Sibling incest, madness, and the "Jews".

How does one organize the categories that we call "deviance"? To examine the nosology of the deviant in modern (post-Enlightenment) culture one is constrained to use categories of analysis that arise in the spheres of law, medicine, and the social sciences. That is, the history of deviance in popular and high culture comes to be the reworking of "scientific" categories of difference that overlay the fantasies of difference, often more complex and more far-reaching than the models themselves. Incest is just such a category of deviance in modern culture. One of the most interesting…