10 Forefront, Foreskin, Fore-what?
The ironic play with both of these terms in my blog-interview No.7 has a long history, going back to the 20s of the previous century.
Forefront (avant-garde) was a term occupied by the Marxists and Communists. It describes the epitome of progress, progressiveness, and social thinking. As the working classes were defined by the master thinkers as the party of progress, of progressiveness, etc. (see above), the term was automatically always coupled to the term “workers’ movement.” And who was the forefront of the workers’ movement? That’s right: the Party. More properly, the united Communist-Socialist Party. For a while, a long time ago, the Social Democrats belonged to the Party as well. That’s in the past, pure nostalgia, who thinks and plans differently …
Yet who was the party of progress? Up to the present day it is an insular clique of the powerful, who (according to Plato) distinguished themselves by capability, knowledge, intelligence, and prudence for the general good. That is to say, ideally they should be among the best, who can steer the ship of State unselfishly.
Yet reality shows again and again that this is rarely the case. Especially when the leadership consolidates and institutionalizes itself. According to Carl Popper it always so transpires, that when you would erect a paradise through violence, that Hell results. At the worst, and up until the immediate, present-day case, this clique exercises power “out of the barrel of a gun,” as Mao Zedong so rightly formulated in his little red book of 1972 (1) and thereby established the guerrilla tactics of armed struggle.
The forefront of progress thus becomes all too easily the dictatorship of a clique, supporting itself by arms. That such a dominion – Plato names it tyranny – may also rely on the power of money – Plato then speaks of oligarchy – or on the will of the people (democracy) is evident in the history of the world. Even up to the present.
The word “forefront” has today completely died out. It lives on nevertheless in the term avant-garde, which the arts and some artists still claim for themselves. Even when the postmodernist movement has degraded the avant-garde to an arrière-garde (from the French for “rearguard”). At the fore is so-called New Music, the Leninist cadres of which still seeks to effect psychoacoustic reeducation of its subjects via broadcasting institutions and schools, quasi as one of the last remaining ideologies.
The term “foreskin” has insinuated itself, through the discourse of the French philosophers, out of the lexicon of sexual education into the language of philosophy, but only for the purpose of deescalation or ironic attacks.
Thus speaks Derrida in a highly philosophical lecture on the apocalypse: we’re in the 80s! our heads are smoking, are they not?(2) Fatigue sets in, to what end, we ask ourselves urgently, all these long sentences, foreign-language quotations– Derrida cites German philosophers especially enthusiastically, whom we ourselves haven’t yet understood. What a …
In this very lecture “On a newly elevated apocalyptic tone in philosophy” (Passages, 1985) there appears, abruptly and to the great surprise of us audience-members or readers, the formulation of “drawing back the foreskin of the glans.” This “deflowering” is to break through the logocentric discourse: that is, the language of men, which is always only logical, in Derrida’s terminology that is to say is “phallocratically” oriented and directed. Or, as Jean Pierre Dubost formulated it in the preceding interview, “every hole wants to be stuffed.” It doesn’t matter which– of the question, of science, of logic, of sexuality…
There you have it: the sexual buzzwords, which Derrida so rhetorically cleverly knew to incorporate into his lectures. Such satirical attacks on our understanding of the scientific approach or even simply of logic and rationality earned him a fierce antagonism in the sciences, especially in Great Britain with its dictatorial, seeking to rule over all, Philosophy of Science. Nevertheless, I greatly admire Derrida’s æsthetic, sometimes even Dadaist provocations, and more as an artistic expansion and challenge of the purposive-rational discourse, which cannot in any event achieve closure in the sense of nondogmatic ascertaining of the truth. Unless you are hooked up with technology, money, or power, and thus corrupted by these forces. Then every sort of dogmatization comes easy, does it not?
I want to address you directly, you new and young people with lovely names like Alexandre, Arthur, Evgeny, Frank, Alexey, Marie-Therèse, Enni, Julia, or Albertina, who are attempting to read this now, to understand my words, to interpret them. Even when, as they say, you no longer want to (or no longer can) read, that you’re so hopefully, or also hopelessly (?) connected with electronic devices, reading to many chats, and over-informed, ever more dependent on your external cranial lobes and yet nevertheless voraciously seeking life, love, art, and adventure (I’m exaggerating).
