Between Speculation and Population: The Problem of "Sex" in Our Long Eighteenth Century

Mme de Saint-Ange: 'Tis fair enough: as we say, a little theory must succeed practice: it is the means to make a perfect disciple.

Domance: Well then! Upon what subject, Eugenie, would you like to have a discussion?

Eugenie: I should like to know whether manners are truly necessary in a governed society, whether their influence has any weight with the national genius.

—Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

I) Toward a Queer History of Sexuality

I want to begin with what I take to be one of the more bizarre history lessons of recent years. Mired in the fall of 1998 in the preliminaries of what would become President Bill Clinton's impeachment and acquittal, the White House legal team responded to the startling news that Monica Lewinsky was prepared to provide prosecutors with an unlaundered, semen-stained dress by delving into the eighteenth-century archive most familiar to the legal profession: the acts and intents of the Constitutional framers. In this instance, Alexander Hamilton was their man. Hamilton, they revealed in a memorandum released to the public, also had an adulterous affair, the details of which were uncannily apt. While under investigation on charges of financial corruption in 1792, Hamilton successfully defended himself by disclosing to a delegation of Congressmen that the money he had given to convicted swindler James Reynolds was not, as many claimed, skimmed from the Treasury and intended for speculation in the stock market. Instead, it was Hamilton's own money invested as a bribe to hush up his affair with Reynolds's wife. Five years later, the same charges of financial corruption resurfaced, and were rebutted this time by Hamilton's publication of a pamphlet in which he attributed these further attacks to the "spirit of Jacobinism," which, by the mid-1790s, had created "men" for whom "nothing is sacred": "Even the peace of an unoffending and amiable wife is a welcome repast to their fury against the husband" (238–39). This historical side note proved apt for the White House legal team because it allowed them to spin two complementary morals. The first explicitly argued that the parallel between the two cases evinced, through inversion, the improper place that sex now occupies within the political economy of the republic: "It is apparent from the Hamilton case that the framers did not regard private sexual misconduct as creating an impeachable offense" ("Founding" 27). The second moral implicitly credited their client with a superior claim to national standing since his affair with Lewinsky retraced the founding footsteps of the framers. Now that we have been forced to talk about it, in other words, the fact that Hamilton did it means that it couldn't be all that bad that Clinton did it as well.

I begin with this anecdote because it foregrounds several of the larger questions I want to pursue in this essay: What is the "it" that Hamilton and Clinton are said to share? Why are we so obviously confused as to whether "it" ought to be public or private? Why do we assume that "it" is the same today as "it" was in 1792? One typical response to these questions is so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated. "It" is "sex," and "sex" expresses a drive that ought to be either sheltered from public scrutiny (hence the "privacy" of the "sexual misconduct" of Hamilton and Clinton), or publicly probed for what it can tell us about the inner needs and desires of the individual(s) involved (hence the spin that identifies Clinton's "misconduct" with that of Hamilton). This way of thinking about "sex" is both profoundly ahistorical and, it seems, convincing for that very reason. By pairing Hamilton and Clinton, this type of reasoning draws on and supports several of our deeply held assumptions about how "sexuality" works—for Hamilton in the 1790s, for Clinton in the 1990s, and for us today. Like each of us, Hamilton and Clinton are understood as bearing within themselves a drive in need of management, a reservoir of sexual energy located at...