#title The Fragmented Body (Seminar)
#subtitle Feeling “free” through Violence
#author Klaus Theweleit
#date 2 March 2019
#source Symposium on Violence at The Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK). [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeI0jL22I10]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-05-10T13:04:47
#topics fascism, violence, psychoanalysis, subjectivity,
There are human bodies which live in constant fear without being exposed to concrete threats from the external world. Such fear derives from specific emotional states of these bodies themselves—fear that comes from the inside, fear that is rooted in people’s intestines, in their hearts, breasts or stomachs, their asses, their knees or their heads. It is the fear of losing the ground under one’s feet. When verbalized, it is described in terms of being devoured or swallowed by sinking ground, of being immersed in floodwaters and carried away by mighty waves or of sinking into an abyss of excrement. The “fragmented body” has no secure feelings about where an individual’s own body ends and the outer world begins; it lives in a permanent state of hallucinatory perceptions. People with such a bodily structure can only achieve the sense of being “whole” or “complete” through acts of violence. There are special expressions of this and for it.
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[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeI0jL22I10]]
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*** Introduction
Host: Now we’re going to hear a lot about bodies quite soon, because our next guest is a literary scholar and cultural scientist, or simply an author whose influence can hardly be overstated, especially here in Germany.
It’s also hard to introduce his work because he has been enormously productive and his subject range is very wide, especially for a German scholar because he connected dots between the disciplines before anyone in academia could even spell interdisciplinary in this country and he probably to this day remains one of the most critical readers of journalism.
Many of his books quote media coverage extensively, which makes me cringe a little bit as a journalist, puts me into fear, so to speak, but fear is actually at the core of his talk he’s going to give in a minute.
But let me start a very general introduction like this.
His work is in that he put the body at the core of not only male studies, something that had not existed before him, the body is also central in his studies on excessive violence.
More than 1000 pages and two volumes of male fantasies, mener fantasien in German, changed the way we think about violence, war, genocide.
Well, let us say some of us talk less about ideology or religion since and more about sex or gender and their relation to the fascist personality which is male.
Male Fantasies was first published in 1977 and 1978 in a couple of months.
There will be yet another edition in the two volumes at Mottesenzeitz in Berlin.
A prominent German speaker living in Freiburg in the south of the Republic has written about colonization too and about the role of the female victim, especially in Buchter Koenigstorste, but also on contemporary pop culture and jazz, on Jimi Hendrix, and on football or soccer, if you’re American.
While male fantasies dealt with the as he calls it, the body armor of the terrified and then terrifying male fascist personality that emerged in and after World War One in the Weimar Republic, up to the Nazi regime, his book, Das Lachen der Teter, Breivik und Andre, Psichogram der Tutungslust Klama und Rubwan Klamat zu, attempt of a translation, the offender’s laughter, Breivik and others.
That book offers many echoes of the book of male fantasies and again tries to reject the myth that terror or violence is about ideology.
It’s much more likely it is about bodies, about child bodies too.
Psychoanalysis is an important tool for his work, but so are sociology, history, and cultural anthropology.
His talk today is called The Fragmented Body: Feeling Free Through Violence.
Extremely pleased to have him here with us today.
Please welcome Klaus Theweleit.
*** Seminar
Klaus: Thank you, Toby, for the introduction and Susanne Pfeffer for the invitation, which I admitted gladly.
Yes, we heard about dismembered persons lying at the way that Sabak was talking about.
We now come close-- just let me have a look at the clock-- close to the body of the people on the other side, not on the side of the victims, the side of the killers, mainly still male groups or male single persons assassinators.
The first part I make a sort of short summary.
Of course, Toby was speaking about male fantasies, starting with this point of fear, anxiety, which is a thing that is structuring persons on both sides of the political lines or the gender lines.
Fear and anxiety both are parts of normal human behavior.
Without getting anxious when looking into an abyss, no humans ever would have survived to this day.
Fear of foreigners, normal too.
In many cases, newly arriving people were hostile to those living at the places the foreigners entered.
But there are human bodies living in a constant fear without being under special threats from the external world.
A fear which derives from special emotional states of their own bodies.
A fear from the inside.
A fear seated in their intestines, in their heart, breast, stomach, their *** their knees, their head.
It’s a fear of losing ground under one’s feet.
A fear that, when it comes to be verbalized, finds expressions for itself like being diverred or swallowed by feeble grounds, overflooded and taken away by mighty waves, or sinking into an abyss of excrements.
German Freiko soldiers in the years of 1919–20 called it , the Red Flood, coming to take them away.
That name indicates that they were speaking of something raging outside of them.
Red Flood, to them, simply meant the threat of communism, Bolshevism.
It was the name they gave to workers on strike or in political demonstrations in the streets and they felt the urge to stop it before it could seize the political power in the country they called Vaterland, Deutschland.
They felt the urge to build dams against that flood.
What do soldiers do when they want to stop something? They shoot, they fire.
Then they laugh.
The flood, that is the crowd, disappears.
The place is empty.
Now they get into a heavy laughter.
That’s one of the steady signs of soldiers having emptied a place.
The laughs of the killer.
They have to laugh because that crowd, that mass that had threatened to swallow him and his comrades has disappeared, has dissolved.
It’s a miracle and he is a wizard with his gun and wizards are not afraid of anything.
He, with his bunch of comrades around him, the military unit, is in power.
