Sade reveals the potential of sexuality if it is explored in a form of eroticism that largely transgresses behavior constructed as normal: his writings open up new forms of existence, where, contrary to prevailing ideas, woman’s sexual freedom is claimed as equal to man’s, where genders are unstable and heterosexuality no longer the standard. Beauvoir’s fascination with Sade in this essay can be linked with the seemingly unresolvable asymmetry in the relation between men and women in The Second Sex: in his writings is revealed sexuality’s potential to subvert patriarchal norms and mystifications, and perhaps, in the end, even gender itself. (shrink)

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from Aretino and Tullia d'Aragona in 16th century Italy to Pepys, Rochester, and Behn in late 17th century England. James Turner explores the idea of sexual education, from the (...) simple instructional dialogue to the advanced experiments of the philosophical libertine, analysing the hard-core curiculum that defined sexuality centuries before the Marquis de Sade. He shows how close, nuanced readings of neglected but compelling texts - like the searingly explicit Alcibiade fanciullo, L'escole des filles, and Aloisia Sigea - link them to larger issues of gender politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, sexual history, medical science, mind-body philosophy, and the educational revolution. (shrink)

Une théorie de la politique n'existe pas dans la pensée libertine intéressée à l'élaboration d'un modèle moral concentré sur la dimension de la vie privée. Pourtant à l'intérieur de cette tradition dans la deuxième moitié du VIIe siècle en France, s'amorce un filon à cheval entre utopie et roman d'aventure dans lequel apparaissent des formes d'organisation sociétales modelées selon les principes de la liberté, égalité, tolérance qui constitueront les mots d'ordres des philosophes des lumières.

Preface par PIERRE FORCE I have a very precise recollection of my first encounter with John Boi- tano. It was during the spring semester of 1988, ...

Mirabeau and Sade, who were incarcerated in the Castle of Vincennes in the same period for breaching moral standards, pursued a correspondence filled with ethical reflections from their time in prison. Their epistolary exchanges in jail show their interest in the penal reform initiated by Beccaria and carried out at the end of the eighteenth century. Their letters likewise underscore the incommensurable aspect of institutional power, the failures of the French judicial system, and the strategies used to crush prisoners. They (...) denounce a world of inverted values in which duping the “deleter” becomes legitimate: the inmate becomes a victim of “brigands” and administrative “executioners.”. (shrink)

Mirabeau and Sade, who were incarcerated in the Castle of Vincennes in the same period for breaching moral standards, pursued a correspondence filled with ethical reflections from their time in prison. Their epistolary exchanges in jail show their interest in the penal reform initiated by Beccaria and carried out at the end of the eighteenth century. Their letters likewise underscore the incommensurable aspect of institutional power, the failures of the French judicial system, and the strategies used to crush prisoners. They (...) denounce a world of inverted values in which duping the “deleter” becomes legitimate: the inmate becomes a victim of “brigands” and administrative “executioners.”. (shrink)

We agree with Fitouchi et al. that self-denial is sometimes moralized to signal capacity for cooperation, but propose that a person's cooperative character is more precisely judged by willingness to follow cultural, group, and interpersonal goals, for which many rules can serve as proxies, including rules about abstention. But asceticism is not a moral signal if its aims are destructive, while indulging impulses in a culturally approved way can also signal cooperation.

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write as intellectual women? What forms of sexuality emerged in the age of educational, scientific, and political revolution? Schooling Sex reconstructs the vividly compelling loose canon of sexually-explicit literature, in Latin, Italian, French, and English.

Don't philosophers die just like all other men? In order to speak of the death of philosophers, why choose an author like Boureau-Deslandes, who collected anecdotes of insolence in the face of death? Undoubtedly, free minds could only disarm theology by joking about it. The mental, moral and playful mechanisms of the mind can be taken apart to reveal the bans inscribed in the conscience through the workings of institutions. Against the philosophies of melancholy, fear, death and power, a philosophy (...) of banter is a cheerful philosophy, an ethics of taste that destabilises the rules. It is this practice of bantering insolence that turns temperament into virtue and a man into a philosopher. (shrink)

In this article I revisit the relationship between Immanuel Kant and the Marquis De Sade, following not Jacques Lacan but Pierre Klossowski. In the process I suggest that Sade's work is marred by a series of antinomies that prevent him from stating a pure practical libertine reason and leave his view purely theoretical.

Iouri Lotman, taking as a starting point the idea that the rapport with the sign determines all the codes of a given culture and their systems of classification, proposes a typology of cultures. His resarch has been received with little interest in France, to the extent that some important articles in which it is described have not yet been translated. This is surprising considering the interest in Lotman's hypotheses, which give a boost and a broader outlook to semiotics which it (...) had lost in certain scholarly minutiae. It may also be held that this indifference is normal for those whose profession is to reflect on the sign, unwilling to consider their object as a relative entity subject to the contingencies of history and culture, but also refusing to recognize the sign as a concrete force in Man's life, capable of directing his knowledge and his exchanges. (shrink)

Hobbes surely spent the ten years of greatest significance for his philosophical career on the Continent, in France, above all, in Paris. It was during this period that he published De cive; wrote the De motu, loco et tempore; produced a draft of the entire Leviathan as well as most of De corpore. His complicated relationship with Descartes has been studied closely, and Mersenne’s role has become clearer. There remains however the task of more carefully delineating the contours of Hobbes’s (...) relations with the circles of “learned libertinism.” The Libertinism which will be dealt with here was not only French, instead of English, but also “theoretical” and “intellectual” rather than practical, and nothing at all sexual, contrary to the common usage of that word in the current language. French Libertinism was a philosophical trend aimed at promoting a non-conformist approach to religion, history, morals, and even politics. (shrink)

Michiel Wielema: The March of the Libertines. Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church (1660–1750). ReLiC: Studies in Dutch Religious History. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004; pp. 221. The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century is famous for having cultivated an extraordinary climate of toleration and religious pluralism — the Union of Utrecht supported religious freedom, or “freedom of conscience”, and expressly forbade reli- gious inquisition. However, despite membership in the state sponsored Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church not being compulsory, the freedom to (...) gather and worship, or “to air anti-Christian or atheistic opinions” was little tolerated “within” the organized structure of the church, which functioned more as “an exclusive organisation for those willing to submit freely to certain confessional canons and to the disciplinary author- ity of the church’s governing bodies” (10): the consistories, classes, and synods. Those not prepared to submit to Reformed doctrine were free to leave the church without fear of any legal or political repercussions. However, for those not prepared to leave for reasons of personal belief, matters turned out to be quite different. Because the Reformed Church enjoyed full State protection, matters of doctrinal conflict could well evolve into political affairs. And, contrary to the Union of Utrecht, religious inquisition was in some cases actually applied with political approval for “heretics” within the Reformed Church. The main focus of The March of the Libertines is an investigation of this obvious tension. (shrink)

A quel droit peut-on parler d’une philosophie de la religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles? Si nous partageons la définition de l’objet donnée par Jean Greisch, («la philosophie de la religion consiste à interroger l’essence de la religion avec les yeux de la raison philosophique […] en tenant compte de sa composante historique et de ses diverses manifestations»), sa présence chez ceux qui sont consacrées comme grands philosophes se réduirait à peu de chose. Descartes et les post-cartésiens se...