Weininger

So, a female's hysteria is a psychological dis-ease, caused when her memetic indoctrination is contradicted by her genetic impulses creating an internal conflict.

She enjoys the masculinity of the other, loathing it at the same time,,, because she is insecure of her feminity. She calls the male weak, powerless etc., but in her mind she tells herself he is Oppressive, Power monster, Controller...

She plays games with herself.

Her repressed animaline feminity comes out in Incoherent Sexual outbursts and made to look emotional, but its sexual.

Yes...so she hated him for not living up to the image he sold her, but she cannot let go of that image without admitting that she is to blame.
Instead she blamed him for not living up to an ideal he seduced her with and was never real.

She screams in outrage at him, when she is screaming at herself for not being able to break free form the ideal she is committed to and one she cannot let go because she has no alternative.

If gene-meme conflict were the only factor, then every modern woman would be called a hysteric.

The typical hysteric female is Passively attracted to Powerful men, wherever power or in wowman's case even semblance of power oozes (she will call this "individuality", "charm of originality", "independent spirit", "daring", "business acumen") but her feminity which she believes is free and independent is stigmatized and cannot accept the "brutality", the masculinity, the very male Power it is enamoured with in the first place...
Aware of its insecurity, it calls the other timid, and to see it be faulted, shamed, reproached, humbled, stripped down - the other "humanized" in a "Non-Threatening" way it can then comfortably absorb owing to its own cowardice,, which it then will mock because there's no power in him any more...  see?
"Once upon a time you were daunting and formidable..." etc.

Although it will speak of the Female Spirit, Independent thinking, and such hyper-words to make up for its inner void, the stigma it carries of its scarred feminity, unable, or lacking the capacity to enjoy itself as I once already said here of being appetized by a cake but unable to eat it, it screams red and swings from one pole to the other incoherently,,, the hysteric is typically characterized by its Passive reactions to Male Norms - the trending.
While other females may use mockery as a tool or a weapon, the hysteric makes of mockery an ends in itself. The lack of capacity to affirm its own feminity incapacitates it to affirm the masculine power it is drawn to, and so it simply makes of mockery an ends in itself. You see in the wowman this instinct to constantly Shame, Expose others, to "bring them to Justice"... this is not emotional, but sexual frenzy of another kind. The hysteric is unable to affirm anything but its own hysteria in the end. It is unable to form any stable relations with anyone and most of all with itself - hence the bipolarity swinging wildly.

Weininger continues;

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"According to my theory, the hysterical woman is a woman who has simply accepted the complex of male and social valuations in passive obedience, instead of wishing to give free rein to her sensual nature in the highest possible degree. The hysterical woman becomes hysterical as a result of her bondage and she is identical to the mental type of the maid.

[W]oman can become hysterical not only if she is subjected to a sexual attack on herself, which she resists externally while failing to reject it internally...

... We have seen that hysteria is such a helpless attempt on the part of Woman to ward off her sexuality. If her struggle against her own desire were honest and genuine, if she sincerely wanted to defeat it, she would be able to do so. But what hysterical women want is hysteria itself: they do not really try to be cured.
...At the last moment they will still kiss a man who is violating them, or try to make a man their master if he hesitates to rape them. It is as if Woman were laboring under a curse. At some moments she may feel weighed down by it, but she can never escape from it, because the burden seems too sweet. Basically, all her screaming and raging is a fake. It is precisely when she pretends to be recoiling from her curse with the greatest horror that she wishes to succumb to it most passionately." [Sex and Character]

A woman shunned...my dear.
She must diminish what resisted her feminine charms.
No other female must be seduced by him, like she was.

The sisterhood becomes an extension of humanism.
He is a fake, a fraud, a pretender...he does not live-up to his promise.
What man would resit feminine mystique?
An "ill" one.
A woman giver herself to you and you turn her down?
Not even the possibility of flirting, of playing the game - no salvation.
There is something wrong with...YOU.

One must then justify the illness, and sell it as a warning to all the sisters.
He must be excluded from the gene pool, or from any possible sexual gratification, as a punishment.
He will pay.

  

Satyr wrote:

A woman shunned...my dear.
She must diminish what resisted her feminine charms.
No other female must be seduced by him, like she was.

