Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation by Zrinka Stahuljak (review)

It is hard to think of another recent monograph more ambitious in scope, more interdisciplinary in method, or more successful theoretically than Pornographic Archaeology. Zrinka Stahuljak takes on in this volume what she calls the ‘double transference’ between nineteenth-century medievalists and the medical establishment on the one hand, and sexuality and nation on the other. In the process she surveys the birth of French medieval studies and philology as a science in the mid- to late nineteenth century, the intersection of colonial thought with medical ‘knowledge’ about genealogy, the politicization of historiography, and the invention of a purified sexual morality (courtly love) constructed to suit state reproductive aims. Most intriguingly, she demonstrates just how nineteenthcentury history, knowledge, and political orthodoxy were constructed through recourse to fiction. Stahuljak’s own methodology derives from an updated model of Foucauldian thought, one that sees both race and sexuality as productive of the French nation and which revalorizes archaeology as a model. The book is organized into three parts — ‘Sex and Blood’, ‘Sex and Race’, ‘Sex and Love’ — and closes with an Epilogue on the discovery, collection, and (non-)display of medieval priapic badges held at the Musée du Cluny in Paris. Sex, while touted as the foundation of the book’s arguments, is not really its focus. Instead, it serves as the grounding for the various disciplines that come under Stahuljak’s scalpel; and its interlinking with issues of race and genealogy proves the impossibility of discussing sexuality (or pornography) without a context and history. Sex is very much part of the theorization of knowledge, history, and morality that obsessed the nineteenth century, and Stahuljak is most successful at exposing and exploding scholars’ attempts to discipline it by cordoning it off into arenas where it could be pathologized. Knowledge is constructed through the progressive layering of fiction, the analysis of events, political flavouring, pseudo-objective observation, and selective silence. Stahuljak is a clever writer, prone to chiasmus, and for good reason. All of the arguments she forwards here are tightly wound and interlinked. It is not enough, she tells us, simply to confront the past with the present: without the addition of the marginalized (here the colony, the racial Other, and abjected sexuality), we end up with a corrupted version of history in which a pure and prosperous state reconceptualizes its own birth and subsequent success as dependent on the maintenance of a pure and disciplined populace (and the elimination of the contaminated few). The truly innovative force of Stahuljak’s book resides in the fact that she brings to light the role that medieval thought (or imagined medieval thought) played in the elaboration of these fantasies. Far from being occluded, as they so often are today, the Middle Ages are shown to have functioned throughout as the pseudo-source of purified notions of gender roles, morality, statehood, and Frenchness. Implicitly, she is also asking us to consider to what degree this thinking has ever really been overcome.