8  The Superior Man and the Absolute Cocotte

Having haunted so many restless youngsters in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and having then been interred among those books known to have once been important, though no one can say why, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character has just been reissued. And one can already foresee that although it will excite the unseemly enthusiasm (after all, it’s so Middle European!) of a few rare zealots, most people will greet it with a flicker of impatience, if not indignation, and ask, “What? After three quarters of a century, do we still have to put up with this arrogant and suicidal young man? This student who went out of his way to bad-mouth women, homosexuals, and Jews?” Agreed, but does today’s sorry official culture really have any reason to look down its nose at him?

The true anti-Semite says, “Besides, some of my best friends are Jews.” The true enemy of women says, “Besides, she’s a nice girl.” The true homophobe says, “Besides, I like them.” Weininger is just the opposite of these people. First of all, he himself was Jewish; second, it was precisely his atrocious remarks about women that aided Karl Kraus, that most eloquent worshipper of woman, in putting the law to shame when it sought with impunity to condemn a number of Viennese filles de joie; third, what Weininger wrote about homosexuality is an early, clumsy effort to approach a subject about which modern thought has never been able even to rise above clumsiness.

So one begins to suspect that the whole story is a bit more complicated, ambiguous, and misleading. I will try to tell it for what it also is: an erotico-philosophical feuilleton. Believe it or not, there was once a time when the “problem of sex” actually existed, and was not merely fodder for statistics, sociologists, marriage counselors, and liberators of humanity. For three generations, from the midnineteenth century on, any hint of sex gave rise to excruciating spasms and cast a pall over everything. Then, as always, sensitive young people indulged in masturbation, but in the heroic certainty that they were courting madness and death.

Indeed, according to what was then accepted doctrine, the spinal cord would supposedly turn rapidly into pulp and trickle down the backbone. And when Strindberg, in Son of a Servant, revealed that this was one of many deceptions practiced on him as a child, it was a gesture of unheard-of audacity. There were also, as Frank Wedekind described, epidemics of suicide among high school students overwhelmed by erotic fantasies and guilt. And the whole world kept piling libido on every knickknack: All of Art Nouveau can be seen as an attempt to eroticize industry, the beginning of the mass production of objects (winding flights of stairs, untrustworthy door handles . . .) that Weininger’s amoral, insatiable woman might continually relate to in her increasing boredom with the ever present and inept man of the law, so stupid and so convinced of being the custodian of the spirit. And it is even plausible that abstract art, whether pre-Informel (as in Schmithals) or absolute decoration (as in Gustav Klimt), was born of an excess of erotic tension: The chromatic blur serves primarily to cover or envelop in a vibrant veneer scenes too indecent to be shown.

It was amid these quicksands that Otto Weininger was born in Vienna in 1880. He was one of those fatal individuals (fatal especially to themselves) who cannot say anything without carrying it to its “ultimate conclusions.” Like many others, he had the vice of the Absolute, and with a neophyte’s energy he went looking for it where people at that time supposed it to be: in science. But for a shrewd eye like his, it was precisely science that presented an image of distressing uncertainty behind its positivist arrogance: The most subtle theorists, like Ernst Mach, had reduced the ego to an anteroom through which impressions flowed. The nihilistic sword of the new epistemology drove consciousness into the “sea of sensations” and transformed it into a “bundle” of chance psychic aggregations. The subject, proud and positive, discovered itself to be a patchwork, a “kaleidoscope” that “reduces everything to a hodgepodge of elements,” “renders everything meaningless and without foundation,” and “destroys the possibility of starting from a fixed point for thought.” In the end it destroys “the concept of truth.”

Behind these agonizing results, one glimpses the impassive sneer of David Hume. But who was it who championed the unity of the subject against Hume’s corrosive acids? The great Immanuel Kant, and the whole of nineteenth-century German culture was a continual gesture of homage and betrayal toward him as the last bearer of the law. Weininger therefore turned to Kant as to an unassailable rock in the “hodgepodge” of elements. Had he been an ordinary spirit, his path would have been laid out: a chair in philosophy and a lifetime of sober research as a neo-Kantian thinker, of which there were quite a few in the Germany of those years. But Weininger had an aberrant originality and followed his own phantasms rather than common sense. And his mind was equally violently obsessed by ethics and by eros. Thus he had the utter effrontery to launch himself on a hitherto unheard-of project: to marry epistemology and sexuality by squeezing Kant, “the superior man,” and Lulu, “the absolute cocotte,” into the same bed. As might have been foreseen, the two of them sprang out of that bed with mutual repugnance (perhaps Kant’s famous Realrepugnanz?).

