Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment 9780823293506
Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself—in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies—as a privileged o
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VOLUPTUOUS PHILOSOPHY
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VOLUPTUOUS PHILOSOPHY Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment
Natania Meeker
Fordham University Press New York 2006
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Copyright 䉷 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meeker, Natania. Voluptuous philosophy : literary materialism in the French Enlightenment / Natania Meeker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2696-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2696-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Representation (Philosophy) 2. Materialism. 3. Literature— History and criticism. 4. Literature—Philosophy. 5. Enlightenment— France. I. Title. B105.R4M44 2006 146⬘.3094409033—dc22 2006035285 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 First edition
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Contents
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Acknowledgments
vii
Abbreviations
ix
Introduction
1
Voluptuous Figures: Lucretian Materialism in Eighteenth-Century France Reading for Pleasure in the French Enlightenment: The Self-Possessed Reader and the Decline of Voluptas ‘‘Flowers Strewn on the Way to Volupte´’’: La Mettrie and the Tropic Body of the Epicurean Philosopher ‘‘I Resist It No Longer’’: The´re`se philosophe and the Compulsions of Enlightened Literary Materialism Dynamism and Disinterest: The Materialist Reader and Diderot’s Dream ‘‘A Fallacious and Always Perilous Metaphysic’’: The Sadean Critique of Sentiment and the Neo-Lucretian Novel
17 59 88 126 155 189
Conclusions
222
Notes
225
Works Cited
293
Index
305
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Acknowledgments
This book finds its origins in an attempt to think through the role played by literature and literary forms of writing in the development of enlightened materialist philosophy. In arguing for the centrality of the experience of poetically induced pleasure to the history of French materialism, I aim to revise and to historicize the notion that materialist thought invariably reaches for a reality that is beyond or outside of representation. Such an understanding of materialism’s import should be viewed, I argue, as the product of specific eighteenth-century arguments around the nature of substance and its relationship to language, rather than as the point of departure for all materialist philosophy. This project owes its very existence—as an idea and then as a book—to the sustained kindness of many people. I will remain particularly grateful to Luce Giard, for the education she has given me in philosophical and critical thinking; to Michel Narcy, for introducing me to Epicurus and to Lucretius; to Jean O’Barr, for inspiring and encouraging me; and to Philip Stewart, for his expert guidance throughout the long process of putting together the argument that appears here. I am equally beholden to the extraordinary support and sheer generosity that has been shown me by Peggy Kamuf, Karen Pinkus, and Hilary Schor during the time I spent working on this book at the University of Southern California; I could not have asked for better colleagues, or for better friends, and am profoundly grateful for their thoughtfulness—as well as for their critical rigor. I also owe many thanks to Je´roˆme Brillaud, Paul Cohen, Corrinne Harol, Anto´nia Szabari, and Helen Thompson, for the care, attention, and intelligence with which they have engaged with various moments in the manuscript. Conversations with Amy Billone and Eleanor Kaufman have been similarly invaluable. I am grateful, too, to Christian Jacob for his having given me the opportunity to present a part of this project in his seminar ‘‘Mise en sce`ne et mise en texte des cheminements de pense´e’’ at the E´cole vii
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viii Acknowledgments
normale supe´rieure in Paris. Marion Hobson was unfailingly generous with her time and with her advice. I could not have completed this book without the intervention of Rebecca Lemon at instances too numerous to recount; her gracious and perceptive readings of my work not only improved the end result, but provided a crucial model, for me, of scholarly professionalism. I would also like to thank Helen Tartar, for her editorial guidance and support at many crucial moments, as well as the anonymous readers of the manuscript, whose comments and suggestions have contributed immeasurably to the book as whole. The graduate students in my seminar ‘‘Voluptuous Aesthetics’’ helped me to hone and refine my argument by challenging my assumptions and allowing me to reread familiar texts in unfamiliar ways, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to Laurence Clerfeuille, for her work on the bibliography. Various parts of the manuscript have profited immensely from the critical and editorial acumen of David Tomkins. The staff of the Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections at the University of Southern California, of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and of the Bibliothe`que nationale de France played an instrumental role in the production of the book, and I feel fortunate to have benefited from their help. I am lucky, too, to have had the support of grants from the Clark Library, the Camargo Foundation, and, at USC, the Zumberge Faculty Research and Innovation Fund, without which the book could not have been completed. Earlier versions of material from this book appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies (parts of chapter four) and in Lire Sade (L’Harmattan, 2004), edited by Norbert Sclippa (parts of chapter six). Finally, I would like to thank Elspeth Kuang, as well as Anne and Janine Chevrier, for enabling me to think about my work—and indeed, about matter and embodiment—in new and productive ways. The mere expression of gratitude to Michael Meeker, Gesine Meeker, and Elena Meeker seems insufficient, given the ways in which they have each been fundamental in forming—and periodically reigniting—my desire to write, to think, and to do academic work. Justin Pearlman reminds me daily of what matters, and why.
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Abbreviations
AL
Melchior de Polignac. L’Anti-Lucre`ce, poe`me sur la religion naturelle. 2 vols. Translated by Jean-Pierre de Bougainville. Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, Antoine Boudet, et Pierre Gilles Lemercier, 1749.
DRN
Titus Carus Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. 3 vols. Trans. and ed. Cyril Bailey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.
E´R
Denis Diderot. E´loge de Richardson. In Oeuvres, edited by Andre´ Billy. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1951.
HJ
Donatien Alphonse Franc¸ois de Sade. Histoire de Juliette. Edited by Michel Delon. In Oeuvres, vol. 3, edited by Michel Delon and Jean Deprun. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1998.
HM
Julien Offray de la Mettrie. L’Homme-machine. In Oeuvres philosophiques, vol 1, edited by Francine Markovits. Paris: Librairie Arthe`me Fayard, 1987.
RA
Denis Diderot. Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot, Le Reˆve de d’Alembert, and Suite de l’entretien. In Oeuvres, edited by Andre´ Billy. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 1951.
TP
Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens. The´re`se philosophe, ou me´moires pour servir a` l’histoire du P. Dirrag, et de Mlle. E´radice. In Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe sie`cle, edited by Patrick Wald Lasowski. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard (Ple´iade), 2000.
VOL
Julien Offray de la Mettrie. La Volupte´. In Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. 2, edited by Francine Markovits. Paris: Librairie Arthe`me Fayard, 1987.
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Introduction
Formal innovation (of the sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experimentation. To respond to the demand of the literary work as the demand of the other is to attend to it as a unique event whose happening is a call, a challenge, an obligation: understand how little you understand me, translate my untranslatability, learn me by heart and thus learn the otherness that inhabits the heart. —Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature The benefits of other pursuits come to those who have reached the end of a difficult course, but in the study of philosophy pleasure keeps pace with growing knowledge; for pleasure does not follow learning; rather, learning and pleasure advance side by side. —Epicurus, The Vatican Sayings
Immanuel Kant’s famous essay ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’ (1784) ends with an oblique reference to the enduringly scandalous materialism of Julien Offray de la Mettrie, author of the treatise Machine Man (1747). Kant writes: ‘‘When nature has . . . developed the seed for which she cares most tenderly—namely, the inclination and vocation for free thinking—this works back upon the character of the people (who thereby become more and more capable of acting freely) and finally even on the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.’’1 ‘‘Man,’’ in Kant’s formulation, accedes to enlightened freedom—of thought, act, and polity—in the process of casting off the trammels of a radically determinist mechanism (for which La Mettrie’s automaton serves as the porte-parole). Yet a material residue lingers on as part of the autonomous Kantian subject, if only in the obligation to disavow, in the name of dignity, a persistent entanglement with the figure of the man who is also a machine. Kantian enlightenment—that philosophical revolution against which the work of the 1
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French philosophes has sometimes been seen as little more than an interlude or a preparation2 —carries within it the memory of materialism as a troubling philosophical inheritance. This legacy is nonetheless a constituent part of the movement into maturity that Kant imagines. In other words, for man to leave behind his status as machine, he first had to become one. This book returns to the scene of French Enlightenment materialism as a crucial staging ground for the modern construction of human beings as objects of knowledge. In the broadest sense, it contributes to an articulation of the ways in which eighteenth-century authors participate in what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘‘the elementary exertions of the modern age: the mathematizing and the materializing of nature.’’3 Whether the material subjects of the French Enlightenment are ultimately renounced or embraced by those who follow in their wake, this period’s intense preoccupation with the objectification and rationalization of matter—in forms ranging from human anatomies to atomic particles—remains fundamental to an understanding of the positioning of the age within the various critical genealogies that have taken the Enlightenment (and the French Enlightenment in particular) as a point of origin for modernity.4 The eighteenth-century fascination with the perceptible substance of experience—as available to experiment, narratable in literary texts, malleable through education, manipulable through time, and regularizable in space—reaches across what later become profound disciplinary and methodological differences to inform the molding of the secular body into a particularly rich source of meaning for post-Enlightenment European cultures.5 Debates over the epistemological status and knowability of ‘‘brute’’ matter not only shape the emergence of discourses of disciplinary specialization, but regulate the way in which connections among domains of knowledge—from literary criticism to scientific research—continue to be understood today. The study of matter as an object in itself has remained basic to the practice of scientific inquiry, but has also deeply marked the evolution of the novel as a genre that, according to the marquis de Sade, derives from ‘‘that burning need to portray everything’’ and to penetrate ‘‘into the bosom of Nature.’’6 This book has thus developed out of a desire to consider eighteenthcentury French materialism seriously in its central position as a site of ongoing and high-stakes struggles over the role of material bodies in shaping the nature of apprehension, defining the limits of the human, and structuring a project of enlightenment that links knowledge to forms of emancipation. French Enlightenment materialists are not just invested in attempts to develop a nontheological science of substance, they also promulgate strategies
