Aroma Philosophorum. The Case of Casanova

C.W. MARIS VAN SANDELINGENAMBACHT?
AROMA PHILOSOPHORUM: THE CASE OF CASANOVA
ABSTRACT. The degree of truth of Casanova’s History of My Life is a matter of heated

debate. Doubt has been cast particularly on whether his stories of incest with his daughters
represent fact or fiction. In this respect, Casanova’s incest narratives are similar to many
incest cases that are taken to court nowadays. Because incest occurs in the bosom of the
family, the testimony of the plaintiff and the suspect is often the only evidence offered,
with all empirical proof lacking. What is a judge supposed to do when the stories of the
two contending parties contradict each other at essential points?
In this essay, the case of Casanova is referred to in order to expose the inadequacy of
the claim of the narrativist theory of law, that all human knowledge consists of narrational
constructs that cannot be verified by any independent reality. If the reality of law was
as narrative as Casanova’s memoirs, a judge could never establish adequate proof. But,
as Susan Haack’s ‘foundherentism’ shows, it is perfectly possible to base knowledge on
experience, even in incest cases.
KEY WORDS: casanova, coherentism, foundationalism and foundherentism, hedonism,

incest, internal and external narrative coherence, melancholy, memories, narrative theory,
recovered normative coherence
C ASANOVA AND L EONILDA
‘We arranged our clothing, and my daughter, sitting beside me, called me
“husband” even as I called her “wife”. By sweet kisses we confirmed
what we had just done, and even if an angel had come to tell us we had
monstrously outraged nature we should have laughed at him.’1 In these
words Casanova (1725–1798) tells of his incestuous relationship with his
biological daughter Leonilda in his History of My Life. By chance he has
met her again in 1770 during his travels and it is paternal love at first sight:
She was my daughter, and nature, far from preventing me from having all the feelings of a
lover toward her, forbade me to have only the inconsequential ones of father.2
? The author is professor of legal philosophy at the University of Amsterdam; this essay
was translated from the Dutch by Donald Gardner.
1 Giacomo Casanova, The History of my Life, 11, 1998, 313.
2 Ibid, 11, 307.
Law and Critique 10: 287–322, 1999.

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
288 C.W. MARIS VAN SANDELINGENAMBACHT
In the paradisiac palace garden where they meet Leonilda responds to her
father’s lascivious passion, and surrenders to the call of her blood. This
incest scene is part of a much larger scenario that is concluded to the
satisfaction of all parties. As her father and lover, Casanova does not only
seek his own pleasure, but also helps his beloved daughter to fulfill her
marital obligations. Leonilda is happily married to the worthy Marquis
della C., ‘who is old and very rich’. In one sense however the marriage
is incomplete – at the age of seventy, the Marquis is no longer capable
of siring children by his young wife. This means that his estate will fall
into the hands of a pack of parasitic nephews and nieces who are waiting
impatiently for him to die. Thanks to Casanova’s incestuous lovemaking,
the Marquis can expect an heir in nine months’ time.3 All’s well that ends
well.
This narrative of incest raises two questions that also dominate the cur-
rent debate over incest: Is it wrong? and Is it true? In accordance with the
prevailing view among eighteenth-century freethinkers and as a libertine
himself, Casanova answers the first question in the negative: ‘I thought to
myself that, in a state of nature, the thing would not arouse horror, and
that all the horror that was felt for it came only from education and force
of habit.’4 He embraces incest rather as something that has a charm of its
own: ‘incestuous relations, the eternal subject of Greek tragedies, instead
of making me weep, makes me laugh’.5
While Casanova himself claims that his story is actually true, the reliab-
ility of his History of My Life has been questioned ever since its publication
in 1822. Suggestions have been made that it consists largely of fables and
bravado. Some authors have even maintained that there was no such person
as Casanova and that his purported memoirs may have been written by a
novelist like Stendhal. Stefan Zweig called Casanova the ‘poet of his own
life’.6 Is the role that Casanova attributes to himself in his memoirs not just
as fictional as the aristocratic pseudonym ‘De Seingalt’, that he frequently
used – an invented name that he justified by arguing that the letters of
the alphabet are freely available to everyone? The question arises then of
3 Between Casanova and the Marquis there is also a metaphorical form of kinship,
making the relationship even more incestuous: on their first meeting they kiss on the mouth
in the fashion of freemasons.
4 Above n. 2, 11, p. 178.
5 Ibid., 7, 229.
6 Stefan Zweig, Drei Dichter ihres Lebens (Frankfurt on Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1938).
In Le véritable Casanova (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1950, at 12–14) Joseph le Gras
queries whether the Casanova of the memoirs is the real Casanova: during his life, after all,
he succeeded in hoodwinking his contemporaries. Le Gras analyses the History of My Life
as a novel and not as a historical account.
AROMA PHILOSOPHORUM 289
whether Casanova’s tale of incest really took place and, if so, whether his
daughter really consented with such abandon as her father claimed.
Today these two questions converge in particular in the law courts.
Widespread indignation was provoked recently when the first, ethical,
question was raised by the Dutch barrister Spong, who defended the right
of parental access to a girl of a man who was both her father and her
grandfather. Was Spong committing a breach of lawyers’ ethics by cre-
ating additional trauma for the mother/daughter and incest victim with this
monstrous demand? Entirely in keeping with Casanova’s own relativist
attitude the barrister argued that what was involved was just, ‘you know’,
antiquated prejudices. The taboo on incest is specific to certain cultures, so
why should the grand/father not have every right to see his grand/daughter
who was, after all, his own flesh and blood? The logical extension of
this would be for the lawyer to plead for the prohibition of incest to be
completely scrapped from the criminal code.
Currently the second question – that of epistemology and the require-
ments for legal proof – provokes even fiercer discussion than the other:
how reliable is the evidence of supposed victims of incest? Because incest
usually occurs in the bosom of the family, the only witnesses are the
victim and the perpetrator. What is a judge supposed to do when their
stories conflict and all empirical proof is lacking? The ascertaining of
truth in criminal law has moreover been made particularly complicated
by the recent rise of ‘recovered memories’ as evidence – adults’ memories
of traumatic experiences of incest during their childhood, that they have
suppressed for reasons of self-preservation and which have surfaced many
years later by therapy. The reliability of ‘recovered memories’ is fiercely
contested by specialists in this field. Thus judges are not only expected to
discover the truth in the conflicting accounts of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’
but also to find their way amid the conflicting interpretations with which
specialists adorn these accounts.
In many contemporary incest cases, therefore, the truth is at least as
difficult to ascertain as it is in the case of Casanova. Due to their excep-
tional narrative character one would think that a judge had no alternative
but to declare defendants not guilty. How, after all, can he decide beyond
reasonable doubt whether the alleged incest actually took place?
But are incest cases with their conflicting narratives, their lack of empir-
ical basis, so exceptional? Are they not in fact exemplary of legal cases in
general? This is indeed the case, if one subscribes to the narrative theory
of law. According to this theory all human knowledge consists of stories –
narrative constructs that cannot be verified by any independent empirical
reality. The law therefore displays a kinship with literature. This is also
true of the ‘facts’ that legal proof is based on: legal facts do not exist as
objective data, but form part of a narrative about reality. A narrativist like
Jackson (1990) therefore advises us
to abandon popular notions of ‘reference’ (. . . ) both as regards the word of the witness in
relation to the anterior facts to which he/she claims to refer, and to the relationship between
the general rule of law (the major premise) and the legally determined facts of the case (the
minor premise).7
According to Jackson the major and minor premises of the juridical syllo-
gism each have their own narrative form and content, and the conclusion is
reached by assessing the similarities between these stories. This conclusion
must meet with the criterion for plausibility of narrative coherence: the
syllogism offers a plausible conclusion provided the different stories form
a coherent whole, and also provided that they comply with the narrative
world view which members of society rely on for meaning. Justification
of the minor premise in which the ‘facts’ are ascertained is also a question
of coherence and not of correspondence with an external reality. The story
of a witness must therefore first of all be internally coherent – that is,
it must show a consistency and consonance in its separate elements. The
evidence must also comply with the requirement of external coherence;
in other words, it must be plausible in light of the prevailing stock of
social knowledge, consisting of exemplary stories and social constructs
that reflect one’s everyday experience and culture. MacCormick makes
an additional terminological distinction between the requirement of nar-
rative coherence for the minor premise and that of normative coherence
for the major one: the normative part of the legal decision is coher-
ent if the norms in question can be contained under a more general
principle.8
I would argue against this that incest cases, because of their extreme
narrative character, expose the inadequacy of the narrativist theory of law,
by taking it to absurd lengths. If the reality of law was a narrative such as
Casanova’s – fictional or otherwise – History of My Life, all verdicts would
lose their meaning and legitimacy: a judge could never establish adequate
proof. But basing knowledge on experience is perfectly possible, even in
incest cases. The narrativist treatment of law as being similar to stories or
literature is founded in romantic exaggeration.
7 Bernard S. Jackson, “The Normative Syllogism and the Problem of Reference”, in
Patrick Nerhot (ed.), Law, Interpretation and Reality (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 380.
8 Neil MacCormick, “Coherence in Legal Justification”, in Aleksander Peczenik,
Lars Lindahl and Bert van Roermund (eds.), Theory of Legal Science (Dordrecht/
Boston/Lancaster: Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 235–251.
T HE C ASE OF C ASANOVA
Poet of His Life

