The Utopian

By Alexander Lee.

“Is it better to be chaste and restrained but moral and sociable, or promiscuous and free but atomised and isolated?”

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Of the myriad impulses which bind humans to one another, desire — and specifically sexual desire—is unique. Unlike love or friendship it touches on our most basic, feral instincts. It draws us to others with an irresistible force, and burns within us like an unquenchable fire from the first moment of sexual awakening to our last breath. It is the one force within us that prevents us from being solitary beings. It, alone of all our affections, demands that we are not alone and compels us with irresistible urgency to seek the most intimate society of others. This social dimension of desire embraces an infinite number of variations. Welling up from the depths of the subconscious almost of its own accord, its forms are limited only by the scope of the human imagination, and its permutations restricted only by the boundaries of experience.

It is perhaps no surprise that sexual desire has been a constant source of fascination for writers, scholars, artists, and musicians since the earliest times. It has provided the axis about which so many dramas have revolved, and has lain at the heart of tragedy and comedy, uniting, dividing, pushing and pulling characters in life and towards death from Aristophanes to Tom Stoppard. The true fascination of desire, however, and the reason for its enduring centrality to western literature has resided not in its dramatic potential, but in its capacity to illustrate the core of human identity. In that sexual desire ties us to others with bonds of such incredible strength, it serves as perhaps the most basic mainspring of the dynamic between the self and society. It mediates between the individual’s perception of himself and his conception of his place in relation to others. The way in which desire is given shape, given rein, or held in check, touches upon the core of self-identity. It is, indeed, no exaggeration to say that it is through desire that we reveal the manner in which we truly see ourselves, and the way in which desire has been understood throughout history is the history of our changing conceptions of ourselves. And until its final, jarring stages, this history is a tale of ambiguity, paradox, individuality, and utopian dreaming.

Origins: from Classical Greece to Early Christian Thought

The paradox of desire, in which the animalistic naturalism of passion is juxtaposed with a sense that humanity is capable of rising to higher things, is first evident in the classical world. In ancient Greece and Rome, society was in many ways dominated by sexual desire, and the literature of the classical period is replete with depictions of sexual longing. In a red-figure kylix, we may see a priapus proudly displaying his engorged manhood, couples—men, women, young girls and boys in every configuration—gently seducing, provocatively flirting, ecstatically joining, sorrowfully parting, or painfully longing. In Aristophanes’ Lysistatra, sexual desire is the dynamic between war and peace, the lever of social relations; in Ovid, the question of sexual pleasure gives the gender-swapping Tiresias his authority before the gods; and in Catullus, the distant yearning for a fickle lover sits alongside crude sexual jibes designed to humiliate and shame enemies. Despite its ubiquity, however, desire was not always viewed as something to which free rein should be given. In both Greek and Roman literature, indeed, desire was often presented as the root of a hero’s undoing. It is Paris’ irresistible desire for Helen that brings Troy to ruin in Homer’s Iliad; it is Medea’s sexual jealousy which leads to the murder of her children and Jason’s new wife in Euripides’ play; and it is Lucius’ charged liaison with the slave-girl Fotis which provides the background to his transformation into an ass in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.

The tragic dimension of desire exposed in Euripides’ Medea and the fateful pairing of voluptas and curiositas in Apuleius’ transformational fable reflects the suspicion with which sexual longing was viewed in classical philosophy. For many ancient philosophers, desire was an expression of the irrational side of man’s nature, and was juxtaposed with the rationality which was essential to the attainment of happiness. Although it was unquestionably a part of human nature, the belief that human existence pointed towards a higher goal, and that the object of life was happiness demanded that desire be kept in check. Despite the immense chasms which divide the various schools of classical philosophy in other respects, all speak with one accord on this question. For the Stoics—especially later Roman Stoics such as Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius—happiness could only come from virtue, and virtue could only be attained by consenting to the good and by withholding consent from the bad. When the soul’s place in the concatenation of creation were taken into consideration, Seneca contended, it was evident that corporeal pleasures were bad. Consequently, in using reason to apprehend its true nature, a correctly withdrew from the allusions of desire and willed temperance in the face of pleasure. Even Epicurus—whose name has today erroneously become associated with wanton abandon—advocated that desire be kept within the bounds of a happy medium. Since happiness consisted primarily in the avoidance of pain, happiness demanded that the potential suffering to which desire exposed a person be limited.

