Pleasure was a problem for members of the Roman elite – or so moralists felt. In his treatise on the good life, Seneca stresses the insidious threat posed by the attractions of sensual pleasure, while asserting that only the subhuman will want to surrender themselves completely ... Seneca’s language presents pleasure as fluid, both engulfing and invading its hapless victims. His insistence on its seductive dangers could be read as betraying a certain fascination with pleasure.

We tend to rehearse familiar narratives with the aid of familiar writing about plants, but a turn to the non-canonical helps us to understand those canonical works in rather different ways. This chapter argues that we should be alive to those longue durée yet intimate traditions that are so often the stuff of lone engagements with individual plants, and which are most often expressed as moments of intense emotion. The chapter also suggests that we should at least question that other familiar narrative of a newly discovered ‘Romantic’ transcendence: turning to moments of emotional engagement with plants both in earlier writing and in writing outside of the ‘Romantic’ tradition, helps us to recognise a much longer tradition of transcendent emotion of which the Romantics are only a part.

Chapter 3 examines scientific accounts of laboratory experiments and outlines antivivisectionist responses to them. By closely scrutinising physiological texts to reveal the ‘real’ experimenter, antivivisectionists produced a language of textual dissection that became problematically allied with laboratory operations and threatened to undermine the movement’s binary rhetoric of ‘Art vs. Science’. Vivisectors and their opponents shared a rhetoric of intense and absorbing concentration, bodily excision and displacement, and triumphant discovery. The chapter then considers three Victorian novels which creatively adapted the reading strategies advanced by antivivisectionist leaders such as Frances Power Cobbe. Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), Edward Berdoe’s St Bernard’s (1887), and Walter Hadwen’s Dr Deguerre (1913–18) proffer supplementary texts including real and fictional pamphlets, newspaper articles, and medical papers. These ancillary materials present alternatives to surgical intervention; they reveal diagnostic information and promote alternative holistic approaches to health which catalyse the fictional vivisector’s demise.

This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

Ancient Egyptian ideas about sex changed over time in close relation to changes in gender power relations. The comprehensive overview of textual and iconographic sources in this chapter indicates that discourses on sex did exist. Desirable bodies were either depicted or described in poetry. Pleasures could be sought in different sexscapes such as e.g., houses, gardens, streets, festivals, marshes and bathhouses. Festival sex had long history and was connected to the celebration of the return of the wondering Sun Eye goddess. She was pacified through consumption of alcohol and sexual intercourse. Sex-work is also attested, but its closer regulation through taxation does not predate Roman occupation. This is also the period when classical authors such as Strabo, formed the orientalist trope of sacred prostitution in Egyptian temples. However, contrary to this trope, sex is rarely depicted in state sponsored art and is found in media such as ostraca or rock art. Similarly, same-sex intercourse is attested throughout Egyptian history but rarely depicted. Passivity in intercourse between men was looked down upon. It even served as a metaphor to designate enemies of Egypt. Sexual violence was punishable but easily confused with adultery, putting women in precarious positions.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

Johann Georg Heinrich Feder (1740–1821) was a well-respected and well-known professor of philosophy at the University of Göttingen, especially during the 1770s and early 1780s. A turning point took place in Feder’s life and career, however, when he edited the infamous Göttingen review of the first Critique, which was originally written by Christian Garve and to which Kant responds in the Prolegomena. This chapter contains a complete translation of Feder’s review of the second Critique, which therefore captures the opinion of one of Kant’s most well-known and infamous critics. Feder discusses a number of topics in the review, including: whether pure reason can be practical without the assistance of feeling and inclination, the nature of good and evil and their relationship to pleasure and displeasure, and the idea that respect for the moral law is respect for ourselves as legislators.

This chapter aims to disentangle some the different views that have often been associated with the term ‘pessimism’. This includes the claims that (1) there is no historical progress; (2) this world is the worst of all possible worlds; (3) happiness is impossible; and (4) life is not worth living. The last thesis is identified as the central concern of the ‘pessimism dispute’, and three different justifications for it are presented. The final section of the chapter considers the expression of pessimism throughout human history and culture, with special attention paid to Schopenhauer’s analysis of religion.

How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

Many people have had the experience of thinking with pleasure, or of the pleasure of thinking, but can we substantiate the idea that thinking can be pleasurable? This first chapter explores non-psychological productions to search for evidence of the pleasure of thinking in the visual arts, in philosophy – mainly in the writings of Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt - and in the self-writing of a few authors, among them Sigmund Freud and the novelist Chaim Potok. This enables to identify five modalities of the pleasure of thinking. The chapter then poses the theoretical frame for the book, a sociocultural and developmental psychology, and highlights its ontological and epistemological axioms. Two concepts are defined: on the one hand, the concepts of thinking, including reasoning, sense-making, and daydreaming; on the other hand, the concept of pleasure. The methodology used for the book is then exposed – an abductive integration of theoretical work with the secondary analysis of existing work and of data collected in our past work. The outline of the volume is finally presented.

In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book 1 of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue (644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion, I comment on what light is thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we have been promised.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.