SOURCE: “The Political Economy of the Body in the Liaisons dangereuses of Choderlos de Laclos” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, edited by Lynn Hunt, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 41-62.

[In the following essay, Deneys explores the tenets of libertinism as expressed in Les Liaisons dangereuses,arguing that an exchange system operates at the linguistic, economic, and ethical level.]

Why speak of “economy” in the Liaisons dangereuses? Because in this novel interpersonal relationships are organized like a system of exchange: letters, promises, libertine accounts, agreements, and challenges are exchanged; also women.¹ As I shall attempt to show, every one of these exchanges assumes above all that women are exchanged, that women circulate among a number of men.

Among libertines, women, goods, and words (in letters) are exchanged, which Lévi-Strauss has shown to have been the general rule of the basic structure of human societies even before they engaged in material production or in political discourse. Does this tell us that, by its system of exchange, the elitist and refined society of the Liaisons subconsciously attempts to constitute a vast family clan, where women tend to be the common property of the masters and where a strict division of functions governs the respective functions of men and of women?

Libertinism in the Liaisons controls all forms of exchange, from its most primitive forms—barter, potlatch, the exchange of goods in trade, services, or women—to its highly sophisticated and, in a way, abstract forms: those that concern signs of value and of “conquests” and that no longer aim at any kind of exchange, even epistolary exchange. I shall thus try to describe the libertinism of Les Liaisons dangereuses as a system of exchange defined at three levels: economic, ethical, and linguistic.²

A number of ideas about libertinism are often repeated and presented as self-evident truths, and they are certainly not without their share of validity. The first is that eighteenth-century French libertinism can only be thought of sociologically, as a symptom of the historical decline of a class or “order” (the aristocracy) that was to play its last influential role on the stage of the erotic.³ The second commonly accepted idea is that libertinism more than anything else constitutes a quest—a sometimes frustrated, but nevertheless positive, search for pleasure.⁴ The third idea—even more attractive than the previous two for those who exalt transgression in contemporary culture—is that libertinism is the perfect model of transgression (be it moral or immoral) of existing sexual law, because it benefits from the uses and abuses of liberty or of license.⁵ In analyzing Les Liaisons under the aegis of the supreme law of exchange, I hope to show that libertinism can, on the contrary, be interpreted, not in the preceding ways, but rather as a structure that reinforces law at every level on which law prevails, as economic law, as ethical law, and as the law of the signifier.

LIBERTINISM AS ECONOMIC SYSTEM, OR, THE RULES OF THE EXCHANGE OF WOMEN

First I want to show how libertinism, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, by establishing an administrative system that regulates relationships between men and women, is organized along the lines of a market economy. Woman is defined from the outset as capital. The novel begins with a letter from Cécile Volanges about her upcoming marriage, which the marquise de Merteuil discusses in her following letters in terms of a financial transaction, referring, for example, to “an income of sixty thousand livres” (letter 2, p. 14). Other economic metaphors may be found throughout the novel. For example, when the marquise proposes the famous pact with Valmont under which she must give herself to him once again in exchange for written proof that he has incontrovertibly “had” the Présidente de Tourvel, the supposedly courtly and heroic vocabulary (speaking of “noble knights who would come and place the dazzling fruits of victory at the feet of their lady”) is finally transformed into a mercantile metaphor: “It is up to you to see whether I have set too high a price, but I warn you that there can be no bargaining” (20, p. 44). It is also a financial transaction. The “fifty-six livre and twenty-six louis” entrusted to his servant Azolan allow Valmont to win the Présidente de Tourvel. As he says, “having essentially paid for her in advance, I had the right to make use of her at my will” (21, p. 47).

By use of words such as price and paid, the woman in the libertine discourse is always put in the position of something bought—that is, in the position of merchandise that can be bought, traded, or even destroyed, as in the case of potlatch, but, in any case, always in the position of that which circulates. I shall take the story of the “three inseparables” told by Valmont to the marquise de Merteuil (letter 79) as an example of this circulation of the woman within a system put in place and set in motion by men. To summarize, Prévan, an infamous lady-killer, introduces himself into the company of three women and seduces them one by one, in each case without the knowledge of the other two. The night of his victory is described thus: “The night was granted by the one whose husband was absent; and daybreak, the moment of this third spouse's departure, was appointed by her during the morning twilight” (79, p. 162). Libertine sexuality operates on the model of division of labor and of repetition, as in assembly-line production. In the second part of the story, the disgraced lovers challenge Prévan to a duel, but during the meal that precedes the duel an odd reversal takes place: “The breakfast was not even finished before they started repeating again and again that such women were not worth fighting over,” and the duel is transformed into merrymaking, “This idea brought cordiality along with it; it was further fortified by wine to the point where it was no longer enough to dispense with ill-will: they swore an unreserved friendship” (79, p. 163). The third part of the story tells of the vengeance taken upon the women: Prévan secretly summons each of the women to his “little house” on the pretext of a romantic dinner (p. 164). Eventually an orgy reconciles the three women, the three men, and Prévan. The story is finally made public, and the three women go into seclusion in a convent—their destiny therefore prefiguring that of Cécile and the Présidente de Trouvel.

This story allows us to lay bare the structure of the erotic system in Les Liaisons dangereuses as a system of exchange and to specify the respective place occupied by men and women within this system with great precision. The system can be formalized according to the following schema: (1) a seducer steals away the woman of another, (2) he uses her up, (3) he returns her. This movement is not circular; it does not involve a simple return to the point of departure. Moreover, as I shall show, this circulation of women yields a “profit.”