In the case of Casanova, it is unclear how far his incest story is truth
or fiction. On the basis of detailed archival research, J. Rives Childs,
the standard biographer, has shown that Casanova’s memoirs are largely
faithful to the truth.9 Félicien Marceau on the other hand regards the pas-
sages on incest as being fictional, amongst other things because they are
noticeably lacking in convincing detail.10
For the psychoanalyst François Roustang the issue is not so much
whether the memoirs are true or false; he criticizes Rives Childs because
he entirely overlooks the fictional element that results from the consciously
literary character of the memoirs: as the son of an actress, Casanova com-
posed both his life and his account of it as a tragicomedy.11 Roustang reads
his memoirs as an attempt to exorcize his fear of life by simultaneously
revealing and concealing it in complex literary montages. Casanova’s liter-
ary self-portrait therefore offers us much more than just a series of elegant
adventures, fictional or true.
What can one say about the History of My Life, and the place that
Casanova’s incest story occupies in it in terms of the criterion of narrative
coherence? Roustang discerns a psychoanalytical structure in the text that
gives a meaningful place to all the basic components. According to this
analysis, Casanova presents his protagonist as an independent man who
liberates himself from all obligations and constraints. His aim is to achieve
control of his own life and to be answerable to no-one.
For one of the passions that possess him is to be free of any mother or father, free of any
genealogy other than the one concocted for his theater, free of the marks of any history save
that inscribed in a script. The seducer must be free of all attachments if he is to succeed in
making all kinds of promises without committing himself to any – so that he can live out
his scenarios, one after the other.12
With this aim in view, Casanova has to attain independence with regard
to the ‘law of the father’ that stands in the way of his infantile fantasy
of omnipotence. The trend is set in one of Casanova’s earliest childhood
memories, in which the young hero steals a sparkling piece of crystal from
his father, only to put the blame on his brother. In later life this quest for
9 J. Rives Childs, Casanova (New York City: K.S. Giniger Company, 1989).
10 Félicien Marceau, Une Insolente Liberté: les aventures de Casanova (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1983), 309.
11 François Roustang, The Quadrille of Gender. Casanova’s ‘Memoirs’ (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988).
12 Ibid., 21.
independence is a continuing presence in his efforts to undermine lawful

order.
Casanova’s attitude towards authority and tradition is ambivalent. He
acknowledges their power, but does not respect them. Wherever possible,
he subverts them to his own advantage and makes them seem ridiculous.
Roustang therefore speaks of ‘subversion without revolution’. Other com-
mentators allude to Casanova’s uncertain social standing as the bastard son
of a Venetian patrician, which led him to adopt an aristocratic lifestyle,
while at the same time, his humble origins in an actor’s family deprived
him of automatic access to these circles. Casanova thus felt compelled to
achieve his goal by unlawful means and constantly indulged in role-play
to conceal his true identity.
This desire for an almost cosmic omnipotence is expressed in Cas-
anova’s efforts to shake off established identities and inconvenient distinc-
tions. Casanova abandoned himself above all to complicated intrigues to
neutralize the difference between the sexes – according to Roustang this
is a second motif in his ‘life’. Here too we see his ambivalence. He is
constantly provoking exchanges of female and male roles – for instance,
by swapping costumes with his partner during a masked ball.
According to Roustang incest plays a central role in this theatrical
fiction. By having sexual intercourse with his daughter, Casanova killed
two birds with one stone: firstly the act of incest breaks the law of the
father, because it encroached on the family ties that are the cornerstone of
the social order; secondly it blurs the distinction between generations and
identities. Roustang agrees with Marceau that Casanova’s incest stories
reflect an idea rather than his actual experience. Doesn’t Casanova himself
hint at the idea of a theatrical fiction when he defines incest as ‘the eternal
subject of Greek tragedies’?
Vixi
From a philosophical point of view you can also construct another sort of
narrative and normative coherence. In my reading, Casanova’s memoirs
revolve around the solution of the tragic tension between his hedonistic
philosophy of life and his melancholy awareness that all things must
pass.
The greater part of the thousands of pages of his memoirs follows
time’s arrow in a chronological account of Casanova’s adventures: the hero
travels tirelessly from one city to another in search of ever new ‘stages’
where he can glitter in social and intellectual circles, strike up relations
with beautiful woman and relieve superstitious millionaires of their money.
He appears here in the first person, as an ‘I’ who acts in the past imperfect.
The adventures of the hero are told in the perspective of a first-person nar-
rator looking back on his own past. But due to the vivacity of his narrative
style and the numerous dialogues, his memoirs feel like an unmediated
evocation of the time these events took place.
This chronology is punctuated at regular intervals by passages that give
the narrator’s retrospective commentary on the vicissitudes of the hero.
A first person then speaks of them in the present tense. The first-person
narrator thus speaks in the present time about an I that is active in the past:
by using this device of a distance in time, Casanova the Narrator can play
spectator to Casanova the Actor.
The commentary in the foreword takes on a unique position in the com-
position of the whole. For the reader it precedes Casanova’s life story, but
for the writer it was the end. The time of the action here is that when the
life and authorship of the I coincide. In his old age, the narrator is taking
stock of both his life and of his literary account of it:
In this year 1797, at the age of seventy-two, when, though I am still breathing, I can say
vixi (‘I have lived’), I can find no pleasanter pastime than to converse with myself about
my own affairs.13
At this moment his life consists of writing his memoirs, and he describes
this moment. Casanova’s own literary credo is perfectly applicable here:
‘my life is my subject, my subject is my life’.14
The narrator’s commentary in the foreword and his interim com-
mentaries contain two main themes.15 In the first instance he places the
vicissitudes of his life in the context of a general philosophy. Secondly,
he compares and contrasts his two I’s: what is the relation between Cas-
anova the young buck and Casanova the aged narrator? These two trends
in his commentary betray a dramatic tension, that gives an extra dimen-
sion to Casanova’s light-footed lifestyle that Stephan Zweig labelled a
‘philosophy of the superficial’.16
Sequere Deum
The philosophy of life embraced by Casanova is hedonism, the attempt
to attain the maximum amount of pleasure. He repeatedly sums up the
moral of his story by quoting the motto of his favourite writer, the Roman
13 Supra n. 2, 1, 28.
14 Supra n. 2, 1, 28.
15 See also: Marie-Françoise Luna, Casanova Mémorialiste (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1988, at 335). Luna points out that the passages of commentary in the early manuscripts
were underlined because they were intended to be printed in italics.
16 Supra n. 7, at 50.
poet Horace, carpe diem – live for the day; get as much pleasure from
the present moment as you can and let tomorrow look after itself. Without
setting himself any fixed goal, his hero goes whichever way the wind blows
with what he calls a ‘systematic lack of system’. He follows the principle of
sequere deum (follow God), while interpreting it in a lighthearted secular
way: ‘abandon yourself to whatever fortune brings’.
Excessive planning and pondering only makes you unhappy. In keep-
ing with this Casanova also rejects rationalism. He replaces the Cartesian
cogito with a sensualist’s alternative:
I know that I have existed, and since I am sure of that because I have felt, I also know that
I shall no longer exist when I have ceased to feel.17
Happiness is to be found in sensual pleasures and erotic ones in particular:

‘Pleasure is immediate sensual enjoyment; it is a complete satisfaction
which we grant to our senses in all that they desire’.18
Human happiness does however require spirituality – a spiritual refin-
ing of the animal instincts involved in eating, aggression and procreation.
Hedonistic happiness, Casanova argues, is only attained through a con-
scious participation in these sensual inclinations. The capacity for thought
means that human beings are capable of planning and anticipating their
pleasure as well as savouring it in retrospect. Due to this spiritualizing
tendency, human enjoyment is much more sophisticated than that of anim-
als. Instead of gluttony, crude revenge and sensual debauchery, we are
capable of epicureanism, calculated retaliation and mutual love.
For Casanova, philosophy consists of a similar mode of thought at a
more general level, and since it is a genuinely practical philosophy it is
also applied at once in practice. A good philosopher will ponder on how
to attain the maximum happiness. To achieve this you must set aside all
your prejudices and seek pleasure in all its forms. A prejudice is ‘every
so-called duty for which we find no reason in nature’.19 The hedonistic
philosopher therefore will reject prevailing norms when they get in the
way of his pleasure.
Casanova unmasks the traditional virtues as no more than customs.
When a good-looking woman hides behind the pretext of virtue to preserve
her virginity, he replies:
If your duty (. . . ) forces you to repulse me despite yourself, it follows that your duty is a
burden to you, it is your mortal ennemy. (. . . ) For your own sake, begin by trampling this
insolent duty underfoot.20
17 Supra n. 2, 1, 29.
18 Supra n. 2, 3, 194.
19 Supra n. 2, 3, 195.
20 Supra n. 2, 11, 9.
He is particularly harsh on Christian morality. In his contempt for religious

prejudices, his philosophy is once more a practical one; he turns theory
into deeds. He experiences added pleasure when the fruit he plucks is
‘forbidden’, for instance, in love-affairs with nuns where he encroaches
‘the rights of an omnipotent husband, snatching from his seraglio the most
beautiful of his sultanas.’21
Casanova’s help with an abortion is the perfect climax of this trans-
gressive hedonism: He increases his pleasures to the maximum through a
combination of breaking the commands of church and state, confidence-
trickery and sexual pleasure. During his stay in Paris in 1759, Casanova
falls in love with a woman, who rejects him in favour of her official lover.
When her lover goes abroad, she discovers that she is pregnant and asks
Casanova to help her obtain an abortion. While reminding her that abor-
tion is punishable by death, he grants her assistance. He deceives her into
believing that he is a master in occult wisdom and that he has a magic
prescription for bringing on a miscarriage – the aroma philosophorum as
described by the great mystic Paracelsus. This philosophical aroma is an
alchemical ointment to be introduced into the womb through the vagina
four times a day for seven days. Or rather:
The cylinder must [. . . ] stimulate the channel leading to the closed door of the little house
which sheltered the little enemy whose departure was sought.22
On his own authority Casanova adds an extra ingredient to Paracelsus’s

