We no longer practise incest, but we have generalized it in all its derivative forms. (Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 121)

The end of kinship is the ending of kinship. (Shell, The End of Kinship, p. xi)

It might, then, be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. (Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 160)

Known as Crimen Sollicitationis, a 1962 "instruction" from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or Holy Office) codifying procedures to be followed in cases of misuse of the sacrament of Penance for impertinent advances to penitents, required a sworn submission to "inviolabile secretum," "secretum Sancti Officii [...] in omnibus et cum omnibus."1 Resonating with erstwhile clinical consensus throughout Europe that societal "hysteria" over initial tensions was the proximate mechanism of sorrow in like cases, the 60-page document sought de-escalation for the greater good. It was to sit in archives unmentioned and unpublished, until it reportedly drew attention to itself in a footnote to a May 18, 2002, letter from Joseph Ratzinger, then Cardinal and head of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, to the bishops of the world dealing with sex abuse cases.

It would seem that church scandals form the latest trans- Atlantic sweep of a more encompassing, late modern resentment articulated by the formula of "sexual abuse." Below I speculate, first, on the modern axiom of tabooed incest as it seems to inform the metastatic troping of sex abuse, and second, on the anthropological sustainability of the latter' s persecutory momentum. On the one hand the protracted Western confrontation of the Father by the Family needs to be read as falling securely within the familiar, figurai perimeter of incest. However, the choreography of outrage currently played out at the site of a utilitarian discussion of sex marks an epochal drift, from taboo's symbolics of blood, via an analytics of sexuality (Foucault' s observation), to a managerialist therapy culture whose order is rather that of a semiosis of difference: the order of the "traumatic" sign and promoted Symptom and their mounting nostalgia for a primal-scenic efficacy.

As elaborated below, this second shift calls for an oblique appraisal of recent queer and otherwise poststructural interventions into kinship studies suggesting taboo has to be read as a constitutive event- projecting a "regime of subjectivation" (Faubion, 2001, p. 12; Faubion & Hamilton, 2007, pp. 535, 544) by rearticulating a common domestic and oedipal matrix (womb and grid) for such rubrics as gender, sexuality, and generationality. What of (fictive) kinship and its ethology of avoidance in the psychomedical, televisual, and victimological age of evidentiary truths and triumphant transparencies? Under late capitalism, all former séduction and discretions are submitted to a new embittered orthodoxy of trauma management- "a whole culture of misfortune, of recrimination, repentance, compassion and victimhood" (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 145), a "new victim order" (1996, pp. 131 -141). 2 The question is how the regime of incest figures in this new order. Da Silva notes with reference to Freud and Lévi-Strauss that incest has been a site of ongoing, "creative transposition of immemorial folklore patterns into modern Weltanschauung" (2007, p. 15). Psychoanalysis and structuralist anthropology epitomize the modern will to substantiate a dispassionate, etiological conception of social affairs through "findings" that often, however, ended up having to be postulateci. Unchangingly, opportune transposition has meant the triumphant declaration of a new sexual realism. As Gillian Harkins contends, the paradigmatic face of late modern incest has been that of a makeshift minority or survivor realism: "Whereas once the specter of incest was used to symbolize a crisis in national family life, it is now the reality of incest that seems to hold the [American] nation captive" (2007, p. 114, 115; 2009, p. 153). Although in practise largely unbothered by three decades of extensive biomedicalization of "sexual trauma/' from the beginning of its current réinstallaient at the site of "the" (American) child, both psychoanalysis and anthropology had to own up to promiscuously emergent fact. Ethnographic realism was to confirm the rapidly paradigmatic suspicion that "anthropologists have relied on folk models that have blinkered their vision" (La Fontaine, 1988, p. 15). Freud was unmasked once more by a new wave of sceptics.3

Taking together contemporary histories of incest such as Harkins', critical histories of psychiatry such as that by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (on seduction and its "interpref action") and Ian Hacking (on the "molding" of child abuse), and genealogies of trauma such as that by Michael Rothberg, the site of modern incest can be thought demarcated by shifting attempts "to produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture" (Rothberg, 2000, p. 103)- a simultaneously epistemological and pedagogical ecomenics. Trauma narratives are classically said to oscillate between realist and anti-realist (literalist and anti-liter alist; mimetic and anti-mimetic) orthodoxies: a dialectic scene variably traversed by critical theory motivated by such parameters as intelligibility (Judith Butler on gender/kinship), grammaticality (David Schneider on kinship), and normativity (Michel Foucault on sexuality). However, as ventured below, the dialectic may have importantly become a nostalgic topos. If the notion of "child sexual abuse" is still to figure forth an old stratagem ("incest avoidance"), its imaginary may be overextended out of a mounting, compounded fascination with the realization of the social. The "specter" of incest used to inform wider tactical necessities of retaining or maximizing rank, property, or coalitions (e.g., Thornhill, 1990), or of cultivating communitarian identity through dramatized scandalization of excess similarity and excess difference. Under capitalist modernity this indictment came to coordinate gender, sexual orientation, skin color, and generationality. Today, the policing of modernity's parametric order has become increasingly strained given ecological situations of erratic implosion, pervasive destratification, promiscuous politicization of difference, and indiscriminate semiosis- Jean Baudrillard' s characterization of late capitalism. Such circumstances predict a convoluted panic with easily and less easily recognized backlashes, compensations, and decompensations. For Baudrillard, an ambient loss of vital symbols once predicated on incommensurable otherness has led to a frantic, compensatory overproduction of banal difference: a situation that has no prospect of resolving matters because it is the very principle of catastrophe. Accordingly, the current cynical policing and calculus of difference at the site of "the minor" can only further erode the modern family's residual, intimate emplotments- its erotics of alterity. The troping of "sexual abuse" (the forensic scrutiny of a libidinal economy through the insinuation of a fundamental sexual psychology and social topology) both symptomatizes and escalates the late modern condition in which a self-appointed social nucleus inquires after, manages, discloses, advertises, reproduces, inoculates, polices, and solicits its truthfulness to destructive extents. If taboo used to encode vital and intimate distinctions, the taboo code today is the prime engine of a total and fatal indiscrimination.

Incest to abuse

Even the most cursory of ethnological views suggests that all administrative-libidinal, sexual, social, poetic, monetary- systems on anthropological record are marked by a precarious balance between deregulation and managerialism. It has frequently been observed that in the West, excess of the latter kind (excess production, excess transparency, excess communication, excess realism) haunts economies of signification generally, to the point of an ambient compromise of the very principle of representation. Moments of excess characterize, for instance, the anthropological will to privilege and elevate administrations- "sexuality," genetics, ideology -to a sublime level of reckoning: to an exhaustive commensuration or final empiricism.

The generic caveat, untiringly voiced by Baudrillard, has typically been lost on modernity's glorious Ockham' s razor, the incest taboo, currently lending itself, in various capacities, to a global endorsement of the late modern forensic hyphenation of child and sex. Clearly, a typological encroachment of "sexual abuse" onto "incest" had become the central conundrum of both concepts immediately after the former's mass-advertisement. Although the initial eruption of the phrase gravitated on the idea of the pathologically authoritative family, "sex trauma," now a paradigmatic claim to self-identity,4 never led to the disarticulation of kinship and sociality at the site of the sexual subject. Much to the contrary: the complaint of abuse summoned to prostrate before the tribunal of "loco parentis" not just a pastoral era's hushed liberties but any ministration of care- 1990s schools,5 1980s daycare, 1970s social experiments from communes to sects, 1960s boarding schools, Victorian nursemaids; distant gurus, ancient prophets, Nobel Prize winners, Gaelic poets, the King of Pop, boy-loving Pashtuns; capitalism as such, "patriarchy" at large. A global Laius (or Jacosta!) complex finally submitted to due forensic realism.

