Male Fantasies: Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror Volume 2

Klaus Theweleit's two-volume study, Male Fantasies (Meinnerphantasien), might be described as a psycho-sexual history of fascist male desire in Germany from its inception in the aftermath of World War 1. Theweleit seems especially informed by the psychoanalytic paradigms of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, insofar as their work, like Theweleit's, consistently emphasises the productive force of fantasy or the unconscious in relation to the material world and its sociopolitical formations. Stylistically, Male Fantasies is made up of textual fragments -- diaries, memoirs, letters, works of fiction, visual art -- which, although historically and culturally specific, are not presented in a stable or overarching historical, narrative or theoretical framework. Instead, Theweleit's text suggests affinities or connotations between symbolic and bodily practices, material production and fantasy, which are not limited to a given historical moment, but which, arguably, maintain both resonance and relevance today. According to Theweleit it is through the body, and the discourses of the body, that fascist desires (and anxieties) take their sociopolitical formations and effects. The threat to the soldier male of bodily dissolution and collapse is played out, or in psychoanalytic terms, projected onto the bodies of its others -- notably those of women, Jews, communists, the proletariat, homosexuals, and other marginalised groups, who can thus be subjected and annihilated in fantasy -- if not in reality. The extracts reprinted here illustrate the brutalising symbolic practices and fantasies by which the soldier male's 'armoured' body is structured and impelled to action.

Where "eros" was covered in the first volume, the second deals with the thanatos, or death urge. Particularly interesting is Thewelveit's treatment of the "soldier's blackout," a synapse frying climax of inner psychological tension resulting from extended periods of drilled formation. An invaluable companion to Volume One, though less interesting in that Vol. I was (IMHO) a revolutionary reformulation and synthesis of many of the insights of Reich, wheras this volume merely elaborates on the (not so obvious) conclusions.

This second volume of Theleweit's ground-breaking examination of proto-fascist 'Freikorps' novels spans disciplinary lines by examining historical documents from a unique combination of feminist and psychological perspectives. While the text is intellectually weighty, Theleweit manages to avoid the verbal dryness inherent in the subject. His thesis is outrageous, illuminating and largely coherent. A must read for aspiring academics and cultural historian