skvortsova & nahkshunov, paradoxes of homosexual desire in the third reich — review
as both are fairly new in english spheres i havent had the chance to read as much as id like by them, however i did find a "gasp" article by nakhshunov titled "is this hate" where you can see the outlines of their stance here as well, where nakshunov writes that about the way in which soviet emancipation during the time of stalin was a total or even totalitarian failure when it came to its treatment of homosexuals, where stalin argues that gay people arent sick or to be treated but rather enemies of the state meant to be eliminated, and the ways in which today russias sentiment simply hasnt changed on this topic rather than taking some negative trajectory backwards from the original soviet standpoint. that being said, this paper is extremely good at isolating all the key points of contestion when it comes to this topic, beginning exactly at that inference point between the rise of bolshevism and its response to fascist rhetoric.
the publication begins with a junger epigraph about militarized youth and its idealization as a military force. this can be seen as a little striking, because its almost like a triple parable, it begins with his consideration of troops which sounds jurisdicationary next to his sudden mention of young boys, which he then kind of grips sexually by mentioning experienced leadership, and then re-enhances them as most formidable, almost situating them inside of a wall in the very sentence.
the second line continues into a staggering portrayal of queer persecution, but whats interesting is that it presents simultaneously that a large number of queer people were intentionally genocided by the machine, but then retrospectively pins that number as only a tenth of the already relatively small number, but then almost vindictively reinstates those who werent deported or killed as somehow requiring further address and analysis. this is obviously not the case neither intentionally nor morally by the authors, but stylistically it makes me feel as if it marks every queer person as not queer enough if they still havent been adressed in a certain sense either institutionally or, now, discoursively.
in the third paragraph it continues this line, mentioning the slogan "we are everywhere" as a decisive moral turning point in their critique, arguing that queer people, as all other social roles also take up hypocritical institutional positions, which is already a step in the right direction away from the usual articulations of conflict in cultural anthropology, and in this sense, the text is unique because it does successively stress this point all the way to its end, over and against a geneological or materialist analysis of ideology and its impositions on top of culture which is already discoursively beaten to death. however, up until the eight paragraph they both state their main point and reinstate it as an aim, which is a little bit odd, the main point being that the homosexual nazi citizen has to decide where in the horizontal but fluid line they have to sit in, between helping institutionally exterminate gay people and glorifying a fully eroticized but de-sexualized body, which is according to them something the nazis were uniquely good at or even originally constructive in.
in paragraph seven they argue against the repressive hypothesis and into the production of sexuality against some type of asexual vision of fascist sexuality, which already doesnt exist in most contemporary discourse, and if anything, they understate the way in which the nazis were far more socially sexually experimental and only economically sexually repressive, whereas the soviets were the opposite, as seen in harry oosterhuis's analysis of the mannerbund which they rely on to understand the origins of homosocialism as opposed to homosexualism in pre-himmler nazi germany.
paragraphs nine through nineteen stage the history of this struggle as ending in the destruction of the hirschfield institute by the nazis, including the earlier mentioned mannerbund which they stage in the fifteenth pargraph as the production of male homosexuality and its perceived superiority by the german youth in the wake of the post-war rupture that concentrated modernity and the lack of domestic and oedipal identity that was seen by some theorists like reich to indicate an economic prerogative towards homosexuality.
essentially the only polemicists remaining that arent ideologically converted by natural succession into whatever the political order manages to narratively regurgiate into formal existence are political missionaries which can be framed as either preservators of alternative logics or just blatant masochists, traumatologues whose identities are already hyperinvested precisely in the unfortunate target of the ever-narrowing fascist obsessive mania, or whoever is incidentally caught into the crossfire before they can convert. later homosexuals who fell victim in various ways to the nazis like gad beck, rudolf brazda, josef kohout and pierre seel explicitly rejected homosexuality as deviant, reframed homosexual prisoners as victims of state terror, refused to pathologize gay men and even issued testimonies challenging the silence around homosexual victims by both civilians and leftists. oosterhuis also early mentions klaus mann as one of these cases which is why i mentioned his paranoia as a pathologization that is able to actually produce sexual imagination that isnt tied to the populist recombination machine.
this reframing becomes more obvious by the time we reach paragraph thirty-nine, because from twenty to thirty-eight the text follows the story of how hitlers early homosexual right-hand man and leader of the sa at the time was politically excused precisely until hitler needed him to be, then at the moment where the political enviornemnt changed, he was in a sense used as a proxy shield where the narrative of his death quite literally served as a martyr for a shifting of ideological stakes corresponding to a historical reterritorialization by hitlers apparatus, where he needed to appeal to beaurocracies, industries and most importantly social narratives that required homosexuality to be denaturalized, abortion clinics be created, and even narratives about racial degradation to be put in place in order to justify rulership in various ways. it shows how rohm was initially not secretive about his standpoint precisely because ideological machinery wasnt exactly ticking in the way that he would be able to anticipate these shifts enough to respond to them by changing his own rhetoric, due to the fact he himself relied on homosocialism to even build his own men up.
