After the Lovedeath

[Dave Monroe]

>From Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual
Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1997) ...

"In relation to Beethoven, Schumann wrote, Schubert
was indeed a feminine composer, but in relation to all
other composers he was masculine enough.  Beethoven,
in this reading, is a violent figure--a
personification--of violence: one who feminizes but
can never himself be feminized....  Before this
Beethoven, Schubert is yielding, dependent, permeable.
 Yet this same Schubert can himself lay claim to the
name of the father if only one can forget (but one can
never forget) the figure of Beethoven behind him." (p.
5)

"Bluntly stated, my argument is that in our gender
identities, all of us--men and women alike--are
Schuberts, none of us a Beethoven.  Between the
sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the position
in which Schumann recognized Schubert became the
normative position of the subject in Western culture,
and so it remains today.  For both men and women, to
become a subject, to acquire an identity, is to assume
a position of feminity in relation to a masculinity
that always belongs to someone else.  The other is the
wielder and bearer of authority in all its forms,
social, moral and cultural; both pleasure and truth
are in his charge; yet no man, and certainly no woman,
can securely identify with this masculine
subject-position.  Instead, biological men are
directed to occupy a position that is simultaneously
masculine in relation to a visible, public, feminine
position, and feminine in relation to an unstated,
often unconscious position held by the figure (trope,
image, or person) of another man.  The same men are
directed to repress their knowledge that this doubling
of polarity by the dim, ever-looming figure of the
other man renders their own position masculine in
content but feminine in structure.  Every man who
commands is secretly a woman who pleads--and
blissfully obeys--but struggles not to know it." (pp.
5-6)

"The reward for maintaining this repression is the
fiction of unambivalent self-possession ....   In the
language of Jacques Lacan, it is the fiction of having
the phallus (note that there is only one).  To be
sure, this fiction is unstable, sometimes even
ridiculous.  But in social terms it translates--for
some men--into the privileges of a practical,
manifest, functional masculinity." (p. 6)

"For some men.  Not everyone with a penis is entitled
to even a fictitiously absolute masculinity; the
masculinity of some must wear its contingency visibly.
Racial, sexual and social polarities cut across
gender polarities in complex ways and further deplete
the position of entitlement." (p. 6)

Cf. ...

McClary, Susan.  Feminine Endings:  Music, Gender
   and Sexuality.  Mpls: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

http://www.linguafranca.com/9407/ross.html

http://www.geocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/mcclary.html

http://home1.gte.net/esayrs68/McClaryFramesText.html

"The point of recapitulation in the first movement of
the Ninth is one of the most horrifying in music, as
the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, drumming
up energy which finally explodes in the throttling
murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining
release."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_McClary#The_Beethoven_and_rape_controversy

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0107&msg=57197



 
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