In her epilogue, Tracie Matysik argues that “questions of universalism, difference, and morality beyond the law have returned with a new force” (256). Similarly, in hers, Judith Surkis shows how the recent virulent controversies around the headscarf in republican French schools and their attendant legislation have a genealogy in the vibrant fin de siècle debates on pedagogy, secularism, and citizenship (243–8). Few would argue with Surkis and Matysik's contention that contemporary debates on universalism, citizenship, and secularism which haunt Western liberal democracies have a historical past, yet few have explored this past in such an illuminating manner. By reflecting on these issues, both studies illustrate how intellectual history, far from being the abstract and arcane sub-field of history it is still considered by some critics, has contemporary purchase and speaks to a present that must be thought historically. These authors show how (sexual) difference constituted a central term in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century definition of the nature and social expression of the subject.

Surkis and Matysik's studies have much in common, despite their different national contexts in France and German-speaking Europe.Footnote ¹ Both engage the question of the subject and explore a range of intellectual projects devoted to the definition of a (French) moral or (German) ethical subject and its relationship with the social, the state, and the world at large in global and imperial contexts. They engage the terms of these debates on morality, secularism, and citizenship in order to illuminate how the boundaries between public and private and the relationship between the state and the (often presumed masculine) individual were delineated, contested, and reworked. Such commonality is not only evident in their object of study, but in the ways in which they approach their subject. They mine a familiar terrain but, by considering the logic of gender and sexuality, they shed light on issues otherwise too often left unacknowledged.

As the last two decades of feminist and gender history has shown, gender and sexuality are privileged sites of meaning for the definition of social life. Both Matysik and Surkis exemplify how, in the words of one historian, the “richly theorized and reflexive feminist historiography, understood as a critical rethinking of historical discourse more generally,” works against the grain of modern European intellectual history by engaging more specifically the questions that pertain to the enduring concern of modernity, namely that of subject, difference, and otherness.Footnote ² Gender and sexuality are not just objects of thought but categories of difference whose very logic structured and enabled the production of political meaning. Both historians take seriously the argument made by some psychoanalytic-informed feminist theorists on “the entanglement of sex with the question of being,” since, as Sigmund Freud first theorized, “sex is not a predicate of the subject, it predicates that there is a subject,” and thus organizes the meaning of difference.Footnote ³ Building upon the work of Joan W. Scott and Carolyn Dean, Surkis argues that “sexuality operated . . . as a powerful site through which individuals could be articulated to the social order, and not simply as a force to be ‘repressed’” (188).Footnote ⁴ Here, Surkis's indebtedness to Michel Foucault is evident in the ways she conceives of sexuality as the site where anxieties about proper masculine subjects’ obsession were driven by a desire for normative regulation made necessary by the very instability and fragility of such norms. Similarly, Matysik argues that for a number of ethics reformers in late nineteenth-century Central Europe, “sexuality [constituted] the site at which ethics reform must operate” (114). Taking seriously how the subject was conceived (or assumed) as gendered and how difference inflected understandings of autonomy, agency, and selfhood has allowed rethinking of the traditional matter of intellectual history.Footnote ⁵

* * *

Surkis explores how French republican citizenship was defined through normative visions of masculinity that were “at once powerful and insecure”, and which were premised upon notions of an autonomous and independent subject that was problematic and needed both disciplining and regulation in order to be realized and to serve the state and the nation. She examines the classical “liberal paradox” that Dean and others have explored (4). After the French Revolution's inauguration of equal and autonomous citizens, “the status of the ‘social,’ which is to say the modalities and norms regulating the relations between individuals, emerged as an ongoing problem in the nineteenth century” (127). Surkis explores how, from the late 1880s onwards, as the Third Republic emerged from the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war and engaged in a series of political reforms centered on education and secularization, the social was defined by a number of prominent critics, reformers, and intellectuals as a site to be properly regulated in order for republican citizenship to flourish. Citizenship was grounded in education and hygiene, which were conceived as moral problems with immediate political import. Morality was a matter of politics and, for many of the men steeped in the neo-Kantianism dominating late nineteenth-century French public thought, reform was urgently needed.