The sisterhood becomes an extension of humanism.
He is a fake, a fraud, a pretender...he does not live-up to his promise.
What man would resit feminine mystique?
An "ill" one.
A woman giver herself to you and you turn her down?
Not even the possibility of flirting, of playing the game - no salvation.  
There is something wrong with...YOU.

One must then justify the illness, and sell it as a warning to all the sisters.
He must be excluded from the gene pool, or from any possible sexual gratification, as a punishment.
He will pay.

  
 

For sure; I wouldn't change a word.

Weininger on Genius:


The man of genius takes his place in the above argument
as he who understands incomparably more other beings
than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of himself
that there was no vice or crime of which he could not
trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of
his life he could not have understood fully. The genius,
therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed,
more varied man ; and a man is the closer to being a
genius the more men he has in his personality, and the
more really and strongly he has these others within him.
If comprehension of those about him only flickers in him
like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to
kindle a mighty flame in his heroes, to give distinction and
character to his creations. The ideal of an artistic genius
is to live in all men, to lose himself in all men, to reveal
himself in multitudes ; and so also the aim of the
philosopher is to discover all others in himself, to fuse
them into a unit which is his own unit.

It is just the same with other characteristics of the man
of genius. Not only the material, but also the spirit, of his
work is subject to periodic change. At one time he is inclined
to a philosophical and scientific view ; at another
time the artistic influence is strongest ; at one time his
intervals are altogether in the direction of history and the
growth of civilization ; later on it is " nature " (compare
Nietzsche's "Studies in Infinity" with his "Zarathustra ") ;
at another time he is a mystic, at yet another simplicity
itself ! (Björnson and Maurice Maeterlinck are good modern
examples.) In fact, the " amplitude " of the periods of famous
men is so great, the different revelations of their nature so
various, so many different individuals appear in them, that
the periodicity of their mental life may be taken almost as
diagnostic. I must make a remark sufficiently obvious
from all this, as to the existence of almost incredibly great
changes in the personal appearance of men of genius from
time to time. Comparison of the portraits at different
times of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, or Schopenhauer are
enough to establish this. The number of different aspects
that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as
a physiognomical measure of his talent

The consciousness of the genius is, then, the furthest
removed from the henid stage. It has the greatest, most
limpid clearness and distinctness. In this way genius
declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity, and thus
the female cannot be possessed of genius. The conclusion
of this chapter and the last is simply that the life of the
male is a more highly conscious life than that of the female,
and genius is identical with the highest and widest consciousness.
This extremely comprehensive consciousness
of the highest types of mankind is due to the enormous
number of contrasting elements in their natures.
Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There
is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics,
or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal
genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without
having learned it.

A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious
connection with the whole universe. It is only then that
the genius becomes the really divine spark in mankind.

Weininger should have taken note of modern fashions and kept it simple and short, for the kids:

Words bad, actions good.
Why say more?
Just Because.

Zizek's conservation of Weininger via Spinoza…

Zizek wrote:

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"Woman is only and thoroughly sexual . . . '  [Weininger]

"For Weininger, sexual difference is grounded in the very ontological opposition of subject and object, of active spirit and passive matter. Woman is a passive, impressionable object, which means that she is entirely dominated by sexuality:

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Woman is only and thoroughly sexual, since her sexuality extends to her entire body and is in certain places, to put it in physical terms, only more dense than in others - she is sexually affected and penetrated by every thing -  always and on the entire surface of her body. What we usually call coitus is merely a special case of the highest intensity. . . . Fatherhood is for that reason a miserable deception: we have always to share it with innumerable other things and people. . . . An entity which can be at every point sexually penetrated by all things can also get pregnant everywhere and by all things; mother is in herself a receptacle. In her, all things are alive, since physiologically everything acts upon her and forms her child. (258-9)

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This universality is to be conceptualized in two ways. First, coitus colours woman's entire activity with its specific tonality. Woman is not capable of a pure spiritual attitude, she cannot aim at truth for the sake of truth itself, at the fulfilment of duty for the sake of duty; she cannot sustain a disinterested contemplation of beauty. When she seems to assume such a spiritual attitude, closer observation never fails to discern a 'patho­ logical' sexual interest lurking in the background (a woman speaks the truth in order to make an impression on man and thus facilitate her seduction of him, etc. ) . Even suicide qua absolute act is accomplished with narcissistic-pathological considerations: 'such suicides are accom­ panied practically always by thoughts of other people, what they will think, how they will mourn over them, how grieved - or angry - they will be' (286).

