The white-bearded philosopher crawls on all fours in a walled garden, while Phyllis, with a broad behind and
obtruding
belly, sits on his back.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
Posterity would doubtless again agree that this brochure is a scandal.
Machiavelli perhaps would not have entirely stripped off his Florentine human- ism and thus would write his treatise in the form of a dialogue between two partners --David and Goliath.
A passage from it might read as follows:
David: Well, Goliath, always fit, always ready for a fight? I hope you're in shape for another duel.
Goliath: How unfair, David! You can see I'm somewhat indisposed today. David: How come?
Goliath: It's a long story.
David: I love stories! How would it be if, for today, we tell stories instead of duel-
ing? The winner would be the one who can tell the crazier story, on the condi-
tion that it's true. Do you want to begin?
Goliath: Hmm, if you like. Stories as a substitute for fighting . . . what a funny
idea. Okay. Let me think . . . Well, some time ago, something happened that unsettled me so much that I can still scarcely relax.
You know, after the Great War, I defeated the giant Caput and wiped out his entire following. That was quite an achievement, for there were a lot of them and it wasn't easy for me to track them all down. They had artfully hidden themselves in my own ranks. In the end, I had created calm and order, and everything seemed to run smoothly again. One day I met a giant who, upon seeing me, at once cried: "You are Caput, I will conquer you! " And thereupon, he began a horrifying arms buildup. In vain I tried to make clear it to him that I was not Caput, because / had killed him with my own hands. But he would have none of it. Incessantly, he piled up the most frightening tools of war so as to be armed against me --whom he held to be the murderous Caput. He armed without letup, so that I myself had no choice but to arm without stop- ping. Nothing I said could convince him that I was not Caput. He nailed me down to it. Both of us were convinced that Caput was terrible and had to be subdued at all costs, but I could not make him see that I was not Caput. Indeed, in time I myself became uncertain whether I had killed the real Caput. Perhaps the one I slew was not Caput at all; perhaps this guy, the one who is attacking me
23
David: Almighty God!
street.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 249
and trying to drive me mad by insisting that /am Caput--perhaps he is Caput. But I won't let him get the better of me. I'm on my guard. We spy on each other day and night. Our fleets are always on the seas, and our planes are constantly in the air so as to be able to strike the instant the other makes a move. I don't know who he is, and I still maintain that he's confusing me with someone else, perhaps even intentionally. In any case, the one thing that is certain is that we are arming against each other, and keep on arming and arming.
David: That really is a nasty story. I'll have to exert myself to find a crazier one. And you also maintain that it's true?
Goliath: Absolutely. I wish it were made up. I'm sure things would then be only half as bad for me. Because of all this armament, I'm on the point of throwing up. I can't even move around freely anymore because of all the armor and the electronic contacts that would set off the bombs if they were touched.
David: Damn! Then you can't even really fight anymore. You'd only blow your- self to smithereens. Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? I almost tan- gled with you just now, just like back then, when you were still a real op- ponent.
Goliath: Before, I would have punched you in the mouth for such cheeky talk. But somehow you're right. As an opponent, I'm useless now. To tell you the truth, I'm already so miserable that I don't know how to go on. Every night brings nightmares that take their toll on my nerves, nothing but bombs, craters, corpses --I feel like I'm suffocating.
David: And I wanted to brawl with someone like that? You're no giant, you're a basket case. Are you finished?
Goliath: Not quite. Since we're on the subject, you may as well hear everything.
Recently I've been having the same nightmare: I dream that I'm a mouse who
wants to die because life has simply become too much for it. I look for a cat
who will do me the favor. I sit down in front of the cat and try to get it in-
terested in me, but it remains lethargic. "That is not fair of you," I say to the
cat, "for I'm still young and must taste pretty good, especially since I've been
well fed. " But the cat, the blase beast, merely answers: "I'm well nourished
too, so why should I bother? That wouldn't be normal. " Finally, with great
difficulty, I talk the cat into it. "I'll help you out this way," it says. "Put your
head in my mouth and wait. " I do what it says. Then I ask: "Will it take long? "
The cat replies: "Just as long as it takes for someone to step on my tail. It must
be a reflex action. But don't worry, I'll stretch my tail out. " So, that is death,
I think to myself, my head in the cat's mouth. The cat stretches out its bushy
tail across the sidewalk. I hear steps. I squint sideways. What do I see? Twelve
little blind girls from the Pope Julius Orphanage come singing down the
250 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Goliath: At this moment I usually wake up, bathed in sweat, as you can imagine. David (reflecting): Well, that's it!
Goliath: What do you mean?
David: You've won. I can't top your story. It makes me shudder, the state you're
in.
Goliath: Really? Well now, a victory in storytelling, that is something after all. David: Perhaps it will be your last.
Goliath: Anyone as big as I am will still often win.
David: Big, what's that?
Sexual Cynicism
Love is a way to pass the time,
To do it you go 'neath the belly line. Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931)
/ do it with my hand, Madam . . . Popular parody
Woman is a being that dresses, babbles, and undresses.
V oltaire
The stage for the appearance and grimaces of sexual cynicism is set by an idealis- tic ideology of love that attributes to the body a lesser role in relation to "higher feelings. " How this separation of body and soul and the construction of a hierar- chy came about in detail would be a complicated chapter in the history of customs and the psyche. We must begin with the result of this history, with the doubleness and dualism of body and soul, heart and genitals, love and sexuality, above and below --even if we want to admit that these dualisms do not necessarily imply universally hostile antagonisms.
Even Platonism -- which continues to be influential (together with Christianity) as the most powerful Western theory of love--takes up the question of the origin of the split between body and soul and the separation of the sexes. Because Plato does not want to or cannot dwell on this chapter, he takes a shortcut. Whenever one does not want to tell long-winded stories, one resorts to small myths that use images to string together the essential points. Let us listen to the fairy tale from Plato's banquet about the hermaphrodite.
In the beginning, so it goes in the mythical poem told by Aristophanes as one of the company, the human being was sexually self-sufficient and complete, a her- maphrodite with all the attributes of both the female and the male. The original human being had four legs and four arms, two faces and a rounded shape, as well
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 251
as the genitals of both sexes. Who would be surprised then that this androgynous wonder-animal was extraordinarily enraptured in itself? The envious gods, how- ever, began to consider how they could punish the hubris of this creature. With a saw, the original human being was simply cut in two. Each half was called, respectively, man and woman and condemned, with bleeding soul, to run after the other half, now separate, so as to comprehend that the part is not the whole and that the human being is not god. Since that time, both halves seek help from Eros, who can unite those who belong together and return human beings to them- selves.
This sarcastic account can be misunderstood only in one way, namely, when it is understood as an expression of naivete. The fairy tale of the hermaphrodite, in its series of speeches about Eros, constitutes the ironical-poetical station, that is, a mere moment or a phase of the truth. This truth must, of course, necessarily be expressed in this way also, but by no means only in this way. In the Platonic dialogue, a reciprocal and ironic deciphering of poetry and philosophical lan- guage takes place --the translation of the enthused into the sober and of the sober into the enthused (which holds for many synthetic mythologies, i. e. , mythologies that reflect on themselves in a rational alternative language). Only if one recalls the extent to which Greek culture idealized and venerated the human body does one understand completely the poetical cynicism of this story. The narrator serves up to his friends at the banquet a Hindu monster with eight extremities and two faces as the original image of the complete human figure (and on top of that, round as a ball, incapable of walking upright) on which the Greek ethics of the body put so much weight. It's hard to imagine what a figure it would make at the Olym- pic Games.
The point of the story is revealed as soon as one sees that here completeness again appears as deficiency --namely, as a lack of beauty. The gods' cruelty, which cuts the original narcissistic monster apart, thus has, on the one hand, a punitive aspect, but on the other, a creative perspective. For with the separation of man and woman arises at the same time, with divine irony, the beauty of the human body. Only this beauty can point the direction for a yearning love. Un- divided, the spherical creature cannot yet experience love because there is as yet no beauty in it that is worth yearning for in love. For this reason, only in the sec- ond unity, which arises out of the unification of the separated, is a real complete- ness possible that in the first unity, due to a lack of beauty, was still missing. From now on, Eros, the god of the desire to unite and of infatuation with beauty, must
24
also be part of the game if unification is to occur.
human bodies embrace and straddle (umarmen und umbeinen) each other with desire.
One then imagines a curious scene: a circle of clever Greeks who rave about Eros's ability to draw a man and a woman to each other, and who, at the same time, do not allow any women to be present among them. At the banquet, in pub-
Only after the separation can
252 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
lie life, in the academy, everywhere, the men and their erotic theories are among themselves. Are they really? Do they suspect that the female aspect is not repre- sented in their circle? Do they sense a lack of oppositions, stimuli, love objects, and targets for yearning when they are among themselves? It does not appear so. They obviously feel themselves to be complete, intellectually as well as sexually. As a closed company of men, they enjoy the consciousness of a complete and mutually complementary group in which the masculine and the feminine, the hard and the soft, the giving and the taking, etc. , are present. In the circle of friends of the same sex, indeed, all countersexual forces are at hand, and what appears to be a homosexual community contains within itself a broad spectrum of bisexual experiences. Only in this way can one visualize the vibrancy of original Platonism. A vibrating atmosphere of wanting to understand fills the academy, this temple of clever male friendships. The longing for insight among them takes on the same tonal color as the longing for a loved one, and understanding itself can be experienced in the same way as the ecstasy of love in which the usual ego vanishes because something larger, higher, more comprehensive has replaced it--enthusiasm, the inner moment with God. One must have seen Mediterranean men dancing together--those auspicious moments of a naive and clear bisexual- ity, when strength and gentleness combine. Between master and pupil, this glim- mer must have been present, with which the younger soul, in perceiving the spiritual glow and mental alertness of the master, and anticipating its own unfold- ing and future, spreads its wings and experiences, beyond itself, itself in an approaching-present magnificence that the master, as someone who is fulfilled, guarantees. The erotic aura gives the school its unmistakable style. It constitutes the spirit of the dialogues through which, throughout all argument and counter- argument, an erotic-dialectical affirmation of all positions and turns of conscious- ness pulses. With its comical movement of opinions, the dialogue becomes a river
that, through an energetic and perplexing dephlegmatizing of minds, frees con- sciousness for the experience of experiences, that ecstatic intensification that lights up in the soul simultaneously as truth, beauty, and goodness.
The dangers inherent in such a rapturous theory of love are clear. As a philosophizing among friends, the theory remains bound to the atmosphere of a rather narrow circle, and each time it is transposed to the universal, it must have a partly incomprehensible, partly irrational, and partly repressive effect. As an idealistic erotics, the theory must seem to all those who do not belong to the circle of friends like perverted effusiveness. Set loose from the erotic force field of the school, Platonism seems like the teachings of an insipid spiritualism. The love of wisdom becomes from then on increasingly sexless; it loses the region below the belly line and its energetic core. From the degeneration of Platonism to a mere idealistic literalism onward, philosophy suffers disturbances in potency, and in the age of Christianization, under the protective umbrella of theology, it becomes nothing more than an organized realm of eunuchs. Materialist counterstrikes are
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 253
inevitable. Because of their pugnacious tendency, they possess a kynical quality. But because men and women experience the presumptions of masculine idealism in different ways, we must take account of two different kynical replies to the idealistic disdain for the body. In fact, for both there are illuminating examples: Sexual kynicism is just as much at play when Diogenes jerks off in front of every- body as when housewives or courtesans give the all-too-clever philosophers a taste of womanly powers.
1. With Diogenes' masturbating in public another chapter of sexual history be- gins. In this first Happening of our civilization, ancient kynicism shows its sharp- est claws. They are partly responsible for the fact that in Christian-idealist usage, the word "cynical" describes a person to whom nothing more is sacred, who declares himself to be no longer ashamed of anything, and who embodies "evil" with a scornful smile. Those who want to make a plea for sublime love, for the partnership of souls, etc. , come up against a radical counterposition here. This position teaches sexual self-sufficiency as the original possibility for the in- dividual. The officially sanctioned married couple is not the first to have a chance to satisfy sexual urges; the individual human being, the laughing masturbator in the marketplace of Athens, is already in a position to do so. Plebeian onanism is an affront to the aristocratic soul-to-soul game, as well as to love relationships in which individuals, for the sake of sexuality, subjugate themselves to the yoke of a relationship. The sexual kynic, from the start, counters this with a self- satisfaction unburdened by scruples.
As soon as the kynic meets someone who wants to impress upon him that he is not an animal, Diogenes pulls out his organ from underneath his toga: Now, is that animalistic or not? And anyway, what do you have against animals? When someone comes who wants to dissuade human beings from their animal founda- tions, the kynic must demonstrate to his opponent how short the way is from the hand to the organ. Did human beings not initally through their upright stature find themselves in the position where their hands were precisely level with their geni- tals? Is the human being --seen anthropologically -- not the masturbating animal? Is it not possible that human consciousness of autarky --more than is generally surmised -- comes from the consequence of the upright stature just mentioned? The quadrupeds, in any case, have been spared this anatomical-philosophical complication. Indeed, masturbation accompanies our civilization like an inti- mately philosophical as well as moral "problem. " Masturbation is to the libidinous region what self-reflection is to the intellectual region. It constitutes at the same time a bridge from male kynicism to female kynicism, especially to the kynicism that can be observed in the present-day women's movement. Here, too, onanism is considered an aid to emancipation. Here, too, it is praised and practiced as a right that one claims for oneself just as much as a joy for which one is not indebted to anyone else.
2. To speak of a female kynicism is methodologically risky because the history
254 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
of "female consciousness" for the whole of ancient times is documented only in- directly, in the medium of male traditions. Nevertheless, some traditional anec- dotes can be examined from a female-kynical perspective. They are, of course, stories told primarily from a male perspective that from the beginning view fe- male images from a master-cynical angle--stories about women as whores and as evil matrimonial dragons. Nevertheless, in some cases a slight displacement of the viewing angle suffices for the same anecdotes to show a pro feminine mean- ing. As a rule, they mirror typical scenes out of the "battle between the sexes," where it happens that the man slips into the weaker position. This happens to him especially in two areas: sexual dependence and household management.
The first example treats Aristotle in the role of a fool in love. One anecdote says that one day he fell so passionately in love with the Athenian courtesan Phyllis that he completely lost his own will and surrendered himself blindly to her whims. The famous whore thus commanded the thinker to crawl on all fours in front of her and he, willingly without will, obeyed and let himself be made a fool of. Humbly he crawled on the ground and served his mistress as a mount.
25
This anecdotal motif was captured by Hans Baldung Grien in 1513-the time
of Eulenspiegel--after the Lai d'Aristote of a French poet of the Middle Ages.
The white-bearded philosopher crawls on all fours in a walled garden, while Phyllis, with a broad behind and obtruding belly, sits on his back. In her left hand she holds the reins, which run through the mouth of the thinker with the receding hair- line; in the right hand, with a delicately extended little finger, she holds a dainty riding crop. Unlike the humbled philosopher, who looks urgently toward the viewer, Phyllis looks at the ground, an Old-German bonnet on her tilted head. Her shoulders are rounded, her body corpulent and melancholy. The kynical meaning of the story is clear: Beauty swings its whip over wisdom, the body con- quers reason; passion makes the spirit pliable; the naked woman triumphs over masculine intellect; against the persuasive power of breasts and hips, understand- ing has nothing to offer. Naturally, here the usual cliches about femininity crop up, but the point lies not in them but rather in the fact that an opportunity for fe- male power is depicted. In Grien's picture, the element of reflectiveness has passed from the philosopher to the courtesan. Admittedly she is "only a whore" but nonetheless it is not a "shame that she is a whore. " She seizes thereby a possi- bility for her own sovereignty. Whoever rides on Aristotle may perhaps be a dan- gerous woman, but certainly one who remains above contempt. That a Phyllis wants to ride on the clever man is supposed, on the one hand, to serve him as a warning, but on the other hand, it should also show him where that can lead. She, with her head tilted thoughtfully to one side, sees coming what he, down under, still seems to fear. To her it is clear that this is only the beginning and that Aristotle will probably not be so stupid in the long run. Admittedly, for him it begins on all fours, but if he is as clever as people say, it will end up with him on his back.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 255
? Hans Baldung Grien, Beauty Swings Her Whip over Wisdom, woodcut, 1513.
