Articles and Essay Reviews:
- “Perverse Perversion: How To Do the History of a Concept” (historiographical essay, co-authored with Kevin Lamb). Forthcoming in GLQ (2011).
In this essay Kevin Lamb and I discuss several historiographical issues related to the history of sexuality. We focus on Michel Foucault's Abnormal, Arnold Davidson's The Emergence of Sexuality, David Halperin's How To Do the History of Homosexuality, and Richard C. Sha's Perverse Romanticism.
"What's Wrong With Sex?" Archives of Sexual Behavior. Published Online First, Forthcoming in Print.
This essay looks at the DSM-5's new take on paraphilias. I argue that the DSM-5 is about to drastically loosen the criteria for paraphilias and to make them directly dependent on cultural values. This will result in an epidemic of perverts, since anyone who likes sex in a way that is not culturally normative will now qualify for a diagnosis of paraphilia -- even if the sexual preference is not a source of distress or harm. The DSM-5 will then be closer to the DSM-I and DSM-II than to their successors, which all were at least trying to separate the concept of "mental disorder" from cultural norms, and which made "harm" or "distress" a necessary condition for having a mental disorder.
- "A Tergo: Taking History From Behind." Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. Forthcoming.
I argue that there are two conflicting tendencies in Michel Foucault's approach to the history of sexuality. The first one, which is developed at length in his properly historical work, consists in describing the gradual transformation of sexuality as it slowly disseminates from one discourse to another. Although it is coupled with an original analysis of power, this approach ends up resembling a traditional history of ideas. The second and much more satisfactory tendency describes sexuality as a rule-governed system in which the concepts of "desire" and "identity" function structurally. Here Foucault was making clearly visible the historical contingency of sexuality, and encouraged us to invent other ways of experiencing sex. Unfortunately, he never delineated "desire" and "identity" with enough historical precision, and as a result most historians of sexuality who have been influenced by his work have paradoxically ended up writing about sexuality as if it were an ahistorical object.
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"The Popularization of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century: Writing, Reading and Rewriting Samuel Auguste Tissot's Avis au peuple sur sa santé." Journal of Modern History. Forthcoming (2010).
Samuel Auguste Tissot’s Avis au peuple sur sa santé, first published in 1761, was one of the biggest medical best-sellers of the eighteenth century. By studying the successive editions of Avis au peuple and the vast correspondence between Tissot and his patients, I revisit the worn-out issue of the popularization of science and medicine. I show that in the case of Avis au peuple the popularization of medicine was a process that involved both author and readers, that took shape through successive editions, and that was the effect rather than the cause of editorial success.
- “Objectivity?” Iris. European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate. Vol. 1 (2009). 281-84. Available online
Essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity. I argue that Daston and Galison offer a triple critique of objectivity: historical, philosophical, and, in a more subtle and reflexive way, historiographical as well.
- “Expérience et observation dans les sciences de la vie au XVIIIème siècle” (with Philippe Huneman). Bulletin d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences de la vie. Vol. 15 (2008). 121-25.
Introduction to a special issue on experiment and observation in the eighteenth century.
- “Huber’s Eyes: The Art of Scientific Observation before the Emergence of Positivism." Representations. Vol. 95 (2006). 54-75.
How could a blind man be an
observer in the eighteenth century? Taking this enigma as its point of
departure, this essay reconstructs the regime of perception that was at the
core of eighteenth-century scientific observation. This regime required senses that
were as ordinary as possible, the analytic ability to decompose a perceptual
whole into its parts, and a faculty of attention that could grasp
intellectually the hidden relations between perceptions. The art of observation
was therefore drastically different from the passive and thoughtless practice that
nineteenth-century positivism made it to be. In the words of one of its most
eloquent theoreticians, it was an “art of thinking.” The article concludes with an anecdote from pianist Glenn Gould, who imagined an experiment for a better experience of Baroque music -- an experiment that happens to capture perfectly the distinctive features of the eighteenth-century regime of perception. A French translation of this essay subsequently appeared in Bulletin d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences de la vie 15 (2008). 147-72.
- “L’ontologie, un problème historico-philosophique.” Agenda de la pensée contemporaine. Vol. 5 (2006). 97-108.
Essay review of Ian Hacking’s Historical Ontology. My analysis focuses on Hacking's discussion of "organizing concepts," "styles of reasoning," and "making up people." I argue that Hacking's tight combination of history and philosophy encourages a form of historicism and an interest in conditions of possibility. These two characteristics are clearly reminiscent of the work of Michel Foucault, and distinct from a traditional form of social history of science.
- “Il caso ‘Sade’.” Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria. Vol. CXXX (2006). 83-102.
This paper traces the emergence of sexuality in the nineteenth century by studying the transformation of the Marquis de Sade into a psychiatric case. At the end of the nineteenth
century Richard von Krafft-Ebing invented the concept of ‘sadism’, a perversion
that combines sex and violence and that is still commonly used by psychiatrists
today. Krafft-Ebing named this
perversion after the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), whose novels are
filled with scenes of violence and sex.
- “La masturbation a-t-elle une histoire?” Critique. Vol. 708 (2006). 439-47.
