Talk:Otto Weininger
Adelheid, Otto's mother, whose health was frail, was a submissive wife to his father, Leopold, a renowned goldsmith and powerful personality.
Of his six brothers and sisters, only four reached adulthood. A gifted student, Otto entered the University of Vienna in 1898 and took courses in all the various subjects he would later treat in his Sex and Character (1906).
His professors included Friedrich Jodl, Ernst Mach, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
He also frequently attended gatherings of the university philosophical society.
In 1900 he traveled to Paris with Hermann Swoboda to attend a conference on psychology, where he sided with those in favor of an introspective approach to psychology as opposed to an experimental and biological approach.
Weininger began writing Sex and Character (origin-ally entitled Eros and Psyche) in the autumn of 1900, and the book progressed through an exchange of ideas with Swoboda.
In 1901, after having registered the copyright to his manuscript, he sought to publish it, and with this in mind he showed an outline to Freud, who was not favorably impressed.
In 1902 Weininger submitted a revised version of the book to obtain his doctorate in philosophy.
On the day he received his degree, he converted to Christianity.
A third version of his book—with the added chapters "Judaism," "Women and Mankind," and "Woman and Her Significance in the Universe"—was published in June 1903 by the major publishing firm Braumüller.
eininger suffered from severe mood swings of exaltation and depression.
During the summer of 1902, he traveled in Northern Europe and, writing to his friend Arthur Gerber, asked, "Am I anything?" Weininger left for Italy in somber spirits.
In Calabria on August 21, 1903, he drafted a new will and testament that replaced the one he had written the previous February 13.
Returning home depressed, he spent five days at his parents' home.
On October 3 he shot himself through the heart in a rented room in the house in which Beethoven, his favorite musician, had died.
Weininger was buried in a Protestant cemetery; his father wrote the text for his gravestone. Leopold Weininger admired his son's book and firmly defended Otto's memory after his death, though Leopold did confide information about Otto to a psychiatrist, who betrayed his trust.
In 1904, texts collected by Weininger's friend Moritz Rappaport were published asÜber die letzten Dinge (translated as On Last Things [2001]).
There Weininger's suicide was explained as a logical conclusion to Sex and Character to insure its success both with a large general audience and among intellectuals. In 1906 Wilhelm Fliess's charge of double plagiarism, specifically, that Freud had passed on Fliess's original ideas about bisexuality to Weininger and Swoboda, also fueled the book's notoriety. In the case of "Little Hans" (Herbert Graf), Freud wrote, "Weininger was completely under the sway of his infantile complexes; and from that standpoint what is common to Jews and women is their relation to the castration complex" (1909b, p. 36n). In his book, Weininger bears witness to the confusion about sexuality and science that was characteristic of the time.
Slavoj Zizek
Sex and Character is an attempt to explain the differences and relationship between the sexes.
Zizek presents a reading of Weininger's book as a misogynist (incorrect) interpretation of Lacan's formulae of sexuation.
In Žižek's reading of Weininger, sexual difference is predicated upon an association with the opposition between subject and object.
Men are active, noble spirits (or subjects) and women are passive, ignoble matter (or objects).
As passive matter, women are ruled by sexuality; indeed, according to Weininger, women are 'sexually affected and penetrated by every thing' (quoted in TMOE: 137).
In this regard, coitus is merely a particularly intense example of the general experience of sexuality which defines 'woman'.
A woman's personal sexuality is thus just an instance of a universal and impersonal instinct, one which 'governs her entire behaviour.
Even if she tells the truth, she does not tell the truth for the sake of the truth, but to impress a potential mate.
For Weininger, man, on the other hand, is a being torn between his senses and his spirituality, between sexuality and love. However, this presents a problem, for how can a man entertain a spiritual relationship with a woman if she is defined as a being for whom spirituality is completely absent?
The answer to this puzzle, according to Weininger, is that the spiritual beauty of a woman (which makes her a fit object for man's love) is actually a product of that love in the first place.
Man's love, in other words, functions as a performative.
Man projects onto woman an ideal she can never attain, and so, in loving woman, man really loves himself.
In fact, man loves the better part of himself, the ideal, spiritual side, rather than the tainted sexual side of his senses.
