In Bed With The Right - Episode 17： Otto Weininger, or Gender and Anti-Semitism

00:00:00.000 hi i'm adrian dob and i'm moira donnegan and whether we like it or not we're in bed with the

00:00:18.580 right so adrian who are we discussing today so today is our long-awaited i think by some

00:00:25.240 sequel to our Nietzsche episode. This is Otto Weininger, a person who, you know,

00:00:33.060 fancied himself a bit of a follower of Nietzsche, was somewhat critical of Nietzsche, but who was

00:00:36.840 definitely regarded by his contemporaries as this kind of Nietzsche figure, someone who

00:00:40.560 had dared to see what others had not seen and who sort of gave everything in pursuit of this

00:00:48.540 very particular way of seeing the world. You know, I feel like we've been really

00:00:53.660 lucky with the podcast we've had some really brilliant writers and scholars come join us and

00:00:58.680 often we have a book to discuss and uh somebody really professional and smart to guide us through

00:01:07.220 this aspect of their work and then we have some episodes where it's just one of us just letting

00:01:13.120 your freak flag fly and today is adrian's freak episode adrian is one of many yes adrian is

00:01:21.720 obsessed with this little known Viennese 19th century freak on a leash named Otto Weininger.

00:01:31.620 So Adrian, who is this guy? Take me into his world. In my defense, like, so he, so he is a

00:01:37.600 footnote today, but he was extremely influential at the time at the time. And like, if you read

00:01:42.320 the book today, which like hardly anyone does other than academic historians, it's really

00:01:48.420 shocking how widely he was read and appreciated, right? I mean, like, kind of like Nietzsche,

00:01:56.780 right? Like, unlike Nietzsche, if you try to do a Vininger seminar, people are like,

00:02:01.140 you know, get your head examined. But like Nietzsche, you know, basically your favorite

00:02:06.100 poet circa 1910, like, read this guy and was like, hey, there's some good ideas in this.

00:02:11.920 But wait, what is the book? What's this book that my favorite poet is reading?

00:02:15.020 So the book is called Sex and Character. It's the one that your favorite poet would have read. It's pretty much the only major thing he wrote. There are other writings that we have. We have a diary, but like, as you'll see, he didn't have much time. He made the most of it in terms of packing, you know, misogyny, antisemitism, and just general misanthropy into a book. But basically, he's known for this one work by and large.

00:02:41.100 Otto Weininger was born in 1880 in Vienna.

00:02:44.700 And you say he didn't have much time.

00:02:47.740 If he was born in 1880, when did he die?

00:02:50.500 1903.

00:02:51.360 So really not much time.

00:02:52.820 So that is, he was 23 years old.

00:02:55.760 So he managed to make this big impression at a very tender age, we might say.

00:03:02.120 And related to this tender age, also a trigger warning that the way he did die was through

00:03:09.560 suicide.

00:03:09.860 So that's important to know here.

00:03:12.320 So he was born in Vienna, 1880, into a Jewish family.

00:03:16.300 And I don't know how much you know about sort of Vienna circa 1880.

00:03:20.060 Very little.

00:03:21.440 A time when, you know, the city would have been chock-a-block with people you still recognize,

00:03:27.280 names you still recognize, right?

00:03:28.540 Composers like Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg is sort of starting out.

00:03:32.900 You have, you know, Freud running around.

00:03:35.220 You have Klimt.

00:03:36.040 You have the secession movement.

00:03:37.160 And so a lot of sort of early modernist painting coming out.

00:03:41.420 So it's really a time when there was kind of a real intellectual ferment and effervescence in that city.

00:03:48.100 But it was also just a time when I think there's a book about the period called A Nervous Splendor.

00:03:53.960 And some of them call it like the Nervous Metropolis.

00:03:56.340 Like it was a place that was both super brilliant, was kind of having a collective nervous breakdown at the same time.

00:04:01.500 And people kind of acknowledged this at the time.

00:04:03.360 like just to give you an example that like this is the austro-hungarian empire and on its kind of

00:04:08.440 last legs and the crown prince in 1889 dies in a apparent murder suicide with some noble woman that

00:04:16.060 he that no one knew he was having an affair with but like yeah apparently and that's the kind of

00:04:20.980 city it is we're just like people are are are living a little bit on the on the edge and

00:04:25.560 what does that remind me of it's a time when the the neurosis the contradictions are coming to the

00:04:32.460 Four, people are getting weirder, and there's a sense that the center cannot hold.

00:04:38.820 Yeah, Weininger, in a weird way, comes of age in that.

00:04:42.100 He was born into it, basically, and didn't outlive it.

00:04:45.300 And he kind of, in hindsight, comes to emblematize that kind of intellectual ferment, the kind

00:04:50.240 of big ambitions and the highly neurotic qualities of it all.

00:04:54.400 There's a great book in French, Le Car, Otto Weininger, Racine de l'Antifeminisme et

00:04:59.920 Antisemitisme from 1982, which says Weininger sums up the demons of an entire epoch. And that's

00:05:05.260 often how he's positioned. He's not the most original thinker, but it's all unvarnished

00:05:12.040 out there for people to see. What in paintings and music, et cetera, et cetera, you sort of had

00:05:17.820 to intuit and deduce. He's just like, here's what I mean. Here's how this is.

00:05:22.480 So he makes the subtext text, as people sometimes say, like Donald Trump in our epoch. All right.

00:05:27.580 So he graduates high school in 1898.

00:05:30.440 He's clearly brilliant, starts attending the University of Vienna, so doesn't really leave

00:05:34.560 the city very much at all.

00:05:36.780 And his dissertation was basically a version of sex and character.

00:05:40.940 A version, we'll talk about that later, is still pretty different from the book.

00:05:45.400 And he has two advisors who I'm sure people aren't going to connect much with.

00:05:50.420 Fritur Hjodel, who's kind of an empiricist or positivist, like someone who wants to meld

00:05:56.140 empirical science and philosophy, and Lorenz Müller, who is a theologian. So that gives you

00:06:01.720 a little bit of a sense of the breadth of these dissertations. That's not unusual at the time,

00:06:05.820 but it gives you a sense of the scope of his ambition. He gets his PhD, I believe, in 1902

00:06:11.280 quite quickly and converts to Protestantism. From Catholicism? No, he was Jewish.

00:06:18.380 Oh, he was Jewish. Okay. And then travels to Bayreuth. Longtime listeners will recall that

00:06:23.040 Bayreuth is where Richard Wagner sort of settled down after his Swiss sojourn. So just as Nietzsche

00:06:29.160 makes his pilgrimage to Switzerland to see it, then in exile Wagner, basically Weininger goes

00:06:36.200 to Bayreuth to see this opera Parsifal, which is Wagner's last opera. Wagner's dead by that point.

00:06:42.160 It's his last opera. And I'd have to double check this, but was for a long time only allowed to be

00:06:48.160 played at Bayreuth and Wagner had had made it so that that you couldn't perform it anywhere else

00:06:53.380 it turns out that had no force of of contract at all and I think it was the Met Opera in fact that 0.88

00:06:58.680 was like fuck it we're putting it on anyway right leave it to New Yorkers to be like we're putting 0.86

00:07:02.740 on a show guys maybe maybe I'll say more about that when we're actually talking about Weininger's 0.99

00:07:07.280 book because like it's very clear it leaves a makes a serious impression on him he calls

00:07:13.100 Wagner, quote, the greatest person since Christ, which, you know, it's nice praise if you can get

00:07:20.340 it. Parsifal is the story of a knight who, or a young man who joins a group of knights that guard

00:07:27.640 the Holy Grail. And it's an all-male ensemble with one exception. There's one female voice 0.95

00:07:33.320 that sort of threads to this entire opera. And it's very much a masculinist and in some ways

00:07:40.880 anti-feminist opera but i'll say a little bit more about that later the one thing that i am i do want

00:07:47.260 to point out is that you know just to give you a sense of like that weininger's experience of this

00:07:51.740 as a kind of revelation was not accidental but was in fact intended wagner insisted that it was

00:07:56.520 not an opera well wagner insisted that none of his operas were operas but he always had like a

00:08:00.880 different name for them and this one is supposed to be a bühnenweifestspiel so a religious

00:08:06.140 performance on a stage, right? And Weininger seems to have taken it as exactly that, right?

00:08:13.260 He was like, well, this is, I just had a religious experience here.

00:08:16.800 So anyway, let me slow down and recap this for our listeners, because what I'm hearing is that

00:08:23.020 this incredibly intense teenager has graduated college, seemingly gotten a doctorate immediately.

00:08:31.580 He has a version of this weird misogynist masculinity manifesto in his book that is incorporating all of the quite heady pathologies of his time.

00:08:44.920 He has had a religious conversion.

00:08:48.780 And then he goes to see this masculinist Christian opera from a man he understands as like quasi-divine.

00:08:58.820 Yeah.

00:08:58.940 This sounds like an intense few months, I got to say.

00:09:01.980 This is also happening very, very fast.

00:09:04.160 It's happening very fast.

00:09:05.200 But also if you're hearing certain, let's say, analogs to today's, you know, young male radicalization, like I think that's not an accident.

00:09:13.960 We're going to dance around the word incel a lot.

00:09:16.020 He's not so much the in part is the problem.

00:09:18.420 The celibacy part he was very down with.

00:09:21.020 It was not involuntary.

00:09:22.520 But, you know, in another time, in another place, I think Otto Weininger could have ended up in an even darker place than he did end up.

00:09:28.940 at least as regards to other people.

00:09:31.600 You're absolutely right.

00:09:32.360 It's this highly intense biography

00:09:34.500 that kind of interacts with all these pathologies of his age

00:09:39.260 and all these kind of cultural neuroses

00:09:41.060 and obsessions of his age.

00:09:42.360 I'm going to ask you one clarifying question

00:09:44.820 before we move on more into this guy's work in life.

00:09:47.560 But like what for a, I'm guessing like bourgeois,

00:09:51.380 Jewish born Viennese guy with these intellectual talents

00:09:56.560 in the 1880s and 90s,

00:10:00.100 would he know many women?

