Reclaiming Southern Pathology: James Agee and the Biological Thought of Georges Canguilhem

Abstract

James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a documentary account of three cotton tenant families in Depression Alabama, centres on the image of the wound in its representations of tenant poverty. But Agee also transposes this image into more biological terms so that the tenants are seen as damaged cells or embryos. This transposition can be framed as a 1930s eugenic concern with pathological bodies. But this article argues, through a comparison to Georges Canguilhem's "The Normal and the Pathological" (1943), that Agee redefines pathology to mean the intrinsic tendency to error (or aleatory possibility) of the organism. This allows him to propose a leftist counter-discourse of resistance that is different from the finalistic Marxist or New Deal solutions to poverty in the 1930s.