By so doing, man betrays not only himself, because he fails to realize his spiritual potential in himself, but he also betrays woman, because he disregards her empirical actuality, subjecting her to an Imaginary idealism.
Thus it is that, for Weininger, 'love is murder' (quoted in TMOE: 140).
Given that it is a calamity for all concerned, why therefore does man continue to misrecognize his spiritual ideal in woman by choosing her as his love-object?
The solution to this problem advanced by Weininger is that man's descent into sexuality creates woman in the first place.
Reversing the biblical narrative which avows that it is woman who causes the sin of mankind, Weininger boldly proposes that 'woman is the sin of man' (quoted in TMOE: 141).
She is produced by man and exists only in so far as man embraces his own sexuality at the expense of his spirituality.
It is thus unsurprising that woman's one aim is to perpetuate the sexuality of man, because if she did not she would not exist.
Woman is just an effect; in herself 'woman therefore does not exist' (quoted in TMOE: 141).
All of which explains why man chooses woman as his privileged love-object: as it is man's 'fault' that woman exists in the first place, he is wracked by guilt at his crime and strives to placate that guilt by loving her.
Nevertheless, however much man loves woman and she strives to internalize the spiritual values of man, she cannot escape her true nature.
For Weininger, woman is inherently unfree, a slave to the Phallus (or patriarchal law) who, if she attempts to repress this fact, will suffer from hysteria when her true nature fights back.
As is clear from this summary, then, Weininger's theory is probably one of the most candid statements of misogyny ever published.
For Žižek, however, it is precisely this frankness, the extremity of Weininger's views, which means that Sex and Character unwittingly provides a basis for a Lacanian feminism.
The first point of note, in this regard, is that Weininger dispenses with any notion of woman as 'enigmatic', of femininity as a 'dark secret' inaccessible to the light of reason.
For, on the contrary, Weininger thoroughly dissects the notion of femininity and finds that, after all, there is nothing there.
The secret of woman is that she does not exist.
Having accomplished this break from traditional, patriarchal descriptions of woman as the mysterious or enigmatic limit of male reason, Weininger, for Žižek, fails to go far enough.
He fails to recognize in the 'nothingness' he discerns in woman, the very basis of subjectivity itself.
The subject is precisely this void or nothingness that precedes its inscription within the Symbolic Order.
What Weininger fears, according to Žižek, is not woman, but the void of subjectivity itself, the absolute negativity of the 'night of the world' which forms the subject.
Woman, in other words, is the subject par excellence.
The fact that behind the enigma, the feminine mask,
Weininger does not find something-some opaque mystery-but, rather, nothing, means that, for Žižek, Weininger stumbled accidentally upon the universal truth of subjectivity.
Another way of looking at this is to conceive of it in terms of the distinction borrowed from linguistics by Lacan between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated.
The abyss or void of subject is the subject of enunciation, whereas the subject of the enunciated is the Symbolic subject, the subject of the social network.
Weininger's contention that 'woman does not exist' therefore amounts to saying that woman does not exist at the level of the subject of the enunciated-she is excluded from Weininger's patriarchal Symbolic-she only exists at the level of the enunciation, as the void of the subject.
'WOMAN IS A SYMPTOM OF MAN'
exist' in so far as she is the subject in its modality of absolute negativity. Nevertheless, how does he then escape what he admits is the apparently obvious parallel between Weininger's assertion that man creates woman and Lacan's formula 'woman is a symptom of man'? The first point Žižek makes in this regard is to note that Lacan's thesis is a product of his later work. This chronological point is important because Lacan fundamentally changed his concept of the symptom from his first articulation of it in the 1950s to his last reformulation of it in the 1970s. In the earlier theory, a symptom is a cipher or a message which returns to the subject the truth about his desire, a desire that was betrayed.