The classical paradox of desire was later transformed by early Christian thinkers. Attempting to transpose elements of classical philosophy to a Christian context, these figures replaced the often abstract idea of ‘happiness’ with the belief that the only true happiness could be enjoyed in the company of God after death, and placed desire in opposition to a rational form of virtue. For Evagrius, for example, the state of ἀπάθεια was a necessary prelude to the attainment of the blessedness of the afterlife, and had as its object a form of peace (ἡσῠχία) in which desires (πάθη) were kept under the sway of reason. In later years, however, this common theme of early Christianity was given its fullest expression by St. Augustine, who dealt with the problem of desire most extensively in his Soliloquies and in the De vera religione. In the Soliloquies, Augustine argued that since ‘truth’ must, by definition, have neither end nor beginning, true happiness (vera felicitas) could not consist in anything that would die, and could exist only in the eternal life to come. Desire, as a consequence, could in no way lead to happiness, since it had as its object mortal things. Augustine, however, went further. In the De vera religione, he explained that the true happiness could be merited only through virtue, and that virtue consisted in recognising the true nature of the soul, and in acknowledging that true happiness could only be enjoyed in the eternal life to come. This was an inherently rational endeavour, since God had endowed man with reason so that he might apprehend the light of truth shining from within his soul. But there was a problem. The exercise of reason could, however, be inhibited by an attachment to corporeal phenomena or the fleeting attractions of transient passions. Consequently, Augustine contended that if a man wished to be happy, he had to use reason to understand the truth of his own soul, and reject desire in the knowledge that the vera felicitas lay in the immortal and the eternal. In his later writings, Augustine came to express this attitude towards desire in terms of the opposition of the love of God and the love of self, or in terms of the distinction between using something for the sake of a higher goal (uti) and enjoying something for its own sake (frui), the latter of which were equated with desire, sin, and damnation.

This understanding of desire can be seen manifested in the lives of many early Christian figures, a large number of whom sought a life of isolation in the desert as a means of avoiding the ever-present attractions of the flesh. Indeed, not content with abject poverty in the world’s most inhospitable environments, some individuals often went to extreme lengths to fight off the temptations of sexual desire. St. Jerome, for example, was tormented by constant visions of naked dancing-girls offering every kind of sexual delight and, desperate to stick to the path of virtue, took to burying his head—quite literally—in the sand so that he might not be tempted. Unbridled sexual desire—understood in opposition to virtue and reason—was there to be resisted; and resistance involved a daily battle against the self for the sake of a higher ideal.

In the ancient world, however, the paradox of desire is not limited to its mere acceptance or negation, but touches also on the manner in which the individual should relate to others outside desire. What is particularly striking about both the classical and early Christian traditions is that sexual desire—pursued for its own sake, without boundaries or limits—is denigrated for the sake of a higher ideal of human existence, but sex per se is not altogether condemned. Rather, for both ancient philosophers and early Christian theologians, sexuality is placed in the context of monogamous relationships for the sake of an ideal form of virtue revealed through reason. In thus setting aside boundless desire enjoyed for its own sake, these schools of thought came to stress a form of virtuous sex which recognised the independence of the other. Effectively, in denying a role for untrammelled sexual desire, the other was given an independent identity of equal value to that of the individual.

Gnosticism: Dualism does Desire.

At the same time as particular strands of classical philosophy were being subsumed into early Christian thought to produce a generally negative view of desire, there emerged a radically parallel tradition of Judeo-Christian thought that was to present sexual passion in a completely different light, but which nevertheless viewed erotic urges as a paradox connected with an overarching ontology, and similarly saw desire as linked to the independent identity of the other.

