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The Metaphysical Cut: Darwin and Stevenson on Vivisection

“For anyone undertaking a genealogical study of the concept of ‘life’ in our culture,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such” (13). I can think of no better way of illustrating the ambiguity of the concept of “life” in our culture than by pointing to the term “vivisection,” which derives from the Latin words vivus (“living”) and sectio (“cutting”). The Oxford English Dictionary defines vivisection as “the action of cutting or dissecting some part of a living organism; spec. the action or practice of performing dissection, or other painful experiment, upon living animals as a method of physiological or pathological study” (“Vivisection,” def. 1a). To vivisect is, in the broadest sense, to cut into life by dissecting some part of a living organism. Vivisection requires one to make not just a physical cut but also a metaphysical cut. At stake is the concept of life itself. Apparent in the debates about vivisection that raged in Victorian England in the 1870s and 1880s is the reluctance, especially on the part of the provivisectionists, to contemplate the metaphysics of the topic. Those scientists who supported the practice tended to treat vivisection as a means to break life down into its component parts rather than to conceptualize it. The British physician and medical biographer Samuel Wilks illustrates this materialist tendency in an 1881 symposium on vivisection that appeared in the Nineteenth Century. Immediately after the Seventh International Congress of Medicine in London, Wilks wrote,