It goes without saying that the same holds even more strongly in the case of love, which always conceals the motive for sexual intercourse: woman is never capable of pure, disinterested admiration of the beloved person. Furthermore, for a woman, the idea of coitus is the only way to overcome her egoism, the only ethical idea available to her - 'ethical' in the sense of expressing an ideal towards which woman strives irrespective of her particular 'pathological' interest:

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Her wish for the activity of her own sexual life is her strongest impulse, but it is only a special case of her deep, her only vital interest, the interest that sexual unions shall take place; the wish that as much of it as possible shall occur, in all cases, places, and times. (257-8 )

Coitus is therefore the only case apropos of which woman is capable of formulating her own version of the universal ethical imperative: 'Act so that your activity will contribute to the realization of the infinite ideal of general pairing.'

In contrast to woman, who i s thoroughly dominated by sexuality - that is, by the notion of coitus - man, in his relationship to woman, is split between the mutually exclusive poles ofsexual coveting and erotic love:

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Loeo and desire are two unlike, mutuaUy exclusive, opposing conditions, and during the time a man really loves, the thought ofphysical union with the object of his love is insupportable. . , . The more erotic a man is the less he will be troubled with his sexuality, and vice versa . . . there is only 'platonic' love, because any other so-called love belongs to the kingdom ofthe senses. (239-40)

If, however, by the very nature of woman, the scope of her interest is limited to coitus, where does woman's beauty come from? How can she function as an object of purely spiritual love? Here Weininger draws a radical conclusion: the nature ofwoman's beauty is 'performative' - that is to say, it is man's love that creates woman's beauty:

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The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite differentin aesthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract truth that is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good that furnishes the criterion ofwhat ought to be done. . . . In aesthetics beauty is created by love. . . . All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation ofthe requirements oflove; and so the beauty ofwoman is not apart from love, it is not an objective to which love is directed, but woman's beauty is the love of man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing. (242)

A further inevitable conclusion is that man's love for a woman - his very 'spiritual', 'pure' love as opposed to sexual longing - is a thoroughly narcissistic phenomenon : in his love of a woman , man loves only himself, his own ideal image. Man is well aware of the gap that forever separates his miserable reality from this ideal, so he projects, transfers, it on to another, on to the idealized woman. This is why love is 'blind': it hinges on the illusion that the ideal we are striving for is already realized in the other, in the object of love:

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In love, man is only loving himself. Not his empirical self, not the weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and smallnesses which he outwardly exhibits; but all that he wants to be, all that he ought to be, his truest, deepest, intelligible nature, free from all fetters of necessity, from all taint of earth. . . . He projects his ideal of an absolutely worthy existence, the ideal that he is unable to isolate within himself, upon another human being, and this act, and this alone, is none other than love and the significance of love. (243-4)

Love, no less than hate, is therefore a phenomenon ofcowardice, an easy way out: in hate, we externalize and transfer on to the other the evil that dwells in ourselves, thereby avoiding any confrontation with it; whereas in love, instead of taking pains to realize our spiritual essence, we project this essence upon the other as an already realized state of being. On this account, love is cowardly and treacherous not only in relationship to man himself but also, and above all, in relationship to its object - it utterly disregards the object'S (woman's) true nature, and uses it only as a kind of empty projection screen:

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Love of a woman is possible only when it does not consider her real qualities, and so is able to replace the actual psychical reality by a different and quite imaginary reality. The attempt to realize one's ideal in a woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the empirical personality of the woman. And so the attempt is cruel to the woman; it is the egotism of love that disregards the woman, and cares nothing for her real inner life. . . . Love is murder. (249)

Here, of course, Weininger speaks aloud the hidden truth of the idealized figure of the Lady in courtly love. The key enigma of love is therefore: why does man choose woman as the idealized object in which he (mis) perceives the realization of his spiritual essence? Why does he project his salvation upon the very being responsible for his Fall since - as we have already seen - man is split between his spiritual-ethical essence and the sexual longing aroused in him by woman's standing invitation to sexual intercourse? The only way to solve this enigma is to accept that man's relationship towards woman as object of erotic love and his relationship towards woman as object of sexual coveting are both 'performative'. Strictly speaking, woman is not the causeofman's Fall: it is man's Fall into sexuality itself that creates woman, conferring existence upon her:

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"It is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the absolute in him, turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence.

