MDMD & Mauve in the Mechanical City

[Terrance]

Roughly between 1745 and 1760, some of the most audacious writings of
the Enlightenment began to roll off the presses. Julien La Mettrie wrote
an important One, L'Homme Machine (1747). In it, he argued that humans
could be understood as mechanisms devoid of spirit. He had arrived at
this conclusion, in part, from reading Descartes and by studying
medicine. His view was so radical, so outrageous, and so controversial
for the times that the Dutch publisher was forced to disavow his ideas,
explaining that they had merit only as a statement about the freedom of
the press. Eventually the publishers wrote a book attacking him, but it
was too late, the book was widely read, the dame done.

The 18th century French philosopher and military surgeon Julien La
Mettrie
(1709-1751), in his L'Homme machine (1747), extended Descartes' doctrine
of
animal automatism to man. La Mettrie argued that both animals and men
are
machines, albeit conscious and cognitive ones, and that there is no
essential
distinction between conscious and voluntary action, and an action which
is
instinctual and involuntary.

And the City: 

http://duke.usask.ca/~akkerman/edition2/QX.htm




 A far more entertaining example, was the anonymous French pornographic
novel, Therese Phiosophe (1748). The novel preaches materialism while
detailing erotic exploits. 




The English equivalent was Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(1749) by John Cleland.