00:10:02.800 What would his,

00:10:03.760 like, I'm assuming

00:10:04.500 he's not going to school with them, right?

00:10:06.040 He's probably not encountering them as peers.

00:10:08.780 It's a good question.

00:10:09.900 In the university,

00:10:10.760 I think there were some.

00:10:12.200 I would have to look up 1.00

00:10:13.680 when the first women 1.00

00:10:15.800 were graduating

00:10:16.820 from the University of Vienna.

00:10:17.900 This really depends

00:10:19.160 by university to university,

00:10:21.360 but it was not unheard of

00:10:22.720 by 1902.

00:10:23.600 But it is an exception

00:10:24.900 and considered exceptional.

00:10:27.820 Yeah.

00:10:28.100 Then again, you know,

00:10:29.440 van der Siegler Vienna 0.99

00:10:30.120 did have famous women artists and authors.

00:10:33.240 So, you know, he's not in a,

00:10:34.500 and he's not growing up Catholic, right?

00:10:35.880 Which is another way in which

00:10:37.400 a lot of, you know,

00:10:39.320 young Austrian men at the time

00:10:41.340 were kind of sheltered from the opposite sex, right? 0.97

00:10:45.560 That was the number one way 1.00

00:10:46.820 to just like never interact with a lady. 1.00

00:10:49.420 Just only go to sex-segregated Catholic institutions 0.98

00:10:52.320 and structure your life around them. 0.90

00:10:53.800 Yeah.

00:10:53.900 Yeah. And that's that is not what he did. So I have never, to be honest, read an entire biography of him. So I don't know much about his early life. But it does strike me also as important that he's converting to Protestantism and maybe the most Catholic country in the German speaking world. Right. Like it's extremely. If you go to Vienna today, it's literally dominated by the Catholic Church. He picks Protestantism. Right. Like it's the form of Christianity. That's basically not that. Right. That's not.

00:11:22.180 uh and that has no crucially has no marian devotion right generally protestants are kind

00:11:27.740 of a little bit allergic to yeah you know catholic worship of mary and and her you know array of

00:11:34.420 female virgin martyr sidekicks yeah yeah so it's a little bit you know like the way some some people

00:11:41.420 in the united states these days on the right choose not to convert just to bog standard

00:11:45.920 evangelical christianity but they're like i'm going orthodox right it's like it's it's like that

00:11:50.140 So he has this dissertation, he's on this mission, he's very excited about Wagner, and nothing wrong with that, except that people who are excited about Wagner sometimes get up to terrible things.

00:12:03.080 Yeah, it's got a bad reputation, the fandom.

00:12:06.240 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:07.100 So, I mean, full disclosure here, like, you know, if people think I'm making fun of Wagner here, I was dragged to see the Ring Cycle for the first time at age 12.

00:12:15.900 So I have, you know, what for you is Catholic school is for me, the ring of the Nibelungs.

00:12:21.760 And I still do like it. 1.00

00:12:23.320 I have to say, I'll defend seeing it.

00:12:25.740 I will not defend the man who wrote it for a half second.

00:12:28.420 But so I kind of get where he's coming from on some level.

00:12:33.020 It's, you know, these are punishing five hour musical ordeals.

00:12:36.680 Like you feel like you've really made it through, you know, through a kind of shell shocking experience by the time you're out of them.

00:12:44.560 and he's he's made this this pilgrimage here he tried to publish his dissertation which which is

00:12:50.700 is uh common has to in fact happen in german-speaking universities uh and he takes it to

00:12:55.880 his advisors and they're like yeah but you got to rewrite parts of this like you can't publish it

00:13:00.580 like this what what do they think is wrong with it so my guess is that that that especially jodel

00:13:06.260 thought that it was overly i didn't look into this but but an empiricist would say like look

00:13:11.680 There is a medical basis from which you're arguing here, and we can talk about that later, that actually this is supposed to be empirical on some level.

00:13:18.200 But you're straying into metaphysics, which is something that Viennese positivists were extremely allergic to.

00:13:24.480 So he would have probably been like, I can't recommend this to my publisher unless you get rid of some of these metaphysical flights of fancy, which was a problem in that Weininger was mostly interested in the metaphysical flights of fancy.

00:13:35.320 wait wait wait this might be a good moment to slow down and just elucidate for our listeners

00:13:41.980 a little bit about what was in this weird book that you know distills all of the neurosis of

00:13:48.760 its time that is interested in these medical physical flights of fancy that is marking him

00:13:53.680 clearly as brilliant but is also making his teachers and professors go like whoa chill out

00:13:58.300 this needs a little more rigor it needs to be a little less weird like what is the project of the

00:14:02.260 book like top line what do our listeners need to know about it so the bay i mean we'll get into the

00:14:07.160 meat of it later but the basic idea is that all human beings contain in them traces of both what

00:14:14.240 he thinks of the sexes and that all human beings are therefore in some basic manner bisexual it's

00:14:21.060 it's one of the first theories of gender and homosexuality or bisexuality that basically says

00:14:27.140 it's a continuum right that's not saying the the the you know the gay person is a pervert uh but

00:14:33.420 rather all of sexuality is a spectrum basically and he has he has some empirical observations

00:14:40.560 that he works from he i mean it's not ones that we would today recognize as particularly salient

00:14:45.240 but the motive argument would strike you as like okay you could argue like this it's just that we

00:14:49.980 don't right right he points out for instance that embryos are um you know that they go through

00:14:56.400 different stages and that you know this is the famous ernst haeckel idea that ontogeny

00:15:00.720 recapitulates phylogeny they thought that like the fetus of a species will undergo the entirety of

00:15:06.500 the species evolution in the room in utero right yeah in utero right and he's like well it's

00:15:12.120 interesting that that that gender is tied up with that and and so you know he he argued you know

00:15:17.240 there he argues from charts graphs numbers in in ways that frankly resemble someone like freud

00:15:23.480 Freud will also sort of have these flights where you're like, you can't prove that, Sigmund.

00:15:28.200 But then other things where you're like, oh, no, he's read medical articles.

00:15:31.320 They're not medical articles that we think necessarily hold water today.

00:15:34.280 But like the mode of argumentation, he's like, I'm doing medical science here.

00:15:38.220 So it's proceeding from a quasi-medical empirical basis of the like sort of available understandings of physiognomy and human development.

00:15:49.280 Very selective, very selective, yeah.

00:15:52.020 And it is a understanding of sexuality as, you know, containing variants within the individual that is sort of commiserate to what we think of as like Freud's theory of sexual development, right?

00:16:08.520 Exactly.

00:16:09.160 Which is why Freud gets super excited about this.

00:16:11.900 Really?

00:16:12.340 Okay.

00:16:13.180 But it also does sound, if I'm understanding Weininger correctly, which, you know, I'm probably not.

00:16:18.640 but if i'm understanding him correctly it sounds like he does have something of a hierarchy

00:16:22.820 of gender and sexuality right like he has something of a is under underselling it yes

00:16:28.900 he has a version that he thinks is kind of the correct or uh most metaphysically worthy or uh

00:16:36.540 sort of like orthologically complete way to do this well no it's so so yes i mean i think you

00:16:41.520 you had it right with he uses this to explain explicate a metaphysical theory and i'm guessing

00:16:46.300 this is where his advisors were like buddy that's that's going a little far and that might not be

00:16:50.820 supported by what you have of science here okay that's not in evidence yeah yeah so but you're

00:16:57.580 pointing out exactly like they're they're the impulses would have been recognizable to someone

00:17:02.080 like freud which is why weininger next after his advisors are like we're not publishing this goes

00:17:06.260 to freud and shows it to him and freud is kind of impressed by this guy's like he's intense he's kind

00:17:11.740 I think he might be a genius.

00:17:13.320 I don't think he's well, but he's a genius.

00:17:15.320 But likewise, Freud was like, well, there are a bunch of things here that aren't right.

00:17:19.460 There are a bunch of methodological deficiencies.

00:17:21.480 This would need to be corrected before publication.

00:17:24.220 And Weininger is like, I'm not changing a thing.

00:17:26.040 And so that also comes to naught.

00:17:27.840 So this is also a kid who's impressive enough and at least sufficiently connected that he

00:17:32.480 can just like ring up Freud and be like, you are going to read my dissertation, sir.

00:17:36.560 Well, Freud, remember, was not quite Freud at the time.

00:17:39.780 Like he's not the institution he would later become.

00:17:41.740 So Freud's, I think he'd already moved into his, the place where he would famously later

00:17:47.000 see patients.

00:17:48.220 That's the, that gas is something like, I mean, Viennese listeners can correct me, but

00:17:52.440 like, I would say that's a five minute walk from the University of Vienna.

00:17:54.920 I mean, like, yeah, yeah, this is all within, within walking distance.

00:17:58.960 And, you know, Freud is still very much at the beginning of his, of his work.

00:18:03.080 And he's still kind of figuring out a lot of the things he's famous for too, right?

00:18:06.340 So for instance, he's kind of grappling with this question of bisexuality as well, right?

00:18:10.700 his version of this will become the concept of polymorphous perversity but he doesn't yet have

00:18:15.760 that yet this is the time when he's when he is exchanging letters with a physician named Wilhelm

00:18:20.320 Fliess which you can read up on or if you don't want to read up on them you could check out our

00:18:25.960 sibling podcast Ordinary Unhappiness which has been devoting I think like five special episodes

00:18:32.460 to the the Freud Fliess correspondence Patrick Abbey and I believe it's Christine Smallwood as

00:18:38.180 the guests are just going real hard on this one so we're just gonna gloss over this but if you do

00:18:44.080 listen to that podcast i think you can see why freud at that time would have been like huh like

00:18:49.100 some of this is crazy but some of this really resonates with what fleece and i are talking

00:18:53.960 about and of course freud is at this point still completely experimental right everything is just

00:18:58.920 not in the sense that he's experimenting but in the sense that like he's just trying out stuff

00:19:03.540 and and so he's like well why not this right like it doesn't seem like it's all right

00:19:08.180 but like, you know, like early, let's think big. Yeah. This is like 1902, right? It's very early

00:19:13.940 Freud. He's not committed to a theory yet. So this guy comes in with one account of bisexuality

00:19:20.540 and Freud is like, yeah, yeah, why not? But he also tells Weininger parts of this don't hold up.

