Episode 17: Otto Weininger, or Gender and Anti-Semitism

Hi, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Laura Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in Bid with the Right.

So, Adrian, who are we discussing today?

So, today is our long-awaited, I think by some, sequel to our Nietzsche episode.

This is Otto Weininger, a person who, you know, fancied himself a bit of a follower of Nietzsche, was somewhat critical of Nietzsche, but who was definitely regarded by his contemporaries as this kind of Nietzsche figure, someone who had dared to see what others had not seen and who sort of gave everything in pursuit of this very particular way of seeing the world.

You know, I feel like we've been really lucky with the podcast.

We've had some really brilliant writers and scholars come join us, and often we have a book to discuss and somebody really professional and smart to guide us through this aspect of their work and then we have some episodes where it's just one of us just letting their freak flag fly and today is adrian's freak episode adrian is one of many yes

adrian is obsessed with this little-known viennese 19th century freak on a leash named named Otto Weininger.

So, Adrian, who is this guy?

Take me into his world.

In my defense, like, so he, so he is a footnote today, but he was extremely influential at the time, at the time.

And, like, if you read the book today, which like hardly anyone does other than academic historians,

it's really shocking how widely he was read and appreciated, right?

I mean, like, kind of like Nietzsche, right?

Like, unlike Nietzsche, if you try to do a Weininger seminar, people are like, you know, get your head examined.

But like Nietzsche, you know, basically, your favorite poet circa 1910 like read this guy and was like, hey, there's some good ideas in this.

But wait, what is the book?

What's this book that my favorite poet is reading?

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, anti-Semitism, and just general misanthropy into a book.

But basically, he's known for this one work by and large.

Otto Weininger was born in 1880 in Vienna.

And you say he didn't have much time.

If he was born in 1880, when did he die?

1903.

So really not much time.

So that is, he was 23 years old.

So he managed

to make this big impression

at a very tender age we might say yeah and related to this you know tender age also a trigger warning that you know the way he did die was through suicide so that's that's important to know here so he was born in Vienna 1880 into a Jewish family and I don't know how much you know about sort of Vienna circa 1880 very little something a time when you know The city would have been chock-a-block with people you still recognize, names you still recognize, right?

Composers like Gustav Mahler, Alan Schoenberg is sort of starting out.

You have, you know, Freud running around, you have Klimt, you have the secession movement, so a lot of sort of early modernist painting coming out.

So it's really a time when

there was kind of a real intellectual ferment and effervescence in that city.

But it was also just a time when, I think there's a book about the period called A Nervous Splendor, and some of them call it like the nervous metropolis.

Like it was a place that was both super brilliant and was kind of having a collective nervous breakdown at the same time.

And people kind of acknowledged this at the time.

Like just to give you an example that like, this is the Austro-Hungarian Empire on its kind of last legs.

And the crown prince in 1889 dies in a apparent murder-suicide with some noblewoman that he, that no one knew he was having an affair with, but like, yeah, apparently.

And that's the kind of city it is, where just like people are

living a little bit on the on the edge.

And we're comes to kind of, what does that remind me of?

It's a time when the the neurosis, the contradictions are coming to the fore, people are getting weirder, and there's a sense that the center cannot hold.

Yeah.

Weininger, in a weird way, like comes of age in that.

He was born into it, basically, and didn't outlive it.

And he kind of, in hindsight, comes to emblematize that kind of intellectual ferment, the kind of big ambitions and the highly neurotic qualities of it all.

There's a great book in French, Le Car Otto Weininger, Racine de l'Antifeminisme, anti-Semitisme from 1982, which says Weininger sums up the demons of an entire epoch.

And that's like often how he's positioned.

He's like, it's not the most original thinker, but it's just like, it's just, it's, it's, it's all unvarnished out there for people to see.

Uh, what in you know, paintings and music, etc., etc., you sort of had to intuit and deduce.

He's just like, here's what I mean.

Here's, here's how this is.

So he makes the subtext text, as people sometimes say, of like Donald Trump in our epoch.

All right.

So he graduates high school in 1898.

He's clearly brilliant, starts attending the University of Vienna, so doesn't really leave the city very much at all.

And his dissertation was basically a version of sex and character.

A version, we'll talk about that later, still pretty different from the book.

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

Fritter Jodel, who's kind of an empiricist or positivist, so right, like someone who wants to meld empirical science and philosophy, and Laurence Müner, who's a theologian.

So that gives you a little bit of a sense of the breadth of these dissertations.

That's not unusual at the time, but it gives you a sense of the scope of his ambition.

He gets his PhD, I believe, in 1902, quite quickly, and converts to Protestantism.

From Catholicism?

No, from he was Jewish.

Oh, he wasn't Jewish.

And then travels to Bayreuth.

You know, longtime listeners will recall that Bayreuth is where Richard Wagner sort of settled down after his Swiss sojourn.

So just as Nietzsche makes his pilgrimage to Switzerland to see a then in exile Wagner, basically Weininger goes to Bayreuth to see this opera Parseval, which is Wagner's last opera.

Wagner's dead by that point.

It's his last opera.

And I'd have to double check this, but was for a long time only allowed to be played at Bayreuth.

Wagner had made it so that you couldn't perform it anywhere else.

It turns out that it had no force of contract at all.

And I think it was the Met Opera, in fact, that was like, fuck it, we're putting it on anyway, right?

Leave it to New Yorkers to be like, we're putting on a show, guys.

Maybe I'll say more about that when we're actually talking about Weininger's book, because it's very clear it leaves a

makes a serious impression on him.

He

calls Wagner, quote, the greatest person since Christ, which, you know, it's nice praise if you can get it.

Parseval is the story of a knight who, who, or a young man who joins a group of knights that guard the Holy Grail.

And it's an all-male ensemble with one exception there's one female voice that sort of threads this entire this entire opera and um it's very much a masculinist um and in some ways anti-feminist opera but i'll say a little bit more about that later the one thing that i

do want to point out is that you know just to give you a sense of like that weininger's experience of this as a kind of revelation was not accidental but was in fact intended wagner insisted that it was not an opera well wagner insisted that none of his operas were operas but he always had like a different name for them.

And this one is supposed to be a Bünen Weifestsbu, so a religious performance on a stage, right?

And Weininger seems to have taken it as exactly that, right?

He was like, well, this is, I just had a religious experience here.

So, wait, wait, let me slow down and recap this for our listeners, because what I'm hearing is that this incredibly intense teenager

has

graduated college, seemingly gotten a doctorate immediately.

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.

He has had a religious conversion and then he goes to see this masculinist Christian opera from a man he understands as like quasi-divine.

Yeah.

This sounds like an intense few months, I gotta say.

This is also happening very, very fast.

It's happening very fast, 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.

We're going to dance around the word incel a lot.

He's not so much the in part, it's the problem.

The celibacy part, he was very down with.

It was not involuntary.

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, at least as as regards to other people.

You're absolutely right.

It's this highly intense biography that kind of interacts with all these pathologies of his age and all these kind of cultural neuroses and obsessions of his age.

I'm going to ask you one clarifying question before we move on more into this guy's work and life.

But like, what for a, I'm guessing, like, bourgeois, Jewish-born Viennese guy with these intellectual talents in the 1880s and 90s, would he know many women?

What would his, like, as I'm assuming he's not going to school with them, right?

He's probably not encountering them as peers.

It's a good question.

In the university, I think there were some.

I would have to look up when the first women were graduating from the University of Vienna.

This really depends by university to university, but it was not unheard of by 1990.