Somewhere in the early 1980s, American kinship passed- definitively if erratically-from myth-incensed, faith-endorsed romance to an evidence-based, statistics-backed, painstakingly factual criminology - the paroxysmal culmination of centuries of disenchantment and dispossession by expert knowledges; a "fever point" (Herdt, 1994, p. 16) in the slow compromise of a cultural ideal. Evidentiary accounts were being proposed or recalibrated across the disciplines: by sociobiologists (e.g., Feierman, ed., 1990; Wolf & Durham, eds., 2005), by feminists in various liaisons (see e.g., Harkins, 2009; Sacco, 2009; Whittier, 2009), by legal reformers, psychohistorians, psychoanalysts, criminologists, phenomenologists. The childsex-family problem articulates core disciplinary and perspectival standoffs, most of which haven arisen, or tensed up markedly, in the past three to four decades: Freud vs feminism, Ferenczi and Freud (seduction) vs Freud (infantile sexuality), Freud vs critical Freud studies, Foucault vs feminism, Oedipus vs anti-Oedipus, Freud vs Westermarck,6 Westermarckians vs neo-Westermarckians, sociobiology vs social anthropology, psychiatry vs anti-psychiatry, psychology vs critical psychology, psychiatry vs "distorted cognition," medicolegal vs ecclesiastical forensics, state vs commune. "Child abuse" is the rhetorical animation of the respective junctures (some junctures more than others); reiteration of the passphrase announces proponents' competitive edge, and becomes the crucible for membership. The theme comes to secure the reputation of academic and governmental entities in their sincere, rigorous, critical comprehension of the affairs of the world.

The situation allows various (variably cynical) scenarios: (1) a primordial mechanism (Westermarck effect) finds its adaptive properties confirmed in the political momentum and "co-evolution" of the latest moral pragmatism or penal populism (sex abuse); (2) the tentative roll-out of a programmatic slogan (abuse) seeks to associate itself with the robust reputation and awe of an arcane interdiction (incest); (3) a litigious culture (abuse) presents its feverish fact-finding as the emancipation from and retroactive indictment of obscurantist, conspiratorial theorems (incest taboo).

One can try to understand the work of various stakeholders in these or similar terms, as has generally been their own proud project. Critical commentary deploys one comprehensive fascination against the other. What might be more urgent, as elaborated below, is a view that historicizes the current theoretical scramble as symptomatic of a general historical predicament in which such paradigmatic, exacting operations as etiology, symptomatology, and nosology take up an ever larger space in the tabooed scene called incest, eventually becoming the latter' s ultimate intrigue. The contemporary empirical phase of Taboo seems to epitomize core themes in Baudrillard's qualified obituary of the real, the social, and the sexualall facing their "disappearance" or "reversion" through extensive objectification, assertive politics, aggressive mediation, and uncompromising transparency. The Sex Abuse affair's peculiar penchant for ecstatic communication and its signature claim to evidentiary traumatology seem to invite a more encompassing ethnographic account than that of a protracted "sex panic," but also a more specific account than that of the integral "victim society" Baudrillard describes as a playing field beyond Foucaulf s "confessional science." If taboo is to retain its familiar phenomenology of acute nausea or precise indifference, can it sustain itself in an era in which science, therapy, and mass mediation indiscriminately precede, prefigure, and premeditate such aspiringly emotive events?

I like to highlight at this point the convergence of Baudrillard's work on "the end of the scene of the social" and reign of the obscene, and Marilyn Strathern's on contemporary Western kinship and social-communicational systems more generally. According to Strathern, the study of kinship's tribulations at the close of the 20th century warrants less a focus on parameters of inclusive fitness than on referential and epistemic eventuality given distributed conditions of literalization and explicitization; the audit imperative that forces "the social" to explain and legitimize itself empirically (to produce little else than evidentiary clues to its "health" status); the consequently radical displacement and grounding of symbolic registers; finally, the immoderate routines of culture critique and coercive accountability that police how theory and theorist eventually come to ambush the theorized event (1992, pp. 5-7 and passim; 2000). Apropos Baudrillard's paradigmatic query: what of modernity's epochal axiom of tabooed incest after the orgy (1993, p. 3)- its afterlife in "obscene" situations- the "achieved utopia"- of accomplished emancipation, secured human rights, triumphant fact-sheeting, evidence-based morality, informational exuberance, Amber alerts?

Jean-Claude Guillebaud's question at this point was how sexuality's utilitarian contractions, following on the heels of the era of "liberation," might speak to "the great contemporary debate over the status of children themselves, the status of families and, in the final analysis, to Western individualism" (1999, p. 21). Zygmunt Bauman (1998, pp. 28-31) poses similar questions. Clearly there is need to pursue something more than the known complaints of draconian laws, groundless moralism, or the immoderation, excess, or exclusions of discourse. Such complaints all too commonly shy away from addressing the nucleus of excess inhering in every discourse painstakingly insistent on its moderate compassion, on its compassionate moderation.

The following is meant to extrapolate the Foucauldian démasqué of the "repressive hypothesis" (that is, of the Freudian, and Freudo-Marxist, dialectic of sex and society), and to conceptualize an ever more desperate and comical deployment of sex in the service of a social fabric whose asserted situation is only ever that of a natural substrate under siege. Sex abuse is contemporary with a new order of preemption, multimediation, and mass information of the social. This new situation escalates the chicken-egg situation of theory and theorized event. Does the deep structure underlie the emergent symptom chronicled by theory, or is the depth model itself a symptom of a theoretical inclination, a substrate hungry strictly for the confirming effect the form of theory (the aspiration of a post-folkloric form) has on its assertive appearance? When theory calls forth the surfacing of symptoms as proofs of a real crime transpiring in defiance of conspiracy and cover-up (all stories of abuse insist on the latter's enormity), it may be showing a historically acute sensibility for a growing impossibility of distinguishing sexuality' s reality and its ever more marketable and profitable simulations.

