Philosophy in the Bedroom

Written in 1795 and cast as seven dialogues, this libertine philosophical dialogue schools a young woman, Eugenie, through a curriculum delivered chiefly by the atheist Dolmance and Madame de Saint-Ange. The instruction argues that nature sanctions the pursuit of enjoyment without limit, that conscience, religion, and pity are learned obstacles, and that reason can be marshalled to license what feeling would restrain. A long pamphlet read aloud in the fifth dialogue extends the case from the bedroom to the republic.

For psychoanalysis the text became a hinge through Lacan's essay Kant with Sade, which reads Dolmance's reasoning as the hidden face of a moral law purified of all inclination. What the dialogue holds up for a clinician is a voice that commands satisfaction rather than forbids it, and prosecutes any hesitation with the same severity a prohibition would use. It shows enjoyment installed as duty, cruelty rationalised into principle, and the demand pressed past any point where the body could comply.