phlogma

Bianco Luno often refers to Otto Weininger in the notes of this period. The reader may perhaps be less familiar with Weininger than with the other names Luno cites. Briefly, Weininger published a book entitled Sex and Character in May of 1903 in Vienna. On October 4th of that year he shot himself in the chest in the apartment where Beethoven had died. Weininger was 23 at the time.

The world wide impact of the book, following his death, was phenomenal. It was translated into a half dozen languages and went through more than 40 editions over the first decades of the twentieth century. No book of “philosophy” has ever matched that level and speed of notoriety. It has recently been translated for the second time into English. From Russia to Mexico to Japan to Hollywood, in the first third of the 20th century nearly every intellectual worth his salt (and more than a few not) was familiar with it. A short selection, confined to writers, from the much larger list of cultural figures influenced by or reacting to Weininger would include Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nishida Kitaro, Nikolai Berdyaev, Carl Jung, Karl Kraus, William Carlos Williams, August Strindberg, D. H. Lawrence, Elias Canetti, E. M. Cioran, Jack London, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Germaine Greer.

But the impression that survives today in those who still recognize his name is fixed on Weininger’s perceived misogyny and self-hating anti-Semitism (he was Jewish). His legacy has had a hard time living down the fact that among his readers were also Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Luno has devoted much effort on this blog toward rehabilitating Weininger’s reputation. Luno claims Weininger was neither “misogynist” nor “anti-Semite” in any sense in which those terms are used today. Quite the opposite, Weininger, Luno insists, laid the groundwork for a form of cultural criticism that will forever remain progressive—and, perhaps for that very reason, difficult to grasp by political forces perennially locked in a struggle for more local ascendancy. He sees in Weininger a clue to understanding the structure of human consciousness and its development. A clear understanding of what bounds and compartmentalizes consciousness, he seems to think, has practical implications for very concrete and seemingly diverse problems in moral and political theory such as the nature of criminality, war, abortion, capital punishment, the distribution of power, the sexual experience of the world, etc… in short, nothing less than the moral infrastructure of all attempts to impose value in human societies.

Even when Luno is not explicitly discussing Weininger, he haunts these notes.