1) How is the concept of sexual instinct being deployed? Is the concept itself sufficiently interrogated in this piece? What enables the conjunction of "sexual" + "instinct"? (Cf. Judith Halberstam's book on Gothic Horror and other work on 19th c. instincts)
2) Where does emerging psychiatry locate 'the sexual instinct'? What replaces the brain in its anatomical functions? Is there a vacant place here?
3) What is the treatment here of the relation between criminality and sexual perversion? What is the relation between these two? Why, for instance, is there not a "criminal instinct"? Or is there? If not, why can't we do with criminality what we have done with sexuality? Why doesn't the same explanatory framework apply? What holds apart the legal and the psychic?
4) How do the claims here differ from MF in HSv1? Where do they differ? Are the claims substantively different? Is the method substantively different? Is there more empirical richness? If so, where? Is the thrust of the thesis here different? Where are the differences? (And what reading(s) of HSv1 are presupposed when we consider these questions?)
5) The crux of the piece seems to be about the emergence of a new style of reasoning. What is the methodological status of SoR? How does it methodologically function? How does one show that a new SoR is what emerges, rather than just the emergence of a new concept or a new technique?
Discussion amongst the group then began:
(5) Method
A provisional thought about how the method works to get us going. The method might works as follows. First you identify a new concept (e.g., 'perversion'). Then you identify a new 'framework' (i.e., an SoR) that makes that concept possible (e.g., 'psychiatric SoR'). The goal is to figure out 'what makes conceptual emergence possible'. This is a concern about conditions of possibility, the conditions that make something, namely a set of possibilities.
----But in what sense does the SoR make a new concept or claim possible?
--It makes it possible in the sense of mode of veridiction, in the sense of being truth-apt, that is in the play of the true-or-false. So SoR is a name for that which makes claims possible as true-or-false claims. These are 'rules of the true-or-false'. These 'rules' do not have their own agency but are expressions of and in practice. So an SoR is the name for the ensemble or assemblage of practices in which these rules come to expression.
----Good, I am with you. But in that case why do we need the methodoloical category of SoR? Is it doing more than just providing a shorthand for 'the rules in practice'? What is it doing?
--It's a way of getting grip on certain conceptual transformations and their conditions that we can't gain grip on if we only write a history of institutions, or a history of culture, or a history of 'mentalities', &c.. It's an explanatory concept that provides a window onto certain kinds of transformations that we otherwise couldn't see.
----It's the same matter in Foucault (and Kant) that is such a long-running issue of concern (for our group). In what sense do 'conditions of possibility' condition? What is it to condition granted the assumption that conditioning is not just causing? How do 'dispositifs' condition? How do 'styles of reasoning' condition? How do 'problematizations' condition, motivate, constrain, produce?
(1), (2), (3) -- Instinct and Sexuality
How is the idea of instinct functioning in Davidson's account? Is 'instinct' taken by the 19c. psychiatrists as basal, or as grounding? Or is it 'just' explanatory? If explanatory, is it essentialist? Is the essentialism key to the concept being explanatory? If so, the essence of 'instinct' appears to be 'propogation' or 'sexual procreation' (15)? The essence of instinct as procreation allows us to treat a variety of otherwise seemingly-different sexual categories within a unity, namely a unity of abnormality and straying from 'propogation'.
Interestingly, then, the category of instinct eliminates the need for a conceptual focus on genitals or brain or other anatomy. This opens up a whole 'normativization' of sexuality. Because it's hard to create a normativity around just the genital organs or the organ of the brain.
Does the instinct account also help us understand why (not covered in AD's piece, but discussed by Deleuze (& others)) sadism and masochism were theorized by both Krafft-Ebbing and Freud as both 'opposed' to one another and 'fundamental' to all other perversions?
What is the history of the concept of instinct? What was instinct doing before it got enrolled in this explanatory account? Was it doing anything? Yes (but we aren't clear what). Or is this the scene of emergence of instinct? Instinct is "everywhere and nowhere" (Legrain, 1896) and so it covers "personality" (12). How can anything, instinct itself, be everywhere and nowhere? Key to the idea is that it is "natural" and "determinate" (15).
A final question. If sexual instinct is a 'norm' that unifies perversions, then how do we square this with Deleuze's observation (in 'Coldness & Cruelty') that Krafft-Ebbing and Freud both described, or drew up, sadism and masochism as opposites? How can two 'deviations from a norm' be related as 'oppositional' or 'opposites'?
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Present at the meeting: CK, NM, GL, SB, ER, CE
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