Klaus Theweleit > Quotes

“We need to understand and combat fascism not because so many fell victim to it, not because it stands in the way of the triumph of socialism, not even because it might "return again," but primarily because, as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production. The crudest examples of this are to be seen in the male-female relations, which are also relations of production.”
― Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History

“His only means of discovering how his body functions is to take bodies apart, as a child might dismantle a mechanical toy. The child's aim is not to fathom the functions of mechanics itself, but to find answers to the riddle of its own existence.

Analogously, the unresolved question that underlies the soldier male's impotent attempts to gain mastery over objects by tearing them apart, and thus rendering them knowable, seems to be that of the construction of his own self— a question which acquires tremendous explosive force in a body never rendered capable of experiencing itself in relation to other bodies. The soldier male cannot know what impels him to tear out his own entrails, what moves him to spill his own contents in an effort to discover what species of being he may be.”
― Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2: Male Bodies - Psychoanalyzing the White Terror

“Freud viewed "female" and "male" sexuality as two separate phenomena. As if the nature of "male" or "female" sexuality had any real significance, as opposed to the relationship existing between them. Relations between the sexes are socially organized and controlled, the object of laws. They are not simply "sexual." A man doesn't have "this" sexuality and a woman "that" one. But if male-female relations of production under patriar- chy are relations of oppression, it is appropriate to understand the sexuality created by, and active within, those relations as a sexuality of the oppressor and the oppressed. If the social nature of such "gender-distinctions" isn't expressly emphasized, it seems grievously wrong to distinguish these sex- ualities according to the categories "male" and "female." The sexuality of the patriarch is less "male" than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected women is not so much "female" as suppressed, revivified. In perceiving sexuality more as an attribute of sex than as a relationship between the sexes, Freud once again substituted an expressive force for a productive one.”
― Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History

“It looks very much, as if these men are likely to assign a penis to a certain type of woman (the "proletarian whore") whose penis they fear as an instrument of castration. The men experience "Communism" as a direct assault on their genitals!”
― Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History

“Freud viewed "female" and "male" sexuality as two separate phenomena. As if the nature of "male" or "female" sexuality had any real significance, as opposed to the relationship existing between them. Relations between the sexes are socially organized and controlled, the object of laws. They are not simply "sexual." A man doesn't have "this" sexuality and a woman "that" one. But if male-female relations of production under patriarchy are relations of oppression, it is appropriate to understand the sexuality created by, and active within, those relations as a sexuality of the oppressor and the oppressed. If the social nature of such "gender-distinctions" isn't expressly emphasized, it seems grievously wrong to distinguish these sexualities according to the categories "male" and "female." The sexuality of the patriarch is less "male" than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected women is not so much "female" as suppressed, revivified. In perceiving sexuality more as an attribute of sex than as a relationship between the sexes, Freud once again substituted an expressive force for a productive one.”
― Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History