prescription; the ointment must be mixed with sperm that has not yet lost
its natural warmth. Since her lover is unfortunately absent he is selfless
enough to propose himself as the donor of the magic ointment. The ‘oint-
ment’ fails to bring about an abortion, but it has the fortunate side-effect
that, after a number of applications, his loved one finally reciprocates Cas-
anova’s passion. The aroma may then rightly be called philosophical, since
it is the perfect means of attaining a peak of pleasure in defiance of the
reigning morality.
In short, ‘The philosopher is he who refuses no pleasure which does
not produce greater pains and who knows how to create pleasures.’23
Casanova has hardly begun to explain this subtle ethical point to a good-
looking neighbour, when they start kissing each other passionately. ‘In
such considerations we spent the whole night’.24
21 Supra n. 2, 4, 33.
22 Supra n. 2, 5, 196.
23 Supra n. 2, 3, 195.
24 Supra n. 2, 3, 196.
Harm Principle
But supposing a person’s pleasure is at the expense of that of another? Cas-
anova limits his hedonism by subjecting it to the harm principle: ‘Happy
they who know how to obtain pleasure without harming anyone’.25 A
hedonist who harms another is committing a reprehensible crime.26
In the light of this criterion, Casanova can justify himself by saying
that he has only sinned in the sense of traditional prejudice. He has not
impinged on universal harmony: if anyone was harmed by his sins it was
only himself and they were thus in no sense criminal. He acknowledges
only one exception – namely the cases where he seduced a woman. But, he
maintains, such cases were rare because on most occasions he was the one
who was seduced. Unlike Don Juan, Casanova was indeed not a profes-
sional seducer who deliberately harmed his victims. Casanova scornfully
describes power-hungry people like this as ‘the enemy of the object on
which he has designs (. . . ) a true criminal’.27 Casanova’s sole desire is to
love and be loved in return. Pleasure in lovemaking presupposes that it is
mutual.
As long as there is no question of any abuse of power he deems it
legitimate however to deceive women, even from the perspective of his
harm principle. Deception between men and women is symmetrical, he
argues, because women are born deceivers. Moreover, in matters of love
both parties allow themselves to be taken in.28
Casanova also approves of anyone who cheats a fool. He deems this
form of deception legitimate because it restores cosmic harmony.
You will laugh when you discover that I often had no scruples about deceiving nitwits and
scoundrels and fools when I found it necessary. (. . . ) I always congratulate myself when I
remember catching them in my snares, for they are insolent and presumptuous to the point
of challenging intelligence. We avenge intelligence when we deceive a fool (. . . ). In short,
deceiving a fool is an exploit worthy of an intelligent man.29
Even if he deceives those who are dear to him, Casanova finds an excuse
for it. His wise readers, he writes,
will not condemn me when they see me emptying my friends’ purses to satisfy my whims.
They were possessed by chimerical projects, and by making them hope for my success I at
the same time hoped to cure them of their follies by opening their eyes. I deceived them to
25 Supra n. 2, 1, 38.
26 Supra n. 2, 12, at 111.
27 Supra n. 2, 12, 111.
28 Supra n. 2, 1, at 27.
29 Supra n. 2, 1, 27.
make them wise (. . . ). It was money which was to be spent on follies; I merely changed its
application by making it pay for mine.30
Here too, properly considered, no real harm has been done. In keeping with
this hedonistic ethical system Casanova has lived for the day throughout
his life without stooping to behaviour that is criminal in a philosophical
sense.
Unhappy the Body Politic Whose Legislator was not a Philosopher

Casanova was prosecuted several times for crimes in the sense of positive
law, but he always saw this as unjust. He had little respect for the law and
he was in a position to know. Besides being a great lover, an adventurer,
a scholar and philosopher, he was also a jurist: at the age of sixteen he
gained his doctorate in law at Padua University, against which he felt ‘an
unconquerable aversion’31 In its turn the criminal law frequently picked on
this remarkable jurist as its target.
On 26 July, 1755 Casanova was arrested in bed by thirty policemen of
the Venice Inquisition, and taken to the dungeon in the Doges’ Palace via
the infamous Bridge of Sighs. He was incarcerated in a dark low-ceilinged
cell of two metres by four, remaining in solitary confinement for more than
a year, with fleas and rats as his only company. On 1 November, 1756 he
made his famous escape, after which he picked up his hedonistic career
where he had left it off.
There was no doubt in Casanova’s mind that his sentence was illegal. In
the first place the State Inquisition had transgressed the rule of law, a basic
requirement for legitimate government activity, according to Enlighten-
ment philosophy. Nobody had told Casanova why he was put in jail, nor
how long his sentence was. No hearing or trial had been held.
When this tribunal proceeds against a delinquent, it is already sure that he is such; so what
need has it to talk with him? And when it has condemned him, what need is there to give
him the bad news of his sentence? His consent is not necessary; it is better, they say, to let
him hope.32
Casanova realized ‘that the tribunal of the State Inquisitors could find me
guilty of crimes of which I had no knowledge’.33
Moreover in a philosophical sense he was guilty of no crime:
As a great libertine, a bold talker, a man who thought of nothing but enjoying life I
could not find myself guilty, but seeing that I was nevertheless treated as such, I spare
30 Supra n. 2, 1, 34.
31 Supra n. 2, 1, 91.
32 Supra n. 2, 4, 217.
33 Supra n. 2, 4, 197.
my reader all that rage and indignation and despair made me say and think against the
horrible despotism which was oppressing me.34
The Inquisition’s own secret notes show that Casanova was condemned to
five years in prison on grounds of making offensive remarks about religion
in public: a spy had heard him read a satirical antireligious poem with
a distinct sexual content. Casanova capped the charge by stating that he
owned books about magic and upheld atheistic ideas, something that was
regarded as a breach of the peace. But to define such things as crimes
is nonsense philosophically speaking, because that would be to resort to
religious prejudice.
He also regarded the legal enforcement of traditional public morals
as unjustified repression. Moreover it has the opposite effect to what
it intends. A lawmaker, he argued, should know that prohibitions are
regarded as challenges to do exactly what they prohibit – a piece of wisdom
of which the machinery of law is all too little aware. ‘Unhappy the body
politic whose legislastor was not a philosopher!’35
In this way Casanova depicts himself as an innocent victim of a despotic
state that trampled on the Enlightenment ideal of individual autonomy and
the liberties pertaining to it. Unfortunately he was a victim of his poor
sense of reality: ‘I was a fool. I reasoned like a free man.’36
Like many Enlightenment philosophers, Casanova advocated freedom
but not equality and democracy. Only an enlightened elite can permit itself
freedom, this self-proclaimed aristocrat argued. The primitive masses were
to be kept in their place with the use of force and superstition. As an elitist
libertine Casanova was also a declared opponent of the French Revolution.
In 1760 he had a discussion with Voltaire, who wanted to free people
from the chains of religion. Voltaire: ‘Loving the human race, I should
wish to see it happy as I am, free; and superstition cannot be combined
with freedom’. Casanova: ‘Then would you wish to see sovereignty in the
people?’
‘God forbid! One alone must govern. (. . . ) I want him to command a
free people.’
‘I am for Hobbes. (. . . ) A people without superstition would be philo-
sophical, and philosophers will never obey. The people can be happy only
if they are cursed, downtrodden, kept in chains.’
‘Are you Venetians free?’
‘As free as it is possible under an aristocratic government. (. . . ) My
imprisonment, for example, was an outright act of despotism; but knowing
34 Supra n. 2, 4, 205.
35 Supra n. 2, 1, 169.
36 Supra n. 2, 4, 192.
that I had myself abused my freedom, at certain moments I considered that

they had been right to imprison me without the usual formalities.’
‘At that rate no one is free in Venice.’37
Tristisque Senectus
Besides this hedonistic philosophy of life, the commentary also contains
a diachronic theme as counterpoint: the aged writer compares his present
situation with that of the young pleasure-seeker. This second theme is at
odds with Casanova’s hedonism because now he is getting on in years it
is hard for him to live for the day. In 1761, for instance, he is aroused by
the sight of the Countess Ambrosio suckling her baby. After the child has
drunk his fill, some drops of milk spill from her nipple ‘which marked the
center of a perfectly chiselled breast as white as snow’.38
“Ah, Signora! It is a crime; allow my lips to gather this nectar which will put me among
the gods, and do not fear that I will bite you.”
In those days I still had teeth.39
Does old age mean the collapse of hedonism as a project? And if so, does
that mean that Casanova’s History of My Life is incoherent?
Casanova describes his life story as a play in three acts. The character
of the protagonist preserves his basic identity throughout his life, but his
temperament changes from one act to the next, passing through the four
classical ‘humours’ in turn. In his earliest years Casanova has a phlegmatic
temperament. He is the opposite of the adventurer he would later become;
he is a sickly, somewhat backward youth to whom nobody gives much
affection. ‘My father and mother never spoke to me’.40 For the rest he
leaves this unpleasant period out of his memoirs because he remembers
nothing of it.
He begins the first act with his earliest memories, aged eight. From that
time on Casanova grows into the ideal hedonistic hero who will have the
world at his feet. This Casanova has a distinctly sanguine temperament: he
appears as an energetic, courageous, cheerful and inventive man, passion-
ate in his pursuit of pleasure and ever-eager to make new acquaintances.
With his striking good looks and brilliant conversation, he makes a deep
impression wherever he goes. In this period the whole of Europe appears
as a harem that exists exclusively to serve his pleasures. Due to his wealthy
37 Supra n. 2, 6, 244–245.
38 Supra n. 2, 8, 230.
39 Supra n. 2, 8, 252.
40 Supra n. 2, 1, 46.
friends and his use of the occult to swindle people, he can live in style and
move in the best circles.
The young Casanova views older people who preserve the illusion
that they are still attractive alternately with a smile or with loathing. His
description of D’Arzigny, the ‘doyen of dandies’, a ninety-year old Epicur-
ean who still lives by the etiquette and fashion of the court of Louis XIV
is amusing and touching:
This amiable though decrepit and shaky old man had such sweetness of character that
I believed everything he said. (. . . ) A large posy of tuberoses and jonquils in the top
buttonhole of his coat, together with a strong smell of ambergris form the pomade that
kept his false hair and eyebrows attached to his head – even with these, his teeth gave off
an extremely strong smell (. . . ) which I found intolerable. Except for that, I would have
sought his society as often as I could.41
But you could also see this portrait as a harbinger of the fate that awaited
Casanova with the passage of the years. His first sign of pessimism occurs
at the age of thirty-six, when he begins to lose his carefree faith in the
sanguine energy of his youth. Gradually the roles are reversed. His first act
closes at the age of thirty-eight when he falls a helpless victim to the young
prostitute, La Charpillon who drives him to despair by alternately leading
him on and then rejecting him. At his wit’s end and no longer a shadow
of the proud independent hero he was, he resolves to commit suicide. His
attempt fails, but since that time his life is permeated by death. ‘It was on
that fatal day at the beginning of September 1763 that I began to die and
that I ceased to live’.42
In the second act Casanova plays a man in mid-life, an age ‘which
Fortune commonly scorns, and for which women care little’.43 At the age
of forty-six he realizes that he has grown old: his looks have lost their
youthful appeal, his potency has decreased during the past eight years, his
pleasure in lovemaking has declined in intensity. Women no longer fall for
him at first sight: ‘I had to talk, rivals were preferred to me’.44 In 1770, at
the age of fifty-five he experiences ‘the last real pleasure I enjoyed in all
my life.’45 He now has to submit to paying for women’s favours. And love
that is not reciprocated soon loses its charm.
For this reason nature must abhor old age, which can itself attain to pleasure, but can never
give it. Youth shuns its presence, for youth’s deadly enemy is age, sad, weak, deformed,
hideous age, which drives it into lonely seclusion at last, and always too soon.46
41 Supra n. 2, 5, 115.
42 Supra n. 2, 9, 272.
43 Supra n. 2, 10, 299.
44 Supra n. 2, 12, 108.
45 Supra n. 2, 11, 293.
46 Supra n. 2, 2, 25.
Henceforth he spends his days mainly in literary and scholarly activities,