The cleverer a man is in his occupation, the greater an idiot he is at home. The more respected he is in society, the more contemptible he appears within his own four walls. This could be the moral of the story of Socrates and Xantippe, if it is tentatively read from a female-kynical perspective. This philosopher has been included in history not only because of his talent for posing questions and leading penetrating dialogues, but also because of his notoriously horrible marriage. Be- cause she is said to have made a domestic hell on earth for her husband, Xantippe is no longer merely a name but has become a generic term for a tyrannical, quar- relsome wife. But a small alteration in point of view suffices to see the relationship between Socrates and Xantippe in another light. Xantippe, the evildoer, then ap- pears rather as the victim of her apparent victim, and the latter becomes recogniz- able in a significant way as the "true" culprit. From today's perspective, every-
256 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
thing speaks for defending Xantippe against her bad reputation. One really has to ask oneself how Socrates managed to maneuver himself into such conjugal mis- ery, and this question can be posed in several variations. If Xantippe really was from the start the kind of woman the legend says she was, we would show very little understanding for our great philosopher because then it was his own care- lessness that led him to choose precisely her and no other woman. Or is he sup- posed to have thought, ironic as he was, that a surly woman is just what a thinker needs? If, from the beginning, he recognized her "true nature" and put up with it, then this indicates deplorable marital behavior on his part because he thus un- reasonably expected a women to spend her whole life with a man who obviously at best endured her but did not appreciate her. Conversely, if Xantippe had be- come as she is described only during her marriage to Socrates, then the philoso- pher would really come into a questionable light because then indisputably he himself must have caused his wife's vexation without having interested himself in it. No matter how the story is turned, Xantippe's moods fall back on Socrates. This is a genuine philosophical problem: How did the thinker and questioner manage not to solve the puzzle of Xantippe's bad temper? This great midwife of truth was obviously unable to let his wife's rage express itself or to help her find a language in which she would have been able to express the grounds and justifica- tions for her behavior. The failure of a philosopher often consists not in false an- swers but in neglecting to pose the right questions --and in denying some ex-
periences the right to become "problems. " His experiences with Xantippe must have been of this kind--a misery that is not given the dignity of obtruding into the male problem-monopoly. Philosphers fail when they endure as a naturally given evil that for which they are to blame; indeed, their capacity for "wisely" enduring it is itself an intellectual scandal, a misuse of wisdom in favor of blind- ness. With Socrates, it seems, this misuse immediately avenged itself. When a thinker cannot refrain from equating humanity with masculinity, reality will strike back in the philosopher's marital hell. The stories about this thus have, I think, also a kynical meaning. They reveal the real reason for philosophical- clerical celibacy in our civilization. A definite dominating kind of idealism, phi- losophy, and grand theory becomes possible only when a certain "other kind" of experience is systematically avoided.
Just as it is impossible to speak of European state-cynicism without dealing with Christian ethics, it is also impossible in our culture to speak of sexual cyni- cism without talking about the Christian way of treating sexuality. The really crass "cynical" gestures can arise only on a foundation of idealism and oppression--the idealism of oppression. Because Christian sexual morality is based on sublime lies, speaking out against it acquires an aggressive, partly satiri- cal, partly blasphemous character. If the Catholic church had not maintained that Mary had brought Jesus into the world while still a virgin, then countless men,
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 257
furiously satirical, would not have hit on the idea of indulging in whore baiting with this peculiar kind of virgin. Santissima puttana! To get pregnant by the Holy Spirit alone --that really is a bit much! Naturally, one would like to know how the Holy Spirit goes about doing it and how the white dove, the most remarkable of all birds, wriggles out of the affair. Is he not already too spiritualized? In the end, does he not do it with the hand of providence?
Enough of that. Jokes of this kind come from Christian mythology almost with the necessity of a natural law. As soon as idealism has gone too far, realism will strike back blasphemously. The question can even be posed, as some psy- choanalysts have done, whether in the psychostructure of the Western Christian man, particularly the Catholic man, who grows up under the halo of a mother- madonna, a sexual-cynical phase is almost unavoidable, for at some time or an- other, the thought reaches the consciousness of every boy that his mother has been his "father's whore. "
Does Christian, dualistic metaphysics offer any chance at all for the un- qualified affirmation of the sexual-animal side of human beings? Has the cor- poreal and especially the lusty aspect, from the start, fallen on the wrong side? There are two reasons why complaining about the hostility of Christian dualism toward the body does not quite exhaust this subject: First, in this religion there have been remarkable attempts to "Christianize" the body and even the sexual act and thus to draw them onto the side of the "good"; and second, there is obviously an old tradition of cynical double standards in which clerics are particularly noticeable because they, in Heinrich Heine's words, secretly drink wine and pub- licly preach water.
If, in the Christian ritual, there is something like a "weak point" predisposed to the bodily pleasure principle, it is to be found in Holy Communion and the Easter liturgy. In commemorating the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, there is a chance for the resurrection of the believing flesh to a holy shame- lessness. Scattered documents from the early Christian period seem to show that in various sects, the agape, as a matter of consistency, was celebrated bodily. A contemporary report describes practices of a Gnostic sect from the Near East in the fourth century. Although Christians, they prayed to a god who had a daughter called Barbelo who in turn gave birth to a son called Sabaoth. When Sabaoth re- belled against the authority of his divine mother and grandfather, in order to cata- pult himself to dominion over the world, Barbelo began to seduce the priests with her sensual charms and, by gathering human semen in her body, began sucking back the scattered life force of the creatures into herself. In an outraged and pre- cise letter to the bishop of Alexandria, the heretic-hunter Epiphanius, a Christian priest who had secretly slipped into a Barbelo feast, recorded what took place in such a liturgy.
258 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
They distribute their women among themselves, and as soon as a stran- ger joins them, the men give the women, and the women give the men a special sign. By extending their hands and stroking their palms, they indicate that the stranger is a member of their religion. As soon as they have identified themselves in this way, they seat themselves at the table. They pass around select dishes, eat meat, and drink wine, even the poor. When they have satiated themselves completely and, if I may say so, have filled their arteries with additional power, they proceed to de- bauchery. The man leaves his place beside his woman and says to her, "Stand up and execute the agape (the communion of love) with your brother! " The misfortunate ones then all begin to indulge in fornication with one another and, although I redden at the mere thought of the description of their impure practices, I am not ashamed to say them out loud, since they are also not ashamed to commit them. Now then, as soon as they have joined again as a group, they elevate their own dis- grace to the heavens, as if this misdeed of prostitution were not
enough: Man and woman take the man's semen in their hands, step forth, their eyes raised to the heavens, and offer the shame on their hands to the Father with the words: "We offer up to you this gift, the body of Christ. " They then eat the sperm and partake of their own se- men, with everyone saying, "This is the body of Christ, this is the Easter feast for which our bodies suffer and for which they confess to Christ's suffering. " They do exactly the same with the women's men- strual flow. They collect the blood of her impurity and partake of it in the same way, saying, "This is the blood of Christ. " In all their numer- ous excesses, however, they teach that one is not allowed to bring any children into the world. Out of pure wantonness, they perform these disgraceful acts. They commit the act of lust to the point of satisfaction but collect their sperm in order to hinder it from penetrating further, and then consume the fruit of their shame. . . . As soon as one of them has by accident let his semen penetrate too far into the woman, and the woman becomes pregnant, then listen to what still greater abomination they then commit. They tear out the embryo as soon as they can grab it with their fingers, take the abortion, grind it in a kind of mortar, mix honey, pepper, and various spices, as well as scents, with it, in order to overcome their repugnance; then they gather--a true congregation of swine and dogs --and each takes communion with his or her finger by eating from this abortion paste. As soon as the "supper" is over, they conclude with the prayer: "We have not allowed the high master of lust to play his game with us, but have taken up the error of our brother into ourselves. " In their eyes, this signifies the consummate Easter feast. Beyond this they practice all kinds of abominations. When they fall into an ecstatic state during their union, they soil their hands with the shame of their semen, distribute it all around, and pray with these soiled hands, the body competely naked, to obtain through this act
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 259
free access to God. (Quoted from J. Attali, L'Ordre cannibale [Paris, 1979], pp. 52-53. )
The witness himself has already provided the key phrase: "true congregation
of swine and dogs. " We are on kynical terrain. This document--even though it
can scarcely be very representative--evidences a radical, Christianized, sexual
kynicism: no longer the initial and simple kynicism of Greek philosophy with its
public onanism and nuptials but already an artificial and religiously involved
kynicism, one that, with its perverse aspects, already makes concessions to the
Christian religion. However, no matter how remarkable these practices may have
been, the main shock that its description conveys lies not in the details but in the
otherwise unthinkable fact that shines through the whole phenomenon: There is
such a thing as Christian orgy, an unrestrained, innocent, indeed, a holy and wild
release and a wallowing in male and female juices that pleases God. At least on
this one occasion, Christianity showed itself as a naked tumult of drunken Chris-
tian bodies that celebrate their lust. This is what makes Epiphanius's face turn
red--of course, it is uncertain whether it is the red of shame or the red of someone
infected by shamelessness. After all, he is infected at least to the extent that he,
as priest, hazards to write these things down, and how he himself behaved in the
middle of this holy group sex remains his secret. The bishop of Alexandria does
not have to know everything. Even more shocking perhaps is that here God's son
is replaced by a daughter who is described as the anti-type of the mother of God,
Mary. Barbelo is the sucking, gathering, and flowing cunt of God, whereas the
Virgin Mary cannot hover over Catholic altars with her belly or anything lower
26
showing.
mythology is reached. And if the blood of the woman is ritually equated with the blood of Christ, then the Gnostic liberation of the female body has ventured fur- ther than modern feminist mysticism has ever dreamed of doing.