Known primarily from the papyri of the Nag Hammadi Library and the writings of Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria, Gnostic theology seems to have grown out of a particularly idiosyncratic interpretation of the dualistic tendencies inherent to early Judeo-Christian thought. Unlike their Christian counterparts, the Gnostics believed in a divinity who was an absolute and ideal form of existence without qualities, and who consequently existed as a remote abstraction without having any connection with creation. The universe was instead created by a ‘false’ god or demiurge, often identified with the Judeo-Christian divinity and called Ialdabaoth in some texts. For Gnostics, the demiurge was unaware of the existence of the true divinity, and hence created the world in ignorance. Material creation was hence imperfect, filled with suffering and unhappiness, and in some senses ‘erroneous’ or false.

The ethic which arose from this radical dualism naturally stressed the perfection of the spiritual life, in which all material things were spurned, and the gross inadequacy of anything connected with the physical world. The spirit and the body were hence placed in stark opposition. Unlike the Christian tradition, the dualism of Gnosticism appears to have divided humanity into three groups. The ‘elect’ or ‘illuminated’—those who were destined to ‘salvation’—eschewed the most basic foodstuffs and completely abstained from all sexual practices in their pursuit of gnosis, or mystical knowledge of the true God. The ‘psychics’—those who were capable of salvation—could follow a moderate form of asceticism. And the overwhelming majority of others resigned themselves to their physical urges.

Although it is not altogether clear how this view of humanity translated into moral practices, it is apparent from the available sources that Gnostics tended to embrace one of two paths. While there were many who perceived themselves to be ‘elect’ and consequently lived lives of rigorous, even suicidal, self-denial, there were also many others who gave themselves over to their bodies in the hope that satiety would mitigate their urges and allow the opportunity for the later revelation of gnosis. Desire seems to have been an intrinsic part of this libertine existence, and numerous texts speak of Bacchanalian orgies of sexual passions run wild. Irenaeus, for example, reported that one particular sect were “immoderately given over to the desires of the flesh” and railed violently against the Gnostic practice of common, ‘fraternal’ cohabitation. While Irenaeus’ vitriolic invective is not to be given complete credence in all its details, his attack on the ‘cult of desire’ accurately reveals that the Gnostic paradox of desire followed the Christian tradition in according an independent identity to the other, albeit in a very different fashion. All members of a Gnostic cult were indeed ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’—that is to say, equal—because of their shared imprisonment in the ‘evil’ of their physical bodies. Indulging desire in common thus became a way for each individual both to recognise their shared material condition, and to reach (or more appropriately, grope) hopefully towards gnosis.

Despite its peculiarities, or perhaps because of them, Gnostic theology underscores helps to underscore a tendency inherent to those traditions which emerged out of classical philosophy towards viewing the paradox of desire as the predicate of a genuine sociability. Curiously enough, it was precisely because Gnosticism—like Judeo-Christian theology—viewed sexual desire as ‘bad’ that its believers were able to recognise the independent identity of the other and were hence able to transform it into the fulcrum around which a society of equal individuals could be shaped.

The Medieval Transformation of Desire: a Second Paradox

During the Middle Ages, desire continued to be a continual source of fascination and spiritual tension, and was every bit as ubiquitous a part of everyday life as it ever was. It is, for instance, telling that the forerunner of medieval scholasticism, Peter Abelard (1079-1142), is perhaps best known today for his ill-fated love for his pupil, Héloïse, and for the desire which cost him dear. From around the eleventh century, however, the question of desire increasingly became subsumed within the theme of courtly love (amour courtois,or cortez amors in Provençal), and the early Christian tradition came to be adapted to a new configuration of the old paradox between erotic desire and a spiritual ideal.