Essay review of Thomas Laqueur’s Solitary Sex, significantly different from my essay review in English of the same book. In this essay I argue that Solitary Sex paradoxically treats masturbation as an ahistorical object. For Laqueur there are three essential aspects to masturbation: solitude, excess, and the imagination. Relying on archival material (letters from eighteenth-century masturbators), I show that the experience of masturbation could mean something very different depending on the type of concepts structuring the masturbator's experience. While praising Laqueur's breadth of knowledge, I therefore claim not only that his historical description is at times inaccurate, but also that, methodologically, he has unfortunately limited his history to a history of the cultural contexts of masturbation, while ignoring the history of masturbation itself.
- “Le sujet, l’objet, et la logique du réel dans Naissance de la clinique.” In Cahiers parisiens/Parisian Notebooks. Paris: The University of Chicago Center in Paris. Vol. 1 (2005). 377-402.
This paper investigates the relations between history and
methodology in Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clinic. Foucault’s
archaeological method is more a series of experiments than a set of fixed precepts. In the course of his archaeological
works Foucault went from a study of holistic and deep structures whose elements
changed all at once, to an analysis of the piecemeal transformations of superficial
systems. In The Birth of the
Clinic, his position was
ambiguous. For instance, in
several key methodological passages he considered object and subject as two elements of a holistic structure, but in other passages he treated
them as if they could exist independently from the medical structure in which they
emerged. Through two specific
examples – the concept of lesion and the practice of percussion of the chest – I argue that Foucault
should have given more rigor to the rules governing the epistemological structures
he described. The concept of lesion
and the practice of
percussion of the chest were indeed structurally related both to one another
and to their common field of emergence.
- “Gli ‘stili di ragionamento’ di Arnold Davidson.” Iride. Filosofia e discussione pubblica. Vol. 45 (2005). 437-42.
Essay review of Arnold Davidson’s The Emergence of Sexuality. In this essay I analyze Davidson's "historical epistemology" by breaking it down into its four main characteristics: 1) its object is located on a deep epistemological level; 2) it bars hermeneutics from the writing of
history; 3) it transcends biographical, social and cultural variations; 4) and its
narrative takes the form of a comparison between static structures instead of
an unfolding of events in constant evolution.
- “The History of Masturbation: An Essay Review.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Vol. 59 (2004). 112-21.
Essay review of Thomas Laqueur’s Solitary Sex, significantly different from my essay review in French of the same book. Laqueur gives a central importance to the anonymous Onania (1716), a book which according to him marks the beginning of the secular approach to masturbation. In my review I argue against this interpretation of Onania by focusing on the specific but crucial problem of the imagination.
- “Friction of the Genitals and Secularization of Morality.” Journal of the History of Sexuality. Vol. 12 (2003). 345-64.
A study of the conceptual relations between religion and medicine through a revisionist reading of Onania (1716) and L’Onanisme (1760), the two most important books written on masturbation in the eighteenth century. Almost all historians who have been interested in the history of masturbation have claimed that there is a clear continuity between Onania and L'Onanisme, and that both partake in a secular (medical) approach to sex. (This was in fact my own conclusion in two previous articles: see below.) In this somewhat structuralist paper I reconstruct the conceptual structures of each book and demonstrate that Onania is in fact primarily organized by the theological concepts of will, sin, and innocence, and relies on medical ideas only insofar as they support its moral message. Onania is therefore a theological book with a few medical ideas thrown in. L'Onanisme is precisely the opposite: it is fundamentally organized by the medical concepts of bodily need, disease and health, and religious ideas are invoked only in so far as they agree with the general medical message. I conclude this paper with a note on methodology, and argue that if historians have not been sensitive to the striking differences between Onania and L'Onanisme, it is because they have located their analyses at the lexical level without penetrating into the internal conceptual logics of these books.
- “Le pouvoir de la science dans L’Onanisme de Tissot.” Gesnerus: Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences. Vol. 57 (2000). 27-41.
In this article, as well as in my 1999 "Tissot and L’Onanisme: a Shadow in the Enlightenment,” my understanding of Tissot's L'Onanisme remained in line with the one offered by most historians. My 2003 "Friction of the Genitals" marks on the other hand a clear departure from what I now think of as a misguided analysis based on a defective methodology.
- “Tissot and L’Onanisme: a Shadow in the Enlightenment.” Spring. Vol. 65 (1999). 33-53.
Book Reviews:
- Richard C. Sha. Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832. In Journal of Modern History. Forthcoming.
- Niklaus Largier. In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. In Journal of Modern History. Vol. 81 (2009). 377-79.
- Sean M. Quinlan. The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c.1750-1850. In Gesnerus: Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences. Vol. 65 (2008). 290-91.
Edited and Translated Work:
- Co-editor (with Philippe Huneman), Bulletin d'histoire et d'épistémologie des sciences de la vie, 15 (2) (2008).
Special issue on experiment and observation in the eighteenth-century life sciences.
- Translator: James Donat, "Les extraits de Tissot choisis par Wesley: Un Imprimatur méthodiste." In La Médecine des Lumières: Tout autour de Tissot. Edited by Vincent Barras and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier. Georg Editeur. 2001. 261-81.