cruically, the authors by choice didnt include the most important part of robert biedron's research, where it states that rohm was initially asked by the ss to take his own life, where he denied his own humiliation and requested that hitler supposedly finish the job for him. the authors are seemingly in favor of sticking to analyzing the history as an attempt to figure out exactly where the moralization occurs (where the reasons for killing him are narratively reconstructed pathologically rather than politically), however, his defiance actually shows that he has nonetheless a stable identity at the time even after the purge. the text does imbed its own criticism when it tries to continously re-consider or even struggle around the question of the way in which the german youth is both technically socialist in its mutual comradery and rhetoric but also genocidal in its treatment of minorities, but if anything this shows that we cant exactly understand the way in which intricate erotic standpoints during the time emerged without reconfirming existing lenses that make subtle political shifts during that time less obvious. the text kind of reveals its weaksides when it goes over the rohm narrative because it isnt exactly sure which parts of that narrative correspond to power vs. intimacy, and which parts of this story are internally constructed vs. externally constructed narratives.
paragraphs fourty to fifty draw on theweleit and hocquenghem as the primary references that reintegrate twentieth century conceptions of homosexuality into the discoursive field which so far relied on nineteenth century ones. they correctly note that theweleit and hocquenghem view homophobia as at the same time inherently alien in that defensive psychology overrides any possible interpretation into the pure concept itself, as locking the keys to an unexplored affective terrain through the gatekeeping of the anus in the image of the phallus as a zone of unreachable de-eroticized totality, as inherently misogynistic and seperative of the ethical and affective other, as well as in the fact that it views transgression as something both repressive and recognizing of the significance and liberative tendency of queerdom.
their analysis however ends right here, glorifying theweleit for unlocking new paradoxes in theories of desire, but entirely failing to develop new aesthetic categories that display our newly updated view on the matter. more specifically, transgression itself may not necessarily be fatalistic for the fascists, and their failure to desire transgression actually can be seen as a deeper more intrinsic or metaphorical form of desire, a layer underneath desire that transgresses it through a drive to seperate its neurotic principles from its affective bounds. unfortunately, they simply dont ever treat theweleit as a counterpoint to their theory, but simply reintroduce him as if he's appearing to the text in the form of a protagonist ready to simply solve the issue from above.
the text finally moves into briefly examining sontag in quite a poetic manner, it immediately and in a productive way raises the question of fascist rituals, which exemplify both servitude and egocentricity, which shows the way in which sexlessness blends in with accelerated motion, control over the body contrasts against drives towards annihilation, obedience with self-exultation, and a weird transmutating flow that shifts enviornments and landscapes in a way that transmogulates their essence. it does implicitly remind the reader that fascist surrender doesnt contrast well at all with their stoneheartedness nor with their tendency to eroticize as a form of meaning-making, it shows that their philosophy is transgressive when it comes to existential norms but passive when it comes to actually acquiring a cosmologically rigid core, their mechanisms falter when compared to asceticism, their ability to withstand weakness collapses the moment they encounter the mystical, they regress and are dominated by circulation, their cults are weak and pervasive.
it further shows the contradiction between requiring a pure body and having to exterminate parts of it to mould it into an idea of one that nonetheless requires a constant battle with hygiene, where appearance becomes emptied out of all its significance precisely due to its pretention, the strictness doesnt enable a metaphor to sit behind it.
now, the text does correctly associate the way in which this originally purified body is then re-imagined by the fascist collective mind, turned into a symbol of de-ideologization, the removal of signs from the body equates directly to the violence required from the fascist to expel the other and the ideology it inherently contains in its non-emptied state, to rid it of significance so that fascists may rid themselves of significance.
unfortunately, the first instinct by queer interpretors is to argue that affective emptying is symbolic of a type of lobotomized pandemic, a deep insecurity within non-affective agents chasing nirvana as a compromise between the unattainable experience of the other and the self-satisfaction of crushing difference. this viewpoint is the furthest from the conceptual truth, even though empirically it is more than likely correct, as insecurity is a type of paranoia that concentrates and defines social networks through their vaccuums and limits, imposing violence as a sorting mechanism through genocide when the normal limits of stratification cant contain sociality
however, the reality is that fascists embody much more than corporeality as deaffective conformity and security, it is quite possible they embody corporeality as the form of agentialism itself. the fascist corporeality doesnt depend at all on a fascist reimagination of the will or desire, but rather something far more alien and extrinsic. it is quite possible that fascism itself has a much more physicalist conception than understood in this text, which purely frames it through nirvana as a compromise against insecurity, deaffectivity and the way it emerges, and the exemption of the other, which is politically unimaginative given it exists on top of the theories of the texts primary references.
