The Ploy of Instinct
Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality
in Liberal Governance
Kathleen Frederickson
Fordham University Press
New York 2014
153-57397_ch00_1P.indd 5
1/24/14 7:35 PM
Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro­
duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or
any other—­except for brief quotations in printed reviews,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per­sis­
tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet
websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of
electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not
be available in electronic books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available
from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
16 ​15 ​14 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1
First edition
153-57397_ch00_1P.indd 6
1/24/14 7:35 PM
Contents
Ac­know­ledg­ments
Introduction
ix
1
1.
Reading Like an Animal
27
2.
The Case of Sexology at Work
61
3.
Freud’s Australia
94
4.
Angel in the Big ­House
Coda
120
155
Notes159
Bibliography197
Index000
153-57397_ch00_1P.indd 7
1/24/14 7:35 PM
Introduction
The definition of instinct as an impetus that substitutes for reason entails a strange but familiar catachresis. The first entry for “Instinct” to
appear in the OED, for instance, switches between the language of
­impulsivity and epistemology without seeming to find this vacillation
unusual:
Instinct (iֺnstiᶇkt), sb. . . . ​
1. Instigation; impulse; prompting. Obs.
2. I nnate impulse; natural or spontaneous tendency or inclination.
Formerly applicable to the natural tendencies of inanimate things.
In modern use associated with sense.
3. spec. An innate propensity in or­ga­nized beings (esp. in the lower
animals), varying with the species, and manifesting itself in acts
which appear to be rational, but are performed without conscious
design or intentional adaptation of means to ends and the faculty
1
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 1
1/24/14 7:36 PM
2 Introduction
supposed to be involved in this operation (formerly often regarded as
a kind of intuitive knowledge).
b. A
ny faculty acting like animal instinct; intuition; unconscious
dexterity or skill.
4. Comb.1
In spite of its gestures toward doing away with “former” beliefs, the entry,
published in 1900, foregrounds assumptions about instinct that substantially
predate the nineteenth century. The theorization of instinct as a bestial substitute for human reason and will, for example, dates back to Avicenna’s reading of Aristotle.2 What is new, the entry tells us, is the repudiation of the idea
that instinct can be understood as “intuitive knowledge.” As it accretes multiple definitions of the term, the entry nonetheless drops even this claim
in the second half of the same definition—­a wise move, given that intuition
continues to persist even today as a highly common synonym for instinct.
The entry’s varied account of whether instinct means intuition might seem
odd enough on its own. Still more confounding, however, is that it denies
that instinct is intuition while, in the same breath, depicting instinct as an
alternative to reason. How can instinct be an alternative to reason and not be
aligned with intuition? By the entry’s own terms, after all, instinct’s ability to
act as an “innate propensity” depends on its capacity to mimic a mode of
knowledge: instinct is an innate impulse that can only be distinguished from
rational activity by subtracting the deliberative volition presumed to accompany rational acts.
This catachresis introduces a set of paradoxes that structure theories of
sexuality and sexual difference in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Instinct’s importance to the rise of modern sexuality is ironic for the
same reasons that the OED’s decision to renounce instinct as “intuition”
is ironic. The classic instinctive agents—­animals and “savages”—­were instinctive precisely because they ­were supposedly incapable of producing a
self-­conscious narrative about themselves or their actions. It is thus peculiar that instinct was so necessary to the elaboration of models of Eu­ro­pe­an
sexual subjectivity based, by Michel Foucault’s famous account, on confession and introspection. As an agency or epistemology in which self-­k nowledge
does not operate, instinct proves to be a useful tool for naturalist projects
that seek to observe, describe, and categorize patterns of behavior. But sex-
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 2
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 3
ology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis gained disciplinary legitimacy by
entrenching a methodology that blends the epistemological criteria of the
natural sciences with casework data drawn from patients’ introspective self-­
narration. Freud famously resolves the tensions between these two modes by
understanding instinct as an unconscious force whose effects can be found in
the traces left in the empirically observable peregrinations of an analysand’s
speech, affect, and embodiment.3 For many of his contemporaries, though,
the relationship between instinct and self-­conscious speech was much less
consistently theorized. As a result, the would-­be bifurcation between instinct
and self-­consciousness fails to hold fast in any sustained way. By the end of
the nineteenth century, it becomes increasingly untenable to see instinct as
dialectically opposed to reasoned self-­conscious action, even though a sizable
quotient of sexological writing (not to mention the OED) persists in attempting to do so.
The changes that made the opposition between reason and instinct seem
implausible had already begun to be elaborated in the Enlightenment, but
they come to the fore in the nineteenth century because the popularization
of evolutionary theory (both Lamarckian and Darwinian) stressed instinct’s
centrality as a mechanism for civilizational progress. Many seventeenthand eighteenth-­century natural phi­los­o­phers had believed that living organisms could be classed into Aristotelian essential types endowed with
God-­given instincts appropriate to their form.4 The nineteenth century not
only saw challenges to the fixity of these types but also recognized instinct
as one of the tools through which this fixity was undermined. As a result of
these shifts, instinct takes on new appeal to elite Eu­ro­pe­an men who identify instinct as both an agent of civilizational “progress” and a force that
offers (in contradistinction to the lack associated with desire) a plenitude
that can hold the alienation of self-­consciousness at bay. Without wholly or
consistently unseating the idea that instinct marks the proper province of
women, working-­class men, and/or savages, this shift in instinct’s appeal to
civilized Eu­ro­pe­an men nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender.
What, therefore, the OED entry does not allow its readers to acknowledge is that, by the end of the nineteenth century, depending on whom you
asked and in what context, instinct could appear as an alternative to, a precondition for, or a defining feature of civilized, self-­conscious rationality.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 3
1/24/14 7:36 PM
4 Introduction
In one line of argument, instinct distinguishes the actions, intentions, and
capacities of animals, “savages,” and the metropolitan poor from the supposedly more rational and deliberative behavior of privileged Eu­ro­pe­ans. In
another, instinct lurks at the root of all or most action, savage and civilized
alike. Within this latter formulation, moreover, instinct sometimes designates a savage kernel at the core of otherwise civilized behavior and sometimes an entity that can be civilized in and of itself. As the OED entry
implies, the different connotations of the word instinct are bound together
by the fact that they all represent a retroactive projection from the vantage
point of self-­conscious and deliberative subjectivity, a projection that accounts for instinct’s ability to conjoin intuition and impulse because deliberative volition and rationality are presupposed to be normatively connected.
That said, these multiple opinions about whether instinct is civilized could
coexist with stunning facility because little consensus prevailed about what
constitutes properly instinctive activity.
The flexibility of this assemblage enables instinct to adapt and respond
to a variety of immediate contingencies. For the most part, instinct eases
contradictions and gaps in liberal po­liti­cal and economic theory that had
been made palpable as nineteenth-­century writers grappled with the legacy
of Enlightenment humanism. All of the versions of instinct’s position with
respect to civilized life that I just described regularly stepped in to mediate
when classic categories of liberal philosophy such as reason, choice, and self-­
ownership faltered as adequate justifications for the praxis of capital and
empire. Instinct also, however, initiated a series of questions that w
­ ere more
unsettling. How rational are choices? What does “wanting” something signify if you are biologically compelled toward your desire? Is it possible to
imagine an emotion or an attachment outside of a rational hedonic calculator? When and how does it matter that you know why you act? Can will and
instinct be distinguished from each other?
This book charts some of the answers to such questions and their effects
on the development of the concept of sexuality at the turn of the twentieth
century. Because many instinct theories distinguished instinct from reflex
by suggesting that instinct implicates a creature’s entire bodily and psychological being,5 instinct was especially well poised to license sexuality as
a legitimate basis upon which, as Michel Foucault so famously argues, to
found something as supposedly totalizing as a subject position. While Fou-
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 4
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 5
cault does not mention instinct in his famous argument that the homosexual became a species in the History of Sexuality Volume 1,6 he was nonetheless
interested in instinct’s relevance to the scene of psychiatric power/knowledge that provides the context for that argument. Foucault’s most elaborate
engagement with instinct occurs in the lectures that he gave at the Collège
de France in 1974–­1975, the year before The History of Sexuality appeared in
print. There Foucault identifies instinct as a new dominant problematic that
materializes in the psychiatry of the 1840s. Arguing that instinct emerges as
the entity that accounts for psychiatry’s expanded sphere of influence in the
nineteenth century, Foucault notes, correctly, that eugenics and psychoanalysis represent the “the two great technologies” that allowed psychiatry
to gain “a hold on the world of instincts.”7 But Foucault does not veer too far
from this domain of psychiatric power/knowledge in the one lecture in
which he gives instinct sustained attention. Nor does he venture answers to
the questions about instinct he deems central to the nineteenth century’s
engagement with psychiatry: “Are human instincts the same as animal instincts? Is the morbid human instinct a repetition of an animal instinct? Is
the abnormal human instinct the resurrection of archaic human instincts?”8
While he accepts that instinct is po­liti­cally significant, he assesses that significance chiefly in relation to how psychiatry claims power by yoking the
juridical to the familial.9
The genealogy he traces in these lectures does not set out to investigate
the changes to what instinct meant in different scenes of disciplinary or
regulatory power. Any attention to how instinct is coproduced in relation to
Eu­ro­pe­an imperialism, nascent or­ga­nized feminism, or metropolitan class
politics thus remains outside of the purview of his analysis. I have structured this book around texts that allow me to attend to such domains, such
as the memoirs of hunger-­striking suffragettes, ethnologies about Aboriginal Australians, pornographic fiction and the legal decisions that regulated
it, evolutionary po­liti­cal philosophy, and writing on perversion by sexologists and homophiles. Reading across disciplinary categories in this way
provides one of the main or­ga­niz­ing logics of this book because instinct’s
presence, absence, and characterization within different disciplines is in
itself instructive about the changes to sexuality taking place around the turn
of the century. This disciplinary breadth, moreover, is proliferated in a discursive milieu that is not easily bounded by the logic of the nation-­state.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 5
1/24/14 7:36 PM
6 Introduction
Aggressive and violent imperial expansion and increasingly transnational intellectual dialogue make it clear that Britain did not create itself on its own.
Because I understand “Britain” to be an imaginary produced in a transnational context, my analysis of its formulation of instinct draws on texts written in Australia, the United States, and continental Europe—­all disseminated,
read, and discussed as Britons sought to articulate even their most “national”
modes of po­liti­cal subjectivity.
This book begins in the late 1850s and ends around the eve of the First
World War. Between these two moments, the sexual sciences became legitimated as professional domains of knowledge, liberal po­liti­cal economy
donned neoclassical garb, and the new discipline of anthropology adopted
the “savage”—­a creature famously associated with instinct—­as its consti­
tutive object of knowledge. During this same period, the popularization of
evolutionary discourse meant that speciation was a topic of debate and speculation, the unconscious came into being at Freud’s hands as a repository of
repressed psychic material, and the liberal state become consolidated as that
which governs through “freedom.”10 In all of these changes, moreover, instinct was a key agent.
A Queer Biopolitics
Accounting for nineteenth-­century instinct in the terms of The History of
Sexuality Volume 1 should seem fitting because instinct discourse proliferated within the same scientia sexualis that Foucault describes. Inasmuch as
instinct is a component of sexuality, it makes sense that it should be coproduced with it. Further, in the account of sexuality that Foucault offers in
History 1, instinct inhabits the point of intersection between the individual
and the population, the disciplinary and the regulatory: a creature’s instinctive actions might be performed solo, but the shift to population biology
that occurs over the course of the nineteenth century means that instinct
was increasingly oriented to species rather than individual survival. Penelope Deutscher identifies the Foucauldian toggle between the disciplinary
and the regulatory as operating in the sphere of sexual reproduction; Nancy
Armstrong in that of gender.11 Instinct is of course implicated in both of
these arenas (and vice versa). It also, however, names a biological mecha-
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 6
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 7
nism for this interchange that explains how any number of behaviors that
are not necessarily “about sex” might be more broadly oriented toward the
social reproduction of the population. Instinct becomes integral to the production of sexuality because it draws together, on the one hand, immediate,
local, and embodied action and, on the other, investment in far-­off abstractions such as “race” and “species.” Summarizing commonly held views among
evolutionists, the psychologist William James observes that instincts are the
“functional correlatives of structure,” such that “with the presence of an
organ goes, one may say, almost always a native aptitude for its use.”12 In this
sense, a specifically sexual instinct could designate something like an ingrained users’ manual for genital organs. This yoking together involves mixing two timescales: the immediacy of the ability to use an organ and the
infinitely longer evolutionary horizon that orients instinctive action far
more distantly than even the temporalities of aspiration and delayed gratification that inhered in liberalism’s work ethic. Instinct’s efficacy as a concept hinges on making the immediate and the multigenerational timeframes
work in tandem.
The fact, however, that instinct and sexuality are subsets of each other
suggests that instinct’s participation in the production of sexuality revises
the Foucauldian thesis in a number of important ways. At the turn of the
twentieth century, sexuality encompasses not only instinct but also desire,
fantasy, and intimate speech. For its part, instinct participates in, for example, debates about cognition, war, hunger, labor, and migration in modes that
are only tenuously related to sexuality as such. Instinct also has a longer history than the comparatively modern category “sexuality,” having, as I have
already noted, been first elaborated in antiquity as the binary twin to reason. Looking at instinct’s relationship to sexuality thus allows this book to
modify the domain of analysis for sexual biopolitics and to elaborate an
analysis of how the genealogies and methods of an older natural philosophy
constitute sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Last, this book’s
account of the disciplinary and regulatory apparatuses producing instinct
offers up a stronger emphasis on conflict and loose ends than Foucault’s work
permits. In History 1’s account of sexuality, different sites of power/knowledge tend to function in mostly happy tandem: Foucault emphasizes, for
instance, how the medical and familial interact in order to produce a regulatory regime.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 7
1/24/14 7:36 PM
8 Introduction
Focusing on instinct allows this book to reexamine what Lynne Huffer,
with some frustration, describes as the “strangely American twinning of
Freud and Foucault” that has “produced the odd, distorted, infamously ungraspable conception of sexuality that has become the common fare of queer
theory.”13 I am much more sanguine than Huffer in my thinking about the
intertwining of ideas drawn from Freud/Lacan and Foucault. Nonetheless,
I am compelled by Huffer’s argument that queer theory has turned to psychoanalysis because History 1 has been “sapped of what we might call the
messy thickness of erotic life” in favor of “the thin abstractions of a dispositif.”14 I hope that this book might offer some answers about the architecture
of the subjective thickness that Huffer finds missing in History 1. Much of
the Lacanian queer theory that Huffer believes promises “messy thickness,”
after all, deploys psychoanalytic drive (which, this book maintains, is more
historically indebted to nineteenth-­century instinct theory than Lacanians
tend to allow) to point toward a space outside of Foucauldian dispositifs. Leo
Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Lee Edelman’s No Future, for instance, put forward the belief that psychoanalytic drive denotes that which
is unassimilable to a social/symbolic order. This book does not read drive
or instinct as an actual exit route from a Symbolic order in the way that
Bersani or Edelman would have us do. But I am interested in assessing the
reasons why instinct, in psychoanalysis and elsewhere, comes to provide the
name for the location where such alternatives and exit routes might be
imagined.
Instinct’s promise of an out to excessively disciplined subjectivity is a
large part of what generates its somewhat incongruous appeal to liberal
cognition. Training instinctive action, after all, requires the disciplining of
something other than instinct itself in order to produce acceptable behavior. As a result, once instinct is attached to idiosyncrasy and plea­sure, it can
seem well suited to act as a paradoxical locus of individual autonomy, outside of disciplinary control. Even Foucault elsewhere acknowledges this
point. In his lectures on psychiatric power in 1973–­1974, Foucault reads
Édouard Séguin’s analysis of the “idiot” children warded at the Bîcetre hospital by noting that Séguin emphasizes that “the idiot seems not to have
any will, but in actual fact he has the will not to will, and this is precisely
what characterizes instinct.”15 This instinctive will not to will, Foucault
continues, is not an adult will because it cannot obey and because it refuses
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 8
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 9
“any kind of integration within a system.”16 Such a snub might seem to offer
a paradigm for negative liberty, but it’s worth noting that it is no accident
that the figure for this freedom—­the “idiot” child incarcerated in an
asylum—­is anything but. All this child has available to him is recalcitrance.
Similarly, the “antisocial” thesis emphasizes negativity: Edelman exhorts us
to “cast our vote” for “the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of
the Symbolic.”17 It is not clear where, if anywhere, instinct is supposed to lead
if it offers a path out of discipline. Why, then, did Victorian liberals adopt it
as an at least occasionally desirable quality for the arts of governance?