He is almighty in that moment, so make it last.
Make it last and his fiesta is in there laughing.
What I have described to you is a typical process within bodies living in unspecified fears.
They handle these fears by giving them names from objects or people who are around them in the external reality.
For example, rebellious workers who are willing to take control of the state, rebellious students working towards a socialist society, black people longing for a state of their own inside the US, Latino immigrants on their way to make California their homeland, or too many yellow people in the country In Germany, around the year of 1900, Emperor William II steadily fantasized about die Gelbegefar, the danger in yellow, without nearly having any people from China, in Germany, or whole Europe.
Red flood, yellow threat, black currents heading to Washington, countless Muslims all wanting to kill every one honest Christian person here, and so on.
In Germany of the 20s, 30s, 40s, the Jews were accused for wanting to seize power over Germany, trying to get control over bank houses, factories, politics, universities, the press, the theaters, the cinema, the warehouses, and so on.
Wherever you looked for a place, for yourself there was, so they said, a Jew occupying that place.
Giving the Germans no space for living, an omnipresent poisonous flood.
This sort of shift in language I realized very clearly when reading the memoirs or reports of those Freikorps soldiers boasting with their deeds of having killed working-class people when beating down the German Revolution after World War I.
Especially proud, their language grew when coming to the point of the most dangerous part of that red flood, working-class women under arms.
the so-called Flintenweiber, riflewomen, who, so they were writing, carried their guns under their skirts.
Their texts entered a mode of celebration when describing how they turned these red huers into a bloody mass.
By the way, nobody has ever seen such a riflewoman alive.
They only exist in form of this bloody mass, after the soldiers have come over them.
There are some similar special words they use when dealing with situations of that revolution.
For example, there is a group of workers demanding better payment or the eight-hour working day.
They are commanded to bring such a group to silence, a somehow clear situation of political confrontation.
But what do we read in their texts? They were writing things like this.
The slimy miasma constantly growing around us had nearly reached the lower lip of our mouths and threatened to cross this border.
The fatherland was drowned in bloody swamps or streams of **** those dirty prostitutes on top.
Was it that way that demonstrators looked like? No, not at all.
I made a list with the words they used for describing those people in rebellion.
dirt, the mire, the mores, slime, pulp, swamps, ****.
Words for rebellious workers, and at the same time, words characterizing the substance of the new republic that was to arise after the defeat of the monarchy.
The red flood, St.
of blood, exploding earth, lava, all things able and willing to work on the dissolution of the soldiers’ bodies, engulfing them.
Reality completely had turned into a swamp-like state.
After a while, it became clear to me what they really were speaking about.
No stream of **** or bloody morares ever had come to their lips from the external world.
They were speaking about themselves.
Inside of them, the red flood, the bloody mass of their inner body had grown to the brink of their lips when they were confronted with the political masses in upheaval.
They were taking and writing strictly about their own bodies in fear.
They felt themselves in danger to be drenched to the bone by their inner feelings.
Expressed in psychoanalytical terms, Their bodies hadn’t developed a clear division between things happening outside of them and inside of them.
They mixed the different forms of realities up all the time.
That was the first rule or law of fascist language to discover.
They are talking of their own bodies all the time.
Ernst Junger’s World War I, title Der Kampfal’s Inneris er Leibniz, battle as inner experience, speaks exactly about this and lecture two, they are mixing up constantly different forms of existing realities to a sort of mash in their perception that is threatening them.
After a while, I defined these states of mind and speaking as hallucinatory.
The next discovery to follow was the fact that all those political reality forms working at the bodily dissolution of the soldiers closely were connected with femininity in their writings.
So, in first line, it was the mud of the lower parts of women’s bodies that was the most heavy threat to them.
The red, muddy hua, who or because she was willing to let all those dirty mire men fighting for the republic **** her.
The perception of their acting in sorts of hallucinatory states of mind brought me to the point of departure from traditional psychoanalysis.
In terms of traditional psychoanalysis, this mixing up of realities is named projections.
For example, we mix up persons in our mind when we are angry about somebody or when we are drunk.
We all do that at special times.
A friend who treats me badly for a moment and my unconscious notes, that’s the way my father used to treat me, may get a reaction from me that’s completely unjust because of the projection of the father figure onto him.
Next day after a good night, I will apologize for that.
reality principle would be back on my mind.
That’s not what happens with persons who haven’t developed secure feelings about their own body borders.
They used to stay in sorts of hallucinatory states of mind all the time.
The threat of being engulfed by surrounding realities never ceases.
But that’s not completely exact.
There are situations where they seem to come to a bodily balance in a sort of harmonic self-perception.
These are, without exceptions, scenes of violence.
They get into states of homo-ostasis when they are killing, and that is especially when killing women.
They love to transform the bodies of women into a very special sight or view.
Taking a closer look at the manifestations of violent, ****** advances, we find the descriptions of bodily states like these, all quotes now, being gored by a bull’s horn, whipping the naked buttocks, being beaten into a bloody mass with a whip, a bullet in the mouth, being beaten with a rifle **** or ripped apart with a hand grenade and they get more detailed.
Killed women, I leave out the names of the authors of those novels or reports, drenched with black blood between hips and thighs, just a monstrous bloody throat where they had once been a face.
A female bullfighter who’s hit by the bull’s horn is a bloody drenched mask, silver and blue, lies in the sand.
