# The Logic of Infection

Speaker: Ken Gemes
Course: The Biology of Evil
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/ken-gemes-the-logic-of-infection
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/ken-gemes-the-logic-of-infection/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Bh012NMbs

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

In this lecture, Ken Gemes examines how Darwin's challenge to the idea of inevitable progress gave rise to degeneration theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He explores how thinkers like Lombroso used cranial measurements to classify criminals as evolutionary throwbacks, and how these same frameworks were applied to women, casting them as biologically primitive. Gemes then turns to Max Nordau's influential book Degeneration, which branded figures like Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Ibsen as degenerates based on little more than their passionate language. The lecture traces how fears of biological regression became entangled with class anxiety about the urban poor and with racist and misogynist ideologies. Gemes pays particular attention to Otto Weininger, whose radical separation of reason from the body led him to equate women and Jews with parasitism, a line of thinking that fed directly into the genocidal logic of the twentieth century.

## Darwin and the Fear of Going Backwards

Last lecture, we saw how Darwin's *Descent of Man*, coupled with his work on the theory of evolution, gave way to a widespread questioning of the notion of progress, in particularly the Enlightenment idea of the inevitability of progress, and it led a lot of people into degeneration theory. There was a big impetus towards degeneration theory, even though as I've warned, we shouldn't take Darwin himself to be a hardcore degenerationist, and we must remember that he himself remained fairly optimistic about the historical progress of mankind.

But you can capture the kind of pessimism that Darwin's notions led to in a book that was very well-known in its time by Ray Lankester in the 1880, and the title of that book was *Degeneration as a Chapter in Darwinism*. So I'll quote from his book. "With regard to ourselves, the white races of Europe, and it is well to remember that we are subject to the general laws of evolution and are as likely to degenerate as to progress."

So this really captures the zeitgeist, that there was this real pessimistic worry that certain forces are retrograde, remember, I refer to atomism, regression to a previous time, that we could be going backwards.

## The Born Criminal as Evolutionary Throwback

A very, very important person in the degenerationist literature is Caesar Lombroso, an Italian. He was alive, I think, from 1835 to 1809, and he was a very famous Italian criminologist. He's actually widely regarded as the father of modern criminology, and he wrote two famous books. I'll say them in English, not in Italian. He wrote *The Male Offender*, and then he wrote this book called *The Female Offender*.

Lombroso also questioned this idea of the inevitability of progress, and he raised the possibility of reversion, or what is also called atavism, and he raised it both for individuals and for peoples more generally. I'll just do a little quotation from an article of his which actually was in an English journal, *The Contemporary Review*, from 1895. "It is a prevalent delusion of our times that we are always progressing. We picture progress to ourselves as an endless line leading straight up to heaven..." Skip a bit of the quote, "...All the same, an attentive consideration reveals the fact that even among the most privileged peoples, the line of movement, far from being vertical, is always describing reactionary curves and winding ways. It is varied by backward movements, just as in the case of individuals, we meet with points of recurrence to atavism." In other words, going back to more primitive forms.

In 1876, he published this book, *The Criminal Man*, which was translated in 1900. This was a super hit. Some of these works I'm referring to are kind of unheard of today, but in their day, they were bloody state-of-the-art. And the main thing is, he discussed there the criminal, he said the criminal should be discussed not in moral terms or religious terms, but in forensic medical terms. Basically what he was arguing is the criminal himself is an evolutionary throwback, an atavistic, an atavism, basically. A reversion to a more primitive type.

He really popularized the notion of the born criminal. In fact, it's a phrase he used in Italian. And you can see the logic of his position doesn't really allow for an Enlightenment idea of rehabilitation. Remember, I said the Enlightenment always saw evil as a matter of having faulty ideas, faulty representation. That always has the hope that you can rehabilitate someone even if they're stubborn by reeducating them. But if you think it's hardwired into their physiology to be a criminal, there's no hope for rehabilitation.

## Cranial Measurements and Gender Hierarchies

In 1893, he, along with William Ferreiro, published a book, again in English. It's called *The Female Offender*. He used cranial measurements to argue that, quote, "Prostitutes and criminals have smaller cranial capacity than normal women." Thus, he established a hierarchy. At the top were men, presumably white men, and then there were women, smaller cranial capacity, and then criminals.