In both the art and the literature of the medieval period, desire is once again placed in opposition to virtue, and the theological importance attached to the virtuous life is still strongly evident. In the elusive tapestries of La Dame à la Licorne, produced for Jean Le Viste c.1484-c.1500, for example, the familiar contrast between desire and virtue appears cloaked in allegorical and heraldic imagery. In the sixth and most important piece in the series, the Lady renounces her jewels in front of a richly decorated tent which is emblazoned with the motto “A mon seul désir”, and the flaps of which are held open by the unicorn and the lion who have attended her throughout. Coming after five tapestries depicting the senses, this final scene represents the liberum arbitrium (the free choice of the will) which leads to right action unless hindered by the passions. In renouncing her jewels, the Lady signals her abandonment of worldly desires and her devotion to her ‘sole desire’ (i.e. virtue), while she is attended by the traditional symbols of fortitude (the lion) and Christ-like purity (the unicorn).

But in much of the art and literature of the central and high Middle Ages, the dynamic tension between desire and virtue is expressed in a more deliberately dramatic fashion that reflects the aspirations of courtly culture and, as some scholars have noted, the often harsh realities of medieval feudalism.

From Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot du Lac (1177) to Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c.1469/70), courtly romances revolved around the idea of sexual desire, even if they did not necessarily result in the physical consummation of that passion, and it is striking that the paradox of desire is often made more intense by being cast in terms of an honourable knight’s adulterous affection for a lady of higher station. While the genre was, of course, marked by tremendous variation, courtly romances in lyric and prose tended to follow the same basic pattern, and this pattern highlights the dynamic role played by desire. First, the knight was attracted to a distant, aloof woman by a chance encounter, usually involving a glance, and immediately fell so passionately in love with her that his devotion quickly resembled worship. Second, in thrall to her physical beauties, her purity and her virtue, the knight confessed his passion, only to be rejected by the lady. Rebuffed, the knight redoubled his entreaties, accompanied by a selection of vows, and was tormented by the pains of his unsatisfied desire. Finally, the knight wins his lady love through some great act of heroism, and the desire—now burning brightly in both hearts—is consummated in secret, before further interminable adventures ensue.

Despite popular perceptions of the Middle Ages, the paradigmatic form of the courtly romance went well beyond the archetypal Christian conception of the passions, and presents desire as being doubly paradoxical. On the one hand, the familiar antithesis of desire and virtue is clearly present: the knight’s desire for the lady is contrasted vividly with her virtuous rejection of his advances. On the other hand, however, while the lady assents to, and even reciprocates, her admirer’s desire when the knight demonstrates his virtue through heroic deeds, their shared desire can be enjoyed only in secrecy: the public expression of desire is thus contrasted with the private enjoyment of passion, the former being reprehensible, the latter almost admirable.

The effect of this double paradox is intriguing, and the addition of the second layer serves further to emphasise the independent identity of the knight’s passion. First, true to early Christian form, the rejection of the knight’s early expressions of his desire transforms the lady from a distant object into an independent actor. By the same token, the rejection of the knight’s passion also moves him to show his true qualities through heroic action, and it is this revelation which endears him to the lady. Second, the secrecy in which the consummation is shrouded allows both knight and lady to reveal their true, private selves to each other: it is only in secrecy that the lady—usually a castellan with a distinct public persona—is able to give rein to her desire, and to meet the knight as an equal. In public, a medieval figure of authority, such as the lady, was debarred from demonstrating partiality by the obligations of justice, and was thus, in a sense, obliged to clothe herself with an impersonal character; in private, the illicit desire allows lady to uncover her true personality. It is, in other words, precisely because the desire is illicit that the lady’s true nature emerges.

Thus, although the courtly romance translated the concept into a different—more dramatic and titillating—form, the negative connotations attached to desire that lend it its paradoxical status confer upon the object of passion an independent identity that serves as the basis for a society of equals. The willingness to negate desire, or to see it as in some ways ‘bad’ because of a belief in a higher ideal for humanity, draws the passionate individual to another of comparable individuality.

The Renaissance: The Icy Fire and the Discovery of the Individual

It would perhaps not be unjust to describe the Renaissance as the great age of desire. An era filled with figures such as Lucrezia Borgia and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, works of art populated by sensuous women and heroically handsome men, and literature pulsing with salacious tales of sex and seduction, it has a good claim to having been the handmaiden of modern erotic desire.

Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1350), for example, is positively filled with x-rated thrills, and story after story explores the titillating excitement of desire run wild. In one tale, Masetto of Lamproecchio pretends to be dumb so that he can work as a gardener at a convent, only for his rippling muscles to induce each of the nuns to take him off to bed in turn. In another, Alibech, a beautiful and pious young girl, becomes a recluse under the tutelage of the monk, Rustico, who almost immediately finds himself unable to restrain his desire for his young, but charmingly innocent, charge. Eventually, when his erect member arouses the girl’s curiosity, he persuades her that it is her duty to help him put the “devil” which so persistently raises its head back into the “hell” which she keeps between her legs, and thus convinces the simple girl to satisfy his erotic urges. And in another still, Fra Alberto convinces a Venetian lady that the Angel Gabriel is in love and, adorning himself with wings and a halo, regularly visits her bedroom until he is surprised by her family and, after jumping into the canal, is brought to book in the piazza S. Marco.

But while the Decameron illustrates the ubiquity of and appetite for sexual passion in Renaissance Italy, it also speaks to the continuity of classical, Christian, and courtly conceptions of desire in the literature of the period. At the same time as Masetto, Rustico, and Fra Alberto give themselves over to erotic abandon, Boccaccio also uses other tales to exemplify the paradoxes of desire. In the final story of the collection, for example, the Marquis of Saluzzo prioritises his desires over his dynastic interests and takes a peasant girl for his wife. After she has borne him two children, however, he seeks to test both himself and his wife through a particularly cruel trial, and abruptly turns her out of doors, while pretending to have taken another wife. On finding that she bears her apparent misfortune with solicitude and remains firm in her attachment to her husband, the Marquis is filled with tremendous love, and gives her the respect and honours which she has always deserved. Although the Marquis’s desire initially has only itself and his wife’s physical beauty as its object, his (extremely harsh) negation of desire reveals her true qualities to him, and his passion is transformed into a love which elevates her to the status of an equal. Similarly, evoking the tradition of the courtly romance in another story, Boccaccio describes how Federigo degli Alberighi squanders his entire fortune in pursuing his desire for a lady who does not return his passion, and is left with nothing more than his precious falcon. Years later, the lady comes to visit him in his isolated hut, and finding his larder empty, Federigo kills his beloved falcon so that the lady may have something to eat. Seeing his true qualities, the lady immediately falls for him. Although his tale is told in an idiosyncratic fashion, it is the rejection of Federigo’s desire that allows him to reveal his true qualities to the lady who had spurned him, and in reaching out to him, the lady also shows her true self.

Indeed, the reworking of earlier traditions of the paradox of desire in Renaissance literature is perhaps the key to understanding what has been termed the ‘discovery of the individual’ in the poetry of the period. Although Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova certainly merits attention in this regard, it is Francesco Petrarca’s Canzoniere which illustrates this most clearly.

From the moment he first saw her in the church of St. Clare in Avignon on 6^th April 1327, Petrarch burned with desire for a mysterious girl called Laura. But although his desire was all-consuming, he was tormented by two painful realities.

On the one hand, Laura remained oblivious to his passion. While he burned with the fire of desire, she was as impassive as ice. The torment was excruciating, and he wilfully, self-pityingly indulged his suffering. Wandering through the Provencal countryside, he was plagued by images of Laura at every turn: everywhere he looked, he saw her image, “in the clear water and on the green grass and in the trunk of a beech tree and in a white cloud.” Even the breeze itself seemed to carry the sweet sound of her voice, and as it brushed his face, he recalled that the air had perhaps once touched the softness of Laura’s skin. So long as she remained distant and unknown, it was sweet torture.

On the other hand, Petrarch was highly conscious of the immorality of his desire. Weaving Augustinian themes into his poetry, Petrarch contrasted the true happiness of the life to come with the lustful pleasures he pursued so ardently. Time and time again, he tried to free himself from the bonds of his passion, but time after time, he failed, and slipped back into his longing.

