The Emergence of Sexuality

Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

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by Arnold I. Davidson

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2002, 288 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674004590

Moving between philosophy and history, Davidson elaborates a new method for considering the history of concepts and the nature of scientific knowledge, a method he calls "historical epistemology." He applies this method to the history of sexuality, with important consequences for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality itself. 

In Davidson's view, it was the emergence of a science of sexuality that made it possible, even inevitable, for us to become preoccupied with our true sexuality. Historical epistemology attempts to reveal how the form of experience that we call "sexuality" is linked to the emergence of new structures of knowledge, and especially to a new style of reasoning and the concepts employed within it. Thus Davidson shows how, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new psychiatric style of reasoning about diseases emerges that makes possible, among other things, statements about sexual perversion that quickly become commonplace in discussions of sexuality.

Considering a wide range of examples, from Thomas Aquinas to Freud, Davidson develops the methodological lessons of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault in order to analyze the history of our experience of normativity and its deviations.

Contents

Preface

 1. Closing up the Corpses
2. Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality
3. How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
4. The Horror of Monsters
5. Styles of Reasoning: From the History of Art to the Epistemology of Science
6. The Epistemology of Distorted Evidence: Problems around Carlo Ginzburg's Historiography
7. Foucault and the Analysis of Concepts
8. On Epistemology and Archeology: From Canguilhem to Foucault

 Appendix: Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure
Notes
Credits
Index

Review

This eagerly awaited book by University of Chicago Professor Arnold Davidson provides, in a series of essays, an insightful and penetrating account of the emergence of modern ways of thinking about sexuality. Simultaneously, Davidson articulates a powerful method of investigation that is both historical and philosophical: historical epistemology. This method draws on the work of Foucault and Canguilhem, together with a Wittgensteinian understanding of concepts. Davidson writes: "It is not because we became preoccupied with our true sexuality that a science of sexuality arose in the 19th century; it is rather the emergence of a science of sexuality that it made it possible, even inevitable, for us to become preoccupied with our true sexuality....Historical epistemology attempts to show how thus new forms of experience that we call ‘sexuality’ is linked to the emergence of new structures of knowledge and especially to a new style of reasoning and the concepts employed within it." In the more "historical" essays, Davidson considers the development of the notions of “perversion” and “monstrosity,” provides a reading of Freud’s seminal Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and investigates the origins of the "science of sexuality." In the later, more methodological and theoretical essays, Davidson engages the work of Foucault, Canguilhem, Carlo Ginzburg, among others - drawing on these thinkers to develop a distinctive approach to the history of concepts and styles of reasoning.

For other titles in related subjects:

• Continental Thought
• Anglo-American Philosophy