If woman is a symptom in this sense then she is merely an embodiment of the betrayal of man's desire, the fact that man 'gave way as to his desire' (EYS: 154). There is therefore little difference between this notion and Weininger's contention that when man fails to fulfil his spiritual potential (his true desire), this failure manifests itself in the creation of woman (as a symptom). As soon as man recognizes this failure and returns to the truth of his desire to be a spiritual being, woman will disappear. She only exists as a result of the unethical division in man himself and therefore has no existence in her own right. In his readings of the operas of the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Žižek proposes that there is what he terms a 'Wagnerian performative' which functions to the same kind of logic espoused by Weininger. When, by means of a performative, a Wagnerian hero fulfils his Symbolic role, this action 'proves incompatible with the very being of woman' (EYS: 155). In The Flying Dutchman, for example, as a result of the captain finally proclaiming that he is the 'flying Dutchman', Senta kills herself. Žižek argues that a similar pattern emerges in hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir. In the noir universe woman appears as a materialization of the detective's ceding of his ethical desire to discover the truth-he is not so much side-tracked by woman (in the guise of the femme fatale) as woman embodies his being side-tracked. When the detective returns to his desire and, as it were, stays true to himself, the woman invariably disappears or dies, both of which happen, for example, to Velma/Grayle in Farewell, My Lovely, by the American author Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), after Marlowe confronts her with the truth.
In contrast to this theory, and the readings produced by it, 'woman as a symptom of man' refers to Lacan's later concept of the symptom.
We can perhaps see now how Žižek pushes the logic of Weininger's theory to the extreme in order to demonstrate that 'woman does not In order to differentiate it from earlier conceptions, such a symptom is sometimes referred to by Lacan and Žižek using the neologism sinthome. In this case, the symptom or sinthome is the signifying formation in which an individual subject organizes its relationship to enjoyment, or jouissance. Enjoyment, or jouissance, is to be distinguished from mere pleasure. It is the pleasure beyond mere pleasure itself-a pleasure that has an orgasmic charge, indexing the point where pleasure becomes pain. As such it expresses the kind of satisfaction to be garnered from picking at your own festering wound, a wound which, Žižek advises us, neatly symbolizes the notion of symptom. The symptom is just such a wound in the subject, one which bestows upon the subject its consistency. As Žižek avers, the sinthome is
a particular, 'pathological', signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it.
(SOI: 75)
As an example of such a stain Žižek cites the alien in the film Alien. While it is a supplement to the crew in the drifting spaceship, it is also what, by virtue of its threat to them, confers a unity upon the group. Indeed, the ambiguous relationship we maintain towards our symptoms-one in which we enjoy our suffering and suffer our enjoyment-is exemplified by the way in which the Ripley character (played by Sigourney Weaver) has progressively come to identify with the alien as the film series has developed.
It should perhaps be clearer now that what Žižek means when he refers to the formula 'woman is the symptom of man' is not the same as Weininger's contention that woman depends for her existence on man. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. For if the symptom is what maintains the consistency of the subject, equally its dissolution will betray that consistency and the subject will disappear. Therefore, the thesis that 'woman is the symptom of man' registers the fact that man only exists in so far as woman confers consistency upon him. Man, in other words, depends for his existence on woman. His being is external to himself. He 'literally ex-sists', as Žižek avers, 'his entire being lies "out there," in woman' (EYS: 155). So, despite the similarity between the Lacanian slogan-'woman is a symptom of man'-and Weininger's
thesis, which Žižek deploys as a kind of worse-case scenario reading of that slogan, the meaning of the two statements are diametrically opposed. 'THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP'
However, at best, are we not left here with a reversal of terms, one which is actually misandrist (displaying a denigration of men) rather than misogynist? Or, at worst, is not Žižek reinforcing Weininger's designation of woman as a passive object, one that here manifests itself in its most ancient form, depicting woman as the passive receptacle or carrier of man's innate being? In order to dispel these conceptions, it is probably apposite at this stage to confirm that when Žižek writes about 'man' and 'woman' these terms are not to be understood as expressing an essentialist point of view. In other words, the term 'man' does not necessarily refer to someone with a penis, just as the term 'woman' does not necessarily refer to someone with a vagina.
