Criticism of Patriarchy: Gendered Reason | nd-aktuell.de

The study “Critique of De-sensual Reason” by the sociologist Mario Wolf is based on a contradictory simultaneity. On the one hand, feminist and queer movements have shaken the rigid heterosexual morality associated with male control of female desire. As a result, the conservative gender arrangement of the post-war period was fundamentally questioned. On the other hand, the basic structures of patriarchal rule and the associated violence against women and queers persist. The ideologues of heterosexuality, which is focused on the complementary-bipolar gender relationship, are currently experiencing a political boom. Against this background, Wolf poses the social theoretical question of why systemic progress within the relationship between the sexes goes hand in hand with the survival of archaic moments in a new guise and a multiple burden for women of having to be wage and reproductive workers at the same time.

Defense of dialectics

By promising to “re-examine the intersection of critical theory and feminist criticism on the basis of the dialectical concept of nature of critical theory,” Wolf moves his work into a materialist-feminist research field. In doing so, he claims to clear up misunderstandings in the reception of critical theory as well as in the more general discussion about sexuality, femininity and nature. He includes the accusation that Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer identified women with nature in the dialectic of the Enlightenment and thereby mystified them. In addition, Wolf criticizes post-structuralist approaches such as the queer theory of the philosopher Judith Butler: With the distinction between sex and gender, she contributed to exposing the category of nature as socially preformed. But it obscures their relationship again by unilaterally dissolving the dialectic of culture and nature in favor of culture.

Wolf, on the other hand, argues for a negative, dialectical concept of nature. Accordingly, nature is not a purely discursive construction like Butler’s, but rather refers to something, albeit indeterminate, pre-social. Indeterminate because there can be no positive determination of what nature “actually” is. Physical, i.e. “more or less natural, factors” have an influence on our becoming subjects and the associated gender relations. Wolf cites as examples the monthly cycle of many women and the voice breakage of most men, but also the “feeling of having the wrong body” of many trans people. But our view of this pre-social world is fundamentally obscured by sensory experiences as well as by socially transmitted concepts and prevailing moral concepts.

What appears as nature is preformed by the domination of nature specific to capitalism and the associated form of instrumental and – as Wolf introduces into the debate – desensualized reason. What confronts people as nature is, as Wolf emphasizes, based on Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism and its reception in critical theory, a reflection of social and historical conditions – and therefore always only “second nature”. In this sense, the history of gender relations includes “the persistence of a socially formed relationship of power that appears to be natural.” That is why one should speak of a natural history of sexuality instead of nature.

This shows how his study is anchored in current psychoanalytic research such as that of Christine Kirchhoff. Wolf shares the contemporary psychoanalytic reception of critical theory with the aim of formulating a criticism of conditions “in which reason and sensuality diverge and lead to contradictions that can hardly be reconciled.” Wolf explains that civil society has produced a specific form of reason that is not only aimed at mastering internal and external nature in a technical-rational sense. Rather, it is a form of de-sensual reason that represses its decay to nature, splits it off and projects it onto “femininity”. This reason is therefore inherently gendered and structurally inscribes the ideological identification of femininity with nature – and its defense – into bourgeois rule. According to Wolf’s thesis, there lies “the possibility for the return of barbarism in the midst of this culture.” As patriarchal violence, this particularly affects women and queers.

The “men’s racket”

In order to develop his thesis with a view to the persistence of patriarchal relationships and the current trend of authoritarian dynamics in the present, Wolf draws on the racket concept of critical theory. Following Horkheimer, but especially the legal theorist and political scientist Franz L. Neumann, he conceptualizes the racket, a term that originally goes back to the patriarchal gang structures of organized crime in the 1920s and 1930s, as essentially a male alliance. Wolf defines the “men’s racket” as the form of rule constitutive for civil society. To this end, he also draws on Freud’s cultural theory, in which the fraternal horde and parricide serve as an image of the prehistory of humanity.

The objection here is that although Wolf identifies Freud’s prehistory as a hypothetical consideration, he does not consistently interpret it as a constellation in the sense of dialectical images. As a result, it often remains unclear how the “materialist view of history” represented by Wolf relates to Freud’s hypothetical considerations: Can the speculative moments in Freud’s cultural theory claim to represent historical realities, or must they be interpreted primarily as literary figures? that help to decipher civil society? The fact that Wolf alternates stylistically between grand historical narrative and philosophical speculation creates the impression that a bird’s flight over human history is being carried out here, which avoids the contradictions of the concrete subject matter.

The unclear relationship between historical and speculative considerations is also evident with regard to the theorem of the “decline of the individual,” which Wolf adopts. After that, the bourgeois subject, once damaged but still existing, shrank to the male self in late capitalism. The ego is forced to psychologically regress to the “bundle of narcissism” “while politically it consolidates male dominance in the male racket and culturally it is condemned to the boring boredom of the schematism of the culture industry.”

Psychoanalytic problems

This is a stimulating thesis that can claim plausibility. But it is highly doubtful that the bourgeois subject would ever have grown up under such conditions that he could have been called an individual. In any case, the basic assumption of critical theory, based on Freud’s psychoanalysis, according to which paternal authority brought about individuality in civil society, can hardly be seriously examined scientifically. Neither the material in the history of psychoanalysis nor of empirical social research goes back sufficiently far.

Furthermore, Wolf’s psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex also seems to be inherently theoretically overly static. Following feminist criticisms, it could be assumed that the Oedipus complex, as a dynamic and fragile process of individuation, is closely interwoven with successful or unsuccessful attachment experiences and thus with specific family and gender constellations that need to be specifically examined.

Of course, these objections do not change the analytically demanding level at which Wolf conceptualizes the change in patriarchy from a primarily personal rule to an abstract form in social theory. He is able to reconstruct instrumental reason as inherently gendered and de-sensualized, and thus makes the survival of patriarchy and the current trend of male-dominated rule understandable – a genuine task of critical theory, to which Wolf’s study makes a stimulating contribution.

Mario Wolf: Criticism of de-sensual reason. On the natural history of culture, subject and gender. Campus 2024, 439 pages, €45.