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of approaching texts that enable this substance to be accurately perceived by readers as elemental to their experience of and in the world. To take one example of this phenomenon, the baron d’Holbach’s categorical assertion that ‘‘The universe, this vast assemblage of everything that exists, everywhere offers us nothing but matter and movement’’ may be read as inaugurating both a program of philosophic inquiry and a theory of the person.7 The former is conceived in the aim of ‘‘bringing man back to Nature, rendering reason dear to him, making him adore virtue, and dissipating the shadows that hide the only path that may properly lead him to the felicity he desires.’’8 In turn, the viability of this objective depends upon the assumption that the human subject is comprehensively describable as ‘‘susceptible to two kinds of movement; some are substantial movements whereby the entire body or some of its parts are visibly transferred from one place to another; others are internal or hidden movements, of which some we can feel while others are accomplished without our knowledge and can only be guessed at from the effects they produce on the outside.’’9 In a characteristic move, d’Holbach, whose intellectual career evolved out of his contributions to such fields as mineralogy and geology, slides from a programmatic insistence on the manifestly physical composition of the universe—‘‘Man should have recourse to physics and experience in his quest for knowledge’’10 —to a diagnosis of the human body as a signifying system, partially legible to itself through an analysis of the effects of sensation on its surfaces and in its interior. As d’Holbach shows in his Syste`me, eighteenth-century materialisms are profoundly involved not just in identifying ‘‘matter’’ in general as a privileged object of study, but in developing rhetorical strategies for allowing readers to comprehend and perceive themselves as material bodies. Even d’Holbachian materialism, then, often neglected by critics due to what appears (in a post-Enlightenment context) to be the aridity of its determinism, conjugates its thoroughgoing materialization of the real with a hermeneutic method for reading the variable and sometimes invisible symptoms of this materialization on and in human bodies. For d’Holbach, as for many of his co-enlighteners, matter in motion represents itself in persons through a series of effects that are at once substantial and symptomatic of invisible, internal reactions to events and objects. These effects are empirically verifiable, yet always subject to interpretation. Even in the framework of d’Holbach’s harsh critique of the oppressive political systems and the harmful ‘‘fictive relations’’ that may be brought about by human ignorance of the absolute primacy of matter in ordering the world, substance shows a surprising vul-
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nerability to forms of representation and to figures of speech.11 For d’Holbach, as for other philosophers of the period, the material subjects of the Enlightenment consistently situate themselves at the dynamic intersection of sensation and trope. The aim of Voluptuous Philosophy is to elucidate the way in which the emergence of these subjects depends upon the gradual, deliberate, and rhetorically inflected repositioning by materialist writers of the relationship of language to substance, so that enlightened readers may eventually come to apprehend themselves as wholly corporeal bodies whose sensations preexist their own representation as such. Many scholars have pointed out the links binding natural science to literary forms—including genres such as fiction and poetry—throughout the French Enlightenment.12 Literary works have come to be seen as indisputably contributing to and influencing the progressive formulation, as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment project, of a secularized notion of matter—what is referred to in the Encyclopedia as ‘‘a substance that is extended, solid, divisible, mobile and pliant [passible], the first principle of all natural things, and which in its different arrangements and combinations, forms all bodies.’’13 Yet these texts are not generally understood as fundamentally shaping the outcome of this project. The practice of materialist analysis—insofar as it privileges, in d’Holbach’s terms, ‘‘experience’’ over ‘‘imagination’’—appears destined to occupy an epistemological arena from whence literary writing may be regarded as a delightful, but hardly determinant, supplement to the more serious labor of philosophy.14 ‘‘Literal’’ forms of knowledge, not literary ones, continue to structure the task of enlightenment as it is understood today. In this context, the Encyclopedia, which aims to develop ‘‘the true principles of things’’ and to ‘‘mark out the relationships among them,’’ has long remained a privileged point of reference for catachrestic invocations of ‘‘Enlightenment thought’’ generally.15 If fictional description and philosophic analysis, during the eighteenth century, can be said to share many of the same methods—to participate in a joint elaboration of the materially determined parameters of human perception, for instance—it is more often natural philosophy (with its intrinsic connections, during this period, to science and medicine) that comes to exemplify the methods and ambitions of the political, cultural, and intellectual endeavor that Kant calls ‘‘Aufkla¨rung.’’ In Voluptuous Philosophy, I call for a relocation of the problem of literary or figural representation at the heart of eighteenth-century debates around matter.16 French materialisms of the Enlightenment are critically and diversely invested not only in the development of a highly sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter itself, but in the production of
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specific relationships between readers and the ‘‘matter’’ of the texts they consume. Put bluntly, this means that even the most overtly scientific forms of materialism are caught up in strategies of representing matter that highlight either its difference from, or its involvement in, the tropes that serve to describe it. The ascension of an enlightened materialism, in the second half of the eighteenth century, may indeed coincide on the one hand with attempts to reorient the perceptions of readers toward what Horkheimer and Adorno famously call the ‘‘instrumentalization of nature’’ seemingly so typical of this period. But on the other hand, the development of a secular science of matter, nature, and the human body also crucially corresponds, I argue here, with efforts on the part of some materialists to sever the engagement of readers in the figural or poetic aspects of a text from their sense of their sensations as materially given in the world—constituted in substance and outside of discourse. Figure may henceforth be grafted onto matter—as, for instance, a pleasure-inducing accoutrement—but it may not fundamentally intervene in readers’ perceptions of the material world. Legitimately ‘‘enlightened’’ readers are thus authorized to find perceptible evidence in texts of their innate predilections or natural modes of feeling, but they do not emerge materially transformed—namely, meaningfully altered in the very substances of which they consist—from their encounters with these texts as figural objects. While such a position may today seem self-evident—of course books do not define the ‘‘substance’’ of sensations, since readers come to the act of reading with their bodily mechanisms of perception already in place—I contend here that the obviousness of this position is at least in part a result of the success of certain eighteenth-century arguments in favor of it. Enlightenment writers must make explicit the distinctness and immediacy of bodily sensation, taken as originally separate from its representation in figure, precisely because such immediacy is not just a matter of ‘‘common sense’’ (or, as the marquis d’Argens puts it in his materialist philosophical compendium, La Philosophie du bon sens, of ‘‘good sense’’). The innate ‘‘feeling’’ of bodily experience as fundamentally prediscursive is itself the consequence of new discursive strategies that enable readers to perceive their own bodies in specifically pretextual ways. This project thus testifies to a gradual dissociation of matter—considered as the substance of which bodies in general consist—from literary or poetic representations—considered as acts of creative invention or poesis.17 This process takes place incrementally over the course of the eighteenth century, and continues well beyond it.18 But the account that I present here is not one of increasing opposition between a modern, scientific worldview that
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organizes itself around grammars of relative transparency—languages that aim for accuracy rather than effect—and a pre-Enlightenment fascination with the intrinsic poetry of things. Instead, I see the struggle to enact a separation between perceptible substance and poetic form as internal to the discourses of eighteenth-century materialism, when these discourses are broadly construed as encompassing literature as well as philosophy, poetry as well as science. The rift that I propose to examine in the chapters that follow—between a materialism that is intrinsically figural and a materialism that seeks to distance itself from figure in its unpredictable effects on readers—is significant not only within philosophical and scientific writings on the nature of matter. This disjunction between materialisms also plays a central role in long-running and vociferous discussions, throughout the Enlightenment, of the corporeal consequences (‘‘dangerous’’ or not) of literary forms of textual consumption. More crucially, this rupture is not just visible in fictional works—often explicitly involved during this period in the diffusion of enlightened ‘‘theory’’—but makes literature a contested space for materializing diverse relationships to language in the bodies of putative readers. Indeed, the gradual emergence of the literary field as a distinct arena of writerly production coincides with the rise of the idea of an enlightened reader who remains more or less fundamentally abstracted from the bodily responses that this kind of writing may induce. The very definition of ‘‘the literary’’ as an autonomous domain may ironically be dependent upon the simultaneous concretization of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects. This study’s focus on a moment of profound diremption at the heart of eighteenth-century French representations of matter derives from my attempts to excavate a theory of material substance that has hitherto had a vexed status within the myriad narratives seeking to account for the new sciences of enlightenment: neo-Epicurean or Lucretian materialism. While references to Lucretius abound in the literature and philosophy of this period, few eighteenth-century writers engage overtly and systematically with the Epicurean heritage transmitted to them across the multifaceted recuperation of ancient materialisms that takes place in France during the seventeenth century.19 Lucretius’s great poem, De rerum natura, thus stands at both the center and the margins of the preoccupations of an age often (self-)defined by its philosophical inclinations. For Lucretius (as well as for some of his eighteenth-century devotees), materialism has its origins in an explicitly poetic rendering of the visible and invisible world. The entry into materialist science, in this framework, is inseparable from the perception of matter
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in its figural dimensions. Moreover, in De rerum natura, it is readers’ investment in the pleasure that poetic form makes available to them that initiates a voluptuous conversion to materialism. Matter, in the terms established by Lucretius, is constituted through its inherent resemblance to poetry, in that the elements of both substance and poetic discourse are fundamentally and appealingly figural in composition and structure.20 In the context of this homology, the pleasure that figural language ‘‘naturally’’ engenders can be made to induce a materialization of the poetic trope in the voluptuous bodily responses of readers to the text that they are moved to enjoy. In his exposition of Epicurean doctrine, Lucretius is thus not only exquisitely sensitive to the pleasures—and potential displeasure—his readers may experience as a mechanism determining the conversion to materialism, but he understands figure as such to inspire a form of delight (voluptas) that is in itself both poetic and philosophic. Voluptuousness, then, provides an index of the truth-value of Epicurean doctrine and a practical embodiment of this truth in the recognition of the freedoms procurable in matter. In other words, Lucretian materialism comes into being with the acknowledgment of the material power of poetry to effect, through pleasure, a transformation in the substance of things in themselves, beginning with the perceptions of the reader of the poetic text. Voluptuous pleasure functions as a form of cognition—and a cognizance of form—that disperses itself outward from the reader through the atomic matter in motion of which the universe is imagined to consist. For Lucretius, the transmission of Epicurean doctrine depends both upon the preservation of the Epicurean canon and upon the reliability of figure as a substantially suasive force that reiteratively and viscerally engages the reader with the materialist principles grounding true knowledge. Lucretian materialism thus requires poetry for philosophy to make itself felt as a lived transformation of the self. Lucretius reiteratively links the emergence of a materialist subject to the production of the voluptuous delight experienced in the act of reading. If the fact of having perused De rerum natura is often described (by its classical critics and admirers alike) as definitively conversive for the reader, it is in part because Lucretius himself presents the poem in this way. This capacity to seduce its readers is a key element of the work’s persistent scandal—sometimes viewed as putting Epicureanism in direct competition with the power of the divine word to enact similar transformations—as well as of its fascination for eighteenth-century publics. The contested and often ambiguous status of De rerum natura during the Enlightenment both derives from and produces a struggle among the