But it is an exception and considered exceptional.

Yeah.

Then again, you know, Fantasie Vienna did have famous women artists and authors.

So, you know, he's not in a...

And he's not growing up Catholic, right?

Which is another way in which a lot of

young Austrian men at the time were kind of sheltered from the opposite sex, right?

That was the number one way to just like never interact with a lady.

Just only go to sex segregated Catholic institutions to structure a life for Hauntle.

Yeah.

Yeah, and 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 nearly 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

crucially has no Marian devotion, right?

Generally, Protestants are kind of a little bit allergic to

Catholic worship of Mary and her

array of female virgin martyr sidekicks.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's a little bit, you know, like the way some people in the United States these days on the right choose not to convert just to bog standard evangelical Christianity, but they're like, I'm going Orthodox, right?

It's like, it's like that.

So he has this dissertation.

He has this, 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.

Yeah, it's got a bad reputation, the fandom.

Yeah, yeah.

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.

So I have, you know, what for you as Catholic school is for me, the ring of the kneebelungs.

And I still do like it, I have to say.

I'll defend seeing it.

I will not defend the man who wrote it for a half second.

But

so I I kind of get where he's coming from on some level.

It's, you know, these are punishing five-hour musical ordeals.

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.

And he's made this pilgrimage here.

He tried to publish his dissertation, which is common, has to, in fact, happen in German-speaking universities.

And he takes it to his advisors and they're like, yeah,

but you got to rewrite parts of this.

Like, you you can't publish it like this.

What do they think is wrong with it?

So my guess is that especially Jodo thought that it was overly, I didn't look into this, but an empiricist would say, like, look, 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.

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

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 of fancy, which was a problem in that Weininger was mostly interested in the metaphysical flights of fancy.

Wait, wait, wait.

This might be a good moment to slow down and just elucidate for our listeners a little bit about what was in this weird book that distills all of the neurosis of its time, that is interested in these physical flights of fancy, that is marking him clearly as brilliant, but is also making his teachers and professors go like, whoa, chill out.

This needs a little more rigor.

It needs to to be a little less weird.

Like, what is the project of the book, like top line?

What do our listeners need to know about it?

So the base, I mean, we'll get into the meat of it later, but the basic idea is that all human beings contain in them traces of both what he thinks of as sexes and that all human beings are therefore in some basic manner bisexual.

It's one of the first theories of gender and homosexuality or bisexuality that basically says it's a continuum, right?

That's not saying

the gay person is a pervert, but rather all of sexuality is a spectrum, basically.

And

he has some empirical observations that he works from.

I mean, it's not ones that we would today recognize as particularly salient, but the mode of argument would strike you as like, okay, you could argue like this.

It's just that we don't...

Right.

He points out, for instance, that embryos are,

you know, that they go through different stages.

And

this is the famous Ernst Haeckel idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

They thought that like the fetus of a species will undergo the entirety of the species evolution in the womb.

In utero.

Right.

Yeah.

In utero.

Right.

And he's like, well, it's interesting that

gender is tied up with that.

And so

he argued, you know,

he argues from charts, graphs, numbers, in ways that frankly resemble someone like Freud, right?

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

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

They're not medical articles that we think necessarily hold water today, but like the mode of argumentation, he's like, I'm doing medical science here for what it's

proceeding from a quasi-medical empirical basis of the like sort of available understandings of physiogamy and human development.

Very selective.

Very selective, yeah.

And it is, it is an understanding of sexuality as, you know, containing variants within the individual.

Yeah.

That is sort of commiserate to what we think of as like Freud's theory of sexual development, right?

Exactly, which is why Freud gets super excited about this.

Yeah.

Really?

Okay.

And then, but it, it, it also does sound, if I'm understanding Weidinger correctly, which, you know, I'm probably not.

But if I'm understanding him correctly, it sounds like he does have something of a hierarchy of gender and sexuality, right?

Like he has

something of A is underselling it.

Yes.

He has a version that he thinks is kind of the correct or most metaphysically worthy or sort of like ontologically complete way to do this.

Well, no, it's so so yes, I mean, I think you had it right.

He uses this to explicate a metaphysical theory, and I'm guessing this is where his advisors were like, buddy, that's that's going a little far.

And that might not be supported by what you have of science here.

Okay.

Facts not in evidence, yeah.

Yeah, so but you're pointing out exactly, like

the impulses would have been recognizable to someone like Freud, which is why Weininger, next after his advisors are like, we're not publishing this, goes to Freud and shows it to him.

And Freud is kind of impressed by this guy.

He's like, he's intense.

He's kind of, I think he might be a genius.

I don't think he's well, but he's a genius.

But likewise, Freud was like, well, there are a bunch of things here just aren't right.

There are a bunch of methodological deficiencies.

This would need to be corrected before publication.

And Weininger is like, I'm not changing a thing.

And so that also comes to naught.

So this is also a kid who's impressive enough and at least sufficiently connected that he can just like ring up freud and be like you are gonna read my dissertation sir well freud remember was not quite freud at the time like he's not the institution he would later become freud's i think he'd already moved into his the place where he would famously later see patients that's the backgasse is something like I mean, Viennese listeners can correct me, but like, I would say that's a five-minute walk from the University of Vienna.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah.

This is all

within walking distance.

And, you know, Freud is still very much at the beginning of his work, and he's still kind of figuring out a lot of the things he's famous for, too.

Right?

Like, so, for instance, he's kind of grappling with this question of bisexuality as well, right?

His version of this will become the concept of polymorphous perversity, but he doesn't yet have that yet.

This is the time when

he's exchanging letters with a physician named Wilhelm Flies, which you can read up on.

Or if you don't want to read up on them, you could check out our sibling podcast, Ordinary Unhappiness,

which has been devoting, I think, like five special episodes to the Freud-Fleece correspondence.

Patrick, Abby, and I believe it's Christine Smallwood as the guests are just going real hard on this one.

So we're just going to gloss over this, but if you do listen to that podcast, I think you can see why Freud at that time would have been like, huh, like some of this is crazy, but some of this really resonates with what Fleece and I are talking about.

And of course, Freud is at this point still completely experimental, right?

Everything is just like, not in the sense that he's experimenting, but in the sense that he's just trying out stuff.

And so he's like, well, why not this?

It doesn't seem like it's all right.

But like, you know, like early Freud does think big, yeah.

This is like 1902, right?

It's very early Freud, he's not committed to a theory yet.

So this guy comes in with one account of bisexuality and Freud is like, yeah, yeah, why not?

But he also tells Weininger, parts of this don't hold up.

It's like, buddy, you got it.

You got it, gotta revise, gotta revise, which, ironically, I don't think Freud was a big reviser either.

Again, the ordinary unhappiness folks can correct me on this, but I think he loved appending footnotes being like, that part's wrong.

And you're like, Sigmund,

you could have just edited.

But well, he has a reason for it.

And Weininger just had ego.

But eventually, in 1903, the book does come out.

The dissertation comes out as a book, Sex and Character, Geschlicht und Karachte.

And Weininger had changed a bunch.

Now, you might say, well, good, he took notes.

Oh, he did not

take notes.

He doubled down on all the stuff that everyone told him to cut.

He added a ton more anti-Semitism, a ton more misogyny, and he moved from what was initially kind of supposed to be an empirical study, as I said, into basically straight up metaphysics.

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

So tell me about the argument of this book now in this version.

What is the source of the anti-Semitism and of the misogyny?

Well, so I think we'll have to get to that.

