Rochester's Libertinism and the Pleasure of Debility

Abstract

What might it mean to recast Anglophone male libertine poetry as a poetics of impairment? As an erotic discourse which foregrounds the sensory body, libertine writing is deeply invested in representations of the erotic body and its pleasures. Yet, the male body that is erotically emplaced in libertine discourse is rarely an able one. From the Earl of Rochester’s self-described cankered and weepy phallus to Charles Churchill’s syphilitic oozing sores to James Boswell’s raging gonorrhea infection, sexual disease imaginatively infects libertine language just as it also, in a more material sense, courses through libertine practices. Taking recent theorizations of debility as its starting point, this article engages with a well-known poem attributed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “The Maimed Debauchee”, in order to trace how the libertine’s experience of debility registers as a privileged form of erotic embodiment.