Like the Monkeys
Instinct’s potential for generating negative freedom generated a number of
incoherencies as Victorian writers attempted to think through how sexuality was or was not invested in liberal personhood. “There is a great story,”
the banker and Liberal economic adviser Walter Bagehot tells his readers
in Physics and Politics, “of some African chief who expressed his disgust at
adhering to one wife, by saying it was ‘like the monkeys.’ The semi-­brutal
ancestors of man, if they existed, had very likely an instinct of constancy
which the African chief, and others like him, had lost.”18 Bagehot tells us
very little—­and perhaps knows very little—­about this story. A caricature
that is localized in neither time nor space, the “African chief” represents
the continent ­wholesale: Bagehot’s choice of the word “some” emphasizes the
polygamous man’s substitutability for any other chief and Bagehot’s own
lack of interest in the origin or particularity of his tale. While Bagehot uses
the anecdote to highlight the remoteness of the “African chief” from the
civilized developments of putative Eu­ro­pe­an monogamy, the story is
nonetheless comic precisely because it implies that the most civilized way
to have sex is to have it simian style. Given that, as I will show in the next
chapter, Bagehot regards instincts as waning over evolutionary time, this
anecdote evinces a tinge of nostalgia as it suggests that, in this case, “animal” instinct is preferable to a distinctively human sexuality. With respect
to sex, the vaunted strongholds of liberal personhood—­imagination, individuality, and the self-­made subject—­do not retain the value that Bagehot
claims they do in other realms of activity.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 9
1/24/14 7:36 PM
10 Introduction
A first glance at this anecdote might suggest that sexuality should be
understood as an exceptional case as far as liberal values are concerned. In
this reading, instinct helps distinguish sexuality from other scenes of desire, action, or fantasy. As I noted earlier, though, by the end of the century,
some of liberalism’s most prized sites of subject formation—­t hose centered
on work and contract most notably—­also found themselves lured by the
kind of instinctiveness appearing in writing about sexuality. We should,
that is, be wary of regarding sexuality as inhabiting a special zone in which
instinct’s relationship to liberalism is wholly and necessarily different from
other sites of subjective and agential formation. Arguments in favor of instinct’s value and usefulness ­were more broadly part and parcel of a critique
of rationality and deliberative volition that was appearing frequently in
debates over effective governmentality. When the Duke of St. Bungay, the
esteemed Whig politician in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, voices his
plea­sure over a cabinet minister’s resignation, he does so by noting that the
minister lacks po­liti­cal instincts.19 This kind of casual usage may seem to be
of a different order than the meditations on instinct that ­were appearing in
evolutionary tracts such as Bagehot’s. But the Duke nonetheless iterates
many of the same tropes about instinct and reason that, as I will elaborate
further in Chapter 2, also animate Bagehot’s Physics and Politics. The resigning minister, Trollope’s Duke opines, “has high principles” but ones that
are “too exalted to be of any use for everyday purposes”; this problem transpires, the Duke laments, because “he has no instinct in politics but reaches
his conclusions by philosophical deduction. Now, in politics I would a deal
sooner trust to instinct than to calculation.”20
In the Duke’s mind, “principles” cause actions that are out of step with
the practical tasks of governing; instinct, in contrast, induces appropriate
responses to problems that actually and commonly arise in the work of government. Instinct offers something like a po­liti­cal knowhow that functions on the ground and designates a way of engaging appropriately with an
environment—­taking cues from an immediate context and acting rapidly
and with assurance. Note, too, that instinct and reason do not actually generate the same results in this instance: principle gives you bad politicking
whereas instinct does not. In the Duke’s chastisement of the minister’s
ineptitude, it becomes clear that one of the reasons that instinct can be so
useful as a paradigm for skillful and efficient action is precisely because it
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 10
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 11
can unite intuition and impetus. To be sure, the predominant contrast between instinct and principled calculation suggests that the passage, for the
most part, portrays instinct as a synonym for intuition. At the same time,
the Duke nevertheless faults the minister for his inability to act in a manner properly fitted to the situations at hand: a large part of the problem
seems to be that the minister thinks too much and acts either too little, too
slowly, or too in­effec­t ive­ly.
The kind of praise that the Duke lavishes on instinct strikes a chord with
what Trollope’s contemporaries believed ­were startling changes to the pace
and structure of nineteenth-­century experience made manifest in increasingly rapid industrial production, newly mass-­based politics, and growing
urbanization.21 Instinct’s swiftness and certainty made it particularly well
suited to this version of nineteenth-­century life: by virtue of their speed and
surety, instinctive agents w
­ ere not stymied in the face of too many options,
nor w
­ ere they liable to lag behind the pace of the industrial city. This state of
affairs is, however, paradoxical, given that these conditions ­were the markers
of civilized modernity while instinct had long been supposed to be the entity
that belonged to the savagely primeval. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the belief that instinct substitutes for reason in animals and those humans or
human qualities that are animalistic had to be balanced with one in which
instinct materializes as, first, more capable than reason and, second, more
ubiquitous and useful in so-­called civilized society.
Given its history as a binary twin to reason, it should seem as though
instinct has little place within the proper orbit of liberalism. Histories of
liberalism tend to highlight the significance of reason as a mechanism for
ensuring progress. The historian Jonathan Parry’s claim that the Liberal
Party “attached great importance to the pursuit of truth and progress
through reason and freedom of conscience” is emblematic of a wider consensus within accounts of nineteenth-­century liberal philosophy.22 These
beliefs have, moreover, been central to the important work on the limited
reach of liberalism’s claims to universality in the subaltern and postcolonial
studies of the 1980s and 1990s. In a book that examines the connections between liberalism and empire in the nineteenth century, Uday Singh Mehta
claims that liberalism contains an internal urge toward imperialism that
exists because liberalism’s investment in rationality makes it possible to compare and classify—­and thus dominate—­t he world without experiencing it.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 11
1/24/14 7:36 PM
12 Introduction
Liberalism’s “singularly impoverished understanding of experience,” he
maintains, occurs because “it has sought in an abstract reason a short cut to
a perilous journey with its unavoidable surprises.”23
Arguments analyzing reason’s centrality to British liberalism have been
hugely important. But the ubiquitous scholarly focus on liberal reason has
sustained two side-­effects that this book seeks to redress. First, scholarship
on liberalism has tended to produce overly rigid, binaristic accounts of reason
and its others that do not do justice to how modes of unreason also enliven
liberal governmentality. Second (and relatedly), critics have frequently
ignored the forms of embodied life necessary to liberal subjectivity. As a
corrective to this latter tendency, Elaine Hadley pairs the formalized practices of what she dubs liberal cognition with an “abstract embodiment” that
coordinates the relationship between a mind that formulates ideas privately
and a body that acts as its public agent.24 This book shares Hadley’s interest
in revising accounts of liberal cognition with respect to its formalization of
embodied practices but tackles the account of reason and deliberation in
studies of liberalism differently by examining moments when reason and
deliberation need to be supplemented by recourse to an instinct discourse
that, in some sense, seems as though it should only occur outside the purview
of living liberalism properly.
By liberalism, I mean a set of interwoven beliefs that valorize a respect
for character and self-­reliance as the basis for progress, a doctrine that the
state should intervene in daily life and in the economy only to help elaborate this character, a critique of aristocratic land tenure as the basis for just
rule, and a stance that po­liti­cal reform should be gradualist in its temporality.25 I am not focused primarily on the Liberal Party—­t hat strange agglomeration of Whigs, Radicals, and free-­trade (former) Conservatives
that, after its founding in 1859, only took on the properties of a “modern”
po­liti­cal party with an official platform in the 1870s.26 While my last chapter,
on the suffragette hunger strikes, features the Liberal Party under Prime
Minister Herbert Henry Asquith quite prominently, most of the chapters
in this book focus instead on instinct’s participation in a number of the
pivotal narratives that inform British liberalism’s po­liti­cal and economic
philosophy: those of work ethic and bootstrapping, of free contract and
in­de­pen­dent opinion, and of the belief in British superiority in these arenas
that was used to justify the subjection of indigenous people in the colonies
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 12
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 13
who supposedly lacked these economic, po­liti­cal, and (more broadly) characterological aptitudes.
Given the primacy accorded to Locke in the histories of liberalization in
Britain, the tendency in these histories to focus on distributions of rationality and concomitant “progress” should seem to make sense.27 For Locke,
the “materials” for reason come exclusively from sensation and reflection28 —­a
philosophy of experience that, as Jonathan Kramnick argues, allows Locke
to identify consciousness with a consistent sense of self that can make people
“responsible for their actions.”29 Instinct has little place in this picture.
Given that it is defined in contradistinction to the very qualities of sensation
and reflection that Locke esteems, it is not surprising that Locke should find
instinct to be a meaningless term.30 Lockean sensationalists, in turn, either
follow Locke in refuting the existence of instinct entirely or opted to separate out impetus and intuition in order to claim that instinct operates solely
as an impetus and that “instinctive” intuition is instead actually intelligence at work.31 The OED’s ambivalence about whether instinct is intuition
stems largely from these different approaches to tackling instinct’s role in
Lockean sensationalism. But even for sensationalist writers who did not
discredit instinct entirely, instinct does not permit the consciousness that
produces the responsible, consistent self that could ground liberal po­liti­cal
philosophy.
If I am right that instinct becomes necessary not only to liberalism’s
constitutive exclusions but also to its own sense of its own virtues, something has evidently shifted over the course of the nineteenth century in the
formulation of liberal cognition. How did this come to be, given the Lockean re­sis­tance to instinct’s existence, let alone to its relevance to the kind of
cognition that could support a liberal po­liti­cal philosophy? Hadley notes
that, while Locke’s influence remained palpable, the context for the gene­
ration of reason had shifted by the mid-­nineteenth century: the Lockean
subject’s rational deliberations had become a “form of social interaction
rather than a precursor to it” to the extent that disinterested thought becomes “a prosthetic for social policy.”32 Such formalization of idealized sites
of privatized reflection, though, left gaping holes in the theories of motivation and action available to Victorian liberals. The Duke’s claim about
the difficulties entailed by principled calculation’s usefulness to the work
of government demonstrates the problems that arise when disinterested
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 13
1/24/14 7:36 PM
14 Introduction
thought governs in the place of those policies it is supposed to generate: the
resigning minister’s overinvestment in the formalized reason of “philosophical deduction” fails as a “social policy” precisely because he does not
recognize that it keeps him from solving the immediate problems of governance he faces. Instinct was not conscious or reflective, but it offered a con­
ve­nient means of explaining how action happened efficiently and accurately
that, as I will elaborate in the next chapters, Victorian liberals identified as
useful to their technē.
Instinct helps make sexuality out of these tactical engagements because
it possesses the capacity to stitch together disparate acts, desires, affects,
and social relations into a single assemblage. Each of the chapters of this
book explains a stitch between instinct’s intervention in one of liberalism
formative scenes and instinct’s activity in making sexuality or sexual difference in law, anthropology, sexology, psychoanalysis, and medicine. This
book thus proceeds by looking at exemplary cases that illuminate how instinct resolves or produces a problem in the relationship between science
and liberal governance. By staging a conversation between materials that are
not frequently read together, each chapter charts how instinct moves and
changes from one discursive domain to another. In doing so, the book seeks
to avoid, first, a contextualist reading in which a fictive social totality could
explain how instinct develops in a given text and, second, a purely reductive
claim that sexuality offers a simple reenactment of instinct’s operations in
other apparatuses concerned with character and agency.
Nonce Science
Sexuality is, of course, in no way more singular or coherent than instinct.
Elizabeth Povinelli argues that “sexuality” names a pro­cess through which
the carnal is attached to what she dubs “genealogical and intimacy grids”
that are, in turn, separated into different geopo­liti­cal imaginaries.33 Her
main cases for this argument, published in 2002, involve land rights claims
by Aboriginal Australians and the desire for the recognition of gay and
lesbian families on the part of the mainstream U.S. gay/lesbian movement.
In the latter, she observes, gay rights activists pitch their demands in terms
of the fact that “in mainstream America, it is said that love makes families
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 14
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 15
elemental(ly).”34 In the former, in contrast, only genealogy matters: “love
does not make an indigenous family qua traditional family according to the
Australian Parliament and the courts, nor do local notions of corporeality,
proximity, affect, place, context, or spirituality.”35 For her, intimacy and
genealogy both offer strategies through which sex acts become constituted
and legitimated as social acts, but, as strategies, they circulate differently,
and in so doing “coloniz[e] social imaginaries and territorializ[e] regional
social worlds.”36 Still, in spite of this differential distribution, we speak of
“sexuality” as though it w
­ ere a single assemblage that could be identified as
a consistent domain of social existence within these widely varying imaginaries. Why?
The History of Sexuality Volume 1 of course offers itself as an answer to
exactly this question. Foucault, that is, provides a genealogy of an assemblage that Povinelli seeks to unravel. While Povinelli inherits a Foucauldian legacy in her understanding of the piecemeal nature of sexuality, her
work nonetheless invites a methodological revision of the Foucault of History 1. When Foucault argues that the “disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the
or­ga­ni­za­tion of power over life was deployed,”37 he focuses on how this “great
bipolar technology” operates as a single overall strategy. Although they remain fundamentally separate, Foucault sees the poles as “linked together by
a ­whole intermediary cluster of relations,”38 a view he adopts so that he can
assess how they work in conjunction with each other. For Foucault, local
tactics and apparatuses may be “heteromorphous with respect to the other
power mechanisms,” but their very insularity allows them to “support” the
“great maneuvers” that History 1 chronicles.39 He is not at all concerned with
how the shape of their dispersal might in and of itself produce asymmetrical
forms of power. Povinelli, in contrast, emphasizes discontinuities in the allocation of intimacy and genealogy: subordination, for her, is a product of
unevenness in how the two grids she identifies circulate. Not only are the
apparatuses different, but they do not necessarily cooperate.
In spite, however, of seeing the “disciplines of the body” and the “regulations of the population” as interlaced, History 1 nonetheless does surprisingly little to document how the supposedly “later” advent of biopolitics
reshapes anatamopolitics. Nor is this omission simply an oversight: Foucault is firm when he claims that there is “no real exchange” between the
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 15
1/24/14 7:36 PM
16 Introduction
“biology of reproduction” and the “medicine of sex.”40 Any examination of
instinct, though, makes this claim ultimately untenable: while it may serve
different functions in each, instinct discourse nonetheless shuttles regularly and densely between these two domains. The instincts that appear in
the Foucauldian “medicine of sex” can indeed only function as they do because debates within natural philosophy around the turn of the nineteenth
century forced the question of how instinct could simultaneously be an
entity oriented to the problem of population and a divinely ordained capacitation of individual (usually animal) bodies. Specifically, the consequences of population thinking in natural philosophy exemplify instinct’s
capacity to remake the individual body as machine. In these debates, a
biopo­liti­cal philosophy reconstitutes an anatamopo­liti­cal one.
To argue this point, I am going to return to the scene that Foucault
identifies as the crux of the invention of nineteenth-­century sexuality: the
restaging of confession from penitential sacrament to (especially) medicine
and psychiatry.41 Instinct can enter the scene of confession only as a result
of this shift to medicalization because it is, at least before the nineteenth
century, entirely incompatible with sin and thus with the need for the interventions of Christian pastoralism. When the poet Alexander Pope argues in his 1734 Essay on Man that instinct is more infallible than reason
because God “directs” instinct, he points out the uselessness of religious
guidance for any creature entirely motivated by instinct: “Say, where full
instinct is th’ unerring guide, / What pope or council can they need beside?”42 Pope cites the idea of instinct as a divine agency bequeathed by
God to animals in lieu of reason, a theological proposition (derived, again,
from Aristotle) that had the authority of medieval theologians, Aquinas
included.43 In spite of the changes to the theorization of instinct that took
place during the nineteenth century, this view retained substantial currency
in the period that this book examines. Darwin, as David DePew and others
suggest, spent a substantial amount of time writing about instinct precisely
because he regarded it as one of the main concepts his opponents, committed
to this theological view, would invoke in order to challenge the legitimacy
of natural selection.44 Even in the Liberal periodical press of the 1880s, it
was still possible for St. George Mivart—­a biologist who sought (to everyone’s chagrin) to make natural selection compatible with Catholicism—­to
invoke instinct as proof of God’s hand in creation because, he claims, instinct
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 16
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 17
is too precise, quick, and reliable to be evidence of anything other than the
miraculousness of the divine.45
These divine qualities should render instinct incompatible with the Foucauldian story. How could an “unerring guide” become the location of a disease? Instinct’s ability to enter the scene of confession demanded two
transitions: first, as Foucault insists, the staging of confession had to move
from the sacramental to the medical; second, the definition of instinct had to
change so that it could become a problem requiring intervention. The first of
these—­the turn toward medicalization—­entailed reconstituting instinct as
something other than the sanctified entity it had been supposed to be. This
reshaping was already underway in the eigh­teenth century: natural phi­lo­
s­o­phers in the sensationalist tradition had made the case that instinct could
not be, in the dismissive words of Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather),
simply a “divine something.”46 While they may have wrestled instinct away
from what they regarded as an overly vague affiliation with the divine,
eighteenth-­century sensationalists ­were nevertheless not identifying instinct
as the site of a problem. They continued, that is, to believe that instincts
generate felicitous behavior. For instinct to become potentially diseased, it
had to be reframed from individual to population thinking.
