The history of sexuality is often that of discourses and concepts. Analysis of the letters sent to the Dr Tissot shows how scholarly analyzes meet the practices and emotions of individuals in search of a remedy.
From Michel Foucault to Thomas Laqueur, the Enlightenment’s medical obsession with masturbation is a commonplace in the history of sexuality. The treatise on Onanism by the famous Swiss doctor Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) is exemplary in this respect, and has been the subject of numerous studies. What is left to say about it? ? It is the merit of the work of Patrick Singy, philosopher, epistemologist and historian of science, to dust off the subject by focusing on an archive which offers a distinct but complementary point of view to Onanism : a series of consultation letters addressed to Tissot, which testify to the continuity between medical theory and the concrete experience of individuals. This work will interest the cultivated reader as well as the researcher, because it offers renewed insight into the question of masturbation in XVIIIe century and a method for writing the history of sexuality today.
The text is organized into two main parts supplemented by a glossary of Enlightenment medical vocabulary and an extensive bibliography. The partial or total transcription of the 98 letters selected from a set of 1346 (p. 49-237) is preceded by the statement of the principles of their transcription (p. 43-47). It is introduced by a short essay, but of remarkable analytical clarity: “ How we write the history of sexuality. Historiographical essay » (pp. 1-42).
A historiographical and epistemological renewal
This essay is in many ways salutary to the proliferating field of historical studies of sexuality. P. Singy in fact carries out an epistemological clearing that does not shy away from the ontological questions that underlie his enterprise: we must first question the type of object that “is”. sexuality » to write its history. Is it an invariant that we talk about differently over time ? Or on the contrary a specific experience appearing at a given moment, which is revealed by the profound mutations of the discourses ?
The test is thus deployed in three stages. The first sets out the historiographical landscape in which Tissot’s treatise has been taken since the 1960s and clears the ground through a close discussion of exemplary theses of the dynamics of the field (p. 1-10). It is above all the analysis dedicated to Foucault’s theses and their legacies, now dominant, which must attract attention – being part of a Foucaultian lineage, P. Singy cannot ignore his positioning. Avoiding the pitfall of challenge as well as that of conformism, he highlights in Foucault the oscillation, which we have inherited, between two concepts of “ sexuality “. Sometimes it appears as “ fundamentally ahistorical » (p. 8), only the discourses regarding it transform ; sometimes as a collective and individual experience in all its emotional, ethical and political depth, which emerges at a precise moment. P. Singy notes that most of those who theoretically endorse the perspective of a radical historicity of their object treat it in practice as a sort of invariant (p. 7-10).
This critical discussion allows P. Singy to develop secondly (p. 10-27) his own methodological hypotheses. They are part of the perspective of a radical historicization of its object based on an analysis of the concepts mobilized by the discourses – which owes a lot to the philosopher Arnold I. Davidson, who in this way renewed the history of sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s (drawing on Foucault and analytical philosophy). P. Singy incorporates this conceptual approach as well as elements of the Foucauldian notion of “ device » (of knowledge-power) in its own notion of “ speech » – the analysis avoiding the risk of abstraction by integrating the institutions and practices which underlie and reinforce the statements (p. 10-11). Each “ speech » is thus organized according to its own regularities which define specific cardinal problems, and forms a coherent whole which is isolated from others by contrast, which allows the precise identification of continuities and ruptures. The way of writing history is affected: what should guide periodization is not the simple presence of a discourse, but the moment of its generalization which grants it a dominant place and sends others to the margins.
The flesh and the seed
This approach “ structural » then allows P. Singy to precisely situate the question of onanism in XVIIIe century by identifying the “ speech of the seed “, medical and physiological, which he distinguishes from “ speech of the flesh » which was that of modern Christian moral theology and the “ discourse of sexuality » produced by medico-psychological knowledge from the middle of XIXe century. This is the greatest originality of this work: to promote the medical discourse on masturbation as a structure of thought and specific experience, of which Tissot’s treatise and correspondence are the shining testimonies and paradigms. If the medical principles (notably Hippocratic) which regulate it date back to Antiquity, it was under the Enlightenment that it became dominant.
The analysis of its regularities (p. 16-27) shows that it obeys a scheme of physiological quantitiesthat of the body’s secretions – the humors. There retention and excess emission secretions, including semen, are then a cardinal problem: they are the cause of imbalances and therefore of diseases. Sex is therefore not an autonomous domain, but is integrated into a much larger register of phenomena both physical and “ moral » (in the sense of XVIIIe century) – because the human of the Enlightenment is a body endowed with spirit and passions. The author then refutes the interpretations which see in Tissot the problem of sin or perversion just as much as he prevents the perplexity of the contemporary reader. The latter will understand why the letters include the description of diet, excess alcohol, sleep and wakefulness, physical exercises, joys and sorrows, and that of masturbatory frequency and relationships with women – two practices that the discourse of semen on the same level, since their result, the emission of sperm, is identical. Because what is at stake is the maintenance, or even the discovery of a general balance, between defect and excess, specific to each human body.
From epistemology to historical anthropology
But what of experience ? Are we not falling back partly into the pitfalls of a history of ideas which would remain ultimately at the discursive level ? The detail of the analysis which extends into that of the content of the letters (third part of the essay, pp. 27-41) is essential here, and gives full meaning to their edition. Because P. Singy propels into a central place the point where theoretical discourse and experience are articulated, on which the history of sexuality most often stumbles, and which establishes the radicality of its own historical enterprise: the practices described by Tissot correspondents, and the emotions (very current subject of the human and social sciences), which show how discourse shapes an entire relationship with oneself and one’s body, and therefore a specific way of living and being. Certain practices thus only have meaning in the context which structures them – like interrupted masturbation, so strange for us, so coherent with regard to the spermatic economy. It is the same for affects. From the pens of these educated men, many of whom have read Onanism and know the portrait of the masturbator dilapidated by excessive loss of semen, we read how medical discourse generates and reinforces a careful attention paid to the body, its health and its ailments, as well as the anxieties and fears faced with its disorders. We then understand why Tissot received letters from all over Europe. Because he who describes the origin of evils must also be the master of remedies.
Far from the simple exercise of commenting on sources and beyond its historiographical qualities and the interest of its subject, Patrick Singy’s work outlines the project of a real history of sexuality, of which the deep solidarity between concepts, emotions and practices which we see in the letters is exemplary. A story in which, with speeches, individuals and their experiences are truly transformed ; a story that is just as much an anthropology.