The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular
A note on this article.[1]
Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient
form—so familiar and important in the West—of preaching .... [W]e might
wonder how it is possible that the lyricism and religiosity that have
long accompanied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial
societies, been largely carried over to sex.[2]
Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the
soul.[3]
What happens to Michel Foucault's contention that the soul is the
prison of the body[4]
when sexuality gets routed not through confession
but through molecular biology and the so-called 'revolution in genetic
medicine?'[5]
How does the market in knowledge-products and services
that this revolution has helped produce change expectations regarding
the body and its truths? To address these questions, I will first
sketch the current situation in molecular medicine and explore the ways
it has made biology conditional, thereby linking body and soul in
non-linear and non-reductionistic ways (Section One). I will then
investigate why 'the genetic revolution'—despite this change—so
relentlessly re-inscribes such conventional relations toward belonging
and intimacy, sexuality and even life itself (Section Two).
Underpinning this analysis of molecular medicine and the expectations
it engenders regarding the body and sexuality is my elaboration of
Foucault's understanding of secularism as in-depth
Christianization.[6]
The idea behind talk of a "Christian secular" is that secularism in the
West is "neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded
it ... nor a simple break from it."[7]
Instead, religiosity and the
secular co-constitute one another. Nowhere is this tangled
co-constitution of religion and the secular more clear than in medicine,
whose vocabularies and techniques helped form the very concept of
secular society in the West during the eighteenth
century.[8] Medicine
provided crucial justification for secular governance: in the secular,
the only truly moral response to pain was to strive to end it; not to
inflict it (as has religion), not to justify it (religion as the opiate
of the masses)—not even to palliate it (in the other sense of an
opiate), but to meet pain head-on without
metaphor. In this way, secular
disciplines like clinical medicine framed their knowledge as motivated
by this secular (because rational) desire to end
cruelties.[9] Yet
despite medicine's use of this legitimation narrative to assert its
status as empirical science, in Section One I will also show how
physicians relied on and even strengthened religious sensibilities
regarding sexuality and shame.
'Sexuality,' of course, is a contested concept. Elaborating on
Foucault, I understand 'sexuality' as a dispositive or apparatus
that (starting roughly in the mid-nineteenth century) draws together
under one name disparate experiences, which include but are not limited
to: reproduction and ancestry; eroticism, romance (which differs from
eroticism due to the salience of gender roles), and affective intimacy;
moral/religious taboos, injunctions, and behaviors; bodily
sensibilities, especially regarding time and futurity; legal forms,
institutions, and codes; as well as a series of biological components
involving genetics, hormones, and anatomy as well as the scientific
discourses, practices, and institutions that study
them.[10] Different
medical paradigms foreground different dimensions of this
dispositive, thereby bundling body, soul, and fate into
'sexuality' in different ways.
Today, we are witnessing a new twist in how religion and the secular
co-constitute one another. As before, nowhere is this twist more clear
than in molecular medicine. 'Sexuality' is still key to the molecular
body—but differently, insofar as the molecular body develops logics of
variation without norm that proliferate individual differences.
Yet despite this freedom from traditional notions of 'norm' and thus
from the shame that medical norms engender, in Section Two I will also
show how molecular medicine curtails and contains these radical
possibilities by foregrounding the domestic family as the primary point
of access and production of this de-standardizing body. Molecular
medicine realizes its dream of tapping directly into the forces of life
itself by backgrounding reproduction and stigmatized forms of identity
in favor of foregrounding the lyrical and allegedly liberating
discourses and practices of romantic love. Thus while molecular medicine
still tells sexual sermons (as did eighteenth century sexology), its
preaching works not by implanting shame or stigma, but rather by
inciting us to invest in the possibility of future growth, not in spite
of uncertainty but because of it.
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