While Petrarch made Laura’s physical beauty the subject of numerous verses, it was her rejection of his passion and his consciousness of the sinfulness of his desire that gave her an independent identity in the Canzoniere. Her unattainability—an echo of the courtly romance which Petrarch knew through Provencal troubadours—brought her independent will into sharp relief, and the immorality of Petrarch’s erotic urges—an evocation of his Christian heritage—allowed him to see her more as an actor in the drama of his conscience than as a remote and objective ideal. Moreover, the operation of this double paradox, which was itself derived from a consciousness of Laura’s independent identity, compelled Petrarch to delve deep into himself, and to question the essence of his spiritual identity: torn between desire, rejection, and the aspiration to virtue, Petrarch was moved to explore the recesses of his own psyche and set foot on the path to creating his own individual identity both as lover and as poet.

But just as Petrarch’s desire threatened to destroy him, and challenged his very selfhood, Laura succumbed to the plague which swept Europe in 1348. Her death devastated Petrarch and for some time, his grief only intensified his sense of unrequited passion and images of the dead Laura continued to haunt him with unremitting regularity. After some time had passed, however, Laura was gradually transformed in Petrarch’s imagination from a Medusa-like apparition of sinful desire into a figure of spiritual transformation not unlike Dante’s Beatrice. In death, with the flesh long behind her, Laura became a spiritual guide, and although Petrarch’s attachment to the world was far from broken, her ethereal presence contrived to aid his passage towards virtue. In keeping with the Christian tradition of desire, the ‘ghost’ of Laura came to be as ‘real’ as the living woman, perhaps even more so. Whereas in life, her attractions allowed Petrarch to focus on her will, and forced him to concentrate on her as an independent agent of tantalising temptation, in death, her capacity to act as a counsellor of virtue endowed her with a personality of equal or greater strength and depth to Petrarch’s own. Similarly, the tentative steps which Petrarch had taken on the road to discovering his own individual identity while Laura was alive were now more rapid and confident: with the deceased Laura as his guide, he drove further into the exploration of his psyche, and succeeded in bringing to light the essence of his own spiritual quest in magnificent form in the Secretum (or, more fully, The Secret Conflict of My Cares) and in the long, meditative verses with which the Canzoniere concludes. The death of Laura not only reified her own independence, but also completed Petrarch’s discovery of his individuality as a poet.

What has been termed the ‘Petrarchan manner’ rapidly became a mainstay of European literature, and came to characterise much Renaissance poetry in the centuries which followed. The use of unrequited, but sinful desire to confer identity on the object of the lover’s passion, and on the poet himself became a hallmark of Italian, French, Spanish, and English verse, and it proved to be a source of colossal inspiration to figures such as Serafino Ciminelli dall’Aquila, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. But while Petrarch’s role in the history of desire in Western literature and thought is certainly considerable, his importance goes beyond the direct influence which he exerted on love poetry; in his verse, it is possible to see not only the blending of different traditions and the invention of numerous tropes rich in literary potential, but the solidification of the paradoxes of desire as a central feature of the search for individual identity. From Petrarch onwards, the negation of desire, through rejection, acts of conscience, or death, not only comes to confer identity on the object of the lover’s passion, but also comes to become a key element in the author’s quest for his own identity.

Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Beginnings of Modernity

Although adapted to changed social conditions and gradually shifting cultural tastes, many of the salient features of the Renaissance synthesis of the classical, Christian, and courtly paradoxes of desire can be detected in the literature and thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Transferred to the elegant drawing rooms of the ancien regime, the provincial households of the Restoration, and the salons of the Second Empire, the ‘forbidden’ nature of desire continues to provide the catalyst for literary protagonists to discover their own ‘true’ identities, and for the objects of desire to acquire their own identity.

