No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment

by Catherine Cusset

Winner of the 1996 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize, Catherine Cusset's No Tomorrow traces the moral meaning of pleasure in several libertine works of the eighteenth-century―Watteau's Pélerinage à l'île de Cythère, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Crébillon's Les égarements du coeur et de l'esprit, the anonymous pornographic novel Thérèse philosophe, Diderot's La religieuse, and Vivant Denon's short story "Point de lendemain." In this ambitious book, Cusset reframes the often misunderstood genre that celebrates what Casanova calls "the present enjoyment of the senses." She contends libertine works are not, as is commonly thought, characterized by the preaching of sexual pleasure but are instead linked by an "ethics of pleasure" that teaches readers that vanity and sensual enjoyment are part of their moral being. Developing Roland Barthes's concept of "the pleasure of the text," the author argues that the novel is a powerful vehicle for moral lessons, more so than philosophical or moral treatises, because it conveys such lessons through pleasure. Cusset reads the proliferation of libertine novels as a reaction against the denial of pleasure in the literature and culture of the time. In the midst of the century's metaphysical impulse to simplify human psychology, these works focus on the moments in which human contradictions are revealed. Cusset's analysis suggests that libertine novels offered the eighteenth century a more complex picture of moral being and ultimately contributed a lesson of tolerance to the Enlightenment.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Catherine Cusset was born in Paris in 1963. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and agrégée in classics, she got a Ph.D in Paris and another one at Yale, and she taught 18th-century French literature at Yale for 12 years. She is the author of ten novels published by Gallimard between 1990 and 2013, among which En toute innocence, Le problème avec Jane (finalist for Medicis prize and Grand Prix littéraire des lectrices d’Elle 2000), La haine de la famille, Confessions d’une radine, Un brillant avenir (Prix Goncourt des lycéens 2008) and Indigo. She is translated into 15 languages. The Story of Jane was published by Simon and Shuster in 2001. After 20 years in the States, Catherine Cusset recently moved to London with her American husband and daughter.