In connection with this description of the Barbelo ritual, it is also documented that, upon Epiphanius's denunciation of this sect to the bishop of Alexandria, eighty Gnostics were excommunicated. We may take this as an indication of the historical chances and fates of Gnostic and other groups that tried to realize "psy- chosomatically" the commandment of love in the Christ religion and to overcome dualism with dualist metaphysics. Wherever such phenomena occurred they were in general violently eliminated.
At the height of the Middle Ages --insofar as one can say anything about such mutilated and cabalistic traditions-the possibilities of a Christianized sexuality seem to have been rediscovered. In the language of the mystical "love" (Minne) of God, an erotic metaphorics emerges in which the figurative meaning can be only speculatively distinguished from the literal component of meaning. If the love lyrics in places bordered on blasphemy by comparing the appearance of a
Here, an alternative extreme within the possibilities of Christian
260 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Scene from Pasolini's Said, or the 120 Days of Sodom, based on the novel by the Marquis de Sade. "Late-aristocratic pornography lays bare the core of violence in sexuality. In order to develop the connection between disinhibition, terror, and dis- cretion, it banishes loose living to a closed space. De Sade puts an end to the age of aristocratic eroticism, which began with the idealism of chivalrous love, in a materialism of rape. "
lover with the dawn of Easter morning, it is still not known how direct or indirect the connections between such linguistic and possible carnal audacities may have been. We also do not know exactly what sexual consequences the mysticism of the brotherhoods of the Free Spirit had. (See Norman Cohn, Das Ringen um das Tausendjahrige Reich [Bern, 1961]. ) Only when, in the merry tales of the late Middle Ages, women come to the conclusion that the soldier is not as good a lover as the clericus can we be sure that this assertion was supported by diligent obser- vation.
In the bourgeois age, the stage was set for sexual cynicism in a new form. The bourgeoisie did not make claims on cultural hegemony without at the same time setting up its own model of ideal love: marriage for love. Countless novels do their part in stamping the templates of bourgeois erotic idealism indelibly into the minds of the reading public, especially the female public. With this, a cultural languor of unknown extent sets in. For on the one side, the "bourgeois soul" wants to partake of the joys of love and is hungry to experience the adventurous, vitaliz- ing, fantastic, and even sensual-passionate power of love. But the other side, the bourgeois soul must take care that love remains strictly confined to marriage, that the "animal side" plays no role, and that even in the most extreme case, the bodily aspect can be regarded as an "expression" of the passion of the soul. This erotic lay idealism (it is not clerics who preach it) provokes sexual-cynical antitheses
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 261
in virtually epidemic dimensions. As in many other things, the bourgeois is, in sexual matters, an almost-realist who indeed risks taking a look at the real, with- out, however, forsaking his idealizations and value phantoms. His ideas are therefore continually undermined by realistic premonitions, and it is this tension that makes the bourgeois man particularly receptive to sexual-cynical jokes, to dirty keyhole realism and pornography. For the bourgeois, the crucial point is to "cherish his values" without forgetting how things happen "down there in real- ity. " Hence the cynical smile. One knows all about it. One knows the business. I too was in Arcadia. But this is not "our level. " We will not so easily be made to confuse above and below. Admittedly, the bourgeois does not unwillingly visit the brothel and convince himself there of the common denominator between whores and ladies, but reality remains divided, the differences are defended. It may well be the cultural strategy of bourgeois literature and art to conquer the public sphere with a depiction of private life, but simultaneously, a dividing wall is erected in the private sphere between idealized private life and animal private life. When the bourgeois knows himself to be protected by a curtain, then he is in his animality more cynical than kynical, more swine than dog. He knows how to distinguish the human from the all-too-human. He can, on the one side, cer- tainly confess "human weaknesses," but on the other, ideal side, he is resolute in preserving "composure"; to quote Bismarck; "politeness to the last rung of the gal- lows. " A definition of a lady has even been attempted according to whether she knows how to make the "right face" when a dirty joke (Herrenwitz) is told in her presence. The right face betrays that the person knows what it is about but also that she "stands above it. " To the cultivation of a lady belongs the tolerant-ironical note in dealing with inevitable male cynicism.
Through psychoanalysis, we have become used to connecting psychological enlightenment automatically with sexual enlightenment. In this there is something right and something wrong. The psychoanalytic attempt to overcome bourgeois semirealism in sexual matters and to develop it into a full realism appears to be right. However, the tendency of psychoanalysis to confuse the unconscious with the secretive is wrong. Of course, sexuality is an area in which this confusion al- most inevitably occurs. When psychoanalysis began to interpretatively explore the so-called unconscious, it entered in fact into that area that in bourgeois society was the secret topic par excellence. It took the self-experience and the self- suspicion of the bourgeois as animal seriously. It went on to neutralize the animal- sexual area and to bring it back into the sphere of nonsecret matters. For this rea- son, contemporary readers were able to sometimes ask themselves when studying psychoanalytic publications whether these should be assigned to the genus of science or to that of pornography. Two generations of analysts as well as patients have been plagued by the tendential confusion of the secretive with the uncon- scious. For the airing of sexual secrets in late-bourgeois culture as a whole has in no way led to the elimination of neurosis from society--because pathogenic
262 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Michael Voltz (? ), Animal Magnetism. A serious preoccupation for thinkers and believing souls. "The suspicion bourgeois individuals have of themselves being animals creates the cultural framework for modern depth psychology. "
sexual secrets constitute only a tiny fraction of the individual as well as of the so-
27
cial unconscious.
Psychoanalysis is a historical hybrid. With its sexual-pathological foundation,
it looks into the past; with its conviction that the unconscious is produced, it looks into the future. In the manner of a cultural detective, it has turned the early- bourgeois suspicion into a certainty: The human being is based on the animal- This suspicion has been, at least since the eighteenth century, with people in bour- geois society, a society that, on the one hand, began with the final taming of the inner animal by reason, enlightenment, and morality, but which saw, as a by-
? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 263
product of this taming, an ever-larger and threatening animal shadow emerge from below. Only the fully civilized, "deanimalized" bourgeois semirealist can have such a persistent and eerie self-suspicion of its interior and its lower parts. This self-suspicion of the bourgeois animal flares up in romantic literature--with all its gloomy, mysterious metaphors of the animal abyss leading inward and downward. The romantics know that two paths are open to the bourgeois, one in the bourgeois light, the other in the unbourgeois depths. The first marries, be- comes a respectable man, begets children and enjoys middle-class peace--but what does he know of life?
To the second sang and lied
The thousand voices in the ground Tempting sirens, and drew
Him into the wanton billows
Of the colorfully ringing chasm.
(Fourth verse of J. v. Eichen- dorff s poem
Die zwei Gesellen [The two bachelors, 1818])
The second is the inner other, the still unchainable animal that risks the descent into its own secrets and the crevices of its soul--in the colorful chasms of animal lust. Only those who try to completely banish the animal element in themselves sense in themselves a growing danger, which should be handled carefully. A vari- ant of such carefulness is encountered in the psychoanalytic vocabulary that designates the area of the "repressed," dangerous, animal element with a true lion tamer's expression: the "unconscious. " Psychoanalysis has a bit of the air of a pseudomedical domesticating science about it--as if it were a matter of chaining the "unconscious" with the fetters of insight.
When Freud speaks of a "sexual chemistry" and treats orgasm as a discharge of tension, it is difficult not to think of men in a brothel who, in "making love," don't even take off their trousers because it is only a "discharge. " This too is a silencing, a disenchanting, an unjustified objectification and neutering of sexual- ity. It constitutes the unarbitrary counterpart to the equally unjustified and un- avoidable demonizing of the inner secret area whose expression we find, almost at the beginnings of bourgeois culture, in the romantics. They created the stage on which the demonology of "sexual unconsciousness" begins its play. The demon is nothing other than the inner animal. What the "unconscious" is in its essence was expressed more clearly by the romantic Eichendorff than by the neoromantic scientist Sigmund Freud: "But take care not to awake the wild animal in your breast, so that it (Es, id) does not suddenly break out and tear your Self apart" (Das Schloss Durande).
264 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
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The late-bourgeois cultural situation is markedly different from the nineteenth century, which found its expression in the psychologies of the unconscious. No contemporary still believes in or practices the separation of ideal and animal love. Thus a basic precondition for sexual-kynical attacks has been voided. A "wo/man" does not laugh at "dirty jokes" any more, nor does pornography have an aggressive bite. Today, both are completely backward. However, it would be naive to think that this means the game is over. Whenever kynicism has asserted itself, new cynics can be found who can, as usual, make a dirty business out of the no longer "dirty" truth. Pornographic shock is admittedly over once and for all, but the business of pornography is still flourishing. For a long time now there has not been in late-bourgeois pornography any spark of a personal reckoning with inhibitions, erotic idealisms, and sexual taboos. Rather, it consciously
? ? ? ? "Bourgeois pornography exposes the commodity aspect of sexuality. Out of principled indiscretion, it bursts the closed rooms, makes nakedness and venality into synonyms, and brings visual drugs onto the 'free market.