In Britain, it is Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population
that provides the most important manifestation of this reconfiguration. It
is not that Malthus’s thinking about instinct is incompatible with the proposition that God gives animals instinct to guide their behavior; it is simply
that, instead of being (to return to Pope) “Sure by quick Nature happiness
to gain,”47 instinct leads to misery. In the Malthusian account, instinct becomes biopo­liti­cal by linking individual action to far-­off, species-­level outcomes. But it does so on the condition that instinct’s lack of suppleness or
awareness of environment does not garner the sense of overjoyed wonder
that is evident in descriptions such as Pope’s. Malthus was the progenitor of
the idea that an instinct to reproduce lurks at the root of the behavior of all
organisms, voicing the now-­famous proposition that unlike other living
creatures (all of which also possess an instinct to reproduce), humans have
the ability to check this instinct with rational decisions. “Among plants and
animals,” Malthus writes, “the view of the subject is simple. They are all
impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of their species, and this
instinct is interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for their
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 17
1/24/14 7:36 PM
18 Introduction
offspring.”48 When Foucault, writing about the “idiot” children under Édouard Séguin’s watch, maintains that instinct refuses “any kind of integration within a system,”49 he could be describing the kind of recalcitrant
instinct that Malthus imagines. God may endow all creatures with instinct
to help ensure their survival and reproduction, but this instinct, if left to
itself, begets extreme suffering. Malthus’s prognosis for unchecked reproduction is, after all, notoriously dire: wars, plagues, famines, mortal epidemics all ensue to wreak “dreadful devastation” upon humanity if instincts
to breed remain untempered.50
Malthus’s work, however, is not enough on its own to offer the conditions through which instinct could enter the psychiatric consulting room.
While Malthus may have set the terms for the radical popularization of the
concept of instinct over the course of the nineteenth century, his readiness
to attribute this reproductive power and impulsion to plants should highlight the fact that this “instinct” is not the same entity that would come to
define sexological or psychoanalytic medico-­confessional subjects around
the turn of the twentieth century. When the literary critic Catherine Gallagher discusses Malthus’s consternation over the relationship between reproduction and resources, she observes that his analysis of reproduction
had been far more shocking than his examination of resources because “no
one before Malthus contended that the sexual instinct was at the very core
of our human nature or that it was as permanent and intractable as the instinct for self-­preservation.”51 We should not, however, misread her by assuming that such a claim is psychological. It is about as difficult to imagine
applying a Freudian theory of instinct to plants as it is to imagine Malthus’s
account of instinct as a kind of hydraulic pressure placed upon a psychological entity.
If instinct was to take on the salience it did in the nineteenth-­century
sciences of sex, the Malthusian concern over instinct as a problem at the
population level thus had to be twinned with something Malthus himself
does not expound: the idea of instinct as having relevance to a psychology
of feeling. Erasmus Darwin, in his case against instinct as a “divine something,” was already suggesting in 1794 that instinct is “attended with consciousness, by the repeated efforts of our muscles under the conduct of our
sensations or desires.”52 But it was the work of the early-­nineteenth-­century
French evolutionist Jean-­Baptiste Lamarck who did most to pop­u­lar­ize the
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 18
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 19
idea of instinct as a feeling in the terms that made it available to the medicine of sex. Unlike Malthus, Lamarck could not adhere to the idea that
instinct animates all living creatures.53 For him, instinct stirs only those
creatures with enough biological complexity to possess ner­vous systems because nerves permit animals to experience the internal feeling that he designates as instinct;54 in contrast, caloric and electric “subtle fluids” alone are
responsible for vivifying simpler organisms.55 While Lamarck insists that
this “internal” instinct differs from a capacity to sense external conditions,
the two cannot be wholly unrelated: Lamarck’s most famous contribution
to models of instinct is the idea that acquired habits (that is, responses to
external conditions) can be inherited as instinct in subsequent generations.
The result of this argument is that Lamarck is in a position to argue that
instinct can determine affection and taste; instinct is thus not behavior
that is uniform—­or, rather, uniform except for activities identified as sex
specific—­t hat identifies a species imagined to be a static form.56
By rescripting instinct into a multigenerational pro­cess of change—­one
in which instincts might develop, wane, or worsen over time—­new evolutionary theories altered instinct’s ability to govern. As evolution made the
case that instincts, like organic structures, w
­ ere adaptable, the status of
instinct’s relationship to the influence of both experience and environment
became much thornier.57 This shift to believing in the transformation of
species thus meant not only jettisoning the idea of instinct as a divine agency
but also abandoning the notion that instinct does not learn from experience
or environment. Whereas an instinct that is fixed and repetitive can carve
up the living world into the rational and the nonrational as a means of ensuring that the latter are governed by the former, the idea that an instinct
might, over generations, adapt makes it subject to debates over progress and
degeneration, a pro­cess more consistent with the precepts of liberal bootstrapping and the promise of class mobility.
What makes Lamarckian instincts fitting for the Foucauldian consulting
room is that they are both narratable as “internal” sensations and (as a result
of Lamarck’s interest in individual adaptation and habit) much less fixed in
character than either Malthusian or Aristotelian instincts. It thus is not surprising that, as historians of both sexuality and science contend, most of the
sociobiology of the late nineteenth century tends to focus on Lamarckian
rather than Darwinian evolution.58 Ignoring Darwin, however, means
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 19
1/24/14 7:36 PM
20 Introduction
missing out on the science of instinct that accounts for instinct’s efficacy
within the British liberal imaginary. Darwin does not share Malthus’s pessimism about instinct’s impact on populations, even though it was Malthus’s work that had led him to thinking in population terms in the first
place.59 Unlike Malthusian instincts, Darwinian instincts are themselves
optimized to the survival of the population and not the organism: “it will
be universally admitted,” Darwin writes in the Origin, “that instincts are as
important as corporeal structure for the welfare of each species.”60 Natural
selection takes on the job of “checking” instinct such that reason does not
have to;61 those instincts that exist are by definition beneficial for population survival. This instinct, though, cannot be the recalcitrant figure for
something that refuses to integrate into a system: instinct ­here defines behavior in relation to a system. It is this quality that appeals to the Duke of
St. Bungay as the best means for doing politics. The resigning minister
fails because he lacks not a recalcitrant “no” but a quality that is finely attuned to an environment, in both its immediate and future needs.
In laying out these arguments, I hope to emphasize the multiple—­and
often incommensurate—­political imaginaries that instinct calls into being
as it gathers together assemblages of liberalized, sexualized governance. In
this respect, this book owes a debt to the phi­los­o­pher Isabelle Stengers,
who, in a book dedicated to Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari (“in memory
of an encounter that never took place”), invites participants in scientific controversies to be “on the lookout for the transversal consequences in their
own field of what is proposed in another, heterogeneous field,” a pro­cess that
gives the heterogenesis of scientific concepts a “po­liti­cal inscription.”62 Following Latour, she emphasizes that scientists (and indeed human beings) are
neither the only actants that produce science nor the only ones that determine its transverse circulation. Thinking about instinct as heteroge­ne­tic
and circulating transversely allows this book to draw together select conversations tactically and locally that in turn can spin out into other scenes of
engagement.
This emphasis on the territorializing of local, tactical interventions is
especially necessary for an analysis of instinct, in that instinct fits poorly
with grander metanarratives about the history of science such as, for instance, the one that Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer provide in their
field-­defining Leviathan and the Air-­Pump. Shapin and Schaffer famously
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 20
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 21
distinguish the philosophies of scientific truth associated with, on the one
hand, Robert Boyle, inventor of the air pump, and, on the other, Thomas
Hobbes, author of the po­liti­cal philosophy in Leviathan and opponent of
both Boyle’s methods and his findings inasmuch as they claim to prove the
existence of a vacuum. For Boyle, Shapin and Schaffer argue, scientific truth
demands an experimental method in which creditable witnesses could produce testable experimental “facts” within a segregated “philosophical space
within which dissent was safe or permissible.”63 For Hobbes, in contrast, scientific “truth” should proceed like a geometric proof, seeking the universal
assent through which order can be secured under absolutist rule.
Nineteenth-­century instinct theories work poorly with both sides of
this debate. Malthus, Lamarck, and Darwin all understood themselves to
be writing an ontology of life that could not be compartmentalized into a
safe scientific corner in the way that Boyle’s method would have demanded;
they did not think that instinct had ever been modern in the sense that the
anthropologist of science Bruno Latour means modern.64 Unlike Hobbesian science as it appears in Shapin and Schaffer’s account, however, nineteenth-­
century instinct discourse does not demand universal assent, a fact that
makes sense given that instinct itself is by definition lived as local and tactical. The muddle in the dictionary definition (still the definition in print in
the OED as of late 2013) suggests the extent to which instinct fails to become
standardized. Moreover, the model of “universal assent” was increasingly
difficult for a topic of inquiry such as instinct in light of the waning of natural
philosophy in favor of separate and professional scientific (and social scientific) disciplines in the first half of the nineteenth century. The rise of the
disciplines recast instinct into separate sets of practices.65
It is not, though, that the rise of the disciplines makes instinct more isolated within separate categories but rather that it draws together new networks of affiliation that themselves produce governmental effects. Instinct
may provide the conditions for individualized choice, possess an eerily savvy
investment in futurity, and enact an equally mysterious coordination of the
body (and especially the carnal body), but, like the circuits in Povinelli’s
account of genealogical and intimacy grids, these transverse movements are
unevenly distributed. The significance of the Darwinian account, for instance, in which instinct is efficacious, environmentally responsive, and oriented toward species survival means that instinct might become a desirable
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 21
1/24/14 7:36 PM
22 Introduction
quality for citizenship if you believe in “life” as a po­liti­cal goal (a contentious topic in the debates over the suffragette hunger strikes that I discuss
in this book’s last chapter); it also, as I will elaborate in Chapter 2, allows
instinct to script a division of labor into species discourse. At the same time,
however, the debates over this version of instinct invoke a population thinking that is at odds with the interests of the governing classes that wanted to
claim it as their own, inasmuch as instinctive creatures cannot “represent” a
population but can only act as a member of it.66
Setting out to trace how instinct’s shifting relationship to reason and
civilization was implicated in the production of sexuality would seem to
place this book’s project in line with Giorgio Agamben’s effort to identify
the mode of a qualified, po­liti­cal life (bíos) that is proper to unqualified,
bare life (zoē). Instinct appears to be a ready affiliate of zoē: after all, the
argument that instinct remains fundamentally opposed to social or environmental influence—­and is thus by definition life “unqualified” by the
political—­informs many of the definitions of instinct, even in the contemporary moment. In Agamben’s recasting of Foucault’s historiography, biopolitics are not new to the modern era in the way that Foucault claims.
Rather, what is par­t ic­u­lar to modern state power is the fact that zoē and bíos
come to inhabit, in the guise of the state of exception, a “zone of irreducible
indistinction” through which life becomes not only an object for po­liti­cal
power but also its subject.67 It is all too easy to imagine instinct as a protagonist of Agamben’s claim that modern democracy “wants to put the freedom
and happiness of men into play in the very place—‘bare life’—­t hat marked
their subjection.”68 Precisely because it designates a quality that resists social experience, instinct offers the fiction of an individualized autonomy
that is not at risk from, for example, the alienation of obligation or contract;
it seems, moreover, to make sense to regard instinct as the effect of a split
between right and fact, law and nature, that, for Agamben, itself constitutes
both the foundation and exercise of power.
Instinct, however, is as often what grounds proper po­liti­cal being as it is
the condition of exclusion from it. Reading instinct in line with Agamben’s
argument would thus entail a problematic belief that instinct participates
in biopo­liti­cal governance only by virtue of being, to deploy Agamben’s
description of the state of exception, “included by means of an exclusion.”69
This kind of analysis would miss out on a much more complex matrix of
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 22
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 23
governmentality at work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Agamben’s corrective to Foucault’s historiography is well taken,
his contention in Homo Sacer is, as many critics have noted, both too simple
and too sweeping.70 Agamben’s argument does not function well for an
analysis of instinct in two ways. First, instinct fails to inhabit a state of exception as Agamben’s assertion about zoē would necessitate. One of the finicky things about instinct in the period this book examines is that it fails to
remain consistently designated as other to the proper operation of law. Second, I share the skepticism that Aihwa Ong, Paul Rabinow, Nikolas ­Rose,
and others evince about Agamben’s overly exclusive focus on the state.71
Inasmuch as this book offers a discourse analysis of instinct in Britain during the period between the 1850s and the First World War, it retains a
Foucauldian belief in the dispersal of power across a field of immanent
dispositifs.
I begin the book with a chapter in which I examine how instinct’s resolution of a contradiction in the liberal theorization of desire-­based choice
provides the animus for its ghostly relevance to pornography. In the Lockean models adapted by the late Victorians, “free” choice was a condition of
liberal contract through which a person might suspend part of his or her
self-­ownership. Instinct worked as a palliating corrective to this alienation
because it offered a model of self-­continuity that could not be alienated,
being safeguarded against the alienation of contract precisely because it
exists outside of reason and rational choice. Instinctive individuals supposedly could not create or manage instinct; as a result, they could not contract
their instincts away. In consequence, somewhat ironically, instinct helped
ensure a germ of inalienable self-­possession. As a result of standing outside
of the economies of “choice” and “contract,” instinct could intervene in a
late Victorian world in which an abundance of information and objects
made the understanding of how and why people make choices an important
object of curiosity. To make this claim, I examine the work of Charles Darwin and his protégé George Romanes, noting that naturalists such as these
demonstrate a fascination with instinct’s “lack of selection of means” as
they investigate moments when instinct seems to respond to “mistaken”
objects. Because of this kind of characterization, instinct winds up being
helpful for imagining how and when people act in the face of a profusion of
potentially stimulating objects. I tackle this problem by looking at the
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 23
1/24/14 7:36 PM
24 Introduction
late-­nineteenth-­century production and regulation of obscenity. Alexander
Cockburn’s 1868 R. v. Hicklin decision entrenched the notion that a text’s professed aspirations or broader genre was immaterial to determining whether it
is obscene. Examining how instinct was mobilized in the legal language of
this kind of obscenity regulation, as well as within pornographic fiction such
as My Secret Life, allows me to demonstrate that the acontextual reading model
depends upon the scientific elaboration of conventions around instinct. The
Hicklin decision, I suggest, imagines that readers will react ineluctably and
forcefully to specific passages in a way that is utterly in­de­pen­dent of the context of the rest of the text in question. In this respect, obscenity legislation
borrowed from the scientific conventions surrounding instinct in which instinct also acts immediately, forcefully, and unavoidably, without paying attention to setting or context.
In Chapter 2, I trace two parallel trajectories. On the one hand, I examine the movement from understanding instinct as an alternative to reason
to regarding instinct as a complement to reason. On the other, it considers
the shift from reading instinct as a force that produces bad laborers who are
incompatible with the demands of liberalism to seeing instinct as lurking at
the root of all laboring and indeed economic activity. Assessing Walter
Bagehot’s optimism about liberal po­liti­cal institutions in Physics and Politics
(1872), I first argue that liberal po­liti­cal and economic theory turns to instinct to explain how savages can act without desire. Because instinct was
thought to be insensible to any knowledge of the relationship between
means and ends, it presented liberal theorists with the means of explaining
a sharply limited aspirational horizon that nonetheless could account for
agency by working as a substitute for motivation. I argue that this formu­
lation was crucial in allowing late Victorian liberalism to imagine savages
who ­were conceived as, on the one hand, fiery and passionate in bursts of
activity and, on the other, indolent and responsible for their own poverty.
Liberals and radicals all agreed, however, that instinct had no place in the
scene of wage work under industrial capital—­a fact that presented complications for the nascent movement for the rights of inverts (or the “inter­
mediate sex”) as it sought to argue that certain forms of labor might be
biologically intrinsic. Looking at labor allowed sexologists such as Havelock
Ellis and Edward Carpenter to appropriate the connection between instinct and work to legitimate the kind of nonreproductive functions that
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 24
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Introduction 25
can be performed by instinctive agents and then to reread these connections within the language of gender.