Part of his shtick was he said, "Women are basically concerned with appearances." And he also had this line that they are not creative. So I need to give you the philosophical background of that.

## Kant's Philosophy Behind Degeneration Theory

A lot of these people were very influenced as a background by Kantian philosophy, and for Kant, there's a very strong break between the world of appearance, the everyday world, and the real world. Kant would refer to noumenon, or things in themselves. But that was the real existence. And what Kant says is it's a devaluing of the world of appearance, in a way Nietzsche later on will say, "Christianity does the same thing. Christianity says this world doesn't count, what counts is the world to come." Well, Kant's not making that religious distinction, but it's like there's this, he called this world, the world of appearance is a phenomenal world, and the other world is the world of noumenon, or the real world.

Well, Kant also made a very important distinction between reason, abstract reasoning, and the passions, which he thought came from the body, and he, just as he valorized the real world, the world of noumenon, the things in themselves, he valued, and disvalued, appearances, he valued reason over the passions. Why is this important? Because people like Lombroso, they located women as being obsessed with appearances. We have those same metaphors today, that women are more concerned with how they look than men, et cetera. Maybe that's receding a bit, but I think that metaphoric is still alive.

## Women as Primitive and the Crime Paradox

But that, for these people in the 19th century, being concerned with appearances is like not being concerned with reality. It's like you're taken with the superficial. So there's this notion that the man represents the development, the possibility of progress, and the woman is basically configured by Lombroso as an atavism.

Now, I want you to realize that Lombroso, these ideas might seem strange to us today, but Lombroso is considered serious heavy-duty science in his day. He was a super respected person. And so women are primitive, atavistic, but what's really strange is that this atavism is used to explain the obvious fact that criminality is much more prevalent among men than women. And there's a problem, because if the woman represents the primitive type and he asserts criminality with being a primitive, retrograde form, then you think, "Well, there should be more criminality about women."

So there are lots of tensions in degeneration theory. It often has internal inconsistencies that they gloss over. They sometimes try to explain them away. "And the primitive woman was rarely a murderess." He's acknowledging the fact that most murderers were male. "But she was always a prostitute. The irritation consequent on a degenerative process is therefore neither so constant nor so lasting and leads more easily to motor and hysterical epilepsy or to sexual anomalies than to crime." So women are more prone because of their atavism to epilepsy and sexual anomalies.

This is part of a rhetoric that says women are inherently perverse. We will come to see the same rhetoric applied to Jews, from other sources. "For a similar reason, genius is more common in men than in women." So this was a large part of the literature on degeneration. Galton, who was the founder of modern eugenics, wrote this famous book on hereditary genius. And one of the themes there is genius is really a possibility for males, not for females.

## The Hidden Criminal Inside Every Woman

Another point that's important for us is, and we've seen this previously in other writers, that Lombroso basically identifies women and children. We saw that with Vogt when he talked about the skulls and the skull of the female is intermediate between the child and the male. So again, quoting from *The Female Offender*. "We also saw that women have many traits in common with children, that their moral sense is deficient, that they are revengeful, jealous, inclined to the vengeances of a refined cruelty." So it's very important to this degenerationist literature to make this equation between women and children, and also to claim they don't develop a full moral sensibility.

We'll see this echoed in a really interesting way later on with Freud. But again, remember our reference, Kant. For Kant, morality is a matter of abstract reason, because women are seen as deficient in having reason. I'm not saying this in Kant's name, but in these people who are influenced by Kant, thought women can't attain to full morality. We'll see that's a very important theme in later parts of the lectures.

And I'll quote again from Lombroso's *Female Offender*. "In ordinary cases, these defects are neutralized by piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, by weakness, and undeveloped intelligence. But when a morbid activity of the physical senses intensifies the bad qualities of women and induces them to seek relief in evil deeds, when piety and maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are strong passions and intensely erotic tendencies, much muscular strength and superior intelligence for the conception and execution of evil, it is clear." This is a key point. "It is clear that the innocuous semi-criminal present in normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal, more terrible than any man."