David: Well, Goliath, always fit, always ready for a fight? I hope you're in shape for another duel.
Goliath: How unfair, David! You can see I'm somewhat indisposed today. David: How come?
Goliath: It's a long story.
David: I love stories! How would it be if, for today, we tell stories instead of duel-
ing? The winner would be the one who can tell the crazier story, on the condi-
tion that it's true. Do you want to begin?
Goliath: Hmm, if you like. Stories as a substitute for fighting . . . what a funny
idea. Okay. Let me think . . . Well, some time ago, something happened that unsettled me so much that I can still scarcely relax.
You know, after the Great War, I defeated the giant Caput and wiped out his entire following. That was quite an achievement, for there were a lot of them and it wasn't easy for me to track them all down. They had artfully hidden themselves in my own ranks. In the end, I had created calm and order, and everything seemed to run smoothly again. One day I met a giant who, upon seeing me, at once cried: "You are Caput, I will conquer you! " And thereupon, he began a horrifying arms buildup. In vain I tried to make clear it to him that I was not Caput, because / had killed him with my own hands. But he would have none of it. Incessantly, he piled up the most frightening tools of war so as to be armed against me --whom he held to be the murderous Caput. He armed without letup, so that I myself had no choice but to arm without stop- ping. Nothing I said could convince him that I was not Caput. He nailed me down to it. Both of us were convinced that Caput was terrible and had to be subdued at all costs, but I could not make him see that I was not Caput. Indeed, in time I myself became uncertain whether I had killed the real Caput. Perhaps the one I slew was not Caput at all; perhaps this guy, the one who is attacking me
23
David: Almighty God!
street.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 249
and trying to drive me mad by insisting that /am Caput--perhaps he is Caput. But I won't let him get the better of me. I'm on my guard. We spy on each other day and night. Our fleets are always on the seas, and our planes are constantly in the air so as to be able to strike the instant the other makes a move. I don't know who he is, and I still maintain that he's confusing me with someone else, perhaps even intentionally. In any case, the one thing that is certain is that we are arming against each other, and keep on arming and arming.
David: That really is a nasty story. I'll have to exert myself to find a crazier one. And you also maintain that it's true?
Goliath: Absolutely. I wish it were made up. I'm sure things would then be only half as bad for me. Because of all this armament, I'm on the point of throwing up. I can't even move around freely anymore because of all the armor and the electronic contacts that would set off the bombs if they were touched.
David: Damn! Then you can't even really fight anymore. You'd only blow your- self to smithereens. Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? I almost tan- gled with you just now, just like back then, when you were still a real op- ponent.
Goliath: Before, I would have punched you in the mouth for such cheeky talk. But somehow you're right. As an opponent, I'm useless now. To tell you the truth, I'm already so miserable that I don't know how to go on. Every night brings nightmares that take their toll on my nerves, nothing but bombs, craters, corpses --I feel like I'm suffocating.
David: And I wanted to brawl with someone like that? You're no giant, you're a basket case. Are you finished?
Goliath: Not quite. Since we're on the subject, you may as well hear everything.
Recently I've been having the same nightmare: I dream that I'm a mouse who
wants to die because life has simply become too much for it. I look for a cat
who will do me the favor. I sit down in front of the cat and try to get it in-
terested in me, but it remains lethargic. "That is not fair of you," I say to the
cat, "for I'm still young and must taste pretty good, especially since I've been
well fed. " But the cat, the blase beast, merely answers: "I'm well nourished
too, so why should I bother? That wouldn't be normal. " Finally, with great
difficulty, I talk the cat into it. "I'll help you out this way," it says. "Put your
head in my mouth and wait. " I do what it says. Then I ask: "Will it take long? "
The cat replies: "Just as long as it takes for someone to step on my tail. It must
be a reflex action. But don't worry, I'll stretch my tail out. " So, that is death,
I think to myself, my head in the cat's mouth. The cat stretches out its bushy
tail across the sidewalk. I hear steps. I squint sideways. What do I see? Twelve
little blind girls from the Pope Julius Orphanage come singing down the
250 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Goliath: At this moment I usually wake up, bathed in sweat, as you can imagine. David (reflecting): Well, that's it!
Goliath: What do you mean?
David: You've won. I can't top your story. It makes me shudder, the state you're
in.
Goliath: Really? Well now, a victory in storytelling, that is something after all. David: Perhaps it will be your last.
Goliath: Anyone as big as I am will still often win.
David: Big, what's that?
Sexual Cynicism
Love is a way to pass the time,
To do it you go 'neath the belly line. Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931)
/ do it with my hand, Madam . . . Popular parody
Woman is a being that dresses, babbles, and undresses.
V oltaire
The stage for the appearance and grimaces of sexual cynicism is set by an idealis- tic ideology of love that attributes to the body a lesser role in relation to "higher feelings. " How this separation of body and soul and the construction of a hierar- chy came about in detail would be a complicated chapter in the history of customs and the psyche. We must begin with the result of this history, with the doubleness and dualism of body and soul, heart and genitals, love and sexuality, above and below --even if we want to admit that these dualisms do not necessarily imply universally hostile antagonisms.
Even Platonism -- which continues to be influential (together with Christianity) as the most powerful Western theory of love--takes up the question of the origin of the split between body and soul and the separation of the sexes. Because Plato does not want to or cannot dwell on this chapter, he takes a shortcut. Whenever one does not want to tell long-winded stories, one resorts to small myths that use images to string together the essential points. Let us listen to the fairy tale from Plato's banquet about the hermaphrodite.
In the beginning, so it goes in the mythical poem told by Aristophanes as one of the company, the human being was sexually self-sufficient and complete, a her- maphrodite with all the attributes of both the female and the male. The original human being had four legs and four arms, two faces and a rounded shape, as well
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 251
as the genitals of both sexes. Who would be surprised then that this androgynous wonder-animal was extraordinarily enraptured in itself? The envious gods, how- ever, began to consider how they could punish the hubris of this creature. With a saw, the original human being was simply cut in two. Each half was called, respectively, man and woman and condemned, with bleeding soul, to run after the other half, now separate, so as to comprehend that the part is not the whole and that the human being is not god. Since that time, both halves seek help from Eros, who can unite those who belong together and return human beings to them- selves.
This sarcastic account can be misunderstood only in one way, namely, when it is understood as an expression of naivete. The fairy tale of the hermaphrodite, in its series of speeches about Eros, constitutes the ironical-poetical station, that is, a mere moment or a phase of the truth. This truth must, of course, necessarily be expressed in this way also, but by no means only in this way. In the Platonic dialogue, a reciprocal and ironic deciphering of poetry and philosophical lan- guage takes place --the translation of the enthused into the sober and of the sober into the enthused (which holds for many synthetic mythologies, i. e. , mythologies that reflect on themselves in a rational alternative language). Only if one recalls the extent to which Greek culture idealized and venerated the human body does one understand completely the poetical cynicism of this story. The narrator serves up to his friends at the banquet a Hindu monster with eight extremities and two faces as the original image of the complete human figure (and on top of that, round as a ball, incapable of walking upright) on which the Greek ethics of the body put so much weight. It's hard to imagine what a figure it would make at the Olym- pic Games.
The point of the story is revealed as soon as one sees that here completeness again appears as deficiency --namely, as a lack of beauty. The gods' cruelty, which cuts the original narcissistic monster apart, thus has, on the one hand, a punitive aspect, but on the other, a creative perspective. For with the separation of man and woman arises at the same time, with divine irony, the beauty of the human body. Only this beauty can point the direction for a yearning love. Un- divided, the spherical creature cannot yet experience love because there is as yet no beauty in it that is worth yearning for in love. For this reason, only in the sec- ond unity, which arises out of the unification of the separated, is a real complete- ness possible that in the first unity, due to a lack of beauty, was still missing. From now on, Eros, the god of the desire to unite and of infatuation with beauty, must
24
also be part of the game if unification is to occur.
human bodies embrace and straddle (umarmen und umbeinen) each other with desire.
