JANA

In everyday language, the term ‘hedonism’ denotes an amoral tendency to a life of sensuality, if not of outright vice. This is inaccurate, of course: Epicurus, the first great theoretician of pleasure, had a highly skeptical understanding of the happy life: pleasure is the absence of suffering. Suffering, then, is the fundamental notion of hedonism: one is happy to the degree that one can avoid suffering, and since pleasures often bring more unhappiness than happiness, Epicurus recommends only such pleasures as are prudent and modest. Epicurean wisdom has a melancholy backdrop: flung into the world’s misery, man sees that the only clear and reliable value is the pleasure, however paltry, that he can feel for himself: a gulp of cool water, a look at the sky (at God’s windows), a caress.

Modest or not, pleasures belong only to the person who experiences them, and a philosopher could justifiably criticize hedonism for its grounding in the self. Yet, as I see it, the Achilles’ heel of hedonism is not that it is self-centered but that it is (ah, would that I were mistaken!) hopelessly utopian: in fact, I doubt that the hedonist ideal could ever be achieved; I’m afraid that sort of life it advocates for us many not be compatible with human nature.

The art of eighteenth century drew pleasures our from the fog of moral prohibitions; it brought about the frame of mind we call ‘libertine’, which beams from the paintings of Fragonard and Watteau, from the pages of De Sade, Crebillon the younger or Charles Duclos. It is why my young friend Vincent adores that century and why, if he could, he would wear the Marquis de Sade’s profile as a badge on his lapel. I share his admiration, but I add (without being really heard) that the true greatness of that art consist not in some propaganda or other for hedonism but in its analysis. That is the reason I consider Les Liaisons dagereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos, to be one of the greatest novels of all time.

Its characters are concerned only with the conquest of pleasure. None the less, little by little the reader comes to see that it is less the pleasure than the conquest that attracts them. That it is not the desire for pleasure but the desire for victory that is calling the tune. That was first appears to be merely obscene games shifts imperceptibly and ineluctably into a life-and-death struggle. But what does struggle have to do with hedonism? Epicurus wrote: “the wise man seeks no activity related to struggle”.

The epistolary form of Les Liaisons dagereuses is not merely a technical procedure that could easily be replaced by another. This form is eloquent in itself, and it tells us whatever the characters have undergone they have undergone for the sake of telling about it, for transmitting, communicating, confessing, writing it. In such a world, where everything gets told, the weapon that is both most readily available and most deadly is disclosure. Valmont, the novel’s hero, sends the woman he has seduced a farewell letter that will destroy her; and it is his lady friend, the Marquise de Merteuil, who dictated it to him, word for word. Later, out of vengeance, the Merteuil woman shows a confidential letter of Valmont’s to his rival; the latter challenges him to a duel, and Valmont dies. After his death, the intimate correspondence between him and Merteuil will be disclosed, and the Marquise will end her days scorned, hounded, and banished.

Nothing in this novel strays a secret exclusive to two persons; everyone seems to live inside an enormous resonating seashell where every whispered word reverberates, swells, into multiple and unending echoes. When I was small, people would tell me that if I set a shell against my ear I would hear the immemorial murmur of the sea. In the same way, every word pronounced in the Laclosian world goes on being heard forever. Is that what it is, the eighteenth century? Is that the famous paradise of pleasure? Or has mankind always lived inside such a resonating shell, without realizing it? Whatever the case, a resonating seashell – that’s not the world of Epicurus, who commanded his disciples: “you shall live hidden”

(via deathsvoice)

(Source: themindgame, via maxexposure)