Experimenting with ‘Life’ in Nineteenth-Century Physiology: Brown-Séquard's Method for Characterising Blood

Abstract

New materialist feminists have long agonised over the constituents of biological ‘life’ or ‘living’ material, by proposing and pursuing questions of ontology: ‘What is matter? What is life? How do they link together [?]’ ([Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin], 17). But in favouring such ontological inquiry, the new materialists have neglected consideration of the very constructedness of this ‘life’ category. To add historical perspective to this debate, this article demonstrates that ‘life’ and ‘matter’ and the way they ‘link together’ are necessarily historical questions, too. These are concepts which are known and experienced differently through time, and I suggest that ‘life’ can only be known once its historicity and contingency is unpacked. To advance this argument, I conduct a close reading of the experimental records of a leading nineteenth-century French physiologist, Charles Brown-Séquard [1817–1894], for insights into how ‘life’ has been (and can be) negotiated, characterised and employed in an experimental setting. Through Brown-Séquard, I describe ‘life’ as an experimental heuristic as much as a phenomenon or reaction of the body, and I argue that to access the phenomena of ‘life’ in the body (if this is possible), one must first engage with the epistemological framework in which it resides.