Moral reform thus became a pressing issue because the “socialization of [male] citizens” was required for the success of a republican nation. Revisiting familiar texts, Surkis “highlights how gender and sexual norms were implicated in these visions” (71). She argues that debates and theorizations of the social were premised upon a “conjugal heterosexuality” considered as “matrix” and “crucible of sociality” (9, 11). In effect, Surkis shows how republican citizenship was articulated by policing and regulating the content and borders of masculinity and how marriage became a marker of modernity. Modernity presumed the disciplining of bodies (of women and colonial subjects as well as of men) in different ways and with different effects. As a result, “The heterosexual masculinity of the citizen, and the specter of its failure, was a structuring assumption of [conservative and progressive] arguments” (103). But, importantly, these normative constructions were not self-evident and required thinking through the particular problems posed by modern life and the ways in which the relationship between public and private, state and family, right and duty were to be articulated.

Surkis argues that, for late nineteenth-century reformers and thinkers, “Masculinity, like citizenship, required schooling” (15). Efforts to reform republican citizens were located especially in pedagogy debates on the role and nature of education. According to Surkis, these efforts centered around conceiving a “liberal discipline, which sought to foster subjects who were capable of moral self-regulation” (26). While philosopher and primary education director Ferdinand Buisson called for the recognition of “maternal love” as a counterpoint to paternal authority that would help develop young boys’ desire to learn in republican schools, his fellow neo-Kantian reformer Henri Marion celebrated conjugal love as the most desirable force to counter the potentially perverse excesses and deviations of adolescence. For him, “the proper administration of passions was central to social order,” and adolescence a universal experience that must be harnessed and redirected (44). For both men, reflecting on the relationship between reason and affect led them to “the complementary logic of conjugality” as a central expression of the blending of reason and affect into ethics (51). Additionally, a number of novelists, thinkers, and social scientists expressed profound concern with the supposedly deleterious effects of the quintessential republican institution, the secondary school (lycée), in its design to mold and train the state's elites. Arguments centered on the lycée's failure to produce young men—citizens—perfectly adapted to the demands of modern life and the requirements of the state, a problem made urgent by the democratization of education. In contrast to primary schools, critics claimed that these relied too much on reason, authority, and “excessive discipline” and worried that the secondary schools produced citizens characterized by both “individualism and alienation.” At schools—especially internats and boarding schools—boys were unmoored from the nurturing influence of family life (in which mothers held a central role) only to be socialized in a space at once harsh and promiscuous that abolished social and sexual boundaries (71). Schools’ authoritarianism encouraged feminization and an excess of docility, in short a perverse masculinity at odds with the ideal self-reliant and autonomous citizen. While conservatives like Maurice Barrès emphasized the need for male citizens to be rooted in the family, for him a site of tradition and culture, other republican critics affirmed the need for the lycées to be transformative so as to avoid the production of “implicitly perverse subjects who were both incapable of self-government and ill-adapted to social order” (83). The heterosexual conjugal family acted as civilizational tool and ideal.