A bloody mass, a lump of flesh that appears to have been completely lacerated with whips and is now lying within a circle of trampled reddish slush.
Another one, a bad girl from Schwabing, is bitten until there isn’t a white spot left on her back.
Tortured women lie naked and cut to pieces in the filth of the street.
Her abdomen was crushed, a pulp of blood and excrement, cloth and flesh.
shoots them all down with machine guns, shreds them to pieces, and pulverize them with dynamite and one of them discovers himself to be a poet, enjoying the view of two women killed.
Quote, Both women lie dead on the floor of their room, their blood exactly the same color as the roses, blooming in extravagant profusion outside the window.
The effective dominance in writing those things is the pleasurable perception of women in the condition of bloody masses that seems to deliver the real satisfaction.
The most frequent words they use for female bodies are dirt, mire, morass, slime, pulp, swamps.
The red flood, street of blood, exploding earth, lava, those altogether are busy dissolving everything that gave security to the soldiers’ bodies.
They form a bunch of engulfing realities.
It became obvious the women they love to kill cease to exist as bodies, as figures with boundaries.
The question was, from where stems this lust of performing living flesh into the view of this bloody miasma? That’s where psychoanalysts of childhood have to enter the scene.
It were mostly women, women from the Freudian International Association, stepping a lot ahead of what Freud had discovered, children’s sexuality and its oedipal fate in the growing up of their child.
Women like Milanie Klein in England and Margaret Mahler coming from Hungary in the US, they realized that the understanding of the basic conditions of the human body has to start at much earlier stages than Freud and co had proposed.
That means directly after birth and sometimes even before in prenatal states.
There is a special state of symbiosis between the baby and the maternal body they came to name as dual union.
Mahler’s book, titled from 1970s, showed the way of a materialist development of the child’s body, symbiosis, and individuation.
The way of the single child out of this symbiosis, which can be completely horrifying, one, when there is a devouring or rejecting maternal body, depends on the sort of body borders the child is able to develop.
That depends on how strong the libidinal cathexis of the skin within the baby is growing.
Pleasurably cathecting one’s own periphery is possible only through ways of loving attention from an external source.
The body has to be stimulated to do this work of growth into an emotionally balanced unity.
Persons who never attained the security of body borders, libidinally invested from within, remain in a way uncomplete, often heavily disturbed.
This kind of staying uncompleted in their early bodily development, I try to capture with the term, people not yet fully born.
People living in a fragmented body, as those female psychoanalysts of children named it.
Psychoanalyst Embaland called this the fundamental .
Fragmented bodies all the time are under threat of deorganization.
They permanently live on the brink of psychical breakdowns, of losing their countenance, of exploding when under pressure.
Their main way of getting out of the state and come out of that state and come to a feeling of wholeness which they constantly lack is the use of violence.
Violent acts hold the promise of keeping threatening things down, the promise to eliminate them.
By acting immediately against everything that makes them feel uneasy, acting in forms psychoanalysis calls the primary process.
Fragmented bodies cannot cope with the changeabilities and complexities.
They cannot integrate and cannot synthesize.
To shelter themselves from the liveliness of life happening around them, fragmented bodies try or abound to take life out of their surroundings.
Marla coined two terms for actions like that she found in her young patients, disturbed patients, youth.
The act of de-differentiation and the act of de-vivification.
Both of them performed violently, both of them in this typical derealized state of mind she called hallucinatory.
Violence because their bodies have not developed the ability to get into a somewhat balanced relationship with their surroundings.
The ability of integrating outer realities into their own psychic process, the ability of working through situations.
what Freud had called the reality principle has never grown in them.
They never arrive at that state of the person that Freud has defined as the ego of the so-called normal, healthy adult who is able to deal with the realities in the so-called secondary process.
To stress the difference of these acts to acts traditional psychoanalysis calls defense mechanisms, Mahler found a new term for them.
She called them maintenance mechanisms, dealing with questions of life and death.
Secondly, her patients psychically exploding in those acts always aimed towards very specific views as the results of their actions.
Mahler called these views conglomerates of perception identities.
I really was struck when realizing that those terms, one from the psychoanalytic work with heavily disturbed children and adolescents, were fitting to describe and define the actions of the soldiers nearly perfectly.
Divification is a perfect term for the perception identity empty place.
de-differentiation, a perfect term for the perception identity, bloody miasma, both groups acting in hallucinary states of mind, both of them finding homoestasis only in and through violent acts, both of them coming to the sort of being alive, feeling free, through taking life out of others or out of reality.
To me, it was as if Marla had developed her terms through studying the actions of...
of those soldierly men.
A closer look at the specific forms of childhood experience of the Freikorps soldiers revealed that most of them had suffered heavy beatings during their childhood, suffered from hunger, shouting of the adults, punishments of all sorts for so-called bad behavior.
You easily will be able to complete that list and also they were objects of the common education of damning in bodily fluids.
Bodilies violently laid dry, whereas lust, sexuality, erotisms are, or at least can be, forms of fluidity.
So it was no big surprise to me to discover what had kept them from becoming lifelong inhabitants of psychiatries or homes for non-educatable children.
It was the bodily training and the military drill, which most of them report to have loved, to give them a sort of body borders from the outside.
A muscular body armor by painful actions with, after a while, for them, turned into some feeling of security within the own body, reborn out of the pain principle, armed with a muscle armor.