So the part we really need to clock is, "innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman." Because for him, women are atavistic, and atavism tends towards criminality. So why does he claim that even normal women contain a latent criminality, a claim he doesn't make about men? Because he sees women as intrinsically atavistic.

And I'll cut down this quotation. Actually, no, I'll read the whole quotation because it's kind of amusing. "What terrific criminals would children be if they had strong passions, muscular strength, and sufficient intelligence?" Remember before I said that thing ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, a very famous saying from Haeckel that all the biologists in the 19th century really adhered to, that the development of the individual recapitulates a development of the species, so that children represent the more primitive type? That's what's going on there.

And so he goes on to say, "And women are big children. Their evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied than men's, but generally remain latent." That's about their passivity. "When they are awakened and excited, they produce results proportionately greater." Now, of course, there's no empirical evidence to this. Most crimes in the 19th century were, the prisons were full of men, not so much full of women, and the vicious crimes, as usual, perpetrated by men, not by women.

But he, nevertheless, configures women as inherently criminal. His book is ultimately confused because he does tell a story about how women should be prone to passivity, et cetera, and he does acknowledge that criminality is much wider in men than women, but because women are atavistic, he's got to have the conclusion that women are more prone to criminality. Lombroso's

## Genius as a Freakish Form of Atavism

ideas were very much popularized in England. Lombroso was a bloody superstar in the 19th century. I want to say a little bit about Lombroso on genius. Lombroso was a bit of an outlier on genius, and that'll become quite important when we come back to Nietzsche on the same topic.

What is interesting is, he gave a particular account of genius. His account of genius, not so widely accepted, but it was well-known, is that the genius is an atavist. Why is his genius an atavism? Because a genius is someone where one characteristic develops and everything else is left behind. So it's like he's a freak of nature, but one character, everything else is left in a more primitive state, and all the energies are concentrated on one characteristic.

So you could think of this, it's not how Lombroso was putting it. He's thinking of intellectual geniuses, artistic geniuses, literary geniuses, but you could think of someone, you could think of there's a footballer who's brilliant at this one thing but retrograde in everything else. Well, he thought of that for all geniuses. He wrote a very famous, I've only got the Italian title here, *Genio e follia* in 1882, that in that sense, regression might be a precondition for progress. It's a very strange idea.

So let's be very clear. Most degenerationists had nothing but bad things to say about the degenerate. The degenerate were a danger to us all. They were a possible site of infection. But because he's got this idea of the genius as a kind of degenerate, a freak who has one freakishly developed trait and every trait atavistic and primitive, he actually thought genius is an atavism that can lead to progress, can lead to progress. We'll see this idea in Nietzsche too, and it is an outlier, but I wanted to put it up there.

## Nordau's Book That Called Geniuses Degenerate

I'm going to switch now to someone called Max Nordau. Nordau was extremely important in the degeneration literature. Nordau was born in 1849 in Pest, that's part of Budapest in Hungary, and he died in 1923. He obtained a medical degree. I emphasize that because I want to say he had a scientific background. He practiced as a doctor.

He studied with Charcot in Paris in 1883, and that's important because Charcot was very, very influential on Freud. Freud also studied with Charcot in Paris. And Nordau's book, *Degeneration*, which was first published in, here I have 1992, typo, 1892, the German word is Entartung, it was much influenced by Lombroso's work, though he disagreed with Lombroso on genius.

Some of you might know Max Nordau because I think there's a Nordau street in Tel Aviv, because he was one of the very, very earliest Zionists. That's something I should have mentioned. Both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau are Jews. So Nordau is a very important person in the founding of Zionism. Today that's very political of me to say that.

His book, *Degeneration* from 1892, was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, and part of the reason to put the degeneration literature into disrepute is because it named all these kind of geniuses as degenerates. He's got separate chapters on... He's got a chapter on Baudelaire. He's got a chapter on Wagner. He's got a chapter on Nietzsche. He's got a chapter on Tolstoy. He's got a chapter on Zola and Ibsen, and he thinks of all of these people as degenerates.