By turning to Victorian ethnology, Chapter 3 investigates how psychoanalysis developed its theorization of instinct in relation to nineteenth-­
century Eu­ro­pe­an presumptions about “savagery.” Freud’s Totem and Taboo
famously establishes an analogy between the psyche of an individual Eu­ro­
pe­an neurotic and the social or­ga­ni­za­t ion of savage life. This chapter reads
two of Freud’s key sources for this argument: a set of nineteenth-­century
ethnological monographs about indigenous Australians that exerted tremendous influence on the development of British anthropology. The first,
Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880), was researched in the heavily colonized regions of Gippsland in the 1870s; the
second, Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia, was a study of Arrernte people in the central desert, where the incursion of whites was much sparser. By the mid–­nineteenth century, ethnology
had developed a professional niche in focusing on institutions, ceremonies,
and material culture as the basis for their knowledge about savages. Chapter 3, however, argues that this kind of ethnological work reproduced
eighteenth-­century depictions of instinctive savages by recasting the tropes
associated with instinct—­unreflecting, binding, and immediate attachment—­
onto the relationship between savages and savage governmentality. Neither
of these texts, however, mentions instinct—­an omission that is in fact common in nineteenth-­century ethnological writing. Freud’s engagement of the
partial erasure of instinct in nineteenth-­century ethnology, I suggest, occasions his striking ambivalence about the relationship between instinct and
social institutions that pervades his first instinct theory, especially as it is
expounded in Totem and Taboo and the earlier Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality.
My final chapter asks why the suffragette hunger strikes emerged as
such powerful po­liti­cal tactics in Britain in the years leading up to World
War I. It does so by tracking moments in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in which the perceived failure of an instinct of self-­
preservation generates po­liti­cal crisis or social panic. By reading suffrage
literature by Christabel Pankhurst, Constance Lytton, and Constance
Maud alongside the emerging literature on suicide, anorexia, and the birth-­
rate panic, the chapter investigates the mediations between the instinctive
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 25
1/24/14 7:36 PM
26 Introduction
citizen and the instinctive woman at a moment when instinct had been regarded as one of the key determinants of sexuation. In a move that reflects
instinct’s position in civilization more generally, the rational citizen was
sometimes the binary counterpart to the instinctive woman and sometimes
a figure endowed with his own set of instincts that ­were different and ideally
complementary to those of women. The suffragette hunger strikes tackled
both of these positions simultaneously. On the one hand, strikers sought to
parody rational citizenship by staging a protest designed to suggest that
they could embody the model voter’s ability to abdicate interest in the name
of principle. On the other, they made the case that women’s instincts ­were
in fact entirely in line with characteristics desired in the electorate. Their
decision to mobilize hunger as a po­liti­cal tactic directly impacts the theorization of gendered instinctiveness. Nineteenth-­century evolutionary theory, in
both Darwinian and Lamarckian guises, positioned hunger as the most
primal of instincts such that hunger provided the template through which
other instincts came to be theorized. In this sense, hunger helped define the
models through which sexuating instincts—­believed to occur phyloge­ne­
tically later—­could be shaped. As suffragettes mobilized the concept of the
strike in order to describe their refusal of food, they linked their protest to the
strikes of Chartists seeking electoral reform in the first half of the nineteenth
century. In so doing, the hunger strikers suggested that their instincts should
be understood as forms of labor, a fact that implied a critique of the way that
the sexual division of labor had become newly scripted as an instinct-­based
discourse of sexual difference.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 26
1/24/14 7:36 PM
t h r e e
Freud’s Australia
A text that undertakes a thorough perusal of late Victorian ethnological
sources, Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) is unabashed in identifying “savages” as the instinctive analogues of Eu­ro­pe­a n neurotics. By adapting
the detailed descriptions of “savage” rules and customs that prevailed in
nineteenth-­century texts—­and especially those about indigenous Australia—
Totem and Taboo makes its famous argument that savage social or­ga­ni­za­t ion
and customary practice produce the simultaneous satisfaction and regulation of ambivalent unconscious wishes. But Freud’s reliance on Victorian
ethnology as the source of evidence for savage instincts should strike any
reader familiar with his archive as curious. Seldom, after all, does instinct
appear as a term in late Victorian ethnological writings; unlike Freud’s more
speculative psychology, these ethnological writings demonstrate a preference for the concrete description of material objects and cultural practices. If, as Totem and Taboo argues, savage custom can provide the map to
the Eu­ro­pe­a n psyche, the Eu­ro­pe­a n fantasy of the “savage mind” itself
94
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 94
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 95
undergoes a shift in the pro­cess because the social systems that Freud
takes as psychic guides to the instinctive ­were new features of savagery that
revised an earlier fantasy of the instinctive savage as largely outside of social
influence.
Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo navigates what was already a cultural paradox in the late nineteenth century: if instinct was to be appropriated as a crucial term for the smooth functioning of “civilized” life, this
appropriation had to be accomplished without entirely uprooting the value
of the “civilized” things that had been commonly defined in dialectical
opposition to the instinctive itself. This chapter argues that while the
nineteenth-­century consolidation of the anthropological culture concept
shifted ethnological interest away from the figure of the solitary savage to
the wider structures of communal governance, it nonetheless accommodated the eighteenth-­century caricatures of instinctive and passionate savages by redeploying the terrain of the instinctive onto collective forms of
social or­ga­ni­za­t ion. At the same time, Eu­ro­pe­an instincts would be thought
to achieve greater in­de­pen­dence from the material stuff of daily life, being
increasingly figured as outside of either social or material influence. In this
sense, in aligning instinct with both the fiery transparency of the savage
whose unconscious knows no repression and the buried sexual psychology
of the medicalized (Eu­ro­pe­an) bourgeois subject, Totem and Taboo navigates
a complex referential bifurcation in late Victorian semiotics of the instinctive. This is to say that instincts, in becoming newly respectable, had come
to mean different things when predicated of savages and of civilized men.
The terms of Freud’s analysis in Totem and Taboo ­were already prevalent
in the idealization of instinct that was becoming more widespread in the
later part of the nineteenth century. In his famous 1869 essay “The Subjection of Women,” John Stuart Mill characterizes the nineteenth-­century
reaction to the Enlightenment as tending “to accord to the unreasoning
elements in human nature the infallibility which the eigh­teenth century is
supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements.”1 Mill likely had in
mind Jeremy Bentham’s admiration for rational systems when describing
the eigh­teenth century in these broad strokes and not the idealization of
sentiment demonstrated by, for example, Lawrence Sterne in Britain or
Jean-­Jacques Rousseau on the continent—­nor, of course, had reason ceased
to be a significant term in late-­nineteenth-­century po­liti­cal philosophy. But
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 95
1/24/14 7:36 PM
96 Freud’s Australia
when Mill writes that “for the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted
that of Instinct,”2 he nonetheless gestures to the importance of the natural and instinctive to nineteenth-­century po­liti­cal ethics. This importance,
however, meant that late-­
nineteenth-­
century American and Eu­
ro­
pe­
an
thinkers became invested in rethinking the relationship between instinct
and evolutionary “progress.” In consequence, when, as I observed in Chapter 1, William James argues in 1890 that instinct increases rather than
decreases with civilization,3 he provides an evolutionary psychology that
reflects the “apotheosis” of instinct that Mill describes. While savages still
bear the cultural burden of being natural in their instinctive unreason, their
consequent status as guides to the purported infallibility of the natural presented a problem for Eu­ro­pe­an po­liti­cal philosophy that eventually came to
condition the redefinition of instinct itself.
By examining the imperial logics that helped enable the writing of Totem
and Taboo, I also seek to understand the cultural politics that produced the
theorization of instinct in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—­a text
that predates Totem and Taboo but that Freud continued to revise until well
after Totem and Taboo had appeared in print in 1912–­1913.4 Arnold Davidson
and Jean Laplanche have both argued that Freud’s chief contribution to the
theorization of instinct lay in revising the Victorian idea that, as Davidson
summarizes, “a specific object and a specific aim formed part and parcel of
the instinct.”5 I am arguing ­here that this account of instinct as it appears
in the Three Essays inherits the legacy of the anthropological writings
Freud cites as he wavers on the question of whether instinct’s objects are
naturally pregiven or not. The in­de­pen­dence that instinct was acquiring
in civilized venues—­a n in­de­pen­dence that increasingly unraveled the primacy of the link between instinct and “natural” aims and objects—­helped
occasion the kind of “apotheosis of instinct” that Mill descries.6 But although these new civilized instincts may show flexible and creative cathexes
to a multiplicity of objects, they are nonetheless modeled on what Freud
insists is an instinctive attachment between savages and savage social structures. Freud’s analogy should remind us that even ontoge­ne­t ic accounts of
instinctive cathexis carry a cultural history beyond the register of an individual’s lived history.
In the original German of Totem und Tabu, Freud uses the term Trieb
(drive) substantially more frequently than Instinkt—­
both of which are
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 96
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 97
translated as “instinct” in the En­glish of the Standard Edition. Commonly
deplored as a failure on the part of the Standard Edition’s translator James
Strachey, this dual usage of the word instinct obscures the idea that, as
Jacques Lacan once put it, Trieb “has nothing to do with instinct.”7 Strachey’s
decision to translate Trieb as instinct may sacrifice some of the clarity that
Lacan and others might wish; it is, however, not wholly unwarranted. Adrian
Johnston observes that Freud never fully shakes the biologism associated
with instinct and that Lacan’s dictum may thus be “too extreme, too sweeping.”8 But it is not only Freud’s tendency toward biological meta­phors that
makes a stark and clear division between instinct and drive untenable. Freud’s
Trieb emerges in explicit reference to the ideas around instinct that ­were
circulating broadly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the original German Totem und Tabu, Freud himself translates James
Frazer’s use of the En­glish “instinct” as Instinkt only to discuss it as Trieb in
the following sentence.9 While Freudian Trieb may depart from late Victorian
instinct theories in a number of important ways, it nonetheless bears the
marks of the changes in thinking instinct that ­were occurring around the
turn of the twentieth century.
My archive for this paper follows Freud’s in Totem and Taboo, at least to
the extent that Freud opts to “select as the basis of this comparison the
tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most backward
and miserable of savages, the aborigines of Australia.”10 Late Victorian anthropological speculation commonly regarded Aboriginal Australians in
the way that Freud does ­here: in spite of Charles Darwin’s selection of the
Fuegans for the title, Australian Aborigines occupied a heightened burden
of repre­sen­ta­tion as the most primitive of humans and consequently the
people thought to be closest to apes and to some imagined fantasy of primeval, nascent humanity. The narratives about local indigenous people that
white ethnologists in Australia ­were producing and sending to En­gland in
the form of journal articles, monographs, and personal correspondence thus
acquired a prominent place in the evolutionary theory central to the emerging discipline of anthropology. In par­t ic­u­lar, two texts would strongly influence Freud’s account of Australian Aborigines: Lorimer Fison and A. W.
Howitt’s 1880 monograph Kamilaroi and Kûrnai, and the 1899 ethnography
that is dedicated to Fison and Howitt, Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s
Native Tribes of Central Australia. Not only does Freud cite both pairs of
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 97
1/24/14 7:36 PM
98 Freud’s Australia
authors throughout his analysis, but his reliance on authorities such as
James Frazer and Edward Burnett Tylor also refracts these earlier texts in
that they provided the most sizable quotient of data in the work of the Oxbridge anthropologists.
The Institution of Instinct
In the fourth and most famous of the essays in Totem and Taboo, Freud both
cites and praises a key sentence from James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy
(1910): “It is not easy to see,” Frazer had written, “why any deep human instinct should need to be reinforced by law.”11 Freud approves of Frazer’s
argument about instinct and law because it allows him to argue against the
idea that there is such a thing as a widespread “horror of incest”;12 Frazer’s
almost quizzical musing on law and instinct reappears in Freud’s text as a
more forcefully stated assertion that laws are not instituted to reinforce
instincts but rather to counteract them. In Frazer, that is, Freud finds an
ally for his famously contentious arguments that Oedipal wishes are universal and that there is no “no” in the unconscious. For Freud and Frazer
alike, the fact that there are institutions such as exogamy in place to prevent sex between close kin is evidence enough that no such thing as a “horror of incest” should be thought to inhere in the human psyche. Institutions,
by this account, must necessarily be at odds with instinct, stepping in to
counteract the potentially destructive effects of truculent instinctive energy. Instinct would consequently seem to need no institutional buttressing or activation, appearing to the two men as fully self-­sufficient in its
activities, by definition broaching no need for or interest in the social institutions that spring up to or­ga­nize human collective life.
But although Freud voices support for Frazer’s advocacy of this ­wholesale
dichotomy between instinct and law, his own sense of the division between
the two is by no means consistently so stark. Freud may regard himself as
partisan to the idea that instinct obviates institutional enforcement when
he needs to make the case that social structures are not the transparent
reflections of human wishes, but the regulatory institutions that appear
throughout Totem and Taboo—­taboo, totemism, and exogamy themselves,
for instance—­are at the same time cast as products of the same instincts
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 98
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 99
they are said to counteract. The fact that ambivalence appears so frequently
in Freud’s analysis highlights the fact that institutions cannot be thought
solely to regulate the undesirable components of instinct. Because cathexis
is multivalent in its emotional expression (hate still means love), institutions cannot help but reinforce some articulations of instinctive attachment in the very same acts through which they prohibit others. In Freud’s
gloss on Darwin’s theory of the primal horde, the band of brothers murders
the primal father out of fear and envy—­only to atone for their act out of
guilt, love, and identification with the figure whom they have supplanted.
The injunction not to murder that the brothers install in the wake of their
crime clamps down on an instinctive aggressivity, but the totemic institutions they form at the same time revere what Freud regards as a cathexis to
the father figure that is itself instinctive in character.
The difficulty ­here is substantially the same as the one that Freud encounters when he confronts the task of analyzing narcissism in light of his
early instinct theory. At this moment in 1912–­1913, Freud was still working
with the first theory of instincts that dominates his work before the appearance of the death drive in Beyond the Plea­sure Principle in 1920. In this earlier formulation, the sphere of the social (and the reality principle entailed
by it) is aligned with the self-­preservative instincts and distinguished from
the sexual instincts, which are, in turn, conceived in more aggressive and
antisocial terms. Freud’s work on narcissism was, however, already beginning to put pressure on his separation between the social and sexual.13
Freud’s 1911 case history of the paranoiac Daniel Paul Schreber had identified Schreber’s belief that he was the wife of god as the outgrowth of a homosexuality founded on narcissistic fixation. The account of homosexual
narcissism elaborated in the Schreber case would come to haunt Totem and
Taboo because, as Peter Gay writes, it allowed Freud to investigate “the relations of men to their gods as derivatives of their relations to their fathers.”14
The yoking of ego instincts and sexual instincts that Freud identifies in the
Schreber case underwrites his understanding of savage social life in Totem
and Taboo because it makes possible, for instance, his reading of the sacralized totem animal as an incarnation of the murdered primal father.
As Freud sees it, these relations to what he understands as the psychologically equivalent figures of god, father, and totem are determined by specifically sexual instincts that allow for narcissistic identification to occur; they
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 99
1/24/14 7:36 PM
100 Freud’s Australia
thus position sexual instincts at the basis of social life. In the course of
tracing the connections between the homosexual investments in both Totem and Taboo and the Schreber analysis, Mikkel Borch-­Jacobsen asks, in a
rhetorical vein, whether “since the ego, according to the first Freudian theory, is supposed to represent society’s interests and values, ­doesn’t the discovery of narcissism permit the libidinal ground of sociality and morality to
be unveiled?”15 Sociality and morality include the “law” that Frazer and
Freud had concurred was categorically at odds with instinct; what we see,
in contrast, through the theory of narcissism is rather the idea that social
institutions are products of an instinctive energy that collapses the distinction between the erotic and the egoistic.
The ­whole idea of a psychoanalytic subject with a set of instincts acting
in reference to the events of a personal history is radically undercut by such
accounts of institutions. Even before penning the famous Oedipal legend
in the book’s concluding chapter, Freud had found troubling the status of
the institutional. The dominant analogy of the second of the essays compiled in Totem and Taboo—­t hat between savages and neurotics—­also relies
on the idea of “social instincts” as the basis for social institutions.16 “The
neuroses,” Freud tells us, “are social structures; they endeavour to achieve
by private means what is effected in society by collective effort,” adding
that “the determining influence in them is exercised by instinctual forces of
sexual origin; the corresponding cultural formations, on the other hand,
are based upon social instincts.”17 Because, as Freud so repeatedly insists,
the neuroses are made of the same stuff as savage social institutions, the
discussion of the instinctive investments in neuroses holds firm for these
externalized savage equivalents as well; Freud, in fact, insists that savage
institutions owe their existence to the fact that savages are privy to “the
projection outwards of internal perceptions . . . ​which therefore normally
plays a very large part in determining the form taken by [the] external
world.”18 Freud had always asserted that mental events do not need to be
materially “real” in order to have real effects on the experiencing subject.