When man became sexual he formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation; she is sexuality itself. . . . Therefore woman's one object must be to keep man sexual . . . she has but one purpose, that of continuing the guilt of man, for she would disappear the moment man had overcome his sexuality.

Woman is the sin of man." (298-9)

Here the normal relationship between cause and effect is inverted: woman is not the cause of man 's Fall but its consequence.4 For that reason, one need not fight woman actively, since she possesses no positive ontological consistency whatsoever: ' Woman therefore does not exist' ( 302 ) . For woman to cease to exist, it is enough for man to overcome the sexual urge in himself. We can see, now, precisely why man has chosen woman as the object of his love: the unbearable fault of creating woman by way of acknowledging his sexuality weighs heavily upon him. Love is but a cowardly, hypocritical attempt by man to compensate for his guilt towards woman:

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The crime man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism. . . . Woman . is nothing but man's expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself and his own guilt. But woman is not herself guilty; she is made so by the guilt of others, and everything for which woman is blamed should be laid at man's door. Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. (300)

Woman's existence bears witness to the fact that man ' compromised his desire', that he betrayed his true nature as an autonomous ethical subject by giving way to sexuality. Consequently, her true nature consists oftheboundlesscravingforsexualintercourse, an expression ofhowthe phallus 'entirely - although often only unconsciously - dominates woman's entire life'. On account of this constitutive submission to the phallus, woman is heteronomous in the strict Kantian sense - that is, unfree, at the mercy of external Fate:

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The male organ is to a woman the Id whose name she doesn't know; her destiny resides in it, something she cannot escape from. For that reason, she does not like to see a naked man and she never expresses a need to see him: she feels she is lost at that moment. The phallus thus deprives woman completely and irreuocably of her freedom. ( 269)

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Woman is not free: ultimately, the urge to be raped by man in one or another way always prevails in her; woman is governed by the phallus. (274)

Consequently, when a woman resists her sexual urge and is ashamed of it, she suppresses her true nature. Internalizing male spiritual values can go so far as to shove awareness of a woman's true nature out of her consciousness - however, this nature fights back violently, returning in the guise ofhysterical symptoms. What the hysterical woman experiences asaforeign, evilandimmoralurgeisthussimplyherinnermostnature, her subordination to the Phallus. The ultimate proof of woman ' s amoral character is that the more desperately she endeavours to assume male spiritual values, the more hysterical she becomes. When a woman acts in accordance with moral precepts, she does so in a heteronomous way. out of fear of the male Master or in efforts to fascinate him: woman's autonomy is feigned, it is an externally imposed imitation of autonomy. When she speaks the truth, she does so not out of true veracity but in order to impress man, to seduce him in a more subtle way: 'So that woman always lies, even if, objectively, she speaks the truth' (287). Herein resides the 'ontologicaluntruthfulness ofwoman' - that is, in this sense, woman's 'love for truth is only a special case ofher mendaciousness' (291). The highest insight a woman can achieve is an obscure premoni­ tion of her constitutive enslavement, which leads her to strive for salvation through self-annihilation.

Cannot we see in Weininger's 'Woman therefore does not exist' the herald of Lacan's 'la femme n'existe pas'? Does not the notion that woman gives body to man's fault - that her very existence hinges on man's betrayal of his spiritual-ethical posture - present a variation on Lacan's thesis on 'woman as a symptom of man'? (According to Lacan, the symptom as a compromise-formation bears witness to how the subject 'gave up his desire'.) When Weininger insists that woman can never be fully integrated into the spiritual universe of Truth, Good and Beauty, since this universe remains for her a heterono­mous order externally imposed upon her, does he not point towards Lacan's assertion that woman is not fully integrated into the symbolic order?