This very simple schema is taken up again in the story of the vicomtesse. The vicomtesse circulates among three men (her husband, Vressac, Valmont), and the outcome replays the scenario of the masculine pact as in the story of the “three inseparables.” In this story, one sees Valmont return the vicomtesse to her titular lover, Vressac: “The two lovers kissed, and I, in turn, was kissed by both of them. I was no longer interested in the kisses of the vicomtesse, but I must admit that those of Vressac were quite pleasurable” (71, p. 143). Once the woman is obtained, she is put back in circulation, and in each scenario, the exchange and circulation of women leads to the establishment of sociability among men, with all of the symbolic attributes of celebration (wine, high spirits, embraces, and so forth).

It is at this moment that the near-total lack of epistolary relationships between men finds all its meaning. There is no private relationship between Valmont and the other men in the novel exactly because the relationship between men unfolds in public and because that relationship requires women to be put into a common pool of circulation in order to manifest itself. In the relationships between men and women, there is therefore a primacy of the masculine contract. The exercise of virility among men in fact allows a rewriting of the social contract in an erotic mode.⁶ This raises the problem of the social status of women treated as mere objects of transaction. This in fact holds masculine society together. It is for this reason that there is such a contrast within the novel between the plurality and diversity of women (Merteuil, Cécile, Emilie, the vicomtesse, Mme de Rosemonde, Mme de Volanges, Tourvel), which stands for the indefinite series of seduceable women, and the singular figure of Valmont, with his double Prévan and his inferior Danceny. The primacy of masculine sociability over erotic relationships with women is inscribed within the structure of every relationship, since rivalry between men always ends with a pact of friendship. Thus Valmont and Danceny finally reconcile before Valmont dies (163, p. 364). It is perhaps of this polarity between exchangers that Marx speaks in an enigmatic sentence quoted by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in The Anti-Oedipus: “The relation of man and woman is the immediate, natural, and necessary relation between man and man; that is, the relation between the two sexes (of man with woman) is only the measure of the sexual relation in general.”⁷ This statement can be interpreted as either ethnological or ethical: (1) either Marx is declaring, by means of a paradox, that sexuality is a system of exchange within which woman necessarily occupies the position of merchandise, or of the token of exchange in general, in a society thus constituted as an ethnological system, (2) or he is saying that, in an ethical rather than ethnological system, woman is included in the universal category of “man.”

Marx defines merchandise in the first chapters of the first book of Capital with reference to a general theory of value.⁸ According to Marx, each piece of merchandise, each good, is endowed with a double value within any economy: use value and exchange value. These two aspects of value are complementary rather than contradictory.⁹ For example, fruits are purchased because they can either be used (eaten) or exchanged or sold. But the revolutionary aspect of capitalist society, as Marx says, lies precisely in its emancipation of exchange value from use value. Marx speaks of the “mystery of the genesis of exchange value” in its ever-greater divergence from use and consumption.

This liberation of exchange value from use value that is characteristic of the capitalist economy allows us to account for a particularly troubling recurrent detail in the “erotic” scenes of Les Liaisons—namely, the disappearance, within the story, of the moment of “consumption,” the erotic act itself. For example, in the episode of the vicomtesse, told by Valmont to the marquise in letter 71, the entire story is devoted to the “circumstances” of the night, “[t]he circumstances [which] were not favorable” (p. 140). He speaks only of the elaboration of the plan against Vressac and the husband, then proceeds to describe the setting and the movements of the various characters between the bedrooms and the hallway. And the long-awaited erotic scene is excised by Valmont himself: “Since I am not vain, I will not dwell on the details of the night, but you know me, and I was satisfied with my performance” (p. 142). Whereas at the beginning of his letter Valmont announces that the affair with the vicomtesse “interested me in its details” (p. 140), one must conclude from it that in the libertine tale certain “details” are worth more than others, or rather, that the erotic act amounts to a mise-en-scène or to a place, in which, as Mallarmé puts it, in an image that laconically condenses temporality and phantasm into place, “nothing will have taken place but the place.”

Even though it is never described, the erotic act nevertheless “inhabits” the text through the obscure presence of a metaphor. The scene is always sexualized indirectly, but even so insistently, since it is constant and persistent: as a formal mark, as a transformation of the story, as a brutal appearance (significant therefore by its very brutality) of direct discourse. Whereas free indirect discourse is the usual narrative form in Les Liaisons dangereuses, the change to direct discourse always points out an entry into “the other scene,” that of desire and sex, of which it in some ways constitutes a metonymy. For example, in the Belleroche tale, a rakish episode the marquise de Merteuil offers to Valmont as a model, the only moment in the whole story that is told through direct discourse announces and prepares a move to the act that it at the same time excises. “There, half by design and half sentimentally, I embraced him and fell to my knees. ‘O my friend, I said, I reproach myself for having troubled you with my pretence of ill-humor, which came only from a wish to keep the surprise of this moment from you; I regret that I was able, even for a mere moment, to hide the true feelings of my heart from you. Please forgive my wrongs: I will expiate them with the strength of my love.’ You may guess the effect of this sentimental pronouncement. The happy Chevalier lifted me from the floor and my pardon was ratified on the very ottoman where once you and I so joyfully sealed our eternal rupture” (10, p. 31). The erotic act is therefore dissolved in this double reference to the furniture in the scene and to Valmont; it is reduced, so to speak, to the discursive act itself. This centrality of language within the erotic act is symbolized in other places within the novel by the “catechism of debauchery” that Valmont inculcates upon Cécile “to speed up her education” (110, p. 255).