These debates, Surkis demonstrates, did not just focus on the form of education but also on its content, and its relationship with state, democracy, and family (74). What was at stake was the nature of the moral subject and its foundation for a viable polity. Echoing Foucault, Surkis highlights how the four figures of the “repressed student, the unemployed bachelier, the unmarried man, and the childless bureaucrat” functioned as metonym for one problem, namely the presumed failure of the state to produce citizens (71). After 1890, debates questioned the nature of the knowledge disseminated in lycées. While some focused on the lack of meritocracy of secondary schools, others like novelist and education journalist Henry Béranger fictionalized the dangers of an excess of intelligence and knowledge over the regulating forces of “intuition” and love” (109). Discussions focused on a new figure, that of the civil servant now populating the corridors of the state. These men were failed instances of productive masculinity because subjected to the “moral degradation” that came from “monotonous tasks [and] meager salar[ies]” that left them unable to care for those dependent on them. According to critics, demographers, and pro-natalists, this was a public and social issue because this proletarianized class of bureaucrats could not assume the virile masculinity of republican citizenship since they were forced to “remain single, childless, or trapped a in loveless marriage” and were excessively individualistic. Instead, many argued, a strong nation demanded the “socialization of men's instincts” (112, 116). Marriage alone could help the socialization of these deficient men into properly masculine citizens. The conjugal bourgeois heterosexual family was thus enshrined at the heart of the social because it alone, through marriage, could bind the public and private and help ward off instances of failed masculinity represented by the devirilized functionary, or the “overeducated, underemployed bachelor” (121).

The conjugal metaphor appears ubiquitous in late nineteenth-century republican thought and, indeed, conjugal heterosexuality also figured prominently in the thought of sociologist Emile Durkheim (127). Here, Surkis fruitfully highlights the manner in which his vision of the social and his engagement in the questions of suicide, incest, and anomie were both premised and dependent upon a gendered and sexualized vision of the individual. Unlike some of the ethics reformers that Matysik examines, that vision of the masculine self, however, did not necessarily imply the recognition of a feminine subject but instead worked to elide femininity and women. As is well known, Durkheim conceived the (masculine) individual as inextricably bound by the social and articulated “a morality . . . rooted in a specific social milieu” (128). Like other republican pedagogues and reformers, he focused on men's unwillingness to marry and father but proposed a different version of the male citizen that ultimately, according to Surkis, made heterosexual conjugality a central tenet for his vision of the social. Durkheim argued that those men who remained bachelors, unmarried, and childless were more susceptible to modern despair—and ultimately suicide—because they were not bound by the ties of dependency which would enable them to flourish socially. While critical of the patriarchal and what he identified as “primitive” models of sociality, he nonetheless saw the modern family as essential for male citizenship. Thus only the familial and the domestic expressed in the ideal of companionate marriage would prevent “egotism and anomie” (130). Durkheim concluded that familial and conjugal binding, as well as a sexual division of labor, allowed “solidarity” to complete and perfect the individual (145). This gendered and sexed vision of the subject enabled Durkheim to solve the regulatory dilemma at the heart of the republican project, and to simultaneously refuse the role of biology and nature, instead affirming the grounding of the subject in the social. It ultimately motivated his embrace of the state's regulatory role in the “delineation and enforcement of domestic morality” (140).

Surkis's analysis of Durkheim's theorization of the (gendered) subject and the social is especially provocative when she turns to his articulation of the role of desire for the modern male individual and of the sacred, incest, and kinship. She shows how Durkheim reformulated the grounds of morality by affirming the presumed heterosexuality of the male subject and valuing the generative nature of conjugal heterosexuality which, alone, could best found a productive moral and social order. Indeed, “For Durkheim, the modern male individual was fundamentally a subject of desire,” but that desire could not be left unfettered and instead must be properly harnessed in order to help generate citizens who flourished in modern society (160). In his early twentieth-century lectures on moral education, Durkheim argued that desire and instinct needed to be regulated. Surkis illuminates how Durkheim thus turned to incest in order to affirm the inherently social value of these norms. For him, the incest taboo “instituted and recognized [the moral] order, and the gender and sexual relations it implied, as a socially desirable norm” (168). But in order to insist that kinship was a necessary social construct, rather than a natural form of social organization, Durkheim had to rely upon an essentialization of heterosexuality which founded his vision of the social. Same-sex desire was thus completely erased: “As an exemplary moral (as opposed to natural) rule, the prohibition of incest, as theorized by Durkheim, simultaneously instituted gender difference and the social organization of heterosexuality as constitutive of sociality itself” (173). Heterosexuality and the gendered organization of social life thus became “sacred social principle[s]” at the heart of his vision of modern ethics (174). Sex (between men and women) fostered socialization. Surkis thus shows how Durkheim constructed conjugality as a moral ideal that confirmed men's masculinity, socialized them, and allowed them to be autonomous because dependent on women now relegated to the private, the domestic, and the familial. For many republican reformers, sex determined the boundaries of the political.

