The Logic of Infection

In this lecture, Ken Gemes examines how Darwin's challenge to the idea of inevitable progress gave rise to degeneration theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He explores how thinkers like Lombroso used cranial measurements to classify criminals as evolutionary throwbacks, and how these same frameworks were applied to women, casting them as biologically primitive. Gemes then turns to Max Nordau's influential book Degeneration, which branded figures like Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Ibsen as degenerates based on little more than their passionate language. The lecture traces how fears of biological regression became entangled with class anxiety about the urban poor and with racist and misogynist ideologies. Gemes pays particular attention to Otto Weininger, whose radical separation of reason from the body led him to equate women and Jews with parasitism, a line of thinking that fed directly into the genocidal logic of the twentieth century.