Stefani Engelstein. Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 373 pp.

Summary

Schiller's Ode to Joy gains its euphoric energy from a translation of transcendent fatherhood into the worldly aspiration of fraternity. Our worship of the Elysian daughter joy sustains the process whereby “alle Menschen” realize their not so subtly gendered brotherhood. This transformation (or what Schiller calls “der große Wurf”) presumes and vindicates a beneficent father god, and folds the vertical descent of daughter joy into the lateral progress of fraternal liberalism. Stefani Engelstein's capacious study reconstructs how sibling terms like these may demarcate and question categories of subjectivity in modern politics and economics, in theories of languages, species, races, and religions, and in correlated literary texts from Sophocles's Antigone to Thomas Mann. For Schiller's men, the test of brotherhood was friendship and, as Engelstein elucidates, the conquest of a “lovely wife.” Sisters accordingly traversed the boundaries of a fraternal politics in line with Lévi-Strauss's explanation of the incest taboo as the flip side of encouraging exogamy. Once praised as wives, these tacitly “potential sisters” qualified, in both the senses of empowering and restricting, universal claims for a progressive “fellowship.” Their shadow presence lay beyond the “boundary” of this political association, though it was equally constitutive of its “belonging” through the requisite “subordination” (62) to fraternal suitors.

In Sibling Action, Engelstein reworks this logic to derive a (counter)genealogical structure, also signaled by her title, in our cultural and intellectual modernity (although the time frame is more complex, as I indicate below). The sibling features in this study as a “boundary object” (123) between self and other. “Not self,” that is, “and yet not quite other”: never chosen, yet potentially desired; born into its social role, yet aspiring to political consent. The pervasiveness of sibling figures Engelstein finds in her corpus both “enables and puts pressure” (156) on our terms for subjectivity, and nowhere more so than in nineteenth-century genealogies for “slippery” aggregates like languages or species. These descending constructs were perpetually “haunted,” Engelstein concludes, by their adjacent sibling objects’ failure to provide a “discrete other” (124) that would stabilize the genealogy.