It's because it's just

like the word cuckoo for Cocoa Pups 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, it's like, the, the, the bottom line is it's the most rank anti-Semitism you've ever heard.

But I, I, I think that short sells why this book became so influential.

Because if you, if I'm just going to lay it out, people are just going to turn off the phone and like switch to something else and be like, why am I even bothering with this?

Which, fair enough.

You know, you have my permission.

But I mean, this is a

podcast devoted to odious little freaks.

Yeah.

Like the most odious, most freakish guy we've perhaps yet encountered.

He's definitely up there.

He's a Hall of Famer.

The book comes out, and it's not sort of torn apart.

Like he gets a couple of notes.

I think Alega Strindberg writes to him, the playwright, and is like, I thought this was very impressive.

The other thing to note is that the dissertation was long.

The book is 600 pages, so I don't know if everyone got to the end, which is where the anti-Semitism comes in.

Like it's sort of right around page 350 and you're like, oh no, oh no.

You know, where like the things really take a turn.

You're like, he's not going there.

And then he's like,

right for it.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the book has some reception.

It's not altogether negative, but it's not certainly not a bestseller.

And Weininger, who was already kind of struggling with depression and feelings of inadequacy, et cetera, and self-hatred, shockingly, gets even more depressed.

And so on October 3rd, here's the trigger warning:

he rents a room in the house where Beethoven died and shoots himself in the heart.

And he's found the next morning, barely alive, and dies at the hospital and becomes kind of this cos célébre because of this suicide, right?

This

young genius who wrote this half-crazy, half-visionary book, and then took this ultimate step in some way.

This also means that his reputation can be

advanced by a tragic ending, but it cannot be delegitimized by his aging into more extreme

crankiness, right?

Like this is something like he is cemented at the time when he wrote this book.

The book is a, it sounds like a real crank book.

I will admit, I have not read all 600 pages of Otto Weidinger's sex and character, but like he cannot do what a lot of our intellectuals do, what Nietzsche seems to have done, which is get weirder in old age, right?

yeah yeah go on an all-beef diet yeah get fall into a parent with comatosis yeah move to indonesia for unclear reasons yeah that kind of thing oh did not even know that that that was hypothetical i'm not thinking of oh okay

okay yeah but yeah so i mean like but so this book has this extremely strong influence uh on on on

intellectual culture in the first i would say quarter of the 20th century maybe first third it has two kind of receptions it has one that's supposed to be a gender and one that's mostly about race.

And it's the one about race that is, frankly, of course, the one that goes to the darkest possible places.

Because if you think about people who lived in Vienna in 1903 or thereabouts, who like the idea of a 600-page anti-Semitic tract written by a person who converted from Judaism, who then kills himself, like Adolf Hitler loved this guy, right?

Like, like the Nazis liked Weininger.

So, what did the Nazis get from Weininger?

I mean, just that, you know, this was exactly what they wanted out of Jewish people, self-hatred and

then not being around anymore, right?

It's like the reception there is too horrible, I think, even for our podcast.

It's just, you know, people can imagine it.

I don't want to belabor it, but basically, this was like the one Jewish author that they loved citing and publishing, frankly.

Right, but I guess I'm asking, what is the content of his anti-Semitism?

Because there's a lot of different kinds of anti-Semitism.

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.

We're going to get to the fireworks factory, but I just want to have to take the long road to the fireworks factory.

You just keep on like pointing out this huge red button and then not like

that.

But so I do want to, I do want to, I do want to tee people up for this.

All right.

All right.

All right.

All right.

I'll stop.

My apologies.

My apologies.

Just to give you a sense of just how widely this book was

read.

So in 1995, there was

this volume on responses to Weininger, and the very simple title is Jews and Gender, which I think is like, they're not overselling it.

Like this is kind of the central text to look at or the central person to look at, think about anti-Semitism and gender, probably even before Weininger.

He kind of distills, you know, like the quote I brought earlier, he distills a bunch of anti-Semitic tropes and then certainly kind of hypercharges them for the 20th century.

But like, just to give you a sense of like the number of people who had, who, who this weird guy and his weird book had had an impact on right so ludrich wittgenstein karl kraus elias canetti sigmund freud franz kafka james joyce dh lawrence gertrud stein it goes on and on and on and like it's really really remarkable and so and the the point that these these essays make and i think this is something that a lot of writers became very fascinated with is that gender is incredibly important for the articulation of 20th century anti-semitism but also anti-semitism is probably inescapable when thinking about how gender is thought in the early 20th century right right?

Like when we think about what's proper masculinity, proper femininity, anti-Semitism is a way in which that was articulated.

So Jews are, among other things, the people in Europe who are doing gender incorrectly.

And you can tell what's correct by contrasting it with what the Jewish population is doing.

Right.

And, you know, and we've, we've alluded to this before, right?

Like, this goes for both Jewish masculinity and Jewish femininity, though I think Weininger is really mostly, he's not thinking about Jews and gender, he's thinking about Jews and masculinity.

But of course, you know, the figure of the demonic Jewish mother, right?

Like the overbearing Jewish mother that existed back then, too.

So like, it's, it really goes for

both masculinity and femininity.

And, you know, as a former advisee of mine is showing in his book that's coming out soon, even trans experience was often framed in terms of Jewish experience, right?

Both by Jewish writers and by non-Jewish writers.

So people, people like to oversell academic volumes.

I think this is a very justifiable title to call Juice and Gender.

That's in this book, and that's what this book really helps foreground.

So, yeah, let me get to what Sex and Character is actually about.

Finally, all right.

I feel like

you're dessert.

Yeah.

I've been bullied.

I've been bullied to

actually have to talk about this.

At its most basic, the main claim of the book falls, at least for listeners of this podcast, into the category, you know, stop me if you've heard this one before, right?

Man and woman designate two principles or basic modalities of the human, of human nature, right?

Masculinity.

Never heard that before.

Yeah.

Wild.

Mind-blowing, yes.

Masculinity is, get this, noble, moralizing, generative.

It's genius and it's formative.

And femininity is, you know, base, immoral, destructive, all about the body, right?

Not about the mind, right?

Masculinity is telling me that this guy is associating women with animalistic nature and men with a higher refined logic?

That is crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

He should have patented this.

I was like, we have a Mr.

Aristotle here who

made the same patent claim about 2,000 years ago.

Masculinity is all about spirit, and femininity is about drive or instinct.

Yeah, it's just real original stuff here.

Really, really wonderful.

Okay, so that I'm not shocked by, but what's going to shock me?

What's next?

Well, okay, so I don't know if this next part is already going to shock you, but it's already unusual.

Men and women do not exist in nature.

Nothing that exists in nature is perfectly male or perfectly female, he thinks.

Any actual human being,

wow, I know, right?

Like, we went straight, we went straight from like

to like gear shift.

We're at gender trouble.

It's 1991.

I've got like a lip ring.

Yeah, this is great.

Hi, I'm Ottawininger.

You're probably wondering how I got here, you know, and this is how I got here.

So, every human being is basically an admixture of

these two factors that he often refers to as M and F, right, or M and W, so man and woman.

But he, but he kind of uses

that abbreviation to sort of say, like, these aren't people you meet on the street, right?

These are principles that are in differential distribution

among any existing human being that you might meet on the street, right?

We're all sort of sexed, not gendered.

This is where it's different from Judith Butler, on a scale from sort of perfect man to perfect woman, right?

Pure man is basically God or God's image, right?

It's Adam.