Whenever threats from the outside or the inside or the fuzzy mixture of both get too strong, over-flooding engulfing their sources have to be eliminated totally.
So Robert Bowers, shortly, the guy who in the Pittsburgh synagogue killed 11 members of HIAS, Hebrew Immigrant Help Society, He didn’t say, when caught by the police, I hate HIAS and the way they are helping Jewish immigrants.
He said, All Jews should be dead, each and every, totally.
Before that day, there will be no feeling of being whole in a whole world, made a whole world by his act of killing.
Uncertain body borders.
Margaret Mead has shown how people of that special statia feel their own body borders to be congruent with the outer borders of their country.
They need the idea of strongly sheltered borders of their countries to stabilize the borders of their own body country.
So refugees crossing German borders, let’s say in Bavaria, step directly right away into the body of an inhabitant of Miklenburg-Vorpommern, who perhaps has never seen a refugee in his life and he’ll cry for help against the intruders.
Fears and hatred against dangerous intruders usually are strongest there, where there are very few or even non-immigrants.
That’s a sure sign for fragmented body people dominating the scene.
The result Fascism is not in first line a special ideology.
It’s a way of organizing reality after the demands of people with certain body structures who all the time work hard for gaining political power in their countries so that they can get into positions who will allow them to form society after their bodily demands.
Male people, their main tool of forming violent acts, suppressing all forms of free femininity and the other forms of free behavior all around them.
So that I would have thought without several actions in the last years that could have been a thing that is historically gone with women in new roles sometimes in places of power, in dealing with men in institutions and so on and so on, that this should have declined.
But what actually is the case is writing about right-wing populists of the moment in the US, Trump time, a German journalist, Angela Nagle, says, In the center of right-wing populist talk, there still is the woman as the main object of hatred, ever and ever again, dear Dawa Brenner.
She finds lots of rhetorical slogans of that kind of those ugly internet platforms of the alt-right people.
There is an omnipresent hatred of the female body giving birth to new children, no matter if they are black, Hispanic, or white trash.
There still are heaps of men who seem to live in heavy fear of uncontrolled reproduction, especially of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Muslims, white trash women in search for sexual augies, an unbearable slimy mass of ****** of all colors in which the normal single white male individual is threatened to be engulfed, swallowed up by an unsecure ground.
For example, the stand-up comedian Bill Hicks performing male fantasies live on stage.
In the fictitious voice of a female inhabitant of a caravan, he lets her say, oh, have a look on all my wonderful little miracles here, balm.
In my cabin, it’s so narrow as in a can of sardinas, balm.
You know which would be the real miracle if I would remember the name of your ******* father, balm.
think I have to call you Trucker Junior, bomb and there’s your brother, Pizza Boy Junior and there’s the next one, Vermin Exterminator Junior and there’s the next one, Working for a Meal Junior, bomb.
Which means all the people who are in the lower positions of society are in the right places down there.
It’s what they have earned.
By their way of living, it’s absolutely clear that the mothers of children in poor dwellings are prostitutes, unprofessional prostitutes, who open their legs for a pizza or a lesser gift.
Incarnation of all that lower grades in society is up to this very day, even in highly technological societies, in the views of the dominant male, especially in the view of the deprived dominator male.
The woman, the female body, which pulls man down, especially through her ability of giving birth, giving birth to lives which are absolutely superfluous, lives that are poisonous, and they are supposed to do this from a planfully obsessive, mean position, having their wicked fun in letting everybody **** them who is able to spit some drops of sperm off.
The assassinator elec Manesian, 25, who with a pick-up van killed eight women and two men on April 23, 2018, in the Toronto walking zone for pedestrians, is a member, as a Facebook posting says, of the INSEL movement.
INSEL is the acronym for involuntary celibacy, like Unfreiwelige and Heilsamkeit.
because women are so horrible.
One of the many small groups living in some obscure corners of the so-called manosphere.
Manosphere is a loosely connected online sphere which is bound together by the core elements of masculinity.
All through the writings of these different online forums, the patriarchal suppression, they say, is an invention of militant feminism, Real American men live under the dictatorship of political correctness and the commands of cultural Marxism.
These, by the way, are exactly the terms Norwegian right-wing killer Anders Breivik used in his internet pamphlet explaining his murders of about 70 young Norwegian social democrats.
For America, they say, it’s Hollywood and the universities where the party of the Democrats and her followers are working obsessively towards the goal of extinguishing the white race, and ahead of all the rest, it’s the white race male who is suppressed on all levels and appropriated in first place.
This view of the world appears in online boards running under the names of Incel Me, the Red Pill, or Return of Kings.
the kings we just heard about.
Those kings, having lost their power, come back as assassinators, the last heroes of masculinity, killing plain-clothed civilians who just happen to be around.
We sure will hit the right ones.
I read in the newspapers, they feel themselves as part of a movement calling itself MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way.
The journalists, Clute de Zimon, and Kaja report the MGTO view of the ideal woman as they find in the net, quote, she should address me as her master, obey all my orders, she should spare all her lust for me, she should be a virgin before a marriage and ask for my permission in every case she wants to act in.
That’s the way one user of the platform, Reddit, describes the woman of his dreams, seine Traumfrau.
They are in fear of the sexuality of women who claim to be free to do what they want.
