Male societies
Open seminar on reading Klaus Theweleit's "Male fantasies"

  • Male societies

According to Theleweit, a certain approach to one's own desire, and even to desire in general and to its flow, plays a decisive role in becoming a fascist.

This fluidity is encoded as the threatening, wild female element. To a fascist a woman can only be a saint (“white nurse”) or a whore (“rifle-woman”). But how does he see the soldier-man? What is the nature of fascist male societies and does desire play a significant role in them?

Reading:

  • K. Theweleit, “Male Fantasies” (Chapters: “Excursus on homosexuality and where we go from here” and “Homosexuality and the White Terror”)
  • H. Blüher, Theory of the male society (from: Rewolucja konserwatywna w Niemczech. 1918-1933 [Germany's conservative revolution 1918-1933], p. 254-272)

Those interested in actively participating in the series of events and receiving the reading material via e-mail are asked to write to the following address: zapisy@artmuseum.pl, with the title: “Male Fantasies”.

Nearly forty years after the first edition of Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies came out in Germany, the cult “psychoanalysis of white terror” is being published in Polish. While many respected voices worriedly consider the dangers coming about from the rebirth of right wing extremism in Europe, it is with great urgency that we must ask ourselves if we are able to face the contemporary nature of fascism. The fascism that may not appear dressed in black or brown shirts and that, contrary to the mitigating theories, is not necessarily only associated with political totalitarianism.

Theweleit's book induces anxiety by presenting fascism as something rooted deeply in the psycho-physiological constitution of the modern man, or rather the modern male, the soldier-male who goes to war with desire, supposedly embodied by femininity.

To understand a fascist, we need to let go of ideology and political systems and turn our attention to his specific psychological and physiological reality. We need to ask, not even “why the masses desired fascism”, but in fact, how the fascist man desires – or does not desire. Klaus Theweleit attempts to answer this question in his thousand page long work. He thoroughly studies historical documents (letters, biographies, novels and other testimonies of the life of men in the Weimar Republic), but also makes use of various theoretical devices, mainly psychoanalytical, as well as some that today would be associated with feminism and gender studies. But those theories are not considered orthodox or canonical. Male Fantasies were, for instance, one of the first serious applications of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis.

Our goal is to read Theweleit's book together and discuss the proposed understanding of fascism as a phenomenon. Alongside extracts from Male Fantasies we will suggest reading fragments of other works that highlight specific issues which will be covered during our meetings.

Each meeting will to some extent be an independent event, open to take part in by anyone, but we do hope to have attendants interested in active participation in the whole program (please inquire at zapisy@artmuseum.pl, writing “Male Fantasies” in the subject line of your message).
 

Other events from that cycle: