7 Over-Complex Thinking and Writing (Part 2)

The following interview is a lonely summit among my journalistic publications. It was directed aggressively against the forced feminism of a very feminist-dominated paper; it is turned against the all-knowing superior attitude of so-called experts, and ironises their belief in science (philology, psychoanalysis). The double meaning of my proposed title, as it appears below, was itself – for the otherwise openly tolerant editorial staff of the Berlin TAZ – regarded as too much. But “Foreskin of Emancipation,”(1) as the title was ultimately printed, is in the event perhaps even better.

In Thomas Brussig‘s novel “Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee” (“At the Shorter End of Sun Avenue”), from 1999, this formulation of mine was used to unnerve quite properly a director, on the occasion of a political propaganda event at the East Berlin school in her charge. “Foreskin of the Workers’ Movement” was now emblazoned on a large poster in the school auditorium. The Marxist “Forefront (avant-garde) of the Workers’ Movement” was, in this manner, quite successfully repurposed and parodied. We are in the 80s: the turning-point proclaims itself from every side (not only in the economic disaster).

This interview appeared in the Berlin TAZ on 1988-01-07, Part 1 on 1986-01-15.

Freud and the Sphinx

Forefront/-skin of Emancipation

Reinhold Urmetzer: If we are to talk about the men’s and women’s movement, then we would first need to clarify just what we understand “man” and “woman” to mean. “Man” has, etymologically, perhaps something to do with manus (hand), to have it in hand, to have it, a thing, the penis in the hand, etc.; while with “woman” we find, already in Old English, a distinction between wīf and wīfman.(2)

Jean Pierre Dubost: If I answer, I’ve already fallen into the trap. You are familiar with the biblical story, painted by Breughel and set poetically by Baudelaire: a blind man, leading a blind man who in turn leads a blind man, falls into a pit. Breughel shows us the moment in his painting as the first of the blind men falls. The rest of what follows, you can imagine into the picture.

In his attempt to transfer the theater into science, Dr. Freud fell tragically into the Greek trap. His ambition, if I’ve understood it correctly, lay in taking the place of the hero Œdipus at all costs, to usurp his role in the work at the decisive moment.
Thus he ascends the stage, shoves the questioner aside and takes on the role via a slight textual shift (hocus-pocus – the text is a discourse). He then proudly proclaims: “It was no theater at all, it was theoria, ie, theory.” The answer is deadly, as you know.

Thus, instead of responding in blind trust to this consequential shift and becoming myself a blind man leading the blind (see above), I would rather introduce into this metamorphosis of theater into theory my own kind of Wayback-Machine.
You could, for example, rewrite the scene as follows (naturally, this is only a minor attempt):
– The Sphinx: Doctor, have you nothing to say?
– Dr. Freud (after a long silence and replying in learned tones): Now that’s quite simple. The creature with four legs in the morning, two at midday, and three in the evening is Man – I beg your pardon: I meant “mankind.”
– The Sphinx: “Curses, he knew!” (plummets as planned into a hole in the stage)
Thunder, lightning, three seconds darkness. On the suddenly harshly-lit stage a plaster bust of Professor Lacan.

That would be a possible meta-text for Freudian discourse, which (blessedly) is dying out for all eternity. But I should come back to your question.
Every anthropological answer, every anthropo-logos is a discursive Magna Mater, is vale and vulture alike.(3) This Great Mother sleeps with all the gods and bears any number of children. As Kronos eats all his children, splits the discursive Great Mother all of her children in two: Man, Woman, Subject, Object, Thing, Desire, Penis, Hand. If the man has himself in the hand, so also does the hand have the man it itself, and hand in hand the lines of the theory encircle “Man” and “Woman” alike. Both, standing naked in the middle and somewhat overawed, stand trial.
We know how the great round-dance of words ends, as in fairy tales, ie: “Problem solved, riddle unraveled, princess married.”
From these words we might also say: “In the end they married, they had a happy marriage and had many children.” No, thank you.

Reinhold Urmetzer: The women’s movement has taught some men to be fearful. But has the men’s movement not also conversely influenced women, such that they identify with the “new” men and now overcome the division of the sexes from a totally different side?

Jean Pierre Dubost: If  W means “women” and W is referent, sender, and message all at once, then W can naturally only be auto-mobile. This discursive self-mobility is then the “women’s movement.”

In reality, however, every woman is and does (speaks) differently than W. Sonia Delaunay limits herself to “simultaneous autos” (in Konkursbuch No. 5, p. 135), and she metamorphoses thereby a mass-consumption product into an artwork. Without this supplement, “auto-mobility” would be merely “dromoscopic” (Virilio).

If, now, W serves as mirror to its symmetric phantom M, then the “mirror stage of specters” arises; that is, something phantomasmic to the second degree. Concerning the self-replication of phantasmata, see my first answer.

Diogenes is thus searching in today’s postmodern Agora for the “new man.”