The absolute pure woman, and this is interesting, right?

You might think, oh, it's just animal.

No, she's nothingness,

right?

This is where most likely his empiricist device was like, wait, now we're at, that's from Aristotle's metaphysics.

Like, what are you doing?

You know, basically, all actually existing gendered expression is somewhere in the middle.

And thus, as Weininger writes, quote, man and woman complement and determine each other.

So we have a version here of complementarity, but of a really weird kind.

Like the idea that our existence is a dialectic between being and nothingness, that's pretty bog standard metaphysics.

But,

you know, but it's kind of unusual to apply that to gender, right?

The idea that women are animalistic, like as you pointed out, is like super old.

But like, ultimately, that's not even true.

Woman is about lacking.

They're non-entities, yeah.

Non-entities, exactly.

Feminines are non-entity.

This is, you know, this is one of those moments where, and I feel like I have one of these at least like once per episode, where I'm like, this could have been said by Shulamith Firestone, right?

Like as a critique of femininity as like self-effacement is taken to its ultimate form.

But I'm guessing as is always the sort of the place where radical feminists and gender conservatives diverge is in the second clause of the sentence.

Whereas radical feminists say, and that's bad, Otto Weininger is going to say, and this is good, or this is at least like an appropriate ordering of the world.

Well, we'll see.

I mean, he doesn't think it's appropriate or inappropriate.

He thinks it's just reality, right?

Like that's the, this is why, where he still has his empirical basis, although he got rid of it for the publication, and it doesn't prove what he thinks it proves, but like, he thinks like, well, this is just, these are just the facts.

I'm not saying that this is good or bad.

But, but you're absolutely right.

And there were feminists then who read this and were like, if you replace this with gender roles, then yeah, this man is spot on.

But he's not talking about a socially constructed gender role.

He's talking about like sort of ontologically pre-existing gendered self.

Yeah.

But the idea that

the sex that isn't one, right, is

you know, is a modern feminist idea, right?

Like you can imagine why feminists at the time were like, yeah, I mean, like, a lot of this is garbage, but like he's queuing into something here, right?

He's on to something.

But we'll talk about that.

That's part.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

But basically, so woman for him is defined by lack, right?

Again, not as a role or as a as a gender category, but as an actual, as an actual principle.

Womanhood is about lack.

Just for the record, right?

Like she lacks an ego, a soul, morality, originality, orientation, et cetera, et cetera.

Basically, where a concept goes to work on brute matter, like woman is like the inert matter, right?

Which is like lovely, just lovely.

I take it this is metaphorized as a lot of this kind of thing is from the mechanics of intercourse, right?

I'm not even sure.

He's so sexphobic, I'm not even sure that

that may be in the background there.

There were a lot of thinkers that he could have drawn on, like Schopenhauer, where that's true, Fichte, where that's true.

I don't know.

It depends a little little bit on his course of reading, but he himself was,

you know, this is not a connection he's making explicitly.

Not that I recall, again, it's 600 pages, and I only reread parts of it for this, to be honest, but not in the parts that I recall.

It's really more that, like, woman receives her essence, right, her content, only from men.

And here we might, you know, might think of some thinkers that either we have treated on this podcast or we might.

This can sound a little bit like, for instance, my former Stanford colleague René Girard.

Woman receives an essence or receives content once male desire imputes something to them.

Only when man affirms his own sexuality, binding her rights, women becomes something.

She becomes something in the eyes of men.

If man were to withdraw his attention, you know, woman disappeared.

Remember, like, these are not actual individual women.

Like, he doesn't think they'd like go poof.

He's saying that the...

concept of W basically disappears, right?

This admixture in human beings, which, and you heard that right, means all sexual desire is bad, basically.

Oh, wow.

So this is not like a healthful exchange of male essence into, you know, woman nothingness by which women are like incorporated into a world of meaning, right?

This is kind of like a waste or a misplacement of the male drive.

Yes.

It's basically creating a kind of duality where none existed before.

If we didn't have the drive to impute to that other side

some kind of essence that justifies our desire, then it wouldn't have kind of content at all, right?

So he thinks that the renunciation of sexual desire is sort of, well, he calls it a heil mittl.

So that's both healing, as in medicine, but it's also heil salvation.

So it's also the form of salvation.

You renounce sexual desire and you thereby

can make this horrible W disappear.

Now, you might think, well, gee, it feels like this is only a

critique of heterosexuality, right?

Right.

I'm glad you asked.

No.

I was going to be like, how does he feel about gay stuff?

Well, he has some feelings about gay stuff.

Okay.

The problem is, right.

So yes, it sounds like it's a perfect justification for, well, at least M on M, right?

If M desires M.

That should be good.

W and W is like just nothing loving nothing, which he's like, well, whatever.

Who cares?

But here's the thing.

He thinks you can't.

It's not possible.

And that's that's not sexual love anyway.

So, like, basically, homosexuality.

So, I don't want to get too far into this because we're going to talk about this a little bit more because that's essentially arguably the most influential aspects of

this book.

You might think, well, gee,

this seems like something Adrian would like because it says everything about male homosexuality, right?

Which, like, people were like, could there be something like that going on here?

Possibly, but not really, because he thinks that gay women are more M than F as well.

That's why they,

that's why they love women, right?

So they hang out at the Home Depot.

Yeah.

So, so this, so you and I are unfortunately in the same boat here, right?

If anything, if anything, I may have more F than you.

Not to brag, but

this reminds me of this Audrey Woolen, who's an art writer, made this meme.

where she's like, I think that male artists should not be allowed to make art about nothingness because girls own the void.

And and I'm a little territorial of my feminine claim on nothingness I'm like fuck off Adrian girls own the void well

unless you go now with some chad unfortunately you're on the wrong side of this you're not the void

but you'll hear out of this that he has some nice things to say about about about lesbian let's say well yeah and about gender non-conformity right like interesting so that it'll it'll go to some very very so we're gonna get weirder we're gonna get weirder it's gonna get yeah.

So, but, but before we get to the part that people might be like, okay,

that's kind of, that's almost neat.

I do, I do need to hit you now with the anti-Semitism stuff and like, you know, just take on a brace position.

This plane is about to crash into the goddamn mountain.

All right.

So it, because it gets wilder.

So he's describing.

femininity as basically reactive, as kind of nothingness.

It leeches its essence out of the strong, kind of the life-giving genius of masculinity.

It's entirely mirroring, is weak and fully sensual, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's parasitic.

It's parasitic, right?

And so you might think, gee, that does kind of sound like an anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as well, right?

Like, and, you know, yeah, but, you know, Weininger doesn't take from that the obvious conclusion that, you know, yeah, that anti-Semitism and misogyny are structured by similar logics.

He thinks, oh, that means Jews are women, right?

That's his, that's his conclusion.

Women are bourgeois.

All Jews are women.

This is amazing.

I love this.

It's, I mean, like, yeah, it's.

Classics of the genre.

Yeah.

So

Jews are women in this, in this metaphysical schema that he's pulling.

Yeah.

Let's go.

As a Wagner scholar, I should point out these are all anti-Semitic canards that Wagner was very fond of.

It's quite possible.

This is very late in the book.

It's quite possible that it was because it was on his Wagner kick that he put all this stuff in there, right?

Like, you know, Wagner wrote this horrible essay in 1851, Judaism and Music, where he sort of claimed that, you know, Jews were unoriginal, that they could only copy and simulate, that they lacked the kind of naivete that is required for true genius, and so on and so on.