The woman is not seduced to be consumed but rather to be exchanged. This domination of exchange over consumption allows us to account for another striking feature in the novel—namely, the total disappearance of bodies in the course of the erotic scenes. In no episode—except for that of the Présidente—is the woman's body described at the moment of the act, because the woman's body exists only as an abstract exchange value.¹⁰

The incessant movement of libertine desire, which reproduces the incessant circulation of capital, is not the result of purchase for purposes of consumption but is instead for exchange. As described in Jean François Lyotard's discussion of capital in L’Economie libidinale,¹¹ libertine desire privileges circulation over merchandise, prefers movement to product; the product in both is only a means for further production. The establishment of the pact of exchange—the contract for the barter of Tourvel for Mertueil—expresses the essence of libertine desire: “Once you have had your beautiful devotee and you can give me proof of it, come to me and I am yours” (20, p. 43). It is a migratory, nomadic desire, which lays siege to entire groups by moving from individual to individual, which always desires the rarest thing on the market, therefore preferring the virtuous Tourvel to the youthful Cécile.¹² This introduces its insatiability: a trait common to libertinism and capitalism. “For the most obvious thing is that desire does not have the people or groups that it traverses.”¹³ In mercantile capitalist economy, wealth is generated from this incessant movement, this redoubling of exchange, this famous “spiral of increasing value.”

In Les Liaisons dangereuses what is described is the front line, the moment of production, the moment of the seductive or maneuvering “work.” (I am using the term work to pursue the economic metaphor and at the same time because seduction is always alluded to as work, and even as arduous work [81, p. 171] by Valmont and the marquise.) Valmont ironically comments on the Belleroche episode in these terms: “You are giving yourself the trouble to deceive him and he is happier than you … he sleeps peacefully while you keep watch for his pleasures. Would his slave do any more?” (15, p. 36). It is thus the amount of accumulated work in a seduction that is described, and then the moment after, the always sudden moment of breaking off, the moment of the woman's reintegration into the open system of exchange, and the subsequent transformation of the affair into a “tale,” a story. And such a story is only valuable if it is told, diffused, made public, “I rather like your affair with the vicomtesse,” writes Merteuil, “but it needs to be made public, as you say” (74, p. 147).

It is this diffusion that allows the generation of an increase in value, a “reputation” for the man. Such a story is valuable in proportion to the amount of renown it brings to the seducer. This ebb and flow of desires is no longer, as in Don Juan, bound to an economy of expense and of metaphysical challenge to higher powers. The libertine in Les Liaisons is a hoarder, and even if he does not keep an exact account of the women he has seduced as does Molière's libertine (who counts “1,003”), he does capitalize on his good stories.¹⁴ It is not merchandise that is fetishized in this economy, but rather the renown acquired through conquests. A sort of enormous fund of phallic values, renown is both the end and the means of seduction. Hegel, quick to schematize the spirit of historical periods in The Phenomenology of Spirit, writes: “The Enlightenment reduced all values to their utilitarian value.”¹⁵ Eros is set up as a “utilitarian value” in Les Liaisons, becoming the means to the attainment of renown, a bastard version of glory. Conversely, renown allows one to attain Eros. We see, therefore, a dematerialization of Eros; by means of a default of the moment of the act and of its consummation, Eros becomes pure sign, a fable, a tale, or letters.

In fact, it is never the man who seduces by means of his own qualities and talents, it is his reputation. Thus, the marquise de Merteuil no longer resists the idea of an affair with Prévan once Valmont tells her the story of the “three inseparables”: “this Prévan is so very formidable … and you're saying that he wants me, that he wants to have me. Surely it will be my honor and my pleasure” (74, p. 146). Similarly, the Présidente de Tourvel acknowledges in all innocence to Mme de Volanges: “I only know him [Valmont] by his reputation.” This confirms the closeness of the ties maintained between desire and the social in this novel. It is always conclusively from others—that is, from the “audience”—that the desirability of object choice comes.

It is also for the sake of his reputation that Merteuil warns Valmont about the slow progress of his designs on Tourvel: “Right now, I am tempted to believe that you do not merit your reputation” (5, p. 20). Valmont is only desirable for the marquise if he is recognized, by public renown, as invincible. Reputation, defined by these libertines as both end and means, defines a sort of transcendent law for the libertine economy itself, a law incarnated by the “audience,” which appears within the novel as the fiction of its own exteriority.¹⁶

This allows us to think of the system of libertine economy not as one that transgresses social law, but instead as the maximal expression of conformity to that law. Whereas Don Juan constantly curses and blasphemes in the name of every devil, exposing himself to damnation, Laclos's libertine has access to everyone. “Of course I receive M de Valmont and he is received everywhere,” Madame de Volanges writes to Tourvel (32, p. 66). Furthermore, for Sade, there is no exteriority with respect to the libertine law; the places of debauchery are always closed places, protected from the rest of the world, they are always institutional (isolated estates, fortresses, monasteries), emblems of debauchery made law. In Les Liaisons, however, the places of debauchery (suites, “little houses,” boudoirs) are always included in the space of the most official, most entrenched social law. In addition, every erotic scene has value according to a generalized theatricality, in proportion to the spectacle it provides for an audience that Merteuil, and we as readers, represent. In the novel, within the discourse itself, this “Audience,” with a capital A, institutes the fiction of an exteriority that combines the social horizon and the theatrical horizon, or the addressee and the law, within one word.

Given the above analysis, the place occupied by Merteuil within this economy must now be specified. The ironically courtly relationship she has established with Valmont, in which she maintains the position of the master or tyrant, as Valmont notes gallantly by saying, “Your orders are charming; your way of conveying them is more charming still; you will soon have us cherish despotism” (4, p. 16), is reversed by the logic of the system of exchange, as it is defined by an exclusively masculine contract.