Taboo after theory: The incestual order indicted

Answers to the larger question of kinship's modern and late modern predicament, gender and its sexualization have been considered to constitute both the conditional and the residual, normative face of (and hence the ultimate stake in) kinship's protracted encoding of sociality. The past decade has seen a sustained encounter of kinship theory and queer theory, spearheaded (in quite separate directions) by Judith Butler's consecutive incursions into structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis (1990/1999, ch. 2; 2000; 2004, chs. 5 and 7; a project in dialogue with prior work by Strathern, G ay Ie Rubin, and David Schneider), and Lee E delman' s "anti-social" diatribe on "reproductive futurism" (2004), the latter extending a lineage of intellectual attitude that can be said to include Jean Genet, Guy Hocquenghem, and Leo Bersani. Less patient with kinship than the more ambitiously anthropological work by Marcel Godelier (2004), the (psycho-) analytic imaginary of "queer kinship," substantially coterminous with that of "queer temporalities,"7 can be understood historically as the Anglo-American, gender- centric recapitulation of the more inclusive anti-familial momentum of post-1968 France, informed as the latter was by an envisioned mode of politics that would not double, mirror, repeat, or co-opt established structures of power (e.g., Starr, 1995). Meaning to radicalize yet earlier as well as contemporaneous Marxist, Frankfurt School, and feminist objections, the proto-queer implication in this imaginary of themes such as Oedipus complex, pregenital child, pederasty, and consent age,8 and the eventual defeat and scandalization of that implication already in the early 1980s, constituted one of the more illuminating crises and recuperations of the incestual order9 on anthropological record: the order whose sexual politics- as Butler, Edelman and a host of commentators (e.g., Canili, 2005; Cobb, 2005, pp. 258-259) had to conclude -remained securely in check by oedipal familism, and whose new tolerance was to extend strictly to social reconfigurations mirroring its policing of sameness and difference. While neither a precise nor an extended appraisal of these incursions into the "sexual family" lies within the scope of the present discussion, it deserves considering that I'apres-Mai was the first and last period where modernity's problematic of sexuality took the sustained, if variegated, shape of a fundamental suspicion vis-à-vis the Family, its Child, and the Sexologies, Psychologies, and Sociologies that hyphenate them- a suspicion only later claimed to have an ultimate stake, namely gender/sex normativity.

Today, most ethical, historical, empirical, and even literary ruminations on the trans- Atlantic "sexuality/abuse" schism implicitly or explicitly prioritize auctorial identification with the new, post-1980 idiomatic momentum of trauma and betrayal. To appreciate this concordance requires consideration of anthropology, feminism, psychology, and the "new kinship studies" as key diffractions and complications of "the incestual" as at once the constitutive and recuperative panic of sociality. Most incest taboo theory, in other words, is anthropologically coextensive with a perpetually rationalized dispositif which is only ever taboo's ultimate playing field. Modernity's Child and Sex, by implication, have never been dehyphenated by emancipation, forensic vigilance, evaluative hindsight or critical theory, for these operations on the whole subscribe to the central realist and objectivist pretenses of the hyphen. What if the incest taboo postulates child and society, as a fundamental siblinghood? An intricate scenario: the body acquires its alure and erotic potential from the down-modulation of disclosure (taboo); simultaneously, taboo generates the body by coercing it into a state of social f acticity, of an immediate co-sociality. In fact, bodies can be overproduced; more precisely, there is the promise of reversibility in any production (whether of bodily knowledge or bodily justice) perpetrated as a tyrannic principle.

These general observations have a bearing on a vast range of well-intended publications attempting to rescue the actual or situational child from its figuration; to rescue pleasure from its overeo dification; to rescue experience from criminalization; to rescue empirical truth from moral insinuation; to rescue non-incestuous from incestuous experiences; to distinguish boy from girl experiences; and so on. These rescue missions and concomitant appeals to "experience" are bound to entrench the incestual production of the sexual as a decipherable, redeemable, differential, negotiable, topological nature. Consequently, none of these missions can be said to perform a properly critical function: they are part of the edifice that solicits the terms within which the whole business of sex-political maneuvering might be said to take place.

Solicitation precedes crime; more and more, it is the crime. Where since the early 1980s gay liberators have been preoccupied with cleansing queeritude from the taint of incest in slippery slope arguments (Cahill, 2005) and from "slanderous, homophobic" identification with child molesters by rejecting any parallel rehabilitation, Edelman was to conclude that to liberate themselves, any minoritarian sexuality necessarily had to "Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized" (2004, p. 29). The reason why there is such subsidized, tenured sympathy for gender/"queer" studies is precisely that gender's overall political scope and its larger "sexual liberation" project could opportunistically and substantially enough be subordinated to the family's motifs, constitutive horrors, and rhetorical and legal melo dramatics. It is only in this light that the cir cum- Atlantic, late 20th century transfiguration of incest into sexual abuse, from taboo theory to "violation" management, and from homosexual recruiter to pedophile predator, could be considered an ethical revolution, part of a wider alleged advance from naïve revolutionisms, impractical prudery, and patriarchal moral psychologies to sensible, evidence-based ethics. As the burgeoning psychologies sought to disassemble, empiricize, or in other cunning ways "rethink" modernity's grand incest conundrum, universalist theorems concerning kin avoidance were being revoked in favor of a largely American forensics of narrative, power, and representation, the occasional "queer" objection to kinship theory, and progressive legal accommodation of "consenting adults." Few cross-culturalists or social anthropologists still pause over the quagmire other than within these terms.

It remains important to remember what ancien régime was being indicted and surpassed here. The modern intrigue called incest characteristically entailed empirical claims to ultimate causes, profound stakes, and critical periods. It has figured in 20th century stipulations of a determining efficacy or functionality for heterozygosity, exogamous politics, co-residential socialization, family or domestic harmony, generational roles, or kin-motivated socialities; only recently the stern eye is on patriarchy and heteronormativity. In their respective empirical moment, however, all these stipulations remain conditional to contestable operationalizations, and it is at this elementary point that incest as etiological motif is marked by an ever more acute dispersion along ethical and empirical inclination.

At this belabored and canonized point of methodological stand-off and opportune reformulation, the vital observation is both ethnographic and meta- critical: the modern project of "incest theory" is tautological. Irrespective of proximate or ultimate mechanisms, incest's scene, proximately and ultimately, is theory: the choreography of a deep, sustaining logic, whether a Geertzian instance of local knowledge, the local corollary of a Foucaultian incitement to discourse, or the latest therapeutic maxim. Theory is the operational face of a regime of disclosure whose logic and mandate (functional taboo) is, in other words, exclusively that of a conventionalized stipulation, and ultimately serviceable to some encompassing ecology of speculation. It is theory that is taboo's survival mechanism. The French encounter sought to expose precisely this identity, anticipating late modernity's "sexual abuse" paradigm which, covering more than three decades of massive scientific outpour and virtually unimpeded Gothic hyphenation of child and sex, constitutes not a confounder of anthropological empiricism but precisely the late modern ethos of kinship- its scene, its climate of opinion, its face of ressentiment. I am not contesting, of course, that incest's theory-taboo is endlessly diffracted along historical and local lines- this is precisely the mark of its adaptability. Harkins, for instance, understands the 1990s troping of incest as "one very particular conjunction between the tactics of [U.S.] governance and the arts of nationalism [...] a particular meeting point between nationalism and neoliberalism for a new era's family romances" (2009, p. xviii). The same, unsurprisingly, applies to consent age. One book on statutory rape compares historical data on three U.S. states to examine how this notion has been "shaped and reshaped to act as a symbol of various American cultural anxieties" (Cocca, 2004, p. 3), while another examined "the logic of consent and coercion, the alignment of properties and qualities that made them intelligible at key moments in American history" (Haag, 1999, p. xvii). Where the nonconsenting child was a critical conundrum in the forging of the American nation out of an abstract Lockean philosophy of universal rights (Shapiro, 1986, p. 279; cf. Ferguson, 2003; Brewer, 2005; Levander, 2006), nonconsent and its personifications today remain overdetermined by local stakes. However, even if we presume a complex pattern of historical layering or a distinct sociological anatomy ("mass hysteria"), the motif and spatialized rubric of kinship must be identified as the ensemble's drone instrument, its bass line.

