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And “The Jew” in Otto Weininger's Sex and Character Original citation: Achinger, Christine. (2013) Allegories of destruction : “Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger's Sex and Character. Germanic Review, Volume 88 (Number 2). pp. 121-149. ISSN 0016-8890 Permanent WRAP url: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/49918/ Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. This article is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license and may be reused according to the conditions of the license. For more details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ A note on versions: The version presented in WRAP is the published version, or, version of record, and may be cited as it appears here. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] http://go.warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications This article was downloaded by: [137.205.202.200] On: 24 June 2013, At: 03:34 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20 Allegories of Destruction: “Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger's Sex and Character Christine Achinger a a University of Warwick Published online: 10 Jun 2013. To cite this article: Christine Achinger (2013): Allegories of Destruction: “Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger's Sex and Character , The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 88:2, 121-149 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2013.784120 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE For full terms and conditions of use, see: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions esp. Part II. Intellectual property and access and license types, § 11. (c) Open Access Content The use of Taylor & Francis Open articles and Taylor & Francis Open Select articles for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. The Germanic Review, 88: 121–149, 2013 Published with license by Taylor & Francis ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2013.784120 Allegories of Destruction: “Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character Christine Achinger This article investigates the constructions of masculinity, femininity, and Jewishness and their interrelation in Otto Weininger’s widely discussed book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). Departing from previous scholarship, I argue that not only the commonalities between Weininger’s images of “Woman” and “the Jew,” but also their hitherto largely ignored differences, are crucial for an understanding of Weininger’s views and their relation to his historical context. Reading Weininger through the lens of Critical Theory suggests viewing “the Woman” and “the Jew” as outward projections of different, but related contradictions within the constitution of the modern subject itself. More specifically, “Woman” comes to embody the threat to the (masculine) bourgeois individual emanating from its own embodied existence, from “nature” and libidinal impulses. “The Jew,” on the other hand, comes to stand for historical developments of modern society that make themselves more keenly felt towards the end of the nineteenth century and threaten to undermine the very forms of individuality and independence that had previously been produced by this society. Such a reading of Geschlecht und Charakter not only can help illuminate the crisis of the bourgeois individual at the turn of the twentieth century, but also could contribute to ongoing discussions on why modern society, although based on seemingly universalist conceptions of subjectivity, continues to produce difference and exclusion along the lines of gender and race. Downloaded by [137.205.202.200] at 03:34 24 June 2013 Keywords: antisemitism, bourgeois individual, capitalism/modernity, gender, misogyny, Viennese Modernism, Otto Weininger c Christine Achinger I would like to thank the participants of the University of Chicago Social Theory Workshop for their valuable comments. 121 122 THE GERMANIC REVIEW VOLUME 88, NUMBER 2 / 2013 The compulsively projecting self can project only its own unhappiness—from the very basis of which it is cut off by reason of its lack of reflective thought. The products of false projection, the stereotypes of thought and reality, are therefore the products of evil. For the ego which sinks into the meaningless abyss of itself, objects become allegories of destruction which contain the meaning of its own downfall.1 I iennese Modernism has attracted much scholarly and public interest in recent decades, V in part because some of the most enduring works of art, literature, and philosophy produced in Vienna around the turn of the last century question key concepts of liberalism and Enlightenment—such as the notions of progress, of the coherent and rational subject, and of a stable and unproblematic relationship between subject and world in which language is nothing but a neutral and transparent mediator—in ways that seem to prefigure contemporary debates.2 Engaging the work of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), one of the most widely discussed authors of fin-de-siecle` Vienna, can help illuminate this sense of a “crisis of the subject” and its relationship to the world that informed so much of Vienna’s cultural production and debate at the time. It could contribute to an understanding of the crisis of pre-World War I Central European society by elucidating the rent character of bourgeois masculine self-understanding. Weininger’s main work, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), published in 1903, is a grandiose attempt to explain the modern world on the basis of the putative opposition between male and female principles, and the struggle between the Aryan and the Jewish mind. The dramatic suicide of the author at the age of only twenty-three, shortly after publication of the book, let sales figures soar and contributed to the widespread contemporary image of Weininger as a tragic young genius. This suicide and the anti-Semitic character of the book also ensured that Weininger, who had been born into a Jewish family, has been discussed as a particularly dramatic example of “Jewish self- hatred” to this day.3 The spectacular success of Sex and Character, which was acclaimed 1Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, original publication 1947, trans. John Cumming (London, New York: Verso, 1997), 192. 2Cf., e.g., Jacques Le Rider’s remarks on the relationship of Viennese Modernism and postmodernity in Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siecle` Vienna (New York:Continuum, Downloaded by [137.205.202.200] at 03:34 24 June 2013 1993), 27ff. 3As an early example, see, e.g., Theodor Lessing, Der judische¨ Selbsthaß (Berlin: Judischer¨ Verlag, 1930); see also more recently John M. Hoberman, “Otto Weininger and the Critique of Jewish Mas- culinity,” Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, ed. Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 141–53; Sander Gilman, “Karl Kraus’s Oscar Wilde,” in Vienna 1900: from Altenberg to Wittgenstein, ed. Edward Timms and Ritchie Robertson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 12–14; on Modernism and “Jewish self-hatred” in general, Pe- ter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 194–200; Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Ritchie Robertson, The Jewish Question in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents ACHINGER ALLEGORIES OF DESTRUCTION 123 by influential writers and cultural figures and widely praised as providing a solution to some of the most important riddles of human existence,4 seems to justify Hans Mayer’s view of the book as revealing “traumatic states of mind of the bourgeois strata in Central Europe.”5 Indeed, it can be read as highlighting some of the fundamental tensions within a liberal bourgeois society in crisis. Weininger was a fanatical individualist who helped to prepare the ground for volkisch¨ thought; he was a thoroughly modern critic of modernity who, yet, propagated irrational misogyny and anti-Semitism out of a deep fear of everything irrational. This essay will suggest that these tensions reveal the hidden connections between ways of thinking we often imagine as neatly separated. Weininger’s misogynist and anti-Semitic obsessions overlap, as others have noted. Jacques Le Rider, Sander Gilman, Hans Mayer, Chandak Sengoopta, and others have provided illuminating comments on these connections and their manifestation in the figure of the “effeminate Jew” in Weininger’s work and in fin-de-siecle` culture more generally.6 Without any doubt, Weininger’s book is a crucial
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