among them an Italian translation of the Iliad. Erotic pleasures only play a
modest background role now.
In the second act Casanova’s temperament becomes choleric, his optim-
istic love of life has vanished. In short, he is no longer his youthful
self:
I found myself a wholly different person, and the more I saw that I was perfectly happy
then, the more I had to admit that I had become unhappy, for the whole prospect of a
happier future no longer stretched before my eyes.47
The world around him has also become unrecognizable. After much travel
he returns to his beloved Paris where he once enjoyed so many triumphs.
Now however he feels like a stranger in this city; his former friends
have died, his mistresses have aged, fashions have changed, buildings and
streets have been rebuilt. In this new world he can no longer find his way:
‘Paris seemed to me to have become a labyrinth’.48 In 1774 the world-
weary hero returns to seek peace and quiet in his native city of Venice
from which he was banished in his riotous youth after his escape from the
Doges’ Palace in 1756.
The third and last act, old age, begins in 1783 when, at the age of fifty-
eight, he is again forced to leave Venice. This period ends with his death
on 4 June, 1798 in Dux, where he drags out the last thirteen years of his
life as librarian to the Count of Waldstein. In this final period Casanova’s
temperament is melancholic. Life has little more to offer him. Women no
longer give him anything except the occasional, meaningless favour. ‘And
I enjoy them, despising myself but also despising the women who grant
them to me.’49 As an eccentric intellectual Casanova does enjoy appreci-
ation in the circle round his noble patron. But when the latter is away on a
journey the proud but defenceless retired adventurer has no-one to protect
him from the humiliations he receives from some of the staff. The tone
of his gloomy reflections about old age becomes yet more dejected during
these melancholy years:
Now that I am entering my dotage everything I foresee is black. (. . . ) Accursed old age,
fit to inhabit hell, where others have already placed it: tristisque senectus (‘wretched old
age’).50
47 Supra n. 2, 12, 161.

48 Supra n. 2, 10, 290.
49 Supra n. 2, 6, 102.
50 Supra n. 2, 6, 167; quote from Virgil, the Georgics III, 67.
It is a problem for a hedonist to reconcile himself with this depressing

conclusion: living for the day is not easy when you are old. Hedonism
really only seems a viable attitude during the first act of Casanova’s life.
In keeping with this perception, Casanova idealized eternal youth in his
utopian novel, Isocaméron, which he wrote during this period and that was
published in 1788. In the opening scene the aged couple Jacques (109) and
Guillelmine (107) get a visit from a young couple who look remarkably
like them; it is their children Edouard and Elisabeth whom they had lost
eighty-one years ago in a shipwereck. The young couple must be 95 and
93 by now. How is it that they look so astonishingly youthful? Edouard
and Elisabeth tell them that after the shipwreck they landed as castaways
in the earthly paradise of the Mégamicres that is situated in the interior
of the earth, ‘a world where time is measured in a totally different way
than in ours’, an ideal ‘other world where time has no power to force
mortal creatures to grow old’.51 Casanova hoped to become famous with
this novel, but, like his earlier literary attempts, it proved unsuccessful.
It was in the last years of Act III that Casanova decided to write his
memoirs. But, just like his first eight disagreeable years, the third act of
his life itself is not included in them. The closing part of the History of My
Life ends abruptly in 1772 half way through the second act, and twenty-six
years before the end of his actual life. Rives Childs thinks that Casanova
regarded his adventures in the two decades between 1772 and the moment
of writing as too depressing to be worth recalling.
The melancholy Casanova of the third act does however appear as com-
mentator in his foreword and in asides during his autobiography. In doing
so he places his sanguine adventures in the melancholy light of finitude. It
is this dimension and the sense of the fleeting character of time that makes
the History of My Life a profoundly moving document.
The third [act] will apparently close here, where I am amusing myself writing these mem-
oirs. The comedy will then have ended, and I will have had its three acts. If it is hissed, I
hope that I shall not hear anyone tell me so.52
You Will Forget Henriette Too

In themselves hedonism and the transitory are not necessarily mutu-
ally exclusive categories, as Casanova’s most beloved mistress, Henriette,
explains to him in 1748 at a time when they are enjoying three months
of uninterrupted pleasure. During a pause in their embraces, she instructs
Casanova in the doctrine of hedonism. She rejects the antihedonist thesis
51 Casanova, Isocaméron (Paris: Editions Francois Bourin, 1988), 9.
52 Supra n. 2, 9, 307.
that perfect happiness does not exist because all happiness passes. An
analysis of the concept of transience immediately shows that this thesis
does not make a scrap of sense. It is true, she admits, that all happiness
is transitory in that it does not last forever, that it is mortal. But in this
sense the thesis has no meaning for mortal human beings like ourselves,
because for us, nothing lasts for ever. The thesis is also mistaken if you
mean by ‘the transitory’ that life does not offer one any uninterrupted
series of joys. Happiness presupposes after all that you also enjoy brief
periods of repose between your joys in order to recall and take stock of
your happiness. Perfect happiness therefore requires that your pleasures
are finite. If you take this into account, you can as a hedonist defend the
argument that enduring perfect happiness is possible, Henriette tells him.
This is particularly so if you alternate intense pleasures with beneficial
moments of repose throughout your life. She and Casanova would be able
to spend the rest of their life in the same way as they have done in these
months of perfect mutual happiness and finally enter the eternal repose of
death without any regrets.
To crown our happiness we could, when we are very old, die together, and then our happi-
ness would have been perfectly enduring. Death would not interrupt it but would only end
it.53
Unfortunately in reality the joys that Casanova and Henriette shared also
proved transitory in this third sense, in that they were not destined to enjoy
a lifelong loving relationship. Henriette stays with Casanova in secret in
order to escape the arranged marriage her aristocratic family is planning for
her. After only three months her whereabouts are discovered and she must
say goodbye to her greatest lover for ever. The social order then leaves no
room for perfect love: it lasts only as long as the couple can preserve their
anonymity protected from the cruel world. In her farewell letter Henriette
acknowledges that, on closer inspection, her ideal of permanent happiness
is an illusion:
Do not add to your grief by thinking of mine. Let us imagine that we have had a pleasant
dream, and let us not complain of our destiny, for never was an agreeable dream so long.
Let us boast of having succeeded in being happy for three months on end; there are few
mortals who can say as much.54
The dream is over and Casanova remains behind, lonely in their hotel
room in Geneva. In a pane in one of the windows Henriette has cut with
her diamond ring the words ‘You will forget Henriette too’.55 Casanova
53 Supra n. 2, 3, 58.
54 Supra n. 2, 3, 78.
55 Supra n. 2, 3, 76.
comments on this, how could I ever forget you. But it is true that time
heals all wounds. After three days of deep mourning, he plunges once more
into social life and gets a dose of gonorrhea from a dissolute actress. He
has never, however, forgotten Henriette and he writes in retrospect that her
memory remains a balm for his soul.
Undying happiness in the form of an exclusive lifelong love also goes
counter to Casanova’s need for independence and his adventurous and
sanguine temperament. Shortly after his relationship with Henriette he has
to defend himself before the State Inquisitor of Venice of having cheated
Signorina Marchetti with a false promise of marriage. Casanova talks his
way out of an awkward situation. ‘I like to do good at the expense of
my money, but not at the expense of my freedom’.56 Under the spell of
a passionate romantic affair, our hero often fantasizes that this time he will
accept the bondage of a relationship once and for all. Plans for marriage
develop. But when the chips are down he always manages to get out of this
situation at the last moment. He feels momentarily sad that he must leave
his sweetheart, only to plunge with renewed gaiety into the arms of a new
mistress: ‘it was always the same play, with nothing new but its title’.57
He is usually gallant enough to leave his ex-mistresses provided for – by
finding a more reliable candidate for her hand in marriage, for instance. He
manages to make everyone happy – although not perfectly so.
Despite the long line of mistresses who succeeded her, Henriette
remains Casanova’s model of the ideal beloved throughout his life. When
by coincidence he stays in the same hotel room in 1760, he is astonished
to come across Henriette’s text again as he looks out of the window.
Instantly remembering the moment when she had written the words for me thirteen years
earlier, I felt my hair stand on end. (. . . ) Ah, my dear Henriette! Noble and fond Hernriette
whom I had so greatly loved, where are you?58
Comparing his thirteen years’ younger self with the man of thirty-five he
has become, Casanova concludes that he is now less worthy of Henriette’s
love; he is still capable of loving someone but it is with less passion,
sensitivity and courage than before. His potency has also apparently
declined.
This physical and mental decline that accompanies the ageing process,
forms the third and most important reason why Henriette’s ideal of lifelong
happiness cannot be attained in practice. Only in the first act of his life does
Casanova abandon himself to lovemaking in carefree fashion. From then
56 Supra n. 2, 3, 100.
57 Supra n. 2, 12, 70.
58 Supra n. 2, 6, 220.
on it is downhill all the way. In the second and third acts of his life he
becomes increasingly frustrated as his passion is no longer reciprocated.
When all is said and done, the transitory character of real life is difficult to
reconcile with Casanova’s hedonistic ethics.
Ultima Linea Rerum