* * *

While French republican thinkers and reformers theorized the role of morality within citizenship, ethics Ethik rather than morality Sittlichkeit became a dominant concern in the same period for German and Central European intellectuals and activists. Matysik examines the debates that emerged within and in response to the ethics reform movement, a loose and heterogeneous collection of critics, philosophers, intellectuals, scientists, and activists in German-speaking Europe who saw ethics not as an arcane philosophical concern (though it was sometimes criticized by contemporaries on those grounds) but as allowing raising “more generally the question of just what —if anything—constituted the grounds of the moral subject” (170). In posing this question, they attempted to define the individual and its relationship with the community, and helped elucidate how the—moral, political, national—community should be conceived. These debates emerged as the urgent response to a rapidly changing social context characterized by urbanization, industrialization, and increasing nationalism, while traversing many of the pressing issues which consumed contemporaries, from secularism to global activism, political organization, and legal reform. Matysik highlights how these men and women conceived of ethics as “a privileged category of social organization and reform,” thus engaging the very meaning of liberalism and universalism (2).

In chapters organized according to controversies and debates rather than strict chronology, Matysik focuses on the small but influential Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur founded in October 1892 (25). It was mostly centered in Berlin, though it reached other German-speaking and European cities, and was liberal, secular, and universalist in orientation. By examining the writings of its founding members—Georg von Gizicki, Wilhelm Foerster, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Lilly Kretschmann, among others—and the pages of its biweekly newspaper Ethische Kultur, Matysik chronicles “how the idea of ethics functioned as a historically contingent site of contestation” for broad political and social issues (5). However, Matysik shows how discussions did not necessarily focus on the “regulatory dilemma” that preoccupied French republican reformers, but insistently tackled the issue of the subject's moral nature and autonomy and thus called into question the philosophical frameworks that these—Kantian, Nietzschean, Hegelian, Spinozist—critics appealed to in trying to map the best conditions for a modern ethics. From Tönnies's Kantian challenge to a Nietzschean ethics to discussions that tested the limits of theorizations of universal community, or the 1904–5 Foerster—Staudinger controversy regarding the role of reason in providing moral guidelines for the autonomous subject, questions of community, secularism, religion, and education consumed the ethics reform movement from the 1890s onwards, in keeping with the members’ commitment to “matters of humanity” (17). Because these debates posed the question of the relationship between public and private, as well as individual and community, sexuality and femininity figured prominently, for they were a privileged site of contest for theorizations of the subject that challenged the limits of the autonomous and liberal individual. Sexuality was thus a central term of these debates, inflecting and reshaping some of the positions that various participants held, especially as the organization radicalized and responded to evolving challenges.

From the outset, questions of gender and sexuality had infused its concerns over reform but these, Matysik shows, did not necessarily unfold in ways some might assume. Already in 1896, the Deutsche Gesellschaft had debated monogamous marriage and reflected upon “reproduction, contraception, and regulation.” One of its founding members, Wilhelm Foerster, argued for the damaging effects on women of the “sexual slavery of marriage” (103). The exchanges between the organization and noted reformer Helene Stöcker's League for the Protection of Mothers would again bring this question to the fore. Stöcker had been an ardent advocate of a “new ethics” where she “used ethics as a means to contest the ways in which the private and intimate were opposed to and cut off from the public and politics” (56). Stöcker argued that, for a proper moral subject to become a citizen, the double standard of morality (Doppelmoral) that prevailed must be challenged and a distinctly feminine moral subjecthood must be acknowledged. More radical than the German women's movement that had influenced her, Stöcker turned to the Nietzschean's injunction to “learn to love first” as a means to reevaluate a feminine moral subject that, she argued, was “synthetic” and did not separate public from private, nor sexuality from love (68–9). In fact, the feminine subject must be recognized as sexually differentiated and citizenship must incorporate the “freedom to pursue one's private desires” (70). Like others in the period, Stöcker challenged the model of the liberal subject, instead emphasizing “a political model that accounts for desiring feminine subjects” and thus refuted the gender complementarity at the heart of bourgeois liberal definitions of citizenship (84, 90). Stöcker's reformist model resonated amidst the ranks of the Deutsche Gesellschaft especially in the early twentieth century.