And his book is unbelievably flat-footed. He just quotes from Nietzsche and he says, "See? The guy's insane." That is really the level of the commentary. And he looked at the overblown language of Nietzsche, the overblown language of Tolstoy and Ibsen, et cetera, said, "Look, there's hysteria here. These people represent a form of atavism." So here's a definition of degeneration from

Nordau's book, *Degeneration*. "The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as a morbid deviation from an original type. This deviation, even if it is at the outset ever so slight, contained transmissible elements of such a nature that anyone bearing in him the germs becomes more and more incapable of fulfilling his function in the world, and mental progress already checked in his person finds itself menaced in his descendants."

## Degeneracy as Infection Through the Blood

So what's really important here to see is this rhetoric of being infected. You're being infected by the blood or your germ plasm, as it was called, et cetera, that these degenerates, these atavistic people are going to pass it on to their descendants. We can see also a hint of Lamarckism too, because the idea is you can acquire degeneracy, for instance, by being exposed to these writers, and then you can pass it on to your descendants.

And I'll quote again from his book. "While under any kind of noxious influences," like reading Nietzsche, "an organism becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy normal types of the species with capacities for development but will form a new subspecies." So you can see this idea, this idea that there are certain influences, it goes back to Morel, who is often considered with his 1857 book on the *Treatise on Degeneration*, the father of degeneration, that there are certain degenerate or bad environment, polluted environments, or the advent of cheap and easy alcohol that leads to a degeneration of the individual that then will be passed on to subsequent

## Middle-Class Fear of the Urban Poor

Nordau, in the typical of literature, claims that the degenerate lacks a sense of morality, that they are prone to emotionalism. Think about women being prone to emotionalism. And he cites Morel, and he also says, "The degenerate is inclined towards pessimism, passivity, tormented by doubts, incapable of adapting to existing circumstances, and they're prone to mysticism." For Nordau, because he was so negative about degeneration. Remember, he's a medical physician, and he's, in this book, trying to warn his contemporaries that there are all these influences out there like Wagner, like Nietzsche, like Baudelaire. It's kind of funny because these are utter geniuses, but he's seeing them as an influence towards degeneration. So he's a medical doctor trying to warn his audience about this possibility.

It's important to see that part of what's going on in degeneration literature is a fear of modernity. A lot of the stuff with Galton and eugenics is really middle-class people, like Galton and Darwin, seeing people in towns, and in the towns, for the first time, they're exposed to the urban poor, and they get this hysterical reaction saying, "Well, these poor, they're all around us and they're breeding like rabbits and they're going to swamp us middle-class people."

And it's one of the things I don't emphasize because I deal a lot with the history of ideas here. I have to acknowledge that there is an economic basis to the attraction of this rhetoric of degeneration, that there were economic changes in industrialization, in the creation of an urban proletariat, in the middle class being exposed and being scared of this urban proletariat. And so they configure it in this literature of degeneration. They configure the working class as degenerate, and they're scared of swamping. This is very clear in the work of Galton. As I said before, Nordau's list of degenerates include Baudelaire, Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Zola, Ibsen.

## Degenerates as Parasites Who Will Perish

But his final prognosis is optimistic. So I'll come back to that because in a way, these degenerationist thinkers are still influenced by enlightenment ideas. Remember, they absorbed a lot of Kant in their way. "I can now sum up in a few words my prognosis. The hysteria of the present day will not last. People will recover from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate will perish. The strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions of civilization, or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity."

And this is one of the funny things I say, the contradictoriness of degeneration theory, it configures the degenerates as a real threat to us normal people, meaning European white males, but it also sees them as inherently feeble, as something that we will naturally overcome, or that they will naturally breed themselves out of existence.

One last quotation because this will become important later on, because he introduces a very important metaphor here. "Such is the treatment of the disease of the age, which I hold to be efficacious. Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased..." That means I'm putting the finger on Wagner, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Zola, whatever, "... unmasking and stigmatizing of their imitators as enemies of society, cautioning the public against the lives of these parasites."

So he introduces a notion of the degenerative parasite. We'll come to see that rhetoric has a lot of repercussions in the 20th century. So I'm now going to move to

## Weininger's Extreme Split of Reason and Body

Another figure, Otto Weininger. And he's a very, very extreme figure. He also, in his day, was an absolute superstar. Freud knew of Weininger, and wrote about him, and I think in a footnote in one of his essays, he said Weininger was brilliant but sexually deranged. I used to teach my classes and I used to say, "I'm one of the two." And yeah, just to put a bit of levity there.

He's a very, very extreme figure. He was very influenced by Kant. He was actually, he had a degree in philosophy and he was super influenced by his reasoning, by his reading of Kant, and so in a very Kantian manner, he gave an extreme value to the faculty of reason, claiming reason is what separates us from the animals. And like Kant, Kant has this idea that true morality can only be arrived at through abstract reasoning, and that our bodily inclination, our passions. And for instance, the very notion of compassion, Kant said, "Is not the basis of morality." Morality can only be based on reason. This is an extreme view. It's a Kantian view and it was very influential in the 19th century.

Why it's important for us is because the degenerationists took from Kant this idea of reason versus the body, morality being assigned to reason, the body being assigned to the passions, the things that can make us immoral, but then they gendered it. The degenerationists, they gendered it and said, "Yes, reason is a site of morality and that is basically a male configuration. The emotions, passions, and even compassion are basically of the body," and they identified that with a female.

Weininger took this to an extreme degree. He published this book called *Geschlecht und Charakter*, *Sex and Character*, in 1903, it was translated into English in 1906. It was a super hit. I think I've seen some letters between the English writer Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, I think he's an American writer, and one of them was complaining that, "I can't meet anyone in London today who doesn't want to talk about that damn book by Weininger, *Sex and Character*." So it's important for Vaihinger that there's this identification of reason with the male principle and the female is identified with the body.

## Everyone Is Part Male and Part Female

He's totally explicit about that. A lot of people who write on degeneration theory would actually wince at the idea of him being a degenerationist. He's not typically counted as one of the hardcore degenerationists. But why do I put him there as opposed to most degenerationists? Because what he shares with them is a pathological fear of infection.

He basically takes male and female and later, we'll see, Jew and Gentile, to be spiritual psychological types. But he sees them as a, you can be infected with this type, and he was very, very scared of the infection of society with feminism or Jewishness. And that's what he shares with the degenerationists.

Just so you see the difference, the hardcore degenerationists, think about Lombroso, who talked about the criminal physiology, they referred very much to physiological conditions. By and large, with a certain exception we'll come to see, Vaihinger did not do that way. He saw criminality, he saw even Jewishness, he saw female as a psychological notion. That's why he doesn't sit so clearly with the notion of degenerationists. But like the degenerationists, he was obsessed with the notion of us being affected with these negative elements and then passing them on to successors.

But there is a certain physiological part to Vaihinger. He claimed, while he claims that being female is basically a psychological type, he claims that there are female and male plasmas and that this is involved in actual every cell. This is the first part of his book. It's a more physiological part, and it's a very small part of his book. And he claimed, and I quote, "There are six characters in the blood, corpuscles."

Nevertheless, he tried to separate what he calls the biological/physiological, which is the focus of this very small first part of his books, from what he called the psychological/philosophical, the second, or what he called the principal part of his book. And so that's important because he wanted to avoid a strict biological determinism according to which the degree of an individual's psychological maleness/femaleness is strictly determined by the degree of physiological maleness and femaleness. An important point about Vaihinger is that he actually proposed

## Women Without Soul, Language, or Mind

The idea of the fundamental bisexuality of all forms of life. In fact, this actually became very important to Freud, who described him as brilliant but sexually deranged. He did this thing, I can do it on a whiteboard? Okay if I. Okay. So he'd do these equations. Oh, I don't know if I can do them right. But he said every, first of all, he did it in terms of plasma, something physiological, but he really meant it in a psychological fashion.

So he said for every male and for every female, there's, so this is male one. And I've probably got his symbols a bit in reverse, but it doesn't really matter. For male one, male one will conturn, is concerned, have a certain amount of male plasma, male psychology, and male one will also have a certain kind of female plasma. And the same thing for females. You can have female, female number one, and this can vary. The amount of, could have M2 who has little, just a little bit of maleness and a hell of a lot of female, and you could have female and she'll also have, female one will have a certain amount of male and female one will have a certain amount of female. And that can vary.

