SOURCE: “The Political Economy of the Body in the Liaisons dangereuses of Choderlos de Laclos” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, edited by Lynn Hunt, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 41-62.

In the following essay, Deneys explores the tenets of libertinism as expressed in Les Liaisons dangereuses, arguing that an exchange system operates at the linguistic, economic, and ethical level.

Why speak of “economy” in the Liaisons dangereuses? Because in this novel interpersonal relationships are organized like a system of exchange: letters, promises, libertine accounts, agreements, and challenges are exchanged; also women.¹ As I shall attempt to show, every one of these exchanges assumes above all that women are exchanged, that women circulate among a number of men.

Among libertines, women, goods, and words (in letters) are exchanged, which Lévi-Strauss has shown to have been the general rule of the basic structure of human societies even...