This is basically his broadside against people like Mendelssohn, who for the record is a wonderful composer, but he just had this whole thing about him.

And I should say,

it's not clear whether Weininger read this essay, but like many have argued, well, okay, 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 he'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.

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, dicification of Judaism, right?

In Weininger's terms, it took a feminine religion and masculinized it, right?

It was part of a civilizing process that eradicated femininity from society.

And we can then infer that the reason he probably converted to Protestantism is that Protestantism doubles down on that, right?

And dicifies, you know, Catholicism another 90% or whatever he thinks.

So this idea of a kind of masculinizing, civilizing process is one that we've encountered a bunch.

And Weininger is working with that.

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

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.

So I don't fucking know how this works.

Are you telling me that a misogynist anti-Semitic screed has some logical inconsistencies?

Well, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, like you heard it here first, folks.

Yeah.

But like, well, even on a mechanical level, I'm not even sure.

Like,

there's no therefore there.

Like,

I don't get it.

But, like, part of it must be that he's basically, well, we'll talk about that more, but part of this is an anti-modernism, and he thinks that modernism is just, you know,

heavily Jewish.

And so it all feels like it's all these associations, right?

That like that like all kind of war in the ether in 1900 or 1902 that he didn't feel like he had to substantiate.

A vibes-based metaphysics that

intuitively like somewhat sensical or familiar to people who are hanging out a lot in Vienna in 1900.

Exactly.

And I think it's worth pointing out that this

does appear to be the part that he wrote after his advisor signed off on the thing.

So it's also like he's not having anyone else read this and be like, I'm sorry, how did you get there?

Right.

Like it's this is not much robust editorial oversight.

You know,

such as it was, right?

But like it, but it's definitely

severe crank shit.

And I should say that like this was also a mode of argumentation that kind of thrived in Vienna at the time.

There were all these weird sort of semi-scientific or pseudo-scientific works that sort of circulated that today are completely forgotten.

There's this guy, Halbinger, who has this like world glacier theory about like Aryans coming from the ice.

And like there's like there's some hollow earth shit.

It's really fucking weird.

The only reason we know a lot of this stuff, there's a great book by Brikette Hamman, Hitler's Vienna, that sort of goes through this because one of the things is like, that's where Hitler probably gets that's where the idea of the Aryan race first comes up as like a thing that people got obsessed with.

It was in this kind of pseudo-scientific bilge that was sort of not like at the University of Vienna, but like people who'd like, yeah, written a dissertation and everyone was like, this guy's weird.

Let's give him a PhD.

Get him out of here.

And then he wants to get him out of here.

And then they're like, they write these pamphlets and like one person who, like, and basically the worst people you know ever, right, like read them and they're like, oh, interesting.

Well, you know, we have this.

We have our flat earthers, we have our anti-vaxxers, we have our artistic conspiracy theorists, we have our chemtrails, et cetera.

Like this is a very easily analyzable milieu.

Yeah.

But just to give you an idea of like how I think it's just like about these consonances of like, you know, almost like stand-up bits, like, you know, if they weren't so noxious, they'd be like stand-up bits, right?

He says at some point that, you know, like women, quote, I'm quoting Weininger, I want to be clear, like women, Jews tend to hang together.

So this is this idea that like, so he combines like this idea that, like, Jews are too clickish, right?

Which like is a super old, you know, anti-Semitic canard, with like what women go to the bathroom together and like gab about men or something like that.

It's like, what, what the fuck is this?

Like, this is reviving my theory from earlier in the episode that this guy has met like max three women and one of them is his wife.

There might be something like that.

Or, or he has the Nietzsche problem and like grew up with too many around them.

And he's like, They talked about me.

I'm freaking out

okay I think that what's important is like that he makes this leap and he makes it kind of intuitively I do think that that is important because like it is it just brings together a bunch of things that people intuitively did think

so he is able to very smoothly make this comparison

between

the concept of women and the concept of Jewish people that sort of folds them together into one entity of nothingness.

And that is a collapse that is supported by sort of the assumptions of his time.

I'm guessing that a lot of readers read this and were like, this is complete and utter bullshit.

This is crazy.

What are we doing here?

But, you know, the question of Jewish masculinity preoccupied Freud.

He was worried about this, right?

And like, they are.

So, so I should give a quick shout out to Sandra Gilman, who's, you know, been doing this kind of work for going on 40 years, just writing one great book about this after the other.

I mean, just to give you two examples, right?

The Jew's Body is fantastic.

Difference in pathology, stereotypes of sexuality, race and madness.

Just check out his work.

Basically, every single one of these will enlighten you about Weininger and about why Weininger could just make this leap.

But the fact that he could, right?

The fact that no one was like, I'm sorry, show your work.

What does that mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I think that's, that sort of proves Gilman's point like this stuff is in the ether in ways and even someone like freud who doesn't really credit this like has an anxiety about it is like a little worried about it right and like you we can think about all kinds of things right like myths about circumcision we can think about sociology right like you know weininger goes to university freud goes to university that is pretty recently integrated right like jews had been prevented uh from a lot of careers in the austro-hungarian empire until the i believe the 1848 revolutions there might have been some opening before that, but like Freud is often sort of like, it's part of the first generation that really could succeed.

Gustav Mahler, I believe, is the first Jewish conductor for the Vienna Hof Opa, right?

So like, and it's basically drummed out by anti-Semitic

intrigues.

But the, and the one place that Jewish men could not really enter was the army.

So this, this, the,

that's, it's not an accident, right?

Like there's, there's a, 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 the sense that like, oh, there was some kind of defective masculinity here, right?

This is also, what is it, like, how many years is this before Dreyfus, right?

Like, where like France has a freak out about this, right?

Like, so again, like, Sandra Gilman would point to all this and be like, he just has to make a pointing gesture and be like, all of this, right?

Like, it's all in there, except that Weininger is sort of the deaffy one who like blabs it all out, right?

Like, there, there is some indication that a lot of his readers were like kind of almost like a little grateful.

It's like, at least you're putting it on paper, this insanity, because otherwise it's like all innuendo and like humor and like, oh, come on, like, don't take it so seriously, et cetera, et cetera.

Like, he kind of brought these pathologies and vomited them out onto the page and so.

I think it's also important that, and we'll get to that in a second, right?

That, like, I already made, made fun of you for being actually not the thing that Weininger would be most terrified by, because you, too, Weininger, have taken the admirable step of, you know, working away the F in you, right?

You're, you're, you know, you cut your hair,

you sleep with women, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Like, yeah,

I have disavowed my feminine nothingness and am aspiring to somethingness, yes.

A masculine somethingness and substantiveness, right?

This is a lot of homophobic or like, frankly, misogynist accounts of lesbians, right?

It's like, well,

at least they're being the thing that we more like the thing that we like, which is men, right?

Yeah.

And you might think, you might think now that this is just a backstandard misogyny, and it might sound perfectly bonkers.

But of course, notice what it also is.

It's a experience of assimilation, right?

And this is what this is.

This is a theodicy of Jewish assimilation through the lens of gender.

Right.

The idea of like, oh, you know, you pray with them and you, you know, sing Christmas songs with them and then you you know and then you'd like make and then make jokes with them right like and suddenly you're just one of the the goyim right like yeah that he's the journey that he has been on over the past exactly yeah right um everything that you'll hear and that'll sound completely baddie when you say it about gender people were very genuinely saying about jewishness at the time right and and again weininger's fascinating pathology is that he just says like, oh, those are the same thing.

Where he's like, I mean, they kind of are, right?