Even if she manages to subvert the division of the masculine and feminine positions in the system of exchange and to put the man (Prévan, for example) in the position of merchandise, consumed and abandoned, she can never go so far as to put herself in an exchange or barter situation with respect to Tourvel and Valmont.¹⁷ Her only resource, to maintain herself in a position other than that of merchandise, is to remain outside of the system of exchange—that is, to exclude herself from an erotic relationship with Valmont. Her only way of maintaining herself at the summit of the system of value is to postpone indefinitely the renewal of her liaison dangereuse with Valmont, to renounce the real relationship and to put in place a narrative relationship, based on a metonymic economy; in other words, the erotic relationships they have with others take the place of their own erotic relationship. Seduction, as a war of the sexes, far from being a war of the aristocratic rearguard, far from being transgressive, is revealed instead to be a metaphor for a bourgeois economy of exchange. Moreover, libertinism as an economy of exchange is aligned along an ethics of austerity and asceticism, and not of fulfilment, as the following section will demonstrate.

LIBERTINISM AS ETHICAL SYSTEM: THE CONFIRMATION OF THE LAW

Libertinism is often defined as an exaggerated search for pleasure. The libertinism specific to Valmont and the marquise, which takes the form of jousting matches of pride and honor—typically aristocratic games—is also presented as an ethical system. The place reserved for fulfillment within this ethics remains to be specified.

One could begin by pointing out the ambiguous status of the term fulfillment itself in the libertine discourse. In a letter to Valmont, Merteuil defines what true fulfillment is, as opposed to the partial fulfillments prudes obtain: “Don’t hope for any pleasure from it. Is there ever pleasure with prudes? At least, with those who are in good faith reserved even at the height of pleasure, you are only offered a partial fulfillment. The total self-abandon and the delirium of pleasure in which pleasure is purified through excess itself, these benefits of love are unknown to them” (5, p. 19). Even if the marquise defines the concept, which would lead one to suppose that she knows what it is, the term of fulfillment itself never appears in the stories of gallant episodes in her little house told to Valmont. In the discourse of the marquise, fulfillment is always the fulfillment of the other. To finish the story of the Belleroche episode, she says, “I made him happy” (10, p. 29).

There is the same ambiguity in the status of the term in the discourse of Valmont. For example, Valmont opposes—is it a slip?—happiness and fulfillment in the matter of the Présidente de Tourvel. “With her, I don’t need fulfillment to be happy” (6, p. 22). In other places, when it is mentioned, fulfillment is never desired as the end of the erotic act, but instead always as a means of disengaging oneself from another, as a means, for the man, of freeing himself from desire, while also keeping open that system of interchangeability within which one woman is always equivalent to another. “Oh, sweet fulfillment! I implore you for my happiness and for my repose. How lucky we are that women defend themselves so badly! Otherwise we would be no more than their timid slaves” (4, p. 18).

The goal here is both rest and mastery, according to a sort of stoic or skeptic ideal; it is apathy or the complete absence of desire that allows the man to reconstitute himself as a free subject and master. Libertinism is thus in no way a quest for fulfillment or, in Merteuil's terms, for a “complete abandoning of oneself”; it is not defined as a quest for fusion with the other, but rather as a search for the division between self and others, as well as within oneself. In this quest, the gravest danger, as Valmont anxiously discovers after his “success” with Tourvel, is abandon or “laxity”: “I believe that is all that can be done, but I am afraid that I have become soft like Hannibal amid the pleasures of Capua” (125, p. 293).

Libertinism is thus not a quest for pleasure, but, paradoxically, an asceticism that attempts to deflect the dangers of fulfillment—excess of sensation, disappearance into the other, lack of distinction.¹⁸ As Joan De Jean has demonstrated, it incorporates the strategies of the hunt and of war: “The insipid honor of having one more woman. Let her give herself up, but not without a struggle. Let her, without having the strength to conquer, have enough to resist. Let her relish the feeling of weakness at leisure and be constrained to admit her defeat. Only a miserable poacher would lie in wait and kill the stag he has surprised; a true hunter should enjoy the hunt” (23, p. 52).

Libertinism attempts to attenuate the dangers of the flesh by establishing a “method” based on principles and rules, the definition of which is provided by Merteuil. Of the two libertines, it is she who fills the role of guardian or judge whose duties are imposed by the law. The vocabulary of the libertine method—as, for example, in the marquise's reproach to Valmont, “There you are moving along without principles and leaving everything to chance, or rather to caprice” (10, p. 28)—is oddly Cartesian. “Method,” “principle,” “order,” “observation,” “reflection,” this is its rhetoric, which is quite logically articulated upon an ethics whose basis is precisely dualistic, upon the maintenance, even at the moment of the erotic act, of self-control and of control of the other.¹⁹ This self-control is attained by means of a long labor of disengagement from affect and from the body. It is this sort of disengagement that allows the attainment of “head libertinism,” obtained by dividing the “head” from the “body,” a labor the epic struggle of which the marquise relates in letter 81. It is a labor comparable to that to which the Comedian in Diderot's Paradoxe sur le Comédien submits his body in order to dissociate it from affect.

This long apprenticeship of the division of the head from the body and this asceticism that allows one to attain a total instrumentalization of the body and its total submission to the direction of “the head” both come out of pain and “labor,” just as in the Paradoxe. Merteuil explains: “I carried this zeal so far as voluntarily to inflict pains upon myself while looking for a pleased expression on my face. I worked on myself with the same care to repress the symptoms of an unexpected joy” (81, p. 171).

