Noel’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update

limitation implacably the master. The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad. Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psycho-analytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband. The lie consists not only in the claim that nature exists where it has been tolerated and adapted, but what passes for nature in civilization is by its very substance furthest from all nature, its own self-chosen object. The femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence – masculine violence – to be: a she-man. One need only have perceived, as a jealous male, how such feminine women have their femininity at their fingertips – deploying it just where needed, flashing their eyes, using their impulsiveness – to know how things stand with the sheltered unconscious, unmarred by intellect. Just this unscathed purity is the product of the ego, of censorship, of intellect, which is why it submits so unresistingly to the reality principle of the rational order. Without a single exception feminine natures are conformist. The fact that Nietzsche’s scrutiny stopped short of them, that he took over a second-hand and unverified image of feminine nature from the Christian civilization that he otherwise so thoroughly mistrusted, finally brought his thought under the sway, after all, of bourgeois society. He fell for the fraud of saying ‘the feminine’ when talking of women. Hence the perfidious advice not to forget the whip: femininity itself is already the effect of the whip. The liberation of nature would be to abolish its self-fabrication. Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it.

* Allusion to the lines Seit ich ihn gesehen / glaub ich blind zu sein (Since I set eyes on him / I seem to have gone blind), from a poem by Adelbert von Chamisso, in his cycle Frauen-Liebe und-Leben, later set to music by Schumann. Von Chamisso (1781-1838) was an émigré French noble who became one of the first German romantic poets.

This is strikingly reminiscent of what Beauvoir says in The Second Sex. But, y’know, I can’t help feeling that Adorno’s tone of reasoning is horribly dismissive of femininity’s subversive potential. A woman who seeks to “deploy” her femininity is always still trapped in a patriarchal configuration. Maybe I should just read some later feminist texts haha.