Unfortunately, a closer examination soon unsettles this apparent homol­ogy, without thoroughly devalorizing it. The great merit of Weininger, which must be taken into account by feminism, is his complete break from the ideological problematic of 'woman's enigma', offemininity qua Secret that supposedly eludes the rational, discursive universe.

The great merit of Weininger, which must be taken into account by feminism, is his complete break from the ideological problematic of 'woman's enigma', offemininity qua Secret that supposedly eludes the rational, discursive universe. The assertion 'Woman does not exist' does not in any way refer to an ineffable feminine Essence beyond the domain of discursive existence:

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what does not exist is this very unattainable Beyond. In short, by playing upon the somewhat worn-out Hegelian formula, we can say that the 'enigma ofwoman' ultimately conceals the fact that there is nothing to conceal. What Weininger fails to accomplish is a Hegelian reflexive reversal of recognizing in this 'nothing' the very negativity that defines the notion of the subject… something like 'Look, this nothing­ ness behind the mask is the very absolute negativity on account of which woman is the subject par excellence, not a limited object opposed to the force ofsubjectivity! 

Far from being dismissable as a meaningless paradox, the statement 'I don't exist' can acquire an authentic existential weight in so far as it signals the contraction of the subject into the empty vanishing point of enunciation that precedes every imaginary or symbolic identification.

That is to say, in a far from simply metaphorical sense, 'I am' only what I am for others, in so far as I am inscribed into the network of the big Other, in so far as I possess a social-symbolic existence - outside of such an inscribed existence I am nothing, nothing but the vanishing point of 'I think', devoid of any positive content.

Hegel characterized this experience of pure Self qua 'abstract negativity', this • eclipse of (constituted) reality' , this contraction-into-self of the subject, asthe 'night of the world':

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The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him - or which are not present. This night, the inner of nature , that exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical represen tations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and j ust so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful.

And the symbolic order, the universe of the Word, Logos, can emerge only from the experience of this abyss. As Hegel puts it, this inwardness of the pure self 'must enter also into existence, become an object, oppose itself to this innerness to be external; return to being, This is language as name-giving power, , . . Through the name the object as individual entity is born out of the I.'

Whatwe must be careful not to miss here is how Hegel's break with the Enlightenment tradition can be discerned in the reversal of the very metaphor for the subject: the subject is no longer the Light of Reason opposed to the non-transparent, impenetrable Stuff (of Nature, Tradi­ tion . . .); his very kernel, the gesture which opens up the space for the Light of Logos, is absolute negativity qua 'night of the world', And what are Weininger's infamous 'henids' - the confused feminine representa­ tions that had not yet achieved the clarity of the Word, the self-identity of Notion - if not the very 'phantasmagorical representations' men­ tioned by Hegel - that is, the fantasy formations that emerge where the Word fails, since their function is precisely to fill out the void of this failure? Herein resides the paradox of Weininger's anti-feminism: far from being a result of his obscurantist anti-Enlightenment attitude, his anti-feminism attests to his adherence to the ideal of the Enlightenment - to his avoidance of the abyss of pure subjectivity.

At the most fundamental level, anti-Semitism does not associate Jews with corruption as a positive feature, but rather with shapelessness itself - with the lack of a definite and delimited ethnic disposition. In this vein, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief ideologue, asserted that all European nations possess a well­ defined 'spiritual shape [ Gestalt] ' which gives expression to their ethnic character - and this 'spiritual shape' is precisely what is missing in Jews. And - again - is not this very ' shapelessness [ Gestaltlosigkeit] ' the constitutive feature of subjectivity? Does not subjectivity, by definition, transcend every positive spiritual shape? It should be clear, now, precisely how anti-Semitism and Fascist corporatism form the two sides of one and the same coin. In its repudiation of Judaeo-democratic 'abstract univer­ salism', as opposed to the notion of society qua harmonious organic form in which every individual and every class has its own well-defined place, corporatism is inspired by the very insight that many a democrat prefers to shirk: only an entity that is in itselfhindered, dislocated - that is, one that lacks its 'proper place ', that is by definition 'out ofjoint ' - can immediately refer to universality as such.

