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J. Edgar Bauer
DECONSTRUCTION AND LIBERATION
"Queer
politics, if it is to remain queer, needs to be able to perform the
function of emptying queerness of its referentiality or positivity,
guarding against its tendency to concrete embodiment, and thereby
preserving queerness as a resistant relation rather than as an
oppositional substance." 1. The German-Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was the most visible and articulate advocate of sexual minority rights of his time, and is arguably one of the eminent theorists in the history of sexology. Soon after the publication of his monumental Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet,2 the five-volume compendium of his life work, Hirschfeld was apostrophized in America as "Dr. Einstein of Sex,”3 and in India as "the modern Vatsayana of the West,"4 in reference to the author of the classical Kamasutra.5 A well-traveled scholar interested in first-hand experience of sexual, racial and culture diversity, he visited North Africa in 1893 on his way back from a trip to America, and Egypt during the last phase of the around-the-world voyage he had begun in 1931. Back in Europe in April 1932, Hirschfeld became increasingly aware of the Nazi menace and decided not to return to Germany. Considering that Hirschfeld had been since 1920 a target of defamation and physical aggression orchestrated by the German fascists, it is not surprising that soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Institute for Sexual Science Hirschfeld had founded in 1919 was closed, and its extensive library as well as its sexual-ethnological collections were destroyed. A year later, in 1934, the Nazi regime deprived the Jewish sexologist of his German citizenship. After moving to Ascona in Switzerland and then briefly to Paris, Hirschfeld finally settled in the city of Nice, in the south of France. There he died on his 67th birthday, May 14, 1935.6 2. In correspondence with his life motto per scientiam ad justitiam - i.e., "through science to justice" - Hirschfeld posited that only the scientific grasp of man's sexual complexities could allow to create cultural and social conditions capable of coping with the inexhaustible diversity of sexual constitutions. Key to the understanding of Hirschfeld's scientific and emancipatory endeavors is the "sexuelle Zwischenstufenlehre,"7 a set of premises aiming at the dissolution of the traditional binary divide between man and woman, and postulating, instead, that "all human beings are inter-sexual variants […]."8 As Hirschfeld suggests in the first volume of Geschlechtskunde, the principles of his doctrine were sketched out in 1896,9 the year in which Sappho und Sokrates, his first sexological treatise, was published.10 Although he did not utilize the term "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" at that early stage explicitly, the treatise contains in nuce the essential elements of Hirschfeld's new scheme of sexual distribution. Groundbreaking as they were, Hirschfeld's sexological endeavors constitute just one aspect of his encompassing critique of the pseudo-scientific premises of Western culture. Toward the end of his life and prompted by the dismaying political dimensions German racism was beginning to acquire, Hirschfeld outlined a conceptualization of race based on biological assumptions comparable to those of the Zwischenstufenlehre and leading to similar deconstructive results. His most comprehensive elaborations on the race issue are included in Phantom Rasse,11 a series of articles he began to write in 1934, a year after the publication of Weltreise eines Sexualforschers,12 the account of his around-the-world trip generally considered to be one of the grounding texts of sexual ethnology. Given the ideological and political turmoil of the time, the articles could not be issued in Germany. The German-language newspaper in Prague that began to publish them discontinued the series upon Hirschfeld's unexpected death in exile. 3. Continuing the resentment at Hirschfeld's work prevalent in pre-World War II Germany, German scholarship in the second half of the 20th century hardly had any interest in assessing the scope and relevance of his doctrine, and thereby contributed to the on-going misrepresentation and underrating of his work as a whole.13 Thus, although Hirschfeld offered a much-needed paradigm for conceptualizing sexual difference beyond the arbitrariness of the binary constructions, he is almost totally absent from all substantial debates in GLBTQ studies. By contending that a human being is neither man nor woman, but at the same time man and woman in unique and therefore non-repeatable proportions, Hirschfeld's doctrine opposes first and foremost the Western ideology of dimorphic sexuality, whose kernel was first articulated in the creation narratives of Abrahamic religion, and purported that the exemplary Adam is to be considered a man because he does not possess the sexual attributes of