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Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini
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eBook - ePub
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini
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The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealingâoutingâ"queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.
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Critique littĂ©raire LGBTFreud, BlĂŒher, and the Secessio Inversa: MĂ€nnerbĂŒnde, Homosexuality, and Freudâs Theory of Cultural Formation
In Totem and Taboo Sigmund Freud endeavored not only to reconstruct the origins of religion but also those of sociopolitical life. Out of threads of British colonial ethnography (Atkinson, Darwin, Lang, Robertson-Smith, Spencer and Gillen, Westermark) Freud manifestly wove together his narrative of the primal horde (Urhorde), the murder of the father by the band of brothers, and its consequences. Upon this evolutionary patchwork Totem and Taboo would read the Oedipus complex, Freudâs algorithm of individual development and desire within the nuclear family, into the origin of human culture.1
This essay argues that the warp and woof that structures Freudâs tapestry of human history is less the confluence of British imperialism and Austrian bourgeois social norms than the entanglement of the gendered, ethnic position of this son of Ostjuden living and writing in the metropole with a particular strand of argument that emerged out of the enthusiasm and MĂ€nnerphantasien (male fantasies) surrounding Germanyâs late nineteenth-century colonial adventures: Hans BlĂŒherâs sexualizing of the ethnographer Heinrich Schurtzâs theories about the foundation and governance of the state by male associations.
Despite devastating critiques by anthropologists of his âjust-so story,â2 Freud remained until the last stubbornly convinced of its truth.3 Yet, as the tale traversed his corpus from Totem and Taboo to Moses and Monotheism, Freud would continually tinker with the relationships within the band of brothers, especially with the role played by homosexuality. This essay argues that the changes in Freudâs depiction of homosexuality in his accounts of social originsâthe increasingly sharp distinction between homosociality and homosexuality that ultimately culminated in the foreclosure of homosexuality from Freudâs narrativeâmay be connected with the antisemitic, Völkisch turn of MĂ€nnerbund theories as well as the racialization of homosexual identities. In the wake of both BlĂŒherâs writings and the loss of Germanyâs overseas colonies some postwar German ideologues and ethnographers recolonized their tribal past with homogeneous communities led by cultic bands of male warriors, while others endeavoredâfar too successfullyâto restore those idealized MĂ€nnerbĂŒnde (male bands) in the present. Moreover, BlĂŒherâs work facilitated the public dissemination of a racial typology of homosexualities: the opposition between the healthy inversion characteristic of manly Germanic men and the decadent homosexuality of effeminate Jews.
Overdetermined Origins
Freudâs work, like so many other psychical acts, was overdetermined.4 For Freud this story of beginnings was meant also to signify an endâand indeed ensured one. He wrote to his colleague Karl Abraham that his study would âcut us off cleanly from all Aryan religiousnessâ associated with the psychoanalytic movement, namely, C. G. Jung.5 It did. Further as some have noted, Freudâs account of the primal horde with its violent and jealous father, with its band of parricidal sons, with its guilt-motivated apotheosis of the paternal imago, may well be said to characterize the psychoanalytic movement.6 Others have taken a different biographical tack and posited Freudâs own ambivalent relationship to his father.7 Still others have also indicated that, rather than tracing the origin of social life, he was backdating the bourgeois family of his own day.8 In this last endeavor Freud joined with the vast majority of ethnographers and social thinkers who viewed kinship tiesâand naturalized familial rolesâas the crucial form of social organization of tribal societies (Naturvölker).9 They further considered the paternalistic family as both the culmination of those societiesâ evolutionary development and the foundation of modern European (Kulturvölker) civil life.