But Freud’s account of savage psyches is starker still in that he positions the
institutions that make up a savage social world as a constitutive part of the
savage psyche to the point that it becomes impossible to discern the edges
of where the experiencing psyche stops and the experienced world begins.
This tangle is obviously a far cry from the observation that we started with,
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 100
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 101
namely that institutions are superfluous where instinct is at play. This claim
becomes almost impossible to sustain because the categories it presumes—­
categories such as “individual psyche” and “social world”—­overlap so fundamentally that it becomes hard to make a definitive claim about how they
are distinguished.
The very untidiness of Freud’s sense of these relationships, however,
bears the traces of reforms in late-­
nineteenth-­
century anthropological
methodology. Freud, we have seen, regards the ­whole operation of any savage society as analogous to the mind of an individual Eu­ro­pe­a n neurotic.19 The ethnology that he cites also effects this kind of transposition
between individual and group but in a different way. I noted earlier that
instinct ceases to be a significant term in Eu­ro­pe­a n ethnological texts
about savage life. Late-­nineteenth-­century ethnology instead borrows from
the features that had hitherto been commonly deployed to characterize individual savages and uses them to designate a way of being in a group that,
in turn, forecloses the possibility of the production of individuality in the
first place. By the end of the nineteenth century, institutions have replaced
the individual savage as the chief objects of interest for anthropologists and
ethnologists.20 Instinct fades from explicit focus, but the nascent discipline’s
inability to shed the terms of its own constitution nonetheless makes instinctiveness a necessary, if tacit, presumption in the way that savages ­were
thought to comprise and relate to these institutions.
The position in which academic anthropology found itself by the end of
the nineteenth century virtually necessitated this kind of transposition between individual and group. At its core, nascent academic anthropology
owed a tremendous debt to earlier figurations of savages because the tropes
affiliated with this figure designated the terrain that made anthropology’s
project intelligible. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot observes that anthropology inherited its monopoly on the production of knowledge about Savages “almost by default” from a Re­nais­sance Eu­rope that constituted itself as such
by projecting the as-­yet-­generically undifferentiated specters of the Savage
and Utopia as its “Elsewhere.”21 Only in the nineteenth century, Trouillot
argues, did the Savage and Utopia become distinguished from each other
in the course of a professionalization that sought to distinguish ethnographic writing from travelogue-­romances and other fictional accounts of
Elsewheres whose specificity and factuality had hitherto been deemed
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 101
1/24/14 7:36 PM
102 Freud’s Australia
substantially uninteresting and irrelevant. Because, Trouillot concludes,
anthropology inherited the “Savage slot” from this early modern world, it
“never bothered to theorize” the category that constituted its raison d’être.22
Stated otherwise, the Savage constituted the imagined baseline in reference
to which the new field of academic anthropology articulated itself. This is
not, of course, to say that anthropological texts did not undermine their
generic constitution or that this constitution was not itself perpetually shifting. But even admitting this shifting and différance, Trouillot’s point nonetheless largely holds: while anthropology may debate the accidents of the
savage figure and strive to work against the imperialist logics that founded
the field, it does not manage to overthrow the definition of the savage as the
primitive counterpart to the modern Eu­ro­pe­an because that figure designates the basis of its intellectual enterprise.
Instinct numbered among the key tropes that produced the savage figure that allowed academic anthropology to come into being. In both the
“Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of In­e­qual­ity Among Men” and
On the Social Contract, for instance, Rousseau famously argues that instinct
renders man utterly capable of living happily in the state of nature: “In
instinct alone,” Rousseau writes in the second “Discourse,” man “had all
he needed to live in the state of Nature, in cultivated reason he has no
more than what he needs to live in society.”23 This lone, male figure appears to the famously misanthropic Rousseau as content because his instinctive self-­sufficiency allows him to avoid the complications of society.
The fact that this savage is also happily fulfilled with hetero sex presents
no problem for this theory of blissful relative solitude, because women are
not, in Rousseau’s po­liti­cal theory at any rate, persons enough to proffer
threatening ontological re­sis­tance.24 On the Social Contract is, in contrast,
premised on the passage, as Rousseau puts it, “from the state of nature to
the civil state,” which produces “a remarkable change in man, for it substitutes justice for instinct in his behaviour and gives his actions a moral
quality they previously lacked.”25 The sense of substitution between rule-­
governed conduct and instinct helps highlight why it is that Frazer (and
Freud, in the moments where he voices his approval for this tendency) can
regard instinct as obviating the need for institutional governance: it is in
fact their similarity that allows them to be positioned as mutually exclusive binary opposites.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 102
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 103
In earlier formulations such as Rousseau’s, instinct marked a defining
feature of the savage in the state of nature. Instinct’s role in demarcating
this figure will, moreover, reappear as a key assumption in anthropological
literature of the twentieth century at least through the structuralist epoch.26
At the moment I am examining, however, the dictates of the intellectual
cultures through which anthropology was becoming professionalized placed
the theorization of instinct outside of the purview of what might be legitimated as anthropological research. While being compelled to preserve the
terms of the “Savage slot,” late-­nineteenth-­century British anthropology
also found itself bound to the protocols and evidentiary standards of scientific empiricism. In Britain, academic anthropology came into its own
through the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a reformed university curriculum in which empirical science was
acquiring new legitimacy.27 As distinct from disciplines such as biology,
psychology, and neurology that might legitimately undertake a “scientific”
study of instinct, anthropology investigated questions that ­were located at
a transindividual level consistent with its developing niche in the scientific
study of savage culture.28 While “armchair anthropology” remained a professionally viable mode of intellectual engagement into the early years of
the twentieth century, the kinds of information demanded by study-­bound
anthropological men seeking to authorize the science of their claims could
increasingly only be produced through sustained, long-­term contact with
the groups of people being studied by ethnologist-­correspondents in the
field.29 Anthropological theorists needed substantial ethnological data that
could be empirically observed in order to produce the generalizations about
“culture” upon which they based their articulation of the laws of socioevolutionary progress.
As a consequence of this new structuring of anthropological science, by
the end of the nineteenth century, the term “institution” was acquiring
greater social prominence as the term for the units of social life that became aggregated under the rubric of the newly consolidated anthropological culture concept. Late in his career, Edward Burnett Tylor, chief among
the early architects of the idea of culture, published a field-­defining essay
titled “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent” (1889), in which he deployed the
term “institution” chiefly in relation to practices of customary avoidance,
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 103
1/24/14 7:36 PM
104 Freud’s Australia
residence, “marriage,” descent, and naming practices—­many of those same
interlocking aspects of social life that interest Freud in Totem and Taboo. Anthropologists such as Tylor regarded “institution” as the appropriate way
of naming units within the category of culture because the term had, by
the 1880s, come to invoke the kind of relative permanence thought to be
necessary to defining culture as a hypostatized entity that is knowable as a
­whole—­and opposed to the immanence predicated of instinct by virtue of
the same qualities. Tylor’s essay introduced the practice of statistical analysis into anthropological writing, deploying institutions as the informational
building blocks from which such analysis might be undertaken. Such institutions could be observed and described by ethnologists in the field, becoming the specimens with reference to which anthropologists could speculate
about the evolution of culture just as their naturalist confreres could examine fossils in order to describe the evolution of species.
The utility of institutions to projects such as Tylor’s was further overdetermined by what Christopher Herbert describes as a growing and socially
widespread critique of disciplinary institutions within En­gland itself—­a
critique that, Herbert suggests, led to a censure of excessive social control
projected outward onto imperial terrain. This projection marks a new moment in this disavowal from the more commonplace distinctions between
savage instinct and civilized reason. H
­ ere, the savage occupies a place in
which Eu­ro­pe­a n anxieties about the relation between subject and law
emerge full force. “What we see, then,” Herbert writes, “is a broad reversal of assumptions in which savage society is transformed from a void of
institutional control where desire is rampant to a spectacle of controls
exerted systemically upon the smallest details of daily life.”30 This excessive social control, however, possesses a characteristic feature that is only
slightly marked in Herbert’s assessment. The symptomatic “spectacle of
controls” implies a society too rife with rules—­t hat is, a society in which
formal regulatory classifications have assumed too much authority and
too much in­de­pen­dence with respect to the material that they categorize,
classify, and discipline. The difference between savagery and civilization
is thus not that the former actuates a socially freeform expression of instinctive licentiousness but rather that savagery represents an overproliferation of institutions with regard to which savages have no metacategorical
self-­reflexivity.31
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 104
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 105
We should, however, by now hear the resonance of the rhetoric habitually associated with instinct in reference to what Herbert describes as savage overdiscipline. If, as I suggested in the last chapter, instinct appears as
the epistemology that is defined as a back-­formation from Reason in which
the relation to the function of a rule is subtracted, it thus describes exactly the
relation to law that Herbert sees as newly emergent in the late nineteenth
century. In the many nineteenth-­century definitions that view instinct as
a substitute for reason, instinct’s effectiveness and structure are defined
relative to the standards and categories established by reason; instinct
steps in to explain how a creature might act in a way that mimics the actions of a rational human being while denying the idea that this instinctive creature possesses the ability to access any rational metacategorical
awareness about the action that instinct has produced. Such a model,
though, flies in the face of the opposition between instinct and institution
that Frazer had elaborated and, indeed, of some of the principles grounding
the definition of the institutional in the first place. The verb form “to institute” that, historically speaking, preceded the nominalization had after all
emphasized its originary function: the act of instituting was regarded as
attached to some form of decisive volition—­t hings that are instituted contrast, for example, with those that simply emerge. Even critiques of such
models of institutionality—­a nd especially, those models that would soon
blossom into an explicit structural-­f unctionalist insistence on institutions
as ideologically neutral expressions of rational social functioning—­accept
the idea that institutions at least present the effect of functional cultural
“self-­expression.”32
As I have said, however, this kind of shift toward anthropological concern with institutions does not preclude the supposition of a savage object
conceived as fundamentally instinctive in nature. Savages still figure prominently in the naturalist and psychological literatures about instinct at this
time; it is simply that instinct ceases to figure prominently in the literature
about savages even though instinctiveness is still presumed to be a defining
characteristic of the savages in question.33 The institutions that replace instinctive individual figures as objects of focus come to take on many of the
qualities of the figure for whom they substitute. Francis Galton’s response
to Australian kinship systems is illustrative of the way in which instinct
came to characterize the relations between savages and institutions. Galton
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 105
1/24/14 7:36 PM
106 Freud’s Australia
admits, openly and unabashedly, to being perplexed by the “peculiarly complicated system of Australian marriages,” noting with considerable frustration that he “had often tried, in vain, to find an easy clue to this strange
custom, feeling assured that no aboriginal Australian brain could acquire
the accurate and almost instinctive knowledge they have of it without
one.”34 Galton’s frustration is telling, as is the language in which he narrates it. He invokes a sense of dizzying categories, which (it turns out later
in his text) subscribe to a simple logic that he, after much effort, has managed to unearth; rather than a complex social system, Galton thus finds the
elaborated repetitions of a simple categorizing idea. This rhetorical move
thus effectively sidesteps the epistemological quandary presented by the
possibility that an aboriginal society might be more subtly sophisticated
than a civilized Eu­ro­pe­an one. ­Here, the underlying principles are discovered to be rudimentary but manifested into an overabundant profusion of
social forms that are consequently illogical and unnecessary. Similarly, the
“aboriginal Australian brain” can only have “instinctive” knowledge of the
system, a means of accounting for knowledge while preserving the idea of
ignorance necessary to regarding tribal societies, to return to Herbert’s
assessment of this schema, as “ ‘fettered,’ ‘bound,’ ‘chained down’ by mindless
conventionality.”35
Being fettered to social institutions without any ability to have a self-­
reflective relationship to those institutions foreshadows Freud’s argument
about the excessive intimacy between savages and savage social structures
that I discussed earlier. I will come back to Freud more fully later in this
essay, but it is worth noting h
­ ere that Freud not only accepts the premise of
Galton’s claim that savages have no meta-­awareness of their social institutions but also goes a step further in maintaining that those savage “social
structures” actually result from the instincts of those savages who are governed by the institutions in question.36 For Freud, that is, savage social institutions express the instincts of a collectivity of individual savages. These
savages are, moreover, not distinguishable from one another. As a result,
the “projection outward”37 of instinctive psychic matter can produce social
structures without substantial difficulty: there are no contradictions and
tensions between individuals with different psychic investments that might
make the transposition between individual and group fraught with trouble.
These movements between individual and group are, moreover, crucial to
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 106
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 107
the definitions of savagery and civilization themselves—­a fact that proves
integral to Fison and Howitt’s critique of the Rousseauian savage in Kamilaroi and Kûrnai.
Individualizing the Individual
Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kûrnai includes a set of essays from each
author, drawing on Howitt’s firsthand experience with Kûrnai people while
he worked in Gippsland as a police magistrate and the survey data on Kamilaroi people that Fison had gathered in response to his correspondence
with the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan. By the 1870s, white
colonization had overwhelmed Gippsland: the gold rush of the 1850s had
led to the tripling of the white population and the rapid eradication of the
Kûrnai, whose tribe of 1,500 people in 1839 had been reduced to only 140
members by 1877.38 So thorough had been the mixture of settler violence,
imported disease, and destruction of traditional land use (not to mention
other forms of colonial violence that Achille Mbembe reads as infrastructural warfare)39 that by and large the colony of Victoria was conceived as
predominantly British in character, supposedly bearing scant cultural trace
of its earlier Aboriginal history.40 With nearby Melbourne taking the title
of the “London of the south” and the comparatively temperate climate
more proximate to what was familiar to Eu­ro­pe­an standards of comfort and
health, the imaginary of the frontier had shifted both west and north by
the 1870s, as the new Overland Telegraph line (completed in 1872) was
staffing outposts through central regions in which few white people had
previously traveled, let alone settled, and the discovery of gold in northern
Queensland led to a boom of fortune-­seeking whites migrating to the
northeastern tropics.41
Naturalizing the genocide of indigenous people in the wake of white
contact was commonplace at the end of the nineteenth century. The observation that Aboriginal people would soon be extinct after civilization had
made its purportedly inevitable inroads regularly graced the prefaces of
ethnological texts that sought to justify the importance and urgency of
their intellectual work. Neither Fison and Howitt nor Spencer and Gillen
are exempt from such a charge, despite that both duos saw themselves as in
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 107
1/24/14 7:36 PM
108 Freud’s Australia
a patronizing and protective relationship to the communities they
studied—­and indeed, they did work to temper some of the most extreme
forms of endemic settler violence. Spencer and Gillen open Native Tribes
with the authorizing claim that “unless some special effort be made, many
tribes will practically die out without our gaining any knowledge of the
details of their organisation, or of their sacred customs and beliefs.”42
The exhortation that more ethnological research (and not a staunching of
the pro­cesses of extinction) marks what is urgently needed with respect to
Aboriginal people makes the practice of regarding ethnology as obituary
writing a particularly egregious insouciance on the part of ethnological
men who mostly considered themselves “sympathetic” to Aboriginal suffering. Morgan reasons similarly in his introduction to Kamilaroi and Kûrnai: “The Australian tribes,” he frets, “are melting away before the touch of
civilization, even more rapidly than the American aborigines. In a lower
ethnical condition than the latter, they have displayed less power of re­sis­
tance.”43 Thrusting the responsibility for the ravages of imperialism back
onto colonized subjects themselves is a familiarly violent ideological maneuver through which the success of colonialism becomes its own justification. Under Morgan’s evolutionary system, the slightly more evolved
Native American barbarians are better possessed than the Australian savages of the self-­awareness necessary to understanding and resisting the violent social impositions of civilization, and the evidence that they are slightly
more evolved is that they are able to do so.
Morgan’s rhetorical tautology reinscribes the notion that what distinguishes evolved humanity is the capacity to have a “mindful” response to
imposed social conditions, be they one’s own or those of an imperial presence.44 The context of this nearly decimated Kûrnai population is crucial
to understanding Fison and Howitt’s adaptation of Morgan’s evolutionary
speculations about the history of the family. Kamilaroi and Kûrnai readily
shares in the pervasive idea that savages remain in primitive stasis until
forced to progress by some external force. In breaking down the community structures that grounded customary life, the recent genocide had
“freed” the Kûrnai from the dictates of tribal law—­a crutch that, Fison and
Howitt maintain, because savages reason deductively rather than inductively, had hindered their entry into Eu­ro­pe­an epistemology and its concomitant forms of sociality. In contrast, the idea that Eu­ro­pe­ans reason
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 108
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 109
inductively had allowed Kamilaroi and Kûrnai to imagine a Eu­ro­pe­an institutional life that emerges out of the reason of its polity rather than as a
force that both imposes upon and controls the possibility of knowledge (the
idea that induction can operate in­de­pen­dent of social setting remains a tacit
assumption for Fison, just as the idea that Eu­ro­pe­ans might possess formal
institutional cathexes is conspicuously absent).