Like, it's just,

you know, it was far more acceptable in his day for, like, to do one than the other, right?

This is also like, I will say, like, talk about seeing this in modern times.

This is the TERF account of trans men, right?

They have sort of betrayed their

oppressed status through an assimilation into actual

manhood.

And that this is kind of like a failure of the righteousness of lesbianism, according to the TERF logic, which I think we can dissect more when we talk about Judith Butler's new book, which we should record.

Yeah.

Like today, obviously, accounts of Jewish assimilation, we tend to be extremely leery of.

Part of that is what happened between us and Weininger, but like it is important to stress that like assimilation was at the time a pretty normal thing for people to do and even aspire to, right?

You know,

45 years later, you wouldn't get that, where Theodor Wiesengrund in 1933 changes his name to Theodo Ardorno and Hannah Hannah Arendt will never let him forget it.

And it's like, like, oh, it's because he was hoping the Nazis wouldn't notice he's Jewish.

That's probably not true.

But like, that was the charge, right?

She's like, you little coward, right?

But that's, that's the 50 years between, right?

Like, that, that, that basically in 1933, people were like, screw this.

I'm not, I'm not, you know, I, you know, also, you couldn't do it anymore because the, you know, at that point, this kind of quote-unquote scientific anti-Semitism that was obsessed with like, you know, blood and extraction and, you know, and family trees had taken over.

but it's it's noticeable right that like it was still conversion was still a perfectly manageable path in 1902 03 but not everyone chose it so he understands himself as having ascended not just into christianity but into a purer form of manhood 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.

Up till today, right, there was a, I found an article in Jerusalem Post about the Weininger syndrome about sort of self-hating Jews, so that he still is kind of like this byword for Jewish self-hatred, but it's also most likely gay self-hatred.

Like there's something about his, like he was queer in some way, right?

Like there was, if he, if he could have unproblematically just like found a girlfriend, like this book would probably look different.

Like there, like whether or not he's gay, we don't know, was gay, we don't know, but like there is a bunch of self-hatred in there, and it's definitely a sense of defective masculinity.

He just doesn't think he's mad enough.

Well, that might bring us to the next point in his account in Sex and Character, which is about bisexuality.

Can you tell me

his theory of bisexuality?

Yeah, so this is probably the most influential aspect of this book, right?

All human beings are in some measure bisexual.

This is why Freud gets interested.

This is the courting to Otto Weidinger.

This is not a,

do not email us.

Like, this is not an argument I think we should be making on our own behalf at Beth with the Wright.

But this is Otto Weininger believes that all human beings are in some measure bisexual, which is what gets the attention of Freud.

Yeah.

So Freud, in fact, Fleece, just to give you a sense of just how new that idea is, Fleece accuses, reads the book and is like, did you leak my idea of bisexuality to this guy?

And Freud's like, no, right?

This is fairly novel, right?

This is something that Gilman talks about too, by the way.

I should

give credit there.

And in fact, it may, I think it was sort of the beginning of the end of their bromance.

They sort of have a very homosocial, shading into more than that relationship.

Freud loves these kind of father figures early in his career.

And this breaks it up, the fact that they're like, you told Weininger about bisexuality, basically.

So what did did Weininger actually say?

Weininger

combines the idea of bisexuality with this complementarity idea that he had, right?

He proposes that in sexual attraction, a person with a certain distribution of M and F, let's say they're one quarter M, three quarters F,

is looking for someone who has the exact complementary distribution.

So in this case, three quarters M.

one quarter F if you're playing along at home.

So this is kind of a demented version of the story that Aristophanes tells in Plato's Symposium, right?

Where you have these like super beings that get split into male and female halves, and then they either male or female halves, and those have to, they just find them each other and combine, recombine.

That's what love is.

But it's also a song in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

That's right.

If you don't want to make it all the way through, go watch the animation in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

But the two halves sort of are like differently gendered and/orily gendered.

And it's an explanation of why we're attracted to certain kinds of people, right?

Why our erotic interests run are probably combined with gender presentations in some way.

He thinks it's completely determinative.

I would find issue with that.

But

the fact that

some people like musselbout and men and some do not, right?

Like this is an explanation of that.

It's intended as an explanation of that.

Otto Weininger has a metaphysical theory about like femmes who are mean to you.

Like this is

like a whole...

He's got a lot.

He's got a lot to say about it yeah it's true right like yeah this is what this is why hot girls are mean to nerds they're like you have too much you have too much f

I mean I do think that the the average American high school might might bear some of this book out which is which is a terrifying thought you know examine your life if you if you if if you if you can be described if you if Artovining is like yeah this proves my theory man if you're nodding along uh at many points during our episodes you need uh the help of a professional exactly but there's also something of, we've mentioned Artu Schopenhauer before in this podcast.

Schopenhauer, you know, thought that we didn't have sexual desire.

Sexual desire moves through us.

And in specific, what it is, is the will of a child to be born.

So the child is like, I want these two people to fuck and make me, basically.

It's a metaphor, kind of, but like, basically, it's like it's future life that

drives us to desire.

And Weininger thinks that through us, one perfect M and one perfect F

sort of try to create or recreate themselves, right?

They're like, hey, that's that person has a little that we know they're nice, but they have too little M or too much M and you need to get yourself a nice person with like too less or more M so that we can be fully complete or something like that, right?

That's the that's the idea These little ghost babies whispering in your ear.

Yeah.

Well, ghost M and ghost F's in this case.

Those babies aren't Schopenhauer on the other side.

Those babies are in Schopenhauer, but these are essence of the gendered metaphysical world.

Okay, gotcha.

So, you know, you might think, like, oh my god, like,

this is the fireworks factory.

This is what we've been staying up for.

No, no, I feel I find this pretty weird.

I feel like this is satisfactorily weird.

So, and it's, but it's also like, this might be, again, where people might hear some consonances with thinkers that we find a lot more palatable than Otto Weininger, right?

I'm taking this argument from Chandak Sengupta's excellent 2000 book about Otto Weininger.

He points out

this story about ratios makes homosexual relations nothing but a statistical inevitability.

Every human being falls somewhere between M and F, right?

Some of them are going to be in that middle portion.

What will that middle portion look like?

Well, those are going to be people who are going to seek out people with similar gender presentations.

That's where he thinks gay people live, right?

And then he's like, they are not different from anyone else.

They are a different part of the spectrum, right?

Gay people aren't distinct from the straits, right?

They're not sick, right?

As 19th century medicine thought.

They're not neurotics, like Freud thought still at the time, I believe.

They're not sinners.

They are, as Segupta writes, Weininger adopted a populational perspective, arguing that homosexuality represented the inevitable consequence of human sexual intermediacy.

The moment you have M and F in differential distributions, this is going to happen.

Can't wish it away, can't do anything about it.

It's just part of, you know, in a large enough population that this is going to happen.

So

he's understanding like male,

like principled celibacy as sort of the aspirational,

healed, sort of like Christly way to be.

But he's also interpreting homosexuality outside of the classical, like, sort of moral and moralizing frameworks through which it has traditionally been understood at this time.

Yeah, so I think that my guess is that most people who liked this idea took it basically

as separate from

his prescriptions of what ought to happen, right?

Because yes, of course, his ultimate prescription is that you should probably work away those parts in you that keep you from perfection.

And therefore, you, in the end, shouldn't be in a same-sex relationship.

Right.

Or opposite sex one for that matter for any relationship.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Right.

Like, so he's not wild about those either.