After the rules of incel logic, women have to be punished for that.
So the guys on this platform share their reports of how to rape women and boast when their acts over their acts of sexual harassment and more, the wish to kill is openly exhibited.
In a Facebook post directly before his action, Mr.
Menesian named Elliot Roger the assassinator who killed six people and hurt 14 in 2014 near the campus of the University of Santa Barbara, naming him the highest gentleman among us.
Elliot is the guy who left to us a manifesto in which he is dreaming of a future where humanity will be liberated from sex.
To get to this happy state, there is nothing more to do than execute all women in concentration camps, he stated.
The programs to come are completely formulated and exhibited in internet forums.
As long as the protagonists of those programs lack the necessary political power, those programs will not, cannot be executed, so what is left for them are terroristic acts with or without suicidal result.
Those...
of you who have taken a look into the 1,500 pages internet manifest of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Bering Breivik, who killed 69 young social democrats in the island of Otoja in 2009, could have found there a complete program how to deal with women in horror.
Bravet accuses feminist women to be responsible for the suppression of men by sexual libertinage and their cultural Marxism dominating Norwegian culture.
Women’s service program for the victorious future for real Christian men to come will only be allowed to university after they have given birth to at least two good Christian Norwegian children.
It’s the state who will care for their education.
The highest rank for women in university will be the bachelor grade.
They will be forbidden to become professors.
They have to be kept out of the army and the police.
Breivik proudly states, in the three years before his shooting of the young Solo Democrats, he had no sexual relations at all.
It’s still the case that in the hidden or even open center of all male terroristic activities in the world, a murderous anti-femininity is glowing.
That’s a more or less common thing and not new at all.
New is another thing.
Those traits have got a new relevance through the Internet.
What we easily had put aside in earlier days as the insane babble of some crazy sectarians actually in our days has got a heavyweight importance through the net, and it becomes noticed worldwide.
One million likes for the anti-feminist hate speech you create there, and within a single miraculous, miraculous moment, you are no longer an isolated, hating person somewhere whom nobody knows and wants to know.
You are active part of a massive empowerment of yourself and the groups you think you belong to.
In the view of German AFD, Angela Merkel is not just a bad chancellor, she is a wicked witch.
Things of that kind get a new sort of relevance because of their public electronic platforms.
Okay, there are some moves against them.
Some people, Amazon and so on, try to put them out from their pages, but Doesn’t work.
The point is, who’s ready to kill or feels himself or herself bound to kill? There you find the shoe fascists, whatever ideology they spread around them.
Ideology is nothing, it’s just words, words that are exchangeable.
The real difference between fascists and non-fascists is their different bodily attitude to killing.
You can check this all over the world and all different political systems and situations.
Whatever they call themselves, where killings and mass killings happen, you have the material tracks of fascism, of whatever status or color.
Killing is the main fascist pleasure.
Biggest pleasure is extermination as a program.
whether insects, viruses, or Jews, or liberal Democrats, out of the way with them, to hell with them.
Where a killing is on the schedule, there is the promise of fun.
Extermination is the highway to happiness.
Jewish author Rud Kluger, who survived Nazi concentration camps, extends this to become a definition of the very nature of the humankind when saying cats are scratching, dogs bite, humans kill.
For the humans not yet fully born, being torn apart in their body fragmentation, filled up with hatred up to the borderline of their lips, her perception probably is true.
So just some sentences to the book, The Laughing of the Killers, that Toby mentioned and it’s a sort of extension of those things I try to describe in Male Fantasies for more modern times and the point is that whether looking at the killings of the communists in Indonesia in 1965, of the killings through children soldiers in in Rwanda and Guatemala, death squads and other places, Gile, Argentine, South America.
Wherever you take a closer look, you have not only this fear or objection of women, you really find this moment of laughter and Anders Breivik, when killing a 14-year-old girl with a gun near, bringing it to her head, and you see he wants to see the bloody mass, and he’s laughing, and he’s shouting with laughter, and people who survived, young people who survived the situation, said he was jubileeing like a football player making a goal when making his shooting.
So, and what is it about this laughter? There are millions of ways of laughter and laughing, but why do they get into the state of laughter when killing and okay, they get into power and the place is empty, they feel whole, all that.
But I think the very special thing with laughter, with this heavily laughter, especially in groups, is that laughter leaves no space for any other feeling.
Laughing puts, the body is choking with laughter completely and especially the which we know from up to meetings of SS people and so on, and the people in describes in the Guatemala killings of so-called guerrillas, and she says, and they often call it fiesta.
The killing is fiesta and the laughing puts them together.
They are sure they cannot be punished because it’s their authorities which command them or allow the killings.
That’s a very important point for Breivik too.
He is allowed to do everything because he’s acting for Christianity and against Islam, and no worldly court has the power to judge him and for all of those, they are what I called, it’s their entering the sphere of a free, unpunishable criminality, godly criminality and the fiesta, moment they enter it, is in their laughter.
So there we deal, we have to deal with people in the world who get to the feeling of being free by killing.
*** Questions
Host: Good.
So thank you, Klaus Taverleit, for your talk here.
We have so many questions, but the time has advanced a little bit.
Let me just ask one, maybe, and then open it up for the public.
I’m sure you have many questions as well.
Maybe we can talk into intermission a little bit more, or maybe tonight.
when we have a dinner.