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period’s philosophic materialists to determine the proper relationship—in a world composed of material bodies—between figures of substance and figures of speech. Enlightenment neo-Lucretians, including Julien Offray de la Mettrie and the marquis de Sade, respond to the poem’s emphasis on the physiological effects of readers’ engagement with figure by developing nostalgically voluptuous materialisms that deploy the tropic force of a libertine literary tradition—informed by the Lucretian critique of sentiment—alongside their theorizations of pleasure as a freedom from constraint. Both La Mettrie and Sade insist that the experience of enjoyment invoked by explicitly literary language can and should end in the eroticized dispersal of each reader’s perceptions across the ever-multiplying tropes that organize, for them, the Epicurean apprehension of substance. In lingering over the figural dimensions of matter, however, and in suggesting that the most formal of pleasures may hold the key to material transformations in human perception, these two philosopher-critics go against the grain of a more authoritatively ‘‘enlightened’’ perspective. According to the latter view, the philosophic reader, in order to exercise good judgment, must disavow the profound interconnectedness of the material and figural worlds so that the voluptuous pleasures engendered by the literary text can begin to serve as the object, rather than as the source, of intellection. La Mettrie and Sade accordingly remain, for all their debts to the larger scientific and philosophic communities to which they refer in their works, unassimilated in crucial ways to the narrative of enlightenment as a process of critical self-elaboration and (potential) emancipation—the movement that Michel Foucault has called the ‘‘permanent reactivation of an attitude’’ and that Kant refers to as an ‘‘exit’’ of sorts.21 Even if Lucretian Epicureanism continues to play, throughout the eighteenth century, a significant part in the development of theories of substance—as well as in the ongoing production of secularist notions of the human—it is slowly cleansed of its insistence on the dynamic engagement of specifically literary pleasures in the organization of human perception. The libertine Epicureanism of unruly passions and seemingly unreflective hedonism—for which the domain of literature serves as a privileged discursive space in the elaboration of materialist philosophies—gives way, by the end of the century, to the celebration of an Epicurus whose voluptas is the faithful handmaiden of a more sober reason. Even as the French Enlightenment is increasingly structured by efforts to portray matter as an organizing principle of all bodies, the successful representation of rational thought as enabling an objective or neutral knowl-
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edge—one not irredeemably tangled in its fictions—becomes reliant upon the gradual undoing of the literary field as a space of materialist inquiry and material transformation.22 But, for a judiciously nonfigural materialism to take precedence over the intrinsically poetic pleasures extolled by the neoLucretians, a persuasive alternative to the scandalously voluptuous method that determines the relationship of the Lucretian philosopher to the corpus of his sensations must be given legitimacy in the eyes of putative readers. The progressive development of a modern scientific materialism thereby becomes contingent upon the outcome of a struggle over reading strategies. Prospective readers must receive serious instruction in the proper means of comprehending the relationship between their persons and the matter of the texts that they consume. As Louis Bollioud-Mermet puts it in his 1765 essay on reading, ‘‘The occupation of reading, although freer and less difficult than that of the writer, is not without demanding a certain labor; and a work done with order and with art will never produce the effect that the Author seeks, if the reading of it is not methodical, reflective, and well-digested.’’23 For this kind of measured appreciation to be made possible, the bond linking embodied substance to its literary representations must be loosened. If the former is no longer to be susceptible to regular modification through the unpredictable interventions of figure, the naturally occurring configurations of matter in the world must take on an ontological stability that will eventually stand in contrast to the variability of representation. What Karl M. Figlio (writing on eighteenth-century theories of perception) refers to as the ‘‘unity of consciousness’’ should discover and reproduce itself in the act of reading, rather than making of this activity the site of a transmutation that affects this consciousness across aesthetic and material registers.24 Enlightened critics of neo-Lucretian voluptas therefore tend to emphasize the self-possession of the philosophic reader as crucial to the exercise of reasoned judgment, rather than seeking the progressive dispersal of this reading subject across a tropically constituted material world.25 Forms of figural representation—including the literary text itself—become for these enlighteners redundant supplements to the task of analytically shoring up a self that is always more than the sum of its senses, even as it is formed by them. In the context of an enlightened materialism that attempts to distinguish the epistemological project of knowing matter from the poetic experience of feeling the effects of figure, the voluptuous ethic of the neo-Lucretians constitutes not only a dangerous mixing of truth with fiction but a perverse resistance to endorsing a properly philosophical strategy for assuming the labor of critique. Such a refusal is made to read, as the century progresses,
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as a deviant and potentially obscene dependence on the dissolute seductiveness of the trope—a mode of ‘‘debauchery’’ that Sade, for instance, recognizes and celebrates in his reappropriation of Lucretius for the purposes of the novel. Neo-Lucretians like La Mettrie and Sade are described by their critics as reuniting the most bankrupt aspects of theological argument—its absolute resistance to reason—with an obsessive interest in the most perverse dimensions of bodily experience. Their infatuation with a formal style that never stops appealing directly to the person of the reader recalls, from one kind of enlightened secularist perspective, both the emergent genre of pornographic literature and the kinds of premodern ‘‘superstitious’’ belief that d’Holbach derides as ‘‘imaginary systems.’’26 La Mettrie and Sade thus seem, to many of their contemporaries, to conjugate in their writings the obscenity of a dogmatic theology with the textual apotheosis of a heedlessly voluptuous body that stands as both the origin and demise of thought. As the nature of pleasure becomes more and more often the explicit object of philosophic analysis, the figural pleasures of Lucretian philosophy appear increasingly like the failure, rather than the products, of intellection. If matter, for the Lockean Condillac, can be characterized as ‘‘a multitude,’’ where the ‘‘subject of thought should be one,’’ neo-Lucretians seem to desire the fragmentation of the unified consciousness into the tropic substance of its parts.27 Their participation in an enlightened project of emancipation is accordingly a deeply problematic one. They substitute for an analytical autonomy of willed action a figurally induced autonomy of feeling, derived from a disappearance of the subject into pleasures made possible through the dynamic abstraction of sensation into form, and form into sensation. Does this mean that Lucretian materialists are in fact aiming for a reduction of matter to pure poetry—a celebration of style over substance? Posing the question in these terms entails accepting as given the rupture between body and language that is, during this period, a matter of intense debate. The neoLucretians, like Lucretius himself, are in fact seeking to alter the ways in which their readers perceive even the most material aspects of existence; these writers imbue sensations and anatomies with figure in order to show that even the most substantial of bodies is vulnerable to self-transformation when it becomes a poetic object. Stable, prediscursive embodied ‘‘identities’’ as we moderns may understand them do not exist in this framework, which presents bodies of every kind as fluid, diffuse, and—in a very real sense—exquisitely vulnerable to words. Yet the eighteenth-century neoLucretians lose their battle to recuperate this ancient approach to figure as a crucial means for apprehending the material world. Literary language ac-
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cordingly has often tended, post-Enlightenment, to appear as extraneous to the problem of matter and ‘‘the body,’’ particularly where the latter’s pleasures are concerned. In fact, the framing of materialism in general as a reality beyond writing is a key consequence of the eighteenth-century struggle against a classical materialism that does not find its own origins in the split between representation and things-in-themselves. The gradual subordination of literary modes of truth-telling to scientific ones in a variety of contexts, including academic ones, represents another such effect. The narrative presented here of an ongoing conflict over the proper place of substance in the act of reading explicitly contests the notion of French Enlightenment literature and philosophy as straightforwardly engaged in a schematic project of objectification, rationalization, or ‘‘naturalization’’ of matter, whether this matter appears in the form of ‘‘soft’’ bodies or in that of ‘‘hard’’ elements. Instead, I suggest that any movement toward instrumentalization necessarily involves a complex series of renegotiations of the relationship of readers to the texts that present substance to them in manifold guises. In order for matter as such to be completely secured as an object of critical reflection, it has to be constantly purged of its contamination by the figures that make it comprehensible in the first place. This process of disinfection is made possible by means of renewed appeals to readers to replace a voluptuous entanglement in literary and poetic language with a reasoned appreciation of the texts that they peruse. As a result, the Lucretian enjoyment of figure in its immediate appeal to the senses does not disappear, but remains viable in the form of superstitious, unenlightened, or variously pornographic reading strategies. Moreover, while such modes of enjoyment, through which Lucretianism may remain present to post-Enlightenment readers, must in the end be disavowed for the process of enlightened critical emancipation to proceed, this disavowal is itself always subject to reiteration. It cannot simply go without saying, but needs to be reasserted by critics as enabling ‘‘good’’ judgment. In this context, within the modern cultivation of literature as a site for the deployment of both disengaged analytical expertise and ‘‘naturally’’ occurring sentiments of identification with persons, the feelings of visceral strangeness sometimes occasioned by the corporeal pull of tropic style may continue to be explicitly overlooked. Derek Attridge, in his book on The Singularity of Literature, describes literary works—and indeed Western art in general—as bringing together what he refers to as the three properties of ‘‘invention,’’ ‘‘singularity,’’ and ‘‘alterity.’’ In presenting literature as an event (rather than as an object), Attridge poses the question: ‘‘How does an entity or an idea unthinkable or unimag-