the paper ends in its argument following preciado that dysphoria is the requirement for imagining new forms of life during the planetary transition that allows fluidity to escape the repressive categories of fascist homosocial rigidity. overall, this paper is a fantastic synthesis of fascist literature on homosexuality, but entirely absent in its own voice.
commentary:
lets deal with the assumptions and thoughts the paper actually is able to produce. if anything, the nazis and the closeted leftist homosexuals both experimented and pushed the boundary of sexual hedonism in different ways, the so-called dirty purges of sexuality are historically largely seen by most figures to have not necessarily produced but quite literally advanced sexual ideals in the minds of the collective regardless of if motivated by social repression or by fantastical ideals
as an example, oosterhuis shows how bartz read bluher as creating a pathological ideal and even dictatorship of homosexuality precisely by advocating for its purification as seen through himmlers targetted cleansing. even in its example of contemporary lgb alliances, it fails to note how its quite likely that this obsessive tendency to steryotype the abilities and desires of various abstracted identities is precisely what produces distinctions rather than the method of staging violence against them. it could simultaneously be and likely is weaponized by beurocrats who later subsume critique into practical action, however this foucaultian production isnt just institutionally formative but precisely in fact, its almost as if the libidinal economy doesnt exist outside of its ability to point itself out and remove from itself the moment that enemies cultivate eachothers ordered distinctions.
oosterhuis's account is once again interesting here as he sees klaus mann and his own closeted but explicit tendencies reflecting on pederastry through images of mass killings and concentrated repressive imaginations as being intertwined with the beastiality behind the lustful drive, and the way in which precisely these narratives as mass-hallucinations and not as actual influences (as klaus writing on this was supposedly ignored until the seventies) shape the genealogy of sexuality more than its foucaultian or institutional production or social ordering or normativization, which is what paragraphs ten to thirteen tend to explicitly endorse. this brings us back to the jurgen quote, where in the nineteenth paragraph they tie beobachter's claim that recruiting young boys into combat units is the only way to produce more german men.
there is something to be said here about how in most cases, at the same time ideology in its essential form takes the head of an institution as its populist rhetorical device and exercises a type of ferocity of the unknowing, essentially, that popular movements are subsumed by rhetoric that is entirely indespensible to most of the actual cognitive spheres or deeply ruminated-upon arguments by the practictioners of a certain ideological movement. narratives are captured, formulated and expressed at will by any number of operatives at one or the other moment, and if it reflects any form of ideological, deleuzian paranoia, in the sense that it manages to capture or attach to both affect and bland and false empricial analysis as an actual sociological categorization, then the political-beurocratic machine allows the ferocity of unknowing or the naive brutality - perhaps framed as "brutivety" to establish and take root in the world regardless of actually held elite belief systems.
if the populist machine can turn against homosexuals, if it can frame homosociality as dignified, and if it can center itself entirely around homonarcassistic conquest the way this paper defines it, all whilst simultaneously positioning itself politically as finding homosexuality simply politically harmful in its formality as a mystified contagiousness as was argued by himmler then, then in a sense, populism is carried blindly by narratives that succeed, which blindly trace the populace's own unconscious and brutal imagination, then attach to naivety as the construct undermining identities themselves, meaning institutions themselves behave as capital in its abstract form does when it reterritorializes, by way of accelerating politically-insipient dogmas, non-dialectical non-technomneumonic territory itself actually belongs to the state as almost a form of latent "social entertainment".
we need to imbed our understanding of the way in which fascist normativization itself is less about explicit production of sexuality and more about the ways in which genocidal machines navigate through social fields and use politics as a proxy not in order to reconsider how to operate most precisely on a field in order to accelerate its reterritorialization most succinctly, but rather, how to operate in a way that singles out political adversaries and accomplices to key ideals, whilst remaining normativizing at its core when it comes to stabilizing the narrative consistency under which the populace can reorient towards wherever the state apparatus actually meets the demands of the global order at whichever period of time it requires something more of it.
