The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (review)

Davidson dedicates his book to his wife and to the memory of Michel Foucault. A fitting dedication. No one of his generation has better mastered Foucault's archaeological and genealogical work than Davidson. I do not mean in saying so that he is an expert on Foucault (which he is) but rather that he has learned how best to do his own work having seen what Foucault could do. There is no imitation of style: Davidson presents vast resources of texts accurately identified, using the crisp ways to argue that he learned when he was an apprentice analytic philosopher.

You cannot fail to delight in the telling illustrations, some macabre, some sad, as in the essay/lecture, "The Horror of Monsters." Essay/lecture—that is Davidson's name for his genre. He has not tried to make a continuous book. But there is far more unity of purpose here than in many a series of chapters. The oldest item, which comes first, is "Closing Up the Corpses." The title alludes to Xavier Bichat's instruction, in the Anatomie générale of 1801, to "open up a few corpses" to confirm that illness is located in specific organs of the body. For many years thereafter doctors tried to locate mental disorders in organs. Then the corpses were closed. The regimes of diagnosing neuroses, hysterias, perversions— diversion of function—and in due course, psychoanalysis—began. Davidson's book ends with a short appendix, "Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure," that offers a succinct remark about pleasure: a word that, unlike desire, is not yet burdened with theory. This single page (213) is more useful than many a book now written about Foucault.

And what is this "historical epistemology"? The phrase is not defined. We are told that "historical epistemology attempts to show how this new form of experience that we call 'sexuality' linked us to the emergence of new structures of knowledge, and especially to a new style of reasoning and the concepts employed within it." Just before making that observation, Davidson says that the emergence of a new science of sexuality "made it possible, even inevitable, for us to become preoccupied with our true sexuality." Whoops. Even old codgers like me who believe absolutely in the virtue of truth, can doubt that there is such a thing as our "true" sexuality.