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inable within existing frameworks and feeling come into being as part of our understood and felt world?’’28 The literary evocation of alterity as Attridge describes it—the capacity of writing to invoke ‘‘a wholly new existent that cannot be apprehended by old modes of understanding’’29 —is also at work in Lucretian materialism. The neo-Lucretianism of the eighteenth century makes use of the power of literary figures to reveal to readers the profoundly creative force of matter. The conversion to materialism, then, is also a conversion to a mode of experience that takes difference—or ‘‘otherness’’—as the defining experience of what it means to be a material body. The Lucretian atomic entity takes on, in this context, the characteristics of the literary trope in order to allow readers to discover a voluptuous freedom of movement within an endlessly shifting landscape of embodied forms. It is undeniable, however, that other Enlightenment materialists can be just as interested as the neo-Lucretians in the power of rhetoric—and of literary fiction in particular—to form and shape the responses of readers. As Marc Andre´ Bernier has recently shown in his study Libertinage et figures du savoir, enlightened thinkers of all stripes are invested in the labor of putting materialist knowledge into (materialist) practice. In Bernier’s description of eighteenth-century sensualism and its accompanying materialisms, ‘‘their essential task consists of rethinking the relationship of the subject to its object, and, in order to remove any sort of transcendence, of establishing the idea that representation cannot be dissociated from the impression that the world makes on our senses. In general, the problem of sensation is posed in order to ground knowledge in experience.’’30 Throughout the French Enlightenment, the literary work represents a privileged means of affecting publics and of providing an experiential basis for materialist arguments, as Bernier claims. The disavowal of the Lucretian approach to this problem, however, allows the modern materialist perspective to emerge—within the novel itself—as an affirmation of the capacity of representation to confirm the plenitude of the natural world in and of itself. In this sense, enlightened materialists are attached not to the destabilizing force of the physical pleasure to be taken in figures, but to literature as a demonstration of the intrinsic resemblance of bodies—and persons—to themselves. Literature, in this framework, enables us to contemplate our own abiding embroilment in sensation as an extradiscursive force. It moves us to rediscover our materiality in our unwilled—often compulsory—responsiveness to words and images. In this context, the alterity of matter is one that seems internal to us, as
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readers, and thus cannot stand as an invitation to incorporate or apprehend a body fully external to our own. My account of the struggle dividing neo-Lucretians from their forwardlooking materialist compatriots is intended to engage with contemporary recuperations of the French Enlightenment as a privileged moment of crossfertilization between literature and philosophy—the scene of a meeting of genres ‘‘in a harmonious synthesis destined to become the ideal of the entire age, from Voltaire to the marquis de Sade,’’ as Pierre Hartmann has recently put it.31 I understand the productive collision of literary figure and philosophic reason, for which the period remains known, to lay the groundwork for a moment of extreme diremption, from which the tropic freedoms of the neo-Lucretians emerge transformed either as the emptiness of a libertine style without substance or as the mechanical excess of obscene delight. Machine-man comes to function primarily as a determinist caricature of robotic constraint just as the Sadean philosopher-libertines are buried under the weight of their own transgressions. In either case, the ways in which these figures gesture toward the possibility of a critique that is both embodied and formal, substantial and abstracted, remain only marginally perceptible, postEnlightenment. Yet, I do not mean, in making this claim, simply to shift the scene of the debate around the status of the material subject during the eighteenth century from philosophical to more literary forms of discourse. Literature, as the neo-Lucretians make clear, may write the terms of its surrender in insisting upon both the critical legitimacy of neutral appreciation and the inevitability of personal identification as strategies for approaching fictional texts. The instrumentalization of matter, to the extent that it can ever successfully take place, is also the objectification of figura. Neo-Lucretianism is the materialism that must be forgotten for the Kantian movement into maturity to begin.32 The first chapter of Voluptuous Philosophy explores the position of a Lucretian tradition of poetic philosophy in relationship to what has been seen as a typically eighteenth-century interest in the ‘‘materialization’’ or ‘‘physiologization’’ of the human subject. While scholars of the Enlightenment have portrayed natural philosophers from the 1760s on as increasingly receptive to a secular Lucretian materialism, I describe this renewed interest in De rerum natura as based in an effort to de-somatize the figure of the reader so that the student of Lucretius might consume the poem without unduly fearing any of its notoriously suasive effects. Far from revealing a turn toward the systematic materialization of experience, the dissemination of translations of De rerum natura is an index of the extent to which matter
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is in fact ceasing to matter in the consumption of philosophical texts by putatively neutral readers. A long history of intellectual engagement with Lucretius as the exponent of a specifically voluptuous philosophy, grounded in the involvement of the potential convert to Epicureanism with the pleasures of poetic form, becomes obscured in the context of an enlightened insistence on the Lucretian oeuvre as either scientifically instructive or formally delightful, either philosophically useful or gorgeously conceived. In this chapter, I begin by discussing the means by which a transformative ethic of voluptas may be derived from De rerum natura, and explore the persistence of this reading of Lucretius in the critiques of Epicurean materialism that predate his ‘‘reinvention’’ in the 1760s. I then investigate the treatment of Epicurean doctrine in three pre-Revolutionary translations that aim to present the poem to an audience of philosophically informed readers. The enlightened translators of Lucretius reveal themselves to be interested, I claim, in repudiating an earlier conceptualization of Lucretian substance as both textual effect and material body. The second chapter examines in more detail the changes in the notion of the reader that are occurring around the time that the new translations of Lucretius appear. Here I discuss the emergence of an idealized ‘‘self-possessed’’ reader, at home in the judicious display of a rational appreciation of texts, as in part a response to the dangerous admixture of figurative language, readerly delight, and potential physiological mutability that neo-Lucretianism is thought to promote. The pleasure of self-possession is regulated not by an ethic of voluptas—whereby matter can only be grasped in its motion across a field that is both textual and real—but by a desire to reaffirm the powers that may be exercised over substance by a self originally constituted outside of its particular representations in language. Because material substrates are conceived by this self-possessed reader as fundamentally unavailable to discursive modification, they are henceforth free to emerge as discrete, manipulable objects that may be studied, known, and ordered according to the will of the educated individual. Within the discourse of self-possession, pleasure ceases to be understood as the outcome of a process of reflection, and becomes instead a natural, universalizable response to stimuli—a symptom of the bodily organization of a specific individual, rather than a force that may alter or transform this organization. My argument here is initially built around the analysis of two treatises on reading that are published in the 1760s. Toward the end of the chapter, I turn to a discussion of the presentation of both voluptuous and ‘‘self-possessed’’ pleasure in the Encyclopedia, in order to examine the ways in which this presen-
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tation reaffirms a renunciation of voluptas in favor of the more legitimate delights of coherent judgment. The next four chapters of Voluptuous Philosophy focus on specific interventions in the ongoing eighteenth-century debate around the epistemological status and ethical aims of Enlightenment materialism. In chapters 3 and 4, I examine the writings of two materialist authors whose best-known works appear within months of each other: the radical mechanist La Mettrie and the philosopher and litte´rateur Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens. La Mettrie’s 1747 treatise Machine Man is often described as a philosophical adumbration of many of the principles that are figuratively incarnated in the 1748 obscene novel The´re`se philosophe (attributed to d’Argens). La Mettrie’s most famous creation—l’homme-machine—is regularly seen as anticipating a modern scientific determinism that prefigures the post-Enlightenment advent of the cyborg and the evacuation of the autonomous will into the anonymity of the biological organism. In a response to this reading, I show, in a chapter on La Mettrie’s profound commitment to the voluptuous figures of neoLucretianism, that he understands the literary sphere to ‘‘complete’’ materialist philosophy in making possible the experience of materialism as a form of transfigurative release from constraint. For La Mettrie, the mechanical body of ‘‘machine-man’’ functions as the exemplary tropic body, fully realizable as a mode of subjectivity only through an investment in literary practices and, not coincidentally, in explicitly literary pleasures. In chapter 4, I show how the figure of The´re`se in The´re`se philosophe is set up to counter the privileging of literature that La Mettrie, as a neo-Lucretian, suggests might provide a solution to the paradoxes embodied in the notion of a determinist materialism as a paradigmatic instance of free thought. In this novel, it is only through the rendering of literature as a site of ineluctable constraint that philosophy is able to come into being in the exercise of rational and objective judgment. Furthermore, the rift between Lamettrian and Dargensian materialisms—one figural, the other seeking to resist the effects of figure—recapitulates the larger incompatibility of a nostalgic Lucretian philosophy of poetic voluptas with an enlightened science for which matter becomes an object of dispassionate study. The last two chapters of the book move to slightly later moments in the development of eighteenth-century materialisms. In chapter 5, I address the perspective on a poetic Lucretianism developed by the philosophe who has remained perhaps the most famous, and famously literary, materialist of the century: Denis Diderot. Diderot, I argue, has a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to the pleasures of the text proffered by Lucretius to his readers.
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Diderot’s approach to matter as a ‘‘first principle’’ of things conceals a disparity between the inherent dynamism of his theories of substance and the more static position assigned by Diderot to the reader as a ‘‘practical’’ embodiment of this theory. For Diderot, neo-Lucretianism may be recuperated as a rehabilitation of sensory delight, but it is stripped of its transfigurative potential as a mode of lived experience accessed first through engagement with literary form. Chapter 6 explores the durably scandalous—but nonetheless eminently canonizable—writings of the marquis de Sade as a final, failed instantiation of neo-Lucretianism. I investigate in this chapter how Sade, in a mordant critique of a literary and political ethos of sentimentality, attempts to create a specifically Epicurean aesthetic that will reintegrate a neutralized science of substance with an imaginative cultivation of voluptuous enjoyment. Sade reiterates, in his revisionist theory of fiction, the Lucretian condemnation of romantic love as a harmful form of mystification, and in doing so displays the dependence of an enlightened social order on sentimental identification as an illegitimate (and politicized) mode of possession. In his attempt to present a Lucretian alternative to a sentimental ethic, however, he also reveals the way in which the triumph of philosophic reason is predicated upon the destruction—or rather, the disavowal—of the epistemological conditions that once made possible the Epicurean preoccupation with the philosophical freedoms vested in poetry. By situating the Lucretian project of transfiguration in the context of the novel, Sade ironically confirms the repositioning of neo-Lucretianism within the sphere of the aesthetic and its subsequent demise as a mode of voluptuously material engagement with the poetic fashioning of substance. In this sense, Voluptuous Philosophy tells the story of the inevitable failure of Lucretian poetic philosophy to speak in a meaningful way to modern experience. Yet, in examining this failure, we can begin to think beyond it—and, perhaps, toward the recentering of literature within a contemporary understanding of how matter makes itself both known and felt to us.
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1.