So that one, on his take, you could be, have the appearance of a female but be largely male in your characteristics. Or, and this is very important, you could have the appearance of a male but be largely female in your characteristics. So you see here what's really he's enacting is the fear of men becoming female. Weininger's an interesting character and it's kind of amusing to read his book, *Sex and Character*, but he ended up in a position of extreme misogyny, and later on we'll see, extreme antisemitism, and he had a really interesting solution, which will be the end of this lecture, to the so-called Jewish problem and the so-called female problem.

So I'll quote to you some of his extreme misogyny. Remember, it's all based on this notion that woman is really not capable of reason. He says, "The absolute woman lacks a soul. The well-known phrase, 'Women have no character,' really means the same thing. Personality and individual, individuality, intelligible ego," the Kantian term, "and soul, will and intelligible character, all these are different expressions of the same actuality, an actuality of the male, that the male of the mankind attains and the female lacks."

And this is a really interesting point, he also claims that women are incapable of language. I'll give you the quotation and then I'll delve into it. "It is true that women has the gift of speech, but she has not the art of talking. She converses, flirts, or chatters but she does not talk." So the idea here is between to be genuinely in the conceptual is to be in the realm of reason. And because women can't really attain to the realm of reason, they can't really talk. They make noises.

There were so many paintings that configured women as parrots. Why? Because a parrot has the art of speech. It makes sounds, but it's not really saying anything. So this was the extreme of this rhetoric that women, yes, they can speak, but as a parrot does, there is not genuine thought behind it. And Weininger retailed these kind of ideas.

And, to take it to extremes, he said, again, very influenced by Kantian notions of the relation between reasons and the ability to have concepts. He claimed women are incapable of language, of concepts. And I'll quote from his book. "The absolute female then is devoid not only of logical rules, but of the functions of making concepts and judgments which depend upon them." This is totally Kant notion that to have a judgment involves drawing down and employing concepts.

Now, well then how come women can do any reasoning at all? How come they seem to be able to talk even if it's not genuine talk? Go back to our equations. As a matter of fact, he thinks there are no absolute 100% women. Remember being woman and a man is to a matter of degree. So you could have someone who's physiological woman. Why can she maybe appear to have, and maybe she can have some thought because she has a certain degree of male in her.

He also says women have no individuality. Also, this harkens back to some of the Aristotelian different distinctions as, remember, I said men have limits. But limits means you've got a shape, you've got an individual shape. Having limits is having no shape. He says, "The woman is always living in a condition of fusion with all the human beings she knows. Even when she is alone, she is not a monad." Here, he's picking up a certain kind of Leibnizian terminology. He was well-versed in philosophy. "For all monads are sharply marked off from their existences." In other words, they have definite shape. "Women have no individual limits, no definite individual limits."

Remember, we think of not having limits being infinite, good. No, in this rhetoric, that's a bad, bad thing. He also claimed that females do not have an indivisible center. They are not a unified whole. And remember, he's talking about the absolute female, which in practice doesn't exist because even every actual female has a certain degree of maleness in her. We're all represented by these equations.

But this is what he says about the absolute female as a limiting case. "The absolute female is capable of subdivision. The male, even to the most complete characterology and the most acute experiment is always an indivisible unit. The male has a central nucleus of his being, which has no parts and cannot be divided. The female is composite so that she can be dissociated and cleft." So a female is not a real whole, it's not a real unit.

And most extreme, and again, this is the absolute female. He says, "Mind cannot be predicated of her." And I'll quote. "Woman is neither high-minded nor low-minded, strong-minded nor weak-minded; she is the opposite of all these. Mind cannot be predicated of her at all. She is mindless. That, however, does not imply weak-mindedness in the ordinary sense of the term, the absence of the capacity to get her bearings in ordinary everyday life. No, cunning and calculation, cleverness are much more usual and constant in the woman than in the man if there is to be a personal selfish end in view." Again, it's this conflicting rhetoric that she doesn't have a mind, but she can have cunning and calculation when it comes to, kind of negative, almost criminal purposes.

