Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 Vague Inquietudes and Uncertain Desires -- Between Devotion and Lust -- The Gaze of the Physician-Philosopher -- The Mad Brides of Christ -- A Chaste, Libertine Novel -- "I Had Often Travestied Religion in my Own Fashion" -- The Masochist's Lucidity -- Embracing the Opiate -- 2 Rebirthing the Past -- Blind Instinct, Mute Fermentation -- Chaining the Imagination -- Pudeur Versus Pudeur, Love Versus Love -- An Instinctual Paladin -- Narcissus Reborn -- The Masochist Aesthetic -- 3 Machinating (and Confessing) the Mekhane -- The Sign -- Containing Itself by Itself -- Deus Ex Machina -- Staging the "Authorless" Theater -- Playing the Child -- The Grace of Stealing -- It is Up to the Heart to Purify the Ears -- 4 Sculpting Desire -- The Nouvel Abelard -- Another Pygmalion -- Re-Becoming a Child -- The Invisible Gardener -- A Natural Trickery -- A Different Kind of Theater -- Fusing the Useful and the Agreeable, Virtue and Pleasure -- A Question of Physics, Morality, and Poetics -- 5 Social Contract, Masochist Contract -- Two Fathers -- The Law Before the Law -- The Third Party -- Un Peuple Naissant -- An Authority that is Nothing -- Simulating The Mother's Voice -- Rousseau's Revolutions -- "All of this Had AIRS OF MAGIC AND RELIGION" -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.