Eros and Inwardness in Vienna. Weininger, Musil, Doderer by David S. Luft

Abstract

286 Reviews The final stage of this is seen in the 1930s in Moses and Monotheism', how far Freud's position had moved in a quarter of a century ismeasured against the essay 'The Moses ofMichelangelo' (1914). In using historical ormythological material, the Moderns assimilated it imagina tively to theirown concerns. The Renaissance served as a symbol of artistic creativ ity; in the 1916 version ofHofmannsthal's Ariadne auf JVaxosthemyth provided the springboard for an exploration of the aesthetics of tragedy and comedy dramatized in the contrast between serious theatre and popular comedy. Le Rider does not treatAriadne auf JVaxos, but he does quote the familiar aphorism inHofmannsthal's Buch derFreunde to the effect thatGerman-speaking culture characteristically treated the ancient (classical) world as a 'magic mirror'. The whole phenomenon of the Moderns' creative use ofmaterial drawn from the past as a 'magic mirror' might make a rewarding further study. University of Exeter W. E. Yates Eros and Inwardness inVienna.Weininger, Musil, Doderer. By David S. Luft. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press. 2003. xiv + 257 pp. $35.00. isbn 0?226-49647-3. David S. Luft's Eros and Inwardness inVienna takesOtto Weininger, Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer as representatives of the generation that reached creative maturity in the firstdecade of the twentieth century. According toLuft, their lives and writings 'constitute a posdiberal critique of liberalism fromwithin the liberal tradition' (p. 4), a formulation which conveys the sense of urgency, and at the same time the impasse, typical of them. Luft's studyfirstpresents a sketch ofAustrian and Viennese intellectual life,as leading to a specific combination of scientificmaterial ism, German humanism and philosophical irrationalism (i.e. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) in the second half of the nineteenth century,while theKantian tradition of idealism remained relatively absent. He then discusses in detail the role of sexu ality and gender in the thought of the threewriters as 'metaphors for thinking about inwardness in the context ofmodern science and the crisis ofWestern traditions of spirituality afterNietzsche' (p. 2). In the chapter on Weininger, Luft attempts to show thatWeininger 'was not a conventional misogynist', and thatGeschkchtundCharakter was 'a critique of conven tional male attitudes towards sexuality and women' (p. 64). He succeeds on both counts, demonstrating how Weininger's (in)famous distinction between M and W (a summary of'the received dualities of Western experience', p. 66), fundamentally, exposes the cultural dynamic of sexual polarity, and the sexual and reproductive practices ofWeininger's place and time. 'ForWeininger', he argues, 'the central moral failure of his society appeared in the realm of sexuality and in the division of labour between men and women, their sexual as well as their social and spiritual relations' (pp. 67-68). Weininger's distinction between individuals and ideal types is seen as an oblique attempt at differentiating between gender and sex, and the book's aim as an ultimately emancipatory one: 'Weininger's intent was not to impose conventional understandings of gender but to challenge empiricism, posi tivism, materialism from the perspective of Kant's transcendental ego' (p. 80). Luft thus offers a positive reading ofWeininger without losing sight of his obvious shortcomings. AUSTRIAN STUDIES, 12, 2OO4 287 The role of sexuality and gender inMusil is clearly more complex. After an impressive portrayal ofMusil's thought as straddling the divide between the ratioid and the nonratioid, Luft discusses how the importance of gender relations and sexu alitywithin his work changed, and, ifanything, decreased after 1914-18. Still, the utopia of the second part ofDer Mann ohneEigenschaften,the spiritual experiment between Ulrich and Agathe, may be seen as the vision of a space where gendered entities can circulate freely: 'itwas a considerable departure from the norm in Musil's generation', writes Luft, 'fora man not only to embrace feminine values as positive but to take them as values formen' (p. 132). While Musil's ironic essayism could not fail to undermine conventional depictions of gender and of sexual iden tity, a slight feeling remains that in this chapter the gender tailwags the positivist dog. The limits ofMusil's scientifically based questioning of social constructions show in a short remark Luft quotes as evidence ofMusil's ironizing of 'the culture's conception...