The definition of the moral as a voluntary ethics of self-mastery proposed by Descartes in Les Passions de l’âme, article 211—“The labors that can correct the falsities of one's nature as we attempt to separate the movements of our blood and our spirit from the thoughts to which they are customarily joined”—provides a perfect definition of the libertine method, a labor of division, of separation of the subject from his affections and passions.²⁰

Even if the Cartesian project of substituting the authority of science for that of the church is an entirely different project from that of the marquise, one can, nevertheless, make out so many similarities between these two discourses that one is led to wonder whether the Discours de la méthode does not constitute a central “intertext” for letter 81.²¹

The theme of letter 81, “I can say that I am a product of my own work,” expresses the essence of the Cartesian project of positing the subject as foundation of the criterion for truth. Similarly, the marquise affirms the primacy of the desire for knowledge over the desire for fulfillment: “I did not wish to be fulfilled, I wanted to know; the desire to instruct myself suggested the means to do so” (81, p. 172), recalling the beginning of the Discours de la méthode: “I have always felt an extreme desire to learn how to distinguish true and false, to see my actions clearly and to walk in this life with assurance.”²² The whole letter, an autobiographical tale of self-creation, is thus given as an ironic rewriting of the first parts of the Discours de la méthode. The opposition between “first training” through education and “second training,” which is perhaps an apprenticeship through a conscious and progressive method based, as in Descartes, on the criterion of “conspicuousness”—“undoubtedly you will not deny these truths, which are so obvious as to be trivial” (81, p. 169)—only makes sense if it is related to the Cartesian discourse of which it is a parody down to its smallest details.

This education that the marquise methodically imposes upon herself is carried out in four phases: mastery of the body, mastery of discourse, mastery of love (first in the form of knowledge extorted from a confessor, then as praxis, through marriage), and, finally, widowhood, which allows completion of the education through reading. What is most notable about it is the central role played by observation and experience in the establishment of method. “I still had many observations to make,” the marquise asserts (pp. 172-73), paraphrasing, so to speak, the following passage of the Discours de la méthode: “I made many observations and gained much experience, giving particular reflexion in each matter.”²³ It is by a similar declaration of will, “I resolved” (p. 174), that the marquise decides to form the libertine method and Descartes the philosophical: “One day, I resolved to study within myself as well.”²⁴ This resolution in both cases transforms the subject into an object of introspection: “I studied myself … pain and pleasure, I observed everything exactly and I only saw within these different sensations facts to gather and to meditate over,” as the marquise says (p. 172). The movement is similar to the conversion of sensation into an object of study that one can see at work in the fourth part of the Discours de la méthode. This resolution at the same time either makes a vast theater of the world (“Then I began to exert the talents I had given myself in the grand theater,” declaims the marquise [pp. 174-75]) or, as in Descartes's resolve to “try to be a spectator rather than a participant in every comedy that plays,”²⁵ makes a vast comedy of life.

This relationship between the two texts could be pursued, especially as we develop a method to progress from “a penetrating glance” to the “rudiments of the science I wished to acquire” (p. 171), from the mask of a provisional morality to a true science, movement libertinism derives from its philosophical ancestor (Descartes). For our purposes, however, it suffices to keep in mind that this letter on method is considered by Madame de Volanges, in a letter to Madame de Rosemonde, as “the height of horror”:

It is also said that Danceny, while still in the throes of his outrage, showed these letters to all who wished to see them and that they are at present circulating through all of Paris. Two of them are cited especially frequently: in the first of them she tells the whole story of her life and of her principles, and it is this one which is said to be the height of horror. (168, p. 371)

It is especially interesting to note that Laclos, who usually does not intervene in the text, takes the trouble at this point to insert a note specifying that Mme de Volanges refers here to letters 81 and 85. The scandal of letter 81 is the scandal of a libertinism—until now purely a practical matter—suddenly raised, through the aberrant female cogito, to the status of theory. The marquise de Merteuil is something like a bad dream of Cartesianism, a Cartesianism that turns into a nightmare since, for libertines, the goal of method is no longer detached from the social, no longer identified, as in Descartes, as a “search for the truth,” but is instead identified as the only means of survival in the context of a generalized social war, in a universe in which, according to Merteuil, “one must win or perish” (p. 177).

The libertine method therefore appears as a method of adaptation for the purposes of a social war, and not as the negation of social law. In fact, although the entire story of letter 81 consists in opposing the sovereign law of the subject to the law of the world, and although the marquise presents herself as self-created, the whole process of the acquisition of method is really a way of adaptation to the law of the world, even through masquerade, in order to transgress certain rules. In the letter Merteuil really sets out a new theory of social ties based on a double contract between being and appearance; it is a theory of a contract that is no longer collective but is instead between individuals.

Identifying himself with the fantasm of absolute knowledge, of a sovereign subjectivity that becomes law, the libertine is really a completely repressed subject, a sort of upside-down Don Juan, symbolizing sensuality, desire made law, the very figure of immediacy whose only “task,” to take up the expression of André Malraux in his description of the characters in Les Liaisons, consists in the revelation that in the social world truth lies only in farce, lies, and hypocrisy.²⁶