Sexuality shored up issues of self, morality, and Christianity. The question of ‘sexual liberation’ required a sustained engagement with the philosophical frameworks that framed many of these critics’ positions: while Stöcker and Bruno Mayer emphasized a Nietzschean vision of the subject, others, like Foerster and Staudinger, evoked a Kantian subject even as they parted ways on the consequences of this position (106). For instance, Foerster, who had “criticized sexual liberation only as the utmost example of modern individualism and its naïve reliance on the rational self,” theorized the relationship between sexuality and moral autonomy, which seemed the most urgent problem, since it spoke to religion and ethics. For him, the question was how to master physical drives (109). Marital monogamy and Christianity would thus help in producing a moral subject who would function in the social unfettered by drives. Secularists like Meyer, on the other hand, argued that “only sexual liberation would allow individuals to realize the kind of autonomy necessary for independent moral decision” (113). Ultimately, though, what matters in these positions, Matysik insists, is their logic and the lack of consensus around these issues.

Similarly, sexuality informed and undergirded the international debates that infused the ethics reform movement's global efforts, for it engaged questions of culture, nation, race, biology, and “universal humanity” (117). Some, like Freud and the Prague philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, turned to sexual ethics in the early twentieth century because it offered a way to think about the nature of the individual and the relationship of morality and the social. “Sexual ethics” allowed Ehrenfels to refine a Darwinian and racialist model of European humanity. In order to counter prevailing degeneration, the threat of an “Asian invasion,” and to win a global contest for supremacy, only a refusal of the Doppelmoral—as feminists, Stöcker, and Meyer had argued—and of the constraints of heterosexual monogamy would help foster national “virility” (122–3). Still, unlike Stöcker, Ehrenfels did not call for a reconsideration of the feminine subject but instead offered a critique of a “masculine” Doppelmoral, advocating polygyny and reaffirming the need for masculine emancipation from conservative sexual mores and the need for female chastity. In this, Matysik argues, Ehrenfels was symptomatic both of a larger European racial discourse and of the prevalence of ethics in Central European intellectual and political circles as “the language with which to ground and justify reform” (126). On the other hand, Freud, who had approved of Stöcker's reform attempts, engaged Ehrenfels and, like him, “began to understand ethics as a necessary site of conflict for the sexual subject” (129). Matysik shows how this concern infused some of his writings from 1908 to 1912 and allowed him to claim that the social could only be understood if individual desires were recognized. Freud's articulation of ethics was thus infused with a belief that desire was marked with ambivalence and hostility and must be acknowledged in any theorization of the moral subject (133–4). Matysik concludes that while “Stöcker had understood sexual liberation as a means for the autonomous subject to realize his or her own ethical potential[,] Freud, in contrast, found sexual desire and moral regulation to be complementary components of the autonomous subject” (138).