The hedonistic philosopher and the world-weary melancholic are espe-
cially contradictory because they have different attitudes towards time.
The hedonist gives Horace’s advice: ‘carpe diem quam minimum credula
postero’ (Carmina I II 8: live for the day and take no care for the morrow).
Casanova defines the greatest hedonist as:
he who best practices the difficult art of making it [life] pass quickly. He does not want to
make it shorter; but he wants amusement to render its passing insensible.59
Casanova’s attempt to immerse himself in the pleasure of the moment

is then a strategy to neutralize his awareness of transience and the finite
nature of things, literally to kill time. His Isocaméron too concerns a
struggle against time: ‘Because the greatest enemy of human youth is time:
it is its true destroyer’.60 The sanguine Casanova of the first act has no
difficulty in identifying with this hedonistic vision of past, present and
future:
since in this life nothing is real except the present, I enjoyed it, dismissing the images of
the past and loathing the darkness of the always dreadful future, for it offers nothing certain
except death, ultima linea rerum (“the final boundary of all things”).61
But the melancholic always paints his days a mournful black. He is a

prisoner of time because he is incapable of participating in present joys.
Casanova’s present is sadder than his past and his future looks even more
bleak. This shift in how he experiences time has already begun to operate
in the second act of his life when his humour becomes choleric. Existence
for him now means being-to-death:
I understood that it was only a matter of making less unpleasant a descent the final term
of which was death. It is on his descent that a man who has spent his life in pleasures
makes these somber reflections, for which there is no place in his flourishing youth, when
he needs to foresee nothing, when the present occupies him completely, and when an ever
unchanging and rose-colored horizon makes his life happy, and keeps his mind so happily
deluded that he laughs at the philosopher who dares to tell him that, behind the charming
horizon, there is old age, wretchedness, repentance, which always comes too late, and
death.62
59 Supra n. 2, 4, 35.
60 Supra n. 52, 20.
61 Supra n. 2, 7, 92.
62 Supra n. 2, 12, 162.
Negative Hedonism
There are two ways that Casanova can eliminate this conflict between
hedonism and melancholy, if he wants to give his life story an internal
coherence: either he can abandon all thought of attaining happiness, or
else he must do his best to brighten up his old age. The first course would
seem the more realistic, since it is clear that hedonism is an option that is
only open to the young. Now that he has become older and wiser, Casanova
would be advised to convert to a more rational view of life, such as the neg-
ative hedonism of Stoics and Epicureans like Cicero or Lucretius. Is there
a melancholic who doesn’t feel attracted to their pessimistic argument that
life as a whole brings more misfortune than happiness? Anyone who still
wishes to achieve as much happiness as possible should strive for ataraxia,
the constancy of mind that makes one indifferent to prosperity or adversity.
But Casanova rejects the Stoic argument that suffering has to prevail in
life. This is simply not true, he argues, since a moment of joy counts for
more than one of grief. A pleasurable experience is always pure because
at the moment of enjoyment you do not think of any suffering you may
undergo later. Moments of suffering on the other hand are always alle-
viated by the knowledge that they will come to an end. Casanova goes
on to propose a mental experiment to his readers. Suppose the lord of
the universe were to offer you a life of thirty years of which fifteen were
unpleasant and the other fifteen pleasurable. You may choose which half
you want to begin with. Everyone would prefer to begin with the lean
years because one’s suffering would be alleviated by the prospect of the
fat years to come. ‘You see, my dear reader, the conclusion which follows
from these considerations. Believe me, the wise man can never be wholly
unhappy.’63
A Stoic however would not be particularly impressed by Casanova’s
experiment. His assumption that pleasure and its opposite would cover an
equal number of years is entirely arbitrary. Supposing the proportions were
ten years of happiness to twenty of misfortune?
Casanova’s actual life moreover develops in exactly the reverse order:
the first act of 29 happy years preceded the 36 unhappy years of his later
life; contrary to how he depicted it in his mental experiment, his suffering
is not alleviated by the prospect of a better future. The thought that his
suffering will come to an end is no consolation either, because the end in
question is the last thing Casanova wants.
Happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure which man possesses, and they who do not love
it do not deserve it. (. . . ) Cicero says that it frees us from our ills. That great philosopher
63 Supra n. 2, 2, 37.
records the expenditure, but does not include the receipts in his accounting. (. . . ) Death
is a monster which drives an attentive speculator from the great theater before the play in
which he is infinitely interested is over. This alone is reason enough to hate it.64
Does Christianity have any alternative to offer? If he were a Christian,

Casanova would have the hope of a life of eternal bliss after death, finally
free of the coercive power of the senses. But this way is also closed to him,
because Casanova is suspicious of the doctrine of the immortality of the
soul:
So, since I cannot be perfectly sure that I am immortal until after I have ceased to live, I
may be forgiven if I am in no hurry to learn this truth. A knowledge purchased at the price
of life is bought too dearly.65
More generally Casanova rejects the whole idea of life as a purifying quest
for a higher form of truth. Unlike Roustang, his History of My Life is not a
Bildungsroman in the style of Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther.
Such was I, but unfortunately I am a different man today. The usual explanation is that age
brings wisdom. I do not understand how anyone can like the effect of an accursed cause.66
The Art of Memory

Casanova has no intention therefore of resolving the conflict between
hedonism and melancholy, by renouncing the former. There remains a
second course to follow: can the hedonist neutralize the melancholic
concept of time? The sanguine Casanova could set aside his sense of transi-
ence by concentrating on the actual pleasure of the moment. But the reality
of his melancholy situation does not lend itself to spending his time in this
way. What is his alternative then?
His prescription consists of negating the unhappiness of the present
time and immersing himself in his memories of past joys. Due to the fact
that time is irreversible you cannot physically recover the golden years of
your youth – unlike the Utopian protagonists in Isocaméron. But thought
is free and it is therefore possible to make a retrospective mental journey
and fill your present with the atmosphere of the past. ‘Remembering the
pleasures I enjoyed, I renew them, and I laugh at the pains which I have
endured and which I no longer feel.’67 Casanova’s approach is systematic.
He decides to write his memoirs:
64 Supra n. 2, 1, 35.
65 Supra n. 2, 1, 30. But according to the Prince of Ligne Casanova’s last words were: ‘I
have lived as a philosopher but I die a Christian’.
66 Supra n. 2, 2, 120.
67 Supra n. 2, 1, 29.
the only remedy I thought I could employ to keep from going mad or dying of chagrin over
the vexations to which I was subjected by the scoundrels who inhabited Count Waldstein’s
castle at Dux. By keeping myself busy writing ten or twelve hours a day, I have prevented
black melancholy from killing me or driving me mad.68
It was in this spirit that he immersed himself in writing the History of

My Life from 1790 onwards – to ensure that his past compensated for his
present.
Unlike the case with his hedonistic mental experiment, Casanova does
not try and make his years of misfortune seem less harsh by anticipating
a happier future; instead he harks back to a more pleasurable past. This
hedonistic manipulation of his old age enables him to conclude that the
balance of his life ends up as coming down on the side of happiness.
Reflecting on the inscription ‘You will forget Henriette too’, he writes:
‘When I consider that what makes me happy in my present old age is the
presence of my memory, I conclude that my long life must have been more
happy than unhappy.’69
His happiness in the third act of his life is based then on reliving the
joys he experienced in the first. In this way he could defend his hedon-
ist position against the onslaughts of transience; given the prospect of a
melancholy old age, it is in fact vital that you get the maximum pleasure
out of your youth. In doing so, not only do you conquer time, you also
invest in your old age. You build up a retirement pension of memories, on
which you can draw in your melancholy years so as to sustain yourself in
an impoverished present:
They [these sad thoughts] would kill me if I did not find ways to kill the cruel time which
brings them to birth in my soul, which, fortunately or unfortunately, is still young. I write
in order not to be bored; and I am delighted, I congratulate myself, that I enjoy doing it.70
Incest as an Elixir of Youth