Freudâs exercise in genealogical construction was, however, perhaps less the blind bourgeois tendency to universalize its historical norms10 than the no less unconscious attempt to legitimize both his own position as a postcolonial subject and the institution of socialization and identity formationâthe familyâthat was under siege.11
Postcolonial as Prehistoric
From the time of Freudâs birth to the publication of Totem and Taboo the Jewish population of Vienna increased some twenty-eightfold, from around 6,000 to over 175,000. Waves of Jews from the impoverished provinces of Galicia as well as from Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary streamed into the imperial capital. Generations who had experienced ghettoization, extensive civil, economic, and vocational restrictions, and a traditional Jewish lifestyle found themselves emancipated citizens with access to secular education (Bildung) as well as the liberal professions and with a Judaism redefined as a private religion rather than a way of life. Yet these assimilation-seeking former inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian periphery also found themselves still largely engaged in commerce and finance, residing primarily in districts with large Jewish populations and subject to discrimination, prejudice, and antisemitic representations.12
Such was also the trajectory followed by Sigmund Freud. Born in Freiberg, Moravia, he and his family moved to Vienna when he was three. They lived in the district of Leopoldstadt where the vast majority of Jews from the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had emigrated and where most of the lower-class Viennese Jews such as the Freuds resided; Leopoldstadt figured âthe Jewish ghetto in the popular imagination.â13 Despite their tenuous financial situation, his parents ensured that young Sigmund acquired a bourgeois Bildung at gymnasium and university; he then pursued a bourgeois career path, and after marriage resided in a bourgeois district. Although he never deniedâdenial struck him as ânot only undignified but outright foolishâ14âand indeed frequently asserted that he was a Jew, Freud realized that he was not in control of the significance of that identification. For many gentilesâand not a few assimilated JewsââJewâ conveyed the image of the Ostjude, the east European shtetl Jew.15 This identification was in part sustained because a cultural division of labor between Austro-Germans and Jews remained even though the types of employment in bourgeois Vienna had changed.16 Also contributing to this identification was the migration of Ostjuden in and through central Europe, especially after the pogroms of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Further, the identification was in part generated by a need to make distinctions. Such differentiation helped create, maintain, and confirm identities that could replace those eroded by the forces of modernization, secularization, and commodification. These identities were forged out of the ânaturalâ differences of nation and race, sex and gender. For Freudâs German readers the space between the inhabitants of the colonizing metropole and those of the colonized periphery created, maintained, and confirmed those essential and hierarchical differences; however, when the colonized entered the metropole and acculturated, the ever precarious identities of the dominant population became more so. To counter the threat, the colonizers imagine the postcolonial subject is merely mimicking them; underlying differences remain and are forever betrayed.17 The Jews, for example, perform their difference; their purported disintegrative intellect and particularity correspond to the presumed disintegrative effect of their presence amid the would-be homogeneous and harmonious dominant culture of the metropole.
Thus throughout his adult life Freud endeavored to distance psychoanalysis from the label âJewish science,â himself from the linguistic, cultural, and religious accoutrements of his more traditional forebears, and both from the antisemitic representations that littered publicâand privateâlife.18 Like other black faces, Freud wore the white masks of Austro-German bourgeois sexual, gender, and familial identities19âidentities that psychoanalytic discourse sustained as much as it provided the narratives and tools to subvert them. And like other postcolonial subjects he internalized the intertwined dominant antisemitic, misogynist, colonialist,20 and homophobic discourses that regularly and traumatically bombarded the Jews (and himself as a Jew) with the opposition between the virile masculine norm and hypervirile cum effeminate other. Freud then reinscribed these images as well as those norms in a hegemonic discourse (the science of psychoanalysis) that in part projected them upon those other Jews (not to be confused with Jewishness per se) as well as women, homosexuals, so-called primitives, the masses, and neurotics, and in part he transformed these representations into universal characteristics.21 Freudâs repudiation of traditional Jewry climaxed with his depiction of the savage Hebrews in Moses and Monotheism. This mass of ex-slaves was unable to renounce its instinctsâunlike their later Jewish and bourgeois descendantsâand as a consequence murdered their leader Moses.
Faulting the Feminizing Family
In discursively acting out his position within the dominant order, Freud sought to defend not only his place there but that order itself. As Freud was preparing his first major foray into societal origins, the bourgeois family was going largely unchallenged in ethnographic and historical discourses; however, its political significance was being contested throughout central Europe. The contradictory changes that this region experienced going into the prewar years of the twentieth centuryâindustrialization, bureaucratization, urbanization, increasing commodification, womenâs emancipation, the decline of liberalism amid the rise of mass politics, as well as the perception of demographic decline, feminization,22 syphilization, and enervationâled to a revolt of sons (and daughters) against the fathers23 and the old order. In c...