Let us quote here Ernesto Laclau's apposite formulation (thoroughly Hegelian, notwithstanding Laclau's declared anti-Hegelianism) :

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. . . the universal is part of my identity insofar as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack - that is, insofar as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution. The universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying and explaining it, but as an incomplete horizon sllturing a dislocated particular identity.

In this precise sense 'the universal is the symbol ofa missing fullness':16 I can relate to the Universal as such only in so far as my particular identity is thwarted, 'dislocated'; only in so far as some impediment prevents me from 'becoming what I already am'

The relationship of the Particular (family) totheUniversal (community) is therefore not that of a harmonious incorporation of the family into the wider community, but is mediated by negativity: an individual ('self­ consciousness') can relate to the Universal beyond family only through his negative relationship towards the family - that is, his 'betrayal' of the family, which entails the family' s dissolution (this negativity is exactly what the corporatist metaphor of society qua large family strives to obliterate).
The negative relationship between thefamily and the universal community is further reflected back into the family itself, in the guise of the woman who negatively reacts to the universal community with her 'eternal irony'. Woman is the cynic capable of discerning, in portentous statements about public welfare, the private motives of those who propagate these statements.

In this duality of private and public sphere is rooted woman's splitting into Mother and Whore. Woman is not Mother and Whore. but thesame woman is Mother in the private sphere and Whore in the public sphere - and the more she is Mother in the private sphere. the more she is Whore in the public one.

Its ideological coordinates become clear the moment we relate them to the male's splitting into Adventurer, destroyer of the family in the private sphere, and Ethical Hero in the public sphere: woman qua Mother (the reliable support of the family) involves the opposition to man qua dislocated Adventurer (in contrast to feminine substantial inertia and steadiness, man is active, reaching outside, transcending himself, the family frame restricts him, he is ready to put everything at risk - in short, he is Subject) ; whereas woman qua dislocated Whore (superficial, unsteady, unreliable, a being of delusive appearance) involves the opposition to man qua agency of ethical reliability (man's word is his bond, he is the very embodiment of reliable symbolic commitment, he possesses the proper spiritual depth in contrast to feminine prattle . . .) . We thus obtain a double opposition: female Substance against male Subject and female Appearance against male Essence. Woman stands for substantial fullness and for the fickleness of Appearance; man stands for the disruptive force of negativity and for the uprightness of Essence.


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Weininger denies even the (limited) ethical value of Mother, the pillar of the family, and reformulates the traditional splitting: man is divided into autonomous spiritual attitude and phallic sexuality (fall into heteronomy) ; woman is divided into her 'true nature' (which consists of her very lack of proper nature: she 'is' nothing but craving for man, she exists only in so far as she attracts his gaze) and heteronomous, externally imposed, morality. If, however, we recognize in the onto­ logical Void of the woman the very void that defines subjectivity, this double division changes into Lacan' s ' formulas of sexuation':

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Woman's division is of a hysterical nature, it assumes the form of the inconsistency of her desire: 'I demand that you refuse my demand, since this is not that' (Lacan) .

When, for example, Wagner' s Kundry seduces Parsifal, she actually wants him to resist her advances - does not this obstruction, this sabotage ofher own intent, testify to a dimension in her which resists the domination of the Phallus? (Weininger himself speaks of an obscure longing in woman for deliverance, for shaking off the yoke of the Phallus through self-annihilation.) The male dread of woman, which so deeply branded the Zeitgeist at the turn of the century, from Edvard Munch and August Strindberg up to Franz Kafka, thus reveals itself as the dread of feminine inconsistency: feminine hysteria, which traumatized these men (and also marked the birthplace of psycho­ analysis) , confronted them with an inconsistent multitude of masks (a hysterical woman immediately moves from desperate pleas to cruel, vulgar derision, etc.) . What causes such uneasiness is the impossibility of discerning behind the masks a consistent·subject manipulating them: behind the multiple layers of masks is nothing; or, at the most, nothing but the shapeless, mucous stuff of the life-substance.