Casanova’s strategy of creating an imaginary second youth in his memoirs
is only partially successful in rescuing his hedonism. The art of memory
is at best a device for killing the time of the melancholic in act III. There
remains yet another problem: how can Casanova get through the second,
choleric phase in his life? In this interim period he can no longer live for
the day, and he has not yet discovered the pastime of literature. You can
hardly begin your memoirs when you are middle-aged.
68 Supra n. 2, 11, 170.
69 Supra n. 2, 3, 27.
70 Supra n. 2, 12, 162.
In the second act incest makes its entry. To Casanova’s dismay women
no longer see him as lover but more as a father. When he falls for Amelia
in 1771, she rejects his advances. He takes her to the theater where she is
flattered by the compliments of a handsome young man. Casanova looks on
in jealousy and later complains to Amelia that the young seducer paid no
heed to the fact that he was present. ‘The dear child continued to torment
me by saying that he had probably thought I was her father’.71
Thanks to his incestuous passion, however, the father figure reem-
erges as a lover. By the act of physical union with his daughter Casanova
becomes a generation younger. He uses incest then as a means to recover
the happiness of his early life; not by way of memory as the aged memoir
writer did, but through a metamorphosis that is physical and symbolic at
the same time.
During his sanguine first act Casanova does not yet need any elixir of
youth. In this part of the History of My Life however, he does anticipate
the incest narratives of the second act. The only difference is that the older
person here who wants to kill time with acts of incest is always the Other
– that Casanova will later become. A first scene occurs in 1747. Casanova,
who is twenty-two at the time, visits an aged actress whose looks were to,
put it mildly, unappealing:
She displayed one half of her flaccid bosom, which aroused disgust precisely because it
showed what it might have been, and two rows of teeth which were obviously false. Her
hair was nothing but a wig which adhered very imperfectly to her forehead and temples;
and her shaking hands set mine shaking when she pressed them. She smelled of amber-
gris, as did the whole room, and the fawning in which she indulged to show me that she
found me attractive very nearly overcame the effort I was making to keep from laughing.
Her extremely elaborate attire was of a fashion which must have been outmoded twenty
years earlier. I saw with terror the marks of hideous old age on a face which, before
time had ruined it, must have made many a man a lover. But what put me in a sort of
daze was the childish effrontery with which this relic of time played up her supposed
attractions.72
Long ago this woman had seduced Casanova’s father. On learning his
name, she exclaims: ‘I adored your father. Unjustly jealous, he abandoned
me. But for that, you would have been my son. Let me embrace you like a
mother.’73
In the case of another older woman, the superstitious and immensely
rich Marquise d’Urfé, sexual intercourse does in fact take place, between
1757 and 1763. Casanova’s purpose was to trick the Marquise out of her
fortune. He relieves her of a million francs by fooling her into believing
71 Supra n. 2, 12, 64.
72 Supra n. 2, 2, 290.
73 Supra n. 2, 2, 291.
that he possesses occult powers, by which he can bring it about that her
soul will be reincarnated in the body of a male baby. After this remarkable
occurrence she will be able to communicate with the spirits of the four ele-
ments. The moment suprème takes place in 1763. According to Casanova’s
account, the Marquise is then 70, although Casanova specialists argue that
she was only 58. As an incarnation of the immortal spirit Galtinarde, Cas-
anova (38) must engage with her in ritual sexual intercourse in a magical
bath to conceive this baby. The prospective mother-son was no beauty;
she ‘had been beautiful, but she was as I am today’.74 Casanova therefore
called on the assistance of a voluptuous young woman in order properly to
celebrate this alchemical marriage: ‘The flabby skin I was touching was not
the skin my eyes saw’.75 In this dual role of husband and father, Casanova
committed alchemical incest with a woman who was old enough to be his
mother, but who wanted to become his child. In their act of intercourse
there is indeed a moment of incest as the Marquise herself acknowledges:
‘Tomorrow, my dear Galtinarde, you will be my husband and my father.
Tell the learned to explain that enigma’.76 With the rebirth, the old Mar-
quise will have overcome both time and death. Later on however she sees
through Casanova’s trickery and he can no longer make free with her
riches.
In the first act there are some real incidents of incest – as yet without
penetration – with young daughters of his, some of the many children
whom he has fathered during his travels in Europe and whom he has run
into by chance at a later date. In 1761 he stays in Naples and meets the
seventeen-year old Leonilda. He fools around a bit with her and her lover
and it is not long before he is proposing marriage. But then her mother
shows up and Casanova recognizes her as Lucrezia, a former mistress –
Leonilda is his daughter.
Inevitably this triggers off an ethical discussion about incest. In prin-
ciple there is nothing repugnant about intercourse between fathers and
daughters, the legal prohibition is based entirely on prejudice. You could
speak of a ‘natural duty’ to refrain from an incestuous relationship – nature
requires reciprocity for true love to develop; this means there should be
equality between the partners, something that is lacking between fathers
and daughters.
The respect which she owes to him who had given her being raises an obstacle to the kind
of affection she must feel for a lover. If the father takes possession of his daughter by virtue
74 Supra n. 2, 9, 64.
75 Supra n. 2, 9, 68.
76 Supra n. 2, 9, 62.
of his paternal authority, he exercises a tyranny which nature must abhor. Our natural love
of good order likewise causes reason to regard such a union as monstrous.77
This natural duty to refrain from a relationship, however, does not apply
to the relation between Casanova and Leonilda, because this concerns two
people who give themselves to each other freely and out of love. A year
later there is a scene in bed between Casanova, Lucrezia and Leonilda.
The father quenched his passion for his daughter in the vagina of her
mother, while Leonilda assisted as a sort of go-between: ‘Leonilda sends
her mother’s little soul on its flight with one hand and with the other she
puts a white handkerchief under her gushing father’.78 The father-daughter
relationship is thus not fully consummated.
Nine years later, in 1770, things take a more serious turn when Cas-
anova meets Leonilda again. This time Lucrezia modestly retires to give
daughter and father privacy for the act of incest with which this essay
began. Now it is he who is the older person who denies the passage of time.
And with success because his daughter reciprocates his passion. A year
later he meets the thirteen-year old beauty Guglielmina, and learns that he
is her uncle: ‘At this news, I made up my mind to love the niece.’79 No
sooner said than done, with Casanova’s daughter Giacomina, aged nine,
lending a hand.
These incest narratives have a dual importance in Casanova’s life and
works, similar to the two themes that intertwine in his autobiography.
Firstly incest fits in with his hedonistic philosophy of life: in the pursuit
of pleasure, the libertine laughs at prejudices such as the taboo on incest.
When Casanova has intercourse with Leonilda, both parties are willing, so
it does not go counter to the reciprocity that characterizes true love. There
is no coercion or abuse of power involved and the harm principle thus
remains intact. Internally speaking then, Casanova’s incest is normatively
coherent.
Secondly this mutual incestuous gratification is in keeping with Cas-
anova’s efforts to kill time – something that is no problem for the young
sanguine hero, but which for the middle-aged choleric individual and for
the old melancholic is much more difficult. In his dual role as father and
lover he can deny the fact that women see him more as a father than as
a lover in the second phase of his life; when he has intercourse with his
daughter Casanova goes back a generation. The fact that he uses incest as a
symbolic facelift is confirmed by the moment that this father-daughter rela-
tionship with Leonilda is consummated – namely just after he has enjoyed
77 Supra n. 2, 7, 229.
78 Supra n. 2, 7, 233.
79 Supra n. 2, 12, 94.
his ‘last real pleasure’ in Sorrento. And in his incest with Guglielmina and
Giacomina, he finds comfort after Amelia has rejected his offer of marriage
because she sees him too much as a father-figure. Casanova’s tales of incest
thus also have an internal narrative coherence.
In the final act, when his physical condition no longer permits even this
therapy to alleviate the ageing process, Casanova exorcizes the passage of
time with his memories of his sensual joys in the preceding acts.
And so in his Preface the author also places himself in the future; like-
minded individuals will in turn be able to enjoy by proxy the pleasures he
describes in the History of My Life. Thus his identity is also preserved even
after his death, but then he is no longer present to enjoy it. Indeed when his
memoirs were published twenty-four years after his death, he finally won
the literary fame he had hoped for in vain when alive. To enjoy immortality
as a literary figure is better than nothing, but it is definitely not sufficient in
Casanova’s eyes. Speculating on the possibility of resurrection he writes
that he would be only too delighted to experience a life after death, but
only on condition that he preserves the memory of his first life. Otherwise
it is not he who continues to exist.80
Casanova is well aware that his attempts to kill time are as illusory as
his efforts to attain freedom. Inevitably his comedy concludes in tragedy;
in the end time kills you, not vice-versa. Sequere deum in the hedonistic
sense of surrendering to your fate leads inevitably to death. The year before
he died, aged seventy-two, Casanova looks back in the foreword to the
History of My Life:
Remembering the pleasures I enjoyed, I renew them, and I laugh at the pains which I have
endured and which I no longer feel. (. . . ) A member of the universe, I speak to the air and I
imagine I am rendering an account of my stewardship as the majordomo does to his master,
before vanishing. (. . . ) I know that I have existed, and since I am sure of that because I have
felt, I also know that I shall no longer exist when I have ceased to feel.81
E XTERNAL C OHERENCE : R ECOVERED M EMORIES
Casanova’s narrative of incest has a pronounced literary character and –

assuming that the narrativists are right inn their argument that there is a
close relation between law and literature – his case might serve not only as
a model for cases of incest, but for lawsuits in general. But if all court cases
were narrative like the stories of Casanova and Leonilda and Guglielmina
and Giacomina respectively, a judge would always get stuck at the level
80 Supra n. 2, 11, at 81.
81 Supra n. 2, 1, 29.
of reasonable doubt. The role of incest in Casanova’s History of my Life

can be understood in two different ways both of which are apparently
internally coherent. In addition to Roustang’s psychoanalytical interpret-
ation, one could also argue for a practical-philosophical one: Casanova’s
tales of incest take on a narrative and normative coherence in his life story
because, by killing time, they reconcile his hedonism with his melancholy
sense of transience. Moreover, supposing Roustang’s analysis was the only
correct one, it would be precisely this coherence that would suggest that
Casanova’s incest narratives were fiction.
A judge in a criminal court who must reach a verdict in a case of incest
is in an even more difficult position than the interpreter of Casanova’s
memoirs. In the History of my Life, the perpetrator does not hesitate to
confess his deeds (he does however deny that they are crimes). Doubt
arises only about whether Casanova’s confession is true. Aren’t these stor-
ies just fantasies of omnipotence? Of course we do not have the versions
of Leonilda, Guglielmina and Giacomina. By contrast in many present-day
incest cases we have two contradictory narratives; against the suspect’s
denial, there is the pitiable story of the victim, while, as in the case of
Casanova, all empirical proof is lacking. Even if a judge succeeded in
interpreting each of the two versions in an internally coherent manner the
narrative contradiction remains unresolved.
It is impossible, moreover, to provide contradictions like these with an
external coherence under the heading of a scientific theory of incest. The
crucial debate among scholars revolves round how you should interpret
the story of the victim. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists such as
Terr and Van der Hart consider that, generally speaking, charges of incest
are credible.82 According to them, incest is even plausible in cases of
repressed memories: adult women without any conscious memory of past
incest enter therapy for completely different kinds of complaints such as
nightmares, depression, forms of sexual deviancy or eating disorders. Dur-
ing therapy they come to realize that their psychological difficulties were
caused by traumatic experiences of incest in their early years. In the ensu-
ing period the conscious ego had no knowledge of this, since the terrifying
experience was driven from the conscious mind through dissociation. In
cases of mild dissociation one’s personality is split into the roles of victim
and spectator; by mentally stepping out of herself, the victim also distances
herself from her pain. In cases of ‘total dissociation’ one’s personality
is definitively split, so that the part that was subjected to the traumatic
82 Lenore Terr, Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and
Found (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Onno van der Hart, Trauma, dissociatie en
hypnose. handboek (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger B.V. Publishers, 1995).
experience is isolated in a separate part of the consciousness which is then