When you describe that sort of male fascist personality or the body of it, or the fear of overflowing, and the body armor of it, you, in the Breivik book, you did, for sure, talk very concretely about bodybuilding as well.
I mean, it’s a very concrete armor.
It’s not a metaphorical armor.
It’s a concrete armor.
It’s muscle, right? But nowadays, I go to the gym, too.
Many people go to the gym and I wonder if the sort of feminization of bodybuilding, to talk in cliches, I mean, there’s many men pumping up, actually going to the gym many times a week, that they pluck their eyebrows, they take great care in facial hair and Brevik has this sort of meticulously ridiculous beard almost.
That is like, it takes a lot of work to do this kind of beard, right? And I think this is maybe that something changed a lot if you like compare a Freikorp soldier from the 20s to a bodybuilder today.
It’s a totally different concept of femininity or masculinity or gender altogether and I wonder, does this sort of conform with your argument of the body in the fascist personality, or does it contradict it? Or is it just yet another way of sort of internalizing what is perceived as the other on the body? It’s on.
Klaus: OK, it’s on.
If we go back before World War I, the officer of the army, and he was like that.
He was the Elegante Leutnant, with a cosette, not showing.
Host: No belly shows, not corsages back then.
Yeah, we have to describe,
Klaus: look at Schnitzler and so on.
These guys, they were very much looking and it was the idea, so they wanted it to be every girl was thought to love a lieutenant, a young lieutenant like that, in the uniform and as a very beautiful man and okay, Breivik says, he complains the feminization of society and when he’s going, into the gym, and he does it every day.
He describes it in his manifesto and he does it not the reason you do that.
I didn’t talk about my reason, but.
I guess that you will not grow too fat, let’s say, like that, and your belly be seen.
Host: I don’t want to get a hexenchuss, but that’s another story, you know.
Klaus: Breivik does the opposite, and he will not get a belly, but he will get weight.
Host: Once again, weight, yeah, it’s a different sort of complex.
Klaus: He says he is weighing every day and every week and so on, and writes it into his diary and says, I started with about 87 kilo, and now I’m at 93.
So by training, he put, that means power, muscular power, not fat.
He goes there to get muscular power in exactly this armor and he says, he has the plan to do his assassination on a special day and he writes, I hope to that day I will be at 95 kilo and he says, I’m completely, and my body was never as good as now.
I feel the strength.
God likes strength before he goes to killing, yes.
So, and what in earlier times were the army and the drill there, some people do like that in those or training centers or so on, and Breivik is one of them and he really, when getting on this way, he starts being a sexual person, which he was before.
Audio file
Anarcho-Nihilism Review The Ideology of Insurrection.mp3
Transcript
Host: Hello, and welcome to Ideology Reviews, a new show where we numerically grade political ideologies in a desperate attempt to figure out which one will fill the hole in our hearts best.
I’m your drag, and today we’re going to be looking at a narco-nihilism.
Now before I begin, I just want to say that none of what I’m about to talk about is an endorsement, necessarily, of the ideas.
I’m simply presenting these ideas to you, and you can make your own judgments about them.
That being said, I explicitly endorse everything I’m about to say.
Part one, Russian nihilism.
Ah yes, once again we talk about a wacky ideology, and once again we find ourselves back in Russia.
Something about cold, miserable people lends itself to extremism, apparently.
As a Canadian, I would not know.
Narco-nihilism has its roots in the Russian nihilist movement, although as a current day political ideology, it really...
is really more of a footnote.
It’s not super relevant to how it operates today.
Russian nihilism came about in a very specific historical context, namely that life was marginally worse than it is in current day Russia.
Essentially, this was back when the Tsar was ruling.
Power structures were justified through the Russian Orthodoxy.
Essentially, life was so bad that they invented being edgy.
Russian nihilists just invented the concept of being an edgy teen.
Basically, Russian nihilists were atheistic, materialistic.
Some people really liked nihilism, some people really hated nihilism.
Dostoevsky, for example, was a notorious example of a guy who really didn’t like all those nihilists, calling up the place and here you see what could be described as a little few seeds of anarcho-nihilism starting to sprout in Russia.
They killed the Tsar.
Well, okay, they were accused of killing the Tsar, or at least precipitating the Tsar’s death.
Although at a certain point, everyone just started calling everything bad that happened, the fault of the nihilists and then the state got a little crueler and cracked down on those nihilists, basically ending Russian nihilism right there.
However, even though Russian nihilism ended there, anarcho-nihilism and nihilism as an ideology continued to spread and now, nihilism lives on in insurrectionary anarchist and individualist anarchist circles.
Oh, also, fun fact, the Black Hand that killed the Archduke, Franz Fernand of Austria, was widely decried by the Austria-Hungarian press as nihilist.
So, did the nihilists kickstart World War I, which then started World War II, which then kicked into place every major world event since then? No, probably not.
Let’s move on.
Part 2, post-leftism.
Narco-nihilism is what we call a post-leftist ideology.
What that means is basically on a political compass, they’re over here.
I just want to take a minute to talk about the progress that post-leftism has made ever since I started talking about it on this channel.
You see, before your buddy Drag came along, nobody knew what post-leftism was.
They just thought they did and now...
Nothing has changed.
I regret nothing.
Same political discourse on the internet, not on Dregs Watch.
Gah, gah, gah.