Are not money, earning money, and career your new gods, leading you at any moment out of ideological disorientation to a frenzy of joy, consumption, noise, and distraction? So often I can’t manage to understand you, your language, your longings (“my mission is…”), your thoughts. And vice versa. Annas, I no longer understand even you, and you no longer understand me! I have no language for you any more, there’s no golden mean between us, we can no longer make ourselves understood. We’ve become deaf and speechless (sigh). – Wherefore? – Make yourself so that I can talk to you, is how Maurice Blanchot puts it.
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Sex and Marxism (Freudo-Marxism) were, for all intents and purposes for a long time a topic in intellectual discourse, which went harmoniously, hand-in-hand together. If it’s a matter of liberation, then it must be not only from the material hardships of the factories or the squalor of the mines, but also from the shackles of an inhibiting and even sickening (neurotic) sexual morals, so it was thought at least, in the long succession after Freud. At the latest from when his student Wilhelm Reich postulated war and aggression in general as more deeply psychological than misdirection and aberration of the (masculine) sex-drive.
Herbert Marcuse also incorporated this theory’s approaches into his philosophy of societal change. Mildly trivialized, the Hippies reappropriated this thesis into “make love, not war,” and lived afterwards thus, even in the deepest reaches of the Black Forest (test-marriages, communes, sexuality, etc.). These approaches were always experimental, that is to say open to rejection. The discussion of pederasty for a long while no longer meant acceptance. But you wanted to be open – curious – you were ready to try everything, including LSD, etc.. Only then did you decide for or against. In the case of pederasty, the judgment was rather swift and unambiguous, especially under pressure from women (mothers): no.
We are thus arrived at the turbulent and overextended sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. Whether the liberation of sex also includes human liberation, and thereby hinders aggressive confrontations, I would dare to express some doubt. Sexual liberation certainly led to the liberation of sex, but not, however, to human liberation. And yet some speak of the thesis that people tend – when oriented towards a life of pleasure, affluence, consumption – that they seek to maintain this way of life, and unwilling to sacrifice it in the name of suicidal wars.
According to Freud, there can nevertheless be no dominion of sex, that is sex-drive, over the Id and in consequence over the pleasure principle. The Id must be channeled (sublimated) into work, culture, love, social activity. Without this, the State would collapse.
No society can be built on pleasure alone. Marcuse speaks against this thesis in light of scientific and economic advances in the western culture of the future, and promulgates in its stead a “de-sublimation” of the sexual libido – he was thus more a follower of Aristippos than of the Stoics.
The taz of the 80s was, like society as a whole and the fashion of the times, anti-repressive; that is to say, against sublimation and for the liberation of pleasure. Who took out an entire page in the taz featuring a naked man with a lasciviously erect penis (“lascivious”?)? Next come ads for pornography, we all feared. The feminists on the women’s side? The homosexual fraction? The photo was subtitled we read: “Now, where the observer is naked.” That is, not a female observer(3), but her male counterpart is naked. – In any case, this photo was one of the most spectacular attacks by the taz against bourgeois decorum in the 80s.
Especially the emancipation movements in America have gained a foothold. Hand in hand with a forced feminism, for which the “penile fixation” of the male sex was always a thorn in the side. It would be better were the men to rub their willies on or against one another (I’m expressing myself so disrespectfully) and “stuff every hole” among themselves as the harlotry of marriage (Arthur Rimbaud), to extend primary and secondary relationships.
I remain, even today, convinced that the early feminism had problems with male sexuality, with male desires in general. And vice versa. That a man might not always know how to appraise a woman’s desires and physicality. That nature orients a woman’s desires towards reproduction and a man’s only towards pleasure. Even if reproduction may be differentiated from the broad category of pleasure for women by means of birth-control, large portions of the female anatomy remain structurally predefined towards the original purpose.
Yet here we are in the midst of my new book project on “Love and Pleasure” and touching on a subject on which I still have to ruminate and research, and on which I perhaps, as a man, can’t give any answers at all. The eyes of a man are different from those of a woman, even when we – despite all differences – are, will become, or would remain human.
1«枪杆子里面出政权», Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book), Chapter 5. Originally published in Problems of War and Strategy (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224.
2 “die Köpfe rauchen” (literally, “to smoke a head”) is also a German slang term for smoking a bowl of weed.
3 In German, the improper noun for “observer” (“Betrachter”) has either the masculine form, or feminine (“Betrachterin”), which are used here successively to indicate that the subtitle of the ad in question refers to a male – and not female – observer.
translated by N. Andrew Walsh