00:19:27.440 Buddy, you got it. You got it. Got to revise. Got to revise, which ironically, I don't think

00:19:31.260 Freud was a big reviser either. Again, the ordinary and happiness folks can correct me on this, but

00:19:35.880 i think he i think he loved appending footnotes being like that part's wrong and you're like

00:19:39.660 sigmund you you could have just you could have just edited it but um well he has he has a reason

00:19:45.020 for it and weininger just had ego so but eventually in 1903 the book does come out

00:19:50.160 the dissertation comes out as a book sex and character geschlecht and character and weininger

00:19:55.260 had changed a bunch now you might say well good he took notes oh he did not he did not take notes

00:20:01.160 He doubled down on all the stuff that everyone told him to cut.

00:20:04.780 He added a ton more antisemitism, a ton more misogyny, and he moved from what was initially

00:20:11.840 kind of supposed to be an empirical study, as I said, into basically straight up metaphysics.

00:20:17.180 Like, so everything that everyone had hated about this book, he like doubled down on.

00:20:21.120 So tell me about the argument of this book now in this version.

00:20:25.140 What is the source of the antisemitism and of the misogyny?

00:20:27.960 Also, I think we'll have to get to that. It's because it's just like the word cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs gets thrown around a lot. And like, I do want to be very careful. Like we have to, I think we have to walk people there. It's like the bottom line is it's the most rank antisemitism you've ever heard. But I think that short sells why this book became so influential. Because if I'm just going to lay it out, people are just going to turn off the phone and like switch to something else. I'm like, why am I even bothering with this? Which fair enough, you know, you have my permission.

00:20:57.560 but i mean this is a podcast devoted to odious little freaks yeah this seems like the most

00:21:04.360 odious most freakish guy we've perhaps yet encountered he's a he's definitely up there

00:21:10.080 he's a he's a he's a hall of famer um the book comes out and it's not sort of torn apart like

00:21:15.460 he gets a couple of notes i think august rinberg writes to him the playwright was like i thought

00:21:19.920 this was very impressive the other thing to note is that the dissertation was long the book is 600

00:21:25.620 pages so i don't know if everyone got to the end which is where the anti-semitism comes in

00:21:29.720 like it's sort of right around page 350 and you're like oh no oh no uh you know where like

00:21:36.120 the things really take a turn you're like he's not going there and then he's like yeah i went

00:21:41.420 right for it yeah okay yeah so the book has has some reception it's not altogether negative but

00:21:47.620 it's not certainly not a bestseller and and weininger who was already kind of struggling

00:21:52.080 with depression and feelings of inadequacy, et cetera, and self-hatred, shockingly, gets even

00:21:57.260 more depressed. And so on October 3rd, here's the trigger warning, right? He rents a room in the

00:22:03.320 house where Beethoven died and shoots himself in the heart. And he's found the next morning,

00:22:08.840 barely alive and dies at the hospital and becomes kind of this cause célèbre because of this

00:22:14.860 suicide right this young genius who wrote this half crazy half visionary book and then you know

00:22:22.400 took this ultimate step in some way this also means that his his reputation can be

00:22:28.860 advanced by a tragic ending but it cannot be delegitimized by like his aging into more extreme

00:22:38.060 cranking crankiness right like this is something like he has cemented at the time when he wrote

00:22:42.560 this book the book is a it sounds like a real crank book i will admit i have not read all 600

00:22:46.720 pages of alter weidinger's sex and character but like he cannot do what a lot of our intellectuals

00:22:54.320 do what nietzsche seems to have done which is get weirder in old age right yeah yeah can go on an

00:23:01.360 all-beef diet yeah get fall into a experiment with comatoseness yeah move to indonesia for

00:23:07.920 unclear reasons yeah that kind of thing oh did not even know that that that was hypothetical i'm not

00:23:12.980 thinking oh okay okay yeah but yeah so i mean like but so this book has this extremely strong

00:23:19.160 influence uh on on on sort of intellectual culture in the first i would say quarter of the 20th

00:23:25.040 century when we first third it has two kind of receptions it has one that's supposed to a gender

00:23:29.300 one that's mostly about race and it's the one about race that is frankly of course the one that

00:23:33.660 goes to the darkest possible places because if you think about people who lived in vienna in 1903

00:23:39.020 or thereabouts who like the idea of a 600 page anti-semitic tract written by a person who

00:23:45.800 converted from judaism who then kills himself like adolf hitler loved this guy right like like

00:23:51.580 the nazis liked weininger like so what did the nazis get from weininger i mean just that you

00:23:58.040 know this was exactly what they wanted out of uh jewish people self-hatred and and then not being

00:24:05.900 around anymore right it's like the reception there is is too horrible i think even for our podcast

00:24:10.680 it's just you know people can imagine it i don't want to belabor it but basically this was like the

00:24:15.040 one jewish author that they loved citing and publishing frankly but i guess i'm asking what

00:24:20.820 is the content of his anti-semitism because there's a lot of different kinds of anti-semitism

00:24:24.400 Again, I don't want to – I feel like this is that Simpsons episode with Itchy and Scratchy going to the fireworks factory and they never get to the fireworks factory.

00:24:32.520 We're going to get to the fireworks factory, but we have to take the long road to the fireworks factory.

00:24:36.960 I'm sorry.

00:24:37.180 You just keep on like pointing out this huge red button and then not let me press it.

00:24:43.160 But so I do want to tee people up for this.

00:24:46.020 All right.

00:24:46.280 All right.

00:24:46.680 All right.

00:24:47.060 All right.

00:24:47.360 I'll stop.

00:24:48.040 I'll stop.

00:24:48.240 My apologies.

00:24:49.000 My apologies.

00:24:50.060 Just to give you a sense of just how widely this book was really read.

00:24:55.080 So in 1995, there was this volume on responses to Weininger.

00:24:59.780 And the very simple title is Jews and Gender, which I think is like, they're not overselling

00:25:04.520 it.

00:25:04.800 Like this is kind of the central text to look at or the central person to look at.

00:25:08.780 Think about antisemitism and gender, probably even before Weininger.

00:25:12.120 He kind of distills, you know, like the quote I brought earlier, he distills a bunch of

00:25:17.240 antisemitic tropes and then certainly kind of hypercharges them for the 20th century but like

00:25:22.860 just to give you a sense of like the number of people who had who this weird guy and his weird

00:25:28.960 book had a had an impact on right so ludwig wittgenstein carl krauss elias carnetti sigmund

00:25:35.080 freud franz kafka james joyce dh lawrence gertrude stein it goes on and on and on and like it's

00:25:40.460 really really remarkable and so and the point that this these essays make and i think this is

00:25:45.140 something that a lot of writers became very fascinated with is that gender is incredibly

00:25:49.240 important for the articulation of 20th century antisemitism, but also antisemitism is probably

00:25:55.200 inescapable when thinking about how gender is thought in the early 20th century, right? Like

00:26:00.260 when we think about what's proper masculinity, proper femininity, antisemitism is a way in

00:26:05.680 which that was articulated. So Jews are among other things, the people in Europe who are doing 0.98

00:26:10.860 gender incorrectly and you can tell what's correct by contrasting it with what the jewish 1.00

00:26:16.860 population is doing right and you know and we've we've alluded to the the this before right like

00:26:22.780 this goes for both jewish masculinity and jewish femininity though i think weininger is really

00:26:27.280 mostly he's not thinking about jews and gender he's thinking about jews and masculinity but of

00:26:31.280 course you know the the figure of the demonic jewish mother right like the overbearing jewish 0.84

00:26:35.920 mother that existed back then too so like it's it really goes for for for both masculine and

00:26:41.080 femininity and you know as as a former advisee of mine is showing in his book that's coming out soon

00:26:46.660 even trans experience was often framed in terms of jewish experience right both both by jewish

00:26:53.460 writers and by non-jewish writers so people people like to oversell academic volumes i think this is

00:26:58.400 a very justifiable title to the juice and gender that's that's in this book and that's what this

00:27:04.100 book really helps helps foreground so yeah let me get to what sex and character is actually

00:27:28.420 about finally all right yes you've badgered me for dessert yeah i've been bullied i've been bullied

00:27:36.580 to to uh actually have to talk about this at its most basic the main claim of the book falls at

00:27:43.140 least for listeners of this podcast into the category you know stop me if you've heard this

00:27:47.760 one before right man and woman designate two principles or basic modalities of the human of

00:27:55.220 human nature, right? Masculinity is- Wow, never heard that before. Yeah, wild.

00:28:00.120 Mind-blowing, yes. Masculinity is, get this, noble, moralizing, generative, it's genius,

00:28:10.020 and it's formative. And femininity is base, immoral, destructive, all about the body, 0.97

00:28:15.820 not about the mind, right? Are you telling me that this guy is associating women with 0.95

00:28:21.700 animalistic nature and men with a higher refined logic that is crazy yeah yeah he should have

00:28:28.680 patented this he's like uh we have a mr aristotle here who uh who made the same patent claim about

00:28:37.080 2000 years ago masculinity is all about spirit and femininity is about drive or instinct yeah

00:28:42.520 it's just uh real original stuff here really really wonderful okay so that i'm not shocked

00:28:47.880 by but what's gonna shock me what's next well okay so i don't know if this next part is already

00:28:52.340 gonna shock you but it's it's already unusual men and women do not exist in nature nothing that

00:28:57.160 exists in nature is perfectly male or perfectly female he thinks any actual human being wow

00:29:03.080 i know right like we went straight we went straight from like aristotle to like gear shift

00:29:09.820 we're at gender trouble it's 1991 i've got like a lip ring yeah this is great hi i'm out of

00:29:15.420 you're probably wondering how i got here you know and this is how i got here so every every human

00:29:20.260 being is basically an admixture of these of these two factors that he often refers to as m and f

00:29:26.480 right or m and w so man and woman but he but he kind of uses that that that abbreviation sort of

00:29:33.820 say like these aren't people you meet on the street right these are principles that are in

00:29:39.080 differential distribution among among any existing human being that you might meet on the street right

00:29:45.620 We're all sort of sexed and not gendered. 0.88

00:29:48.240 This is where it's different from Judith Butler

00:29:49.620 on a scale from sort of perfect man to perfect woman, right?

