Abstract
Building on my analysis of the rhetoric of masochism in the previous chapter, I now turn to a case study whose formal composition offers a different way of getting a purchase on the violence of masochism. Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless), first published in 1906, can be read as a narrative of the modern pedagogical institution in which diverse forms of violence become intertwined. Contrary to the assumption that Musil’s novel intends the depiction of sado-masochistic excesses, my argument focuses on a reading scene that mediates the various potentials of violence the novel harbors: only when Törleß reads Kant does it become clear which violence and which pain are meant by Musil’s text. This allegory of reading furthermore discloses the manner in which the novel’s formal principles of composition bear on the violent acts it represents. Whatever violent event finds itself depicted within the novel discovers its condition of possibility in the abstract violence that primordially institutes its form. In Kant, the object of Törleß’s readerly desires, this abstract principle takes the shape of the law of practical reason. The Zögling’s story becomes readable not simply as an exhibition of schoolboys in disgrace, but as an insight into the violent structure of practical reason itself.
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Notes
- 1.
See The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as Literary Genre, ed. Barbara Johnson, Yale French Studies 63 (1982).
- 2.
All mentioned titles except Goldschmidt’s have official translations into English; for the sake of completion, I supplied “Seclusion.”
- 3.
The inclusion of Joyce, concretely his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in this list indicates that the sudden prominence of pedagogical-institutional narratives is not reducible to the German tradition. However, German literature does warrant special attention in this respect, because the novels in question can be seen as a transformation, perhaps even the endpoint, of the German bildungsroman tradition that places the onus of education on the free individual rather than the institutional apparatus. For an elucidation of the bildungsroman, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 1987). That this problem is not limited to prose genres is skillfully demonstrated by Brian McGrath who discusses the interrelation between poetry, reading, and pedagogy in The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Poetry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013).
- 4.
Rüdiger Campe, “Kafkas Institutionenroman: Der Proceß, Das Schloß,” Gesetz. Ironie: Festschrift für Manfred Schneider, eds. Rüdiger Campe and Michael Niehaus (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2004), 197–208, 198. See also Rüdiger Campe, “James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man und die zwei Seiten des Romans: Bildung und Institution,” IASL 41.2 (2016): 356–375. Elsewhere, Campe speaks of “fictions of stories that owe their formal consistency not to the life of their protagonists but to the perseverance and decay, the existence of sub- and pre-governmental institutions.” Rüdiger Campe, “Robert Walsers Institutionenroman Jakob von Gunten,” Die Macht und das Imaginäre, eds. Rudolf Behrens and Jörn Steigerwald (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005), 235–250, 239; my translation.
- 5.
With regard to the works of Kafka, it’s important to emphasize that the novel of the institution is not limited to negotiations of the pedagogical. Its interest is dedicated to any modern institution and practice that serves to produce and regulate human forms of life. In more recent writings, Campe even considers Musil’s monumental Man Without Qualities as an exemplary novel of the institution because it reflects the institutionality of modern prose such that it not only inquires about the ways in which institutions shape lives but asks how social institutions themselves achieve their form. See Rüdiger Campe, Die Institution im Roman: Robert Musil (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020).
- 6.
The motif of the student suicide is a central topos explored in many of the texts in question, most prominently in the above-mentioned Young Gerber.
- 7.
The shapeshifting of the allegory of reading first into an allegory of bleeding and here into an allegory of breeding does not owe itself to the accidental convenience of the pun but means to demonstrate that the allegory of reading, by definition, cannot contain itself; it bleeds out and breeds forth. It is only by virtue of this radical unboundedness that it occupies the structurally essential (as opposed to accidental) place within my analysis—a place whose conceptual register keeps overflowing. In this sense, “allegory of reading” is another name for its own permanent self-othering and other-naming.
- 8.
“[…] kehrt die Gewalt des Grundes wieder, der im rechtstheoretischen wie im Musilschen Sinne der mystische Grund der Institution ist.” Rüdiger Campe, “Das Bild und die Folter: Robert Musil’s Törleß und die Form des Romans,” Weiterlesen: Literatur und Wissen, eds. Ulrike Bergermann and Elisabeth Strowick (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), 121–147, 33; my translation.