If many people might find such an assertion hard to accept, many others might well understand this to indicate the prevalence of two 'cosmic' poles-the masculine and the feminine-both of which are shared by men and women. After all, we are now familiar with the concept of men trying to 'discover their feminine side' and vice versa. The whole notion of equality between the sexes is often based on the principle of a kind of balance, the fact that we are able to deploy different aspects of ourselves in different situations and that no one sex is therefore able to monopolize any particular activity. However, this is not what Žižek means by 'man' and 'woman'. Nor does he mean by it a variation on this theme, such as may be found in the best-selling book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by the American author John Gray (b. 1951), which finds that men and women are (metaphorically) from different planets with different (and therefore misunderstood) psychic economies. Rather, the problem for men and women is, according to Žižek, that we both come 'from the same planet which is, as it were, split from within' (TTS: 272).
In order to explain this assertion and thus understand what Žižek means by 'woman' and 'man', we need to attend to the slogan which sits at the heart of the Lacanian formulae of sexuation: 'there is no sexual relationship'. I will not reproduce the formulae here using the form of calculus that Lacan deploys but, instead, summarize its main thesis, which Žižek deploys as a kind of worse-case scenario reading of that slogan, the meaning of the two statements are diametrically opposed. 'THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP'
However, at best, are we not left here with a reversal of terms, one which is actually misandrist (displaying a denigration of men) rather than misogynist? Or, at worst, is not Žižek reinforcing Weininger's designation of woman as a passive object, one that here manifests itself in its most ancient form, depicting woman as the passive receptacle or carrier of man's innate being? In order to dispel these conceptions, it is probably apposite at this stage to confirm that when Žižek writes about 'man' and 'woman' these terms are not to be understood as expressing an essentialist point of view. In other words, the term 'man' does not necessarily refer to someone with a penis, just as the term 'woman' does not necessarily refer to someone with a vagina.
If many people might find such an assertion hard to accept, many others might well understand this to indicate the prevalence of two 'cosmic' poles-the masculine and the feminine-both of which are shared by men and women. After all, we are now familiar with the concept of men trying to 'discover their feminine side' and vice versa. The whole notion of equality between the sexes is often based on the principle of a kind of balance, the fact that we are able to deploy different aspects of ourselves in different situations and that no one sex is therefore able to monopolize any particular activity. However, this is not what Žižek means by 'man' and 'woman'. Nor does he mean by it a variation on this theme, such as may be found in the best-selling book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by the American author John Gray (b. 1951), which finds that men and women are (metaphorically) from different planets with different (and therefore misunderstood) psychic economies. Rather, the problem for men and women is, according to Žižek, that we both come 'from the same planet which is, as it were, split from within' (TTS: 272).
In order to explain this assertion and thus understand what Žižek means by 'woman' and 'man', we need to attend to the slogan which sits at the heart of the Lacanian formulae of sexuation: 'there is no sexual relationship'. I will not reproduce the formulae here using the form of calculus that Lacan deploys but, instead, summarize its main
points in a simplified format in Table 5.1. What probably first strikes someone about these formulae is that the validity of one formula (for example, 'all speaking beings are subject to the phallic function') renders impossible the coexistence of another formula (for example, 'not all speaking beings are subject to the phallic function). This impossibility is already one way of interpreting the slogan 'there is no sexual relationship', in the sense that there is no way of establishing any harmony between the four positions elaborated here.
To get beyond such an innocent reading of the formulae, we have to understand what is meant by the 'phallic function'. At a basic level, the phallic function represents (somewhat paradoxically given its name) the function of castration. Let me be clear here: neither Lacan nor Žižek are talking about severing actual penises. In fact, they are not talking about actual penises at all. As the title 'phallus' suggests, their point of reference here is a symbol. Castration is merely the name given to the process by which we enter the Symbolic Order, the process by which we substitute the actual thing for a symbol of that thing. In this sense, castration signifies the loss engendered by the process of Symbolization. As Lacan's reworking of the Cartesian cogito suggests-'I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not' think'-when we choose thought we lose being, when we choose words we murder the things which they represent. In line with this, what we also lose with the advent of castration is jouissance. It is subject to a Symbolic prohibition, a prohibition signified by the phallus.
