Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development

PREFACE

vii PREFACE The work of many contemporary French philosophers of note makes incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: duplicity, concealment, forgetting, and subterfuge, among others. This book employs Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of ‘sex.’ These are the sleights associated with the concepts of ‘norm,’ ‘bisexuality,’ and ‘development.’ This book aims to identify the oft-obscured workings of these three concepts and to display the subtle collaborations of their components. For these components can work together to constitute sleights. Such sleights could also be called “conceptual Jacquemarts.” In the Jacquemart, we have a single machine whose internal differentiation permits its self-reference and whose self-reference permits trickery. A first component allows that a second component carries out chiming work that it does not; it mimes a chime. Other parts of the machine actually effect the chiming. The machine as a whole refers to itself precisely through the dissimulation of the source of the chime. The machine’s trickery requires self-reference. Similarly, concepts are ideal mechanisms that necessarily have the conceptual equivalent of this capacity for internal ventriloquism. This book attempts to draft the conceptual equivalents of horological technical figures for several complex conceptual Jacquemarts relating to the concept of ‘sex.’ Chapter 1 presents a general account of the sleight of reason. Chapter 2, on sleights of the norm, scrutinizes several basic moves found in certain elementary social statistical concepts through a reading of Foucault’s work on normalization and biopower. First, the conversion of discrete into continuous quantities that is effected with the statistical norm is examined so as to demonstrate the role of apparently simple tools of statistical measure in the constitution of social homogeneities. Second, an account of this conversion and similar operations is offered in terms of the concept of the ‘average’ or ‘mean’ in social statistics. Third, the existential function of these statistical orderings is sketched in an account of what is here termed “statistical panopticism.” Chapter 3 is devoted to sleights of bisexuality. The examination focuses on two interrelated sleights found in the Freudian construal of bisexuality viii PREFACE as the universal, coconstitution of each sex by both sexes. These are, first, the sleight of pure and impure sexes and, second, the sleight of what are termed here “microsex” and “macrosex.” Sleights of development are the topic of chapter 4. First, it exposes a sleight that pertains to the concept of ‘societal development’ according to which societies can be progressive or regressive. This sleight is relevant to the question of the relation between the concepts of ‘sexuality,’ ‘primitivity ,’ and ‘societal evolution.’ It operates through a covert switching between two kinds of contemporaneity, temporal and normative. Second, Freud’s developmental accounts of sexuation and sexuality exemplify some sleights of sexual development. The section exposes duplicities in Freud’s cultural version of Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law and examines a proleptic fallacy in Freud’s teleological account of infantile eroticism in the context of his evolutionary thought. Identification and discussion of these three kinds of sleights of reason,1 then, occupy the bulk of this text. The book concludes with a chapter that attempts a synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those, jointly, into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros. ...