Post-leftist ideology is explicitly not a leftist ideology, although it’s definitely not a right-wing ideology.
According to post-leftists, at least, post-leftists are not leftists.
That’s debatable, but according to the post-leftist, they’re not leftists.
Why is this? Well, here’s an example, right? An anarcho-nihilist differs from your typical leftist in the fact that a nihilist is actively rejecting ideas of state, family, hierarchy, which maybe a leftist might agree with, but then they also reject ideas like equality and human rights on a first principles basis.
Leftist means of organizing, leftist groups, leftist visions of the future, all of that explicitly gets negated.
Another way you could look at it is if leftist critique just ate itself.
Don’t do deconstruction alone, kids.
It’s not safe.
Part 3, post-modernism and rejection.
Okay, real quick, one aspect of post-modernism, one of many aspects of post-modernism, we’re not going to get into it, is a rejection of what we might call the metanarrative.
A metanarrative is essentially just this idea that sort of claims to structure or explain or organize humanity in a certain direction.
So for example, Marxism and the ideas, the utopias of Marxism, all of that from a nihilistic perspective is a meta-narrative and so it would be rejected under that framework.
So the whole post-modern neo-Marxist idea, in theory at least, doesn’t mesh well at all.
Although you could say in practice maybe there’s some cognitive dissonance going on there.
So postmodernism and nihilism both share this active rejection of the metanarrative.
Family, God, Order, Money writes, nihilism is skeptical and contemptuous often of all of these things.
postmodernism continues these critiques into areas like gender and sex, but also mainly the notion of an objective truth.
There’s some similarities between postmodernism and nihilism, but don’t get them confused and Russian nihilism actually had a lot more in common with modernity than it did with postmodernity in the sense that it was rejecting what they viewed as esoteric in favor of science and materialism.
So essentially, when a conservative says, these leftists just want to tear down society because they’re all nihilists and resentful towards the world, and a leftist says, no, that’s not true at all.
We instead want to text, the narco-nihilist is just like, Yeah.
Somewhere at the end of time, there’s a battle between Jordan Peterson and an anarcho-nihilist.
You’ll never make me believe in the metaphysical importance of God, Jordan.
You’re going down, bucko.
Part 4, insurrection.
An insurrection is an explicitly violent uprising against the state.
Anarcho-nihilism is an ideology of explicit insurrection.
Why are we talking about insurrection right now? No reason.
narco-nihilism, because they don’t view, for example, human life as having any innate importance, like any metaphysical importance, they are basically more inclined to violence? Because if there’s no god watching you, kneecap a government official with your gun and drive off, then, I mean, it’s not like you’re gonna get cosmically punished for that action.
But what’s important to note is that just because anarcho-nihilism is an insurrectionary ideology, not all insurrectionary ideologies are anarcho-nihilism.
There’s a lot of reasons that one might cause an insurrection, and a lot of those reasons have nothing to do with anarchism whatsoever.
Marxist-Leninists and fascists alike both hate the liberal democratic state, but that doesn’t mean that they’re anarchists.
There’s a lot of reasons an ideology might call for a violent uprising against the state.
Very few of those reasons end up being to just leave the state dismantled.
Insurrectionary anarchism and anarcho-nihilism aren’t separate ideologies.
Insurrectionary anarchism is a form of anarchist praxis that uses violence against the state.
Anarcho-nihilism is the ideology that underpins and justifies using insurrection as an anarchist.
Violent insurrection is justified through anarcho-nihilism, because anarcho-nihilism doesn’t value something like human rights or even human life, inherently.
So if you kneecap a government official, for example, there’s not going to be any cosmic punishment awaiting you for doing crime and punishment, et cetera, et cetera.
Get out of here, Dostoevsky.
You’re not my real dad.
Part 5, climate denialism.
No global future.
Anarcho-nihilists don’t have the prettiest view of the future.
Nihilists, like a lot of post-left anarchists, don’t subscribe to this idea of human progress.
Whether it’s anti-civ anarchists who view society as an abomination, or nihilists that outright rejects the idea of human progress as a meta-narrative, post-leftists don’t tend to like the way that human society is heading.
You could even say that of extremist ideologies, they are the most society type of ideology out there.
Desert, for example, is basically a critique of leftist ideas that say that we can do something about climate change.
Basically, it says, no, we’re ****** and we’re ****** real bad, too? And you trying to peddle this hope that if we all band together and work as a team, we’ll be able to reverse it? We’ll just make everything worse.
Essentially, the anarcho-nihilist position on climate change is, yeah, it’s real.
Oh, you want me to come to your protest so we can increase the marginal tax rate by 3%? Nah, I’m not sure you’ve realized this yet, but you’re gonna ******* die.
You can definitely see this tension between leftist ideology and anarchist post-left anarcho-nihilist ideology.
Left environmentalists obviously think that leftism is the solution to climate change by nipping capitalism the bud and the general environmentalist critique of this kind of boomerism is, well, you know, it’s not Exactly helpful to be complaining that there’s nothing we can do about it, but the nihilists’ response to that is basically, Let’s accept that there’s nothing we can do about it, and then go from there.
Here’s a fun quote: So, nihilists being against meta-narratives are also against...
the idea of progress and by being against progress, they’re in a way kind of against time.
Every attempt to block the global system, every movement, every revolt, every uprising should be seen as a vertical attempt to stop time.
