Social contract, masochist contract

Fayçal Falaky

Theorization of sensual desire was not uncommon in the eighteenth century; like many materialists of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected imperatives founded on metaphysical suppositions and viewed the senses as the only valid source of philisophical knowledge. In Social Contract, Masochist Contract, Fayc̜al Falaky demonstrates that what distinguishes Rousseau is that the foundational measure on which he bases his materialist philosophy is a sexual instinct edowed, paradoxically, with the same sublime, self-abnegating attributes associated with Christian, metaphyscial desire. To understand the aesthetics of Rousseau's masochism is, Falaky argues, to understand how ideals of Christian morality and spiritual enoblement survuved the enlightenment, and how God died, only to be repackaged in new fetishes. Whether it is the imperious mistress of his erotic fantasies, the...