Some of these discussions came to a head around the 1909 government proposal for the rewriting of the Criminal Code's paragraph 175, criminalizing female homosexuality. By the fin de siècle, female homosexuality had become a favorite though still marginal topic of sexology and psychoanalysis. The controversy around the proposal for paragraph 250 during World War I highlights the challenges and limits of visions of the female homosexual, and therefore of the foundations of the modern sexual subject. According to Matysik, this heated debate is an especially crucial moment in the ongoing ethics reform debate for it revealed the different logics at work around this legislative attempt as well as the assumption that the moral subject was indeed sexual in nature. While state proponents of the law reflected upon the issue of equality before the law and the “relationship between law, state interest, and public and private morality,” the definitional uncertainty of the category of the female homosexual opened up a space for protesters to argue against the law's regulatory drive (159). Some, such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Heinrich Winzer, invoked the emancipatory power of science to argue that the purpose of the law was to correct, not mirror, the prejudices of public opinion on morality and sexuality (162–3). At stake in these debates was the nature of the individual: did the person possess a “sexual essence” or could one “assert a distinction between individuals and their acts” (165)? German feminists, however, did little to protest the law. Even Stöcker voiced a rather muted protest, emphasizing that love was “normal” when heterosexual, but still pointed out that all women would therefore fall under the purview of this legislation and suffer because of the difficulties of distinguishing between the practices of heterosexual and homosexual women (166). Ultimately, for many, heterosexuality was reaffirmed as the grounds for the social.

* * *

These works highlight the different manner in which French and German reformers and thinkers defined subject formation, the nature of the individual, and its relationship with the social and the state. They thus interrogate the “uneasy relationship” that morality has held with the political and how it infused nineteenth-century definitions of the “social.”Footnote ⁶ Despite my emphasis on their common critical outlook, the two books nevertheless differ somewhat in orientation for they address their field's respective methodological concerns. For Surkis, World War I is a horizon, while it implies rupture in Matysik's account. The end of the ethics movement came as a consequence of the war, yet Matysik skillfully traces its legacy for the psychoanalytic movement's interwar investigation of the “gendered moral subject,” most notably in the work of Lou-Andreas Salomé and her theorization of narcissism, ambivalence, and otherness (223, 224). Matysik's chapter on these interwar sequels is especially engaging for it reveals the trajectory of an idea—a gendered moral subject—in “unlikely” places. In turning to different sites, these books thus exemplify the productive paths opened in the wake of feminist and gender history, while offering the “reformulation” for “critical and self-questioning” intellectual history that practitioners like Dominick LaCapra have called for.Footnote ⁷

In fact, one might argue that in many ways, Matysik and Surkis illustrate the kind of “critical history” whose “object . . . is the present though its materials come from the archives of the past” and whose “aim is . . . to illuminate those blindspots,” as Joan W. Scott has recently described it.Footnote ⁸ Both works offer reflexive histories that show how “theory” can be productive in infusing familiar questions with a renewed force and, as Jacques Rancière has famously noted, in “finding an enigma in what seems to be commonsense.”Footnote ⁹ To be sure, the fin de siècle has been richly mined, in a rich historiography with which Matysik and Surkis engage. Yet both manage to reveal the era's “strangeness” and, in the process, show us how intellectual history might be rejuvenated. The (gendered) trope of youth and vitality suggests an exhausted body, and the fate of intellectual history has been a recurring source of “anxiety” and “unease.” These works, however, suggest not an exhausted body—intellectual history—but instead a reinvestment from within in the critical operations of intellectual history that manifests itself not only in the choice of object—how sexuality and sexual difference figured in fin de siècle debates—but also in the manner in which these objects are interrogated. While Matysik does not focus on individuals or ideas but offers an “intellectual history of a public discussion that was made up of conflicts and contradictions that revolved around the shared theme of ethics,” Surkis's theoretically sophisticated blending of intellectual and cultural history calls upon historians to refute the logic of “crisis” that too often dominates accounts of late nineteenth-century France, and of its debates on gender, citizenship, and republicanism (10). Rather than presuming the stability of norms and ideals, Surkis begins from the assumption that these are “contingent,” and that historians must therefore pay closer attention to the “precariousness that constituted the force of masculinity as a norm” (12).

