The collapse of necessary difference evoked by cannibalism (along with its hysterical provocation of an absolutism of difference) has received fruitful attention in our investigations into European “othering” in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, much less so the prebiological and legally hypermanaged field of incest and related phenomena.
It seems of value for the framing of debate to consider the potential for unheimlich monstrosity in what is too much of the same. This article, however, will emphasize an earlier issue, the sixteenth-century rhetorical, religious, and alchemical stakes raised in the Paracelsian experimental recipe, with an eye to the basic dynamic of self/other, or more broadly and deeply, same/other. My recent research into the issues of parthenogenesis, homunculi, and the Jewish golem is focused on the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries, where the mythical and alchemical combine with the biological in ways that establish the ground of current commercial and ethical debates about cloning. The cultural history of modern attempts to develop human cloning has a rich past that in all its various manifestations is held together by one motive of mythic depth and familiarity-the male desire to reproduce the self in perfect mimesis, without female assistance, in a bid for a kind of vicarious personal immortality. And the “animalculistes” generally who followed Leeuwenhoek’s micrographic discovery of sperm cells in semen believed in a basically monogenetic (and masculine) reproductive universe, the “preformationists” among them, in particular, believing that these sperm cells contained perfectly formed homunculi that were developed into life-sized infants in the matrix of the womb.
During decades that overlapped with Rétif’s, the Swiss entomologist Charles Bonnet worked memorably, if less spectacularly, on the parthenogenesis of the aphid. Pre-Mendelian anticipations of cloning reached an amazing climax in the eighteenth-century French utopian thinker Rétif de la Bretonne’s “Multipliandre,” a precursor of Marquez’s Colonel, who manages over the course of thirty-six years in an incestuous harem to father 232 children and 2,320 grandchildren, albeit with the help of women, and whose offspring will eventually dominate the populations of most of the world’s countries, including Australia’s. Paracelsus’ sixteenth-century focus on the man-made man had a future, even if the culture of signification in which it emerged was soon to be rationalized and literalism to take hold of the natural philosophy of western Europe. The seventeenth century was to see the German of Paracelsus translated into French, Latin, and English, and a great alchemical flowering in northern Europe, perhaps especially in England where Baconian empiricism, inspired by the more demonic branches of alchemy, was taking root and inspiring considerable hands-on experimental activity. His man-made man is formed alchemically-in a test tube-from human sperm, heated by horse dung for the forty weeks of normal human pregnancy, and “from such Artificiall men, when they come to Mans age, are made Pygmies, Gyants, and other great and monstrous men, who are the instruments of great matters,” according to a seventeenth-century English translation. Paracelsus comes quickly to mind as the medical thinker who offers a recipe for the formation of a “chymicall homunculus” in the controversial late treatise, De rerum naturae (1537), addressed to his brother and summarizing the gist of his knowledge as he saw it in the last phase of his life. In the period immediately preceding the seventeenth century’s grand eschewal of metaphor, especially in Protestant nations that detested the Catholic mystery of the Eucharist with its overtones of cannibalism, the fundamentally metaphorical process of alchemical transformation fascinated many of those who considered the natural world in ways we might now consider precursors to the “properly” scientific. Metaphor is a figure of resemblance, even if its literary charm and its pedagogical powers depend on the kick of difference. Moshe Idel, The Golem (1990) (emphasis added)