Darwin’s Chronicles of Seasickness

This article explores Charles Darwin’s accounts of seasickness as archival repositories of ugly feelings. It draws on Darwin’s invocation of the “crip uncanny” to argue that the uncanny has been historically constructed as a crip feeling, an affective tendency of ill bodies. Describing seasickness as a pandemonium in which “animals [were] staring [him] in the face, without labels & scientific epitaphs,” Darwin brings attention to an uncanny collapse of the human/nonhuman animacy hierarchy that takes place in illness: dead animals become agents of knowledge production, and the ill scientist transforms into a supine, scrutinized body. First, this article suggests that Darwin’s uncanny becoming-specimen challenges Deleuzian and new materialist figurations of becoming as a cultivated practice of ecstasy and joy. By emphasizing the necessity of practicing caution in the act of becoming, Deleuzian philosophies universalize the subject-in-becoming as able-bodied, effectively excluding from their considerations instances of crip becoming, which are bound up with negative affect. Finally, the article proposes that Darwin’s crip becoming-specimen had epistemic effects: it challenged the creationist framework that Darwin still endorsed in the early 1830s, gesturing at the uncanny possibility of species transmutation.