phlogma

Notes on Steven Burns, “Sex and Solipsism: Weininger’s On Last Things” in Wittgenstein Reads Weininger
90
Burns cites an intriguing reference to a religious interpretation of Weininger by Waltraud Hirsch, (1997), Eine unbescheidene Charakterologie: Geistige Differenz von Judentum und Christentum; Otto Weininger Lehre vom bestimmten Charakter.
92-3
He attempts to tease out what Wittgenstein found so engaging about Weininger’s […]

Notes on Joachim Schulte, “Wittgenstein and Weininger: Time, Life and World” in Wittgenstein Reads Weininger
112-115
Schulte begins his piece by warning us against attributing current understandings of anti-Semitism or anti-feminism to an earlier though recent period. It was a time which we are inclined to see as formative of our current state of “relative enlightenment” on […]

Notes on Daniel Steuer, “Uncanny Differences: Wittgenstein and Weininger as Doppelgänger” in Wittgenstein Reads Weininger
139-40
Steuer (who wrote the introduction to the Löb English translation of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character) sets out to explain the famous negation Wittgenstein wanted to place in front of Weininger’s book in his letter to Moore. Wittgenstein at the same […]

Notes on David G. Stern, “Weininger and Wittgenstein on ‘Animal Psychology,’” in Wittgenstein Reads Weininger
169-70
Stern quotes Weininger’s On Last Things:
The vegetarians are just as wrong as their opponents. Anyone who does not wish to contribute to the killing of living things may only drink milk, for anyone who eats fruits or eggs still kills embryos. […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
According Otto Weininger’s biographer, David Abrahamsen, Freud read an early draft of what later became Sex and Character. The encounter is also dramatized in Joshua Sobol’s play, Weininger’s Night.
—Editor’s note
 
xiii (Foreword by Nancy Chodorow)
Chodorow writes,
As someone who has written both appreciatively and critically about […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“The Sexual Aberrations”
7
In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. These either persist without function as rudimentary organs or become modified and take on other functions.
These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“Infantile Sexuality”
42
Of the third or fourth year of life:
It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“The Transformations of Puberty”
73
A normal sexual life is only assured by an exact convergence of the two currents directed towards the sexual object and the sexual aim, the affectionate current and the sensual one.
82
Freud’s anticipation of the discovery of sex hormones and how little adjustment […]

Notes on Virginia Woolf and Otto Weininger
In the October 2, 1920 issue of The New Statesman (p.704), Desmond MacCarthy, writing as “Affable Hawk”, reviewed Arnold Bennett’s just published Our Women. MacCarthy mentioned in passing, and somewhat in support of Bennett’s views, Otto Weininger’s Sex & Character, which first appeared in English in 1906. (A book […]

This is Desmond MacCarthy’s first reply to Virginia Woolf’s letter in The New Statesman. It appeared on October 9, pp.15-6, Woolf’s letter having appeared in the October 2, 1920 issue. See “Weininger’s wake and Woolf’s ire” for context.
[“Affable Hawk” writes: “Sappho was at the height of her fame about 610 B.C. She was a contemporary […]