The Eloquence of Speechlessness : Hybridity, Sexed Bodies, and Astonishment in Kant’s Theory of Epigenesis

Abstract: Keywords: Immanuel Kant ( narratives in European naturalism and political anatomy. Yet the concept surfaces in gender historical research on the period in foot notes and cursory remarks. This paper interrogates why epigenesis has been eradicated from the historical consciousness of today’s scholarship on gender politics. By honing in on the weirdness, a term borrowed from Lorraine Daston, in and of Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) theory on animal generation I show how an alertness it requires a re-evaluation of views on "political anatomy" taken-for-granted in scholarship, but also of Kant’s philosophy itself. The endeavour is divided into three main sections. In the first, I situate the failure of Kant-scholars to, in the words of John H. Zammito, "stabilize" epigenesis by exploring the hitherto unacknowledged peculiarity of Kant’s use racial hybridity to ‘prove’ the theory. In the second, the analysis departs from the notion ‘modern sex difference’ and show that a reading of epigenesis requires a re-thinking of sexed bodily identity in terms of conflict and contradiction. The third section reads this strife in light of Kant’s experience of "astonishment", a cognitive mode, I argue, designed to resolve both physiological and ideological inconsistencies. The antinomy of sex differentiation is in a concluding section juxtaposed with Kant’s phrase "eloquent speechlessness" in which the gender practice activated in the writing of, about, and on epigenesis is compared to the structure informing moral philosophy’s definition of lies.