Here, however, we must avoid a fatal misunderstanding. In so far as these hysterical masks are the way for a woman to captivate the male gaze, the inevitable conclusion seems to be that the feminine Secret inaccessible to the male phallic economy - the 'eternally Feminine [das ewig Weibliche), (Goethe) beyond symbolic masks - consists of the feminine substance that eludes the reign of 'phallogocentrism'. The complementary conclusion is that in so far as there is nothing behind the masks, woman is wholly subordinated to the Phallus. According to Lacan, however, the exact opposite is true: the pre--symbolic 'eternally Feminine' is a retroactive patriarchal fantasy - that is, it is the Exception which grounds the reign of the Phallus (like the anthropological notion of an original matriarchal Paradise, which was ruined by the Fall into patriarchal civilization and which, from Bachofen onwards, firmly supports patriarchal ideology, since it relies on the notion of teleological evolution from matriarchy to patriarchy) . It is thus the very lack of any exception to the Phallus that renders the feminine libidinal economy inconsistent, hysterical, and thereby undermines the reign of the Phallus. When, therefore, as Weininger puts it, woman is 'coited by every object' , this very boundless extension of phallus undermines Phallus as the principle of the Universal and its founding Exception.

'Feminine' is this structure of the limit as such, a limit that precedes what may or may not lie in its Beyond: all that we perceive in this Beyond ( the Eternal Feminine, for example) are our own fantasy projections. Woman qua Enigma is a spectre generated by the inconsistent surface of multiple masks - the secret of 'Secret' itself is the inconsistency of the surface. And the Lacanian name for this inconsistency of the surface (for a convoluted topological space like the Moebius band) is simply the subject.

Man subordinates his relationship to a woman to the domain of ethical goals (forced to choose between woman and ethical duty - in the guise of professional obligation, etc. - he immediately opts for duty) , yet he is simultaneously aware that only a relationship with a woman can bring him genuine 'happiness' or personal fulfilment. His 'wager' is that woman will be most effectively seduced precisely when he does not subordinate all his activity to her - what she will be unable to resist is her fascination with his 'public' activity - that is, her secret awareness that he is actually doing it for her. What we have here is the inverted libidinal economy of courtly love: in courtly love I devote myself directly to the Lady, I posit my serving her as my supreme Duty, and for that reason woman remains a cold, indifferent, capricious Despot, an 'inhuman partner' (Lacan) with whom a sexual relationship is neither possible nor really desirable, whereas here I render the sexual relation­ship possible precisely by not positing it as my explicit goal.
This paradox emerges in almost every melodrama that interprets the man's readiness to sacrifice his beloved for the (public) Cause as the supreme proof of his love for her - that is, of how 'she is everything to him'. The sublime moment of recognition occurs when the woman finally realizes that the man has left her for the sake of his love for her.

When the soprano 'puts herself entirely into the voice' - perhaps the neatest exemplification of what Lacan calls jouis-sense, enjoy-meant, the moment at which sheer self­ consuming enjoyment of the voice eclipses meaning (the words of the aria). At this moment, one can briefly entertain the illusion that the woman' has it in herself', objet petit a, the voice-object,the cause of desire; and, consequently, that she exists.

On that account Lacan is as far as it is possible to be from the notion of sexual difference as the relationship of two opposite poles which supplement each other and together form the whole of Man: 'masculine' and 'feminine' are not the two species of the genus Man but, rather, the two modes of the subject's failure to achieve the full identity of Man. 'Man' and 'woman' together do not form a Whole, since each of them is already in itself a failed Whole.

'Mascu­line' and 'feminine' are not opposed in the guise of a series of contrary predicates (active/passive, cause/effect, reason/sentiment; etc.) ; rather, 'masculine' and 'feminine' involve a different modality of the very antagonistic relationship between these opposites.

Within the domain of sexual pleasures proper, masculine economy tends to be 'teleological', centred on phallic orgasm qua pleasure par excellence, whereas feminine economy involves a dispersed network of particular pleasures that are not organized around some teleological central principle. As a result, 'masculine' and 'feminine' are not two positive substantial entities but two different modalities of one and the same entity: in order to 'feminize' a masculine discourse it is enough to change - sometimes almost imperceptibly - its specific 'tonality'.