- 9.
Jacques Derrida, “Force de loi: Le ‘fondement mystique de l’autorité’”/“Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11.5–6 (1990): 920–1045, 941f.
- 10.
Walter Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, eds. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 49; my emphasis. In his essay, Benjamin makes an enigmatic reference to what he calls “erzieherische Gewalt” (“educative violence”) which, he suggests, eludes both law-positing and law-preserving violence. I explore this concept in greater detail in the volume Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy, eds. Dennis Johannßen and Dominik Zechner (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 5–8.
- 11.
Campe goes in a similar direction when, with an eye to The Man Without Qualities, he writes: “I would like to show […] that institutions […] don’t just appear in specific moments [i.e., on the level of representation, D.Z.], but that institutionality becomes the general program of the novel’s coherence.” Campe, Die Institution im Roman, 36f. my translation (“Ich möchte […] zeigen, dass Institutionen […] nicht nur in bestimmten Momenten hervortreten, sondern Institutionalität darüber hinaus zu einem allgemeinen Programm der Kohärenz des Romantexts verallgemeinert ist”). This, in turn, echoes a claim Joseph Vogl made already in 1987 when arguing that, in Musil, “the processual form of experience is the actual object of narration.” Joseph Vogl, “Grenze und Übertretung: Der anthropologische Faktor in Robert Musils ‘Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß,’” Robert Musils “Kakanien”: Subjekt und Geschichte, ed. Josef Strutz (Munich: Fink, 1987), 60–76, 62; my translation (“[…] und damit die prozessuale Form dieser Erfahrungen als eigentlichen Gegenstand des Erzählens ausweist”). Both takes show that formation is not only depicted on the level of representation, but that this representational content is only an effect of a more profound process of formation that affects the forging of the novel’s text itself. What my chapter adds to this line of reasoning is a focus on the violence necessary for any kind of process of formation, instituting, and rearing.
- 12.
“The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations.” Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty: Presentation of Sacher-Masoch,” Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1991), 7–138, 20. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer pursue a similar line of reasoning when they divulge the sadist as a proponent of modern science and civilization: “Juliette’s credo is science. She abominates any veneration which cannot be shown to be rational […]. She is attracted by those reactions which have been proscribed by the legends of civilization.” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 76. This link between violence, institutionality, and the order of reason proves critical for Musil as well.
- 13.
Carl Niekerk, “Foucault, Freud, Musil: Macht und Masochismus in den ‘Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß,’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 116.4 (1997): 545–566, 552; my translation (“einen grundlegenden Masochismus im Verhalten von Törleß”).
- 14.
Freud often interprets a passive comportment within one’s sexual life as a masochistic trait.
- 15.
See Niekerk, “Foucault, Freud, Musil,” 556–558.
- 16.
The fact that the institution’s direct representatives appear only at the narrative’s closure to assert their authority and to reestablish some form of order is consistent with the above claim that the conspicuous absence of the figure of the schoolmaster makes space for the horizontal occurrences of violence that structure Musil’s novel.
- 17.
Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 2001), 155. See Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. II: Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik (Rowohlt: Hamburg, 2000), 135f.
- 18.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 155. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 136.
- 19.
Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 159–170, 164. See Sigmund Freud, “Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus,” Studienausgabe, vol. III: Psychologie des Unbewußten, eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1975), 339–354, 348.
- 20.
This ontological unification of two perversions would subsequently undergo severe critique, especially from Deleuze in his aforementioned study on Masoch.
- 21.
See Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 161.
- 22.
Ibid., 167.
- 23.
Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 167f. See “Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus,” 351.
- 24.
Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 167.
- 25.
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xxxi.
- 26.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 86. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 77.
- 27.
Thomas Söder concurs with this assessment; he even apodictically decides: “The book to which the math teacher refers is the Critique of Practical Reason.” Thomas Söder, “Robert Musil und die Begegnung mit dem Denken Kants in ‘Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless,’” Musil-Forum 19/20: 31–46, 32; my translation.
- 28.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 89.
- 29.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 89. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 80.
- 30.
Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, xxxi.