Survivalism: Family harmony and genealogical disambiguation

Assuming an ecological approach to incest as epistemic event allows a reappraisal of certain functional formulations. Incest's taboo-theory has been understood as generative of "society" (any sociality metaphorized by kin relations) in the precise sense of a crystallization and ongoing, dramatized disambiguation of genealogical positionality, such that, for instance, "lover" and "child" logically exclude the other. It may matter little how such a disjunction is explained, as long as it is incessantly delivered to an explanatory momentum. Articulated by Malino wski (1927 [2003, pp. 197-198]) as well as Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, and Parsons, anthropology's family harmony and kin status disambiguation theses stipulate that the presence of a child is a latent stressor for the integrity of the dyadic parental alliance it would otherwise complete or enrich, given the potential mayhem of affectively competitive liaisons and the concomitant frustration of the rule of unambiguous assignment of kinship status or articulation of correspondingly exclusive "roles." This frustration is not limited to the eventuality of incestuous offspring but integral at least to the triadic family's modern, "nuclear" constellation and complexes. Incest is avoided out of diffuse angst concerning these scenarios, recited as they incessantly are whether by myth or expert testimony, and dramatized in typically hyperbolic spectacles of interdiction. As Godelier (2004, p. 491) maintains, the anti-social potential of "sex" (whether discursive or impulsive event) has to be contained, if not already much earlier, at the door of the child-rearing family, such that core solutions concerning consanguinity and affinity remain unconditionally ratified.

The figure of harmony, then, attempts to entrench kinship as primal, exclusive assignment of status, and to secure sex as a contractual consummation of cross-lineages. While this securing modulates in strategy and perceived success, kinship and sexuality are widely and enduringly postulated as pivotal, critically exclusionary, and critically cross-referential administrations, in the sense that any eventual disharmonious or ambiguous slanting is declared the epitome of ill fortune. A compromise of the administration is scandalized as an insult to the deep, shared nature of those administered. This principle proved particularly adaptive to the modern psyche, whose privileged scope is empirical psychology; to the modern child, whose sentimentalized truth is cluelessness; to the modern woman, whose intellectual card is ambivalently anti-patriarchal and therefore ambivalently anti-sexual; and to the post-industrial domestic setting, besieged by perpetually conflicting discourses and corrosive twittering of dissonant opinions about the sexuality-sociality nexus. Trauma is the locus where the psyche is postulated as an index to the system's health. If the weighing down of the system's comprehensive code is compromised, the subject is said to be in a debilitating state of inconclusi veness, confusion, dissociation, hysteria, depression, or overcodification ("sexualization"). The situation is said to be contagious ("abused abuser," "traumatic reenactment"), forever underestimated and misunderstood, and ultimately beyond resolution: it maims and scars, until the code reestablishes order around the permanent cicatrix of victimhood.

The necessary proximity or coincidence of sex and child as figurai functions, in short, presents a general potential for syntactical and coalitional problems within the symbolic-affective sphere of kin, as well as any metaphoric extrapolation from that sphere, such as intergenerational alliances in feminism, the British boarding school system, and pastoral-residential systems of care. Such problems are probably universally played down by a myriad of interventions, some at the level of access (separation of siblings by gender, dormitory systems, assumption of neolocal residence and/or marriage before pubescence; formalized explicit joking and sexeducative relations with others than primary kin of adjacent generations; age-stratified or general restrictions on content, products, sites, words, events), some discursive (religious or quasi-ritual validation of abstinence; pathologization or intimidation; developmental psychology; ritualized proscriptions), some directly retaliating against events in which sex and child are said to concur in act or representation (indecency, abuse, molestation; obscenity, pornography). The idea of the social unit is transcribed into a discrete set of meticulously preempted incidents at the thus metonymized site of the child.10

Simultaneously, however, it has become impossible to postulate a universal pedophilic diathesis (projected onto types of calamity and types of idiopathology for clearcut defensive reasons) or a differentiated emotive propensity like disgust. To try and differentiate between degrees of phobia, horror, or philia on the one hand, and a calculated opportune stylistics of outrage and of mediation on the other, is to disregard the intricacy of scandal in the semiotic age.11 There is not so much a universal human situation as an integral, past catastrophe: diffusely fascinated masses whose coordinated defensive maneuvers have realized their strategic projections beyond the tipping point of ultimate success. As etic (analytic) theory, incest theory is coterminous with an ernie (folk) psychology that translates the administration's health into a paranoid biology without recourse to ethical agency. The omnipresent result is a sufficiently a-cultural psychology that denies political investment and that can, must, postulate an acute and discrete biomedical calamity beyond any historical specificity; a psychology, furthermore, that resolutely inoculates itself against dissent by the "groomed" and "brainwashed" yet "surviving" victim, as well as by the "paraphilic," "cognitively distorted" "predator."

One can readily trace the roll-out of the abuse movement over the course of three decades in aforementioned terms. Suddenly everywhere in staggering numbers, unbelievable ratios, and the remotest and unlikeliest of places, the unthinkable act becomes critical to the system's contours, its signature limit, its last taboo, its last chance for a taboo. Ideally, traumatology is driven by public acts of memorializing and melancholic chronicling, exorcizing memory where (always ubiquitously) "repressed," and developing into a disseminated technology of disclosure and campaigning. The thesis also tolerates a moral pragmatism that can indict the alpha (household) male such that an immediate eviction, alienation, and incarceration does not overburden an eventually enucleated household economically, and hence does not terminate "the family" (or any pastoral institute) symbolically but leaves it (indeed anybody scrambling to commiserate) in a perpetual mood of "survival."

To suggest that abuse's trauma, by virtue of some ultimate or ulterior singularity, precedes and forever plays tricks on the sphere of figuration, is simply to mystify the affair by denying its most obvious and most excessive mechanics. A psychological approach is an approach ensnared by the gyrations of modern sexual disclosure. The monitored, surveyed, or restored sexual health of the minor is only ever that of the circular diagnostics that preoccupies the self -referential sphere of the family: pathological socialities produce transgressions which in turn produce pathological socialities. Victimology and trauma psychology, in other words, are the ways a social order speaks to itself through the victim's apprehension concerning its categorial status. Health means "adjustment" to the micro-architecture of the most minimal social unit granted the claim of sanctified productivity, and that must forever articulate that claim, if it is to uphold overarching systems in the capacity of the latter' s pristine cipher.

Taboo is the situation of a rule posing as a law. Other than the law, which allows no violation, the rule transvalues violation into demarcation. This means a number of things. First, there is no family benefitting from protection from taboo violation or suffering the consequences of such a violation, for "the family" assumes coherence only at the point of threat. In this sense the family, rather than avoiding it, revels in the nightmare of its violation: it has a profound stake in the melodrama of its own crisis, and invests heavily in, because it knows itself to depend on, the scenario of its demise. The late modern family, particularly, has no existence outside of the emplotment and embattlement of its decline- imminent defeat is both its ontological situation and its finest hour. Families know themselves to be the pursuit of an ethos or imaginary, "the familial," and find themselves most effectively realized either at the hallucinated site of their tragic dissolution (typically some minor incident of promiscuity; increasingly also the contemplation of its historical demise) or at the heroic site of their "survival." The family lives to tell you it has miraculously survived some sexual catastrophe. The familial is a nostalgia for its own empirical verification, its sexual objectivity, its deferred realization: it never was, and this is its recuperative romance, its redemptive story. It will pontificate all the louder the more it fears it might be losing its audience.