00:29:54.800 Pure man is basically God or God's image, right?

00:29:58.420 It's Adam. 0.99

00:29:59.060 The absolute pure woman, and this is interesting, right? 1.00

00:30:01.800 You might think, oh, it's just animal. 0.97

00:30:03.320 No, she's nothingness, right?

00:30:05.700 This is where most likely his empiricist devise was like,

00:30:09.020 wait, that's from Aristotle's metaphysics.

00:30:12.400 Like, what are you doing?

00:30:13.200 it you know basically all actually existing gendered expression is somewhere in the middle

00:30:18.680 and thus as weininger writes quote man and woman complement and determine each other so we have a

00:30:23.640 version here of complementarity but of a really weird kind right like the idea that our existence

00:30:28.680 is a dialectic between being a nothingness that's a that's pretty bog standard metaphysics but

00:30:33.800 you know but but it's it's kind of unusual to apply that to gender right the idea that women

00:30:39.800 are animalistic like as you pointed out is like super old but like ultimately that's not even true 0.91

00:30:46.800 woman is about lack they're non-entities yeah non-entities exactly femininity is a non-entity

00:30:52.220 this is you know this is one of those moments where i feel like i have one of these at least

00:30:56.120 like once per episode where i'm like this could have been said by shulamith firestone right like

00:31:01.180 as a critique of femininity as like self-effacement has taken to its ultimate form but i'm guessing 0.99

00:31:07.500 as is always the sort of the place where radical feminists and gender conservatives diverges in the

00:31:13.940 second clause of the sentence whereas radical feminists say and that's bad Otto Weininger is 0.99

00:31:19.140 going to say and this is good or this is at least like an appropriate ordering of the world well

00:31:24.720 we'll see I mean he doesn't think it's appropriate or inappropriate he thinks it's just reality right

00:31:28.680 like that's the this is why where he still has his empirical basis although he got rid of it for the

00:31:34.060 publication and it doesn't prove what he thinks it proves but like he thinks like well this is

00:31:37.920 just these are just the facts i'm not saying that this is good or bad but but you're absolutely

00:31:40.920 right and there were feminists then who read this and were like if you replace this with gender roles

00:31:45.740 then yeah this man is spot on but he's not talking about a socially constructed gender role he's

00:31:50.840 talking about like sort of ontologically pre-existing gendered self yeah but the idea

00:31:55.800 that the that you know the sex that isn't one right is a is a uh you know is a modern feminist 0.99

00:32:01.640 idea, right? Like, you can imagine why feminists at the time were like, yeah, I mean, like, a lot 0.94

00:32:06.420 of this is garbage, but like, he's queuing into something here, right? But we'll talk about this 0.97

00:32:10.600 part. Yeah, okay. Yeah. But basically, so woman for him is defined by lack, right? Again, not as

00:32:17.660 a role or as a gender category, but as an actual principle. Womanhood is about lack. Just for the 1.00

00:32:25.380 record right like she lacks an ego a soul morality originality orientation etc etc basically where a 1.00

00:32:32.620 concept goes to work on brute matter like woman is like the inert matter right which is like 0.98

00:32:38.180 lovely just lovely is this i take it this is metaphorized as a lot of this kind of thing is

00:32:43.340 from the mechanics of intercourse right i'm not even sure he's so sex phobic i'm not even sure

00:32:50.660 that that that that may be in the background there there were a lot of thinkers that he could

00:32:54.760 drawn on like schopenhauer where that's true fichte where that's true i i don't know it depends

00:32:59.900 a little bit on his course of reading but he himself was you know this is not a connection

00:33:04.180 he's making explicitly not not that i recall again it's 600 pages and i i only reread parts

00:33:10.160 of it for this to be honest but not in the parts that i i recall it's really more that like woman

00:33:14.700 receives her essence right her content only from men and here we might um you know might think of

00:33:21.980 some thinkers that either we have treated on this podcast or we might. This can sound a little bit

00:33:26.380 like, for instance, my former Stanford colleague, René Girard. A woman receives an essence or 0.78

00:33:31.840 receives content once male desire imputes something to them. Only when man affirms his 0.67

00:33:36.160 own sexuality binding or rights, women becomes something. She becomes something in the eyes of 0.99

00:33:40.880 men. If man were to withdraw his attention, you know, a woman disappeared. Remember, like these 0.52

00:33:45.240 are not actual individual women. Like he doesn't think they'd like go poof. He's saying the concept 1.00

00:33:51.520 of w basically disappears right the the this admixture in human beings which and you heard

00:33:56.620 that right um means all sexual desire is bad basically oh wow so this is not like a healthful 0.87

00:34:03.300 exchange of male essence into you know woman nothingness by which women are like incorporated

00:34:11.020 into a world of meaning right this is kind of like a waste or a misplacement yes of the male

00:34:15.960 drive yes it's basically creating a kind of duality where none existed before if we didn't

00:34:21.720 have the the drive to impute to that other side some kind of some kind of essence that justifies

00:34:29.860 our desire uh then it wouldn't have kind of content at all right so he thinks that the

00:34:35.920 renunciation of sexual desire is sort of what he calls it a high middle so that's both healing as

00:34:41.340 in medicine, but it's also salvation. So it's also the form of salvation. You renounce sexual

00:34:47.580 desire and you thereby can make this horrible W disappear. Now you might think, well, gee,

00:34:56.820 it feels like this is only a critique of heterosexuality, right?

00:35:01.480 Right. I'm glad you asked. No.

00:35:06.140 I was about to be like, how does he feel about gay stuff? 0.99

00:35:09.740 well he has some feelings about gay stuff okay the problem is right so yes it sounds like it's 0.95

00:35:15.780 a perfect justification for well at least m on m right if m desires m and that should be good

00:35:22.320 w and w is like just nothing loving nothing which he's like whatever but he's the thing he thinks

00:35:27.040 you can't it's it's not possible and and that's not sexual love anyway so like like basically

00:35:32.160 homosexuality so i don't want to get too far into this we're going to talk about this a little bit

00:35:37.080 more because that's essentially arguably the most influential aspects of this book you might think

00:35:41.720 well gee this this this seems like something adrian would like because it says everything

00:35:46.740 about about male homosexuality right which like people were like could there be something like

00:35:52.180 that going on here possibly but not really because he thinks that gay women are more m than f as well 0.70

00:35:58.400 that's why they that's why they love women right so they hang out at the home depot yeah so so this

00:36:06.820 so you and i are unfortunately in the same boat here right if anything anything i may have more

00:36:12.720 f than you uh not to brag but uh this reminds me of this audrey woolen who's a an art writer

00:36:21.140 made this meme where she's like i think that male artists should not be allowed to make art 1.00

00:36:27.440 about nothingness because girls own the void and i'm a little territorial of my feminine claim on 0.99

00:36:33.320 nothingness i'm like fuck off adrian girls own the boy well well unless you're going out with 1.00

00:36:39.060 some chad unfortunately you're on the wrong side of this you're not the void damn but you'll hear 1.00

00:36:46.260 out of this that he has some nice things to say about about about lesbians let's say well yeah 0.96

00:36:52.300 and about gender non-conformity right like oh interesting so that that it'll it'll go through

00:36:56.240 some very very so we're gonna get weirder we're gonna get weirder it's gonna get weird yeah so

00:37:00.800 but but before we get to the part that people might be like okay that there's that's kind of

00:37:05.840 that's almost neat i do i do need to hit you now with the anti-semitism stuff and like you know 0.96

00:37:10.080 just take on a brace position this plane is about to crash into the goddamn mountain all right so 0.96

00:37:16.160 because it gets wild so he's describing femininity as basically reactive as kind of nothingness it 0.98

00:37:22.380 leeches its essence out of the strong kind of the life-giving genius of masculinity it's entirely

00:37:28.900 mirroring, is, you know, weak and fully sensual, et cetera, et cetera.

00:37:32.720 So it's parasitic.

00:37:33.920 It's parasitic, right?

00:37:35.260 And so you might think, gee, that does kind of sound like an anti-Semitic stereotype of

00:37:40.000 Jews as well, right?

00:37:41.480 Like, and, you know, yeah, but, you know, Weininger doesn't take from that the obvious

00:37:46.560 conclusion that, you know, yeah, that anti-Semitism and misogyny are structured by similar logics.

00:37:52.400 He thinks, oh, that means Jews are women, right?

00:37:55.840 That's his conclusion. 0.99

00:37:57.760 women are bourgeois all jews are women this is amazing i love this it's i mean like yeah it's 0.85

00:38:04.420 classics of the genre yeah so yeah jews are women in this in this metaphysical schema that he's 0.96

00:38:10.820 pulling out let's go let's do this as a wagner scholar i should point out these are all

00:38:14.460 antisemitic canards that wagner was very fond of it's quite possible this is very late in the book

00:38:19.600 it's quite possible that it was because he was on his wagner kick that he put all this stuff in

00:38:23.360 there right like you know wagner wrote this horrible essay in 1851 judaism and music where

00:38:28.360 he sort of claimed that you know jews were unoriginal that they could only copy and simulate

00:38:32.920 and that they lacked the kind of naivete that is required for true genius and so on and so on

00:38:39.040 this is basically like his broadside against people like mendelssohn you know who for the

00:38:42.900 record is a wonderful composer but he just like had this whole thing about him and i should say

00:38:47.340 you know it's not clear whether vininger read this essay but like many have argued well okay

00:38:52.080 I have argued, and many others have also argued, that Wagner put these ideas into his figures and that very, very easily he could have read that out of the Wagner operas that you'd heard. It doesn't take rocket scientists to pick out figures that sort of embody Wagnerian anti-Semitism in his operas. Weininger, I would argue, did.

