SEXUAL CAUSALITY

Abstract

Close on the thematic heels of her groundbreakingSex after Fascism, Dagmar Herzog offers us in her new bookCold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophesa further elaboration on her earlier thesis about the complex relationship between sex and politics.Sex after Fascismmade an immensely productive but counterintuitive argument, one that crucially relied on the proposition of three historical periods, each defined by its particular relationship with sex(uality). Herzog claimed, first, that German fascism was not sexually repressive; second, that the immediate postwar environment was, on the contrary, sexually repressive; and third, that the “sexual revolution” beginning in the late 1960s and expanding into the 1970s was consciously contesting fascist repression, while in fact it was actually and unconsciously in dialogue with the more immediate past of the postwar era. Her tour de force argument here was that this historical sequencing had the overall effect of obscuring, indeed repressing, the sex-positive policies of the Nazis and therefore “misunderstanding” not only fascism itself but also—and especially—fascism's (sexual) appeal. Herzog suggested that not only did the generation of the 1968-ers espouse a politics of the missed object; more nefariously, the repression of fascism's sexual appeal also opened the road to all sorts of varieties of historical revisionism.