One then imagines a curious scene: a circle of clever Greeks who rave about Eros's ability to draw a man and a woman to each other, and who, at the same time, do not allow any women to be present among them. At the banquet, in pub-
Only after the separation can
252 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
lie life, in the academy, everywhere, the men and their erotic theories are among themselves. Are they really? Do they suspect that the female aspect is not repre- sented in their circle? Do they sense a lack of oppositions, stimuli, love objects, and targets for yearning when they are among themselves? It does not appear so. They obviously feel themselves to be complete, intellectually as well as sexually. As a closed company of men, they enjoy the consciousness of a complete and mutually complementary group in which the masculine and the feminine, the hard and the soft, the giving and the taking, etc. , are present. In the circle of friends of the same sex, indeed, all countersexual forces are at hand, and what appears to be a homosexual community contains within itself a broad spectrum of bisexual experiences. Only in this way can one visualize the vibrancy of original Platonism. A vibrating atmosphere of wanting to understand fills the academy, this temple of clever male friendships. The longing for insight among them takes on the same tonal color as the longing for a loved one, and understanding itself can be experienced in the same way as the ecstasy of love in which the usual ego vanishes because something larger, higher, more comprehensive has replaced it--enthusiasm, the inner moment with God. One must have seen Mediterranean men dancing together--those auspicious moments of a naive and clear bisexual- ity, when strength and gentleness combine. Between master and pupil, this glim- mer must have been present, with which the younger soul, in perceiving the spiritual glow and mental alertness of the master, and anticipating its own unfold- ing and future, spreads its wings and experiences, beyond itself, itself in an approaching-present magnificence that the master, as someone who is fulfilled, guarantees. The erotic aura gives the school its unmistakable style. It constitutes the spirit of the dialogues through which, throughout all argument and counter- argument, an erotic-dialectical affirmation of all positions and turns of conscious- ness pulses. With its comical movement of opinions, the dialogue becomes a river
that, through an energetic and perplexing dephlegmatizing of minds, frees con- sciousness for the experience of experiences, that ecstatic intensification that lights up in the soul simultaneously as truth, beauty, and goodness.
The dangers inherent in such a rapturous theory of love are clear. As a philosophizing among friends, the theory remains bound to the atmosphere of a rather narrow circle, and each time it is transposed to the universal, it must have a partly incomprehensible, partly irrational, and partly repressive effect. As an idealistic erotics, the theory must seem to all those who do not belong to the circle of friends like perverted effusiveness. Set loose from the erotic force field of the school, Platonism seems like the teachings of an insipid spiritualism. The love of wisdom becomes from then on increasingly sexless; it loses the region below the belly line and its energetic core. From the degeneration of Platonism to a mere idealistic literalism onward, philosophy suffers disturbances in potency, and in the age of Christianization, under the protective umbrella of theology, it becomes nothing more than an organized realm of eunuchs. Materialist counterstrikes are
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 253
inevitable. Because of their pugnacious tendency, they possess a kynical quality. But because men and women experience the presumptions of masculine idealism in different ways, we must take account of two different kynical replies to the idealistic disdain for the body. In fact, for both there are illuminating examples: Sexual kynicism is just as much at play when Diogenes jerks off in front of every- body as when housewives or courtesans give the all-too-clever philosophers a taste of womanly powers.
1. With Diogenes' masturbating in public another chapter of sexual history be- gins. In this first Happening of our civilization, ancient kynicism shows its sharp- est claws. They are partly responsible for the fact that in Christian-idealist usage, the word "cynical" describes a person to whom nothing more is sacred, who declares himself to be no longer ashamed of anything, and who embodies "evil" with a scornful smile. Those who want to make a plea for sublime love, for the partnership of souls, etc. , come up against a radical counterposition here. This position teaches sexual self-sufficiency as the original possibility for the in- dividual. The officially sanctioned married couple is not the first to have a chance to satisfy sexual urges; the individual human being, the laughing masturbator in the marketplace of Athens, is already in a position to do so. Plebeian onanism is an affront to the aristocratic soul-to-soul game, as well as to love relationships in which individuals, for the sake of sexuality, subjugate themselves to the yoke of a relationship. The sexual kynic, from the start, counters this with a self- satisfaction unburdened by scruples.
As soon as the kynic meets someone who wants to impress upon him that he is not an animal, Diogenes pulls out his organ from underneath his toga: Now, is that animalistic or not? And anyway, what do you have against animals? When someone comes who wants to dissuade human beings from their animal founda- tions, the kynic must demonstrate to his opponent how short the way is from the hand to the organ. Did human beings not initally through their upright stature find themselves in the position where their hands were precisely level with their geni- tals? Is the human being --seen anthropologically -- not the masturbating animal? Is it not possible that human consciousness of autarky --more than is generally surmised -- comes from the consequence of the upright stature just mentioned? The quadrupeds, in any case, have been spared this anatomical-philosophical complication. Indeed, masturbation accompanies our civilization like an inti- mately philosophical as well as moral "problem. " Masturbation is to the libidinous region what self-reflection is to the intellectual region. It constitutes at the same time a bridge from male kynicism to female kynicism, especially to the kynicism that can be observed in the present-day women's movement. Here, too, onanism is considered an aid to emancipation. Here, too, it is praised and practiced as a right that one claims for oneself just as much as a joy for which one is not indebted to anyone else.
2. To speak of a female kynicism is methodologically risky because the history
254 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
of "female consciousness" for the whole of ancient times is documented only in- directly, in the medium of male traditions. Nevertheless, some traditional anec- dotes can be examined from a female-kynical perspective. They are, of course, stories told primarily from a male perspective that from the beginning view fe- male images from a master-cynical angle--stories about women as whores and as evil matrimonial dragons. Nevertheless, in some cases a slight displacement of the viewing angle suffices for the same anecdotes to show a pro feminine mean- ing. As a rule, they mirror typical scenes out of the "battle between the sexes," where it happens that the man slips into the weaker position. This happens to him especially in two areas: sexual dependence and household management.
The first example treats Aristotle in the role of a fool in love. One anecdote says that one day he fell so passionately in love with the Athenian courtesan Phyllis that he completely lost his own will and surrendered himself blindly to her whims. The famous whore thus commanded the thinker to crawl on all fours in front of her and he, willingly without will, obeyed and let himself be made a fool of. Humbly he crawled on the ground and served his mistress as a mount.
25
This anecdotal motif was captured by Hans Baldung Grien in 1513-the time
of Eulenspiegel--after the Lai d'Aristote of a French poet of the Middle Ages.
The white-bearded philosopher crawls on all fours in a walled garden, while Phyllis, with a broad behind and obtruding belly, sits on his back. In her left hand she holds the reins, which run through the mouth of the thinker with the receding hair- line; in the right hand, with a delicately extended little finger, she holds a dainty riding crop. Unlike the humbled philosopher, who looks urgently toward the viewer, Phyllis looks at the ground, an Old-German bonnet on her tilted head. Her shoulders are rounded, her body corpulent and melancholy. The kynical meaning of the story is clear: Beauty swings its whip over wisdom, the body con- quers reason; passion makes the spirit pliable; the naked woman triumphs over masculine intellect; against the persuasive power of breasts and hips, understand- ing has nothing to offer. Naturally, here the usual cliches about femininity crop up, but the point lies not in them but rather in the fact that an opportunity for fe- male power is depicted. In Grien's picture, the element of reflectiveness has passed from the philosopher to the courtesan. Admittedly she is "only a whore" but nonetheless it is not a "shame that she is a whore. " She seizes thereby a possi- bility for her own sovereignty. Whoever rides on Aristotle may perhaps be a dan- gerous woman, but certainly one who remains above contempt. That a Phyllis wants to ride on the clever man is supposed, on the one hand, to serve him as a warning, but on the other hand, it should also show him where that can lead. She, with her head tilted thoughtfully to one side, sees coming what he, down under, still seems to fear. To her it is clear that this is only the beginning and that Aristotle will probably not be so stupid in the long run. Admittedly, for him it begins on all fours, but if he is as clever as people say, it will end up with him on his back.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 255
? Hans Baldung Grien, Beauty Swings Her Whip over Wisdom, woodcut, 1513.