If we now turn to the gendered differences between the various relations towards the phallic function, we can see (in Formula 2) that all men are defined by the fact that they must submit to symbolic castration. In the kind of paradox which, by now, is probably familiar to Žižekian converts, this universal rule can only be established by an exception to it-the man (in Formula 1) who does not have to sacrifice his jouissance. This, for Žižek, is 'the primordial father of the Freudian myth in Totem and Taboo, a mythical being who has had all women and was capable of achieving complete satisfaction' (FTKN: 123). The mythical status of this man is important, for he has to be dead or indeed slaughtered in order for men in general to persist in the Symbolic. His myth sustains the illusion necessary to the Symbolic that the full plenitude of jouissance will once again be available.
In the status of this exception that guarantees the totality, we can perhaps see an analogy with the thesis that 'the genus is always one of its own species'. In addition to all men, there is a Man who sustains them. It is similar to the way in which, for the ancients, in addition to the four elements or essences that made up the universe-earth, water, air, and fire-there was a fifth element, the quintessence as it was called, which was actually latent in all things. The man with complete access to jouissance is, in this sense, quintessential to the universality of castrated men. In contrast to this, which is why I have not labelled the formulae sequentially, the logic of woman belongs to the 'not-all'. If, as we have seen, the whole of man, the set of all men, is only defined by granting an exception to that set (in Formula 1), then, conversely, the fact that under the designation 'woman' there is no exception to the phallus-'there is no speaking being that says 'no' to the phallic function' (in Formula A)-means that woman is not a totality, or a whole: she is, in other words, not-all. The exception in the formula for man, which Žižek identifies with the primal father of Totem and Taboo, functions as a limit or boundary against which man as a whole is defined, but this is not granted woman-there is no limit or boundary to woman. So, whereas the primal father embodies the concept of Man ('Man' with a capital 'M', as opposed to all men, counted one by one), there is no equivalent universal notion of Woman. This then, finally, is what is meant by 'woman does not exist': la femme, the Woman does not exist.
What this means is that there is a 'feminine resistance to symbolic identification' (TWTN: 57). Žižek proposes that the form this resistance takes is hysterical. Hysteria, for psychoanalysis at least, designates an attitude of questioning, specifically a questioning of the big Other. Such questioning in Žižek's work is often rendered in shorthand as 'Che vuoi?'-'What does the big Other want from me?' By its very articulation, this question creates a distance between the questioner and the big Other, the Symbolic Order. It thus designates the failure of the Symbolic Order, but-and this is crucial-it also designates the moment of subjectivity. If we completely assume our position in the Symbolic and take up our role in it 100 per cent, what part of us, as subjects, is actually subjective? The answer is that no part of us is-we would be wholly subsumed in the Symbolic, wholly objective. Our status as subjects, as subjective beings, issues directly from our failure to integrate fully in the Symbolic. The failure of the Symbolic is, therefore, strictly correlative with the creation of subjectivity. The subject is precisely that part of us which disassociates itself from the big Other in the form of the hysteric's 'Che vuoi?'-the questioning of the Symbolic.
From this theory we may surmise two things: first, that the status of the subject is inherently hysterical and, second, that woman, as the hysterical being, is the authentic subject. This, finally, is where Žižek locates the value of Weininger's Sex and Character. What this text represents is the culmination of a trend beginning in the late nineteenth century-a trend in which 'the sudden emergence of the figure of the hysterical woman (in the works of Richard Wagner, Franz Kafka, Edvard Munch, and others) announced a crisis of sexual relationship in whose shadow we continue to live' (GAV: 2). The horror expressed by Wagner's operas, Kafka's stories or Munch's paintings at the hysteria of women is merely the horror of recognition-the recognition that (all along) at the heart of the subject there is nothing, the 'nothing' which is precisely the failure of Symbolization. Man, in the formulae of sexuation, is what fills out this 'nothing'. In other words, woman is the limit of the abyss against which man defines himself. What the designations 'man' and 'woman' represent, therefore, are two modes of the failure of Symbolization. 'Woman' and 'man' are not biological givens, they are not subject positions or roles which we assume, rather, they are the two ways in which the failure of Symbolization is given form.