Neither, of course, is there a desire to violate that precedes the revelation of the rule. The revelation is precisely that of the desire to violate; all violation, in other words, will have to admit to its being encoded by this or that rule. It is precisely incest theory, not a prediscursive incest potential, that insinuates, advertises, and surcharges the scenario of violation. Taboo, James Kincaid (1992, 1998) and anti-heteronormativists concur, does not antagonize desire; taboo is a discourse of desire's pervasive imminence. There is no sexuality or experience whose innocence of the rule can be plausibly commemorated, revenged, or reinstated, just as there is no unabused or unsexualized child after (or indeed, on retrospect, before) the rule against "child sexual abuse." The mantric reminder of "the reality of sexual abuse" rather attempts to retroactively establish what counts as realism, what as sexual, what as childhood, and what as proper "use." All these naturalistic and utilitarian parameters might otherwise have remained dangerously unestablished and unhyphenated. The rule instantiates the respective domains onto which the taboo is said to latch (the sexual, the familial), precisely by collapsing their hitherto unaffiliated moments of truth. The rule is constitutive of all possible scenarios and personas recognized under its jurisdiction and it is through its conjunctive forensics that all positions- victim, hero, villain- and sentiments are granted a contingent social pertinence and compelling coincidence. The incest taboo, then, renders the existence of rules conditional to a comprehensive socio dramatic bias: a grand conflation of destinies or orchestration of stakes.

The American trajectory of "child sexual abuse" does not me ta- theorize the "primitive," "universal" sphere of tabu. It rather expounds the blueprint of taboo as historically opportune configuration of sociality: a paradigmatic prism for elementary local differentiations and contrastive effects (us/them, domestic/foreign, pathos/norm, intimacy/intrusion, sex/affection). The modern rhetorical deployment of incest (an indefinite meta-cultural projection of the local stakes of taboo), in order to preempt large scale disintegration of the triadic-nuclear concentration of kin as well as potential contestation from outside such distributions, had to entail dismissal of a local (e.g., strictly domestic) pertinence, and insinuate a deep psychological mechanism in the clueless child now globally circumscribed- because, as indeed, increasingly surrounded- by acutely traumatic knowledges and knowledgeable traumatologies.

Taboo's shifting ecological niche: Symbolism, analysis, semiosis

The incest taboo's livelihood as disseminated and neo colonial theorem is an important clue to the adaptability it sets out to defend. The parable of incest in the West took the variegated shape not just of a deep psychology but also of a universal ethology, a conflation of the mores of all other cultures, typically sought in standard samples and "natural experiments." Early champion of this ambition, nestor cross-culturalist George Mur dock (1949 [1965, chs. 9 and 10]) offered a quadripartite explanatory approach to incest taboos, combining psychoanalytic, sociological, behaviorist and cultural anthropological elements. It was to account at once for such taboos' universal, peculiarly emotional investment, diminished investment outside the nuclear family, and occurrence of taboo violations; taboo's social utility; the translation of this utility into custom, including its extension and generalization beyond the immediate family setting; and lastly the cultural conditions for the channeling of such extensions and generalizations.

While for Murdock generalization was that of primary to non-primary kin categories, the term can be taken, as above, to apply to a whole era and dispositif of categorization through which kin, sex, generation, and gender become idiomatically tied and articulated as necessary for each other's intelligibility. Though seeking to qualify such contemporary Kinseyan terms as mating, sexual outlet and sexual drive (pp. 6-7), Murdock' s anthropology and that of most contemporaries is embarrassed by the elementary observation that the anthropologist's invocation of the idea of a natural and behavioral substrate itself qualifies as the key anthropological event: the ethical situation of a will to a strategic, correlative naturalism. David Schneider's analysis of sexual intercourse as American kinship's "central symbol" later (1968, pp. 31, 43, 59) outlined the stakes. Taboo partakes in the rubrification of "the sexual;" it refers to an insinuating rather than an expressive or repressive regime. The modern scientification of incest has not so much clarified this situation as exalted naturalistic accounts of its stakes.

The problem was famously taken up later in Foucault' s genealogical approach to the family-sexuality-child nexus (1976 [1978, pp. 103-159]; 1999 [2003, ch. 10]), an interrupted project later to be extended primarily by literary historians (e.g., Backus, 1999, pp. 41-47; Kincaid, 1992; Perry, 2004, ch. 9; Pollak, 2003, ch. 1), only sporadically by anthropologists (Stoler, 1995, ch. 5; cf. Taylor, 2009, pp. 14-15). An exogamous "politics of blood," Foucault wrote, was surpassed by a new modern disposition to intimation, disclosure, and "analytics" of sexuality. The latter order's relation to the previous was, Foucault suggested, that of a complicit superimposition: sociality's scene, idioms, tropes, personas, and figurations were translated from the premodern politics of reproductive ritual (in the words and scope of anthropologists Paige and Paige, 1982) to the modern sexological consensus, stretching from behavioral hygienics (anti-Onanism) to the totalizing dictum of "mental health" ("child sexual abuse"). Late modernity's "sexual harassment" paradigm assumes as its range of motion less the guarded symbolic perimeter of acting kin, and increasingly that of an indiscriminate solicitation of outrage through such metastatic American tropes as exposure, safety, betrayal, harm, and abstinence. Late modernity's incest taboo is "radically extended" (Hacking, 1995, p. 62; 1999, p. 140) beyond the nominal authority of kinship and its nuclear administrations: it is hyperextended as an integral and global sexological purview meaning to crossfade anthropology's situational (cellular, domestic, Oedipal, symbolic, figurai, ritual, mythic, political, genealogical) child-gift or child-commodity, to the overdetermined and exponential stakes of the virtual (demographic, statutory, statistical, average, and simulated) Child-sign.

Under modernity, incest reinvented itself at the evermore "scientific" levels of "childhood" and "development" (not anymore that of son, mother, or father's brother's wife), and at the level of "sexuality" (not anymore that of exogamy, inbreeding, royal exemption, or virginity tests). None of these new terms seems to have much practical traction beyond their grammatical effects in the domestic sphere. Virulent use of such phrases as "childhood sexuality" denotes the rhetorical reach of an ambient interdiction of incest that is, of course, procedurally and "epistemically" incestuous (Foucault, 1999, p. 234). Thus, taboo extends from a referential act between nominal kin to any figuration construed as invoking the specter of that kinship's "actual" or "original" referential scene. This has meant an unprecedented ontological spin: contemporary legislation bans any, even any virtual, depiction of intimacies involving "what appears to be a minor." Such legal pronouncements claim to "protect minors." Their effect is the imposition of a generalized, categorical injunction that denies kinship its earlier symbolic, ascriptive vitality in favor of a less cumbersome, metric administration: a moral calculus. Child: an idiosyncratic and divine figure becomes an exchangeable asset which becomes a semiotic stake.

Illustratively, Murdock separates kin-based avoidance from a "positive gradient of appropriate age" (1949, pp. 318-319) applicable to mate choice. By contrast, it is now widely assumed that idiomatic interventions such as sexuality, through their endless qualifications, postulate the matter they purport only to take stock of. Whereas legal, forensic, and biological discourses rely on ex ante definitions, it is precisely the convention and citational effect of definitions that epitomizes the crystallization of a category and its assumption in categorical interpretations. Genital play in infants becomes adaptive when called that by ethologists (just as juvenile coital posturing would evidence elementary fitness in mammals); a life-threatening emergency when called onanism; "the executive agency to the whole of infantile sexuality" when contemplated in a grand Psychology of Man (Freud, 1920 [1953, p. 189, n. I]).