From this incident emerged Sex and Character; first a graduate thesis, then a heavy tome, and finally a contagious best-seller until the late 1920s. But Weininger was not around to witness this last phase: He had fired a bullet into his heart a few months after the book’s publication in 1903. He was twenty-three years old. The reasons for his suicide can be divined from the illuminating fragments collected as On Last Things and published posthumously. Weininger, who had invested his book with the fanatical necessity of being the truth, had come to a growing realization that his creation was a grandiose failure and above all that the person Otto Weininger was not the spotless and perfectly conscious subject he had thought; rather, he had increasingly come to resemble woman’s proxy, the criminal. Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, caught in a similar conflict, had found a way out in paranoiac delusion.

The Kantian Otto Weininger chose suicide: “The decent man proceeds by himself toward death, if he realizes that he has become definitely wicked.” So how should one read Sex and Character? Certainly not as a scientific treatise. That would be to fall into the error of which Weininger himself was a victim, in order to derive the mean satisfaction of smiling superciliously at these sometimes hilarious pages, pure fin de siècle grotesqueness, in which he lashes out at women, Jews, and homosexuals. No, Sex and Character is a desperate, subtle confession, both lucid and raving, that stages an intermezzo in the “tragedy of consciousness.” And precisely for theatrical reasons, Weininger had to give it the seal of scientific solemnity, to formulate it in that grave and cumbersome language that is nevertheless continually shaken by a tremor, the first sign of a psychical tempest, the omnipresent threat of eros.

The hidden point from which the whole book proliferates is the specter of the androgyne. The bisexuality marvelously depicted by Plato, the cabalists, Jakob Böhme, and books of alchemy, all the way to Honoré de Balzac’s Séraphita, and now a lost and elusive chimera, resurfaces by murky underground channels in young Weininger, as it also did, and by no less murky channels, in the slightly older Wilhelm Fliess and Sigmund Freud. Having stated the obvious fact that masculine and feminine traits coexist in every person but carrying it—as though obsessed—to its “ultimate conclusions,” Weininger ended by noting that bisexuality necessarily led to an incurable and baleful split in the subject. On one side is man, something, affirmation, the heir of Kant’s transcendental subject, reduced to a policeman ever on the alert, his will vainly tense, in danger of losing his identity and damaging the law, which in his coercive vacuity he represents. On the other is woman, nothing, negation, this amoral and irresponsible creature, this Lulu who has no ego (and yet is sovereign), who tells lies out of biological necessity and copulates continually with everything around her.

This outrageously comical comparison was not invented by Weininger, as his undiscerning critics have always insisted, but transcribed by him. The text from which he transcribed it was none other than the clandestine system of thought that governed (and still governs) our civilization. Weininger sketched that oppressive cage in the darkness and made it recognizable. Thinking the cage’s founding assumptions through to their “ultimate conclusions” caused it to creak. Or rather, Weininger himself tried to get out of the cage but could not, precisely because of his “scientific” and Kantian assumptions. Outside the cage, he might truly have begun that “research on principles” (masculine and feminine) promised by the book’s subtitle. And there he would have encountered alchemical and mythological symbolism to serve as a guide. Instead, Weininger’s involuntary grotesqueness rages just when he is fumbling to emerge from his cage.

Once he had finished writing Sex and Character; Weininger seems to have realized that his whole system did nothing but describe a hallucination produced by fear of the void and its troubling synonym Woman: “And this is also the explanation of man’s deepest fear: fear of the woman, that is, fear in the face of the absence of meaning: that is, fear before the seductive abyss of the void.” For if “woman is man’s sin,” as Weininger observes at the end of his Kantian “deduction of femininity,” his whole book could no longer claim to have described woman as a real being, but woman as a perpetual hallucination of sin. And this is no small feat: He may not have written a scientific work, but he was surely a faithful and clairvoyant chronicler of the specters of his civilization. His error, once again, was the one that Karl Kraus is said to have pointed out in Strindberg: “Strindberg’s truth: The order of the world is threatened by the feminine. Strindberg’s error: The order of the world is threatened by woman.”

The “cultural world,” in its ever renewed respectability, has not been exactly generous toward that valuable error known as Sex and Character: when the book appeared, because it had too much success, was read too avidly by young girls, and therefore could not be taken seriously; today, because it is offered as a period piece, for the grotesqueness scattered throughout it and for the pompous incongruity of the scientific apparatus that goes with it. Very few people have actually acknowledged a debt of gratitude to this book. And those who did were writers who were indeed horrified by the “cultural world”: Kraus, Strindberg, Wittgenstein.