The politics of pleasure talk in 18th-century Europe

This article provides an analysis of the role played by competing conceptions of pleasure in European cultural politics during the 18th century. Beginning with the ‘onanism’ panic, which gripped western Europe in 1712, and with the apparent paradox that new concern about masturbation developed at a rime when the pursuit of pleasure w as increasingly legitimized in intellectual discourse, this article suggests that the panic can be understood as part of a wider process. This was a process in which a legitimization of pleasure w as accompanied by a series of battles u> define the concept in more socially useful ways. These battles can be traced across a range of literary fields from theology and aesthetics to physiology and political and moral theory.