The cleverer a man is in his occupation, the greater an idiot he is at home. The more respected he is in society, the more contemptible he appears within his own four walls. This could be the moral of the story of Socrates and Xantippe, if it is tentatively read from a female-kynical perspective. This philosopher has been included in history not only because of his talent for posing questions and leading penetrating dialogues, but also because of his notoriously horrible marriage. Be- cause she is said to have made a domestic hell on earth for her husband, Xantippe is no longer merely a name but has become a generic term for a tyrannical, quar- relsome wife. But a small alteration in point of view suffices to see the relationship between Socrates and Xantippe in another light. Xantippe, the evildoer, then ap- pears rather as the victim of her apparent victim, and the latter becomes recogniz- able in a significant way as the "true" culprit. From today's perspective, every-
256 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
thing speaks for defending Xantippe against her bad reputation. One really has to ask oneself how Socrates managed to maneuver himself into such conjugal mis- ery, and this question can be posed in several variations. If Xantippe really was from the start the kind of woman the legend says she was, we would show very little understanding for our great philosopher because then it was his own care- lessness that led him to choose precisely her and no other woman. Or is he sup- posed to have thought, ironic as he was, that a surly woman is just what a thinker needs? If, from the beginning, he recognized her "true nature" and put up with it, then this indicates deplorable marital behavior on his part because he thus un- reasonably expected a women to spend her whole life with a man who obviously at best endured her but did not appreciate her. Conversely, if Xantippe had be- come as she is described only during her marriage to Socrates, then the philoso- pher would really come into a questionable light because then indisputably he himself must have caused his wife's vexation without having interested himself in it. No matter how the story is turned, Xantippe's moods fall back on Socrates. This is a genuine philosophical problem: How did the thinker and questioner manage not to solve the puzzle of Xantippe's bad temper? This great midwife of truth was obviously unable to let his wife's rage express itself or to help her find a language in which she would have been able to express the grounds and justifica- tions for her behavior. The failure of a philosopher often consists not in false an- swers but in neglecting to pose the right questions --and in denying some ex-
periences the right to become "problems. " His experiences with Xantippe must have been of this kind--a misery that is not given the dignity of obtruding into the male problem-monopoly. Philosphers fail when they endure as a naturally given evil that for which they are to blame; indeed, their capacity for "wisely" enduring it is itself an intellectual scandal, a misuse of wisdom in favor of blind- ness. With Socrates, it seems, this misuse immediately avenged itself. When a thinker cannot refrain from equating humanity with masculinity, reality will strike back in the philosopher's marital hell. The stories about this thus have, I think, also a kynical meaning. They reveal the real reason for philosophical- clerical celibacy in our civilization. A definite dominating kind of idealism, phi- losophy, and grand theory becomes possible only when a certain "other kind" of experience is systematically avoided.
Just as it is impossible to speak of European state-cynicism without dealing with Christian ethics, it is also impossible in our culture to speak of sexual cyni- cism without talking about the Christian way of treating sexuality. The really crass "cynical" gestures can arise only on a foundation of idealism and oppression--the idealism of oppression. Because Christian sexual morality is based on sublime lies, speaking out against it acquires an aggressive, partly satiri- cal, partly blasphemous character. If the Catholic church had not maintained that Mary had brought Jesus into the world while still a virgin, then countless men,
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 257
furiously satirical, would not have hit on the idea of indulging in whore baiting with this peculiar kind of virgin. Santissima puttana! To get pregnant by the Holy Spirit alone --that really is a bit much! Naturally, one would like to know how the Holy Spirit goes about doing it and how the white dove, the most remarkable of all birds, wriggles out of the affair. Is he not already too spiritualized? In the end, does he not do it with the hand of providence?
Enough of that. Jokes of this kind come from Christian mythology almost with the necessity of a natural law. As soon as idealism has gone too far, realism will strike back blasphemously. The question can even be posed, as some psy- choanalysts have done, whether in the psychostructure of the Western Christian man, particularly the Catholic man, who grows up under the halo of a mother- madonna, a sexual-cynical phase is almost unavoidable, for at some time or an- other, the thought reaches the consciousness of every boy that his mother has been his "father's whore. "
Does Christian, dualistic metaphysics offer any chance at all for the un- qualified affirmation of the sexual-animal side of human beings? Has the cor- poreal and especially the lusty aspect, from the start, fallen on the wrong side? There are two reasons why complaining about the hostility of Christian dualism toward the body does not quite exhaust this subject: First, in this religion there have been remarkable attempts to "Christianize" the body and even the sexual act and thus to draw them onto the side of the "good"; and second, there is obviously an old tradition of cynical double standards in which clerics are particularly noticeable because they, in Heinrich Heine's words, secretly drink wine and pub- licly preach water.
If, in the Christian ritual, there is something like a "weak point" predisposed to the bodily pleasure principle, it is to be found in Holy Communion and the Easter liturgy. In commemorating the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, there is a chance for the resurrection of the believing flesh to a holy shame- lessness. Scattered documents from the early Christian period seem to show that in various sects, the agape, as a matter of consistency, was celebrated bodily. A contemporary report describes practices of a Gnostic sect from the Near East in the fourth century. Although Christians, they prayed to a god who had a daughter called Barbelo who in turn gave birth to a son called Sabaoth. When Sabaoth re- belled against the authority of his divine mother and grandfather, in order to cata- pult himself to dominion over the world, Barbelo began to seduce the priests with her sensual charms and, by gathering human semen in her body, began sucking back the scattered life force of the creatures into herself. In an outraged and pre- cise letter to the bishop of Alexandria, the heretic-hunter Epiphanius, a Christian priest who had secretly slipped into a Barbelo feast, recorded what took place in such a liturgy.
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They distribute their women among themselves, and as soon as a stran- ger joins them, the men give the women, and the women give the men a special sign. By extending their hands and stroking their palms, they indicate that the stranger is a member of their religion. As soon as they have identified themselves in this way, they seat themselves at the table. They pass around select dishes, eat meat, and drink wine, even the poor. When they have satiated themselves completely and, if I may say so, have filled their arteries with additional power, they proceed to de- bauchery. The man leaves his place beside his woman and says to her, "Stand up and execute the agape (the communion of love) with your brother! " The misfortunate ones then all begin to indulge in fornication with one another and, although I redden at the mere thought of the description of their impure practices, I am not ashamed to say them out loud, since they are also not ashamed to commit them. Now then, as soon as they have joined again as a group, they elevate their own dis- grace to the heavens, as if this misdeed of prostitution were not
enough: Man and woman take the man's semen in their hands, step forth, their eyes raised to the heavens, and offer the shame on their hands to the Father with the words: "We offer up to you this gift, the body of Christ. " They then eat the sperm and partake of their own se- men, with everyone saying, "This is the body of Christ, this is the Easter feast for which our bodies suffer and for which they confess to Christ's suffering. " They do exactly the same with the women's men- strual flow. They collect the blood of her impurity and partake of it in the same way, saying, "This is the blood of Christ. " In all their numer- ous excesses, however, they teach that one is not allowed to bring any children into the world. Out of pure wantonness, they perform these disgraceful acts. They commit the act of lust to the point of satisfaction but collect their sperm in order to hinder it from penetrating further, and then consume the fruit of their shame. . . . As soon as one of them has by accident let his semen penetrate too far into the woman, and the woman becomes pregnant, then listen to what still greater abomination they then commit. They tear out the embryo as soon as they can grab it with their fingers, take the abortion, grind it in a kind of mortar, mix honey, pepper, and various spices, as well as scents, with it, in order to overcome their repugnance; then they gather--a true congregation of swine and dogs --and each takes communion with his or her finger by eating from this abortion paste. As soon as the "supper" is over, they conclude with the prayer: "We have not allowed the high master of lust to play his game with us, but have taken up the error of our brother into ourselves. " In their eyes, this signifies the consummate Easter feast. Beyond this they practice all kinds of abominations. When they fall into an ecstatic state during their union, they soil their hands with the shame of their semen, distribute it all around, and pray with these soiled hands, the body competely naked, to obtain through this act
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free access to God. (Quoted from J. Attali, L'Ordre cannibale [Paris, 1979], pp. 52-53. )
The witness himself has already provided the key phrase: "true congregation
of swine and dogs. " We are on kynical terrain. This document--even though it
can scarcely be very representative--evidences a radical, Christianized, sexual
kynicism: no longer the initial and simple kynicism of Greek philosophy with its
public onanism and nuptials but already an artificial and religiously involved
kynicism, one that, with its perverse aspects, already makes concessions to the
Christian religion. However, no matter how remarkable these practices may have
been, the main shock that its description conveys lies not in the details but in the
otherwise unthinkable fact that shines through the whole phenomenon: There is
such a thing as Christian orgy, an unrestrained, innocent, indeed, a holy and wild
release and a wallowing in male and female juices that pleases God. At least on
this one occasion, Christianity showed itself as a naked tumult of drunken Chris-
tian bodies that celebrate their lust. This is what makes Epiphanius's face turn
red--of course, it is uncertain whether it is the red of shame or the red of someone
infected by shamelessness. After all, he is infected at least to the extent that he,
as priest, hazards to write these things down, and how he himself behaved in the
middle of this holy group sex remains his secret. The bishop of Alexandria does
not have to know everything. Even more shocking perhaps is that here God's son
is replaced by a daughter who is described as the anti-type of the mother of God,
Mary. Barbelo is the sucking, gathering, and flowing cunt of God, whereas the
Virgin Mary cannot hover over Catholic altars with her belly or anything lower
26
showing.
mythology is reached. And if the blood of the woman is ritually equated with the blood of Christ, then the Gnostic liberation of the female body has ventured fur- ther than modern feminist mysticism has ever dreamed of doing.
In connection with this description of the Barbelo ritual, it is also documented that, upon Epiphanius's denunciation of this sect to the bishop of Alexandria, eighty Gnostics were excommunicated. We may take this as an indication of the historical chances and fates of Gnostic and other groups that tried to realize "psy- chosomatically" the commandment of love in the Christ religion and to overcome dualism with dualist metaphysics. Wherever such phenomena occurred they were in general violently eliminated.
