Male Fantasies, Volume 2 Psychoanalyzing the White Terror

by Theweleit, Klaus

• ISBN13: 9780745605562
• ISBN10: 0745605567
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-01-15
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

This is the second volume of Theweleit's extraordinary study of the fantasies of some of the men centrally involved in the rise of Nazism. The author develops his account by focusing on the representation of masculinity and homosexuality and their relation to the preparations for and conduct of war. He offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the role of warfare as a search for sensation without desire or pleasure, leading to an image of the body which emphasizes hardness, self-discipline and, ultimately, violence. This is much more than a book about culture of warfare: it is about sexuality and power, about gender, representation and violence. It is a document of our times which will be of interest to anyone concerned with modern history, contemporary politics and social, political and literary theory.

Author Biography

Klaus Theweleit earned his Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of Friebourg and is now a freelance writer working in West Germany. He is the author of both Male Fantasies (Polity Press, 1987) and Male Fantasies, Volume 2 (Polity Press, 1989).

Table of Contents

Foreword

The Mass and Its Counterparts

The Mass as Embodiment of a Specific Unconsciousness

Contagious Lust

The Alien within as 'Primitive Man'

Aspects of the Masses in Reality

Women to the Fore

The Uncanny

Blackout, and Loss of Fleshly Reality: Decomposition with the Mass

The Mass and the Culture: The 'Upstanding' Individual

Culture and the Army

Undefeated in the Field?

The Mass and the Race

The Nation

The People

The Whole

Excursus: The Sexualization of Language

A Forerunner on the Road to the Reich

Ths Speech

The Eyes

Male Bodies and the 'White Terror

Sexuality and the Drill

The Body Reconstructed in te Military Academy

The Troop as a Totality-Machine

The Totality-Component: Figure of Steel

Preliminary Comments on the Agency of the Ego

Blackouts

The Absorbtion of Sexual Desire

Prussian Socialism

Battle and te Body

Speed and Explosions: Contact with the 'Object'

The Site of War

The Soldierly Body, the Technological Machine, and the Fascist Aesthetic

The Ego of the Soldier Male

Fragmented Armor

The Ego and Maintainance Mechanisms

Ego-Disintegration and Work

Collected Observations on the Ego of the Not-Yet-Fully-Born

Fascism and the Family

Regression

Susceptability to Analysis

Conciousness

Memory

'He Has It in Hand...'

Projection

Aids to Full Birth

The Aggressive Nature of Human Beings

Mountains of Corpses

The White Terror as Bounding and Maintainance of the Self

Three Perceptual Identities Associated with the 'Undifferentiated Objects of the Drives'

Black White Red

The Whip

Ritual Flogging and the Look

Homosexuality and the White Terror

Homosexuality and Sado-Masochism

Homosexual Desire

Controvesy

Socarides's Overt Homosexual

Anal Intercourse as an Act of Maintainance

Homosexuality in the Military Academy

Transsexuality as Regulated Play

The Attractiveness of Men as a Social Quality

Freud and History

The Struggle for Power as a Struggle between the Homosexual and the Anti-Homosexual

Double Double Blind

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.