Women's Experimental Writing by Berry Ellen E.;

Author:Berry, Ellen E.; [Berry, Ellen E.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474226417
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Why approach abjection?

In a preliminary summary of his findings in Volume I of Male Fantasies, Theweleit directly addresses his rationale for studying fascism: “We need to understand and combat fascism not because so many fell victim to it, not because it stands in the way of the triumph of socialism, not even because it might ‘return again,’ but primarily because as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production. . . . [I]‌t becomes apparent that fascism is a current reality whenever we try to establish what kinds of reality present-day male-female relations produce” (220–1). Theweleit rejects psychoanalytic models of a universal biological basis for aggression, the oedipal complex, or the absolute difference between male and female sexuality in favor of a socially based relational theory that brings his analysis of fascism very close to home. According to Theweleit, “A man doesn’t have ‘this’ sexuality and a woman ‘that’ one. If it seems possible today to make empirical distinctions between male and female sexuality, that only proves that male-female relations of production in our culture have experienced so little real change for such a long time that structures have arisen whose all-pervasiveness tempts us into regarding them as specific to sex” (221). Under current conditions, Theweleit argues, “it is appropriate to understand the sexuality created by, and active within, [patriarchal social] relations as a sexuality of the oppressor and the oppressed . . . The sexuality of the patriarch is less ‘male’ than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected woman is not so much ‘female’ as suppressed, devivified” (221–2).

Chawaf almost certainly would agree with Theweleit’s assessment of the dangers arising from our current mode of reality-production, as she dramatizes it in Redemption. Through the figure of Charles, she demonstrates how the pathological fear of and desire for fusion with the (m)other generates life-destroying realities that, in their extremity, are indistinguishable from those modes operating under fascism. As Chawaf makes clear in her interview with Alice Jardine, she writes in the hope that symbolizing and working through these life-destroying modes will help them to evolve and “generate life to avert misfortune.”

Theweleit also stresses the importance of conceiving of fascism not as “something alien and opposed to the individual self,” and he quotes Walter Benjamin’s advice in this matter. “It is not enough,” Benjamin cautions, “simply to know the thing you wish to destroy; to complete the test you have to have felt it” (226). In her foreword to Male Fantasies, Barbara Ehrenreich comments on just this aspect of Theweleit’s unflinchingly direct approach to the subject of fascism and distinguishes it from other “less disconcerting” approaches to the subject.

We set out to read about fascism in a hardheaded, instrumental frame of mind . . . [W]‌e approach the subject of fascist men with the mind-set of a public health official: We want to get near to (the toxin or the protofascists) in order to get as far away as possible.

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