Um, but those two are distinct enough that someone who's like, well, I don't grant that, I'm still gonna have sex, right?

That, like, it's a, it is a really strong argument for,

you know, these people are not different from me from anyone else, right?

Like, and that's that's really, really important.

Now, I think you're getting at the big difference from Freud, from Plato, et cetera, et cetera.

Oh, Plato, Aristophanes, really, right?

Aristophanes

comes in the symposium.

It's

all about why love is a good thing, right?

Why it's kind of wonderful that we seek out each other, why we sometimes make fools of ourselves seeking out each other, but why, you know, why being together is awesome.

The wedding speech, the wedding speech

of sexual love, yeah.

Exactly.

Isn't that nice, right?

We seek

our compliment, and while it's a sign of our own defectiveness, it's fine.

It's nice that we seek to complement our defects, right?

Weininger is like, no, no, no, this is terrible, right?

Because the striving itself is the problem, right?

The sexual desire comes from the misalignment of M and F, or the, frankly, the existence of F in any of us at all.

We should work away the false part of our complement, right?

We should strive.

And now you might think, right, you might be like, oh my God, is this going to go here?

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

No.

Right?

Because you're not supposed to be working away your M.

You're supposed to be working away your F.

We're all on a journey towards perfect masculinity, which I guess is Swoll Jesus or Richard Wagner or something like that.

I don't know.

He doesn't seem to think that women should strive for perfect femininity, right?

Makes sense for him, right?

Like, first of all, he's like extremely dismissive of femininity.

And, of course, she's a nullity.

Who would willingly

for him, right?

So women would willingly make themselves a nothing, right?

Most thinkers in this vein don't really have a ton of prescriptions for women's conduct, right?

Because women's lives are morally irrelevant.

They are non-entities.

They are not in the sphere of moral or inquiry or concern, right?

Or you could sort of say, oh, it's more instinctual.

And so become more like that.

Basically be like, you know, a maid.

who I can also have sex with or whatever, right?

Like there are ways around this, but like he doesn't like sex and he doesn't think woman is identical to nature.

He thinks she's nothing, right?

So like basically, that's not an option that he has.

He's like, women should really work this away, right?

Like they, they should become little men.

Once again, I could find a radical feminist from the late 90s

who could have like roughly the same prescriptions.

Like, okay, what you need to do is divest yourself from femininity and embrace what have been coded as masculine, but are in fact merely human virtues.

Like this could be, I would like, I do not think they would hang out, but this this could be a prescription you get from like a married daily yeah i love i love the idea of auto winning or hanging out at a lesbian commune i mean like you you all get me and then they're like you know we're all women right he's like what like i'm i gotta call someone call me an uber yeah he's high tailing it out of northampton yeah yeah

anyway so i mean like can i say something without everyone getting mad like there is a certain weird fucked up logic to this right if you think that human sexuality is bad and you think that human sexuality is about the relationship between these two principles then the way to quiet all sexuality is to remove any duality right like the other side is not real you need to get rid of it he thinks in his diary weininger once wrote that and i quote the hatred of woman is really the hatred against one's own as of yet untranscended sexuality so this this to me like yeah not wrong not wrong yeah yeah

yeah again again like if rotating clocks man yeah yeah if you talk about gender roles like it's probably spot on, but like, but he really thinks like it's a non-relationship, right?

I mean, we also might think of like Jacques Lacan's infamous dictum, Igna pas de relation sexuel, there is no sexual relationship.

Very similar point.

He's like, you're engaging with a speculum.

You're engaging with a mirror.

You're engaging with a figment.

The thing you think you're having, you're not having, right?

Like

there too, Weininger.

Yeah, it's like, it's a weird, I do not want to say this man is ahead of his time.

He's not ahead of any time, but he's, but they're like yeah broken clock describes it well like some of you but these are these are strains that that were not these are strains of of european thought that were not uh eradicated by the holocaust right like these are yeah yeah things that have remained in the zeitgeist in sort of the unspoken subtext of a lot of european thought yeah have been resurrected in a figure like lacan Yeah, yeah.

Much later.

And so this is also where, if you wanted to, we could talk a little bit about Parsifal, the the opera that I sort of yada yada earlier.

Oh, yeah, let's get into it.

Yeah, so right, so it's the story of this young fool who happens upon the Knights of the Holy Grail, and their

king, the Grail King, is

in is in dire straits because he has,

you know, basically met

a woman who has wounded him.

Hint, hint.

Okay.

Right.

And who is therefore, and basically

who has seduced him and wounded him thereby.

And

only a pure fool can release him from this curse.

Parseval turns out to be that pure fool.

He meets

said woman, the only female speaking or singing role in the entire opera.

And her name is Kundri.

And she's sort of in league with this evil sorcerer.

She kind of ensorcels him and tries to seduce him.

And at the end, the moment she kisses him, Parsifal understands, feels sympathy for

the Grail King and realizes what it was that hurt him.

And at that moment, he basically is able to banish this woman.

She becomes kind of, she is a mute basically for the entire rest of the, she's on stage, but she doesn't say anything.

She becomes a penitent.

And

the all-male Grail Knights celebrate kind of this like all-masculine communion.

So woman is the force of all evil.

She imposes this terrible knowledge, which like

you from now.

Not so covertly, also syphilis, yeah.

Which imposes, you know, the fall from grace, but then also is the path to its restoration.

Yeah.

And, you know, this is one reason why Nietzsche came to hate Wagner.

He thought this was perfect garbage.

Weininger loved this stuff.

So, what Weininger took away from was, and I'll, this is again from his diary, quote, coitus is the payment that the man has to make to the woman for her oppression, right?

So it's the, it's the, the wages men pay for women's oppression.

I have, I have questions about this trade.

Yeah, no, right.

Like, well,

you also might have questions about the man who thinks this is a trade, right?

Well, it just seems asymmetrical on several levels.

And also, yes, this characteristic of it as this this like terrible tax that must be paid by the masculine kind.

I don't know.

I have notes.

I have notes.

I feel like this does not stand up to scrutiny.

And we should say, right?

Like, so like

it's an opera all about kind of a

male homosexual cleansed of all femininity is essentially a step towards salvation, right?

I should say that there are.

There were others who took something totally different away from that, namely that gay sex rules, but that's maybe for another episode.

Parsival was apparently a fairly common shifter that people would like use in personal ads.

They're like, I'm looking for a bike companion in brackets, Parsival.

And it's like, oh, yeah, that's going to be more than just biking done on this trip.

I will say there are some people who will take anything to be a lesson in how much gay sex rules.

This is

a frequent motif.

Show a gay man a lug wrench, and they're like, Yeah, that's a metaphor for how much gay sex rules.

Well, Well, you see, no, anyway.

Weirdly, Weininger manages to still be kind of ambivalent about the women's movement, right?

Oh, that's not where I thought you were going with that.

Okay.

Oh, you thought he was going to be full of hatred?

Yeah.

Why do you think he was going to be full of hatred?

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

These are

going to stick to their nature, right?

Yes, he agrees with all of that.

Except, you see, if you're a woman or a female presenting person in a, you know, university

or in a women's lib movement he thinks well that is you subduing the W in yourself right or the F right you are you're embracing your inner M right

this is quite

so that there is a an ethos that I want to just draw attention to which is that the

these ontological sort of like pre-social pre-voluntary impulses and drives within us of masculinity and femininity are like can be contained by the will, right?

They can be excise, they can be.

Yes, which is interesting, right?

