- Sadism at the Limits: Sex, Violence, and the Historical
Boundaries of Sexuality (monograph)
Homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism, frotteurism,
telephone scatologia, acrotomophilia, and so many others: the colorful list of
perversions coined by psychiatrists since the nineteenth century appears
to be endless. Yet only homosexuality has benefited from the sustained
attention and intellectual commitment of scholars – LGBT programs are spread all
over the academic world, but no university has ever built a CSS (Center for
Sadist Studies). While there were and remain very legitimate political reasons
for such an exclusive focus on homosexuality, Sadism at the Limits: Sex,
Violence, and the Historical Boundaries of Sexuality argues that sadism has played in fact a much more
decisive role in the history of sexuality. The ambition of this study is
therefore not simply to rectify a historiographical balance, but to offer a new
reading of the history of sexuality as a whole by focusing on what has been
historically its paradigmatic perversion.
Why
sadism? Sadism at the Limits argues that the discourse of sexuality emerged within the context of the
rise of forensic psychiatry. Starting in early nineteenth-century France, psychiatrists
began to claim an expertise in criminal matters. One of their concerns was to
decide the criminal responsibility of individuals who had committed atrocious
sexual deeds without motives. Some of those individuals were deemed legally
irresponsible: they were perverts whose uncontrollable instinct had forced them
to commit violent and cruel acts. Sexual violence toward others, which in 1890
was coined “sadism” by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, played therefore a fundamental
role in the emergence of sexuality. Sadism at the Limits further argues that after a long period when it
receded into the background in favor of homosexuality, sadism has become once
again the perversion par excellence.
- Embodied: Space, Time, and the Emergence of Modern Medicine (monograph)
Traditionally, scholars have argued that the emergence of
clinical medicine in late eighteenth-century France was the outcome of the rise
of physical examination, which itself was possible when physicians overcame
cultural taboos against touching bodies. Questioning this interpretation
empirically as well as methodologically, I historicize both the patient’s
diseased body and the physician’s experience of perception. My project shows
how the shift in medical practice that took place between 1750 and 1850 was not
located in the physicians’ putative acknowledgment of the body, but in a new
conceptualization of disease and a new way of looking at, touching and listening
to the body. While my general approach is reminiscent of Foucault's in Birth of the Clinic, the specific historical conclusions I reach are significantly different.
Embodied concentrates
on four medical practices, chosen both for their historical importance and for
strategic reasons: consultation by letter, the taking of the pulse, percussion
of the chest and pathological anatomy. Current scholarship takes
consultation by letter as a symbol of Ancient Regime medicine because of the
absence of any direct physical contact between patient and doctor; it assumes
that the taking of the pulse has not undergone any dramatic change between 1750
and 1850; and it sees in both percussion of the chest and pathological anatomy
the first steps in the emergence of modern medicine. By giving a new
interpretation of the history of each of these practices, Embodied offers
an original understanding of the emergence of modern medicine as a whole.
- “Structuralism” & “Xavier Bichat” (encyclopedia entries)
To be published in Foucault Lexicon, edited by Leonard Lawlor
and John Nale (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2012).
- “Introduction: What Do We Want Epistemological History to
Be?” (short introduction, co-authored with Matthew L. Jones)
In this introduction to our edited volume, Beyond Cause and
Meaning: Essays on Epistemological History (see below), Matt Jones and I will
describe the main characteristics of a historiographical tradition that
has its roots in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault, and that
has been developed more recently by scholars such as Lorraine Daston, Arnold
Davidson, and Ian Hacking.
- “Writing History With a Saw” (book chapter)
In this polemical essay I defend the use of discontinuity as
a historiographical tool. I distinguish between "chronological
discontinuity," which necessarily raises the thorny issue of
periodization, and "epistemological discontinuity," which is only
secondarily related to the temporal dimension of history. I argue that
most of the attacks that have been launched against the idea of discontinuity
stem from a confusion between these two types of discontinuity. I then describe
some of the specific narrative and philosophical characteristics of histories organized by the concept of
discontinuity.
This
essay will be published in the volume I am co-editing with Matt Jones, Beyond
Cause and Meaning: Essays on Epistemological History (see below).
- “Carving Out Sensations: An Epistemological History of
Percussion of the Chest” (book chapter)
In this essay I will reread a famous event in the history of
medicine: the invention and dissemination of percussion of the chest.
Auenbrugger first published on his new diagnostic technique in 1761,
and Corvisart made it famous in 1808 with his French translation and lengthy
commentary. Why did it take almost half a century to be
widely adopted by physicians? I argue against the interpretation of
several historians of medicine, including the one offered by Michel Foucault.
Foucault, however, got his facts wrong but his method right, and I lay out the
benefits of epistemological history for the study of something as concrete as
percussion of the chest.
Like
the essay described above, this essay will be published in the volume I am
co-editing with Matt Jones, Beyond Cause and Meaning: Essays on Epistemological
History (see below).
- Beyond Cause and Meaning: Essays on Epistemological History (edited volume, with Matthew L. Jones)
For several decades social and cultural historians of
science have been working to debunk the old myths of Whiggish history. Without
a doubt, they have been successful. Whether considering Robert Boyle’s air-pump
or today’s laboratories, numerous case studies have shown that science cannot
be reduced to a universally valid method or practical norms. The most
assiduous observers, like the most recluse theorists, are sometimes driven by
less-than-rational interests, and science as a whole is a culture like any
other, with its own procedures, etiquettes, and polities.
For
all its innovations, the social and cultural study of science has created or
reinforced a series of assumptions that have often solidified into
historiographical habits:
1)
The assumption that causality governs history, and the concomitant disciplinary
rule that historians must always subordinate the task of description to the
task of causal explanation.
2)
The assumption that the true reality of any scientific activity lies in the
details of local practice, and the methodological correlate that historical
understanding improves in proportion to the narrowness of the historian’s gaze.
3)
The assumption that history is necessarily continuous, and the hope that the
devout frequentation of archives will smooth the asperities of time
and seamlessly connect the chains of precursors.
4)
The assumption, rooted in a vague form of humanism, that human beings are
always, ultimately, the explanans of history (and sometimes its explanandum as
well), with the clear implication that historians must first and foremost pay
attention to flesh-and-blood scientists, lest they produce studies that are
flawed, uninteresting, or overly abstract.
The
essays collected in Beyond Cause and Meaning describe, debate about, and embody
an approach to the history of science that is primarily descriptive,
voluntarily global, profoundly discontinuous, and unapologetically
antihumanist -- an approach sometimes called historical epistemology or historical
meta-epistemology. What can such an approach reveal that traditional social and
cultural history leaves aside? What are the stakes – historiographical
and philosophical – of this approach? Can such an approach overcome the
limitations of local history of science without reifying some universal
rationality? How does this approach evade the problems inherent to alternate
approaches in the history of science and traditional intellectual
history?
This
book will include historiographical essays by Lorraine Daston, Arnold Davidson,
Claude-Olivier Doron, Peter Galison, Philippe Huneman, Matthew L. Jones, Kevin Lamb,
Paolo Savoia, and myself.