The Kûrnai provide what Fison and Howitt regard as a “missing link” in
the paleontology of social institutions. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877)—­t he
text that Friedrich Engels would adapt to materialist history in The Origin
of the Family, Private Property, and the State—­had elaborated a theory of the
social evolution of marriage systems from matrilineal communalism to
the monogamous patrilineal system that Morgan identified with civilized
life. The debates around “primitive” marriage had been hugely influential
on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1860s onward—­before which time,
as Engels writes, “one cannot speak of a history of the family.”45 By the
1880s, the terms of the debate had focused rather on classification systems
themselves than on the evolutionary speculation on origins that had been
characteristic of Morgan’s generation. More advanced in their kinship systems than the Kamilaroi who retain a “primitive” system of group marriage,
the Kûrnai “are a tribe of savages off the rails”46 because their marriage laws
have been rendered untenable given the fact that they have lost about 90
percent of their population in less than forty years. With quite simply not
enough people to permit the system of classes that, Fison and Howitt claim,
had governed the greater sexual communalism of their earlier social or­
ga­ni­za­t ion, the Kûrnai ­were obliged to adapt to a partial “pairing system”
that marked their course toward the civilized ideal of companionate and
monogamous coupledom. In effect, the text implies, the Kûrnai had been
forced into progress but died from its influence, thus providing would-­be
evidence for the claim that savages could not adapt to the forms of civilized life.
The new pairing kinship, however, is significant not only for the shifts it
produces in social or­ga­ni­za­t ion but also for the changes in subject formation that result from it. Being thrust “off the rails,” it seems, may destroy
tribes, but it creates individuals. In Kamilaroi and Kûrnai, the tendency of
Australian tribes to subdivide into progressively larger numbers of marriage
classes marks a gradual pro­cess of differentiation whereby the very fact of
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 109
1/24/14 7:36 PM
110 Freud’s Australia
what is imagined as a too-­u niform collective unit becomes the model of
primitivism that the pairing marriages help the Kûrnai to escape. “In the
tribal divisions and subdivisions,” Fison writes, “we see what appears to be a
steady progress towards the individualizing of the individual (if the phrase
may be allowed), with a continued struggle against the old tribal law along
all the line.”47 Fison’s presumption that “to the savage the group is the individual”48 is, as George Stocking notes, a clear adumbration of Emile Durkheim’s emphasis on primitive collective life in Elementary Forms of Religious
Life—­a fact that is hardly surprising given Durkheim’s heavy reliance on
Fison and Howitt’s work to provide the ethnological basis for his argument.
“Progressing” toward Eu­ro­pe­an standards of civility means severing the
ties that had hitherto, by this account, turned you into only a nodal extension of “the old tribal law” itself.
Nonetheless, it is unclear what the unit struggling against tribal law
is, ­here—­whether struggle happens in the same way and degree at all
stages of “individualization,” whether old tribal law has always maintained a conflicted relationship with the collective unit of the tribe it
governs, or whether the old tribal law is the residual legacy of an earlier
tribal unit that it defined. In spite of this lack of clarity, they use their
conceptualization of an aggregated, anti-­individualist savage state as a
corrective to what they see as a malign communism spreading from the
tenets of Rousseau:
It was Rousseau’s deep sympathy with the woe and anguish of down-­t rodden
humanity that gave life and apparent reason to the visionary fallacies of his
writings. The twofold conception of man in a state of nature and man degraded from a primeval condition of innocence, became in its new form and its
fantastic dress a potent agent in bringing about the first French Revolution. In
the conception of the primitive in­de­pen­dent freedom and equality of mankind,
Communism has its roots, and from these roots the future may see spring
forth a growth that will perhaps cast a baleful shadow over the ­whole earth.
The progression theory, on the contrary, is of modern origin, and has
arisen through the scientific investigation and comparison of the social
condition and customs of savage and barbarous races.49
For Fison, the collective identity of savages stands in contradistinction to
the alliances and citizens produced by more civilized politics, and a return
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 110
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 111
to that collective life, so feared in his worried assessment of communism, is
hardly desirable in its would-­be atavism. The shift that Fison locates ­here
between what he describes as the “degradation” and “progressive” models
of human history focuses not only on the kinds of people imagined to exist
as the primitive models of humankind but also on the way that is imagined
by specific disciplinary practices. The focus on the system of rules that
governed societies as a ­whole seeks to undermine the myth of merger that
had pervaded the Rousseauian idealization of savage life. Indeed, the basic
gist of Fison’s critique recurs among more recent critics of Rousseau; aligning himself with both Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, James Martel,
for example, maintains that “neither of the options Rousseau initially presents us with—­rapturous merger with the other (as ‘citizens’), or radical isolation (as ‘men’)—­are particularly demo­cratic principles.”50 What looked
like a happily collective, sufficiently transparent selfhood to Rousseau appears in Fison’s more “scientific” account as a collective unit so tightly
bound to custom and law that its members have no possibility for knowing
what “freedom” might be.
Fison’s objections to Rousseau and his followers highlight the importance of the role of family forms in terms of producing individual persons
with an appropriate relation to law. The shift to the civilized patrilineal
family that Morgan and Engels alike identified as a necessary, foundational principle of the nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pe­a n state was seemingly
contingent upon violence, just as the transition to this state entailed a fair
quotient of “residual” (to use Raymond Williams’s historiographical terminology) kinship formation. Both Fison and Howitt see vestiges of communal marriage present as a cultural “default” that reemerges in the moments
when the conjugal couple falters. Howitt, likely recalling the spearing of an
“eloping” married woman he had witnessed in 1876,51 mused: “The expected
fidelity towards the husband was enforced under severe penalties. In the
event of a woman eloping with some other man, all the neighbouring men
might turn out and seek for her, and, in the event of her being discovered,
she became common property to them until released by her husband or her
male relatives. The husband, on his part, probably speared her. Her life was
in his hand.”52 With little language invoking anger or lust (either by the
men or the woman), the “penalties” ­here are characterized as a matter of
course, evoking a rather different tone from the reportage of violence
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 111
1/24/14 7:36 PM
112 Freud’s Australia
focused on savage events, such as the Ripper murders, in the metropole.
The banality of the language of law and entitlement belies the fact that this
type of scene is supposedly the evidence of the newfound individualism that
Fison lauds with such fervor. The penalties function as a toggle between
two systems rather than as violations of either. Glossing Howitt’s narrative,
Fison summarizes the practice with the statement, “By her own act she has
severed the tie which, binding her to her husband, guarded her against the
old communal right, and forthwith that right asserts itself.”53 The language
of protection that Fison employs in the description of the couple form
elides all questions about unwanted subjection to the sole husband’s “right,”
just as elsewhere he emphasizes that group marriage is not a thing of contract. The fact that the woman in question sends herself into the expectation
of communal right “by her own act” emphasizes the fact that the paired
couple is contractual and chosen, both in entering into and departing from
the couple; nowhere does Fison so much as intimate that a woman could ever
opt to return to communal right. The structure of group sex forecloses the
conditions of contract.
Desert Hearts
In 1903, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss published a jointly authored
text titled Primitive Classification, published as an essay in the pages of the
Année sociologique. The essay’s conclusion relied on two interlocking arguments that extend the idea that communal right precludes individual choice
into a ­wholesale theory of savage epistemology. First, Durkheim and Mauss
suggest that savages classify things in the world in the terms of categories
produced by affectively generated social relations; second, they argue that
the attachment savages evince toward their social or­ga­ni­za­tion forecloses
their capacity for self-­consciousness: “Scientific classification,” they write,
“is, in the last analysis, the history of the stages by which this element of
social affectivity has progressively weakened, leaving more and more room
for the reflective thought of individuals.”54 The pa­ram­e­ters of this argument recollect Freud’s thematization of instinctive institutions in that they
suggest a nonreflexive pro­cess of classification that produces a too-­t ightly
focused attachment to savage law, as a result of which savages effectively
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 112
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 113
become a bundle of diverse but specific and focused instinctive cathexes to
customary practices.
In claiming that “social affectivity” designates savage overattachment to
law and custom, Durkheim and Mauss ­were summarizing a tendency in
Australian ethnological writing that had been developed, more explicitly
than in Fison and Howitt’s work, in Spencer and Gillen’s famous ethnography Native Tribes of Central Australia. Spencer and Gillen ­were believed to
be in a more credible position from which to imagine such an overattached
social affectivity in that they regarded the Arrernte people they studied as
standing in different relation to civilization than did the Kûrnai in Fison
and Howitt’s assessment. Fison and Howitt interest themselves in the Kûrnai because they believe they demonstrate the effects of civilization on the
“progress” of savage culture; Spencer and Gillen ­were, in contrast, fascinated with the Arrernte because of what they regarded as their relative lack
of contact with white norms. Setting made a big difference in this respect
in that, unlike the sizeable and well-­established white population in Victoria, the Central Desert saw only a scattering of Eu­ro­pe­a n settlement.
While the Telegraph Station at Charlotte Waters, where Gillen was based;
the police camp and nascent settlement at Stuart (later Alice Springs); and
the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg all marked an increased white
presence in the Central Desert, it was nonetheless small enough to preserve
the myth of a surrounding natural Aboriginal culture in need of investigation before whites would eventually eradicate it. This context also helped
facilitate the idealization of untouched autochthony as the sought-­after ethnological commodity (the idea that their own presence as observers might in
any way affect their ideal of a true native object available for white speculation remains unmentioned—­never mind the fact that not even Gillen was
fully fluent in the Arrernte language).55 Gillen, indeed, occasionally hesitated about whether to interview Arrernte people in the Hermannsburg
mission because their at least nominal conversion to Christianity rendered
them suspect as pure examples of customary indigeneity.56
The emphasis on marriage classes in Native Tribes of Central Australia
thus assumes a greater sense of unfamiliarity between its subjects of enquiry
and its implied readers. The language of instinct appears no more ­here than
it does in Kamilaroi and Kûrnai, but the way Native Tribes deploys the emotional category of jealousy mirrors Freud’s use of instinct in relation to the
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 113
1/24/14 7:36 PM
114 Freud’s Australia
savage institutions. In Freud’s work, emotions regularly appear as the ideational formations of the affect that is a component of instinctive energy.
Because of this connection between instinct and emotion, Freud is able to
derive a theory of the interrelations between instinct and institutions from
ethnological studies that use institutions to substitute for instinct as well as
for emotion. With that in mind, it is worth observing that jealousy is the
only term that appears in Spencer and Gillen’s index to Native Tribes of
Central Australia that would have been recognizable as an emotion word to
a turn-­of-­t he-­century audience. At that, it gets scant mention, with Spencer
and Gillen only briefly noting its absence among Arrernte people. Spencer and
Gillen highlight the difference between Eu­ro­pe­a n and Arrernte sexual
affective economies by noting that Arrernte attachment to custom acts as
a substitute for jealousy. “For a man,” Spencer and Gillen write, “to have
unlawful intercourse with any woman arouses a feeling which is due not so
much to jealousy as to the fact that the delinquent has infringed a tribal
custom.”57 Arrernte men, by Spencer and Gillen’s account, experience a
binding to law that is as psychically entrenched as the naturalized accounts
of jealousy that appear in the plots of Eu­ro­pe­an domestic fiction—­a fact that
both serves to distance them from the complex emotional psyches of Eu­ro­
pe­an men and naturalize their experience of legality.
While jealousy may be understood as natural and tolerable because ubiquitous in bourgeois Eu­ro­pe­an life, it is not typically an object of aspiration
or idealization that surrounds the discourse around the law. Immanent, moreover, rather than transcendent, sudden and reactionary rather than stable
and noumenal, the idea that savages relate to law as a jealous husband does
to his wife brings us back to the fact of the undue attachment to customary
institutions that had so troubled Fison and Howitt. Jealousy, after all, typically figures in the plots of domestic novels as something slightly unseemly
and beyond propriety. In the context of instinctive institutions, then, the
intimacy that both Fison and Howitt and Spencer and Gillen predicate of
savages and tribal law entails a focused attachment to specific customary
precepts in and of themselves—­t hat is, minus any relation to legality as an
abstraction.
The temporalization of savage law and affect as insistently immediate
and immanent allowed for savages to be characterized as disinterested in
futurity. Spencer and Gillen observe that Arrernte people are not invested
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 114
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 115
enough in the future in the abstract, although they may experience specific
moments of fear—­a fact that suggests more of the immediate, focused, and
unreflecting responsiveness that often, though not always, characterized
the instinctive in Darwinian accounts of animal behavior (and, indeed, in
the writings of many of his pre­de­ces­sors in natural philosophy, although I
do not have the space to rehearse this history ­here). Spencer and Gillen
write:
There is, however, in these, as in other savage tribes, an undercurrent of
anxious feeling which, though it may be stilled and, indeed, forgotten for a
time, is yet always present. . . . ​It is, however, easy to lay too much stress upon
this, for h
­ ere again we have to put ourselves into the mental attitude of the
savage, and must not imagine simply what would be our own feelings under
such circumstances. It is not right, by any means, to say that the Australian
native lives in constant dread of the evil magic of an enemy. The feeling is
always, as it ­were, lying dormant and ready to be at once called up by any
strange or suspicious sound if he be alone, especially at night time, in the
bush; but on the other hand, just like a child, he can with ease forget anything
unpleasant and enter perfectly into the enjoyment of the present moment.58
As I discussed in the first chapter, John Locke and his followers famously
maintained that anxiety is a necessary basis for liberalism and for the development of desire as an economic motivator. The version of anxiety that
emerges in Native Tribes is derided not for the false or irrational fears that
Eu­ro­pe­ans sometimes identified with savages but rather for not being sufficiently continuously present. In Spencer and Gillen’s analysis, the idea
that anxiety might be dormant is deemed childlike in such a way that implies, by way of negative contrast, the figure of a civilized adult man who
productively spends his time vigilant and worried as, indeed, a condition of
his capacity to desire. This position of course replicates the opinion, as I
observed in the last chapter, of nineteenth-­century po­liti­cal economists as
different as John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons, who could nonetheless agree that the absence of this desire was the source of savages’ lack
of access to the goods promised by liberal economic theory.
Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo that savage social institutions form
part and parcel of savage instincts suggests that part of what is savage about
savages is their focused intimacy with their specific customary precepts.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 115
1/24/14 7:36 PM
116 Freud’s Australia
The focused, object-­specific quality of instinctive attachment applies, however, to fear as much as to law (remembering that, for Freud, the potent
psychic reality of a thing is not dependent on its material reality). When,
for example, Adam Phillips attends to the distinction between fear and
anxiety (“Fear has an object, anxiety has a vague location”),59 he notes that
Freud wavers in his position on whether analysts should seek to identify
par­tic­u­lar objects of ill-­defined anxiety or to demonstrate the psychic irrelevance of par­tic­u­lar objects to the structure of fear.60 Phillips’s obser­
vations parallel the discussion of object specificity that concerns Laplanche
and Davidson in Freud’s theory of the instincts. When Spencer and Gillen
suggest that savages can experience acute dread while simultaneously manifesting insufficient anxiety, they effectively maintain that savage instincts
can be distinguished from civilized desire because their focused immediacy places them outside of the extended temporal horizons necessary for
appropriate economic motivation. Anxiety is figured in Spencer and Gillen’s account as commendable emotional preparedness for the possibility of
calamity in general; fear, in contrast, emerges as an overfocused, irrational
state that ascribes too much power to specific objects.
Freud, Redux
It might, then, be less surprising that Freud’s most influential move in theorizing Eu­ro­pe­an sexual instincts consisted of severing the model of focused attachment between instinct and object that we have seen to inform
these accounts of savage instinctive institutional life. If Eu­ro­pe­an po­liti­cal
forms are valued, in contradistinction to savage ones, for their supposedly
greater proximity to the conditions of abstract generality, instinct becomes
similarly modeled in Freud’s estimation. Such a move, flying in the face of
instinct’s object-­bound definition in the nineteenth century, nonetheless
proves difficult for Freud to maintain. Laplanche notes that the status of
particularity with respect to both the aims and objects of both drives and
instincts remains a quandary that Freud never fully resolves:
The question then arises of determining the relation between an aim which is
entirely general and (as with “impetus”) abstract—­t he appeasing of tension—­
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 116
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 117
and, on the other hand, the very specific and determined acts which are the
aims of various instincts: eating, seeing (since one finds in Freud a “drive to
see”), making love, ­etc. The problem is that of the specification of the aim: why
is it that something quite specific and not simply appeasement represents the
final aim?61
In what way is either an instinct or a drive in­de­pen­dent of its actions and
objects? How general can satisfaction be? What, if anything, allows an instinct to be delineated from another with any particularity? What limits
can be placed on the possibilities of what can appease an instinct?