his human Other: Adam is not Eve, a man is not a woman. Hirschfeld's dissolution of the sexual binary does not presuppose the hypostatization of a "third sex" intermediate between putative men and women, although such a strategy has been repeatedly assigned to Hirschfeld ever since Sigmund Freud's misrepresentation of the sexologist's critical stance.14 Although Hirschfeld contributed to the relative popularity of the term "third sex" in the 20th century, he was keen on stressing that he never used the concept in his scientific publications,15 but only in the context of his political activism.16 Since the strict postulation of a third sexual alternative would have implied, according to Hirschfeld, the addition of a further "fiction" to the already fictitious categories of male and female,17 its merely rhetorical utilization never led Hirschfeld to revoke his fundamental insight concerning the universal scope of sexual intermediariness. Never regarding the "third sex" category as "something complete or even almost closed in itself,"18 Hirschfeld considered it just an indispensable "makeshift"19 designed to overcome the "extremely superficial scheme of classification into man or woman."20 On these assumptions, the supposed members of the so-called third sex, as well as those who deem themselves in conformity with a pretended sexual majority evince themselves as being only individual instantiations of sexual intermediariness brought about by ever-varying Nature. 4. As a paradigm shift concerning the very foundations of sexuality, Hirschfeld's doctrine of sexual intermediaries entails a meta-theoretical re-inscription of sexual difference in a framework of natural continuity that adumbrates the post-modern contestation of closed schemes of sexual subsumption.21 The scope of this shift can be elicited from the motto Hirschfeld chose to open the crucial treatise he published in 1905 under the title Geschlechts-Übergänge.22 The quote in question is a brief sentence by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that runs: "Tout va par degrées dans la nature et rien par sauts."23 Applying this general principle to sexuality, Hirschfeld concluded that all artificially separated groups of sexual variation are actually transitions within the pervasive continuity of nature. Contrary to the either/or scheme of traditional assignation to one of two sexes, the idea of sexual gradation allows in principle for infinite variations of sexual constitutions depending on the way the poles of the masculine and the feminine combine at each of the different layers of sexual description. In Hirschfeld's time, such layers were assumed to range from the sexual organs and the secondary sexual characteristics, to the sexual drive and the way psychological traits are articulated in the societal context.24 Since within Hirschfeld's scheme sexual difference is not determined in relation to one single excluded alternative (male or female), but in relation to an open ended system of as yet only partially realized combinations of the masculine and the feminine at the different descriptive layers, the sexuality of each and every individual is characterized by a unique complexity. 5. Even though Hirschfeld was careful not to offend the sensibilities of the alleged sexual majority and preferred to downplay the import of his deconstructive approach, he did contend in unambiguous terms that sexual difference is not determined once and for all within a binary pattern, but is defined within the framework of potentially infinite sexual constitutions, all differing from one another and undergoing change throughout the life of the individual. Since Hirschfeld's doctrine of sexual intermediary stages posits that the number of sexualities is co-extensive with the number of sexed individuals,25 it not only cancels the subsumptions of individuals under categories within a closed set of sexualities, but also dispenses with the issue of fixed sexual identities. Thereby, the traditional procedure of sexual determination becomes a continuous task that precludes final closure and in which categorizations are, at most, provisional approximations in need of constant adjustment. Notwithstanding Hirschfeld's avoidance of detailed explanations concerning his doctrine, his interest in the sexological aspect of biographies as well as his tireless efforts to refine his taxonomic terminology suggest that, from early on, he was guided by the idea of the irreducible complexity and constant transformation of the individual's sexuality. From this perspective, the fact that Hirschfeld contributed in no small degree to the proliferation of sexual categories, does not contradict his contention that they could only be adequately applied within asymptotic processes of sexual determination. Acknowledging the provisoriness of any subsumption of individuals under sexual categories, Hirschfeld's meta-theory of sexual difference rejoins, in the last resort, the old philosophical contention concerning the limits of the utterable: individuum est ineffabile. 