00:39:13.060 So the argument, it's an argument we've seen before. In fact, we saw that with people like Mr. Pottles in our Swole Christianity episode, right? It's that Christianity is the great, yeah, the swollenizing, the great masculinizing, the great, you know, dickification of Judaism, right? In Weininger's terms, it took a feminine religion and masculinized it, right? 0.96

00:39:37.360 It was part of a civilizing process that eradicated femininity from society.

00:39:41.820 And we can then infer that the reason he probably converted to Protestantism is that Protestantism

00:39:46.360 doubles down on that, right?

00:39:48.060 And dickifies, you know, Catholicism another 90% or whatever he thinks.

00:39:53.000 So this idea of a kind of masculinizing, civilizing process is one that we've encountered a bunch,

00:39:59.660 and Weininger's working with that.

00:40:01.000 Now, how any of this is supposed to work in practice, please don't ask me, right?

00:40:05.340 Like I, Weininger doesn't seem to think that there's a complementarity between Jewish and non-Jewish people the way there is between M and F. 0.94

00:40:11.800 So I don't, I don't fucking know how this works. 0.94

00:40:14.440 Are you telling me that a misogynist, anti-Semitic screed has some logical inconsistencies and isn't? 0.98

00:40:20.960 Well, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, you heard it here first, folks.

00:40:24.840 Yeah.

00:40:25.420 But like, well, even on a mechanical level, I'm not even sure, like, there's no therefore there.

00:40:29.860 Like, I don't, I don't, I don't get it.

00:40:31.300 but like part of it must be that he's basically well we'll talk about that more but that part of 0.93

00:40:35.680 this is an anti-modernism and he thinks that modernism is just you know heavily jewish and

00:40:42.180 so like it all feels like it's all these associations right that like that like all

00:40:47.420 kind of were in the ether in 1900 or 1902 but that he didn't feel like he had to substantiate

00:40:53.580 a vibes-based metaphysics that would have been intuitively like somewhat sensical or familiar

00:40:59.860 to people who are hanging out a lot in Vienna in 1900.

00:41:03.380 Exactly.

00:41:03.980 And I think it's worth pointing out that, right,

00:41:05.880 like this does appear to be the part that he wrote

00:41:08.780 after his advisor signed off on the thing, right?

00:41:10.680 So like, it's also like,

00:41:12.000 he's not having anyone else read this and be like,

00:41:14.160 I'm sorry, how did you get there, right?

00:41:15.600 Like it's, this is-

00:41:16.840 Not much robust editorial oversight.

00:41:19.700 You know, such as it was, right?

00:41:22.360 But like, it's definitely, 1.00

00:41:23.740 this is like severe crank shit. 0.99

00:41:25.940 And I should say that like, 0.99

00:41:27.340 this was also a mode of argumentation

00:41:28.820 that kind of thrived in Vienna at the time.

00:41:31.540 There were all these weird sort of semi-scientific

00:41:34.620 or pseudo-scientific works

00:41:37.600 that sort of circulated that today are completely forgotten.

00:41:40.360 There's this guy, Helbinger,

00:41:41.600 who has this like world glacier theory

00:41:43.720 about like Aryans coming from the ice. 0.99

00:41:47.460 And I guess like there's some hollow earth shit. 1.00

00:41:50.420 It's really fucking weird. 0.99

00:41:51.840 The only reason we know a lot of this stuff, 0.97

00:41:53.320 there's a great book by Brigitte Ham on Hitler's Vienna

00:41:55.940 that sort of goes through this

00:41:57.340 because one of the things is like that's where hitler probably gets that's where the idea of

00:42:02.340 the aryan race first comes up as like a thing that people got obsessed with it was in this

00:42:07.640 kind of pseudoscientific bilge that was sort of not like at the university of vienna but like

00:42:12.340 people who'd like yeah written a dissertation and everyone was like this guy's weird let's give him

00:42:16.160 a phd get him out of here and then he winds up yeah and then they're like they write these pamphlet

00:42:21.360 and like one person who like and basically the worst people you know ever right like read them

00:42:27.040 and they're like oh interesting well you know we have this we have our flat earthers we have our

00:42:30.380 anti-vaxxers we have our conspiracy theorists we have our chemtrails etc like this is a a very

00:42:37.540 easily analyzable milieu yeah but just to give you an idea of like how i think it's just like about

00:42:42.520 these consonances of like you know almost like stand-up bits like if they weren't so noxious

00:42:47.700 they'd be like stand-up bits right he says at some point that you know like women quote i'm

00:42:53.620 quoting vineyard i want to be clear like women jews tend to hang together so this is this idea

00:42:58.340 that like so he combines that this idea that like jews are too cliquish right which like is a super

00:43:05.340 old you know anti-semitic canard with like what women go to the bathroom together and like gab 0.98

00:43:11.220 about men or something like that it's like what what the fuck is this like this is reviving my 0.98

00:43:15.360 theory from earlier in the episode that this guy has met like max three women and one of them is 0.98

00:43:20.400 there might be something like that or or he has the nietzsche problem and like

00:43:23.900 grew up with too many around them and he's like they talked about me

00:43:27.860 i'm freaking out okay i think that what's important is like that he makes this leap

00:43:37.000 and he makes it kind of intuitively i do think that that is important because like it is it

00:43:42.000 just brings together a bunch of things that people intuitively did think so he is able to

00:43:47.940 very smoothly make this comparison between the concept of women and the concept of jewish people 0.85

00:43:56.300 that sort of folds them together into one entity of nothingness and that is a collapse that is

00:44:04.000 supported by sort of the assumptions of his time i'm guessing that a lot of readers read this and 0.92

00:44:10.600 were like this is complete and utter bullshit this is crazy what are we doing here but you know 0.92

00:44:16.620 the question of Jewish masculinity preoccupied Freud. He was worried about this, right? And like 0.99

00:44:23.000 there are, so I should give a quick shout out to Sandra Gilman, who has been doing this kind of

00:44:30.160 work for going on 40 years, just writing one great book about this after the other. I mean,

00:44:35.360 just to give you two examples, right? The Jew's Body is fantastic. Difference in Pathology,

00:44:40.840 Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness. Just check out his work. Basically every single one

00:44:45.880 of these will enlighten you about weininger and about what why weininger could just make this

00:44:51.540 leap but the fact that he could right the fact that like no one was like i'm sorry show you work

00:44:55.700 right what does that mean yeah yeah like i think that's that sort of proves gilman's point like

00:45:00.480 this stuff is in the ether in ways and even someone like freud who doesn't really credit this

00:45:06.040 like has an anxiety about it is like a little worried about right and like you we can think

00:45:11.460 about all kinds of things right like myths about circumcision we can think about sociology right

00:45:15.860 Like, you know, Weininger goes to university, Freud goes to a university that is pretty

00:45:20.700 recently integrated, right?

00:45:22.080 Like Jews had been prevented from a lot of careers in the Austro-Hungarian empire until

00:45:27.380 the, I believe the 1848 revolutions.

00:45:29.680 There might've been some opening before that, but like Freud is often sort of like, it's

00:45:33.540 part of the first generation that really could succeed.

00:45:36.060 Gustav Mahler, I believe is the first Jewish conductor for the Vienna Hofopa, right?

00:45:40.280 So like, and it's basically drummed out by antisemitic intrigues.

00:45:44.480 But the one place that Jewish men could not really enter was the army. So it's not an accident, right? There's an anxiety about Jewish men proving their manhood in ways that in the 19th century you were supposed to prove your manhood, namely shooting things into other people, the other men specifically, and a sense that there was some kind of defective masculinity here, right?

00:46:07.820 this is also what is it like how many years is before dreyfus right like where like france has

00:46:12.940 a freak out about this right like so again like sandra gilman would point to all this and be like

00:46:16.980 it just has to make a pointing gesture and be like all of this right like it's all in there

00:46:21.620 except that weininger is sort of the daffy one who like blabs it all out right like there's some

00:46:27.020 indication that a lot of his readers were like kind of almost like a little grateful it's like

00:46:30.560 at least you're putting it on paper this insanity because otherwise it's like all innuendo and like

00:46:36.740 humor and like oh come on like don't take it so seriously etc etc like he kind of brought these

00:46:42.540 pathologies and vomited them out onto the page and so i think it's also important that and we'll get

00:46:47.480 to that in a second right that like i already made made sorry fun of you for for being actually not

00:46:52.700 the thing that weininger would be most terrified by because you to weininger have taken the

00:46:58.080 admirable step of you know working away the f in you right you're you're you know you cut your hair 0.57

00:47:05.860 you uh you sleep with women etc etc right like yeah i am i have i have disavowed my feminine

00:47:12.960 nothingness and i'm aspiring to to something yes a masculine somethingness and substantiveness 0.87

00:47:19.560 right this is this is a lot of uh homophobic or like frankly misogynist accounts of lesbians

00:47:24.420 right it's like well yeah yeah at least they're being the thing that we more like the thing that

00:47:28.900 we like which is met right yeah and you might think you might think now that this is just a

00:47:35.180 Yeah. Box standard misogyny. And it might sound perfectly bonkers, but of course, notice what it

00:47:40.300 also is. It's a experience of assimilation. Right. And this is what this is. This is a theodicy of

00:47:49.460 Jewish assimilation through the lens of gender. Right. The idea of like, oh, you know, you pray 0.97

00:47:56.400 with them and you, you know, sing Christmas songs with them. And then you, you know, and then you'd

00:48:02.680 like, make, and to say, make jokes with them, right? Like, and suddenly you're just one of the,

00:48:06.800 the, the, the goyim, right? Like, yeah. It's the journey that he has been on over the past year. 1.00