This, then, is what 'there is no sexual relationship' means. It does not mean that in reality there is no such thing as sex or coitus. Rather, it refers to a more profound distress, which is that sexual difference is Real and that, as such, it is impossible to Symbolize. In a similar way to which, for Žižek, class conflict is an expression of an antagonism in the Real, so 'man' and 'woman' are failed attempts to transpose the Real of sexual difference into Symbolic oppositions. The difference between the sexes, therefore, is not a simple question of assuming two different Symbolic mandates-these are not roles as such, failure to fulfil either of which means that you are expelled into the Real. Instead, the designations 'man' and 'woman' refer to different ways to account for the failure to Symbolize the Real of sexual difference.
The American feminist Judith Butler (b. 1956) has queried this theory and asked if it means that 'feminism is a dead end' (CHU: 6). For if sexual difference is Real, does that not mean it is, in some way, transcendental or a 'natural given'? And if sexual difference is 'naturally given' surely any attempt to improve the present conditions of women can always be trumped by reference to 'the way things really are'? The answer to both these questions, for Žižek, is 'no'. Such arguments, he claims, rely on a kind of temporal confusion in which the Real is only understood as being prior to the Symbolic, whereas the Real is actually produced by the failure of the Symbolic. The Real is what is left over after Symbolization and, as Symbolization changes through history, feminism is therefore not a pointless exercise in trying to change what cannot be changed. Indeed, far from there being a given set of norms against which we can judge people, Žižek contends that there are no norms as such:
It is not that we have homosexuals, fetishists, and other perverts in spite of the normative fact of sexual difference-that is, as proofs of the failure of sexual difference to impose its norm; it is not that sexual difference is the ultimate point of reference which anchors the contingent drifting of sexuality; it is, on the contrary, on account of the gap which forever persists between the real of sexual difference and the determinate forms of heterosexual symbolic norms that we have the multitude of 'perverse' forms of sexuality.
(TTS: 273)
Our sexuality, then, is a strange combination of what Žižek refers to as 'animal coupling' (EYS: 154)-the biological fact of copulation regulated by instinct and natural rhythms-onto which is grafted the Symbolic deadlock of the impossibility of sexual difference. These two elements-animal coupling and the failure of Symbolization-are not linked in any way except by their contingent encounter at the level of our sexuality. Our sexuality, in other words, is the product of the entanglement of the living body in the Symbolic Order. There is not a perfect 'fit' between the two because if there were the Symbolic
Order would not actually exist. It is predicated upon its own insufficiency, its inability to complete itself or conform to a perfect fit between the world of things and the world of words. And it is precisely the Symbolic's insufficiency which is referred to in the slogan 'there is no sexual relationship'.
As a final sting in the tail, Žižek suggests that the fact that 'there' is no sexual relationship' is precisely why we have love. According to Žižek, 'love is a lure, a mirage, whose function is to obfuscate the irreducible, constitutive "out-of-joint" of the relationship between the sexes' (GAV: 2). In this sense, love is akin to ideology; we may even say that it is the ideology of sexual difference. For in the same way that the spectre of ideology conceals the failed Symbolization of class struggle in the Real, so love conceals the failed Symbolization of sexual difference. Indeed, love at its most beguiling, such as may be found in the detective's love for the femme fatale, presents a series of obstacles to its own fulfilment. These obstacles merely obscure the fact that the fulfilment which they seem to hinder is not actually possible-that, in the end, it is not possible to reconcile 'man' with 'woman'.
SUMMARY
Many of Žižek's discussions of the differences between men and women refer to Otto Weininger's book Sex and Character. In this book, Weininger proposes that women are created by men's failure to fulfil their own spiritual potential. As such, Weininger's theory sounds very close to Lacan's formulae of sexuation which, in the form of slogans, propose that 'woman is a symptom of man' and that 'woman does not exist'. In other words, Weininger's theory represents an extreme misreading of the formulae. For Žižek, however, these formulae mean that woman is what sustains the consistency of man, and that woman's non-existence actually represents the radical negativity which constitutes all subjects. The terms 'man' and 'woman' do not, for Žižek, refer to a biological distinction or gender roles, but rather two modes of the failure of Symbolization. It is this failure which means that 'there is no sexual relationship'.
See Also
References
- Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. SE, 10: 1-149.
- Weininger, Otto. (1906). Sex and character. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. (Original work published 1903)
- ——. (2001). A translation of Weininger's "Über die letzten Dinge, 1904-1907," On last things. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. (Original work published 1904)