These studies are therefore symptomatic of the ways consideration of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality might work firmly within the conventions of intellectual history while simultaneously extending and reworking its methods, objects, and assumptions. In different ways, Matysik and Surkis illustrate how a serious consideration of “theory” might productively help in this endeavor. This kind of critical work is especially important at a time when “theory” seems to be in retreat, and its alleged demise has been both celebrated and nostalgically bemoaned.Footnote ¹⁰ Surkis's Sexing the Citizen is a Foucauldian project examining the subject as the site where both emancipation and regulation are justified and articulated. For, according to her, paying attention to the instability of categories of meaning and the work of difference in establishing meaning allows us to explore how “the instabilities that haunt such socially constituted categories are not, of necessity, delegitimating” (8). This rigorous attention to difference rejects the simple “binary between history and theory” that still afflicts historical debates.Footnote ¹¹ It is precisely the provocative insights of Surkis's work that have led one historian to scapegoat it for “reek[ing] of sophisticated theories about sexual instability and a certain postmodern fluidity.”Footnote ¹² Such reactions testify to the rigorous work she has undertaken (all the while anachronistically echoing the oppositions that have in the last decade pitted proponents of social history against those of cultural history, and empiricists against post-structuralists, even among feminist historians). Surkis demonstrates how a rich and theoretically sophisticated lens might help revisit the familiar and question its assumptions. She also shows what might be gained once the tools of intellectual history are applied to a wider range of sources and topics. In the last part of her book, she turns her attention to how “hygienic reform” over questions of venereal disease and prostitution in the metropole and the colonies—conceived as “experimental spaces” for reform—reveals contemporaries’ obsession with “how best to moralize and socialize men within the secularized framework of republican politics” (225, 187). Managing the contradictions of regulation reformulated the notion of reform and rights while revealing how “hygiene was a flexible principle that at once constructed and reproduced sexual, racial, and class differences between subjects” (224). Marking out difference between subjects was precisely the work done by French republican thinkers’ entanglement with sexual difference and sexuality as they mapped out a desirable masculine citizenship.

While Surkis illuminates how norms are contingent and meaning unstable, Matysik's interrogation of a specific historical problem—the relationship of morality, subjectivity, and politics—is sustained by a theoretical engagement free of any narrow dogmatism. She explains she takes her cue from Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and feminist theory, and masterfully brings together the insights of German women's history, feminist theory, and the recent literature on cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. She carefully attends to the contingency of debates, definitions, and discussions in order to “reconstruct the fin-de-siècle debates on subject-formation,” thus focusing not just on the centrality of sex and gender to fin de siècle definitions of the subject, but also on how they came about, and the complicated routes they took (7). Matysik's last chapter and (brief) discussion of philosopher Slavoj Žižek's reading of Otto Weininger especially highlight how a theoretical outlook (here inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, Luce Irigaray, and others) sheds new light on familiar issues. Though one might regret that, in her indebtedness to all critical theories, Matysik may not have teased out further how these helped her historicize ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics (7, 253–7). Ultimately, while Matysik's work fits more recognizably within the conventions of intellectual history, it offers a different and compelling understanding of the subject, that is at once more complex and sensitive to the different influences that came to bear upon it.

Both these authors interrogate how social life was given value—and according to what criteria—at a moment when those meanings, norms, and ideals were being challenged and redefined. Thus the “social,” that nineteenth-century obsession, is revealed in these works not as a “neutral and vacant backdrop” but, in the words of feminist scholar Denise Riley, a “strange phenomenon” that delineated the bounds and nature of the political through categories of difference.Footnote ¹³ Taking seriously sexual difference as object and lens to bear upon analyses of the subject, ethics, and citizenship allows Surkis and Matysik to illuminate the historicity of morality, the state, and regulation. These scholars clearly demonstrate how theorizing the subject in this manner changes the “canon as much as the objects of historical investigation” and offer a sharp and provocative engagement with the historical vagaries of the individual, the self, and subjecthood.Footnote ¹⁴