In attempting to lay out a distinction between drives and instincts,
Laplanche observes that the two share analogical definitions in that they
can both be described in relation to impetus, object, aim, and source.62
While noting, as many others have done, that Freud is lamentably inconsistent in this aspect of his terminology, Laplanche nonetheless ventures the
idea that drives can be distinguished from yet related to instincts through
“propping” (étayage). Laplanche’s desire to retain the aspect of reproduction
and self-­preservation as the definitions of instinct most appropriate to the
Freud of the Three Essays leads him to separate drives and instincts with
reference to Freud’s famous analysis of the autoerotic plea­sure in sucking
that, Freud claims, emerges in reference to breastfeeding. For Laplanche,
the anaclitic moment is a key model of the instinct/drive relationship because it highlights both the bond and the departure of sexuality from a vital, self-­preservative function. “Without the terminological coherence of
Freud’s writings being absolutely systematic,” Laplanche writes, “we shall
nevertheless find, in a manner sufficiently motivated to allow us in turn to
‘lean’ upon it, that the terms function, need, and instinct characterize generally the vital register of self-­preservation in opposition to the sexual register.”63 While the theory of ego instincts and the death drive was yet to be
elaborated as such, the splitting off of the sexual from the self-­preservative
that Freud describes in the breastfeeding anecdote in the Three Essays opens
up the space that will allow that distinction to emerge more concretely fifteen years later.
Freud’s theorization h
­ ere allows the arena of the sexual to be separated
from that of reproduction and self-­preservation by means of an imaginative production of the civilized individual—­indeed, it is this imaginative
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 117
1/24/14 7:36 PM
118 Freud’s Australia
production that designates, for Laplanche, the orbit of the properly sexual.
If, as I pointed out in the Introduction, Michel Foucault is right in maintaining that, as early as 1840, sexologists began to unyoke instinct from reproduction in order to align it with plea­sure and imagination,64 Freud’s
innovation in this regard was not unpre­ce­dented. But in terms of the sociology of instinct that interests us h
­ ere, this severing matters because it allows
us to see the difference in the application of instinct to Eu­ro­pe­ans and savages. Civilized neurotics may have individualizing particularity in their objects and aims, but they are individual precisely because they reflect a
personal adaptation of a species-­wide, itinerant instinctive substance. Something akin to the way in which, for Lacan, being the phallus precludes
wielding it, savages, because they are identified with the objects of their
instincts, are denied that particularity of having individually produced
objects and aims for an instinct imagined as universal in its unattached
aimlessness. The varying answers to the question of how instinct attaches
to its objects and aims have been crucial in the debates over the value of
psychoanalysis for feminist and queer studies projects, as the question of
whether appropriately gendered heterosexuality remains a “natural” telos in
Freud’s thought or a contingent, socially conditioned accident.65
What remains underemphasized in accounts of instincts such as
Laplanche’s, however, is that Freud’s modification to the theory of instinct
and drive had the effect of recasting instinct as something that was increasingly valuable to privileged, white Eu­ro­pe­ans (however diseased these latter might be). In a moment when sexuality became something that could
provide at least bourgeois Eu­ro­pe­ans with a means of self-­identification, the
dynamics around savages and sexual “identification” ­were quite different.
In Samuel Butler’s satiric Erewhon (1872), the savage Chowbok who leads the
narrator to the beautiful but diseased titular settlement can nonetheless not
enter it himself because he is paralyzed by his fear of gruesome totems barring the way.66 This state of affairs, nevertheless, is apparently for the best:
Chowbok and his kin, the narrator informs us, would have been too ugly to
be allowed to exist freely in Erewhon anyhow.67 In spite of the anagrammatic
“nowhere” of the title, the novel’s setting bears striking affinity in geography, climate, and industry to the pastoral regions of the Antipodes. (Not so
coincidentally, Butler lived in New Zealand between 1858 and 1864.) The
savage guide who cannot enter Butler’s diseased parody of Eu­rope tells us
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 118
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Freud’s Australia 119
something about the relationship between savages and neurotics that Freud
lays out in Totem and Taboo. In Erewhon, being sent to the “straightener” to
help cure the ailment of embezzlement remains a pitiable but socially acceptable state of affairs; being physically ill, in contrast, is punishable by
imprisonment or death. The critique of medicalizing what had formerly
been identified as a punishable moral issue appears as a fairly clear critical
transposition of the discourse around the medicalization of sexuality that
Foucault has so famously predicated of Butler’s era. The fact, however, that
Chowbok leads the narrator to this inverted world but cannot enter it allegorizes the relationship between savage instincts and Eu­ro­pe­an neurotics
that I have been describing ­here.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 119
1/24/14 7:36 PM
notes
Introduction
1. ​At this point, the OED was still entitled New En­glish Dictionary on Historical Principles Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society.
The entry for “Instinct” was originally published in 1900, in the “Input-­I nvalid”
fascicle. In 1901, the Input-­I nvalid entries w
­ ere subsumed into the Dictionary’s
Volume V, which contained all the entries for words beginning with H, I, J,
and K. I am citing this entry, omitting the passages cited to exemplify usage.
This definition of instinct has, moreover, yet to be revised and is still the one
in use in the OED as of 2013. James Murray, ed., “Instinct,” A New En­glish Dictionary on Historical Principles Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the
Philological Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 352.
2. ​Robert J. Richards notes that “From the resources of Aristotle’s De anima, Avicenna developed a theory of ‘instinct’ in Kitāb al-­shifā, the Sufficientiae
of the Medieval translation. The distinctive and skillful behaviors of different
species evinced to him that the estimative faculty, that internal sense which
detected intentiones, was infused with a divine ‘inspiration’ (ilhām, rendered by
the Latin translator variously as cautela naturalis and instinctus insitus).” Robert Richards, “The Evolution of Behavior: Theories of Instinct in the Nineteenth Century with an Essay on Animal Instinct and Intelligence Before
Darwin” (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of History, 1978), 14n1.
3. ​Freud’s tendency to prefer the German word Trieb over the German
word Instinkt has led recent translators to distinguish between drive (Trieb) and
instinct (Instinkt). I will have more to say on the Trieb/Instinkt distinction later
in this book, but for the moment I would like to note that while there are valid
theoretical reasons for enforcing this distinction between drive and instinct, it
risks obscuring the fact that even Trieb was formulated in dialogue with the
instinct theories that w
­ ere being published in En­glish during Freud’s lifetime.
4. ​Providing an elaborate history of the natural philosophy of instinct is
beyond the scope of this project. For an account of the different strands of
159
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 159
1/24/14 7:36 PM
160 Notes to pages 000–000
belief about instinct within natural philosophy, see especially Richards, “The
Evolution of Behavior,” 20–­70.
5. ​Herbert Spencer, for instance, argues that instinct is “a compound reflex
action,” a form of agency distinguished from simple reflex because it demands
coordination between different organs and functions in the body. Herbert
Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (New York: D., 1883), 1:432. Tony Bennett
points out that Spencer’s theorization means that, for him, “there is no break
­here between habit and the will, just a seamless transition.” Tony Bennett,
“Habit, Instinct, Survivals: Repetition, History, Biopower,” in The Peculiarities
of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Simon Gunn and James Vernon
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 110.
6. ​Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New
York: Vintage, 1990), 43.
7. ​Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–­1975,
ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Picador USA, 2003), 132.
8. ​Ibid.
9. ​Ibid., 139, 276.
10. ​Patrick Joyce develops the argument that the liberal state uses “po­liti­cal
freedom as a means of governance.” Patrick Joyce, Demo­c ratic Subjects: The Self
and the Social in Nineteenth-­Century En­gland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3.
11. ​Penelope Deutscher, “Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume 1: Rereading Its Reproduction,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (January 2012):
120. Nancy Armstrong, “Gender Must Be Defended,” South Atlantic Quarterly
111, no. 3 (2012): 535.
12. ​William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950),
2:383.
13. ​Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 36.
14. ​Ibid.
15. ​Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–­
1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 215.
16. ​Ibid.
17. ​Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 5.
18. ​Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London: Kegan Paul, 1887),
124–­125.
19. ​Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (London: Chapman and Hall,
1865), 2:147.
20. ​Ibid.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 160
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Notes to pages 000–000 161
21. ​The classic text on the psychology of urban life at the turn of the twentieth century in Eu­rope remains George Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in which Simmel argues that “the psychological foundation upon
which the modern individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional
life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.”
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader,
ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 2nd ed. (London: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010),
103. In terms of the effects of the emergence of mass population’s effects on
governmentality, Nancy Armstrong argues, following Foucault, that “the
mass body that emerges in nineteenth-­century literature—­w ith the increase
in urban populations, the extension of empire into the colonies, and the migration of w
­ hole demographic groups across regional and national boundaries—­
was (in contrast to those that both Hobbes and John Locke imagined) not one
that could be broken down into individual bodies. Nor could this body be
understood as a single unified people.” Armstrong, “Gender Must Be Defended,” 535.
22. ​Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: En­glish Liberalism, National
Identity, and Eu­
rope, 1830–­
1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 89.
23. ​Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-­Century
British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20, 23.
24. ​For Hadley, liberal cognition designates the “quite specific techniques of thought production and judgment, such as ‘free thought,’ reflection, abstraction, logical reasoning, and internal deliberation” that formalize
the production of liberal ideas. Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical
Citizenship in Mid-­V ictorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010), 9, 14.
25. ​
Widespread debates internal to liberalism over franchise extension,
Irish Home Rule, tax and tariff reforms, state intervention in education and
the economy, military expenditure and imperialism, and acceptable methods
for pacifying class conflict all provide ample evidence of the different presumptions about governance and personhood that could be legitimated in
accordance with “liberal principles.” For a history of some of these debates, see
especially Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 43–­85. Most historians note that liberalism becomes more collectivist and prointerventionist later in the century,
with the advent of New Liberalism. The classic history of this change remains
Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978). More recently, Zarena Aslami has emphasized that
while New Liberals believed in a collectivist stance on state welfare, they nonetheless “by no means abandoned an individualist model of the self.” Zarena
Aslami, The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the
State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 148.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 161
1/24/14 7:36 PM
162 Notes to pages 000–000
26. ​Most historians of the Liberal Party attribute the rise of formal party
politics to the reor­ga­ni­za­t ion and cohesion produced by William Ewart Gladstone from the late 1860s onward. On Liberal Party or­ga­n i­za­t ion during this
period, see especially Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–­
1939, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 23.
27. ​Locke’s importance to histories of British liberalism is most famously
attributed to C. B. McPherson’s now-­classic 1962 account of possessive individualism. See C. B. MacPherson, The Po­liti­cal Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
28. ​John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 105–­106.
29. ​Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 15.
30. ​Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 512.
31. ​For an example of this kind of thinking, see the work of Charles-­
Georges LeRoy, the author of a series influential essays on animal behavior
first printed in the Encyclopédie Méthodique in 1764 and republished in Nature in
1871. On LeRoy’s contributions to the natural philosophy of the 1760s, see
Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind
and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 26. LeRoy’s writings ­were republished in Nature in 1871. Alfred Russel Wallace observes that
“M. Leroy appears to reject altogether what is commonly termed Instinct,
maintaining that the word should be applied only to those acts which are the
direct consequences of organisation, such as the grazing of the stag, or the
flesh-­eating of the fox; but not to the expedients to which those animals resort
in the gratification of their natural wants, which are due to sensation, observation, memory, and experience. To the objection that many animals perform
complex operations perfectly well without experience, and always in the same
manner, he replies that in many cases the fact is not so.”
32. ​Hadley, Living Liberalism, 50, 50n18.
33. ​Elizabeth Povinelli, “Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 216.
34. ​Ibid., 228.
35. ​Ibid., 227.
36. ​Ibid., 216.
37. ​Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:139.
38. ​Ibid.
39. ​Foucault’s example h
­ ere is the family. See ibid., 1:100.
40. ​Ibid., 1:54–­55.
41. ​Ibid., 1:68.
42. ​A lexander Pope, “Essay on Man,” in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed.
Whitwell Elwin, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1871), III.ii:98, III.ii:83–­84.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 162
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Notes to pages 000–000 163
43. ​Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and
Behavior, 23n5.
44. ​David J. DePew, “The Rhetoric of the Origin of Species,” ed. Michael
Ruse and Robert J. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
244.
45. ​St. George Mivart, “Organic Nature’s Riddle,” The Fortnightly Review
43, no. 219, New Series (March 1, 1885): 591.
46. ​Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic Life, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1796), 1:137.
47. ​Pope, “Essay on Man,” III.ii:92.
48. ​Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Antony Flew
(London: Penguin, 1983), 76.
49. ​Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 215.
50. ​Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 253.
51. ​Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Po­
liti­cal Economy and the Victorian Novel (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University
Press, 2006), 159.
52. ​Darwin, Zoonomia, 1:137–­138. On Erasmus Darwin’s rejection of “preestablished” instinct, see especially Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, 34–­36.
53. ​Jean-­Baptiste Lamarck, “Habitude,” in Nouveau dictionnaire d’histoire
naturelle (Paris: J. Deterville, 1817), 14:130.
54. ​Jean-­Baptiste Lamarck, Système analytique des connaissances positives de
l’homme (Paris: A. Belin, 1920), 193–­194.
55. ​See Richard W. Burkhardt, “Lamarck, Cuvier, and Darwin on Animal
Behavior and Acquired Characters,” in Transformations of Lamarckism: From
Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, ed. Snait B. Gissis and Eva Jablonka (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 33–­4 4. Also see Richard Burkhardt, The Spirit
of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 155.
56. ​Lamarck, Système analytique des connaissances positives de l’homme,
216–­217.
57. ​Michael Davis points out that “any instinct, in Darwin’s view, arises in
the context of the lived experience of many generations: it is an adaptation,
rather than an essential, immutable feature of species and, as such, is open to
further change in the future.” Michael Davis, George Eliot and Nineteenth-­
Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate,
2006), 55. Charlotte Sleigh suggests that although Darwin at times rejects
“habit-­
based instinct acquisition” (153), he also acknowledges that “habits
might be inherited and thus to all intents and purposes become indistinguishable from instinct” (153). Charlotte Sleigh, “ ‘The Ninth Mortal Sin’: The Lamarckism of M. W. Wheeler,” in Darwinian Heresies, ed. Abigail Lustig, Robert
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 163
1/24/14 7:36 PM
164 Notes to pages 000–000
J. Richards, and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 153.
58. ​The most sustained argument of this sort in the history of biology remains Peter J. Bowler, The Non-­Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical
Myth (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). I will discuss
the primacy of Lamarckian evolution in the history of sexology further in
Chapter 2.
59. ​A lthough he had already heard Malthusian theory discussed, Darwin
first read Malthus’s Essay in the fall of 1838 and was compelled by the hostility
of nature that he identified in Malthus’s work. See Adrian Desmond and James
Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Norton, 1994),
264–­265.
60. ​Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. Facsimile of the First Edition
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1859), 209.
61. ​Darwin writes in the Origin that natural selection “is the doctrine of
Malthus applied with manifold force to the ­whole animal vegetable kingdom.”
Ibid., 63.
62. ​Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, trans. Daniel W.
Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 162.
63. ​Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press,
1985), 107.
64. ​On the modern constitution, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993), 34.
65. ​Richard Yeo observes that “between 1781 and 1840 the monopoly of the
Royal Society was overthrown by the foundation of some two dozen specialist
scientific societies. By the early nineteenth century, the entries on these general terms in major encyclopaedias ­were displaced by detailed articles on separate disciplines; if included at all, they invariably pointed the reader to the
entries on specific subjects. Similarly, the people who studied the natural world
­were coming to be identified as astronomers, chemists, botanists, or geologists.” See Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge,
and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 33.
66. ​There is a large literature on the concept of po­liti­cal “repre­sen­ta­t ion” in
the Victorian period. Catherine Gallagher offers an important early study on
the connections between the concept of repre­sen­ta­t ion in politics and in literature. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas examine how “culture” operated as a pedagogy through which Victorians came to learn what it meant to be represented
po­liti­cally. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 5–­7; Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of En­
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 164
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Notes to pages 000–000 165
glish Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative from 1832–­1867 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985), 187–­268.