Anthropologists appraise scenes of rubrification through their diffraction by other such scenes. Events classified as falling within the realm of the sexual may be associated with varied intentions, they may typically be multi-intentional, polysémie, and homological across situations of intentionality. They may well be quasiintentional: simulations of intention. Several studies suggest that the demarcation of "sexual act," especially regarding and by classificatory youth, is entirely opportune, ultimately a function of wider regimes of classification- relative, typically, to a functional economy that pronounces some acts as "the act" and others as tragic (if effective) substitutions, yet others as altogether unimaginable. An inherent confusion of tongues haunts the great Westermarck-Freud dialectic: their respective theories of taboo are maintained in spite of copious "sex play" between co-socialized siblings (Shepher's Kibbutzim data) or a constitutive and complexly "sexual" (pregenital, genital, Oedipal) intrigue between adjacent generations (Freud). In all cases, however, behavior and its intention are propelled into eventuality by an ambient sexual code. Encoding is the elementary event: a precarious economy of hushing and telling, preempting and exempting, scandalizing and tolerating. Any tendentious system is wise to exempt an always extensive range of imminently countertendentious events (consider familial co-sleeping and co-bathing, family nudism, toilet training, bathtub photography, lactation). Beyond pragmatics, there is a fundamental logic to both preemptions and exemptions, as these allow the system's tendencies to be articulated in the first place.

From these observations it is easy to understand the complicit orientation of scholarly formulation. Sociobiologists, clinicians, legislators and journalists have no patience with a corollary of the above, that sex plays a key synecdochic function in the "foundational narratives of social and political life" (Laqueur, 2009, p. 434), a question of the respective significance of the symbolic and the imaginary (Godelier, 2003). There is no regard either for similar claims concerning the child: that it is "one of the key modern bearers of all myth" (Rose, 1992, p. xviii), a figurai function that "coercively shapes the structures within which the 'political' itself can be thought" (Edelman, 1998, p. 19).

Hyperbolic citational functions, sex and child refer beyond themselves, to epochal strategies and grand plots, to the very possibility and orientation of social politics. Their situation is antonymic, a reciprocal state of acute implication which today's ubiquitous chagrin over "the sexualization of the child" seems to serve to obscure. Incest theories in various ways manage to engage this negative hyphen, but few advance an understanding of that hyphen as a historically contingent event. Kincaid's argument was that Anglo- America' s conspicuous policing of sex acts by or with children, is only the loud epiphenomenon of modernity's protracted eroticization of the child, the cultivation of a perfect prelapsarian alter. One beholds "a complex image of projection and denial" (1992, p. 5; 1998, p. 284) entirely lost to the law enforcers, traumatologists, and evolutionists.12

In light of this, the incest conundrum can be ref ocused not from interdiction to violation (this does not constitute a shift of focus), but from symbolic efficacy to doctrinal evidentialism. No evidentiary eventuality exists independently of the evidentialist inclination that pursues and insists on it. Facts are not anthropologically eventful; their exaltation, factualism, is. For Baudrillard, "Reality and simulation then are not binary opposites; 'reality' is simulated through the breaking of symbolic exchange relations and the positing of the discrete and 'disenchanted' universe of the sign" (Pawlett, 2010, p. 108). The modern, familial child, as Chris Jenks (1994) suggests and Edelman (2004) elaborates, does not so much express a genotypic code or filial stake as act out an overdetermined and overextended figuration of absence (of experience, knowledge, identity, agency). The problem, then, is to identify such a figuration as overstated, since over-statement is its default mode of operation, its sole redemptive function. The Child is an ambivalent figure of futurity and nostalgia- the preeminent attractant for modern and postmodern moods and their altercation. "Child sexual abuse" attempts to appropriate and capitalize on these figurative and integral reverberations, but renders them symptomatic of a comprehensive insinuation, an integral problematic: a set of conditions that seeks to preempt all alternatives. As is concerned the seeming essentialization and encroachment of a totalizing globalist discourse of "child protection," the child comes into its own only as an advertised cipher for its own sign-value. The curiously optimistic "sexual agency" motif in academic commentary seems to expound this turn of events: a widespread nostalgia and campaign for the willed event. "Sexuality," of course, names a mode and apparatus of rubrication; to claim it as a personal right or inclination is to submit oneself to that mode and apparatus.

What is enduringly at stake, then, is kinship's naturalistic meta-ethics of sexual sociality. This meta-ethics classically claims the child as evidentiary stake, and deploys it to police the entire economy of semiotic disclosure it calls "sexuality," from primal scenes and sex education to the pervasive algorithmic processing of "content"- its rating, screening, moderating, filtering, delaying, cartooning, blocking, bleeping, and blotting. A paradigmatic concern here seems to be the denial of Freudian Nachträglichkeit, allowing only "biased" and "unbiased" referentiality of the discursive and semiotic events circumscribed and solicited by the abuse paradigm: exposure, symptom, memory, interrogation, disclosure, testimony, sentence, therapy, registration, parole, documentary, theory. The sole purpose of this torrent of informational events may well be to moderate and bifurcate the household libidinal economy into disjunctive referential schemes, "non-sexual" and "sexual," both theoretically predicated on the imaginary of an ultimate etiological niche, namely, itself: domestic co-subjectivation and co-socialization.

To summarize, paradigmatic shifts between economies of taboo- symbolic, analytic, semiotic- render the sociobiologist's take on such hypertensive indictments as "pedophilia" increasingly problematic. Such indictments rather suggest that incest's purview- a constitutive, integral code of co-sociality- has always been precisely an ultrahygienics directed at any pain or pleasure imminently escaping the confinements of ernie or ette categorization.

Triumph of the empiricists

The most urgent anthropological consideration, perhaps the only interesting one, is whether such a function is able to survive its own unqualified hegemony. What is ever more spectacular in its durability is the casuistic pretense evidenced when legislator and all conspiring symptom hunters scramble to wrest "the" child from the claws of the "cognitively distorted paraphile," in order to speak of it in a final, undistorted way. The intellectually fashionable emancipation of casuistic pain from rampant theory -or absent pain from tendentious theory, for that matter- is the expectable face of an ever more penetrative realism, which has become incest's final riddle- a riddle never resolved, only ever escalated, by triumphant fact.

Taking note of the oeuvre of Baudrillard, it would seem that late capitalism requires cross-fading of the socialist-feminist paradigm of kinship studies (focusing on kin units as gendered scenes of production and reproduction) with a post-Marxist view on its mass-mediated and mass-consumed representations- focusing, for instance, on the multi-mediation and semiotic inflation of the Symptom as paradigmatic event: the dissemination and erratic imposition of sign- value. Contra historical materialists, who subscribe to a sociobiological exaltation of stakeholders, the social order never materializes as order. Materialized, society is dead. Indeed, the more it campaigns the reality and "embodiment" of its disintegration, pain, and traumas, the more it may be staging a (fortunate) failure of realizing itself through such categories. The figuration of stakeholders always was the critical event, the critical economy. The stakes in human societies always were figurai; the key difference, according to Baudrillard, is that between a vital symbolism and a fatal semiotic exuberance. The seeming late modern desperation of incest's differential diagnostics (use/abuse) marks not a new ethics but another metamorphosis of an old ethics confronted by ever changing ecological pressures. The novel ecological parameters are epistemic and semiotic: parenthood' s reputation of reflexive altruism and instinctive bonding is perpetually disenchanted by expert doctrine and intrusive facticity (see e.g. Halley, 2007); the parent finally ends up as a "concerned," but only ever under performing, sign-manipulator and symptom-hunter: a rater, screener, filterer, censor, and persecutor.

