In his brilliant novel Payback, Mike Nicol tells about an Anglican priest who at the end of the
18th century was burnt to death because of his paedophilic crimes. Nicol’s story seems to imply
that paedophilia already existed at the end of the eighteenth century and that at that time
people also reacted to it in the same way as many people do today. How can we explain then
that Immanuel Kant who lived in the same period and who basically wrote about everything
(including mental disorders and sexual life in all its diversity) never mentions paedophilia
(or, more generally, the sexual perversions) as a “mental disorder”? I discuss different
hypotheses: was paedophilia not discovered yet or did it occur less frequently then it does
today? The German psychiatrist and sexuologist Krafft-Ebing who introduced the term (“paedophilia erotica”) in German psychiatric literature at the end of the 19th century claims,
for instance, that he only encountered four cases in his entire career. I formulate another
hypothesis on the basis of the work of Foucault and Hacking: paedophilia as a “possibility
of personhood” (Hacking), or better still, the paedophile as a type of person, only came into
being at the end of the 19th century. This “possibility” is intrinsically linked to the introduction
of a “deployment of sexuality” over and against a “deployment of alliance”. Kant’s remarks
on incest make it possible to explain why there is no room in the “deployment of alliance” for
paedophilia or the paedophile. This is why Kant never considers generalizing his argumentation
against incest to sexual relations between children and adults as such. What counts for him
are not so much children, but children in as far as they are relatives. It is only at the very
moment that sexuality starts being conceived in terms of feelings, fantasies and capacities
that can be different in adults and children that paedophilia enters the (intellectual and social)
arena and that propositions on it become intelligible. This was not yet the case in Kant’s day.
I illustrate the distinction between these two “deployments” further through the analysis of
the opposition between Kant’s approach and the approach of the Hungarian psychoanalyst
Sandor Ferenczi. I refer in this context to Ferenczi’s seminal text, “Confusion of Tongues
Between Adults and the Child”, which was first published in 1932. I further illustrate this
opposition by explaining that the very idea of a “psychic trauma” did not exist as such before
the second half of the 19th century. In the conclusion, I state that this debate should not be
reduced to mere epistemology and that Foucault’s “deployments” or Hacking’s “possibilities
of personhood” are something more and something different than just divergent “modes of
thinking”. Quite on the contrary, they are intrinsically rooted in the material conditions of
our existence and in the power relations that constitute it.
Bestond de pedofilie reeds voor het begin van de 19 e eeuw? Zo ja, hoe kunnen we dan begrijpen
dat Immanuel Kant, die in principe over alle onderwerpen schreef (inclusief de “mentale
stoornissen” en de seksualiteit in haar veelvuldige verschijningsvormen) de pedofilie nergens
vermeldt? Verschillende hypotheses worden vermeld en besproken: moest de pedofilie nog
worden “ontdekt” of kwam ze in Kants tijd minder vaak voor dan vandaag het geval is? Vanuit
het werk van Foucault en Hacking formuleren we een meer gewaagde hypothese: de pedofilie
bestond nog niet als een “possibility of personhood” (Hacking). Ik bespreek deze hypothese
uitgaande van Kants verwerping van de incest. Ik laat zien dat Kant nog niet over het
conceptuele kader (“dispositief”) beschikt om de pedofilie te denken. Het “dispositief van de
seksualiteit” (Foucault) dat dit mogelijk maakt ontstaat slechts in de loop van de 19e eeuw.
Ik illustreer de nieuwe logica die dit dispositief introduceert aan de hand van een confrontatie tussen Kants bespreking en verwerping van de incest en Sandor Ferenczi’s tekst over
“Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child”.