00:48:12.580 Exactly. Yeah. Right. Um, everything that you'll hear, and that'll sound completely

00:48:16.220 batty when you say it about gender, people were very genuinely saying about Jewishness at the

00:48:21.400 time. Right. And, and again, Weininger's fascinating pathology is that he just says like, 1.00

00:48:26.260 oh, those are the same thing, which like, I mean, they kind of are right. Like, it's just,

00:48:30.200 you know it was far more acceptable in his day for like to do one than the other right like this

00:48:37.640 is also like i will say like talk about seeing this in modern times this is the turf account

00:48:41.420 of trans men right right they have sort of betrayed their uh oppressed status through

00:48:48.240 an assimilation into actual manhood and that this is kind of like a failure of the righteousness

00:48:54.360 of lesbianism according to the turf logic which i think we can i dissect more when we talk about

00:48:59.620 judith butler's new book which we should yeah record yeah like today obviously the accounts

00:49:04.380 of jewish assimilation we tend to be extremely leery of part of that is about what happened

00:49:09.540 between us and weininger but like it is important to stress that like assimilation was at the time

00:49:15.000 a pretty normal thing for people to do and even aspire to right you know 45 years later you

00:49:22.400 wouldn't get that where theodore wiesengrund in 1933 changes his name to theodore adorno

00:49:26.780 know and Hannah Arendt will never let him forget it and it's like oh it's because he was hoping

00:49:31.380 the Nazis wouldn't notice he's Jewish that's probably not true but like that was the charge

00:49:35.780 right she's like you little coward right but that's that's the 50 years between right like 0.80

00:49:40.720 that that that basically in 1933 people were like screw this I'm not I'm not you know I I you know 0.66

00:49:47.180 also you couldn't do it anymore because the you know at that point this kind of quote-unquote

00:49:51.620 scientific antisemitism that was obsessed with like you know blood and and extraction and you

00:49:57.800 know and family trees had taken over but it's noticeable right that like it was still conversion

00:50:03.000 was still a perfectly manageable path in 1902 or 3 but not everyone chose it so he understands

00:50:09.780 himself as having ascended not just into christianity but into a purer form of manhood

00:50:16.140 Right. Yeah. Except he can't fully get there somehow. Right. Like the part of this is is about himself. He doesn't think he's not he's not liver king. He's not trying to teach you how to do masculinity. He understands himself as a failure. Right. This is a case study in Jewish self-hatred. In fact, Sandra Gilman, again, has a book about Jewish self-hatred that dwells on Otto Weininger as well.

00:50:38.980 up till today right there was a i found an article in jerusalem post about the weininger syndrome

00:50:45.100 about sort of self-hating uh jews so that he still is kind of like this byword for jewish

00:50:50.400 self-hatred but it's also most likely gay self-hatred like there's something about his

00:50:53.980 like he was queer in some way right like there was if he if he could have unproblematically

00:50:58.240 just like found a girlfriend like this book would probably look different like there like whether 0.66

00:51:03.020 or not he's gay we don't know was gay we don't know but like there is a bunch of self-hatred

00:51:06.960 in there. And it's definitely a sense of defective masculinity. He just doesn't think he's man 0.90

00:51:10.940 enough. Well, that might bring us to the next point in his account in Sex and Character,

00:51:17.620 which is about bisexuality. Can you tell me his theory of bisexuality?

00:51:22.880 Yeah. So this is probably the most influential aspect of this book, right? All human beings are

00:51:28.000 in some measure bisexual. This is why Freud gets interested. This is according to Otto Weidinger. 1.00

00:51:34.600 this is not a yeah don't do not email us like this is not a argument i think we should be making on

00:51:40.520 our own behalf at uh in both the right but this is auto weininger believes that all human beings

00:51:45.340 are in some measure bisexual which is what gets the attention of freud yeah so freud in fact um

00:51:52.620 fleece and just to give you a sense of just how new that idea is fleece accuses reads the book

00:51:58.320 and is like, did you leak my idea of bisexuality to this guy?

00:52:02.960 And Freud's like, no, right?

00:52:05.700 This is fairly novel, right?

00:52:07.340 This is something that Gilman talks about too,

00:52:09.180 by the way, I should give credit there.

00:52:11.520 And in fact, it may,

00:52:12.800 I think it was sort of the beginning

00:52:13.960 of the end of their bromance.

00:52:15.320 They sort of have a very homosocial,

00:52:17.480 shading into more than that relationship.

00:52:19.940 Freud loves these kind of father figures

00:52:21.560 early in his career.

00:52:23.840 And this breaks it up.

00:52:24.940 The fact that they're like,

00:52:26.220 you told Weininger about bisexuality. 0.89

00:52:28.320 basically. So what does Weininger actually say? Weininger combines the idea of bisexuality

00:52:34.460 with this complementarity idea that he had, right? He proposes that in sexual attraction,

00:52:39.980 a person with a certain distribution of M and F, let's say they're one quarter M, three quarters F,

00:52:47.220 is looking for someone who has the exact complementary distribution. So in this case,

00:52:52.760 three quarters m uh one quarter f if you're playing along at home so this is kind of a

00:52:58.620 demented version of the story that aristophanes tells in plato symposium right where you have

00:53:04.500 these like super beings that get split into male and female halves and then they either male or

00:53:08.980 female halves and those have to they just find them each other and combine recombine that's what

00:53:13.060 love is but it also has song and hedvig and the angry inch that's right if you don't want to make

00:53:18.580 it all the way through go go watch the animation and have the angry inch but you know the two

00:53:23.060 halves sort of are like differently gendered and or complementarily gendered and it's an 0.88

00:53:28.400 explanation of why we're attracted to certain kinds of people right why our erotic interests

00:53:33.680 run are probably combined with gender presentations in some way he thinks it's completely determinative

00:53:39.180 i would find issue with that but but you know the the fact that like some people like muscle

00:53:45.760 about men and some do not right like this is a explanation of that it's intended as an explanation 1.00

00:53:51.180 of that auto weininger has a metaphysical theory about like femmes who are mean to you like this

00:53:56.480 is yeah like a whole he's got a lot he's got a lot to say about it yeah it's true right like yeah 0.98

00:54:02.080 this is why this is why hot girls are mean to nerds they're like you have too much you have too

00:54:06.200 much f i mean i i do think that the the average american high school might might bear some of

00:54:12.380 this book out, which is, which is a terrifying thought, you know, examine your life. If you,

00:54:17.080 if you, if you, if you, if you can be described, if you're providing, I was like, yeah, this proves

00:54:21.060 my theory, man. If you're nodding along at many points during our episodes, you need the help of

00:54:27.200 a professional. Exactly. But there's also something of, of, we've mentioned Arthur Schopenhauer

00:54:32.620 before in this podcast, Schopenhauer, you know, thought that we didn't have sexual desire. Sexual

00:54:39.480 desire moves through us and in specific what it is is the will of a child to be born so that the 0.98

00:54:46.580 child is like i want these two people to fucking make me basically it's a metaphor kind of but like

00:54:51.720 basically it's like it's future life that that that that drives us to desire and vineyard thinks 0.98

00:54:57.400 that through us one perfect m and one perfect f sort of try to create or recreate themselves right

00:55:03.780 they're like hey that's that person has a little that we know they're nice but they have two little

00:55:09.060 m or too much m and you need to get yourself a nice person with like two less or more m so that

00:55:15.460 we can be fully complete or something like that right that's the that's the idea these little

00:55:19.140 ghost babies whispering in your ear yeah well ghost m and ghost f's in this case those babies 0.81

00:55:24.300 are in schopenhauer the babies are in schopenhauer but these are um essence of of the the gendered

00:55:29.740 metaphysical world okay gotcha so you know you might think like oh my god like this this is what

00:55:35.760 this is the fireworks factory this is what we've been staying up for like well i don't know i feel

00:55:40.020 i find this pretty weird i feel like this is satisfactorily weird so and it's but it's also

00:55:45.520 like this might be again where people might hear some consonances with thinkers that we find a lot

00:55:52.540 more palatable than otto weininger right i'm taking this argument from chandex and gupta's

00:55:57.020 excellent 2000 book about otto weininger he points out this story about ratios makes homosexual

00:56:04.940 relations nothing but a statistical inevitability every human being falls somewhere between m and

00:56:10.340 f right some of them are going to be in that middle portion what will that middle portion

00:56:15.580 look like well those are going to be people who are going to seek out people with similar gender

00:56:19.900 presentations though that's where he thinks gay people live right and then he's like they are not

00:56:25.780 different from anyone else they are a different part of the spectrum right and gay people aren't

00:56:31.920 distinct from the straights, right? They're not sick, right? As 19th century medicine thought,

00:56:36.760 they're not neurotics, like Freud thought still at the time, I believe. They're not sinners.

00:56:42.400 They are, as St. Gupta writes, Weidinger adopted a populational perspective,

00:56:47.960 arguing that homosexuality represented the inevitable consequence of human sexual

00:56:52.300 intermediacy. The moment you have MNF and differential distributions, this is going to

00:56:57.180 happen. Can't wish it away. Can't do anything about it. It's just part of, you know, in a large

00:57:01.220 enough population that this is going to happen so he is he's understanding like male like

00:57:07.800 principled celibacy as sort of the aspirational healed uh sort of like christly way to be but

00:57:15.440 he's also interpreting homosexuality outside of the classical like so moral and moralizing

00:57:22.760 frameworks uh through which it has traditionally been understood at this time yeah so i think that

00:57:28.120 my guess is that most people who like this idea took it basically as separate from his

00:57:35.620 from his um from from his prescriptions of what ought to happen right because yes of course his

00:57:42.120 his ultimate prescription is that you know you should probably work away those parts in you that

00:57:47.780 keep you from perfection and therefore you in the end shouldn't be in a same-sex relationship

00:57:53.660 right or an opposite sex one for that matter for any relationship yeah right exactly right like so

00:57:58.640 he's not wild about those either um but those two are distinct enough that someone who's like well

00:58:02.440 i don't grant that i'm still gonna have sex right that like it's a it is a really strong argument

00:58:08.060 for you know these people are not different from from anyone else right like and and that's that's

00:58:13.280 really really important now i think you're getting at the big difference from freud from plato etc

00:58:19.380 et cetera played aristophanes really right aristophanes comes in the symposium it's

00:58:26.820 all about why love is a good thing right why it's kind of wonderful that we seek out each other

00:58:33.460 why it's we sometimes make fools of ourselves seeking out each other but why you know why 0.96

00:58:37.580 being together is is awesome the wedding speech the wedding speech yeah of sex sexual love yeah 0.91

00:58:43.640 he's like isn't it nice right we seek our our our compliment and while it's a sign of our own

00:58:49.880 defectiveness it's fine it's nice that we that we seek to compliment our defects right

00:58:54.080 weininger it's like no no no this is terrible right because the striving itself is the problem

00:59:01.280 right uh the sexual desire comes from the misalignment of m and f or the frankly the

00:59:07.600 existence of F in any of us at all, we should work away the false part of our compliment, right?

00:59:14.400 We should strive. And now you might think, right? You might be like, oh my God, is this going to go

00:59:18.740 here? Am I going to be told to grow out my hair, you know, find a nice boy, et cetera, et cetera?

00:59:23.340 No, right? Because you're not supposed to be working away your M. You're supposed to be

00:59:28.160 working away your F. We're all on a journey towards perfect masculinity, which I guess is

00:59:34.180 swole Jesus or Richard Wagner or something like that. I don't know. He doesn't seem to think that

00:59:38.920 women should strive for perfect femininity, right? Makes sense for him, right? Like, first off, 0.99

00:59:43.740 he's like extremely dismissive of femininity. And of course, she's a nullity who would 1.00

00:59:49.720 willingly for him, right? So who would willingly make themselves a nothing, right? 0.98

00:59:54.220 Most thinkers in this vein don't really have a ton of prescriptions for women's conduct, 0.93

01:00:02.380 right because women's lives are morally irrelevant they are non-entities they are not in the sphere 0.94

01:00:08.840 of moral or inquiry or concern right yeah well or you or you could sort of say oh it's more 0.98

01:00:13.780 instinctual and so like become more like that you know like you know basically be like you know a 0.72

01:00:19.500 maid who i can also have sex with or whatever right like like there are ways around this but 0.56

01:00:24.180 like he doesn't like sex and he doesn't think woman is identical to nature he thinks she's

01:00:29.580 nothing right so like basically that's not an option that he has he's like women should really

01:00:33.940 work this away right like they they should become little men once again i could find a radical

01:00:40.660 feminist from the late 19th i know who could who could have like roughly the same prescriptions 0.79

01:00:45.820 like okay what you need to do is divest yourself from femininity uh and embrace what have been

01:00:52.760 coded as masculine but are in fact merely human virtues like this could be i would like i do not

01:00:58.440 think they would hang out but this could be a prescription you get from like a mary daily yeah

01:01:02.880 i love i love the idea of auto whining or hanging out a lesbian commune i mean like you you all get

01:01:08.520 me and then they're like you know we're all women right he's like what like i gotta call someone

01:01:12.740 call me an uber yeah he's hightailing it out of northampton yeah yeah anyway so i mean like can i 0.90

01:01:19.260 say something without everyone getting mad like there is a certain weird fucked up logic to this 0.61

01:01:23.240 right you think that human sexuality is bad and you think that human sexuality is about the 0.96

01:01:27.700 relationship between these two principles then the way to quiet all sexuality is to remove

01:01:34.060 any duality right like the other side is not real you need to get rid of it he thinks

01:01:39.820 in his diary weininger once wrote that and i quote the hatred of woman is really the hatred

01:01:45.220 against one's own as of yet untranscended sexuality so this this to me like yeah not wrong

01:01:51.840 not wrong yeah yeah again again like if broken clocks man yeah if you talk about gender roles

01:01:59.240 like it's probably spot on but like but but he really thinks like it's a non-relationship right

01:02:04.340 i mean we also might think of like jacques lacan's infamous dictum there is no sexual relationship

01:02:10.660 very similar point he's like you're engaging with the speculum you're engaging with a mirror you're

01:02:16.360 engaging with a figment the thing you think you're having you're not having right like

01:02:21.480 there too vininger like yeah it's like it's a weird i do not want to say this man is ahead of

01:02:27.180 his time he's not ahead of any time but he's but they're like yeah broken clock describes it well

01:02:32.340 like sometimes these are these are strains that that were not these are strains of of european

01:02:37.680 thought that were not uh eradicated by the holocaust right like these are yeah yeah things

01:02:42.820 that have remained in the zeitgeist

01:02:45.440 in sort of the unspoken subtext

01:02:47.760 of a lot of European thought

01:02:49.960 that have been resurrected

01:02:51.320 in a figure like Lacan much later.

01:02:55.620 And so this was also where,

01:02:57.080 if you wanted to,

01:02:57.660 we could talk a little bit about Parsifal,

01:02:59.740 the opera that I sort of yada yada earlier.

01:03:02.200 Oh yeah, let's get into it. 0.99

01:03:03.920 Yeah, so it's the story of this young fool 0.97

01:03:07.160 who happens upon the Knights of the Holy Grail 0.95

01:03:11.520 And their king, the grail king, is in dire straits because he has, you know, basically met a woman who has wounded him.

01:03:26.340 Hint, hint.

01:03:27.380 Okay.

01:03:28.260 And who is therefore, and basically who has seduced him and wounded him thereby. 0.99

01:03:35.160 And only a pure fool can release him from this curse. 0.99

01:03:39.700 parsifal turns out to be that pure fool he meets said woman the only female speaking or singing 0.99

01:03:47.260 role in the entire opera and her name is kundri and she's sort of in league with this evil sorcerer 0.98

01:03:55.480 uh she kind of ensorcells him and tries to seduce him and at the end the moment she kisses him

01:04:01.300 parsifal understands feels sympathy for the the grail king and realizes what it was that

01:04:09.580 hurt him and at that moment he basically is able to banish this woman she uh becomes uh kind of she

01:04:16.820 is a mute basically for the entire rest of the she's on stage but she doesn't say anything she

01:04:21.560 becomes a penitent and the the all-male grail knights celebrate kind of this like all-masculine 0.74

01:04:28.200 communion so so woman is the force of all evil she imposes this terrible knowledge which 0.87

01:04:35.800 and syphilis not so not so not so covertly also syphilis yeah which imposes you know the fall 0.93

01:04:44.620 from grace but then also is the path to its restoration yeah and you know this is one reason

01:04:50.480 why nietzsche came to hate wagner he thought this was perfect garbage weininger loved this stuff

01:04:56.660 so what weininger took away from was and i'll this is again from his from his diary quote

01:05:03.160 coitus is the payment that the man has to make to the woman for her oppression right so it's the

01:05:08.220 it's the the wages men pay for women's oppression i have i have questions about this trade

01:05:15.640 yeah no right like well you also might have questions about the man who thinks this is a

01:05:21.900 trade right well it just seems asymmetrical on several levels and also yes this characteristic

01:05:29.200 of it as this like terrible tax that must be paid by the masculine kind i don't know i have notes i

01:05:35.060 have notes i feel like this does not stand up to scrutiny and we we should say right like so like

01:05:40.500 it's an it's an opera all about kind of a home male homosociality cleansed of all femininity

01:05:47.520 is essentially a step towards salvation right i should say that there are there were others who 0.83

01:05:53.840 took something totally different away from from that uh namely that gay sex rules but that's maybe

01:05:58.580 for another episode uh parsifal was apparently a fairly common shiffer that people would like

01:06:04.680 use in like personal ads they're like i'm looking for a bike companion in brackets parsifal and it's

01:06:10.300 like oh yeah there's gonna be more than just biking done on this trip i will say i will say 0.60

01:06:15.120 there's some people who will take anything to be a lesson in how much gay sex rules this is a sure

01:06:20.000 yeah a frequent motif i've noticed show show a gay man a lug wrench and they're like yeah that's 0.98

01:06:25.720 a metaphor for how much gay sex rule it is well you see you know anyway

01:06:32.040 weirdly weininger manages to still be kind of ambivalent about the women's movement 0.94

01:06:57.580 right oh that's that's not where i thought you were going with that okay

01:07:01.080 Oh, you thought he was going to be full of hatred?

01:07:03.640 Yeah.

01:07:04.720 Why did you think he was going to be full of hatred? 1.00

01:07:07.120 Because women are nothingness and therefore cannot be entitled to human values like, you know, citizenship, equal dignity, education. 1.00

01:07:15.900 These are antagonistic to their nature, right? 1.00

01:07:19.720 Yes, he agrees with all that. Except, you see, if you're a woman or a female presenting person in a university or in a women's lip movement, he thinks, well, that is you subduing the W in yourself, right? Or the F, right? You're embracing your inner M, right? 0.87

01:07:39.660 this is quite so that there is a an ethos that i want to just draw attention to which is that the

01:07:47.280 uh these ontological sort of like pre-social pre-voluntary impulses and drives within us

01:07:55.420 of masculinity and femininity are like can be contained by the will right they can be excised

01:08:02.440 they can be yes which is interesting you think that instincts couldn't be like who i find

01:08:07.780 attractive feels like the most given thing but like he doesn't think so right and again like i

01:08:13.040 think the analogy to jewish assimilation is pretty important here right like he has to think this is

01:08:20.140 possible because like he's lived it with respect to his culture um he's i think right and now he's

01:08:26.180 like well now i just gotta really do it with respect to gender right when he's like oh gee

01:08:30.600 that's a little harder than like changing your religion man like you but it's a very protestant

01:08:36.860 idea, right? It's like, I can purge my soul of its unworthy elements. I can become perfected 0.97

01:08:44.240 in the image of God. Doesn't he talk about like the healed, defeminized, masculine, 0.98

01:08:51.380 pure himself as a kind of salvation, almost in Christian terms, right? It's like ascending to

01:08:58.440 this Christly plane. Yeah. I forget who says this. I'm stealing this from somewhere,

01:09:04.200 but I don't know from whom.

01:09:05.880 I don't remember from whom.

01:09:07.000 Someone's like, yeah, it's the Protestant work ethic

01:09:09.280 applied to your gender presentation, right?

01:09:11.480 Or to gender, right?

01:09:12.540 To your sexual desires. 1.00

01:09:14.060 Just work hard enough, ladies. 1.00

01:09:15.480 You can become a man. 1.00

01:09:16.760 Yeah.

01:09:17.100 Yeah.

01:09:17.620 So it's first important to note that he's generally positive

01:09:21.080 about what he calls emancipatory movements, right?

01:09:24.780 Because he reads it as an attempt by certain women

01:09:27.660 to rid themselves of their own femininity. 1.00

01:09:30.260 That's, by the way, something that feminists 1.00

01:09:32.320 generally liked about Weininger.

01:09:33.720 There is a review of this book, the English edition by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, noted early feminist in the magazine, The Critic.

01:09:44.900 And she thought that Weininger was basically making the same point as a lot of feminists, right? 0.91

01:09:50.240 Femininity, as constructed traditionally, was an abomination and needed to be worked away, right? 1.00

01:09:56.560 Like they thought, no quibble with me, right?

01:09:58.520 Like it's not about like biology.

01:09:59.880 it's like the category the social category of femininity is a is bad and needs to be destroyed

01:10:05.560 and so so weininger very much like spoke their language in a weird way he had a few nice things

01:10:11.480 to say about female emancipation maybe i'll say a few i'll read two passages so first go for it

01:10:17.080 the general direction of the investigation is easy to understand from what has already been stated

01:10:22.580 a woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in direct proportion

01:10:27.560 to the amount of maleness in her right so he thinks you in some way you can't if you're a

01:10:34.880 woman asking for rights you're already discovering your inner dude and he's like good for you buddy 1.00

01:10:40.020 you can do it here's a baseball hat for you to wear yeah you can't be a feminist and be a real 1.00

01:10:45.600 woman but he means that as a good thing yeah yeah but in a good way yeah but i should mention right 0.94

01:10:53.980 Like you also hear why he hates, he loves emancipation. 0.76

01:10:58.080 He hates women's rights movements.

01:11:01.500 He's like, what you're trying to do is give rights to people who don't,

01:11:05.420 haven't worked for them. He's like, right. 0.83

01:11:07.680 Like you can't admit everyone, but only those.

01:11:11.940 So it's a very weird thing. 0.98

01:11:13.240 It's like if a feminist shows up to a, to Weininger and is like, 0.69

01:11:16.920 I demand this, he's like, good for you, get in there. 1.00

01:11:19.400 And they're like, and for all my sisters who's like, no, no, no, no,

01:11:21.260 because they didn't ask for it.

01:11:23.020 so they're still fully f and like they can't do this right so like they need to transform themselves

01:11:28.100 into more masculine creatures in order to be worthy of rights inclusion dignity yeah it's

01:11:34.040 like an incel version of consciousness raising yeah anyway so i'll read one more just to just

01:11:40.300 to where he explains this a little bit emancipate this is a little long i'm sorry about that

01:11:44.080 emancipation as i mean to discuss it is not the wish for an outward equality with with man but

01:11:50.340 what is of real importance in the woman question the deep-seated craving to acquire man's character

01:11:55.400 to attain his mental and moral freedom to reach his real interests and his creative power i

01:12:01.340 maintain that the real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity for emancipation in

01:12:06.280 this sense all those who are striving for this real emancipation all women who are truly famous

01:12:11.700 and are of conspicuous mental ability to the first glance of an expert reveal some of the

01:12:17.980 anatomical characters of the male oh my god sorry sorry it's like a it's great investigator it's

01:12:27.300 like this got an app adam's apple that woman's a dude yeah yeah but he means it in a good way

01:12:32.620 again he's like he's like good for you yeah new dudes we'd like to welcome the new dudes 1.00

01:12:38.240 to this orientation meeting this is how you you know play with your crotch or whatever all those 0.82

01:12:44.440 who are right and are consuming you know those so-called women who have been held up to admiration 0.86

01:12:50.120 in the past and present by the advocates of women's rights as examples of what women can do 0.63

01:12:55.740 have almost what women can do have almost invariably been what i have described as sexually

01:13:00.860 intermediate forms his point is like this is what happens to a person when they're already sort of

01:13:06.780 in the middle and want to you know really you know uh crank up their their m factor right so

01:13:13.040 yeah so that's that that's his his view on this kind of task that that this book thinks uh is set

01:13:19.400 for all of us the other thing we should point out just because with nietzsche we were so careful to

01:13:25.200 sort of point out that nietzsche was ultimately not anti-modern weininger is right really yeah

01:13:31.680 he's a he's a big critic of modernity and i think he's ultimately in some ways a traditionalist

01:13:37.960 right and and this is where his critique of judaism or of jewishness really goes he thinks

01:13:43.880 that the modern age is a jewish age right and this is again something that like the nazis would

01:13:48.140 really like about him right like why do the nazis hate modern art why do they call it degenerate 0.97

01:13:53.260 well it's because of you know vienna circa 1900 right the the term degeneration entered the

01:14:00.960 vocabulary of discussing art through max nordau who was you know a little older than weininger

01:14:06.200 but not by a whole lot, but was a Viennese writer, right?

01:14:09.440 So like this is the moment where people sort of,

01:14:12.080 this idea of that modernity is a diseased time

01:14:17.120 and that the disease is somehow identical 0.98

01:14:19.320 with both gender variance and Jewishness

01:14:23.960 really has a great deal of purchase.

01:14:26.560 And he thinks this is sort of a central aspect

01:14:29.140 of his critique.

01:14:30.840 What I want to impress on people

01:14:31.980 is that this critique of modernity is so widespread, right? 0.93

01:14:36.160 Like it's a feminacy, it's, you know, it's an originality, right?

01:14:42.440 Like think of how many trad Twitter accounts there are, like what's keeping art from looking

01:14:46.260 like this, right?

01:14:48.480 The thing that I find quite valuable in Weininger is that he just, in that daffy way that this 0.86

01:14:54.140 book does, sort of just makes explicit like, hey, this is antisemitism, right?

01:14:58.180 Like he doesn't think that's a problem, like, but for all of us who think that's a problem,

01:15:02.300 It's worth kind of thinking about, like to what extent anti-modernism and kind of very glib critiques of modern life as somehow inauthentic is basically it's about it's about gender.

01:15:18.640 There's a gender politics submerged not far below the surface there.

01:15:22.920 And there's anti-Semitism that that's sort of in its DNA, basically.

01:15:27.240 I like the comparison of him with Percival, who I see as a, you know, comparing to him in a way that I think he would find flattering and I don't find flattering, which is Otto Weininger. 0.95

01:15:38.700 It's kind of, he's this idiot who just sort of flounders into the cultural scene and like thuds the knowledge on the table that is supposed to be sort of subterranean. 0.78

01:15:51.820 He's just literalizing all of it and has brought it all to the fore. 1.00

01:15:57.020 And he has certainly enlightened me.

01:16:01.840 Yeah.

01:16:02.000 And I mean, the other thing that he does, I think, is he makes connections that were in the culture, right?

01:16:07.200 he's this is a big bold book this is like right it makes it keeps making connections that that

01:16:15.940 other people sort of made only sort of in the sides footnotes and like you know maybe in their

01:16:21.180 speeches but in their books and he's the one who sort of like just lays it out there these three

01:16:25.560 things are the same right and and i think that that made him extremely general generative for

01:16:31.360 for a lot of thinkers to just have that stuff out there and you know i think that that he's been

01:16:39.240 more or less forgotten he's more or less a footnote now himself but i i do think it's

01:16:45.020 someone that we need to grapple with and it's someone that i think you know there's a reason

01:16:50.000 why like a scholar like sandra gilman returns to him again and again because he is the nexus he is

01:16:55.180 the the person who brings together things that elsewhere as you said earlier in the culture

01:17:01.340 were just vibes based and that we have kind of carried forward right like we're allowed to talk

01:17:06.820 about right like you know coastal new york liberal elites and it's like and and somehow you're not

01:17:14.320 supposed to hear what's obviously being said that there's anti-semitism in that characterization

01:17:18.960 The coastal liberal elites who go to Zabars and need a couple days off every September, you know, it's a very, very thin subtext.

01:17:28.420 yeah right but like weininger is is really i think valuable in his own in his own way in his own

01:17:34.460 bizarre and tragic and sad way he really foregrounds what holds a bunch of these

01:17:42.920 narratives together that we've kind of kept living with that are kind of still okay to

01:17:48.860 trot out right like a lot of the stuff that that that weininger said you know obviously

01:17:54.600 that were written today you know be you know you'd be laughed out of out of the university

01:18:01.360 at the same time there are you know the fact that we keep coming up with modern day analogs tells

01:18:08.180 you something right like in in isolation right these ideas have persisted and and are even

01:18:14.740 maybe more acceptable now than they were you know five years ago and and i do think that that it's

01:18:21.940 the voluminousness of this tome that really is the great value here and that it like brings

01:18:28.180 together these things and interweaves them in ways that are maybe more effective historically

01:18:34.860 and more dangerous historically than any single idea that's contained in it.

01:18:39.100 Maybe one thing we could leave our listeners with is the exhortation to please be as bold 0.99

01:18:44.320 and rude and stupid and obvious in pointing out misogyny and racism and antisemitism as 0.99

01:18:50.400 Otto Feininger was in avowing them. 1.00

01:19:05.180 In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R. Klayman Institute for Gender

01:19:08.540 Research for generous support, Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

01:19:12.680 Our theme music is by Katie Lau.

01:19:14.360 Our producer is Megan Kalfas.

In Bed With The Right - April 04, 2024

Episode 17： Otto Weininger, or Gender and Anti-Semitism

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