Stopping time in Point de lendemain: A sensualist reading of a libertine nocturne

Abstract 0

In Vivant Denon’s Point de lendemain (1777), a libertine impromptu turns into an attempt at stopping time, as the lovers seek to lengthen the duration of the night. By cleverly playing with their sensations and slowing down their pleasures, they will be able to believe that they have entered a time bubble, that of the everlasting moment of their rapture. The libertine topos of the lovers’ delighting in slowness, which comes from Ovid’s Ars amatoria, is revisited through eighteenthcentury sensualist and materialist theories. This essay brings together Denon’s libertine text, the new experience of time in the Enlightenment and Condillac’s and La Mettrie’s theories of sensation and time; it seeks to make plain the stakes behind the libertines’ slow dalliance. Ultimately, the lovers aim at pretending that they have escaped human finitude by experiencing infinity and eternity by means of sensation and imagination.