Human survival today pertains less to the genetic code than to the social code's radically empiricized Weltanschauung; to the order of the Symptom given its promiscuous dissemination as solicited sign; finally to the fashionable complaint of "abuse" given its virulent insinuation of "proper use." The perennial indictment of a behavioral promiscuity serves to ward off the more radical angst that such regulatory tropes as "safety" are irretrievably lost to their unqualified, promiscuous ratification.

This is not to say that the empiricists, critical theorists, and expert witnesses are wrong or limited in accounting for kinship or intimacy: they only refuse to locate both themselves and their objects of study in the ecological situation in which they nevertheless wish to assert themselves. Taboos upheld in the name of mentioned rubrics, sex /child, exponentially in the name of the hyphen, serve to reiterate a particular assumptive mood, a local order of insinuation, and it is this order, over and above the particular traumas, aversions or indifferences whose actuality the hyphen would preempt or prefigure, that begs the question of an ultimate or "adaptive" strategy. The intrigue of taboo lies in the affordance of explanatory power associated with its operant form, its mode of solicitation and referential scope of etiology or teleology. Only as authorized etio-teleology of sociality, the intrigue of incest has universal currency. It announces the futility of any proposal to liberate the child from the family, or "boy-love" from "incest," or ambulant desires from their domestic interdiction, or meaning from morality, or sign from signification. It likewise announces the intricacy of any "pedophile activism," as this is bound to entail the contestation of a representational apparatus from the position of a libidinal investment in the last standing avatar of that apparatus.

Moreover, the modern empirical stance is commissioned by the same conceptual apparatus it purports to test: it presumes precisely the coherence and centrality of those issues whose coherence and centrality it says it regards as explanandum. Where pioneering sexologist John Money complained bitterly about the dearth of research on childhood sexuality, he should have acknowledged that any interview question that makes it through the ethics committees is only ever the reinscription of the idea of something to answer to and for. Whispering back to the system the latter' s own preferred idioms, empiricism flatters ("operationalizes") that system as ultimate effect, such that the system, thereby, becomes the continuous effect of its self-assurances and self -solicitations. Similar objections can be raised with regard to ethical, historical, and explanatory approaches. The ethicist, historian, and evolutionist as a rule presuppose the rubrics they purport to hold up to fundamental analysis- child(hood), sex(uality), (ab)use. These rubrifications however are little else than the footprint of an enthusiasm for objectif iable rubrics, and it is precisely this in principle immoderate enthusiasm that requires qualification as ethical, historical, and generative event. Violation and taboo arise in the same moment, a revelation of a purported underlying nature or logic, and only ever the imposition, dissemination and translation of the empiricist's appreciation of its status as explanandum and universalium. The form and extent of this imposition, dissemination and translation characterize culture integrally; the reputation of taboo as idiosyncratic, prediscursive, and primal (that is, ancestral to culture) depends strictly on complicit recitation and lumping of forms. If taboos are functional, it is the cumulative effects of that recitation that must be considered, and these are integral.

Ground Zero of the real

Theory and the thing theorized have always been co-emergent properties; the one solicits and advertizes the other. To tease them apart as cause and effect, or to subject them to a differentiating forensics, is to entrench their logic. But this entrenchment has its breaking point, its moment of saturation or exhaustion. Academic moderation key worded by such formulas as "sexualization," "abuse," and "sexual agency" of youth, just as those warning for "medicalization," "feminization," and "hysteria," have become late modernity's ground zero- a commemorative scene of collective, redemptive recollection of disorting and disrupting acts, that is, the collective affirmation of unimpeachable stakes. Here roams the specter of a majestic but spoiled endeavor. Post-traumatic disorder. Mass broadcasted outbursts of memorial activity. Solemn oaths to revenge and rebuild. Child sexual abuse has become late modernity's quintessential advert for realization- shocking statistics, comprehensive fact sheets, exhaustive symptom lists, recovered memories, broken silence, awareness raised. "Abuse" sought to reconstruct, rehabilitate and mourn the real- child, family, justice, trust, memory, identity, some proper deployment of the sexual- after its catastrophic loss- dissociation, repression, cognitive distortion. It was soon being reported that the makeshift therapeutic industry was soliciting and overproducing the real at syndromal levels- Multiple Personality Disorder, False Memory Syndrome, Sexual Allegations in Divorce Syndrome, Parental Alienation Syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, God-fearing parents arrested for bath tub pictures- and that these incidents strengthened the eligibility of a moderate, dispassionate realism. A number of dissenters arose to the stage- more meta-review, sober empiricism, methodological reform.

The result has been that most ethical, empirical, historical, legal, critical, and therapeutic commentary on sexuality as past trauma- a whole era of semiological, technological, and etiological rumination- has been coextensive with the affair's ontological panic- namely, the nostalgia for and reestablishment of some original, objective, truthful, unabused, unadulterated, idiosyncratic experience or pleasure- and consequently fail to fully appreciate trauma's constitutive role and regulatory contours in anthropological terms. Rather, these moderations may have become fully complicit with traumatology's metastatic realism, its hyper-empiricism in trying to establish a developmental sexuality, an ineffable wound, a damage "beyond words," a pure indentation or definite defilement.

One may be left with Edelman' s antiheteronormative conclusion, that the pervert's choice is either stoic refutation or fatal endorsement of sociality. The former option's implied iconoclasm of the figurai Child (as key symbol of the reproductive order of the family) is indicative of the predicament of any project that seeks to humanize the contemporary hyphenation of child and sex, since (to radicalize E delman' s own iconoclasm) both sides of the hyphen are entirely a matter of figuration, of semioticization.

If modernity's troping of incest remains volatile, it is not because of direct contestation, but strictly given the project's being delivered to its own persecutory momentum, its own self-limiting or "fatal" trajectory of total disclosure and hyper-empiricism. To function, taboo only needs to be able to preempt or survive its own blatancy and loudness; and this it increasingly fails to do. Incest used to be modernity's authorized differential diagnosis of the real and the imaginary; trauma and desire; nature and culture; sociality and disintegration; speech and aporia. It may have been little else than that generic disambiguation all along. If so, its hyperextended forensics may turn out to have been an event of anthropological proportions. An extreme phenomenon: an endemic hyperrealization and semioticization of sociality, whose prior mystique is now meticulously and retroactively attested in its every miniscule irregularity. As I write, the evening news program announces that a Dutch ex-bishop is alleged to have secretly watched a boy masturbate in the latter' s dorm, in 1959. A resentful regime of surveillance feeding ever desperately on its own antique minutiae: morality now has to live up to its own retrospective realism, having to explain itself in any alleged eventuality past or present, not through a single parable; taking care for every real child and its every out-of-the-ordinary experience, not the one avatar of a bright future; containing every minute risk, not one denigration of the symbolic status quo. Melancholic accountancy of reality in its ever imminent ubiquity.