67. ​Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9.
68. ​Ibid., 9–­10.
69. ​Ibid., 7.
70. ​Aihwa Ong, for instance, suggests that Agamben focuses too exclusively
on the arena of law, thus missing out on “other systems for valuing and devaluing bodies,” and that his “bifurcation of the population” into po­liti­cal beings
and bare life does not do justice, either po­liti­cally or ethnographically, to the
complexity of the “shifting legal and moral terrain of humanity.” See Aihwa
Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 22–­23, 197. In Paul Rabinow and
Nikolas R
­ ose’s reading, Agamben’s apparent belief that all sovereign power is
backed up by the threat of death forgets that Foucault’s understanding of the
immanence of productive power means that the threat of death is not, in fact,
“the guarantee or underpinning principle of all forms of biopower.” Paul Rabinow and Nikolas ­Rose, “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1 (2006): 201.
71. ​Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 22. Rabinow and ­Rose, “Biopower Today,” 202.
1. Reading Like an Animal
1. ​George John Romanes, The Natural History of Instinct: A Lecture Delivered
to the Tyneside Sunday Lecture Society, November 22, 1885 (London: Walter Scott,
1886), 24.
2. ​Writing in 1879, only a few years before Romanes, the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre orients his discussion of the theory of instinct with reference to this type of wasp and its provision of living food for its buried grubs.
See Jean-­Henri Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques. Études sur l’instinct et les moeurs
des insectes (Paris: Delagrave, 1891), 1:186. Solitary wasps that exhibit this kind
of behavior have a long history in French entomology in that they also occupy
a prominent place in Rene Antoine de Reaumur’s early account of insect behavior. See René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Mémoires pour servir a‘
l’histoire des insectes (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1734), 251–­265. J. F. M. Clark
claims that the En­glish entomologist Henry Brougham used the case of the
sphex to mediate a “middle ground between Darwin and Paley.” See J. F. M.
Clark, Bugs and the Victorians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2009), 37. Darwin, having read Fabre, directed Romanes’s attention to the
creature in a letter during 1881. See George John Romanes, The Life and Letters
of George John Romanes, ed. Ethel Duncan Romanes (New York: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1896), 109–­112.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 165
1/24/14 7:36 PM
182 Notes to pages 000–000
91. ​Ibid., 57.
92. ​Ibid., 51.
93. ​Edward Carpenter, Sex-­Love, and Its Place in a Free Society (Manchester:
Labour Press Society, 1894), 6–­7.
94. ​Ibid., 10.
95. ​Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 157.
96. ​Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. While Freeman finds the
argument of No Future “compelling,” she worries that it “risks . . . ​evacuating
the messiest thing about being queer: the actual meeting of bodies with other
bodies and with objects.” Ibid., xxi. For Edelman, the drive represents a surplus
in the fabric of the social that “dissolves those congealments of identity that
permit us to know and survive as ourselves.” Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 17.
97. ​Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 36–­37.
98. ​The literature on queer sexuality and the Gothic is large. On male homoerotics in Frankenstein see, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1980), vii–­x; Anne Mellor,
Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989),
121; George Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2006), 52–­57; Freeman, Time Binds, 96–­105. On sexuality, science, and the late
Victorian Gothic see especially Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-­de-­Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–­150.
99. ​Halberstam, Skin Shows, 37–­38.
100. ​Nancy Armstrong, “Gender Must Be Defended,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (2012): 536.
3. Freud’s Australia
1. ​John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, “The Subjection of Women,”
in Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970), 128.
2. ​Ibid.
3. ​William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950),
2:389.
4. ​
Freud published the first two essays of what would become Totem
und Tabu in Otto Rank and Hanns Sach’s newly founded journal Imago in 1912;
the third and fourth essays w
­ ere published in the same periodical in 1913, during which year all four ­were collected and published in book form.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 182
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Notes to pages 000–000 183
5. ​Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and
the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001),
79; Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
6. ​Mill and Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” 128.
7. ​Jacques Lacan, “On Freud’s Trieb and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire,” in
Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. Richard Feldstein,
Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, trans. Bruce Fink (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press,
1996), 417.
8. ​Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the
Drive (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 156.
9. ​Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu: Einege Übereinstmmungen im Seelenleben
der Wilden und der Neûrotiker (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag, 1920), 165.
10. ​Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1990), 4.
11. ​James Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of
Superstition and Society (London: Macmillan, 1910), 4:97.
12. ​Freud, Totem and Taboo, 154.
13. ​Freud first began to theorize narcissism in 1910, beginning a pro­cess
that would eventually lead to aggregation of the self-­preservative and sexual
instincts as “life instincts” in Beyond the Plea­sure Principle.
14. ​Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 328.
15. ​Mikkel Borch-­Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 29.
16. ​The subtitle on many editions of Totem and Taboo is Several Congruencies
in the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics. Peter Gay observes that Freud surpasses the promise of his subtitle, investigating in addition the congruencies
between savages and all forms of thought. Gay, Freud, 328.
17. ​Freud, Totem and Taboo, 92.
18. ​Ibid., 81.
19. ​Freud was able to sustain this analogy because, as Ranjana Khanna observes, his reliance on Lamarck’s idea that acquired characteristics could be
inherited “offered him a way to conceptualize the relationship between individual
and group without having to share Jung’s theories of a collective unconscious.”
Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2003), 81.
20. ​The word is either not mentioned at all or mentioned only with respect
to animals in all of the ethnological works discussed in this essay (namely,
Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia, Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kûrnai, and Morgan’s Ancient Society). None of the major ethnological works written about Australia rely on the term. It is absent in, for example,
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 183
1/24/14 7:36 PM
184 Notes to pages 000–000
Spencer and Gillen’s Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Edward Curr’s The
Australian Race, William Pridden’s Australia: Its History and Present Condition,
George French Angas’s Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, and
Richard Sadleir’s The Aborigines of Australia. Among all the essays in The Native
Tribes of South Australia, only J. D. Woods’s introduction mentions instinct at
all; it does so to claim that the savage finds civilized life to be “foreign to his
instincts and to his habits”—­a mention, to be sure, but hardly one that indicates that savages are instinctive at core. J. D. Woods, “Introduction,” in The
Native Tribes of South Australia, ed. George Taplin (Adelaide: E. S. Wigg &
Son, 1879), xxvii. The absence of instinct is notable but slightly less stark
among the anthropologists who ­were reading the ethnological literature, often
within an evolutionary frame that had itself theorized instinct extensively.
James Frazer does not use the word at all in Totemism. In The Golden Bough,
Frazer invokes instinct to apply to savages only when he makes the case that
savages will not abandon sexual instincts for an ideal of moral purity but will
do so for the instinct of self-­preservation. James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A
Study in Magic in Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1900), 2:215. Edward
Burnett Tylor does not deploy the term in Primitive Culture. In Tylor’s Researches Into the Early History of Mankind, the term only appears in a statement
of Darwin’s that the Fuegans’ workmanship is instinctive like that of animals—­a claim that Tylor cites in order to refute. Edward Burnett Tylor, Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization
(London: John Murray, 1865), 162. In Tylor’s Anthropology, the only time the
term appears in reference to savages occurs with respect to law, as Tylor suggests that primitive law uses “for the public benefit the instinct of revenge
which man has in common with the lower animals” (415).
21. ​Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the
Modern World (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 19.
22. ​Ibid.
23. ​Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
In­e­qual­ity Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Po­liti­cal Writings,
trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 150.
24. ​T he phrase “ontological re­sis­tance” is Fanon’s in his critique of the
applicability of Hegelian dialectics of recognition between whites and blacks
in a world structured by colonial violence. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White
Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 90. Hegel’s
dialectic of recognition, Fanon claims, does not apply to white/black interactions because whites do not regard blacks as beings who can confer
recognition—­t here is no “being for other” for blacks encountering whites in
colonial situations.
25. ​Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 26.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 184
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Notes to pages 000–000 185
26. ​In Totemism, for example, Claude Lévi-­Strauss praises Rousseau for
largely skirting the language of instinct in his discussions of sociality because instinct, Lévi-­Strauss claims, “belonging as it does to the order of nature, could not enable [man] to go beyond nature.” Claude Levi-­
Strauss,
Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 99. In the same
section, Lévi-­Strauss also proffers a critique of Henri Bergson that exactly
reproduces Frazer’s argument that institutions only exist to fill in what has
not already been stipulated by instinct. In Lévi-­Strauss’s earlier Elementary
Structures of Kinship, the incest taboo operates as the self-­t ranscending lever
between nature and culture because it possessed both “the universality of
bent and instinct, and the coercive character of law and institution.” Claude
Levi-­Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. Rodney Needham, trans.
James Harle Belle and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 10.
Totemism does not investigate the dialectical movement that allows for the
supercession of this instinct/institution binary, but it is worth noting that
both texts retain the sense of institutions as coercive social forces acting on
instincts that are thought to precede and exist in­
de­
pen­
dently of social
influence.
27. ​On anthropology and reforms to the British university system, see especially Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–­1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.
28. ​George Stocking famously makes the case that the idea of separate, distinct, and plural cultures did not prevail in the nineteenth century, which
rather preferred the hierarchization of a single human Culture that had been
fragmented in such a way as to “presuppose a hierarchical, evaluative approach.” George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), 80. See also James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-­Century British Novels
(Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 6.
29. ​The term “ethnologist” was typically reserved for the people in the
field who ­were understood as gathering information about a par­t ic­u ­lar group
of people. “Anthropologist” at this historical moment most commonly designated those men, most of them study-­bound in Britain, who ­were producing
theories about the progression of human cultures. See George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 249–­257. Jim Buzard argues
that “the explicit formulation of culture as an anthropological category used
mainly on remote, so-­called underdeveloped societies actually follows and reverses a great deal of implicit reliance upon something operating discernibly
like culture in novelistic repre­sen­t a­t ions of British society.” Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 13.
30. ​Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in
the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 65.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 185
1/24/14 7:36 PM
186 Notes to pages 000–000
31. ​Povinelli argues that for the modern subject, “the real difference between the West and the rest no longer [lies] in Morgan’s famous descriptive
and classificatory distinctions, but in the stance people took in relation to
their capture by culture.” Herbert’s argument provides a historical account of
the genealogy of that capture during the moment that Morgan was writing.
Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy,
and Carnality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 236.
32. ​Cornelius Castoriadis’s emphasis on the imaginary component of institutions, for example, does not contradict the fact that institutions are insti­t utions
“because they have been posited as universal, symbolized and sanctioned ways of
doing things,” even though Castoriadis’s training in Marxism and psychoanalysis allows him to offer a critique of the ideological structuring of that positing.
Cornelius Castoriadis and Kathleen Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 124, 132. Castoriadis’s distinction between autonomous and heteronomous societies depends on the assumption that
it is possible but not assured that a society knows how it is instituting itself.
33. ​In the one instance in which he mentions instinct in his pop­u­lar ethnological narrative entitled Among Cannibals (1889), Carl Lumholtz explains that
“it is not true, as many maintain, that the Australian native is guided wholly by
his instincts. I am willing to admit that his reasoning powers are but slightly
developed, as he is unable to concentrate his thoughts for any length of time on
one subject, but he can come to a logical conclusion, a fact which has been denied.” Lumholtz’s protestations that indigenous Australians possess “slightly
developed” reason was typical of ethnological writers in that, while claiming
to position itself more moderately with respect to pop­u­lar opinion, it hardly
upends what he describes as the widespread identification of Aborigines with
instinctive epistemologies. Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals: An Account of
Four Years’ Travels in Australia and of Camp Life with the Aborigines of Queensland
(London: J. Murray, 1889), 168.
34. ​Francis Galton, “Notes on the Australian Marriage Systems,” Journal of
the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 13 (1889): 71.
35. ​Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 66.
36. ​Freud, Totem and Taboo, 92.
37. ​Ibid., 81.
38. ​George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–­
1951
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 22.
39. ​Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 29.
40. ​This evisceration of Aboriginal populations occurred in spite of, as
Richard Broome describes, the fact that the 1836 Port Phillip Protectorate was
purported to safeguard Aboriginal people in Victoria against the worst forms
of colonial violence. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 39.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 186
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Notes to pages 000–000 187
41. ​Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and
Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 78–­
79, 121–­122.
42. ​Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia
(Oosterhout: Anthropological Publications, 1969), ix.
43. ​Lewis Henry Morgan, “Introduction,” in Kamilaroi and Kûrnai: Group
Marriage and Relationship, and Marriage by Elopement (Melbourne: George
Robertson, 1880), 2.
44. ​Elizabeth Povinelli argues that liberalism justifies its violence by maintaining that it can encounter radical alterity from the “perspective of perspective,” noting further that the mixture of expert culture and “sympathetic
understanding” provided by anthropologists was germane to such belief. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of
Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 129.
45. ​Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 74. For
an excellent account of the debates on “primitive marriage” in the 1860s, see
Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Po­liti­cal
Economy and the Victorian Novel (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press,
2006), 161–­172.
46. ​Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kûrnai: Group Marriage and Relationship, and Marriage by Elopement (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1880), 132.
47. ​Ibid., 128.
48. ​Ibid., 90.
49. ​Ibid., 338–­339.
50. ​James Martel, Love Is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in
Liberal Po­liti­cal Theory (New York: Routledge, 2001), 77.
51. ​George Stocking notes that Howitt wrote to Morgan about the incident. See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 22.
52. ​Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kûrnai: Group Marriage and Relationship, and Marriage by Elopement, 205.
53. ​Ibid., 310.
54. ​
Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans.
Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 88.
55. ​On Gillen’s fluency, see Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, 89.
56. ​A lthough he did, in practice, frequently interview people at the Mission, Gillen wrote to Spencer on June 5, 1896, that the “Mission Station is not
a good field for the anthropologist, everything possible has been, and is being
done, to blot out old customs.” F. J. Gillen, “My Dear Spencer”: The Letters of
F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ed. John Mulvaney, Howard Murphy, and Alison
Petch (Melbourne: Hyland ­House, 1997), 119.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 187
1/24/14 7:36 PM
188 Notes to pages 000–000
57. ​Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 99.
58. ​Ibid., 53–­54.
59. ​Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 62.
60. ​Ibid.
61. ​Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 11.
62. ​Ibid., 13.
63. ​Ibid., 16.
64. ​Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–­1975,
ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Picador USA, 2003), 131, 286.
65. ​Teresa de Lauretis, for example, summarizes the debates around instinct and heterosexuality by noting that “Freud’s equivocation with regard to
this issue—­whether a normal sexual instinct, phyloge­ne­t ically inherited, preexists its possible deviations (in psychoneurotic individuals) or whether instinctual life is but a set of transformations, some of which are then defined as
normal, i.e., non-­pathogenic and socially desirable or admissible—­is a source
of continued but ultimately insoluble debate.” Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice
of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 10.
66. ​Samuel Butler, Erewhon; or, Over the Range (New York: New American
Library, 1960), 25.
67. ​Ibid., 71.
4. Angel in the Big ­House
1. ​Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James
Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 1.
2. ​Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: The Evolution of Modesty; The
Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-­Erotism (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1901),
iv–­v. This preface dates from 1897, when Ellis published Sexual Inversion,
which was then the first volume of the Studies. Only a very few copies of the
1897 edition ­were circulated. In 1901, with the U.S. publication of the second
edition, he reordered the series such that The Evolution of Modesty (1899) became the new first volume. The Preface became affixed to this volume. On the
publication history of the Studies, see Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980), 184–­185.
3. ​H. J., “Short Cuts,” Once a Week (October 18, 1862): 461–­462.
4. ​Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (New York: Feminist Press at
CUNY, 1993), 210.
5. ​Thomas Laqueur regards the figure of the pure and dispassionate woman
as a post-­Enlightenment invention accompanying a new two-­sex model in
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 188
1/24/14 7:36 PM
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, series editors
Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life. Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, Introduction by Paola Marrati and Todd
Meyers.
Henri Atlan, Selected Writings: On Self-­Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics,
and Judaism. Edited and with an Introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers.
Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
Translated by Steven Miller.
François Delaporte, Chagas Disease: History of a Continent’s Scourge.
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Foreword by Todd Meyers.
Jonathan Strauss, Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-­
Century Paris.
Georges Canguilhem, Writings on Medicine. Translated and with an Introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers.
François Delaporte, Figures of Medicine: Blood, Face Transplants, Parasites.
Translated by Nils F. Schott, Foreword by Christopher Lawrence.
Juan Manuel Garrido, On Time, Being, and Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life.
Pamela Reynolds, War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State.
Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (eds.), The Government of Life: Foucault,
Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism.
Roma Chatterji (ed.), Wording the World: Veena Das and the Scenes of
Inheritance.
Kathleen Frederickson, The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature
and Sexuality in Liberal Governance.
153-57397_ch01_1P.indd 213
1/24/14 7:36 PM