In the days of Louis XIV, the experience of pleasure was as much a social and political tool as an essential ingredient in personal life. From the Memories of Louis XIV comes the term "society of pleasures" to describe the masses who lived under Louis's rule, the collective body that became enthralled in the trances of pleasure and thus secured within the bonds of regal power.

Kathryn Hoffmann, in an interdisciplinary volume, explores this society by studying the strange couplings of pleasure, power, and knowledge that took shape within it. Across tales of harems and figs, narratives on chocolate and secret histories, she analyzes the politics of pleasure and knowledge arising in notions of public rights, conundrums of aesthetics, and the politics of erotics.

In so doing, Hoffmann reveals that the society of pleasures was not law, or policy, or an exact procedure of totalizing power, but a state and a people where the logic of pleasure always contained the trap of violent oppression; a place where desire and force, the caress and the grip, informed and fed upon each other.

A unique work that manages to intertwine both canonical literary works and documents from the margins of history, philosophy, and gastronomy, Society of Pleasures locates the passions and essence of a legendary society and traces the routes to the modern in the fissures of an absolutist dream.