Voluptuous Figures: Lucretian Materialism in Eighteenth-Century France
It is enough to point out that the subject of thought should be one. Now a mass of matter is not one; it is a multitude.1 —Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines
In the ‘‘Discours pre´liminaire’’ prefacing his 1768 translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke describes the poem as ‘‘the boldest work that any human being had ever dared compose.’’2 Panckoucke was not alone in this assessment, since an explicit commitment to the voluptuous atomism associated with Lucretius had so often been made to serve, in more orthodox circles, as a gauge of swinishness.3 For French Enlightenment intellectuals, the open embrace of Epicurean doctrine could easily devolve into serious accusations of atheism and libertinage. Nonetheless, the spectral presence of Lucretius haunts eighteenth-century science with remarkable persistence. Enlightened French philosophic materialism not only provides an important site for the reiteration of a Lucretian debunking of superstition, but gradually incorporates a nascent utilitarian calculus reminiscent of the Epicurean investment in the primacy of pleasure as supreme good. The reemergence of an explicit interest in Lucretius’s poem that takes place in the latter half of the eighteenth century in France seems unsurprising in this context—part of a generalized philosophical response to a new, and more openly secular, critical imperative. As Johan Werner Schmidt has put it in his work on Denis Diderot’s engagement with Lucretius, ‘‘It became necessary to study phenomena and facts, to ask ‘how’ and not ‘why’ . . . and to do so without reference to the existence of God, a need that a renewed and freshly interpreted Epicureanism answered to a large extent.’’4 Moreover, the scientific injunction described here by Schmidt appears to take on heightened urgency given the period’s increasing emphasis on the mechanics of pleasure as ever more fundamental to human experience. As Diderot sums it up in the Encyclopedia, ‘‘every man is voluptuous, more or 17
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less.’’5 Even if Lucretius’s poem remains throughout the Enlightenment a text first defined by the whiff of scandal associated with it, the eighteenthcentury return to Lucretius seems symptomatic of an ongoing commitment on the part of Enlightenment materialists to the articulation of pleasurable sensation in particular as a crucial mechanism for apprehending and organizing the ‘‘stuff ’’ of existence. From this perspective, the lingering scandalousness of Lucretian sensualism—in its critique of religious faith and endorsement of bodily delight for its own sake—becomes tangential to an understanding of De rerum natura as an exemplary Enlightenment text avant la lettre: antireligious, proto-empiricist, and susceptible to proselytic use.6 Does the earthly voluptas of Lucretius indeed come into its own in the pleasure-seeking eighteenth century,7 and should we see in this focus on the mechanisms of corporeal enjoyment a confirmation of the importance of materialism in general for an enlightened understanding of human subjectivity? From one perspective, the private interest of the materialist philosophers of the second half of the Enlightenment in a poem often decried as a locus classicus of antitheological eudaemonism appears quite characteristic of what has been portrayed as the radicalization of French materialism that takes place toward the end of the century. In the context of this radicalization—described unflatteringly by Ernst Cassirer as a ‘‘retrogression’’ into dogmatism8 —the enlightened philosophic investment in Lucretius’s De rerum natura comes to stand as an indicator not only of the increasing secularism of prominent Enlightenment intellectuals, but of a ‘‘hedonistic turn’’ linked in part to the gradual somaticization of the human subject occurring in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy.9 The Enlightenment provides a fertile ground for the cultivation of forms of scientific materialism with potentially radical and destabilizing effects on ancien re´gime religious orthodoxy—effects eventually played out, in perhaps the most celebrated instance, in the pornographic pleasure-seeking of Sade’s libertines. The Epicurean suspicion of theology, as well as Lucretius’s emphasis on corporeal pleasure as a summum bonum, fit neatly into this narrative of De rerum natura as a forerunner of modern scientific fascination with the explanatory narratives of physiology. This reading situates increased attention to Lucretius within a movement toward a mechanized and rationalized modernity whose revolutionary subject eventually becomes the cyborg, the postmodern ‘‘homme-machine.’’10 But it tends to underestimate the significance of Lucretian materialism as a doctrine crucially invested in science primarily as a series of embodied and poetic effects on a specific reader. Reading De rerum natura as a symptomatic expression of a general process of secularization thus
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downplays what prior to the Enlightenment was seen as the central transgression or scandal of the Lucretian perspective: namely, the latter’s focus on materialism as formally conversive, a means of transfiguration grounded in the discursive production of readerly pleasure.11 The history of intellectual engagement with Lucretian materialism as a voluptuous strategy of reading—a method of apprehension ordered by and through a poetic text—is obscured by the post-Enlightenment conceptualization of Lucretius as situated either on one side or the other of what comes to be seen as an inevitable rift between the scientific analysis of bodily enjoyment and the production of this enjoyment in literary form. In this chapter, I take up readers’ changing relationships to Lucretian voluptas or pleasure in order to propose a new understanding of the assimilation of Lucretius as a vexed but crucial part of the Enlightenment materialist canon. I argue here that late eighteenth-century translations of Lucretius do not in fact consistently reveal a systematic investment in the ‘‘materialization’’ or ‘‘physiologization’’ of human experience and knowledge that has come to be understood as broadly characteristic of Enlightenment discussions of subjectivity. Instead, I suggest that renewed interest in the project of translating De rerum natura corresponds to a significant change in the way the act of reading becomes envisioned, during this period, as itself fundamentally dematerialized—an index of the extent to which matter ceases to matter in the ‘‘proper’’ consumption of texts by thoughtful readers. Lucretius proposes, in De rerum natura, a theory of embodiment whereby tropic language and material substance are connected to one another in the act of reading in order to effect the voluptuous conversion of an exemplary reader to materialist doctrine. This characteristic emphasis on the substantial pleasures prepared by the Epicurean text long functioned as the defining scandal of the poem, but it is not until the eighteenth century that Lucretius was regularly presented to readers without fear of (or desire for) contagion by the very pleasures that the poem describes. As I will show, this transformation, far from indicating a widespread and ‘‘enlightened’’ acceptance of the poetic and material enjoyment induced by Lucretian doctrine, suggests instead changes in the philosophical status of reading for pleasure in its relationship to material embodiment. Late-Enlightenment translations of Lucretius are underwritten by a model of the enlightened reading subject according to which the poetic exposition of Lucretian doctrine is no longer made to function as a threateningly immediate intervention in the material experience of readers. The rise of materialism in the second half of the eighteenth century is sustained by the development of a modern technology of
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reading in which matter stops working as an active principle in the formation of enlightened subjects.12 By the end of the century, the concurrent production of several French translations of De rerum natura implies that Lucretius’s poem can indeed be read safely, not because the doctrine of hedonistic atomism has been absorbed into the cultural imaginary, but because new methods of reading enable the disinterested perusal and circulation of even the boldest of texts. The increased availability of Lucretius’s De rerum natura to a literate public goes along with a carefully monitored emphasis on the dematerialization of the poem’s possible effects on such an audience. In other words, the full emergence of eighteenth-century scientific materialism as an explanatory network relies in part on the contemporaneous emergence of a fully disembodied understanding of the relationship of the reading subject to texts (particularly poetic or figurative texts).13 Ultimately, while late-period French Enlightenment materialism would itself fall victim to a backlash of sorts after the Revolution, the understanding of reading that undergirds the development of this materialist tradition would display a remarkable tenacity as a bequest of the eighteenth century to an emergent modernity. The somatic pleasure that was once imagined to follow upon and govern the reading of Lucretius’s poem would become—and remain—the domain of pornographic, not philosophic, experience. In fact, the more materializable subjectivity became, the harder it would be to portray reading for pleasure as engaging a series of either freely philosophic or actively transfigurative effects on those who indulged in it. In order to elucidate more fully the significance of the act of reading for pleasure in eighteenth-century approaches to Lucretian materialism, I begin here with a discussion of the centrality of readerly voluptas to De rerum natura. I first describe the place of voluptuous experience in structuring the initial encounter with Epicurean doctrine in Lucretius’s poem. The second section of the chapter turns to one of the most impressive—albeit rarely studied—monuments to early eighteenth-century critical investment in the Lucretian project: Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius, of which Voltaire remarked, ‘‘I am still surprised that in the middle of worldly dissipations, and thorny political affairs, he managed to write such a long work in verse, in a foreign language, he who would have hardly produced four good lines in his own tongue.’’14 Polignac is of interest in this context because, as a philosopher and a theologian, he remains explicitly concerned with Epicurean materialism as necessarily bodying forth a series of material symptoms in readers. Polignac (like Lucretius, but unlike later eighteenth-century critics) refuses
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to see the aesthetic pleasure readers might take in the perusal of the Epicurean poem as in any sense subordinate to the philosophical or scientific aim of the text as a study of the nature of the constitutive elements of the material world. Instead, Polignac reminds his readers that the dangers of the Lucretian text are fully visible in the way it aims to function both as figurative discourse ought, by inducing pleasure in those who peruse it, and as an intervention in an exemplary reader’s material perception of the real—an attempt to inaugurate within this reader the experience of poetic pleasure as real proof of Epicurean epistemology. For Polignac as for Lucretius, the conjunction of knowledge and sensation that marks the very experience of reading De rerum natura allows the production of an active (rather than a passive) form of pleasure, where readers are meant to understand their bodily investment in the material world of substance not as determining, but as freeing. My reading of Polignac’s project thus serves to highlight the ways in which his perspective on Lucretian poetry as materially productive quickly becomes unsustainable in the context of late-Enlightenment materialism. In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss why the series of translations of Lucretius produced in France after the 1760s seem no longer to be primarily involved, as Polignac is, with the question of the pleasures that might be corporeally solicited by De rerum natura. These translations testify to the way in which the study of materialism as a science is becoming divorced during this period from a commitment to the production of material effects in the bodies of communities of readers. (The pleasure of reading, then, is no longer thought of as potentially transformative in a mental and physiological sense, with the exception of the limiting case of pornography.)15 The publication of these translations bears witness to the ways in which literary and poetic texts might be said to be losing their philosophical purchase on substance as a constitutive element of subjectivity. From here on out, the pleasures of literature may function to unveil our material natures to ourselves, but not to change them substantially. By the end of the Enlightenment, putative readers have been freed, in the guise of critical or rational subjects, from the texts that solicit them. Their bodily responses are no longer linked primarily to figuration and, in theory at least, can consistently be made more readily available for mastery through processes of empiricist self-discipline (such as education or Cartesian ‘‘habituation’’). At the same time, the act of experiencing pleasure—the moment of voluptas—itself gets reconceptualized as taking place before or beyond authentic philosophic engagement.
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This split between a self cultivated in philosophy and a natural self unthinkingly present in its moments of embodied delight—moments in which pleasure is understood as threatening the dissolution, rather than the transfiguration, of the autonomous reading subject—is fully visible in the way in which De rerum natura is presented to enlightened audiences after 1768. The models of reading deployed in the paratexts to eighteenth-century French translations of Lucretius serve to reaffirm the development, in natural philosophy, of an approach to Lucretius as a philosopher of passive substance, rather than one of active pleasures. For the late eighteenth-century translators of Lucretius, we read freely as enlightened subjects only when the act of reading is itself understood as profoundly immaterial. The price paid by philosophic understanding is thus the material pleasure of the text.
1. Reading Lucretius: voluptuous freedom and the Epicurean conversion Epicurean doctrine explicitly invokes the thoughtful cultivation of pleasure as an urgent16 task of the philosopher. As Epicurus writes in his Letter to Menoeceus, ‘‘we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good.’’17 Despite its overwhelming significance for Epicureanism as both lived practice and materialist theory, the centrality of pleasure (heˆdoneˆ in Greek, voluptas in Latin) to Epicurean philosophy has conventionally represented the aspect of the doctrine most vulnerable to critical misreading. For Cicero, the use of the word voluptas was alone enough to render the philosophy suspect and ‘‘notorious.’’18 This process of contamination was often understood by its critics as transitively infectious, so that eighteenth-century rehabilitations of volupte´, for instance, customarily start by addressing the related problem of Epicurus’s sullied reputation as a piggish hedonist. The definition of volupte´ in the Encyclopedia includes a succinct explanation of the dilemma: ‘‘The word volupte´ was the object of indignation; those who were already corrupted by it abused the term; the enemies of the sect prevailed against them, & thus the name of epicurean became an extremely odious one.’’19 As this passage makes clear, voluptuousness inflects the semantic substance of Epicurean doctrine from the outset. The ‘‘boldness’’ of Epicurean philosophy as Panckoucke evokes it in his introductory description of De rerum natura is thus effectively two-pronged. On the one hand, the mention of Epicurus and his disciples had historically been associated with atheism, despite the efforts of those
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scholars who, like the seventeenth-century theologian Gassendi, sought to christianize the doctrine. On the other, perusal of the Epicurean text threatens to introduce unwary readers to new and seductive material pleasures among which is included the encounter with the philosophy itself. The exposure to Epicureanism is likely ‘‘to produce very dangerous impressions in those minds that are less than attentive, and to lead them into disastrous transgressions.’’20 These ‘‘disastrous transgressions’’ are not just symptomatic of the ‘‘impressions’’ made by the text, however. They may also be understood as a fundamental part of each reader’s interaction with the doctrine, so that the first pleasurable impression made upon the reader by the words themselves will uncontrollably engender the desire to repeat the experience in other modes. Voluptas is suspect, as Cicero suggests, in that it embodies, as nomen, the seductive power of language on the embodied person. This ongoing emphasis on Epicurean materialism’s potentially contagious effects on vulnerable readers is unequivocally staged by Lucretius himself, in the much celebrated invocation to Venus with which De rerum natura begins. The goddess, exhorted as the divine incarnation of the pleasure of men and gods (hominum divumque voluptas), is described as inspiring a form of sensuous delight that is both inherent in natural elements—in that Venus serves to ‘‘guide the nature of things’’ toward pleasure—and the fortuitous product of Venus’s own work upon the natural world. In the opening lines of the invocation, Venus seductively awakens nature to her presence and in doing so displays the poetry in things: ‘‘for thee earth, the quaint artificer, puts forth her sweet-scented flowers; for thee the levels of the ocean smile, and the sky, its anger past, gleams with spreading light.’’21 Lucretius implores Venus to imbue the words of his poem with the same ‘‘lasting loveliness’’ with which she characteristically endows the rest of the natural universe. She is shown standing at the origin of the words themselves—‘‘nothing without thine aid comes forth into the bright coasts of light’’—and as the purveyor of a certain supplemental delight that will eventually constitute the poem’s effectiveness as suasive speech.22 While Lucretius soon turns away from this rendering of Venusian voluptas to his presentation of the Epicurean theory of matter, his initial, allegorical focus is on the imbrication of pleasure in the exposure of readers to Epicurean doctrine as a poetic object.23 This strategy is not simply a rhetorical one, since the capacity of any reader to respond with pleasure to the ‘‘true philosophy’’ that Lucretius outlines will later become an index of this reader’s ability to relish the freedom (from
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anxiety, fear, and desire) that Lucretian materialism seeks to sustain. In a passage that appears toward the end of the first book, Lucretius writes: So now, since this philosophy full often seems too bitter to those who have not tasted it, and the multitude shrinks back from it, I have desired to set forth to you my reasoning in the sweet-tongued song of the muses, and as though to touch it with the pleasant honey of poetry, if perchance I might avail by such means to keep your mind set upon my verses, while you come to see the whole nature of things, what is its shape and figure.24
For Lucretius, the success of his project as materialist epistemology is contingent upon his ability to fix the attention of his reader on his verse. Pleasure, intimately linked to an engagement with the poetic form of De rerum natura, functions as the lens through which the world may be viewed afresh, enabling the longed-for materialist conversion. The reader’s mind is first to turn, not toward the natural world as material object, but toward the poem as formal structure. The ‘‘nature of things’’ will initially be glimpsed sidelong. The object of De rerum natura is thus both explanatory and explicitly hortatory, as Lucretius aims to transfigure his addressee, Memmius, by dispelling the ‘‘terror of the mind’’ typically instilled in men and women by the superstition and ignorance Lucretius sees as pervading human society. The pleasure that serves as both cause and effect of the poem is the crucial mechanism that will allow this conversion to be performed. In this sense, pleasure does remain for Lucretius a scientific phenomenon, subject to causal explanation by way of a materialist reading of empirically determined processes. Yet voluptas is also figured as constitutive of the literary practice of Epicureanism as a mode of urgent and intimate address to a determinate reader. Voluptas must thus be ceaselessly rediscovered in the interaction of the reader with poetry in order for materialist knowledge in its scientific form to become philosophically meaningful as care of the self. Lucretius enlists the seductiveness of poetic discourse as a vehicle for the successful incorporation of Epicurean practice into the bodily substance of the delighted reader, just as he suggests that the pleasure produced by the words themselves—‘‘the pleasant honey of poetry’’—may function as an element of the voluptas that is to be carefully cultivated by the Epicurean philosopher.25 Lucretius’s exordium to Venus implies that the pleasure of the poetic text, born in the voluptuous contemplation of Epicurean precepts, prefigures and accompanies an entrance into material delight, carefully defined, as the ideal state of the philosopher. The sensuousness of nature—bursting into bloom
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at the approach of Venus—becomes in this context a proof of the poetry inherent in material substance itself. If Epicurean voluptas lies at least in part in the just appreciation of matter in motion—in contrast to the quasimetaphysical fear of the unknown that religion seeks to compel—then reading is the (reiterative) technique that is to produce this transformation in the willing student.26 Pleasure, transmitted through the entranced reader, is both the beginning and the end of the poetic experiment on matter that Lucretius undertakes: ‘‘On a dark theme I trace verses so full of light, touching all with the muses’ charm.’’27 What starts as an effort at persuasion in the beginning of the poem—the ‘‘coating’’ of the rim of the cup of truth with the sweet taste of poetic speech—becomes the nectar that is delightfully imbibed from the very words of Epicurus himself: ‘‘From thy pages, our hero, even as bees in flowery glades sip every plant, we in like manner browse on all thy sayings of gold, yea, of gold, and always most worthy of life for evermore.’’28 Language, here, does function to seduce, but not, as many eighteenth-century commentators would continue to suspect, in order to lure the unwary reader into a life of unreflecting and luxurious consumption. Instead, the perlocutionary force of poetic speech—defined first in terms of voluptuous enjoyment, and only later as ratio—is an indicator of the philosophic force of Epicurean doctrine. The atomistic first principles of the physical organization of the world materialize themselves proleptically in the reader’s pleasure, a pleasure that is the very essence of figure in its superfluous yet insistent embodiment as philosophy’s sweet ‘‘coating.’’ In this sense, as Richard Minadeo puts it in The Lyre of Science: Form and Meaning in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, ‘‘The meaning is the form. . . . It must be experienced.’’29 While Lucretius first urges Memmius to feel his introduction to the Epicurean text as a process of pleasurable transfiguration, the poet goes on to theorize the nature of material substance in a way that is meant to make clear to his reader precisely what is at stake in the conversion to Epicureanism. The transformation that Lucretius understands Epicurus’s materialist philosophy to enable is vigorously presented in the proem to the second book, in a passage remarkable for the apparent cynicism of its endorsement of a philosophical Schadenfreude famously identified by Francis Bacon as ‘‘Lucretian pleasure.’’ The proem begins with a description of the philosopher observing with joy the struggles of those who remain unfree, whether they are entrapped by the vain and damaging pursuit of power or victimized by the forces of nature. ‘‘Sweet it is,’’ writes Lucretius, ‘‘when on the great
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sea the winds are buffeting the waters, to gaze from the land on another’s great struggles; not because it is pleasure or joy that anyone should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortune you yourself are free.’’30 Lucretius extols the Epicurean philosopher as ‘‘firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others,’’ standing aloof and apart from the common miseries of human existence.31 The powerful may stage ‘‘mimic wars’’ to assuage their anxiety, but, as Lucretius suggests, it is not the spectacle of conflict that is in itself alleviatory or voyeuristically pleasing. The student of Epicurus should be immune to scopophilic pleasure as ultimately a form of constraint on both the subjects and objects of identification. Rather, it is in the repositioning of the philosopher vis a` vis the material world in its entirety that Epicurean doctrine works its transmogrifications. Emergence into a state of spectatorial detachment—with its multiple and shifting perspectives on the panorama of worldly strife—occurs with the realization that nature reliably provides ample sustenance for human pleasures, properly conceived, and that the fear of death can be conquered not by the accumulation of worldly goods, but through the study of natural processes. The suggestion that sadistic delight in the spectacle of others’ suffering might constitute a truly philosophical pleasure may seem provocative, but, as Lucretius explains, the intensity of this pleasure is in no sense bound to the prospect of identification with the suffering object of contemplation.32 Instead, he evokes a freedom that is born not in an act of will—the choice to pity or to scorn an other—but within the feeling of suffusive and honeyed voluptas that was conjured in the proem to the first book. The independence of Epicurean philosophers is thus defined not in the context of their ability to assent rationally to an apodictic materialism, but in their capacity to sustain the experience of philosophic pleasure even in the face of ‘‘real’’ strife. While the proem to book one opened with the image of Venus stimulating a latent pleasure in the very substance of the earth—so that the universe appears as ‘‘enchained by delight’’—the beginning of the second book displays voluptas as the necessary condition of a freedom that is rendered in the form of an ineluctable sweetness—a voluptuous sensation of exquisite materiality on the part of the reader. The seductive suaveness of Epicurean poetry is shown here as inhering, not in its ability to ensnare its audience in passive submission to their own embodied pleasures, but in the way in which the poet reveals matter itself to constitute an open space of infinite delights. The rematerialized body of the Epicurean convert becomes a free body in the recognition of its own, henceforth inevitable, voluptuousness, so that the