6. In analogy to his sexological ground premise that there is no dichotomous divide between men and women, but only gradual differentiations of sexual intermediariness, Hirschfeld postulated that there are no essentially distinct, clear-cut races of the human species, but only diversifications of nuances within the continuity of the racial spectrum. Thus, the sexological proposition that "all human beings are sexual intermediaries" corresponds to the assertion that, "strictly speaking, from the point of view of biology, all human beings are hybrids."26 In his deconstructive critique of the way natural continuities are arbitrarily parceled and the resulting excisions elevated to the rank of natural factualities, Hirschfeld recurs to Jean- Baptiste Lamarck's philosophical thesis that, "with regard to the infinite fullness of inherited characteristics and forms, […] all classifications of living beings are ultimately only 'artificial instrumentalities': […] Nature herself knows neither classes nor species."27 The precise observation and study of Nature's "infinite fullness" necessitates, in Hirschfeld's view, the dissolution of the categorial closures superimposed on her by man, and fosters a sense of humanness irreconcilable with the sexual and racial classificatory schemes utilized throughout history in the (self-)identification processes of individuals. Prolonging this line of argument, Hirschfeld objects against the fascist and fascistoid self-misapprehension of culture as a product of racial "purity," and underscores: "culture is the result of racial mixings, and only this mixing saves from barbarism."28 In this assessment, Hirschfeld was certainly not only drawing on his experience as a Jewish non-Arian confronting German racism, but also relying on his first-hand knowledge as a traveler, who had faced in Asia and Africa the greatest cultural diversity ever brought about by the racial spectrum of mankind. 7. Hirschfeld's principled disruption of the ideological fixations concerning sex and race resonates with his efforts to de-hierarchize cultural differences by regarding them as historical variations of patterns shared by humanity as a whole. Thus, even when he conveys his utter revulsion regarding the oppression of women in non-European cultures, and condemns the pre-arrangement of children marriages,29 the circumcision of girls,30 or the enslavement of women in harems and brothels,31 Hirschfeld does not assume that the sexual mores of the West could offer adequate parameters for critiquing the insufficiencies evinced by the colonized nations in this regard. Rather, Hirschfeld considered all known historical mores and the morality codes they purport to be intimately related configurations within the spectrum of human cultures and, without exception, in need of critical analysis. Hirschfeld illustrates this relatedness when he remarks, for instance, that the difference between the belly slapping of Ceylonese forest people and the buttocks slapping of Bavarian dancers is hardly greater than that between the nose rings of Indian women and the earrings of their European counterparts.32 Viewing these phenomena as being "basically the same,"33 Hirschfeld asserted that, in the last resort, there "is no essential difference between 'primitive' and 'civilized' people."34 Like in the case of sexual or racial individuation, the specificity of cultural articulations is not, according to Hirschfeld, the result of unique qualities, but of gradual transitions in constant transformation within an open totality. Ever mindful of the "the mighty greatness of Nature," Hirschfeld was intent on grasping the relatedness and thus "relativity" of the individual phenomena he examined, while castigating "the human pettiness and narrow-mindedness,"35 which sanction arbitrarily existing configurations of nature or culture as if they were "absolute" paradigms that could be detached from the continuities in which they originate. Having dismantled the fictive isolation of individuals in the constructed purity of a sexuality, race, or culture, Hirschfeld pleads for their re-insertion in a serial pattern of intelligibility that dispenses with the categorial closures, on which the multi-secular strategies of oppression have grounded their pervasiveness. 