In the course of this revelation, method becomes a substitute for the object of desire. Fulfillment in Les Liaisons dangereuses is, to use an expression used by Marcel Hénaff on Sade, “the fulfillment of method.”²⁷ The marquise de Merteuil's fulfillment is her incarnation of the law, and her identification of herself to it: “When have you ever seen me stray from the rules I have given myself or be lax in my own principles?” (81, p. 170). The erotic activity between the marquise and the vicomte becomes the exercise of, and repetitive commentary upon, method. The marquise spends her time judging, comparing, and evaluating the purity of method implemented by Valmont in his seduction of the Présidente de Tourvel. It is precisely within this notion of fulfillment that method becomes a substitute for the object of desire. Fulfillment in Les Liaisons dangereuses is finally the fulfillment of the “Merteuil method.” The final punishment of Merteuil, the loss of an eye and disfiguration by smallpox, is quite significant in its ironic negation of this methodological negation of the body, this monstrous, unheard-of attempt to be always superior to one's desire. The disfiguration of Merteuil is simultaneously a return to the repressed body and, through this corporeity, a return to morality. It is the overturning of the scandal of a female cogito; the woman who wished to be “head,” law, and method is revealed to be only a body, a sex organ, a woman. The paradox of libertinism is that, while practicing a cult of inconstancy and cynicism, while positing itself as the reversal of traditional morality, it reveals the hollow, false quality of the morality it reverses. Its rejection of the morality of sincerity and sentimentality, its rejection of abandonment to pleasure and amorous fusion in fact betrays a nostalgic quest of that lost sincerity and authenticity both moral and erotic. Libertinism is thus a kind of asceticism; it is a protest against the absence of an authentic morality and eroticism, dramatizing this absence by representing it. The systematic challenge to morality and the outbidding of worldly conventions express the desire for a morality, the desire for something or someone in the absence of morality.²⁸ By creating a metamorality—that is, an even more severe system of laws and principles—libertinism comes to replace the missing law exactly at the point where it is flawed.

The libertines in Les Liaisons punish themselves and others to protest the absence of a real morality. In so doing they become representatives of law. This comes close to Sade. For Lacan, the Sadean torturer is the true representation of the superego in literature, the representative of pure morality.²⁹ Lacan can say this about Sade because, in fact, the Sadean torturer has no subjectivity; he is there only for the other, the one whom he tortures; he is no longer an individual but instead completely assumes the role of the law. For Laclos, things are different; one does not find this extreme specialization of function that one finds in the universe of Sade's black novels. For in Laclos, the characters play the roles of executioner and victim at the same time. Merteuil tries to punish others in the name of the absent law, to punish them for pretending to believe in morality and love while looking only for pleasure. At the same time, she does not herself in any way escape from law, in the form of smallpox or natural law; she is thus also a victim. The same holds for Valmont: the executioner of Tourvel, he forces himself to be his own executioner by sending her the insulting letter of dismissal written by the marquise (145, p. 333).

The transgression of sentimentality is a representation of law, a way to search for a deeper and truer law. It is perhaps for these obscure reasons that Valmont punishes Tourvel, because she gives in and precisely by her “fall” reveals the absence of authentic moral law. The aim of the libertine within the social space, as Jean Marie Goulemot has noted, is to prove that “within every woman [is hidden] a prostitute, passionate or guilty, modest or seductive, but always there,”³⁰ from Cécile, of whom the marquise says that she is “absolutely nothing but a pleasure-machine,” to Tourvel. Valmont's page boy sums it up: “‘Monsieur surely knows better than I do,’ he told me, ‘that to sleep with a girl is only to make her do what pleases her.’” (“Sometimes the good sense of the rascal astonishes me,” adds Valmont.) It is striking that not a single woman escapes this law of desire in the novel:

All are implicated in it, young and old, prostitutes and innocents, like Cécile who yields “everything that one does not even dare to expect from girls whose career is to do such things.” Cécile's destiny is in this respect especially significant. Barely out of convent school, attracted to the first man who comes along, a shoemaker, seduced by Danceny, taken by Valmont, she is the very sketch of femininity. She goes as far as to write love letters to Danceny from the arms of Valmont.³¹

Libertines therefore expose these desiring women to infamy and to public reproof, and by so doing, far from contradicting the moral law, they are trying desperately to reconstitute it. Ultimately, libertinism, despite the sophistication of its motives, through its trivial critique of what Baudelaire called “universal fouterie,”³² is a desperate attempt to find a certain lacking transcendence again. This is what the marquise de Merteuil says in her own way:

Women of this sort are nothing more than pleasure-machines. You will tell me that all there is to do is that, and that that’s enough, for our plans. Very well! But let us not forget that with such machines, anybody can quickly get to know their springs and motors. So, in order to use this one without danger, you must hurry, stop at just the right time and then break it. (106, p. 244)

This is an old dream of metaphysicians; they have a grudge against machines and against what in man is mechanical and therefore reveals desire. “But your measured pace is so easily guessed! The arrival, the aspect, the tone, the language: I knew all that the day before” (85, p. 188).

Thus libertinism, as exacerbated protest against, and punishment of, desiring women, is a protest against the absence of spirituality and of transcendence in the machine of desire, an absence whose entirely profane mechanism is laid bare by their “machinations”:

Once the structural unity of the machine is undone, once the personal and specific unity of the living being is overthrown, a direct link appears between the machine and desire, the machine passes to the center of desire, the machine desires and desire is machined. It is not desire that is in the subject but the machine that is in desire, and the residual subject is on the other side, beside the machine, at the perimeter, a parasite of machines and an accessory of the vertebro-mechanic desire.³³

LIBERTINISM AS A SYSTEM OF SUBVERSION OF SIGNS, OR, THE TRIUMPH OF THE LAW OF THE SIGNIFIER

Given the above, I would like to attempt now to show how libertinism attempts to subvert the system of signs, the code of decency and propriety of language according to which one says what one feels and does what one says, and also, finally, how the novel undoes and condemns this subversion of the signs of natural language, so that it is the law of the signifier that wins out.