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pleasure taken in the text should be the first taste, deliciously iterable, of the unfettered sweetness of the philosophic existence itself. ‘‘And so we see that for the body’s nature but few things at all are needful, even such as can take away pain, yea, and can also supply many delights.’’33 Lucretius presents his readers at this point with the possibility of a perfectly free material body, a body that discovers its independence not in a moment of action, but in the process of poetic contemplation. ‘‘Come now,’’ he writes, ‘‘I will unfold by what movement the creative bodies of matter beget diverse things, and break up those that are begotten . . . : do you remember to give your mind to my words.’’34 Voluptas thus comes to define a stochastic domain where a full range of pleasurable sensations coexists with the transfiguration, through poetry, of the philosophic body as a fully material body. The importance of the philosopher’s ongoing and voluptuous engagement with doctrine in its poetic form is reaffirmed, here, as the sign of his conversion. Although eighteenth-century narratives of originary nature—what Marx refers to as ‘‘the fiction and only the aesthetic fiction of the small and great Robinsonades’’35 —might lead us to expect differently, the transfiguring mechanism of Lucretian materialism does not depend, as the proems show, on the invocation of a return to a natural state that somehow preexists doctrine, despite the fact that Lucretius will go on to produce an often cited account of the origin of humankind in book five.36 The process of (re)discovering nature is one that is (re)enacted in the contingent movement of the reader through the encounter with poetic narrative. The characteristic state of human subjects who have not yet begun this emancipatory process is one of painful ideological enthrallment to narratives of belief, so that prospective Epicureans will experience the trajectory toward knowledge as a struggle against the power of theology to define bodily ‘‘feeling’’ as if this feeling were fully determinant. Lucretian poetry, which disseminates pleasure alone, thus works to ‘‘free’’ the reader from the gloomy realm of religious discourse, where the body is entirely bound and subdued by awe-inspiring myth. The condition of possibility for this struggle, in Lucretius’s terms, is a delighted recognition of (rather than a reasoned assent to) the heady sweetness of poetry, in which the ‘‘nature’’ of matter is re-presented as voluptuous experience. Lucretius thus marks the conversion enabled by Epicurean materialism as implicated in a generic transformation in discursive techniques, so that the material and luxuriant ‘‘worldliness’’ of Epicurean empiricism is the product of an imagined journey ‘‘far beyond the fiery walls of the world’’ first undertaken and, more crucially, narrativized by Epicurus himself.37
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The figure of Memmius as addressed by Lucretius in his poem is that of an exemplary Epicurean reader, distinguished by his responsiveness, his attention (always, however, threatening to waver), and the prospect of his delight. As Lucretius portrays him, Memmius seamlessly experiences the transition from poetically induced pleasure to physically produced knowledge. If Epicurean physics remains in the service of Epicurean ethics, it is in the sensation of ineffable douceur that the Lucretian reader recognizes the practical validity of the materialist knowledge that De rerum natura is written to impart. The pleasure that Memmius takes in the act of reading is understood to anticipate (and later, coincide with) the pleasure instilled in material substance itself as a poetic force. Reinforcing this connection, Lucretius famously likens the elements of matter to letters: Nay indeed, even in my verses it is of moment with what others and in what order each letter is placed. For the same letters signify sky, sea, earth, rivers, sun, the same too crops, trees, living creatures; if not all, yet by far the greater part, are alike, but it is by position that things sound different. So in things themselves likewise when meetings of matter, its motions, order, position, shapes are changed, things too are bound to be changed.38
If the correspondence of language to matter—the analogical interweaving of one with the other—is here made explicit, poetic language and material substance are represented from the beginning of De rerum natura as alike in their ability to inspire a contingent yet consistent voluptas in prospective converts. The initial exposure to Epicurean doctrine, however harsh the truths it may have to transmit, is meant to be memorable in its joyfulness. The ‘‘sweet tongue’’ of Lucretius should recall to us the poetic verve of our own sensations in an immediate thrill of recognition.39 While we may be tempted to understand this voluptuous delight as an essentially constraining or determinative force—the ‘‘unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right’’ of the Phaedrus, for instance40 —Lucretius should instead be said to describe the aleatory ‘‘swerve’’ of an authentically free pleasure as originating in the most basic elements of the materialist universe—the atomic particles or ‘‘first-bodies’’ themselves. For Lucretius, voluptuous materialism relies on the literalized embodiment of chance in the reader, a transformation dependent on the lusciousness of his poetic technique. Voluptas is the product of figure, and is itself only describable as such—a ‘‘sweet tongue’’ that tastes of itself. In the second book of De rerum natura, Lucretius presents the Epicurean theory of material substance according to which matter is made up of tiny,
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indestructible, and indivisible particles, primordia rerum (primary particles) too small to be observed by the naked eye. Agglomerations of these particles or semina (seeds) constitute the material world as we experience it, although the primary bodies are in themselves imperceptible to us. Epicurean physics as a system rests on the ability of the philosopher to effect an analytical movement from the perceptible (corpora generally, comprehended by humans through the senses) to the invisible (known to Epicureans through the encounter with doctrine).41 We find at this point that matter, in all of its solidity, is in fact reliant on the Lucretian text to make itself known, since it paradoxically resists sensory apprehension. De rerum natura thus enacts a direct apprehension of material substance—unimaginable without textual intervention—not just in the production of an aesthetic response in the reader but in the poetic revelation of the fundamentally imperceptible existence of primary particles. These particles, similar in their activity to the letters of the alphabet as Lucretius describes them above, are in constant motion, since they are not only substantial but weighty—possessed, as Lucretius puts it, of gravitas: ‘‘For in truth matter does not cleave close-packed to itself, since we see each thing grow less, and we perceive all things flow away, as it were, in the long lapse of time, as age withdraws them from our sight: and yet the sum of all is seen to remain undiminished.’’42 The Epicurean universe is one that is made and unmade in a process of continuous flux whereby material things flow into and out of one another as their constitutive particles are redistributed. Generally speaking, these particles tend to move vertically downwards, in the image of a ‘‘rain of atoms’’ also present in the earlier Democritean depictions of the world as physically determined by the linear movement of atoms through space. But it is in his depiction of this atomic movement that Lucretius introduces the crucial element upon which the Epicurean critique of Democritean determinism rests: the clinamen, or atomic swerve, that allows for the reinsertion of contingency into what would otherwise be the relentless predictability of atomic motion in and through space. As Lucretius puts it, ‘‘But if they were not used to swerve, all things would fall downwards through the deep void like drops of rain, nor could collision come to be, nor a blow brought to pass for the first-beginnings: so nature would never have brought ought to being.’’43 The appearance of the atomic swerve makes free will possible, since the clinamen is not in itself the product of any determinate cause and instead seems to work, as Warren F. Motte, Jr. has put it, to ‘‘subvert the control mechanism.’’44 If the introduction of the clinamen signals the return of free-
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dom to what would otherwise have become a bleakly determinist universe, impervious to change or chance, it also heralds the contingent recovery of voluptas as the central trope of Lucretian science.45 Voluntas and voluptas are revealed as intrinsically connected—movements linked together through the inherent substitutability of one letter/atom for another. Indeed, the passage in which Lucretius explains the effects of the clinamen on living things has been marked since the Renaissance by a moment of semantic hesitation that has worked to underline the uneasy persistence of voluptas at the very heart of atomist science, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out in an essay on chance (for which the clinamen becomes the privileged figure) and psychoanalysis.46 The passage in question is transcribed in early editions of De rerum natura (including the Oblongus and Quadratus manuscripts, dating from the ninth or tenth centuries) as ‘‘libera per terras unde haec animantibus exstat, unde est haec, inquam, fatis avulsa voluptas per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluntas.’’47 As Cyril Bailey puts it in his commentary on these lines, ‘‘It is generally agreed that libera voluptas is an improbable expression. The natural expression is libera voluntas ‘a free act of will’ which is ‘wrested from determinism.’ ’’48 Following Lambinus’s 1563 edition of the poem, Bailey reads voluptas and voluntas as having been haphazardly transposed, since the notion of a truly contingent pleasure—voluptas as a figure of freedom—seems to him counterintuitive or ‘‘improbable.’’ Will is ‘‘naturally’’ free, while pleasure, we might surmise, is inevitably bound.49 As Bailey continues, ‘‘Pleasure gives the incentive and will determines the action.’’50 Bailey’s gloss of this passage relies on what he reads as the difficulty of conjugating independence, structured through conscious choice, and voluptuous delight, defined as a passive or inherent quality of things. Yet from the beginning of the poem, with its prayer to Venus as both genetrix and emancipator of a war-weary world, Lucretius reads pleasure as a kind of radically material autonomy—a delight ‘‘wrested,’’ perhaps, from fearinspiring ritual—and, what is more, as an autonomy embodied in the first deliberately sensuous taste of the ‘‘honey’’ of poetry. The lapsus that has for so long troubled commentators on Lucretius confirms the difficulty of defining the precise status of Epicurean voluptas within De rerum natura when the poem is viewed as a closed system. The enactment of voluptuous pleasure, not unlike the introduction of the clinamen, requires an intervention from ‘‘outside,’’ since it is only in reaching out to an interlocutor (as Lucretius demonstrates from the outset of the poem) that the elements of philosophical inquiry are put into creative motion in the first place. This intervention does not take place through an interaction be-
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tween an active will and the passive matter which this will seeks to subjugate. On the contrary, it is in the beguiling surprise of pleasure in and of things that the Epicurean disciple becomes aware of his conversion. As Lucretius says of Epicurus, ‘‘For as soon as thy philosophy, springing from thy godlike soul, begins to proclaim aloud the nature of things, the terrors of the mind fly away, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things moving on through all the void.’’51 Derrida is thus able to read the (accidental?) conjunction of voluptas and voluntas in the following terms: The mere difference of a letter introduces a clinamen precisely when Lucretius is at the point of explaining the extent to which the clinamen is the condition of the freedom and will or voluptuous pleasure that has been wrested from destiny (fatis avolsa). But in all cases the context leaves no doubt as to the link between clinamen, freedom, and pleasure. The clinamen of the elementary principle—notably, the atom, the law of the atom—would be the pleasure principle. The clinamen introduces the play of necessity and chance into what could be called, by anachronism, the determinism of the universe. Nonetheless, it does not imply a conscious freedom or will, even if for some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable.52
Lucretius, for all his critique of theology as mass delusion, is less concerned with freedom as ‘‘enlightened’’ choice than he is with pleasure as giving rise to a moment in which one reader’s experience of the world may be materially reconfigured. His intention is at least in part to give readers what they most want to receive—not an illusory freedom of pure choice—but the possibility of bodily reinvestment in the material autonomy of the semina rerum as the very substance of delight. The voluptuous atom swerves— unconsciously—and in this motion the world, and the poem, are born in the person of Memmius, the reader.
