Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida

MLN - Modern Language Notes

Volumn 118, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 603-621

  Milburn, Colin Nazhone ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149681949     PISSN: 00267910     EISSN: 10806598     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mln.2003.0060     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in idem, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978), 278-293, 280, 292, 293; hereafter cited as "SSP. "
2. An affinity between Darwin and Derrida has been previously suggested by Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2000), 90
3. and by George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988), 86.
4. See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books 1998);
5. Donna Haraway "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge 1992).
6. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1974) 4-5; hereafter cited as OG.
7. Derrida, "Deconstruction and the Other" Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester UP 1984), 123.
8. Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford UP 1995), 387; hereafter cited as P.
9. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (2nd ed. , 1859), ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP 1996) 9; hereafter cited as OS.
10. Darwin, The Descent of Man (Princeton: Princeton UP 1981), 224; hereafter cited as DM.
11. Darwin, Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Inquiries, transc. , and ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1987) 199.
12. On Darwin's fears about his own transmutation theory, which led him to delay publication for fifteen years, see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York: Norton 1991), 316-7.
13. See "SSP" 280; Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge 1994), 75.
14. See Keith Ansel Pierson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge 1997);
15. Frank J. Sulloway Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1992);
16. Lucille Ritvo, Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale UP 1990);
17. C. U. M. Smith, "Homo sapiens and Human Being" in Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 17 (1994), 413-434;
18. Paul Heyer, Nature, Human Nature, and Society: Marx, Darwin, Biology and the Human Sciences (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1982).
19. Ernst Mayr, "Typological Versus Population Thinking," in idem, Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1976), 26-29.
20. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Three Rivers Press 1996), 41.
21. See James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1995)
22. and Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford UP 2000).
23. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981), 44; hereafter cited as D.
24. Darwin's relationship to natural theology and his religious beliefs in general have been the subject of much debate; see Silvan S. Schweber, "The Origin of the Origin Revisted" in Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977), 229-316;
25. and Dov Ospovat, "God and Natural Selection: The Darwinian Idea of Design" in Journal of the History of Biology 13 (1980), 169-194.
26. Stephen G. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1999).
27. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), in idem, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin 1998), 4. 142-3; hereafter cited as PL.
28. See Beer, Darwin's Plots, 44-70.
29. Derrida's deconstruction of the Edenic narrative in Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (wherein the innocent Nambikwara are supposedly corrupted by writing) is exemplary; see OG, 101-140.
30. Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 85, 73, 317, 677, 449.
31. Darwin writes, "Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton"; Darwin, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton 1969), 85.
32. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1839), eds. Janet Browne and Michael Neve (London: Penguin 1989), 288; hereafter cited as VB.
33. In 1844, Darwin writes, "I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable"; see Ralph Colp, Jr. , "'Confessing a Murder': Darwin's First Revelations about Transmutation" in Isis 77 (1986), 8-32.
34. The killing of Galapagos birds is significant for Darwin's theory because: 1) The birds are transported to England and catalogued by Darwin as samples of evolutionary variation (see Frank J. Sulloway "Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend," Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1982), 1-53);
35. and 2) Fear becomes recognized as a heritable adaptive trait (see Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray 1872), chs. 12-14).