Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

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      So why do I part company with the new “unhistoricism”? The unhistoricists’ implicit query of genealogy—what might be occluded by it?—is a vital one,³³ and no doubt speaks to a more general fatigue regarding the injunction “always historicize!” Furthermore, I have considerable sympathy with the critical methods, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, that the unhistoricists employ to oppose that hegemony.³⁴ I agree that “psychoanalysis, as an analytic, is also a historical method,”³⁵ and would point to increased appreciation for its utility as one of the more appealing trends in early modern queer criticism.³⁶ I share, as well, their interest in the capacity of queer to denaturalize sexual logics and expand the object of study through untoward combinations and juxtapositions; recognition of the role that affect and desire, particularly identification, play in the work of historical reconstruction; confidence in the specific capacities of literary language and literary form to contribute to historical understanding; and belief that the past can speak meaningfully to the present.

      Despite these areas of agreement, I remain unconvinced that a teleological imperative is what impedes our understanding of past sexualities. In part, my skepticism stems from my understanding of genealogy as it was theorized and put into practice by Foucault. Since the publication of his initial description (articulated through a reading of Nietzsche), genealogy has come to mean a lot of different things to different people—some of it identifiable as Foucaultian, some of it not. Linguistically connoting “descent,” genealogy for Foucault “postulates conditions of possibility in the past for some synchronic feature of the present.”³⁷ More particularly, it concerns how the identity of something is dispersed over time through mixing, repurposing, and contingency. Drawing a distinction between the organic development traceable back to an origin (Ursprung), descent (Herkunft), and emergence (Entstehung), he argued that the genealogist should seek to “dispel the chimeras of the origin” by “cultivat[ing] the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.”³⁸ Due to his emphasis on power, “details and accidents” tend in Foucault’s corpus to be produced by violence, pettiness, meanness, and quarrels, but to my mind they stand more generally for the principle of contingency and the way history proceeds by fits and starts. “Beginnings” refers to those moments when one thing is repurposed into another through practices of power-knowledge. Pressing for recognition of historical rupture and discontinuity, especially in terms of events and episodes “situated within the articulation of the body and history,”³⁹ Foucault traced epistemic breaks of intelligibility that fundamentally altered what could be thought.⁴⁰ Practices of repurposing necessarily involve dispersion, and the point of genealogy is “to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion,” while also recognizing in those passing events that which “gave birth to those things that continue to exist.”⁴¹ With the inevitability of the present disrupted, so too is the idea that the past actively inheres in or secretly animates the present.⁴² What is at stake in these productive contradictions is precisely the distinction Foucault drew between writing a history of the past in terms of the present (that is, conventional history) and writing a history of the present (genealogy).⁴³ The latter recognizes that there is no firm ontological or epistemological ground for our identifications with the past—they, too, are historically contingent. The accusation, then, that genealogy, in the form that Foucault wrote it, is teleological runs against the grain of Foucault’s own project. Indeed, nothing could be further from teleology than Foucault’s own genealogies, which understand historical processes in full light of their conditionality.

      With Foucault’s own genealogical project in mind,⁴⁴ I now want to scrutinize how the unhistoricists build their indictment of teleological misprision, first by presenting their projects through their own words. Recognizing that an “altericist reaction” among pre- and early modernists “was undoubtedly necessary insofar as it sought to enable analyses of gender and sexuality rather than foreclose them through a presumption that ‘we know whereof we speak,’” Freccero nonetheless worries “that altericism is sometimes accompanied by an older, more familiar claim that periods—those confections of nineteenth-century disciplinarization in the West—are to be respected in their time- and context-bound specificity. This is the historicism I speak of, the one that, in the name of difference smuggles in historical periodization in the spirit of making ‘empirical’ claims about gender and sexuality in the European past.”⁴⁵

      Here Freccero forges a close correlation between a prior, apparently principled, commitment to alterity (thus, “altericism”) and periods (those time- and context-bound Western confections), while also suggesting that periodicity becomes the vehicle by which scholars make “empirical” claims. Freccero’s formulation “in the spirit of” leaves ambiguous whether periodization necessitates empiricism or empiricism necessitates periodization, but her point seems to be that altericists pass off periodization as something empirical, whereas it actually is something conceptual and metaphysical. Whichever way it works, empiricism and periodization are judged to be inimical to queer. I will return to the status of periods and empiricism later, but for now simply offer Freccero’s own description of her project in Queer/Early/Modern, which “set itself the task of critiquing historicisms and troubling periodization by rejecting a notion of empirical history and allowing fantasy and ideology an acknowledged place in the production of ‘fantasmatic’ historiography.”⁴⁶ Approaching historical affects as persistence and repetition, and situating subjects in a more “promiscuous” and asynchronic relationship to temporality, she fashions a historiographic method she calls “queer spectrality—ghostly returns suffused with affective materiality that work through the ways trauma, mourning, and event are registered on the level of subjectivity and history.”⁴⁷ As a historiographic method, queer spectrality is a flexible, alluring, and often moving hermeneutic. For instance, Freccero’s application of spectral (or as she also calls it, figural) historiography charts the “transspecies habitus” of dogs and humans through their manifestations of violence in colonialism and the contemporary prison-industrial complex; this reading implicates racism, transnational capital, virile masculinity, queer heterosexuality, and lesbian domestic relations in a complex affective network that is “comparatively queer relative to any progressive, ameliorative rational accounts of historical process.”⁴⁸ Rejecting progressive narratives as well as remedy and rationality, Freccero maintains that she is motivated by an ethical impulse to produce “queer time”⁴⁹ by means of “a suspension, a waiting, an attending to the world’s arrivals (through, in part, its returns), not as a guarantee or security for action in the present, but as the very force from the past that moves us into the future.”⁵⁰

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