Geschlecht: Sex and Species, Being and Difference Public
Therezo, Rodrigo (Fall 2017)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to think through an extremely rich and polysemic word, “Geschlecht,” particularly as it plays a central role in Freud’s writings on the intellectual development of children and in Derrida’s four-part series on Heidegger and Geschlecht, paying special attention to the newly discovered (and forthcoming) “Geschlecht III.” Meaning sex, species, genus, stock, house, family, lineage, clan, tribe, race, people, generation, this word provides a favorable point of entry for relating seemingly independent issues philosophy and psychoanalysis tend to treat as mutually exclusive. I argue that “Geschlecht” invites us to think these politico-sexual problems together without for all that erasing an irreducible polysemy – as Heidegger does – at the heart of “Geschlecht” that we might more rigorously, following Derrida, call dissemination.
In chapter 1, I examine the aforementioned manifold meaning of “Geschlecht” by means of a detailed analysis of the principal areas of meaning of this word as listed in the Brother’s Grimm dictionary. I then turn to Aristotle’s intricate theory of homonymy as a way to introduce an Aristotelianism at the center of Heidegger’s interpretation of this word. The second half of the chapter follows Freud’s oscillation between the two main meanings of “Geschlecht” – sex and species which, as I show, can be translated into two kinds of difference, sexual and ontological – in relation to the question that inaugurates intellectual life in children, an indecision that Freud wil embrace by affirming an element of chance endemic to Geschlecht that complicates Heidegger’s Aristotelianism. In chapter 2, I broach Derrida’s treatment of this politico-sexual Geschlecht problematic by means of a reading of “Geschlecht I.” I retrace the complicated steps Derrida takes in order to see an opening – despite what is thereby potentially closed off – of Heideggerian thought unto a “pre-dual sexual difference” which Derrida is trying to think and affirm, too, his reservations with Heidegger’s maneuver notwithstanding. In chapter 3, I turn to the second of Derrida’s Geschlechter – and to the 1984-85 seminar from which it was “transcribed” – in order to pursue the more political vein of Geschlecht vis-à-vis a counterband national-humanism Heidegger’s purportedly anti-humanist and anti-nationalist thought nevertheless surreptitiously affirms. The final chapter of the dissertation further explores Derrida’s denunciation of Heidegger’s national-humanism in the newly discovered “Geschlecht III.” I demonstrate how an uncanny doubling of narratological structures in Heidegger’s essay on Trakl which Derrida reads in “Geschlecht III” – according to which Heidegger speaks of himself when speaking of Trakl – is symptomatic of a subtle and yet deeply problematic nationalistic undercurrent in Heidegger’s thought of “Ein (one) Geschlecht,” which incidentally brings the dissertation back to the supposed Aristotelian unity that Heidegger wants to retrieve, and Derrida, to deconstruct.
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………..1
The Forthcoming Geschlecht
Chapter One………………………………………………………………..40
The Manifold Meaning of Geschlecht
Chapter Two………………………………………………………………..83
“Geschlecht I”
Chapter Three……………………………………………………………..117
“Geschlecht II”
Chapter Four……………………………………………………………….155
“Geschlecht III”
Bibliography……………………..…………………………………………200
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