Winner of the 1996 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize, Catherine
Cusset's No Tomorrow traces the moral meaning of pleasure in
several libertine works of the eighteenth-century--Watteau's
Pelerinage a l'ile de Cythere, Prevost's Manon Lescaut, Crebillon's
Les egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, the anonymous pornographic
novel Therese philosophe, Diderot's La religieuse, and Vivant
Denon's short story "Point de lendemain."
In this ambitious book, Cusset reframes the often misunderstood
genre that celebrates what Casanova calls "the present enjoyment of
the senses." She contends libertine works are not, as is commonly
thought, characterized by the preaching of sexual pleasure but are
instead linked by an "ethics of pleasure" that teaches readers that
vanity and sensual enjoyment are part of their moral being.
Developing Roland Barthes's concept of "the pleasure of the text,"
the author argues that the novel is a powerful vehicle for moral
lessons, more so than philosophical or moral treatises, because it
conveys such lessons through pleasure.
Cusset reads the proliferation of libertine novels as a reaction
against the denial of pleasure in the literature and culture of the
time. In the midst of the century's metaphysical impulse to
simplify human psychology, these works focus on the moments in
which human contradictions are revealed.
Cusset's analysis suggests that libertine novels offered the
eighteenth century a more complex picture of moral being and
ultimately contributed a lesson of tolerance to the
Enlightenment.
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