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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Tahitian Jouissance

This article traces the peculiar conjunction of property and sexuality that precipitates the fall from a prior, undifferentiated state of nature into a civilized state of enforced renunciation and social constraint in eighteenth-century representations of Tahiti. Juxtaposing the navigation journals from Bougainville's voyage around the world, Rousseau's account of the state of nature in the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité, and Diderot's riff on the island in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, the article examines the ways property claims in persons—both in women and in the children they bear—organize the very nature of sexual desire. At the heart of the nexus of sexuality and property in these accounts lies the double sense that the word jouissance, like its English counterpart "enjoyment," possesses: as both right of property use and sexual pleasure.