Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste by Carrie D. Shanafelt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste by Carrie D. Shanafelt Stella Sandford Carrie D. Shanafelt, Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022). Pp. 194. $32.50 paper, $95.00 cloth. Carrie Shanafelt's Uncommon Sense is part of a recent resurgence in Bentham studies, driven by the ongoing, decades-long work of the Bentham Project at University College London on a complete critical edition of Bentham's work, including previously unpublished works. The volume Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality (edited by Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Michael Quinn), published in 2014, is a startling read. It is difficult not to believe that the mid-late twentieth-century reception of Bentham via Foucault would have been very different had Foucault had access to these manuscripts. In contrast to the stern utilitarian picture of Bentham popularized by Dickens's Gradgrind, or the disciplinary panopticist picture of Foucault, this volume reveals Bentham as an astonishing sexual radical, not just in terms of his proposals for legal reforms but in the promotion of the joys of sexual exuberance. (Louis Crompton published some of Bentham's work on sexuality in 1978, in the Journal of Homosexuality, but it seems to have received little attention at the time.) Shanafelt's book is the result of an encounter with Bentham's work on sexuality and an attempt—perhaps the first—to locate it within his larger intellectual project of reform. Shanafelt approaches Bentham—squarely—from the standpoint of the present and the demands for equality characteristic of late twentieth-century and twenty-first century progressive social and political movements. Bentham emerges from Uncommon Sense as a formidable ally for those groups of people (who Shanafelt often identifies as women, sexual and religious minorities, the poor, colonized and enslaved people) that were and often still are deprived of the right to be the "custodians of their own bodily pleasures and political power" (49). As the book's title suggests, Shanafelt locates Bentham critically against the presumption of the eighteenth-century discourse of common sense, or more particularly the imagined universal figure of common sense who, of course, in fact, has the common sense and the tastes of the male, heterosexual ruling class. Shanafelt presents Bentham arguing against any appeal to an imaginary common sense in favor of an analysis of actual human behavior and against the presumption of the universality of one's own tastes, both aesthetic and sexual. Building on the existing literature on Bentham's analysis of the ferocity and cruelty of the prohibition and punishment of same-sex desire, the book charts Bentham's location of the force of that ferocity in "aesthetic" disgust (the energetic disavowals of the prosecutors also invite a psychoanalytic reading) and his consistent and insistent argument against "antipathy" as a defensible basis for morality or law. Any reader of Bentham's well-known works will be familiar with his defense of pleasure as the basis for happiness. But his defense of sexual pleasure—of whatever form, with whomsoever one chooses to find it—as a good in itself when it is not achieved at the expense of another's pain reveals a lesser known and possibly even queer Bentham. The most interesting and potentially game-changing aspect of Shanafelt's book for Bentham studies centers on the fact that Bentham was continually thinking and writing about sexual liberty alongside all of his work on legal reform, moral philosophy, and theology. Shanafelt proposes, on this basis, that sexual liberty was for Bentham "a test case" for all his arguments in these fields, that [End Page 499] he consistently tested "liberal rights" discourses, for example, against a criterion requiring "sexual liberty from legal prescription" (and of course always found those discourses wanting) (59, 85). Given that most of these writings on sexuality were not published in Bentham's lifetime, sexual liberty could only function for Bentham as a private test for the utility of government in providing for the happiness of people, but this is a test which has, arguably, proved its worth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries...