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Blog
entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and
reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer
have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent
essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them
with all who are interested.
If
you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a
note: sam@macspeno.com
Post
#123 is about a book I received in error, but which turned out to be both
fascinating and disturbing, and the clearest understanding I've ever seen of
the psychological origins of the patriarchal masculine.
===
BOOK
REVIEW June 96
TITLE
Male fantasies / Klaus Theweleit ; translated by Stephen Conway in
collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner ; foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.
PUBLISHER
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c1987-
SUBJECTS
Germany. Heer. Freikorps. * Soldiers -- Germany -- Sexual behavior. * Fascism
and sex. * Fascism and women. * Psychoanalysis and culture Germany. * Fantasy.
===
This book
is especially helpful in showing the nature of the hierarchical and/or
patriarchal masculine at its most blatant extreme. It also allows for some good
insights into the authoritarianism of Western religion. It was originally
published in German in 1977.
It is many
things. Essentially, it is a psychoanalytic study of fascism, with its male
mystique of war and violence.
Fascism,
which developed in the 1920s and early 30s, between WW I and WW II, provided
the sociological context out of which Nazism emerged.
This
study is based on the “archeological find” of several hundred novels and
memoirs written by members of the fascist Freikorps (private armies of former
WWI soldiers, adventurers and drifters-- not, apparently, unlike contemporary
groups such as the Montana Freemen).
At
fascism’s core is a hierarchical authoritarianism, with a primacy of violence;
its origin is the fear and hatred of the feminine and a repudiation of the
quotidian world. Although explicit sexual language is a major element in
fascism, it is in fact anti-erotic; indeed,
it is against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure.
The book
is a deconstruction of the male myth of war: that war is a rite of passage
which turns boys into men. It shows instead that war is a repudiation of one’s
own body as well as of femininity, and that war identifies masculinity with
hardness, destruction and self-denial.
The book
maintains that what the Freikorpsmen enacted is the common psychic property of
all males in a hierarchical, patriarchal culture.
Fascism
is a radical right-wing military cult of male camaraderie and heroic youth; it
is anti-liberal, anti-Jewish, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-feminine.
(Fascism differs from Nazism in that Nazism puts anti-Semitism in a more
central position than fear and hatred of women.)
Fascism
is marked above all else by its veneration of the transformations undergone by those fighting in a war,
transformations which are described as a “resurrection and rebirth of dead life
in the masses.”
This book
shows that, for the fascist soldier, male identity is defined in terms of
flight from the feminine due to fear of ego dissolution, and of warfare as the
fulfillment of longing for fusion with the military machine and explosion in
battle. (“Explosion” seems to mean something like “going berserk.”)
From
background information, I learned that Volume One deals with images of the
feminine found in the collective un-conscious of the fascist warrior. This
second volume, the one I received "by error," focuses on images of
the male body and the boundaries of the self (i.e., ego) which the war
experience provides.
The
feminine is understood to be all that threatens to flood or deluge the
boundaries of the male ego; it includes the material world and the unconscious
as well as real women and even the male’s own body.
The
organization of the male cult against dis-integration-- the very essence of
fascist militarism-- is mechanized by various ego-hardening “techniques of
self,” techniques which include, especially, military drill and ritual
flogging.
These
constitute a system of ego-self regulation arising from the dread of any
outside life which threatens to fragment the ego’s stability. “A ‘man of steel’
(sic) must pursue, dam in, and subdue any force which threatens transformation
back into the jumble of flesh, hair, skin, intestines and feelings (sic) that
calls itself human.”
In the
fascist perspective, the body constructs the external world: fear of the inner
body with its inchoate mass of viscera and entrails, its soft genitals, its
lower half, is translated into the threat of the masses, especially focusing on
women and children.
The
feminine is soft, fluid, liquid; it is negation, and as the “other” which lurks
inside the male body as the subversive source of pleasure and pain, it must be
sealed off.
All this
contrasts with the hard, organized, phallic male body, the ideal of which is
the machine. A mechanized body is the fascist male’s utopia: “The new man is
one whose physique has been machine-ized and his psyche eliminated.”
Thus, to
be disemboweled and disembodied is a mechanism for eluding feminine liquidity,
warmth, sensuality, and responsiveness to other human beings.
Again,
the key to this rage and destructive violence against women-- indeed, against
one’s own physical being and all material reality-- is terror at the threat of
ego destruction. These men “kill to remain whole,” i.e., to keep their ego
intact.
The great
fear of fusion with the mother-unconscious is based on lack of pre-oedipal
separation from it.
Such men
were never fully born. They never differentiated enough to relate, as a
separate ego, to an other. They can not distinguish themselves from the other,
and can only feel the integrity of the ego-self and sustain a sense of bodily
boundaries by inflicting violence on others.
The
fascist soldier’s desire to “fuck the earth” is not a desire for incestuous
union but rather a repudiation of all maternal qualities, of all warmth and
sensuality: the desire to destroy the mother. (What he does desire to fuse with
is other men like himself: his soldier-brother-mirror.)
The book
contains a lot of art work from the 1920’s; much of it is from the Freikorp
literature and most of it is ugly. (Some of it looks very much like the ugly
comic book drawings widespread today. And some of it reminds me of the Maria
Lach school of liturgical art that used to appear in old missals and is found
at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. What I used to call “Egyptian.”)