repressed. Incest and other forms of abuse are then completely forgotten.
According to these experts dissociation is painful for the victim, but it
does in the end unearth the truth. Usually memories undergo a pronounced
distortion in the long term due to the fact that they are encapsulated in
schematic memory structures. Owing to its isolation, however, the trau-
matic memory of incest remains preserved in its pure form, so that years
later it can rise to the surface during therapy without any distortions.
The dissociation theory can thus integrate the conflicting stories of the
victim before and after therapy in a more general story that offers an out-
ward coherence. Within this framework the victim often rewrites her life
story so that it becomes an internally coherent whole. On the basis of such
memories of incest, they can retrospectively bring charges against their
parents.
Even so the specialists have not succeeded in establishing a theoret-
ical framework for the conflicting incest narratives that lends them any
adequate external coherence. The view of clinical psychologists is rebutted
by more experimentally-minded colleagues. On the basis of the empirical
research into the functioning of memory, psychologists and psychiatrists
like Wagenaar et al., Loftus, Reviere, Crombag and Merckelbach reject
the diagnostic value of dissociation. They argue that traumatic memor-
ies are not repressed, but are engraved in our consciousness with extra
vehemence.83 Experiments suggest that therapists play a crucial role in the
construction of memories of sexual abuse. One researcher, for instance,
succeeded in talking an incest suspect into the firm but erroneous belief
that he had forced his son and daughter to have sexual intercourse with
each other. The existence of dissenting opinions in psychology has led
to a new legal complication. Full of indignation, parents today are suing
therapists on the grounds that they have talked their children into memories
that are illusory.
When all is said and done, the dissociation theory is unable to incorpor-
ate the incoherences in the narratives of the parties to an incest trial in a
more inclusive Grand Narrative that would offer a judge adequate external
narrative coherence. Incest cases then fit perfectly into the narrative theory
83 Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham: The Myth of Repressed Memory; False
Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); W.A.
Wagenaar, P.J. van Koppen, H.F.M. Crombag, Anchored Narratives. The Psychology of
Criminal Evidence (Hertfordshire/New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf/St. Martin’s Press,
1993); H.F.M. Crombag and H.L.G.J. Merckelbach, Hervonden herinneringen en andere
misverstanden (Amsterdam/Antwerp: Contact, 1996); Susan L. Reviere, Memory of Child-
hood Trauma; A Clinician’s Guide to the Literature (New York, London: The Guildford
Press, 1996).
of law: the stories are everywhere, the referent is nowhere. But the more
narrativity there is, the less straightforward are both internal and external
narrative coherence and the more doubtful legal proof becomes.
F OUNDHERENTISM AND I NCEST84
Coherence and Correspondence

Contrary to what the narrativists suppose, the view that human knowledge
is a question of interpretation does not necessarily lead to a coherence
criterion for justified knowledge and truth. In the philosophical theory of
knowledge the plausible components of the classical foundationalist cor-
respondence theory and the coherence theory are combined in a synthesis
that once again gives sensory experience a privileged position.85 Disput-
able stories can then be tested for their empirical reliability, so that the
judge can rise above the reasonable doubt in which he has been immersed
by the narrativist pluralism of attribution of meanings.
Classical foundationalism contains two central theses: (1) that there is
a privileged subclass of beliefs based on direct sensory and introspective
experience that is justifiable as such, independent of whether it is con-
firmed by other beliefs; (2) that these empirical beliefs serve as a basis
for justifying all other beliefs. This foundationalist epistemology is often
combined with the ontological claim of realism, namely that (3) this empir-
ical belief is the product of an independent external reality. Coherentism
rejects this division into foundation and superstructure. In this doctrine the
justification of every belief depends on whether it is consistent with other
beliefs. Against theses 1 and 2 the coherentists offer the holistic theory
that every observation is contained in a network of interpretations, so that
an empirical belief derives its meaning from its place within a system
of concepts. In contrast with the realist thesis 3, Jackson also refuses to
recognize any reference to a reality outside language:
The problem of the referent is then reduced to the question of the correlation between
two semiotic systems (for example, natural languages and natural semiotics . . . ). This is a
problem of inter-semioticity (cf. intertextuality).86
84 See for a more detailed version of the following paragraphs: C.W Maris, ‘What is
Truth?’, in Albert W. Musschenga and Wim J. van der Steen (eds.), Reasoning in Ethics
and Law. Theory, Principles and Facts (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing Limited) 1999.
85 See: Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1995),
who reconciles foundationalism and coherentism in her concept of foundherentism.
86 Bernard S. Jackson, Semiotics and Legal Theory (London and New York: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1987), 15.
The coherentism that refuses to grant special status to empirical beliefs

is implausible, however, from the point of view of its own coherence
criterion. It takes no account of the special place granted to experience
in substantiating the truth on the basis of which we make a distinction
between a coherent empirical theory and a coherent fairy story. The hypo-
theses of foundationalism and realism do offer a reasonable alternative.
The assumption that our perceptions are directed causally by an external
reality gives our system of everyday and scientific convictions the greatest
degree of coherence. It makes it plausible that sensory perceptions surface
involuntarily, that the empirical world shows continuity and coherence and
that other people experience it in the same way. It also takes account of the
practical success of science and of the role that experiments play in this.
The scientific doctrine of evolution may add to this the argument that our
human capacity for knowledge adapts adequately to its environment: for
this reason one can assume prima facie that under normal circumstances
everyday experience offers us a reliable reflection of reality and can thus
serve as a foundation stone for human knowledge.
The coherentist perception that empirical beliefs are affected by the-
ories does, however, undermine a number of the radical assumptions of
classical foundationalist tenets: legitimation is not a one-way street from
foundation to superstructure, because empirical beliefs are not indubitable
facts but fallible interpretations; their justification depends in part on con-
ceptual consistencies and background theories. By way of a similar sort of
argument Susan Haack concludes:
A is more justified in believing that p the better this belief is anchored in experience and
supported by other beliefs by being integrated into an explanatory story the components of
which are also anchored in experience and supported by other beliefs . . . etc.87
It is in this spirit of synthesising coherentism and foundationalism that the

psychologists Wagenaar, Van Koppen and Crombag have proposed further
empirical requirements for proof in criminal proceedings.88 In the first
place the narrative element must be plausible with a coherent, true-to-life
story being told with a clear central action that occurs under circumstances
that account for it. The perpetrator for instance should have a plausible
motive. Secondly, the story must be anchored in knowledge of the empir-
ical world as this is generally understood by reasonable people. According
to the authors there should at least be sufficient empirical evidence for
the identity of the perpetrator, for the way that the crime occurred in
accordance with the description of the offence and for the guilt of the
87 Supra, n. 86, 212.
88 Supra, n. 84.
perpetrator. The judge may not base himself on notions of reality that are
demonstrably incorrect. He must also explicitly indicate why he does not
regard as convincing any alternative stories or empirical evidence to the
contrary.89
Due to the privileged position of empirically anchored beliefs in the
furnishing of proof in criminal proceedings, a distinction can be made
between justified and non-justified narratives. No longer then does the
judge drown in a plurality of incoherent attributions of meaning that the
narrativists heap on him. Even in polysemic incest cases it is still possible
to reach verdicts that can be justified, as I will show below.
Normative Coherence and Incest

What answer do we have now to the two questions about incest – the one
about whether it is wrong and the other about how the truth of a charge of
incest can be proved. Firstly, is incest an evil that deserves to be dealt with
in criminal law?
On this point there is no difference in principle between Casanova’s
point of view and that of the contemporary liberal legal order. What the
parties involved do out of their own free will is nobody’s business but their
own; the authorities should only intervene if there is a risk of harm to third
parties. The same goes for sex between members of the same family. Vol-
untary sexual intercourse between adults who share a blood relationship
is as such not criminal, but incest between fathers and daughters may be
judged a crime if the power relationship is unequal and coercion plays a
role.
Nonetheless a number of important ethical and legal changes have
taken place since the eighteenth century with the result that Casanova’s
libertinism is in part out of date. Firstly, the liberal principle of freedom
is now upheld by all contemporary democratic constitutions. The ‘law of
the father’ has, as a result, become less authoritarian, so that a libertine has
less need to subvert it. Moreover, since the sexual revolution of the 1960s,
free-thinkers have less reason to challenge prejudices on the grounds of
public morality. Today sexual freedom is generally accepted. There is also
even less reason for a universal taboo on incest than was the case in the
eighteenth century: modern means of contraception have separated sexual
89 For a critical discussion of Wagenaar, see: Bernard S. Jackson, “Anchored narratives’

and the interface of law, psychology and semiotics”, in Legal and Criminal Psychology
(1996), 1, 17–45; but see also: Ian E. Morley, “Narratives, anchored narratives and the
interface between law and psychology: A commentary on Jackson (1996)”, in Legal and
Criminal Psychology (1996), 1, 271–286.
intercourse from reproduction, so that the danger of inbreeding has been

enormously reduced.
Freedom moreover is no longer just the privilege of an aristocratic elite,
now that increased democracy has given all citizens equal freedom rights.
Partially as a result, a greater sensitivity to vulnerable social groups has
come about. More account is now taken of the position of women and
children for instance. Due to all these developments people today are much
more alert to the damage that young female incest victims can suffer due
to sexual abuse in a relationship of dependency.
Armed with this more refined notion of both freedom and harm, modern
legislators are in a position to give a convincing normative interpretation of
the prohibition of incest. Children who are on the way to maturity are as yet
incapable of making a choice of their own in these matters. Their parents
are key figures in their growth into adulthood. This exceptional situation
of dependency means that children are particularly vulnerable to abuses
of power by their mothers or fathers, certainly in the intimate domain of
sex that forms a crucial component in their identity. Far-reaching sexual
exploitation of youthful family members then implies a serious risk for
their future development; protection in the penal code is only right and
proper then.
Judged by these standards Casanova would go scot free in the case of
his incestuous affair with Leonilda. His niece Guglielmina and his daugh-
ter Giacomina on the other hand were much too young for him to take them
as sexual partners, even if they willingly surrendered to their uncle and
father: Casanova was undoubtedly guilty of a crime here. There is however
one mitigating factor in this retrospective condemnation: Casanova was an
absentee father. As a chance passer-by, he was not in a genuine position
of authority over his youthful kin. His fault then lay mainly in the age of
his sexual partners not in the kinship ties between them. The criterion of
normative coherence can thus give us an adequate answer with regard to
setting norms for incest in the major premise of the legal syllogism that, at
least in Western culture.
Truth in Incest Cases

