In this book Davidson engages in two main
related topics — a discussion of some of the methodological issues that emerge
in the work of Michel Foucault, and an elaboration and application of those
ideas in a range of issues around questions of medicine and sexuality. There is
cohesion to the book, but these are collected papers, bearing marks of their
separate genesis and original oral form. Not in itself a problem, but it does
mean that the book shifts gear rather dramatically in places, and that the
ordering of the papers is somewhat arbitrary. Davidson’s scholarship though is
exemplary, and his linguistic ability — French, German, Italian — opens up a
range of sources. Philosophically he straddles the Anglo-American/Continental
divide.

The book falls largely into two parts:
four essays on the application, followed by the conceptual discussion. What
might seem the wrong way round is actually rather effective, as the reader is
plunged into work of the kind that Foucault himself did, replete with textual
analysis, plenty of graphic examples and remarkable revelations, before the
more sober philosophical concerns come to the fore. In many ways this was
precisely the way Foucault himself worked, moving from early studies on madness
and clinical medicine to methodological works, and in his work on sexuality,
for example, going through several moves on the topic before the chapter ‘Method’.

The first chapter “Closing Up The
Corpses” reverses a Foucauldian trope from The Birth of Clinic, and
charts how pathological anatomy became less important in the work of
psychiatry, specifically here in the realm of sexual perversion, though
Davidson notes how it also relates to hysteria. Perversion, to which we are all
in potential susceptible, moves from being a disease of the organs, to one of
the sexual instinct that could doubtless be traced to neurophysiology and neuroanatomy,
and finally to the instinct alone, a question of psychology (p. 4). It is rare
to find exact dividing lines and these three modes are often confused, but they
are for Davidson useful ways of understanding the literature and ideas of the
period he studies. This chapter is also useful for clarifying Foucault’s famous
comment about the emergence of homosexuality. Davidson claims that “homosexuality
was a disease, a ‘perversion’ strictly speaking, whereas sodomy was a vice, a
problem for morality and law, about which medicine had no special knowledge”
(p. 23). Although Foucault analyses the role of medical knowledge in law in
some of the recently published lecture courses — of which Davidson is the
editor of the English translations — the point is well made: “perversion
is a thoroughly modern phenomenon” (p. 25).

Chapter Four offers a fascinating set of
observations around the figure of the monster, and our horror of it. For
Davidson, “our horror at certain kinds of monsters reflects back to us a
horror at, or of, humanity, so that our horror of monsters can provide both a
history of human will and subjectivity and a history of scientific
classifications” (p. 93). There are some great illustrations to this
chapter, and indeed in other places throughout the book. The sexuality angle is
pronounced — these monstrous births are held to be the product of sins against
nature, including bestiality, of surplus seed or lack of it, and other related
reasons. In the first half of the book many of the more standard sources are analysed
— Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis — but also some important but less
obvious ones such as Morel, Ambrose Paré, and Saints Augustine and Aquinas.
Along the way there are some remarkable analyses of John Merrick,
hermaphrodites (in parts of two chapters), the sexuality of Christ in
Renaissance Art and representations of mania. The religious point is not
surprising, given that convert and pervert were originally antonyms, “a
pervert being one that is turned from good to evil, and a convert being the
contrary” (p. 63). Equally the reading of monsters begins with Luther and Melancthon’s
analyses of the ‘pope-ass’ and ‘monk’calf’ of the sixteenth century as “signs
of God’s wrath against the Church which prophesised its imminent ruin” (p.
96).

As he makes explicit throughout these
studies, Davidson is making use of Foucault’s ideas and analyses. In some
places what he is doing is filling in some of the gaps in Foucault’s own work,
particularly in the originally conceived plan of The History of Sexuality.
One of the projected volumes, never published but which Davidson has a
manuscript version of, was entitled Perverts. Although Davidson does not
break his promise to Foucault, and never quotes from this, it is intriguing to
speculate how much the unknown Foucault has influenced his work. Monstrosity,
sodomy, hermaphrodites and masturbation were certainly among Foucault’s themes.
For the rest of us, studies like this, and the new lecture courses that treat
many of these topics, are a more than useful replacement.

The second half of the book is, to my
mind, somewhat less successful, but still offers some intriguing readings of
important issues in Foucault. Davidson convincingly argues for seeing
archaeology and genealogy as complementary analyses rather than distinct
methods, and usefully relates both to claims about truth and its politics. He
discusses the work of those close to Foucault such as Paul Veyne and Ian
Hacking, and their common inspirations in historians or philosophers of science
such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. These chapters are most compelling when
Davidson relates the methodological issues to the concrete concerns — such as
the discussion of Augustine on perversion which demonstrates how the same word
can apply to different concepts at different times, and that his use of the
word therefore does not refute the idea that perversion emerged in the late
nineteenth century (pp. 137’40).

Foucault, in Davidson’s reading, was an
exemplary historian of science, philosophically informed but engaged in
analysis of the historical nature of knowledge claims — what Davidson calls
historical epistemology. Such a reading of Foucault is certainly possible, and
illuminating in a number of regards. Foucault did indeed acknowledge his debt
to Bachelard, Canguilhem and Dumézil. But he also drew upon a wider range of
sources, some more explicitly philosophically minded, notably Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Neither are mentioned by Davidson, although Nietzsche appears
briefly in a quote. Thinking through this set of relations shows how Foucault is often concerned with a deeper
historical problematic than the one he is seemingly investigating. Hacking and
others, including Foucault himself in a late interview, have called this, not
historical epistemology, but historical ontology.

 

© 2004 Stuart Elden

 

Stuart Elden
teaches political geography at the University of Durham, UK. He is the author
of Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial
History (2001) and Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible
(2004). He is currently working on issues around calculation and territory.

Categories: Philosophical, Sexuality