For me,
the most disturbing picture is a poster which says, “Make yourself happy, fuck
the world.” It shows a youth doing just that, draped around a globe, with an
idiot smile on his face. What is so especially disturbing is that he appears to
be no more than 14 or 15 years old.
Note that
fascism is not a “search for father,” nor an attempt to deal with
“father-wounds,” as so much of the contemporary men’s movement literature is
concerned with. It is, rather, a defense against the need for a mother. “Long
ago as a child he was denied nurturing and feminine warmth and sensuality, and
he replaced those with physical pain and discipline.”
The
Freikorp texts are themselves attempts to eradicate fear of ego-dissolution.
They are not writings about war so much
as themselves acts of destruction: “imperialistic acts which attempt to
annihilate any form of independently moving life.”
But they
don’t just create empty space. Any hole produces dread and must be filled with
something reassuring. So this writing is a kind of protective shield that
secures the boundaries of the body no less than do the other “techniques of
self.”
Against
the threat of ego-dissolution in the face of the masses and the feminine is the
defense, “I stiffened.” (“The male member is a complete miniature ego.”) A male
is to be upstanding, to have “backbone.” The backbone of honor is loyalty (“and
neither is the business of women”).
The
military front is a clear boundary, while everything behind the lines is
threatening. All effort is aimed at standing erect, becoming phallus. Any
question of meaning is barred in advance; order, not meaning, is the great
preference.
“Culture”
is equated with the army battalion, and all relationships at the military
academy are hierarchical. Military drill and ritual beatings cause the youths
to black out, but the blackout is seen as a sign of strength, demonstrating
that one has gone beyond his limits.
In
battle, the ultimate goal is “to explode against the enemy.” This going berserk
emotionally is equated with the birth of a flesh-less body having metal armor.
The ideal is to become “a living gun.”
===
Reflections.
We have
become aware in recent years/decades about such things as the flight from the
feminine, the disdain for the world, the hatred of the body and the ascetic
denial of pleasure, as primary characteristics of religious dualism and as
specifically negative features of the patriarchal mentality.
And while
the author is neither Jungian nor (here) interested in religion, there is
little in this book which could be excluded from a Jungian perspective, and
there is much that is helpful in understanding the extremes of patriarchal
religion.
The
institutional church’s fear and hatred of women, for example, as well as things
like the aberrations of monastic asceticism, the practice of ritual humiliation
in religious orders, and power politics among the clergy and hierarchy, all can
be seen as versions of this same fascist mentality: the need of the upstanding
phallic ego to defend itself from the threat of non-existence which it
perceives as coming from all that is not itself.
The book
is also helpful in better understanding the meaning of “the recovery of sacred
manhood.”
When
during the time of the Neolithic Age male sacredness was lost to mainstream
global culture, with the loss of hunting as the primary way of earning a
living, males eventually became little more than domesticated (i.e., castrated)
pets of the Mother Goddess (or, at best, stud-bulls for breeding).
The whole
early history and mythology of the Near East would seem to be a memory of this
time of subjugation by females. And patriarchy is its backlash.
Fear of
the feminine, flight from the earth, reason standing up against the very
existence of intuition, the use of asceticism and pain to make oneself into a
stiffened ego-- all this would seem to have its historical source in the
domestication and subjugation of males during the Neolithic Age of the Great
Mother.
Just as
fascism’s fear of the feminine comes from the lack of a mother good enough to
allow and encourage the male child to differentiate himself from the feminine
sufficiently for him to become a separate ego, so something similar must have
been the case historically, with Western culture as a whole.
And at
least from the time of St. Augustine, all this was proclaimed to be of the very
essence of Christianity. Salvation from the body, escape from the earth,
suffering as the means for making oneself worthy of salvation, the feminine as
the principal tempter preventing salvation, the body itself as evil.
The
understanding that the male soldier can only be an ego by killing others also
helps to make clear how contemporary exploitation and destruction of the
natural environment is motivated not just by greed but by fear of the feminine.
The same
is true with regard to CEOs making millions of dollars at the expense of the
little people who lose their jobs due to corporate merges.
Those
CEOs don’t just want money; they want to be something, to be somebody. And they
can only do that by destroying their underling-employees. It even helps make
sense of why athletes keep plugging away at being better than others: they have
to, simply to be anything themselves.
There is
a scene described in the book about a military officer masturbating while
presiding at a ritual flogging. He is utterly indifferent to the presence of
the rabble watching (who know that any indication on their part of awareness of
his activity would mean death). And once he “finishes himself off,” as the text
says, he turns and walks away utterly unconcerned.
How often
we have experienced this kind of total indifference to the presence and fate of
others in pastors, religious superiors, school administrators and other
authority figures!
Finally,
it seems important to repeat that none of this, as the author says, has to do
with the absence of a father. It comes, rather, from an earlier stage of
development: the lack of a good experience of one’s source. The feeling of not
being nurtured by a mother, of not being cared for by Mother Earth, of not
being wanted by the universe!
Only such
a lack could allow a man who thus experiences himself as only a partial or
incomplete ego to say, “Piss on you, Earth!” Or to be willing, as a way of
pushing away the fear of being swallowed up by existence itself, to “fuck the
world” with a little-boy smile on his face.
Reality
itself, says patriarchal dualism, is not to be trusted! No wonder the essence
of the gospel is, “Fear not."
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