- 31.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 89.
- 32.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 65.
- 33.
See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 63–93; and Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” trans. James B. Swenson, Jr., October 51 (1989): 55–75.
- 34.
Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 22.
- 35.
This means that masochism can offer a model not only for education but also for an anti-authoritarian politics, whereas sadism cannot: its logic is the logic of the dialectic of enlightenment which, at its most extreme, always entails fascism.
- 36.
Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 20.
- 37.
Ibid., 22.
- 38.
Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: New York Review Books, 1999), 5.
- 39.
Campe, “Robert Walsers Institutionenroman Jakob von Gunten,” 243; my translation.
- 40.
Walser, Jakob von Gunten, 5.
- 41.
Heinrich Mann, Small Town Tyrant, trans. Ernest Boyd (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), 3. See Heinrich Mann, Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2014), 7.
- 42.
Mann, Small Town Tyrant, 8. See Professor Unrat, 11.
- 43.
Mann, Small Town Tyrant, 10.
- 44.
Act I, Scene 10; my translation (“Genug! Ich glaube dir! Soviel vermag / Kein Mensch! Dich hat der höchste Gott gesendet”). Unrat turns Johanna’s unbearable excess of speech into a searing lack.
- 45.
Mann, Small Town Tyrant, 9. See Professor Unrat, 12.
- 46.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 158.
- 47.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 57. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 52f.
- 48.
Musil uses the singular pronoun “ihn” for the letter instead of “sie” (“them”) for the plurality of little pieces.
- 49.
The reason Basini maneuvers himself into a position of radical subjection is that he owes money. Nietzsche discusses the repercussions of the linked etymologies of debt and guilt in the second essay of his Genealogy of Morals, 57–96 [esp. II: §§4, 6, 19, 20].
- 50.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 98f. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 88.
- 51.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 100f. translation modified. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 89f.
- 52.
The value of this observation is not isolated but holds true also for the explicit scenes of Basini’s sexual abuse, which regularly commence by coercing the naked victim to read: “Usually I have to get undressed,” he tells Törleß of his intemperance with tormentor Reiting, “and read him something from history books; about Rome and its emperors, about Borgias, about Tamburlaine.” Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 114.
- 53.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 107.
- 54.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 107. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 95.
- 55.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 107. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 95.
- 56.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 107. See Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, 95.
- 57.
Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, 107.
- 58.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar, vol. XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (London and New York: Norton, 1999), 71.
- 59.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar, vol. VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: Norton, 1997), 161. Alenka Zupančič corroborates this point when she states that the “non-relation is not simply an absence of relation, but is itself a real, even the Real.” What is Sex? (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2017), 18.
- 60.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 53. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 180.
- 61.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 53. See Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 180.
- 62.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 60.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 61. See Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 192.
- 65.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 61. See Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 192f.
- 66.
In his unfinished treatise “Other Pains,” Werner Hamacher discusses a similar moment in Kant’s Anthropology wherein pain “precede[s] all objective experience.” This is to say that pain is a feeling that antecedes the experience of all feeling—hence a feeling that heralds our very ability to feel. There is no pain without pain. Wherever there is a feeling, that is, wherever something is felt, pain has already occurred, for “pain is the ground plan of life.” Werner Hamacher, “Other Pains,” trans. Ian Alexander Moore, Philosophy Today 61.4 (Fall 2017): 963–989, 976. See also the reference to Kant’s doctrine of virtue in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 74f.
- 67.
In a different context, Hamacher uses this very term to describe a dynamic within the analytic of the sublime as it is developed in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. In pursuit of the question as to what exactly we find pleasurable in the experience of the sublime, he comments: “The pain of being unable to achieve an adequate sensible presentation of the Idea—in an act of transcendental masochism—provokes a pleasure in the adequacy of precisely this inadequacy of sensibility with respect to the idea of reason.” Werner Hamacher, “The Quaking of Presentation: Kleist’s ‘Earthquake in Chile,’” Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 261–293, 277. I discuss the structure of the sublime and its relation to the representability of pain in greater detail in Chap. 5.
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Zechner, D. (2024). Transcendental Masochism. In: The Violence of Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53192-7_4
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