Littleton: it's Adorno's fault

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Sep 28 07:24:24 PDT 1999


[This hardly seems like the aphorism of a sexual troglodyte.]

Minima Moralia, #59

Since I set eyes on him.[1] - The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this limitation implacably the master. The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad. Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband. The lie consists not only in the claim that nature exists where it has been tolerated and adapted, but what passes for nature in civilization is by its very substance furthest from all nature, its own self-chosen object. The femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence - masculine violence - to be: a she-man. One need only have perceived, as a jealous male, how such feminine women have their femininity at their finger-tips - deploying it just where needed, flashing their eyes, using their impulsiveness - to know how things stand with the sheltered unconscious, unmarred by intellect. just this unscathed purity is the product of the ego, of censorship, of intellect, which is why it submits so unresistingly to the reality principle of the rational order. Without a single exception feminine natures are conformist. The fact that Nietzsche's scrutiny stopped short of them, that he took over a second-hand and unverified image of feminine nature from the Christian civilization that he otherwise so thoroughly mistrusted, finally brought his thought under the sway, after all, of bourgeois society. He fell for the fraud of saying 'the feminine' when talking of women. Hence the perfidious advice not to forget the whip: femininity itself is already the effect of the whip. The liberation of nature would be to abolish its self-fabrication. Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it.

1. Allusion to the lines Seit ich ihn gesehen / glaub' ich blind zu sein (since I set eyes on him / I seem to have gone blind), from a poem by Adelbert von Chamisso, in his cycle Frauen-Liebe und-Leben, later set to music by Schumann. Von Chamisso (1781-1838) was an émigré French noble who became one of the first German romantic poets.



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