8. The countries he visited in 1931/32 offered Hirschfeld such an appalling view of the quandaries of colonialism that he considered a world conflict to be almost an inevitable consequence. While in China, he referred to "shining lightnings of a perhaps not too remote world thunderstorm,"36 and in Egypt he sensed that "under the smoothed-out surface boils a mighty explosive matter, whose elemental outbreak will hardly be prevented in the long run, and will take a high toll of human lives, if 'the seething popular soul' is not liberated from the burden oppressing it."37 The effects European colonialism had produced in Asia led Hirschfeld to regard pacifist appeals as mere "wishful thinking with neither a basis in the past or a well-grounded prospect for realization."38 Conceding that "[t]he idea of 'war never again' looses much of its weight during a world trip,"39 Hirschfeld became a supporter of the quest for political liberation as represented by so diverse figures as Sun Yat Sen in China,40 Mahatma Gandhi in India,41 and Zaghul Pascha and Nahas Pascha in Egypt.42 Well aware that his Nazi enemies and conservative critics would readily object to his excursions into world politics, Hirschfeld was keen on underscoring that politics and the love life of nations are intimately connected, for both are rooted in the sentiment of freedom.43 As a monist in the philosophical tradition of Baruch de Spinoza, Hirschfeld asserted that only a libertarian culture could provide the adequate framework for realizing the natural capacities of individuals inherent in their sexual and racial uniqueness. On this assumptions, it is not surprising that Hirschfeld became the first scholar to publicize the idea of "sexual human rights" as proposed by his friend Rudolf Goldscheid in 1930,44 and that he courageously castigated in the last publication to appear in his lifetime - Phantom Rasse - the official racial politics of Nazi Germany. 9. A close reading of Weltreise makes it apparent that Hirschfeld's parameters for examining the deployment of world-historical forces were at odds with those of Europe's colonial politics and its attendant Christian ideology. Despite his personal identification with the ideals of German classical culture, Hirschfeld was deeply marked by the awareness of belonging to an exiled and homeless people whose historical and geographic traces he constantly looked after during his journey. Thus, he refers for instance to his meeting in Shanghai with Arthur Sopher, the author of a monograph on Chinese Jews dealing not with the descendants of the Jewish emigrants from Baghdad, but with a group of Jews that presumably immigrated to China "after the destruction of the first temple by Nebukadnezar."45 He further mentions his conversations with Baghdad-Jews in Calcutta, and with a colored Jewess in Bombay, who came originally from South India.46 Elaborating on the concrete exilic existence of Jews, Hirschfeld foregrounds their specific mission of building a "bridge" that "overcomes the existing oppositions from man to man, from nation to nation, from country to country."47 Revealing much of his own self-understanding, Hirschfeld suggests that such a mission differs on principle from good-will ideologies of universal harmonization, for it operates on the basis of critiquing the assumptions that underlie the dissensions and enmities it intends to mend. From this perspective, the reconciliation of sexes and races can only be envisaged once the artificial patterns that structure their domains are dissolved in light of Nature's continuous deployment. Thus, when Hirschfeld postulated the sexual intermediariness and racial hybridity of all human beings, he was not just hoping for a more tolerant or compassionate treatment of the underprivileged, but re-structuring the most fundamental assumptions of those co-implied in the so-called dialectic of masters and slaves. 10. Based on his grasp of life's deployments, Hirschfeld envisaged a libertarian conception of ethics that leads ultimately to "the ideal republic of humanity, which so many—from Plato to Kant and [Auguste] Forel—dreamt of."48 As Hirschfeld maintains toward the end of his travel report, the ethics needed for attaining the future "United States of Earth"49 is essentially a "panhumanism and cosmopolitanism"50 centered on the idea that the commonality of humanness, existing only in the fractionation of individuals, refutes and supersedes the putative privileges of appertaining to a specific natural or cultural formation. Focusing on human diversity as revealed by his "biologico-psychological outlook,"51 Hirschfeld contended that, in a world-wide scale, the most visible witnesses to this diversity are, on the one hand, the sexually oppressed resisting the hierarchical binarism of the societies they live in, and, on the other, the Jews assuming their role as outsiders among the gentile nations. By affirming their otherness in face of the secular attempts to appropriate and negate their difference, both minorities hint at the universal challenge that humanity's sexual and racial diversity poses to all classificatory systems operating with closed sets of categorial alternatives. In his attempt to cope with this challenge, Hirschfeld envisions an ambit of the human beyond categorial reductions and in accordance with the ascertainable continuities of Nature. His critical disruption of primitive prerogatives based on sex, race, or national identity allows to conjecture that the sexologist might have agreed with the aesthete Derek Jarman who, giving a provocative twist to the incarnational scheme of Christianity, proclaimed: "God is a Black Jewish Lesbian." 52 ENDNOTES
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