this is why its less obvious why certain identities enter beurocracy from an intimate standpoint, practically betrayal makes sense, but even hitler himself understood himmlers betrayal of him at a cosmic scale, in a sense that political fate entirely depends on trajectories always interspersed between personal accounts and actual developments. and if anything, the homoerotic theatre was allowed due to the way in which the social order self-organized to create the means necessary for these almost self-conscious historical developments to actually occur in real time, where the intentional object is always self-referentially postponed into a future that justifies its own latent trajectory. so to say, it is unsure whether political deviancy was constructed, produced or posteriori justified, but it is sure that whichever of these it is if not all, the series of events themselves are always both more unconscious yet somehow more intentional than the categories stuck inbetween them
the problem that this paper makes visible is that desire itself is infertile at explaining political succession and trajectories, which depend far more on the creation of orientations that then embed desire. desire and repression as in klaus mann's case arent libidinal flows on their own, but projections of even higher social memetics that consistently randomize the next operational sequence so that the social field consistently creates its inner dynamic of social roles within a broader interchangable economy where prerogatives themselves are exchanged in the form of circulation.
political power follows the narratives that allow desire to latch onto programs rather than following desires own imperatives. this social movement is exactly opposed to everything arcane and stable, to all ideas of naturalization themselves, which is precisely why naturalization is the implicit metaphor for almost all politicized collective virtue. it isnt that jews, homosexuals or women are targetted because of purity, rightousness or eugenical pouissance, but that the erotic men of that day couldve been a gang of women in the form of amazonian serial killers waging war against an imported assortment exclusively made up of mexican cleaningmen and bartenders, if somehow mass hallucination permitted this narrative to occur through wider circulations of role-swapping and exchange.
political power, seemingly in its refusal to connect cleanly to desire, instead re-routes through narratives that reframe desire, whereas the production of desire happens on lower levels, where instead of desire it actually depends on an unconscious social apparatus that itself, through populist heuristics cultivates and eventually intensifies into a system that can easily pick up a narrative connection required of it to produce the very desire in quantities large enough for it then to successfully replicate, first through paranoia, then through institutions and then finally through justification once it already is a political reality.
a constructed abstract narrative could pin the point here for us that circulations create abstractions capable of fostering these roles, for example we could say that somehow a certain mexican import was causing homosexual contagion, and the presence of mexicans themselves could somehow unlock the natural heterogeneity of this commodity, freeing the germans from their cultural and foreign enslavement. in a sense, something similar may unconsciously be reproducing in todays america, but maybe together with the way it conceives of chinese imports in relation to its revenge of americans through tiktok the way they did through opioids, but translated through the image of the immigrant, which may be why i can so easily dream up such an example. it is only that the fascist system itself permits these exchanges to occur to begin with, that they are able to sneakily promulgate in a latent manner totally divorced from their original conception and from some supposed rational will by the people. as the text itself notes, the machinic desire component is obvious in the way in which the german soldiers treat their enviornemnt as de-fantasizing.
speaking of unconscious reproduction and its latent drive, it may be that the nazis, unable to expediate their reichian armoring, but requiring the defensive libidinal charge of transgression that can allow them to occupy hypermascuine and hypermilitant roles, required a more renounced and fetishistic but equally powerful form of what they call egocentric or totalitarian transgression, or it may be that their fantasies are far more intricate than we can comprehend, that in their metaphorical disavowal rises a type of latent recognition that isnt actually sadistic but even masochistic, that it glorifies what it cannot reach but still latently accepts affective charges as something deserving of being seperated from fascist life, due to the way modernity split the oedipal structure of the family and was unable to tie the loose knots that the fascists had to run away from. some of these ideas you may also notice in theweleit's fantasies which do reimagine the stakes on this issue. this is what allows the pornographic interpretation to work, the sterility doesnt welccome responsibility, it just kind of collapses the ambiguity behind its presentation and drives it into an interpretative nihilism that hinges on visibility as a latent form of control, and the ways in which the will to become and the penetrative gaze to order this will arent able to hold the structure together under the weight of the ideal of order imagined through glorified hygiene, as glorified hygiene simply removes the body from its ability to express itself.
a much more physical theory of fascism is that the fascist carries with him the cleansing of attachment signals in general as a totality, not just affective ones. the fascist machine isnt an assembladge, its the machine as its own steryotype, it is essentially the way in which we already and historically interpreted and sinned against inorganic nature, the way we constitute the hidden imaginative corporeality of a rock or block of ground. the fascist body isnt about the passivity of non-corporeality, but about the will of the agent when its seperated from its own imposition or condition. this is why eugenicism has no actual theoretical limit even politically, the fascist extradies and slowly banishes everything, not seeking nirvana nor annihilation but ever higher states of excstatic thingness - the modde of being of an object, or more specifically the heightened sense of the inertia of the thing - the bodily existence that is somatic in its mode of being as agential - but not willing - yet materialistic in its corporeality - where inertia impedes sensation as affect but enables sensation as motion.