Within the novel two uses of language can be distinguished: a “naive” use, which is proper to victims and dupes, and a tactical, “political,” use, which is proper to libertines and non-dupes. Victims possess only an unconscious use of language, and therefore their language, which expresses the voice of nature and sentiment at the same time as the voice of morality, does not vary. Libertines, however, change styles the way they change their socks, borrowing from every possible tone (the virtuous style of the prude, the “stupid” style of Cécile, the cynical style, and so on).³⁴ The discourse of libertines attempts to establish an economy of the sign dominated by a generalized exchange similar to that of their erotic system. They attempt to elaborate a particular economy of signs in which a “sign” or “signifier” no longer corresponds to a true “sentiment” or to any moral “signified,” in opposition to what happens in natural language. In this economy, the sign becomes a mask, a false pretense whose only finality is to mystify the other. Libertine discourse is no longer “expressive”; it is a discourse of exchange. It is always as a function of the addressee that discourse is organized. The goal consists of certain effects to be produced within the other, rather than of “communication” with the other.³⁵ It is this strategy that the marquise de Merteuil explains in a postscript to Cécile that defines the rule of the libertine epistolary genre: “Be sure that, when you write to someone, it is for him and not for you; you must look to telling him not so much what you think but instead what pleases him” (105, p. 242).

The libertine discourse is, then, a strategic discourse that tries to make an instrument of language as well as of the body, to make of it a simple tool, which the marquise and Valmont think of as both docile and resistant. It is of this particular resistance of writing, which in a way renders it less susceptible to plagiarism than speech, that Merteuil speaks when she says: “An observation it surprises me that you have not made already is that there is nothing so difficult in matters of love as to write what one does not feel. I mean write in a convincing manner, of course: it is not that you do not employ the same words, but you do not arrange them in the same way, or, rather, you arrange them thinking that that is enough” (33, p. 68).

Libertine discourse thus implements a theory and a classification of the forms that “naive” discourse takes, all the while trying to imitate it, to appropriate it, not only in its utterances but also in the properties of its uttering. In the same way that the rhetorician is in fact he who calls attention to the traces that the passions leave in language, libertines establish tables of equivalencies that enable the orator to express a passion he does not feel. Thus the equivalency between tenderness and “disorder,” virtue and simplicity, or, even further, between love and languor, allows Valmont to speak of a passion that he does not feel: “I reread my letter. I discovered that I had not been sufficiently watchful and that I conveyed more ardor than love, more ill-humor than sadness. I’ll have to redo it” (23, p. 53).

The opposition between libertine discourse and the discourse of the Présidente de Tourvel is not a simple opposition of true and false or lie and sincerity, but is rather one of conscious and unconscious lies. In fact, the discourse of the Présidente is riddled with slips, denials, and arguments in bad faith, as Valmont points out to Merteuil: “Read and judge; see with what evident falsity she swears that she feels no love when I am sure of the contrary” (25, p. 55). By pointing this out, libertine discourse lays bare all of the “insincerity” contained in the “sincerity” of the Présidente; it is a sincere insincerity, which Valmont turns into an insincere sincerity: “How can I answer your last letter, Madame? How can I dare to speak the truth when my sincerity will ruin me in your eyes? No matter, I must; I will have the courage” (68, p. 135). Valmont does not stop telling Tourvel that he refuses to lie; in so doing he brutally exposes her to the discourse of desire and of love. Since denial is the dominant rhetorical figure in Tourvel's discourse, Valmont keeps telling her that he denies denial, and that that is the proof of his sincerity. In so doing, he exposes Tourvel to the truth of her own lie, he backs her up against the bad conscience of her language, all the while using this bad conscience to his own best advantage, as a guarantee of his credibility.

The game of signs becomes complicated by one more degree if one remembers that Valmont spends his time telling the Présidente that he loves her and all the while explaining to the marquise that, when he tells the Présidente that he loves her, it proves that he does not love her and that his declarations of love are purely tactical. The novel completely reverses the structure of the relationships between truth and lies, between hypocrisy and denial. In fact, by telling Tourvel that he loves her—declarations that are, moreover, only tactical—Valmont nevertheless falls in love with her by accident, which is exactly what Merteuil keeps telling him: “Now it is true, vicomte, that you are under an illusion as to the sentiment that attaches you to Mme de Tourvel. Either it is love or love has never existed” (134, p. 312).

This turn of the screw thus totally reverses the relationship between hypocrisy and denial. What was given as false, as hypocrisy, as pure masquerade—the correspondence between Valmont and Tourvel—becomes true; what was given as the real truth—the cynicism behind the correspondence between Valmont and Merteuil, becomes pure denial. Denial changes sides; it was on the side of the dupe—Tourvel—but it goes over to the side of the non-dupes—Valmont, Merteuil.

Libertinism that attempts to make a pure artefact, a pure (and impure) instrument of the linguistic sign, is therefore finally caught in the trap of words. The moral of the novel is perhaps that in playing at saying that one loves so as to say that one does not, one ends by loving; that no one, man or woman, is master over the signifier, that words hold us and implicate us, especially words of love, because there is no pure word. This is exactly what Valmont says—he is taken who thought himself to take!—about Tourvel: “Well, you know that a woman who consents to speak of love ends up falling in love or at least acts as if she had” (76, p. 150). To speak with military metaphors, as libertines do, the words of war end up turning into a real war, as the marquise declares so succinctly, “Well, then, it is war!” (153, p. 350). The meaning of these successive reversals, then, is that one cannot play with the law of the signifier with impunity (any more than with moral or natural law).

We might well finish by wondering what the place of the reader is within this narrative economy. The reader enjoys the deconstruction of Tourvel's denial by the libertines; he is at first on the side of Valmont and Merteuil, thereby believing himself to be in the position of mastery. Then he witnesses the turning of libertinism against itself. His absolute knowledge is deconstructed by the novel, since the dupers reveal themselves to be duped. The final fulfillment is that of the reader of the stolen letters, of the indiscreet third party: it is found in the recognition of the law that is superior to all others, because of the reversals it provokes, the law of the novel.³⁶ It is from having systematically and loyally served this supreme law of the novel, whatever his intentions may have been, that Laclos does indeed merit being judged “the honest man par excellence” and not by reason of any overly edifying final morality.³⁷

Notes

1. The complexity of epistolary exchange in Les Liaisons dangereuses has been admirably analyzed by Tzvetan Todorov in Littérature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967). All references to Les Liaisons are taken and translated from Laclos: Oeuvres complètes, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1979).