It is here that Foucauldian 'constructionists' and Lacan part company: for the 'constructionists', sex is not a natural given but a lnicolage, an artificial unification of heterogeneous discursive practices; whereas Lacan rejects this view without returning to naive substantialism. For him, sexual difference is not a discursive, symbolic construction; instead, it emerges at the very point where symbolization fails: we are sexed beings because symbolization always comes up against its own inherent impossibility. What is at stake here is not that 'actual', 'concrete' sexual beings can never fully fit the symbolic construction of 'man' or 'woman': the point is, rather, that thi.s symbolic construction itself supplements a certain fundamental deadlock. In short, if it were possible to symbolize sexual diferf ence, we would have not two sexes but only one. 'Male' and 'female' are not two complementary parts of the Whole, they are two (failed) attempts to symbolize this Whole." [Metastases]

Lyssa wrote:

Weininger wrote:

"I believe that the development of hysteria, assuming a “traumatic” sexual experience as its most frequent (according to Freud, its sole) cause, must schematically be pictured as follows. A woman has had a sexual observation or idea, which she understood, either at the time or in retrospect, as relating to herself. Under the influence of a male judgment, which has been forced on her and totally adopted by her, which has become part of her, and which exclusively dominates her waking consciousness, she indignantly and unhappily rejects that observation or idea as a whole, but, given her nature as Woman, at the same time affirms, desires, and attributes a positive value to it in her deepest unconscious. This conflict festers and ferments in her, until it bursts out from time to time in fit. Such a woman shows the more or less typical picture of hysteria, and that is why she feels as if the sexual act, which she believes she abhors, but which something in her—her original nature—actually desires, were a “foreign body in her consciousness.” The colossal intensity of the desire, which is only heightened by any attempt to suppress it, and the increasingly ferocious and indignant rejection of the thought—this is the interchange that takes place in the hysterical woman. The chronic falseness of Woman becomes acute, when it reaches her main concern, when she has even absorbed Man’s ethically negative valuation of sexuality, and the fact that hysterical women are most suggestible by men is well known. Hysteria, then, is the organic crisis of the organic falseness of Woman. I do not deny that there are also hysterical men, although these are relatively rare, since one of the infinite number of possibilities in the psyche of Man is to become a woman, and consequently to be hysterical if the occasion arises. Admittedly, there are also false men, but in their case the crisis takes a different course (just as their falseness is always different and never completely hopeless): it often leads to reformation, albeit often only of a temporary kind.
This insight into the organic falseness of Woman, her inability to see the truth about herself—which alone makes it possible for her to think in a way that is not at all appropriate for her—seems to me in principle to provide a sat- isfactory resolution of the dif¤culties presented by the etiology of hysteria." [Sex and Character]

Lys, you posted the writings of a genius.

He is absolutely right. But missing one thing.

People, liberals, are gonna hate me for what I'm about to say. Republicans, may also hate me for what I'm gonna say.

But I have to say it, in the interest of Truth.

Women will develop a psychosis, unless they have sex with beautiful men. And here's what the liberals are gonna hate me for saying...By beautiful I mean, nordic, tall, and aryan...

By aryan i dont mean lumbersexual hipsters. i mean guys like rock and roll guys of the 80's.

Thats not to say all browns are ugly. There are some handsome, brown men that don't give women a psychosis.

But this is the part, where it makes Republicans, Conservatives, rage at me.
The type of brown men that don't give a woman psychosis, are brown fem boys.

Modern brown women seem to have a fetiziation of masculine men. Men that look like this. Brown women seem to say they want men like this.
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Its a schizoid, compartmentalization, a fetish. When in actually, what they want are more feminine looking, paler looking males...But the fetish is deep and strongly rooted, and they cannot resist the promise of money and security offered by the more deeply masculine men.

Masculine males offer the added advantage of inherently turning a woman mindless into sex. Women are wanting of this mindless decadence. A feminine prince makes her think too much. What she wants is to revert into a a mindless state surrounded by a strong powerful masculine entity.
The feminine looking man
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Makes them think too much. Does not turn off her brain like the hulking man flesh made of bones. Does not make her feel utterly small.

Yes this post may make liberals and republicans rage at me, but so beit.

Also, read the Zizek thing too. He is a brilliant philosopher. I was confused about 1 or 2 things, and I think he made one or two mistakes, but overall, brilliant, magical philosophy.