At the height of the Middle Ages --insofar as one can say anything about such mutilated and cabalistic traditions-the possibilities of a Christianized sexuality seem to have been rediscovered. In the language of the mystical "love" (Minne) of God, an erotic metaphorics emerges in which the figurative meaning can be only speculatively distinguished from the literal component of meaning. If the love lyrics in places bordered on blasphemy by comparing the appearance of a
Here, an alternative extreme within the possibilities of Christian
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? Scene from Pasolini's Said, or the 120 Days of Sodom, based on the novel by the Marquis de Sade. "Late-aristocratic pornography lays bare the core of violence in sexuality. In order to develop the connection between disinhibition, terror, and dis- cretion, it banishes loose living to a closed space. De Sade puts an end to the age of aristocratic eroticism, which began with the idealism of chivalrous love, in a materialism of rape. "
lover with the dawn of Easter morning, it is still not known how direct or indirect the connections between such linguistic and possible carnal audacities may have been. We also do not know exactly what sexual consequences the mysticism of the brotherhoods of the Free Spirit had. (See Norman Cohn, Das Ringen um das Tausendjahrige Reich [Bern, 1961]. ) Only when, in the merry tales of the late Middle Ages, women come to the conclusion that the soldier is not as good a lover as the clericus can we be sure that this assertion was supported by diligent obser- vation.
In the bourgeois age, the stage was set for sexual cynicism in a new form. The bourgeoisie did not make claims on cultural hegemony without at the same time setting up its own model of ideal love: marriage for love. Countless novels do their part in stamping the templates of bourgeois erotic idealism indelibly into the minds of the reading public, especially the female public. With this, a cultural languor of unknown extent sets in. For on the one side, the "bourgeois soul" wants to partake of the joys of love and is hungry to experience the adventurous, vitaliz- ing, fantastic, and even sensual-passionate power of love. But the other side, the bourgeois soul must take care that love remains strictly confined to marriage, that the "animal side" plays no role, and that even in the most extreme case, the bodily aspect can be regarded as an "expression" of the passion of the soul. This erotic lay idealism (it is not clerics who preach it) provokes sexual-cynical antitheses
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in virtually epidemic dimensions. As in many other things, the bourgeois is, in sexual matters, an almost-realist who indeed risks taking a look at the real, with- out, however, forsaking his idealizations and value phantoms. His ideas are therefore continually undermined by realistic premonitions, and it is this tension that makes the bourgeois man particularly receptive to sexual-cynical jokes, to dirty keyhole realism and pornography. For the bourgeois, the crucial point is to "cherish his values" without forgetting how things happen "down there in real- ity. " Hence the cynical smile. One knows all about it. One knows the business. I too was in Arcadia. But this is not "our level. " We will not so easily be made to confuse above and below. Admittedly, the bourgeois does not unwillingly visit the brothel and convince himself there of the common denominator between whores and ladies, but reality remains divided, the differences are defended. It may well be the cultural strategy of bourgeois literature and art to conquer the public sphere with a depiction of private life, but simultaneously, a dividing wall is erected in the private sphere between idealized private life and animal private life. When the bourgeois knows himself to be protected by a curtain, then he is in his animality more cynical than kynical, more swine than dog. He knows how to distinguish the human from the all-too-human. He can, on the one side, cer- tainly confess "human weaknesses," but on the other, ideal side, he is resolute in preserving "composure"; to quote Bismarck; "politeness to the last rung of the gal- lows. " A definition of a lady has even been attempted according to whether she knows how to make the "right face" when a dirty joke (Herrenwitz) is told in her presence. The right face betrays that the person knows what it is about but also that she "stands above it. " To the cultivation of a lady belongs the tolerant-ironical note in dealing with inevitable male cynicism.
Through psychoanalysis, we have become used to connecting psychological enlightenment automatically with sexual enlightenment. In this there is something right and something wrong. The psychoanalytic attempt to overcome bourgeois semirealism in sexual matters and to develop it into a full realism appears to be right. However, the tendency of psychoanalysis to confuse the unconscious with the secretive is wrong. Of course, sexuality is an area in which this confusion al- most inevitably occurs. When psychoanalysis began to interpretatively explore the so-called unconscious, it entered in fact into that area that in bourgeois society was the secret topic par excellence. It took the self-experience and the self- suspicion of the bourgeois as animal seriously. It went on to neutralize the animal- sexual area and to bring it back into the sphere of nonsecret matters. For this rea- son, contemporary readers were able to sometimes ask themselves when studying psychoanalytic publications whether these should be assigned to the genus of science or to that of pornography. Two generations of analysts as well as patients have been plagued by the tendential confusion of the secretive with the uncon- scious. For the airing of sexual secrets in late-bourgeois culture as a whole has in no way led to the elimination of neurosis from society--because pathogenic
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Michael Voltz (? ), Animal Magnetism. A serious preoccupation for thinkers and believing souls. "The suspicion bourgeois individuals have of themselves being animals creates the cultural framework for modern depth psychology. "
sexual secrets constitute only a tiny fraction of the individual as well as of the so-
27
cial unconscious.
Psychoanalysis is a historical hybrid. With its sexual-pathological foundation,
it looks into the past; with its conviction that the unconscious is produced, it looks into the future. In the manner of a cultural detective, it has turned the early- bourgeois suspicion into a certainty: The human being is based on the animal- This suspicion has been, at least since the eighteenth century, with people in bour- geois society, a society that, on the one hand, began with the final taming of the inner animal by reason, enlightenment, and morality, but which saw, as a by-
? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 263
product of this taming, an ever-larger and threatening animal shadow emerge from below. Only the fully civilized, "deanimalized" bourgeois semirealist can have such a persistent and eerie self-suspicion of its interior and its lower parts. This self-suspicion of the bourgeois animal flares up in romantic literature--with all its gloomy, mysterious metaphors of the animal abyss leading inward and downward. The romantics know that two paths are open to the bourgeois, one in the bourgeois light, the other in the unbourgeois depths. The first marries, be- comes a respectable man, begets children and enjoys middle-class peace--but what does he know of life?
To the second sang and lied
The thousand voices in the ground Tempting sirens, and drew
Him into the wanton billows
Of the colorfully ringing chasm.
(Fourth verse of J. v. Eichen- dorff s poem
Die zwei Gesellen [The two bachelors, 1818])
The second is the inner other, the still unchainable animal that risks the descent into its own secrets and the crevices of its soul--in the colorful chasms of animal lust. Only those who try to completely banish the animal element in themselves sense in themselves a growing danger, which should be handled carefully. A vari- ant of such carefulness is encountered in the psychoanalytic vocabulary that designates the area of the "repressed," dangerous, animal element with a true lion tamer's expression: the "unconscious. " Psychoanalysis has a bit of the air of a pseudomedical domesticating science about it--as if it were a matter of chaining the "unconscious" with the fetters of insight.
When Freud speaks of a "sexual chemistry" and treats orgasm as a discharge of tension, it is difficult not to think of men in a brothel who, in "making love," don't even take off their trousers because it is only a "discharge. " This too is a silencing, a disenchanting, an unjustified objectification and neutering of sexual- ity. It constitutes the unarbitrary counterpart to the equally unjustified and un- avoidable demonizing of the inner secret area whose expression we find, almost at the beginnings of bourgeois culture, in the romantics. They created the stage on which the demonology of "sexual unconsciousness" begins its play. The demon is nothing other than the inner animal. What the "unconscious" is in its essence was expressed more clearly by the romantic Eichendorff than by the neoromantic scientist Sigmund Freud: "But take care not to awake the wild animal in your breast, so that it (Es, id) does not suddenly break out and tear your Self apart" (Das Schloss Durande).
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The late-bourgeois cultural situation is markedly different from the nineteenth century, which found its expression in the psychologies of the unconscious. No contemporary still believes in or practices the separation of ideal and animal love. Thus a basic precondition for sexual-kynical attacks has been voided. A "wo/man" does not laugh at "dirty jokes" any more, nor does pornography have an aggressive bite. Today, both are completely backward. However, it would be naive to think that this means the game is over. Whenever kynicism has asserted itself, new cynics can be found who can, as usual, make a dirty business out of the no longer "dirty" truth. Pornographic shock is admittedly over once and for all, but the business of pornography is still flourishing. For a long time now there has not been in late-bourgeois pornography any spark of a personal reckoning with inhibitions, erotic idealisms, and sexual taboos. Rather, it consciously
? ? ? ? "Bourgeois pornography exposes the commodity aspect of sexuality. Out of principled indiscretion, it bursts the closed rooms, makes nakedness and venality into synonyms, and brings visual drugs onto the 'free market.
