Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences by Susanne Lettow (review)

This rich collection of papers by leading figures in the field concerns the “co-emergence of the concepts of race, gender and reproduction in the decades around 1800” (1). The editor, Susanne Lettow, notes that these have “rarely been studied in relation to each other” (1), and this motivated the collection, which was based upon conferences she sponsored in Vienna at the Institute for the Human Sciences as part of her research project “The Symbolic Power of Biology: Articulations of Biological Knowledge in Naturphilosophie around 1800.” The upshot, she notes, was to discern “resonances” but the concepts were “rarely parallelized or treated as analogies”—and above all, despite anticipations of the nineteenth-century dogma “that sex and race are biological givens indicating cultural and social status,” no “idea of biopolitics as a unified paradigm” had consolidated by 1800 (7, 8). I will return to this point later, but let me start with the observation that while race and gender are altogether familiar frame-concepts, “reproduction” is somewhat less so, and therefore deserves initial consideration.

Indeed, Lettow argues that reproduction served as the linchpin of the co-emergence: “concepts of race and gender . . . became systematically intertwined via reflections on reproduction” (7). Even more, she accentuates the novelty of the term. While “generation” and “production” were long-established concepts in the discourse of the life sciences, the concept of “reproduction,” she argues, emerged only at the middle of the eighteenth century, in direct response to the startling experimental results presented by Trembley regarding polyps and their regenerative capacities (25–28). On this basis, a radical rethinking of generation arose, problematizing notions of preformation, of the animal soul, and of organic functions more generally. Indeed, Lettow notes, François Jacob, in his influential Logic of Life, pointed to Buffon’s uptake of these matters as giving “a wider meaning” to the term reproduction (28). That is, Buffon used it to encompass distinctively organic processes like nutrition and growth, in addition to generation specifically. Moreover, he concentrated his theoretical interest upon the perpetuation of species, as contrasted with individual organismic life, thus adopting what Lettow calls “a genealogical perspective that surpasses the individual” (28).

This impetus culminated, for Lettow, in a hardening of lines in German Naturphilosophie, which she sees as the “cultural invention of new myths of origin” that structured “the relation of the individual to the supra-individual” and “contributed to the emergence of a biopolitical gaze” (23–24, 37). My sense is that, despite her qualifications of the view, there is all too much teleology in Lettow’s conception; it is the “biopolitical gaze” that is her ultimate concern, and what she uncovers in the eighteenth century, and a fortiori in German Naturphilosophie, is appraised primarily in terms of how it anticipates the ultimate consolidation of that ideological frame (and Foucault’s formulation of it).

Strikingly, this ideology-critical interest on Lettow’s part assimilates and indeed accentuates Peter Hanns Reill’s construction of the divide between the Enlightenment and Naturphilosophie. Lettow cites Reill throughout her essay, and she is not alone. Florence Vienne also structures her contribution around Reill’s conceptualization of the relation between the Enlightenment and Naturphilosophie. As Reill well knows, I have never been convinced of the sharp split he has attempted to insert, in his great work Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, between the eighteenth-century vitalists he celebrates and the German Naturphilosophen he so cordially despises. His contribution to this collection sets out with a very candid acknowledgment of his motivation: he wishes to save the Enlightenment from the postmodernist critiques to which it has recently been subjected by deflecting that criticism to the Naturphilosophen (66). While I agree with him that the postmodernist conception of the Enlightenment is rank caricature, I do not find it historically plausible or conceptually sensible to offer them an alternative scapegoat. What is bad history vis-à-vis Enlightenment...