Yes, the anarcho-nihilist seeks to stop time.
Very based.
You can also see this as antithetical to an accelerationist kind of philosophy that wants to accelerate time.
The nihilist conception of time is that the past and future are only constructs, and so all that exists is the present and if all that matters is the present, then theorizing in academia and coming up with all these great ideas in your head sound nice, doesn’t really matter.
Part 6, struggle is an end.
In the anarcho-nihilist framework, struggle against the state is not a transitionary period towards a greater utopia.
A struggle is not a means to an end, it is the end.
The nihilist has no grand utopia he’s working towards.
Resistance is is just kind of something you do.
This is from an article about anarcho-nihilists.
The members aren’t out to represent you or to protect anybody from the ruthless grip of inequality.
They are not Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Lenin.
They don’t care if your plight isn’t represented if you’re just standing by with your hands in your pockets.
But if you’re fighting like they are, if you are reaching into those pockets of yours and pulling out a letter bomb or a pistol, for example, then they’re most definitely with you.
Part 7, a post-modern right.
Alright, brief pause here.
Let’s zoom out and apply the ideas of nihilism and post-modernism to a broader sense, outside of a leftist or anarchist frame, and let’s go into the right.
It might be fun to try to describe something called a postmodern right.
A postmodern right would either consciously or unconsciously adopt some of the tenets of postmodernism to benefit their movement.
This, by the way, might go against the conception you might have in your head as the right standing against postmodernism and the left kind of advancing postmodernism.
Anarchism and nihilism are obviously extremely compatible philosophic, but can nihilism and nationalism be something that is compatible.
Now, right-wingers often accept the idea of the meta-narrative because it goes with their beliefs.
But what happens if the meta-narrative stops going with their belief and instead starts pointing in the other direction? What if this myth of human progress starts to apply more to other groups of people rather than their own ideology and they don’t like it? Essentially what I’m saying here is what if the right-wing rejects the meta-narrative? Whereas a traditional right-winger might be a right-winger because they believe that the facts are on their side and they can definitely defend their arguments with facts and logic, a new postmodern right-winger may not really be interested in what the mainstream consensus of facts are.
A postmodern right is a right-wing that rejects the general consensus of absolute truth and does so with gusto, because they know that it’s beneficial for their ideology, for them as a group.
Because if you reject the broader consensus of capital T truth, you can instead focus on the group truth, which is its own subjective reality, but still truth.
Essentially, a new postmodern right might act out the tenets of postmodern nihilism for explicitly anti-nihilist and anti-anarchist purposes.
A bitter rejection of an overly leftist or overly neoliberal status quo.
A new postmodern right explicitly doesn’t care about the facts peddled by the mainstream.
Choosing local narratives over the meta-narratives as post-modernists are wont to do.
When capital T Truth does not fit with or is actively harmful towards the ideological framework, the ideological framework spits it out like a poison.
So basically, the right wing can de-territorialize post-modernism and nihilism from the left taking the ideas and removing them from their cultural origins.
It’s a really great time to be alive right now.
Part 8, Praxis.
But all of this is just wacky nonsense, right? Anarcho-nihilism is just some edgy ideology cooked up by a 14-year-old in Russia, and now it’s just some idea in people’s heads, and it has no actual bearing on reality...
Oh, what’s that? Oh, it’s actually the ideological underpinning of several left-wing terrorists.
I find this extremely upsetting and absolutely not based.
Instead of peacefully handing out leaflets, they mask up and employ the full force of direct action, proven by their many attacks, like the bombing of private banks in Rome, the torching of surveillance towers in Russia, and the destruction of rail lines in the UK.
They’ve also tried to send letter bombs to MEPs, which were either intercepted or didn’t explode, something the FAI says was an intentional scare tactic.
The FAI is one of these insurrectionary anarchist nihilist groups.
They send mail bombs to people, they shoot government officials in the knee.
It’s, uh, terrible.
I disavow.
The FAI isn’t the only insurrectionary anarchist nihilist group in the world, but it is one of the more well-known ones, and they’re still active today, in September 12.
2020, they sent multiple mail bombs across Italy, which is really too bad, and I do cry in the strongest possible terms.
Conclusion.
It’s time we grade an arco-nihilism on how extreme the ideology is.
Now, because this is an anti-centrist channel, we’re going to be removing all numbers between 1 and 10, because we don’t give middling opinions around here.
Fun fact, if you want to know if something is actually against the status quo or is just posturing to be, check if they’re on terrorist watch lists.
If they’re on terrorist watch lists, It’s probably a safe bet that they’re against the status quo.
With that in mind, anarconihilism is an easy 10.
Will anarconihilism fill the hole in your heart? No, but it might help you understand that nothing will fill that hole in your heart.
Nobody understands me for the last time.
Dad, get out of my room and final question, will anarconihilism get you laid? The answer is yes, but only from somebody who is currently wanted by the FBI or someone who is pretending to be someone who’s interested in you.
It actually works for the FBI.
That or somebody who works at Hot Topic.
Let me know other ideologies you would like to see me cover.
I’d like to thank one of my patrons, Anarcho Delusian, for sending me a reading list about anarcho-nihilism.
If you like this format and want to see more of it, let me know in the comments.
If you don’t like this format and don’t want to see more of it.
Too bad, what does this look like? A ******* democracy? This land is my land.
From California to the New York Island.