## The Equation of Jews and Women as Parasites

Another thing that's very common in this rhetoric of degeneration, and you get this, again, in the versions of the course I taught, at Yale and other universities, I used a lot of the 19th century paintings, is that women are somehow closer to animals and closer to flowers. So they were seen as in proximate to the non-rational in particular. Quoting from Weininger, "Woman, according to the poet and according to Buddha and in my interpretation has no relation at all to the whole world, to God. Is she then human or an animal or a plant?" He raises that question which we've seen before. Are women fully human?

Then he goes on to say, "As a matter of fact, women are sisters of the flowers and are in close relationship with the animals. Many of their sexual perversities and affectations for animals indicate this, but they are human beings." So in the end, just like the church, the people who raised, certain medieval fathers who raised the questions whether women have a soul, whether women are really human beings, he has to go and say, "They are human beings." "They are human beings. Even the absolute woman whom we think of as without any trace of intelligible ego is still the complement of man. And there is no doubt that the fact of the special sexual and erotic completion of the human male by the human female, even if it is not the moral phenomena which advocates of marriage would have us believe, is still of tremendous important to the woman problem. Animals are mere individuals. Women are persons, although they are not personalities." So this is like saying, "They are humans, but they are not genuinely individuals. They are not personalities."

Besides being an extreme misogynist, he was also famous for his antisemitism. He himself was a Jew. So I have to tell you what he meant by Judaism. "I must, however, make clear what I mean by Judaism. I mean neither a race, nor a people, nor a recognized creed. I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion among the Jews." So basically, despite that first part of his book that talks about plasma, et cetera, he both configures being female and being Jew as a psychological type, and it's a type that's open to all of us.

And what's very interesting for us is, he makes an equation between Jews and women, which becomes important later on. He says, "Jews, like women, have humor, but not mockery." So I'll quote to you from his book, *Sex and Character*. "The Jew who does not set out, like the humorous from the transcendental." This is a bit that real humor is meant to come from the transcendental, meaning it's a Kantian notion, but I'll read on. "Humor, because it recognizes the transcendental, if only by the mode of resolutely concealing it, is essentially tolerant. Satire, on the other hand, is essentially intolerant and is congruous with the disposition of the Jew and the woman. Jews and women are devoid of human, but addicted to mockery." So this is a notion, it's a particular notion of humor, that humor relies on juxtaposing appearances with reality, because Jews and women don't have a grip on reality, on the transcendental, so they can't have humor. They can just have mockery. So this is importing a lot of Kantian machinery, which he was prone to.

So I'll go on to establish how Weininger has this congruity between Jews and women, which though he doesn't use the terminology, in his view, they're basically degenerate forms of life. "The congruity between Jews and women further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism, the nobility inverted comment of their minds, their lack of deep-rooted and original ideas. In fact, the mode in which, like women, because they are nothing in themselves," they're not monads, "they can become everything. The Jew is an individual, not an individuality. He's in constant relation with a lower life, and has no share in the higher metaphysical life." He's putting all this Kantian terminology about higher metaphysical life.

But what's important for us is, as part of this, remember I talked about the economy of liquids, that liquids have no definite shape? This is part of the degeneration. Look, I'm not saying all degenerationists were anti-Semites. A lot of them were. But what I want to convey to you is that the degenerationists often talk about the adaptability, the lack of having a core character of the degenerates. And this, by certain of the degenerationists, so those who were sympathetic to degeneration theory, was attributed to those they saw as degenerate, was attributed to women, was attributed to Jews. Women live amongst us, but they adapt to us, they mimic us, et cetera. They can't be original, but they can mimic. Well, the same was said about Jews.

In fact, Weininger might think of women and Jews as kind of shapeshifters. And I'll quote to you. "The woman is material," think back to Aristotle, "which passively assumes any form impressed upon it. In the Jew, there is definite aggressiveness. It is not because of the great impression that others make upon him that he is receptive. He is no more subject to suggestion than the Aryan man, but he adapts himself to every circumstance and every race, becoming like the parasite, a new creature in every different host." He's a parasite infecting the host, remaining always though remaining essentially the same. So the Jew has no intrinsic character, but he adapts himself to the world around him, as does the woman.

