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34 “The Art of Self-Deception”: Libertine Materialism and Roman Philosophy
Get accessNatania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (2006) and coauthor of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (2020). She is currently completing a monograph, tentatively titled Illusion without Error, on feminine materialisms in eighteenth-century France.
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Published:22 March 2023
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Abstract
This chapter explores the way in which libertine materialisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century engage with a Roman philosophical legacy. The intellectual attitudes connoted by “libertinism” on the one hand and “materialism” on the other remain at odds with one another as the Enlightenment wears on. In a rearticulation of Lucretian themes, however, the two positions find a point of convergence. With the return to Lucretius, libertine materialism recovers a certain consistency and new versions of Epicurean community emerge in a space opened by literary and poetic representation. In contrast to other critiques of religious and political authority, libertine neo-Lucretianism most often posits pleasure not as the ultimate affirmation of a secular human subject but as this subject’s delightful dissolution or dispossession. The libertine turn to Lucretius is transnational and transgenerational, knitting together seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophies of pleasure, a libertinage érudit, and an enlightened libertinism preoccupied with the mechanics of the erotic encounter.
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