2. The notion of “system” applied to Les Liaisons comes from Peter Brooks's The Novel of Worldliness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 177: “Les Liaisons dangereuses is profoundly a novel about system, processes of systematization, man as creature of system.”

3. An example is Baudelaire's commentary on Les Liaisons, “How love was made under the ancien régime,” from “Notes analytiques et critiques sur Les Liaisons dangereuses,” in Oeuvres (Paris: Club Francais du Livre, 1955), p. 1229. See also Joan De Jean's Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), ch. 5, “The Attack on the Vaubanian Fortress,” pp. 191ff.

4. Nancy Miller implicitly associates Valmont with pleasure in his opposition to Tourvel: “Opposed to that is Valmont's conception of happiness, posited on the existence of pleasures unknown to her” (The Heroine's Text [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], p. 124).

5. See, e.g., Anne Marie Jaton, “Libertinage féminin, libertinage dangereux,” in Laclos et le libertinage, 1782-1982: Actes du Colloque du bicentenaire des Liaisons dangereuses (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), pp. 151-62.

6. On the relation between Laclos and Rousseau in Les Liaisons, see De Jean's analysis in Literary Fortifications.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 350. Text from Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, book 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, sec. 1, ch. 1, “The Commodity” (New York: Vintage Books, Marx Library, 1976), pp. 125ff.

9. “He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labor admittedly creates use-value, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values … Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility” (ibid., p. 131). This principle of Marx's theory of value is discussed in detail in La Logique de Marx (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), specifically in F. Ricci's chapter, “Structure logique du 1 paragraphe du Capital,” pp. 105ff.

10. See Les Liaisons dangereuses, letter 71, p. 142.

11. “Movement will be good, investment, bad; action as far as innovation and power of events will be good, reaction reintegrating identity, bad,” says J. F. Lyotard in L’Economie libidinale (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974), p. 123.

12. Marx considers the concept of scarcity especially in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy in Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, Marx Library, 1973).

13. Deleuze and Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe, p. 348.

14. “He [the capitalist] is fanatically intent on the valorization of value. … Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment,” Marx says (Capital, book 1, sec. 7, ch. 24, p. 739).

15. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), sec. 2, “Culture,” “The Enlightenment,” p. 354.

16. Les Liaisons, letter 71, Valmont to Merteuil: “If you find this story amusing, I do not ask you to keep it secret. Now that I have amused myself with it, it is only right that the public should have its turn” (p. 143).

17. Les Liaisons, letter 81: “Born to avenge my sex and to master yours, I knew enough to create means known only to me” (p. 170).

18. André Malraux has perceptively analyzed the mixture of sexuality and will in this novel in Le Triangle noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1970): “Les Liaisons dangereuses is a mythology of will, and its permanent mixture of will and sexuality is its most powerful means of action” (p. 47).

19. Jean Luc Seylaz very accurately characterizes Les Liaisons as “the novel of pure intelligence” in Les Liaisons dangereuses et la création romanesque chez Laclos (Geneva: Droz, 1958), p. 151.

20. René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme, part 3, article 211, “Un remède général contre les passions,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. A. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1953), p. 794.

21. Colette Verger Michael interprets this similarly, but with respect to the Spinozism of Laclos's novel, in Laclos: Les Milieux philosophiques et le mal (Nîmes: Ed. Akpagnon, 1985), pp. 65ff. and 133ff.

22. Descartes, Le Discours de la méthode, in Oeuvres, p. 131.

23. Ibid., p. 145.

24. Ibid., p. 132.

25. Ibid., pp. 144-45.

26. Malraux, Le Triangle noir, p. 47.

27. Marcel Hénaff, Sade: l’Invention du corps libertin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), esp. ch. 3, “Les Jouissances de la méthode,” pp. 99-117.

28. Baudelaire understood the aspiration to a higher morality of the cynical libertines in Les Liaisons, “the work of a moralist as moral as the most moral, as deep as the deepest” (“Notes analytiques et critiques sur Les Liaisons dangereuses,” Oeuvres, p. 1228).

29. Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” in Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 765-90.

30. J. M. Goulemot, “Le Lecteur voyeur et la mise en scène de l’imaginare viril dans Les Liaisons dangereuses,” in Laclos et le libertinage, 1782-1982: Actes du Colloque du bi-centenaire des Liaisons Dangereuses (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), pp. 168-69.

31. Ibid., p. 169.

32. Baudelaire: “Fouterie and the glory of fouterie, were they any more immoral than our modern fashion of adoring and mixing the holy and the profane?” (“Notes analytiques et critiques sur Les Liaisons dangereuses,” Oeuvres, p. 1228).

33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie II (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980), p. 339.

34. On the function of italics in libertine discourse, see Michel Delon, Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons dangereuses (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Etudes littéraires, 1986), p. 87.

35. See Janet Gurkin Altman, “Addressed and Undressed Language in Les Liaisons dangereuses,” in Laclos: Critical Approaches to Les Liaisons dangereuses, ed. Lloyd R. Free (Madrid: Studia Humanitatis, 1978).

36. Joan De Jean perceptively remarks on “the relationship to authority [that] fuels Laclos's devious masterpiece” (Literary Fortifications, p. 193).

37. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, La Prisonnière (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1958), p. 379.