Weininger did say there is a fundamental difference between Jews and women, and I'll quote for him. "We've now reached the fundamental difference between the Jew and the woman. Neither believes in themselves, but the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself. She has a center of gravity, although it is outside of her own being." Herself, she's not a whole, she's not self-contained, she's not a monad. "The Jew believes in nothing, within him or without him. His wonted desire of permanent landed property," meaning he doesn't want to be attached to a country, "and his attachment to movable goods are more than symbolical."

It's actually important for us in this course to see part of what's going on, and I mentioned it very briefly with the economic turmoil of the 19th century with the industrialization, to a certain extent, in a lot of these writers, both the Jew and the woman, and especially the feminized Jew, get identified with modernity. And Weininger is really explicit on this, and I'll quote, "Our age is not only the most Jewish, but the most feminine." So you have this fear that we are all somehow becoming, in German we have a wonderful word for it. The only English translation I know, we're becoming Jewified. We're becoming Jewified and we're

## Anti-Semitism as Projection of Self-Hatred

becoming more feminine. One of the most interesting things about Weininger, and this will become important when we do the Freud and certainly to a certain extent with Nietzsche, is that he actually has a projective theory. He actually gives an account of antisemitism and he says, basically he's saying, "It's this, we're fearing this of the Jewishness in ourselves, and we project this hatred of the Jewishness in ourselves onto the Jews." That's his genesis of the antisemitism. We'll come to the theory of projection when we do Freud and Nietzsche.

So I'll read to you, "Whoever detests the Jewish disposition detests it first of all in himself. That he should persecute it in others is merely his endeavor to separate himself in this way from Jewishness." In other words, we're scared that somehow deep inside we're Jewish. And so we try to localize that Jewishness outside of us, in other people, in the actual Jews, and then we prosecute the Jewishness in us by prosecuting them.

"He strives to shake it off and to localize it in his fellow creatures, and so for a moment to dream himself free of it. Hatred, like love is a projected phenomena, that person alone is hated who reminds one unpleasantly of oneself." It's a very deep point that was taken up by Freud, but that's his account of the antisemitism. Weininger actually had a solution to the Jewish problem and the women problem.

## The Final Solution: Stop All Procreation

His worry was, being Jewish and being a female are basically psychological notions, and they're available to any of us. He himself was born a Jew, but he converted to Catholicism. And, double punchline, he had a great solution to the... You can see what his real fear is. He's scared that he's gonna wake up tomorrow and find he's a Jewish woman. And he had a solution. He committed suicide.

Actually it's not in my notes, but I'm pretty sure he committed suicide in Beethoven's house in Vienna, because he wanted to do it in a place of real genius, because Beethoven was recognized by everyone as a genius. And I have to say, it's partly his suicide, I think at the age of 23, pretty soon after he wrote that book, that helped make him a superstar. Think about the actor James Dean who died very young, or Marilyn Monroe, it's part of their... Died very young. It's part of their aura. His suicide was a big impetus in his book becoming a super hit.

But now to the second point I want to make. He had a general solution. He said, "Look, there's this worry that we're all becoming Jewified, we're all becoming more psychologically Jewish. We're all becoming feminized. We're all becoming women. Easy solution, we should stop procreating." So that was the punchline of this book. I can't say how serious... The book was taken terribly seriously in his day. I can't say how seriously that part was.

By the way, since he was now a good Catholic, he said, "This is not to worry, because all that means is if we stop procreating, the soul," which he configured as basically a male ideal, "the soul will live on. It's just these bodies will wither away."

That's extreme and it's kind of funny. But remember, he had the fantasy of eliminating degeneration by literally eliminating all women and literally eliminating all Jews. Other people didn't share that fantasy. Maybe some people are inclined in extreme misogyny to fantasize of a world without women, but no one is really practically advocating it. But the other half of that had very big advocates. That is, we could solve the Jewish problem by doing away with Jews. That famously had advocates in the 20th century. And I'll finish there.