Elements can be found scattered throughout a large number of works in complete form—from Balzac’s Les Illusions Perdues and Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights—but Laclos’ epistolary novel Les Liasons dangereuses (1782) provides an excellent opportunity to see all of the components developed in a single, magnificently emotive drama. The central protagonist, the Vicomte de Valmont is, from the beginning, a creature of desire and his activities are circumscribed by his erotic passion to such an extent that he seems to be defined by them. His seduction of the married Madame de Tourvel, his corruption of Cécile de Volanges, and his expectation of sexual satisfaction from the scheming Marquise de Merteuil are all a product of his unbridled, unquenchable lust. But at the last moment, when he is confronted with the vicious deception of the two-faced Merteuil, and the Madame de Tourvel has been put beyond his grasp by Cécile’s outraged mother, he realises that the virtuous, married woman whom he had previously desired only for her body is endowed with a character which strikes an unfamiliar chord with a better part of himself of which he was scarcely aware. Losing everything to the furnace of desire, and sensing the inferiority of his passions to the love which he now feels, Valmont not only sees the full, autonomous identity of the Madame de Tourvel, but also realises that his true self, the self which seeks happiness, is at odds with his earlier behaviour. And at the moment of his death in the ill-fated duel with the musical Chevalier Danceny, the virtuous character of the Madame de Tourvel, which overshadows the entire scene from a distance, seems to usher in his spiritual transfiguration and, in a sense, his salvation. Although it is the conflicted protagonist, and not the object of his desire, who meets death, it is not difficult to observe the parallels between Laclos’ magisterial treatment of Valmont’s passion and Petrarch’s own exploration of the paradoxes of desire: the sinfulness of the erotic urge, the unattainability of the beloved, the sense of transformation through denial, and the ultimate redemption in death are all present.

To some extent, some of the same notions can be found reflected in the systematic moral philosophy of the time, and it is not difficult to find illustrative examples. Written a little more than twenty years before Laclos’ novel, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is in many senses framed around the negation of the passions in favour of the recognition of the other’s independent identity as the predicate of moral action. So too, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant formulated his understanding of the categorical imperative in such a way that it, too, placed emphasis on the autonomy of the individual, on the assumption of the equal status of the agent and the person affected by an action, and on the opposition of reason and desires. An action, Kant argued, could only be moral if the agent could will that the maxim which underpinned it would become a universal law. Similarly, a moral individual should act such that he approached humanity “as an end, never merely as a means.” Further, an action could only be moral if the agent had laid down a law for himself, that is to say, if the will—which is the causality of action—is free; and a free person is one whose will is not influenced by an external agency, including his desires. Thus, seen from one perspective, the pursuit of mere sexual desire is almost the antithesis of moral action for Kant. Not merely would the satisfaction of that desire make the object of the passions a means to an end, but in allowing his will to be moved by an impulse external to his reason, the agent would compromise his freedom and autonomy.

But at the same time as earlier traditions of desire found new expression in the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a completely new and entirely different approach to the topic began to emerge. As the spirit of the Enlightenment took hold of France, in particular, there arose not merely an intellectual impulse towards reason and the rights of man, but also a growing inclination towards the unrestrained indulgence of desire in both literature and thought. Even in its earliest phases, this trend—which one could reasonably argue to have constituted the first stirrings of true pornography—not only had as its sole point of reference the satisfaction of the agent’s erotic urges, but also strove at every turn to minimise, if not entirely to obviate the autonomous identity of the person who was desired, and, as Simone de Beauvoir argued, may have in part been given impetus by a radical interpretation of Enlightenment notions of freedom.