The rational dissensus concentrates on ascertaining the truth with regard
to the minor premise of the legal syllogism, that in which the facts are
established. Can you prove beyond any reasonable doubt that criminal
incest has taken place?
But the difference of opinion about the relation between narrative and
reality also remains limited. The case is clear when the victim’s statement
is supported by adequate evidence from other sources, such as the exist-
ence of offspring, traces of sperm, photos, videos, accounts of third parties,

as long as it is not gainsaid by evidence to the contrary.
But supposing all one has is the opposing accounts of the different
parties? To ensure that innocent people are not found guilty, the Dutch
penal code rightly imposes the burden of proof on the public prosecutor.
The statement of a witness is insufficient proof by itself. In Dutch law
then a reasonable degree of agreement prevails over the extremes – over
what should qualify as sufficient or insufficient proof. The dispute remains
confined to the twilight areas.
What if the victim’s narrative is supported by the claim of a psycho-
therapist that his psychological investigation of the plaintiff shows that
the charge is true? Experimental psychologists cast doubt on such claims,
especially when the expert evidence is based on repressed memories.
Advocates of the dissociation theory reject this criticism and appeal instead
to their own clinical experience that shows that many recovered memories
are plausible. According to my synthesis of the coherentist and foundation-
alist theories the practical experience of experimental psychology should
be decisive here, so that specialist validation of repressed memories by
a clinical psychologist cannot serve as additional evidence. Because the
experience of clinical psychologists is limited to their patients’ narratives,
their truth can hardly transcend the clinical context. Furthermore the dis-
sociation theory suffers from an internal incoherence with its claim that a
therapist can ascertain the truth of recovered memories of incest. Even
if the traumatic experiences resulting from dissociation were preserved
in pure form, they are still integrated in the consciousness of the patient
during therapy by psychological interpretation. As a result they inevitably
get distorted by the schematic prejudices of client and therapist, so that
they are no more reliable than normal memories.
To sum up, as long as it remains a matter of conflicting statements by
those concerned and their expert interpretations, there are plenty of stories
but no legally grounded knowledge. The suspect will rightly be given the
benefit of the doubt. But in other cases of incest the charge may well
be sufficiently anchored in experience for the court to be able to reach
a verdict of guilty.
C ONCLUSION
Narrative theory is an understandable response to the decline of classical

metaphysics, in which reality as a whole is presented as rational and coher-
ent, with human knowledge being viewed as ideally speaking a rational
reflection of this. In modern times this rationalist metaphysics has been
consigned to the scrapheap of history as unprovable: according to the sci-

entific model of epistemology, claims to knowledge must be empirically
verifiable. But the empirical facts turn out to be less objective than was
hoped, because they are dependent on interpretation and construction. If
scientific theories do not give an exact picture of reality, it is tempting to
conceive of human knowledges as narrative structures contained in inter-
pretative systems. The theory of knowledge thus lands up once more with
the criterion of coherence, only now it is not as a property of reality itself,
but of human cognitive construction. By the same token, the narrative the-
ory of law conceives of both the normative and the empirical part of the
legal verdict as stories that do not refer to any external reality. As a result
some narrativists view the law as akin to literature.
The problem then arises of what coherence in this narrative sense means
as a criterion for epistemological justification. Due to the process of mod-
ernization the classical metaphysical unity of the True, the Good and the
Beautiful has disintegrated into a plurality of heterogeneous practices. The
danger is that what remains will be fragmented partial theories; at most
they will show an internal coherence, but they will not tally with each
other, nor are they commensurable.
In The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera argues that the novel is super-
ior to both science and philosophy, because novels give a more adequate
picture of the pluriform and polysemic reality of contemporary life. A
scientific or philosophical theory aims to chart reality or a part of it in
an unambiguous, systematically coherent abstract model. Novels, on the
other hand, through the complex interaction of their characters, offer a
variety of views of the world, without attributing a monopoly of truth to
any of them. According to Kundera, Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote marks
the transition from the unambiguous medieval world view to the modern
pluralist idea.
As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of
values, distinguished good and evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote
set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the
Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity. The single divine
Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parcelled out by men. Thus was born the
world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world.90
Modern literary truth then is par excellence one of different perspectives.

The Surrealists saw life itself as being so incoherent that they rejected
every attempt to come up with a consistent story. As Louis Aragon wrote:
90 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 6.
It would seem, it is said, or to put it more precisely it is insinuated that all of this will
end up as a story. Maybe for bastards, that’s what I say. They see novels or novelettes in
everything. There are people who only need to see a man with a red hat to make a whole
story of it. For people like that everything is material for a story: a piece of wood, adultery
or a gardenia. A tedious mountain of stories. (. . . ) It is a bourgeois habit to want to turn
everything everywhere into a story.91
Narrativism degenerates thus into a cacophony of narrators drowning out

each other’s pronouncements, without any criterion that might still pre-
serve something of the classical harmony of the spheres. If court cases
really were as narrative like Casanova’s History of my Life then judges
might as well doff their gowns and give up their practice.
This radical identification of reality and law with literary fiction or
narrative is however a romantic exaggeration. One has every reason for
drawing a distinction between truth and fiction. According to my own
theory of Critical Schizoism, you cannot refute scepticism by taking the
spectator’s role to an extreme, but as a participant in everyday life you can
suspend your sceptical judgement.92 Due to the overwhelming role that
empirical experience plays in our acquisition of knowledge you can con-
clude that there is such a thing as an independent reality that considerably
limits one’s freedom of interpretation in one’s quest for empirical truth, and
which makes possible a selection of narratives based on their correspond-
ence with this reality. Even if every statement about empirical reality is
based on hypotheses, the building blocks of these hypotheses are not purely
fictitious in character; the person constructing them cannot create them out
of nothing. Susan Haack’s foundherentism offers a reasonable synthesis
between foundationalist ideas and coherentism, according anchored empir-
ical experience a privileged position in the process of cognitive furnishing
of proof. Legal depositions can in this way be tested against intersubjective
experience.
Even in cases of incest with their high level of narrative content, it is not
theoretically impossible to anchor the charge in reality beyond reasonable
doubt. Fundamentally speaking it is not controversial what transactions
qualify as incest, nor what qualifies as compelling evidence – for instance,
traces of sperm on a woman who is under age that are identified as her
father’s.
In the historical case of Casanova it is much more difficult to separate
fact from fiction. Casanova was a self-proclaimed sceptic with regard to
historical truth, having experienced in practice how easy it was to pass
91 Louis Aragon, Le con d’Irène (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 78.

92 C.W. Maris, “The Tao of Jurisprudence”, Law and Critique, Vol. VII, no. 1, Spring
1966, 123.
convincingly with a completely false identity. In 1744 after he had lost

his passport, and with it his public identity, he appointed himself as an
army officer. Clad in a splendid uniform of white, blue, silver and gold,
he made a deep impression wherever he went. His martial reputation was
reinforced by a false newspaper report about an officer called Casanova
who had deserted after killing his captain in a duel.
Laughing to myself over all unfounded stories and over the combinations of circumstances
which give them a semblance of veracity, from that time on I became a great Pyrrhonist in
respect to historical truths.93
Even so it is possible to ascertain the truth of important sections of his

History of my Life beyond reasonable doubt by means of indirect anchor-
ing in experience, for instance through archive research. The truth of his
confessions of incest however is more difficult to establish. According to
Roustang it is the very psychoanalytical coherence of these stories that
makes it plausible that they are fictional: Casanova was after all a wish-
ful thinker. Yet here too such anchoring is theoretically not impossible.
Archive research may show that Leonilda was born nine months after
Casanova had deserted Lucrezia and that Leonilda’s son was born nine
months after Casanova’s visit – all of this being confirmed by statements
of witnesses, for instance, from the mother, mother/daughter and even
the grand/son. But Casanova himself writes about seeing his supposed
grand/son again:
In May Leonilda gave birth to a son, whom I saw in Prague at Prince Rosenberg’s when I
was there for the coronation of the Emperor Leopold [1790]. He is called Marchese della
C . . . , like his father, who lived to the age of eighty years. Though he did not know my
name, I arranged to be introduced to him (. . . ). What pleased me most particularly was the
youth’s resemblance to the late Marchese, his mother’s husband. (. . . ) I wrote to her, and I
entrusted her son with the letter. She did not receive it until he returned to Naples during
the Carnival of the year 1792, and I at once received an answer in which she invited me to
come to her son’s wedding and to spend the rest of my days in her house. Perhaps I shall
go there.94
University of Amsterdam
Faculty of Law
Amsterdam
The Netherlands
93 Supra, n. 2, 2, 48.
94 Supra, n. 2, 12, 79.

Aroma Philosophorum. The Case of Casanova

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C.W. MARIS VAN SANDELINGENAMBACHT?

AROMA PHILOSOPHORUM: THE CASE OF CASANOVA

ABSTRACT. The degree of truth of Casanova’s History of My Life is a matter of heated

KEY WORDS: casanova, coherentism, foundationalism and foundherentism, hedonism,

C ASANOVA AND L EONILDA

Law and Critique 10: 287–322, 1999.

Poet of His Life

independence is a continuing presence in his efforts to undermine lawful

Happiness is to be found in sensual pleasures and erotic ones in particular:

He is particularly harsh on Christian morality. In his contempt for religious

On his own authority Casanova adds an extra ingredient to Paracelsus’s

Unhappy the Body Politic Whose Legislator was not a Philosopher

that I had myself abused my freedom, at certain moments I considered that

Henceforth he spends his days mainly in literary and scholarly activities,

47 Supra n. 2, 12, 161.

It is a problem for a hedonist to reconcile himself with this depressing

You Will Forget Henriette Too

Ultima Linea Rerum

Casanova’s attempt to immerse himself in the pleasure of the moment

But the melancholic always paints his days a mournful black. He is a

Does Christianity have any alternative to offer? If he were a Christian,

The Art of Memory

It was in this spirit that he immersed himself in writing the History of

Incest as an Elixir of Youth

E XTERNAL C OHERENCE : R ECOVERED M EMORIES

Casanova’s narrative of incest has a pronounced literary character and –

of reasonable doubt. The role of incest in Casanova’s History of my Life

experience is isolated in a separate part of the consciousness which is then

F OUNDHERENTISM AND I NCEST84

Coherence and Correspondence

The coherentism that refuses to grant special status to empirical beliefs

It is in this spirit of synthesising coherentism and foundationalism that the

Normative Coherence and Incest

89 For a critical discussion of Wagenaar, see: Bernard S. Jackson, “Anchored narratives’

intercourse from reproduction, so that the danger of inbreeding has been

Truth in Incest Cases

ence of offspring, traces of sperm, photos, videos, accounts of third parties,

Narrative theory is an understandable response to the decline of classical

consigned to the scrapheap of history as unprovable: according to the sci-

Modern literary truth then is par excellence one of different perspectives.

Narrativism degenerates thus into a cacophony of narrators drowning out

91 Louis Aragon, Le con d’Irène (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 78.

convincingly with a completely false identity. In 1744 after he had lost

Even so it is possible to ascertain the truth of important sections of his

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