2. Into the Enlightenment: rereading Lucretius I have focused here on Lucretius’s positioning of voluptas vis-a`-vis the figure of the ideal Epicurean reader in De rerum natura because commentaries on the poem take the problem of the possible corporeal effects of the text— positive or negative, freeing or enslaving, aleatory or inevitable—as a central critical concern well into the eighteenth century. On the one hand, modern commentators on Lucretius tend to see the place of readerly voluptas in De rerum natura as subordinate to more explicitly philosophico-scientific ques-
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tions, even when these questions are also presented as aesthetically inflected.53 Earlier exegetes of Lucretius, on the other, typically approach Lucretian Epicureanism as intensely preoccupied, for better or worse, with the problem of readerly voluptas as the most meaningful consequence of Lucretian ethics generally and of the Lucretian text in particular. In this sense, premodern critics of Lucretius remain exceptionally responsive to the Epicurean emphasis on the reader’s consumption and transmission of doctrine as one of philosophy’s most enduring and affecting pleasures. Following Epicurus, these critics tend to understand the scientific claims presented in De rerum natura—including, for instance, the Lucretian exposition of the nature of the atom—to be wedded to the ethical aims of Epicurean thought. With Lucretius, Epicurean doctrine narrates the space of textual consumption as a primary site of voluptas, so that the body of the reader becomes the privileged locus of the recombination of word and matter. This reader, exemplary or otherwise, is accordingly shown as having a significant role to play in the potential transmissibility of the doctrine. For premodern critics of Epicurean materialism, the figure of the voluptuously embodied reader thus emerges as a troubling symptom of the injurious consequences of the material transfiguration Epicureanism seeks to produce. Moreover, in keeping with the centrality of voluptas—as trope and as experience—to Epicurean thought, the legend of Lucretian authorship as it was transmitted through the fourth-century writings of Saint Jerome portrayed the poet himself as the victim of a ‘‘love-philtre’’ he had consumed. Driven mad by the (honeyed?) draught, Lucretius is said to have eventually committed suicide, but not before having penned De rerum natura in the rare intervals of lucidity he experienced. (The poem comes into being, in this anecdote, in the interval between sanity and complete mental collapse.) Here the enchanting ‘‘sweetness’’ of Lucretius’s poetry reappears, in inverted form, as the pharmakon of the murderous draught. If Lucretius seeks to charm his readers, he does so at their (and his) peril. The persistence of this myth coincides with the presentation of De rerum natura as itself a kind of ‘‘philtre,’’ mixing madness and reason to advance a process of seduction that betrays the reader into materialist belief.54 The legend of Lucretius’s decline and suicide—‘‘medically’’ induced—is part of an exegetical tradition that takes Epicurean materialism extremely seriously as a forceful intervention in the experience of putative readers. From this perspective, Lucretian poetry is written to engage a bodily response, and in doing so seeks to transform the fundamental conditions governing its readers’ knowledge of the world. As the baron des Coutures writes in the preface to his
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seventeenth-century translation of Lucretius, ‘‘He shows perceptibly [sensiblement] that the object of our most ardent desires is an aim that runs counter to our happiness . . . he establishes in a powerful way the first bodies or atoms as the guiding principles of this immense vastness: he elegantly describes their combinations, their liaisons, their movements, their weights & their different figures.’’55 In des Coutures’s schema, Lucretius redirects readers’ desires through his manipulation of poetic language; the solidity of his atom is reiterated in the power of his prose, while the gracefulness of corpuscularian movement is made acutely visible in his elegant deployment of figure. The enjoyment that des Coutures describes himself as experiencing in his readings of De rerum natura thus remains both implicitly physiological and actively figurative. ‘‘With these maxims,’’ des Coutures writes, ‘‘that have since appeared only too certain to me, I attach myself to this philosopher.’’56 This kind of ‘‘attachment’’ is exactly what eighteenth-century critics of Epicurean materialism will seek to forestall as too outrageously ‘‘bold.’’ In this sense, Lucretian science continues to be understood by some eighteenthcentury readers as operating first and foremost by means of the binding power of pleasure on readers’ imaginations. Indeed, this mechanism can still be thought of during this period (by Polignac, among others) as the primary one governing the initial engagement with atomist description. Des Coutures’s 1685 introduction confirms the enduring power of this emphasis, even as he strains to demonstrate the ways in which such delight might reinforce, rather than dismantle, an ethical imperative. But, while antimaterialist dismay at the prospect of the seductive effects of the dissemination of Lucretian doctrine persists throughout the Enlightenment, the relationship between philosophic or scientific practice generally and the kind of readerly pleasure described by des Coutures in his introduction becomes increasingly ambivalent. After the appearance of des Coutures’s translation toward the end of the seventeenth century, it would be eighty-three years until Panckoucke undertook his (extremely free) ‘‘traduction libre’’ and La Grange produced his own, more famous, prose version, under the guidance of enlightened materialists Diderot and d’Holbach. The dearth of new French scholarly translations during the first half of the eighteenth century (and well into the second) does not, however, reflect a lack of interest in materialist philosophy generally on the part of Enlightenment intellectuals—far from it. By 1759, for instance, the abbe´ Dufour expressed his consternation at the progress made by materialist thought in the following terms: ‘‘Materialism, this monster that is so often struggled against, without having been destroyed, today
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makes inroads too rapid not to be alarming.’’57 In his book on the development of French materialism between 1734 and 1784, Franck Salau¨n estimates that it was around 1740 that ‘‘the turning point or the acceleration manifested itself . . . , as if the materialist arguments had suddenly become particularly up-to-date, useful, and topical.’’58 In this intellectual climate, the absence of French translations of De rerum natura may reflect a reluctance to undertake the conjugation of the delights of Lucretian poetry with the objects of materialist science as they come to be configured by the end of the century. While discreet references to De rerum natura do appear with regularity in texts published both before and after 1740, the difficulty of negotiating this (growing) divide is already tangible in Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s references to Lucretius in the Re´flexions critiques sur la poe´sie et la peinture of 1719. As Dubos describes the situation: Everyone reads and rereads Virgil, and few people make of Lucretius their favorite book. . . . Compare the number of translations of Lucretius with the number of translations of Virgil in all the civilized languages, and you will find four translations of the Aeneid for every one translation of the poem De rerum natura.59
In the Re´flexions, Dubos testifies to what he reads as the lack of popularity of De rerum natura while claiming that ‘‘the true means of knowing the value of a poem will always be to consult the impression that it makes.’’60 As he goes on to assert, ‘‘One must examine whether it is pleasing, and to what extent it pleases and binds its readers to it.’’61 Dubos’s description may at first seem to solidify the privileged status of De rerum natura as a delightful piece of poetry, full of verve and energy. Yet, in the context of his presentation of De rerum natura as a work of philosophy vitiated from within by ‘‘bad reasoning’’ and (as he claims at the beginning of the Re´flexions) infrequently read or enjoyed by the public, it becomes difficult to specify the nature of the faculty (critical or sentimental) that should ultimately regulate judgment of the poem in Dubos’s terms.62 While he affirms, in his discussion of De rerum natura, that condemnation of Lucretian materialism as philosophy should not necessarily affect readers’ relationship to the work as poetry, his argument that ‘‘the public judges the part of the value of his poem that falls under the domain of poetry’’63 is undermined by his initial supposition that ‘‘one only reads this work with deliberation,’’ in the absence of a characteristically poetic ‘‘pleasure in being moved.’’64 As a work that pleases few, and convinces fewer, De rerum natura occupies an uneasy place in the evaluative schema set up by Dubos. What might it mean, in view of the extreme am-
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bivalence surrounding this account of the reception of De rerum natura during the Enlightenment, for the work to ‘‘bind’’ (attacher) its eighteenthcentury readers in the way it once did des Coutures, as physics and poetics all at once? In fact, the development of eighteenth-century materialist thought— alongside the movement toward physiology as a privileged source of explanatory rubrics for the ordering of the human subject (what Foucault names ‘‘an intensification of the body’’)65 —coincides broadly with a sharp turn away from an engagement with the long-standing consideration of voluptas as the central and transfiguring effect of Lucretian science. The Lucretian investment in the model of the voluptuous reader—materially imbricated in the process of textual consumption—turns out to be at odds with an ‘‘enlightened’’ focus on materialism, not as practice, but as ontology. As ‘‘matter’’ comes to assume a key place in discourses around human subjectivity, its effects come to appear more determinate (particularly where pleasure is concerned), if not more constraining. Moreover, while literature may remain a site of subjective ‘‘play’’ or autonomy where the experience of readers is concerned, this experience no longer tends to be configured as substantially transformative—or as necessarily active. To read for bodily effect—for pleasure—is to read thoughtlessly, distractedly, and even superstitiously. Late eighteenth-century translations of Lucretius bear witness to this gradual process of divestment whereby both the material nature of the reading body and the potentially material effects of the poetic text become substantially deradicalized. In this context, fascination with Lucretian voluptas in its constitutive and lyric modes can only appear as the index of an unenlightened misreading. It should come as no surprise, then, that by the middle of the eighteenth century it is an ardent critic of Lucretian materialism, the Cardinal Melchior de Polignac (1661–1741), who devotes his magnum opus, the Anti-Lucretius, to a final struggle with De rerum natura as a pleasurably ‘‘binding’’ narrative. Polignac seeks gradually to undo the ties that, pace Dubos, might otherwise function to shackle the voluptuous Epicurean to his pernicious doctrine. By the time Polignac’s monumental response to Lucretius appears in print, however, its assumptions about the power of figure—coupled with scientific explanation—to transform readers’ pleasurable apprehension of the material world appear to miss what for more secularly oriented philosophes becomes the point of both poetic and analytical textual production.66 The Anti-Lucretius thus stands as a symptom of an ongoing transformation. This poem paradoxically marks the onset of a gradual move away from an understanding of the mechanism of voluptas,
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36 Voluptuous Philosophy
ineluctably tied to figura, as a privileged means of rendering bodily matter perceptible to itself.
3. The Anti-Lucretius: Polignac and the pleasure of the text Polignac, like Lucretius in the legend of his untimely end, is said to have been at work on his poem while upon his deathbed: ‘‘He added several lines to it only three days before his death.’’67 Although Bougainville, the translator of the nine books of Latin hexameter that make up the Anti-Lucretius, writes that ‘‘never . . . had any book had such a dazzling reputation in advance of its publication,’’ Polignac would not live to see his massive text published.68 Inspired by the author’s long-standing interest in Cartesian metaphysics as well as by a suspicion of Lucretian materialism at least in part the product of Polignac’s conversations with Pierre Bayle, the Anti-Lucretius had circulated in manuscript form among the cardinal’s numerous friends and connections well before its 1747 publication in Latin. The poem constitutes an attack on Epicurean doctrine as transmitted through Lucretius—and on the centrality of voluptas to this doctrine in particular—buttressed by an energetic defense of Cartesian science. By the time the Anti-Lucretius appeared in print, however, the Cartesianism to which Polignac weds himself in his polemic against Lucretius was falling out of fashion, and the metaphysical ‘‘esprit de syste`me’’ that characterizes his adherence to Cartesian thought was under attack in more enlightened quarters. The very genre in which he had attempted his investigation of materialism—the Latin ‘‘poe`me didactique’’—was, in Dubos’s terms at least, practically a guarantee of unpopularity. In this context, the Anti-Lucretius can be read as the product of an understanding of scientific knowledge—and of the role of verse in the restricted dissemination of this knowledge—that was no longer fully operative by the time of the didactic poem’s publication toward the middle of the century. If the vigor of Polignac’s critique testifies to the extent to which he considered Lucretian science a threat to ethical judgment broadly speaking, the dated quality of the work itself confirms that Polignac’s response to this threat no longer resonated in the highly privileged and hypercultivated circles that he frequented. (The failure of the Anti-Lucretius to capture the spirit of the times as both science and poetry also emphasizes the relative speed with which transformations in the reception of De rerum natura had come about.) As Bougainville puts it, ‘‘What reception can such a work hope for in an age, where the tongue of ancient Rome is little cultivated, where an
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