| Drawing on the tools of film studies, my dissertation rethinks nineteenth-century zoologist Ernst Haeckel's notorious theory of evolutionary recapitulation and the problems of visualization that have historically accompanied it. According to this theory, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," or in less specialized terms, the individual organism variably repeats its species history as it develops, a contention that Haeckel and his followers bore out in writings as well as in myriad drawings and photographs. Challenging previous accounts of Haeckel's work that reject its purportedly universalizing views of evolutionary time, my project reframes recapitulation in and as close-up. To do so, I unearth a contrapuntal desire to bring evolution's alien temporality near that I see driving recapitulation's much-derided history. That desire, I contend, not only opens a site for ethics and freedom in natural science, but also envisages its temporality as an enigmatic interface---what I call the face of evolutionary time. With this, my project explains the peculiar, cross-disciplinary sympathy for recapitulation that has persisted well after its supposed demise in the early twentieth century and turns the universalizing perspectives of Darwinists, present and past, toward divergent logics and uncanny sensibilities that inhere within, but extend beyond, the mechanistic and statistical images proffered by their science. Uncovering Haeckel's visual aesthetics, American psychologist James Mark Baldwin's theory of intersubjective recapitulation, and the evolutionary grounds of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's conceptions of the subject and freedom, my project contributes to ongoing debates in evolutionary-developmental biology and expands the meaning of visuality for science studies, visual studies, and continental philosophy alike. |