Reinhold Urmetzer: What would be the intersecting set between “new man” and “new woman”? Is the vanishing of Man rather more likely to occur than that of Woman? And what then, if eventually a tabula rasa is made, not only in the present sense of a new war, that was always a purely self-flaying men’s issue?

Jean Pierre Dubost: “Intersecting set” is to mathematical for me. I’d rather it were oenological; that is, as “blending.”(4) As we all know, blending is used just as often for improving the taste as for production of inferior wine varieties.
By the same measure, I don’t see why a “blend” of “man” and “woman” should be better or worse, which does not at all signify that rigid roles should be preserved – that was not your question.
The questions seems to be rather the danger of a new territorializing. If I begin to categorize an initiating line of flight (and the media exerts a flagrantly enormous pressure on language in this regard), then I have killed it.

It is nevertheless difficult to speak about what newly arises. Deleuze provides here a good formulation: hear the grass growing. Thence is the offensive of paradox necessary against every castrative limitation.
That which is the least tolerated by heads of media is the delay of the Definitive. In a symmetrical sense, the illusion of the pure beginning is fatal. The Modern is a mushroom, which grows anew every new rain. And every time this means: now begins the aurora. Thus is every tabula rasa in itself a bringing to an end, title, text, and signature alike. All times are exhausted here in advance: the end of the (old) world is the beginning of the new. This is programatically already fulfilled (filled, fulfilled, and exhausted).
Tabula rasa is Big Bang.
Yet between Christmas and New Year’s there is a week (thank heavens). The stage of emancipation may always be archæologically reconstructed ex post facto. But who speaks of a world that is ever approaching a utopian beginning (no Eschaton)?
Otherwise the Child Jesus would have already overtaken us, and we remain as dumb as the oxen and mules, giving not the least bit of warmth.

Reinhold Urmetzer: The phallocracy, and with it perhaps even the entire western logo-centrism that perhaps derives from it, finds itself in crisis. In parallel, there arises among men and politicians a new fear of castration, provoked by forced feminism. The terms “feminization of language” and “man, the sexless creature” come to mind.(5)

Jean Pierre Dubost: The “big Thing” has a long future before it yet. Let us leave all the proud erections to bicker among themselves about the length of their shadows. That which reaches its apogee by virtue of its own potency will inherently find itself in crisis.

The erective crisis is sexless. I don’t know, what the “feminizing” of language might be (see the first and third answers). I know only, that every phallo-logocentrism is ruttish for every hole, desires immediately to stuff every lacuna.

Reinhold Urmetzer: Derrida differentiates in one essay on Nietzsche’s styles between an image of the hymen, the veil, and its revelation, the defloration, and connects in the treatise on the apocalypse the “retraction of the foreskin from the glans,” the penetration, with the apocalyptic move. That is: maidenhead and defloration, or rather revelation of truth, together with the “retraction of the foreskin from the glans” and apocalyptic revelation; shall this rupture logo-centric discourse?

Jean Pierre Dubost: No lacuna “tolerated.” Phallo-logo-centrism knows only one thing: 0 – 1, true – false, one – two. March, march!
How would it be, if the actual opposition were not between truth and lies, “deconcealment” versus “enshrouding,” but rather between truth and lacuna. To uncover or not to uncover, that is then the question. What might lay bare the event, these days, is the greatest question.
The language of media has always speaken here with quite stirring transparency. In French journalism-jargon, one speaks these days wholly unselfconsciously of “covering the event.”

*

Jean Pierre Dubost taught French and general literature at the romanistic Institute of the University of Stuttgart; teaching positions at the University of Klagenfurt and at the Collège international de Philosophie in Paris.

Publications (only in German): „Don Juan oder die Stroboskopie“ (Berlin 1984), ,,Wiederholter Anlauf zu einer unabschließbaren Rede über das Verschwinden der Welt“ (Stuttgart 1985), „Einführung in den letzten Text“ (Hamburg 1986), „Marguerite Duras oder nach Auschwitz filmen“ (Stuttgart 1986), „Montaigne, Marx, Proust“ (Frankfurt 1986).

1The word-play here in German between Vorhut (“advance guard”) and Vorhaut (“foreskin”) is, as the words differ by only a letter, more felicitous than the rendering here in English.
2 Old German makes a stronger distinction between wip (a neutral term for any adult of female gender) and frouwe (an honorific specifically for noble married women, closer in usage to the English “lady” [which curiously derives from the Old English roots for “loaf-kneader,” related to “lord:” “loaf-ward”]).
3 The German term for “vulture” here (Geier) is more homophonous to the Gaia used in the original.
4 The word-play in German is here between Schnittmenge (“intersecting set” in mathematics) and Verschnitt (referring to blending specifically in winemaking).
5 The feminist movement in Germany, as in many European societies and to a greater degree than in English-speaking countries, had to contend with a language in which many terms had grammatical gender at odds with concerns of social equality. Criticism of efforts to overcome this inherent bias described them as “feminizing” the language.

Translated by N. Andrew Walsh.