Sibling Logic. The Genealogical Structure of Modernity

In the eighteenth century, Europeans began to classify historical systems genealogically, turning contemporary terms in these systems – whether languages, religions, races, species, or individuals – into siblings of varying degrees. This genealogical theory came to structure the modern subject, modern state, and methodologies of the life- and human-sciences. In this talk, I will explore the implications of this genealogical structure in both comparative philology and evolutionary theory of the long nineteenth century, and will analyze Goethe’s early interrogation of the system in Iphigenia auf Tauris. Within a language family, a sister language is a boundary object whose delineation enables, and yet simultaneously calls into question, the definition of any particular language; the speaking sibling puts similar pressure on the notion of the subject. Darwin turned naturalist epistemology on its head by endorsing this
same contingency in biological classification. To reinforce threatened boundaries, both linguistics and evolutionary theory embraced unidirectional diversification, repudiating merger as »monstrous,« thus participating in an affective rhetoric also implicated in policing the genealogical boundaries between population groups.