Description
How to transmute sensation into sensuality, and sensuality into voluptuousness? Does the mind contribute to the pleasures of the flesh, or are men and women mere sensorial machines? Finally, can surroundings seduce and increase jouissance, and if so, how? These questions intrigued thinkers throughout the eighteenth century. Then, artists, architects, writers and philosophes examined the relationship between body and soul, and believed clues could be found in the study of pleasure and its causes. This paper will explore these questions by bringing together reflections on sensualist and materialist theories and a study of that architectural phenomenon of the French Age of Enlightenment: the petite maison.Conveniently hidden in Parisian suburbs to provide complete discretion, the petite maison entered the topography of eighteenth-century worldliness as an intimate space dedicated to libertine pleasures. The erotic function of these villas dictated their construction: they had to be lavishly decorated, displaying splendour and comfort to beguile all senses and obliterate virtue’s any last attempt at resistance. Skilful clairs-obscurs, scented rooms or gardens, delightful music, delicious suppers, luscious fabrics and soft beds, all set in the most artful decoration, were devised to seduce. Sensations, in a petite maison, were thus devised to be conducive to sensuality.
However, whilst the aesthetic appreciation of the petite maison relied on sensation [aesthetis], it also relied on a more intellectual form of gratification involving both imagination and ‘good taste’, a concept invented at the time. When the mind complements fleshly pleasures, says La Mettrie, mere enjoyment becomes voluptuousness. The voluptuous sensations triggered by a petite maison thus bridge the gap between body and mind; the two are connected as parts of a machine which sensations activate, almost automatically (thereby also making the petite maison a sure trap to virtue). Therefore, that suburban Parisian villa may owe it prominence in eighteenth-century France’s cultural landscape to the fact that it offered at last a unified image of Man, no longer the Augustinian creature torn between flesh and soul, but a being animated by his or her reconciled senses and sensibility.
| Period | 15 Oct 2014 → 17 Oct 2014 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ’From Sensations to Voluptuousness: The Materialist Alchemy of the Petite Maison’, Conference The Early Modern Villa: The Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, Wilanow Palace, Warsaw (Poland) |
| Event type | Other |
| Sponsor |