Conclusion: Otherness as difference

Both genealogy and intimacy have emerged as semi autonomous foundations for legitimating sex acts and other forms of corporeal sociality, even as both have been dispersed in and by colonial and postcolonial worlds. Sociality seems unthinkable not only without one or the other of these two grids, but without them working as twin pairs, intertwined, twisting, struggling against each other in the empty horizon of the Universal. (Povinelli, 2002, p. 235)

Virtual child pornography, the bleeping of profanity, and alarm over boobs during Super Bowl halftime shows are vignettes of a comprehensive algorithm: the loudly advertized need for a consistent elaboration of avoidance so great that it stipulates a manneristic ban on verbal allusions, on the merest "exposure" to a televised pair of breasts, even on "potentially eroticized" computer-generated images of what appear to be pre-fertile juveniles- indeed, in the case of an Australian man convicted for possessing risqué images of Bart Simpson, on the private joke on cartoonesque icons. One sees in mentioned examples a paradoxical preemption of coresidential sibling and intergenerational incest through the most paranoid hyphenation of "child" and "sex."

Our task has been to account for the contemporary Anglo-American case, which is bound up with the logic of decipherment, retro-moderation, and extraction of the real. After its "revolution," experience of the sexual is governed by an ever more cynically econometrics of performance and expression, a consumer duty whose industrialism, as announced in its colloquial name ("adult"), is bend on establishing "the child" as its sole proviso. The viability of the operation lies in the nature of the proviso. Baudrillard: "The fact remains that otherness does come to be in short supply and, for want of living otherness as destiny, the Other has to be produced imperatively as difference" (1996, p. 115). The child used to be modernity's erotic, gothic Other (Kincaid), but is now a statistical and meta-reviewed "item from a different age" (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 105) delivered to a generic calculus of consent and "mental health." The child is rendered commensurable in its antinomy (the word "minor" is pathognomonic), commiserable at the exact location- generic "position" - as any survivalist.

Kinship's abuse industry produced exactly the opposite of what it might have intended: the entire Euro-American scene of anti-self-abuse, anti-sexualization, antiharassment, virginity pledging, and abstinence-only has only ever sexualized the previously self-moderated ethology of genital exploration and immature copulations. In this light it would seem that the hyperextension of taboo, as triumphant empiricism, has been the prime perverting momentum all along. One could object that it is hardly the efficiency of sexual managerialism and protectionism that drives sexuality as totalizing code. What would seem to matter is the mark of intentionality, a community-minded commitment to the idea that communities nominally cohere and contract around the expulsion of ungrammatical events (Evans, 2007, p. 168), and whose binding logic therefore remains, against all odds and despite all distractions, properly sexual and familial. But it is precisely such intentions that are radically betrayed by their unprecedented efficiency. The (Sir James Frazei^s) question used to be, what effective taboo needs a law? The final question is, what taboo survives a law?

Footnotes

1 Instructio de modo procedendi in causis [de crimine] sollicitationis (Ty pis Poly glottis Vaticanis, 1962, pp. 27, 8).

2 For further notes see Janssen (2010a,b, and forthcoming).

3 See work of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (e.g., 2009) as well as colleague Freud critics Allen Esterson, Frank Cioffi, Han Israels, Frederick Crews, Frank Sulloway, Todd Dufresne, and Richard Webster.

4 Only some Lacanians have addressed this situation. Slavoj Zizek considers locating the current revival of the seduction theme "in the context of the late capitalist Narcissistic mode of subjectivity within which the 'other' as such- the real, desiring other- is experienced as a traumatic disturbance, as something that violently interrupts the closed equilibrium of my Ego" (1999, p. 7). Jan Jagodzinki argues postmodernity is marked by an internal logic of post-Oedipalization, an authority shift in which the Oedipal Father is rivaled by a Jouissant Father at the mercy of whose campaign we are "constantly confronted by the Other's enjoyment, often in its most unbearable dimensions" (2004, p. 91). The tabooing of incest under "designer capitalism" would be, as indeed, characterized by a permanent adrenergic state: "In such a world of capitalist consumerism an impossible "enjoyment" is posited in the Other that the Other doesn't have, and it is this positingnot the actual enjoyment- which leads to a rise in aggressivity" (p. 95). Kincaid's culture of child molesting (1998) fits very well what Jagodzinki discerns as postmodernity 's "strange inversion of enjoyment into jouissance- into forms of envy and jealousy that characterize resentment" (2004, p. 96).

5 Again, the work of Jagodzinski is insightful, where he examines schools in terms of "post-Oedipal relationships where notions of 'family' have been decentered" (2006, p. 338). See also Cavanagh (2007).

6 This pertains to a century -long schism between an innately incestuous sexual situation (Freud) and an "ancient sexual desensitization [of co-socialized kin, through early propinquity] found in all other primates thus far" (Wilson, 1998, p. 195). For recent critical commentary on the Westermarck effect, see for instance Leiber (2006), Leavitt (2007), and Shor and Simchai (2009).

7 For general and recent commentary see for instance Strong (2002), Carver and Chambers (2007), Eng (2010), and Freeman (2007, 2010).

8 For cursory reference see for instance Bourg (2005; 2007, pp. 204-218) and Guillebaud (1999, pp. 16-19). Apart from Foucaulf s genealogy, well-known is the Deleuzean/Guattarian schizoanalytic critique of psychoanalysis whose early momentum was largely that of their programmatic "anti-Oedipus" proclamation (1972). Other sources of the early 1970s ferment are less well known: René Schérer's Emile Perverti (1974) was inspired by early socialist Charles Fourier's anti-familist sexual utopianism; among the more idiosyncratic, proto-queer contributions is Tony Du vert's Le Bon Sexe Illustré (1974).

9 I am borrowing Paul-Claude Racamier's neologism of Vincestuel, described as "un climat où souffle le vent de l'inceste, sans qu'il y ait inceste" (1995, p. xiii), suggesting that it can be read in conjunction to the "epistemophilic incest"- consummated in the form of surveillance, forced disclosure, and confessional routines- Foucault argued constituted the modem family. Ramacier (1995) does not cite Foucault.

10 According to Steiner,

"Taboo gives notice that danger lies not in the whole situation, but only in certain specified actions concerning it. These actions, these danger spots, are more deadly than the danger of the situations as a whole, for the whole situation can be rendered free from danger by dealing with or, rather, avoiding the specified danger spots completely.... The narrowing down and localisation of danger is the function of taboo of which we are now speaking. The dangerous situation is then defined in terms of such localisation, which in its turn is meaningless without abstentive behavior" ([1956] 1999, pp. 213-214).

11 Intuitionist models of disgust such as adopted by Haidt and Hersh (2001) try to distinguish between "affective condemnation" and slow, ex post facto rationalization, but do little to clarify, indeed they largely entrench, this binary. Moreover, they do not explain apparent covariation of "immediate" affect and political proclivity with regard to for instance gay marriage, nor the apparent invariability in casu sibling incest scenarios.

12 The cogency of Oedipal psychology in America was studied by a contemporary of Foucault, John Demos (1978), who, historicizing the later queer complaint, considers gender rigidity as co-emergent with what he calls the "hothouse family. " The scene of domestic psychology was later complicated by a deep concordance between feminism and therapy culture, as studied by Eva Illouz (2008).

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Author affiliation:

Diederik F. Janssen*

* Independent researcher, The Netherlands.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Diederik Janssen, Berg&Dalseweg 209k60, Nimegen 6522BK, The Netherlands. Email: diederikianssen@gmail.com