It need hardly be said that the most famous—indeed, notorious—example of this new attitude towards desire was the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). In his numerous erotic novels and plays, and most notably in the 120 Days of Sodom, he explored the life of sexual passion and perversion in more vivid terms than ever before. As the word ‘sadism’ itself suggests, he placed particular accent not just on the satisfaction of sexual desires, but also on humiliation, degradation, and punishment. Although he seems to have assumed that the figures with whom his characters copulated were at least capable of forming their own will, and were thus potentially autonomous agents, the essence of his eroticism lay in the subversion of that autonomy, often by violent and painful means. In contrast both to earlier paradoxes of desire and contemporary explorations of traditional themes, de Sade erected a notion of individual identity through the systematic sexual destruction of another’s independent will, and through the use of desire to affirm oneself. There was no higher goal than this and de Sade’s work is particularly notable for its implicit (and sometimes explicit) sense that the freedom he was describing was a freedom from the moral strictures of Christianity: the enactment of every imaginative fantasy was an expression of free will, and free will was the necessary predicate of individual identity, even if it came at the price of another’s character. Although they were bitter personal enemies, de Sade’s coeval, Nicolas-Edme Rétif (1734–1806), who has lent his name to a descriptive term for shoe fetishism (retifisme), shared a similar fascination with the assertion of independent identity and free will through the sexual subjection of others.

What is particularly intriguing about the eroticism described by de Sade and Rétif is that it seems to edge towards a new paradox of desire. For both men, desire undoubtedly represented a natural, human need, and there is little sense in the works of either figure that it was, at some level, the force which drew us most strongly to seek the society of others. Yet ironically, in erecting a model of freedom through unrestrained sexual desire, de Sade and Rétif each advocated the erosion of the other’s independence, and thus the freedom they espouse, though free from cast-iron moral strictures, actually negates the possibility of a society of equals.

The recognition that desire could be linked to human freedom was also a matter of particular interest to several philosophers of the period, and it is striking that the question of autonomy and equality seems to have led to new visions of society. Although one can detect an early trace of a new, and more indulgent attitude towards desire in A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis by Gabriel de Foigny (c.1640–c.92), the subject is more interestingly explored in the utopian thought of Charles Fourier (1772–1837). A deeply solitary and morose man, Fourier developed a vision of a perfect society of erotic liberty and playful work. On the basis of his belief that there were 810 types of personality, he concluded that human society could be best ordered where people were gathered into communes of 1620 individuals. In each commune, life is ordered according to a rational response to the different personality types, and work was to be an erotic game which respects both the natural predispositions of each individual, and the desires towards which each person is drawn. In large-scale industrial projects, for example, an ‘army’ of ‘industrial athletes’ will be assembled, one third of which will be composed of women called ‘Damsels’, who will inspire men to work by choosing lovers from their number. For those men who were not fortunate enough to be chosen, a further group of sexually avaricious women, called ‘Bacchantes’, would provide for their needs. The combination of organised eroticism and labour was, it seems, intended to remove all disharmony and lead to a state of peaceful happiness.

Although it adopts a very different approach, Fourier’s thought shares many points of commonality with that of de Sade and Rétif. Like his sexually-obsessed contemporaries, Fourier’s utopian vision rested on the belief that desire is a natural impulse which must be satisfied if people are to be free, equal, and happy, and that attempts to suppress the passions, under the influence of ‘civilised’ Christianity, led only to crime, oppression, and psychological disaster. The freedom and contentment of an individual could, in other words, be understood in terms of indulging ‘natural’ erotic urges precisely because they were an innate part of a person’s identity. Although his analysis of personality types indicates that (unlike de Sade and Rétif) he was at least partly concerned to ensure that an individual could satisfy his desires with a ‘psychologically’ appropriate partner, the manner in which Fourier presented his utopian vision of desires set free nevertheless has the individual’s erotic urges as its sole point of reference. The passions and the psychological condition of the agent are the only things which are of concern, and it is clear that by indulging his sexual desires, one of Fourier’s utopian actors could affirm his own identity and actualise his will freely. While the object of an agent’s desires is presumably compatible with his passions, there is no sense that the agent needs to acknowledge the other as an autonomous individual of equal status. For Fourier, as for de Sade and Rétif, the other is a means, not an end, and is almost wilfully objectified in the name of freedom and ‘natural’ inclinations. Fourier’s ideal society was thus a collection of self-regarding individuals, so far as desire was concerned, and was not an association of individuals whose equality rests upon the mutual acknowledgement of the other’s autonomous identity.

For Part II, on the Atomised Desire of the Moderns, click here.