Instincts couldn't be like who I find attractive feels like the most given thing, but like he doesn't think so, right?

And again, like I think the analogy to Jewish assimilation is pretty important here, right?

Like he has to think this is possible because like he's lived it with respect to his culture.

He's he's, I think, right, and now he's like, well, now I just got to really do it with respect to gender, right?

When he's like, oh,

that's a little harder than like changing your religion, man.

It's a very Protestant idea, right?

It's like, I can purge my soul of its unworthy elements.

I can become perfected in the image of God.

And doesn't he talk about like the healed, defeminized, masculine, pure M self as a kind of salvation, almost in Christian terms, right?

It's like ascending to this Christly plane.

yeah i forget who says this i i should i should i'm stealing this from somewhere but i don't know from whom i don't remember from whom but someone's like yeah it's the it's the protestant work ethic applied applied to your gender presentation right or to gender right and to your to your sexual desires just work hard enough ladies you can become a man yeah yeah so It's first important to note that he's generally positive about what he calls emancipatory movements, right?

Because he reads it as an attempt by certain women to rid themselves of their own femininity.

That's, by the way, something that feminists generally liked about Weininger.

There is a review of this book, the English edition, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

noted early feminist in the magazine The Critic.

And she thought that Weininger was basically making the same point as a lot of feminists, right?

Femininity, as constructed traditionally, was an abomination.

and needed to be worked away, right?

Like they thought, no quibble with me, right?

Like it's not about like biology.

it's like the category, the social category of femininity is bad and needs to be destroyed.

And so, so, Weininger very much like spoke their language in a weird way.

He had a few nice things to say about female emancipation.

Maybe I'll say a few, I'll read two passages.

So, first,

the general direction of the investigation is easy to understand from what has already been stated.

A woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her, right?

So he thinks you, in some way, you can't, if you're a woman asking for rights, you're already discovering your inner dude.

And he's like, good for you, buddy.

You can do it.

Here's a baseball hat for you to wear.

Yeah.

You can't be a feminist and be a real woman, but he means that as a good thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In a good way.

Yeah.

But I should mention, right, like you also hear why he hates, he loves emancipation.

He hates women's rights movements.

Because he's like, what you're trying to do is give rights to people who don't, haven't worked for them.

He's like, right?

Like, you can't admit everyone, but only those.

So it's a very weird thing.

It's like, if a feminist shows up to

Weininger and is like, I demand this, he's like, good for you, get in there.

And they're like, and for all my sisters, who's like, no, no, no, no, no, because they didn't ask for it.

So they're still fully F and like they can't do this, right?

They need to transform themselves into more masculine creatures in order order to be worthy of rights inclusion dignity yeah it's like an incel version of consciousness raising yeah

anyway so i'll read one more just to just to where he explains this a little bit emancipate this is a little long i'm sorry about that emancipation as i mean to discuss it is not the wish for an outward equality with with man but what is of real importance in the woman question the deep-seated craving to acquire man's character to attain his mental and moral freedom to reach his real interests and his his creative power.

I maintain that the real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity for emancipation in this sense.

All those who are striving for this real emancipation, all women who are truly famous and are of conspicuous mental ability, to the first glance of an expert, reveal some of the anatomical characters of the male.

Oh my God.

Sorry.

Sorry.

It's like a great transvestigator.

It's like, this got an app, Adam's apple.

That woman's a dude.

Yeah, yeah.

But he means it in a good way.

Again, he's like, good for you.

Yeah,

new dudes.

We'd like to welcome the new dudes to this orientation meeting.

This is how you

play with your crotch or whatever.

All those who are

constructed is mentally, you know, those so-called women who have been held up to admiration in the past and present by the advocates of women's rights as examples of what women can do, have almost, what women can do, have almost invariably been what I have described described as sexually intermediate forms.

His point is like this is what happens to a person when they're already sort of in the middle and want to, you know, really, you know, crank up their M factor, right?

So yeah, so that's that's his view on this kind of task that this book thinks is set for all of us.

The other thing we should point out, just because with Nietzsche, we were so careful to sort of point out that Nietzsche was ultimately not anti-modern, Weininger is, right?

Really?

Yeah.

He's a big critic of modernity, and I think he's ultimately in some ways a traditionalist, right?

And this is where his critique of Judaism or of Jewishness really goes.

He thinks that the modern age is a Jewish age, right?

And this is, again, something that the Nazis would really like about him, right?

Like, why do the Nazis hate modern art?

Why do they call it degenerate?

Well, it's because of, you know, Vienna circa 1900, right?

The term degeneration entered the vocabulary of discussing art through Max Nordau, who was

a little older than Weininger, but not by a whole lot, but was a Viennese writer, right?

So this is the moment where people sort of, this idea of that modernity is a diseased time and that the disease is somehow identical with both gender variance and Jewishness really has a great deal of purchase.

And he thinks this is sort of a central aspect of his critique.

What I want to impress on people is that this critique of modernity is so widespread, right?

Like this, it's a feministy, it's, you know, it's an originality, right?

Like think of how many trad Twitter accounts there are.

Like, what's keeping art from looking like this?

Right?

The thing that I find quite valuable in Weininger is that he just in that deaffy way that this book does sort of just makes explicit like, hey, this is anti-Semitism, right?

Like he doesn't think that's a problem, problem, like, but for all of us who think that's a problem, 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.

It's basically it's about

gender,

there's a gender politics submerged not far below the surface there.

And there's anti-Semitism that that's sort of in its DNA, basically.

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 auto-winding or 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.

He's just literalizing all of it and has bring it, brought it all to the fore.

And he has certainly enlightened me yeah and i mean and what the other thing that he does i think is he makes connections that were in the culture right he's this is a big bold book this is like right like it makes it it keeps making connections that that other people sort of made only sort of in asides footnotes and like you know maybe in their speeches but in their books and he's the one who sort of like just lays it out there these three things are the same right and and i think that that made him extremely generous generative for a lot of thinkers to just have that stuff out there.

And, you know, I think that

he's been more or less forgotten.

He's more or less a footnote now himself.

But I do think it's someone that we need to grapple with.

And it's someone that I think,

you know, there's a reason why like a scholar like Sandra Gilman returns to him again and again, because he is the nexus.

He is the person who brings together things that elsewhere, as you said earlier in the culture were just vibes-based and that we have kind of carried forward right like we're allowed to talk about right like you know coastal New York liberal elites and it's like and and somehow you're not supposed to hear what's obviously being said that there's anti-Semitism in that characterization the coastal liberal elites who go to Zay bars and need a couple days off every September you know it's like it's very very thin subtext yeah right but like Weininger is really, I think, valuable in his, in his own way, in his own bizarre and tragic and sad way.

He really foregrounds

what holds a bunch of these narratives together that we've kind of kept living with, that are kind of still okay to trot out, right?

Like a lot of the stuff that

Weininger said, you know, obviously that were written today, you know, be, you know, you'd be laughed out of out of the university.

At the same time,

there are, you know, the fact that we keep coming up with modern day analogs tells you something, right?

Like in isolation, right, these ideas have persisted and are even maybe more acceptable now than they were, you know, five years ago.

And I do think that it's the voluminousness of this tome that really is the great value here and that it like it like brings together these things and interweaves them in ways that are maybe more effective historically and more dangerous historically than any single idea that's contained in it.

Maybe one thing we could leave our listeners with is the exhortation to please be as bold and rude and stupid and obvious in pointing out misogyny and racism and anti-Semitism as Otto Weininger was in avowing them.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.