Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 24, July 2004
Thus Spake Nietzsche?:
Heide Schluepmann's _Abendroethe der Subjektphilosophie_
_Abendroethe der
Subjektphilosophie: Eine Aesthetik des Kinos_ Frankfurt am Main/Basel:
Stromfeld,
1998 ISBN
3-87877-740-X 187 pp. Heide Schluepmann's
_Abendroethe der Subjektphilosophie_ (literally,
'sunset-redness of subject philosophy') proclaims itself as
a kind of feminist manifesto even before the text begins,
with its frontispiece a self-portrait of the first great
Italian independent woman painter, Sofonisba Anguissola
(1532-1630), and its epigraph a verse by Elisabeth Epstein
(presumably the relatively obscure French painter whose work
was exhibited along with the Blaue Reiter group in 1911).
The first section of the actual text is prefaced by a brief
quotation from Helene Stoecker, a nineteenth-century German
feminist political writer, taken from her 1900 book _Die
Liebe und die Frauen_ ('Love and women'). This progression
not only brings us closer to Schluepmann's subject,
specifically the German cultural sphere at the turn of the
20th century, but introduces the motif of love, which will
underpin the entirety of this difficult and somewhat
convoluted book. Schluepmann's project is
inspired by the realisation that 'the feminist
psychoanalytical film theory that was developed in the 1970s
and 80s has today become stagnant' (7). [1] This is
particularly true from Schluepmann's point of view, since
the crucial theory of the 'gaze', as originally introduced
by Laura Mulvey, was rooted in the practices of classical
Hollywood cinema, whereas Schluepmann's own field of
research is early German silent film, non-Hollywood and
pre-classical. As Schluepmann herself argues in her previous
monograph, _Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des fruehen
deutschen Kinos_ ('The uncanny gaze: The drama of the early
German cinema'), [2] these early films are not
marked by the dominance of a male gaze, but rather
predicated on a female audience seeking, and presumably
finding, its own representation and reaffirmation on the
screen. On the contrary, in the German historical context it
was the 'reform movement' -- the reactionary forces that
sought, in patriarchal fashion, to censor the cinema and
protect the working-class audience whom the reformers saw as
feminized and infantilized -- who embodied the dominance of
the male gaze. However, where that previous book was
sumptuously full of concrete examples (names and dates of
films, stars, directors) and replete with film stills,
_Abendroethe der Subjektphilosophie_ seems nakedly abstract:
only a very few theorists and writers are mentioned (Mulvey,
Derrida, de Sade), often only in passing, and only two
filmmakers (Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren;
12-13). Schluepmann argues that a
feminist film aesthetic should not be founded on the idea of
a 'man's cinema' reifying a male gaze. Instead, her ideal
aesthetic would elucidate a critical view of this
construction, based on women's self-evident *love* for the
cinema -- a love that 'should not be condescendingly
regarded as misguided and thus in need of enlightenment, but
rather as something that can tell us about the revolutionary
meaning of the cinema for women' (8). To this end,
Schluepmann further proposes, such an aesthetic should not
be founded in psychology, as Mulvey's theory is, but in
philosophy. However, Schluepmann locates the problematic
moment where film theory went astray not in the feminist
theorists of the 1960s -- again, in a German context,
emerging German feminists of this period were largely thrown
back on the achievements and ideas of their colleagues
abroad, since the highly promising early feminist movement
within Germany had been interrupted, if not eradicated
altogether, by the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War,
and the conservative atmosphere of the postwar 'economic
miracle' -- but rather in classical film theory's roots in a
continuation of Kantian Enlightenment ideas. In contrast to this
legacy, Schluepmann constructs an alternate genealogy for
her aesthetic, from Kant through Schopenhauer and finally to
the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who becomes the
cornerstone of her proposed feminist aesthetic. In order to
accept this premise, of course, one has to accept a feminist
reading of Nietzsche such as that of Sarah Kofman, whom
Schluepmann specifically mentions (34), or Luce Irigaray,
who is not mentioned but whose prose style haunts the edges
of Schluepmann's paragraphs. Following Kofman, Schluepmann
suggests that Nietzsche's apparently misogynist philosophy
functions somewhat like Freud's explanation of the obscene
joke: it seems to be aimed at a male audience only because
it cannot be directed at the resistant 'real' female target
(34-6). [3] Schluepmann further refers to the work
of Guenter Schulte, whose construction of Nietzsche's work
as suppressing or sublimating the writer's homosexuality
allows it to express 'the femininity of man', thus
facilitating Schluepmann's own project (25-6).
[4] As Schluepmann points out,
Nietzsche, that most body-conscious of philosophers, once
refers in the _Notebooks_ to proceeding 'along the guiding
thread of the body' ('am Leitfaden des Leibes'). [5]
To her end, Schluepmann alters this phrase to 'along the
guiding thread of love' ('am Leitfaden der Liebe'; the
closest English approximation of her wordplay her would be
'along the guiding thread of the bawdy', but that is not
quite close enough, even though Schluepmann's aesthetic is
meant to be erotic in its way as well, and Nietzsche might
have recognised that 'Leitfaden der Liebe' in Sanskrit would
be 'Kama Sutra'). This reformulation is both an analogy and
a contradiction to Nietzsche's original, a 'mirroring'
('Spiegelung'), which is not only intended to allow
Schluepmann to create an identity from which she can write
as a woman -- here Schluepmann is following the strategy of
Helene Stoecker, the above-mentioned contemporary reader and
feminist critic of Nietzsche -- but also reflects the entire
strategy of the book: Schluepmann intends to construct a
feminist aesthetic of film by writing *a pastiche of
Nietzsche* (8-9). This pastiche permits
Schluepmann to indulge in wordplay and aphorism to her
heart's content, and thus to reflect Nietzsche's presence
throughout her writing, despite the fact that no actual
quotations from Nietzsche's writings appear beyond the
fragmentary phrase which serves as the book's springboard.
This also explains the quaint spelling of 'Abendroete' in
the book's title, the antiquated 'h' (that Nietzsche would
have recognised, and did himself use) signaling that
something unusual is waiting between the covers. Moreover,
it prompts Schluepmann to begin her arguments by recourse to
Nietzsche's original discipline, philology: as she points
out, the term 'aesthetics' in its original Greek form does
not mean, as is often assumed, 'theory of beauty', but
rather 'theory of perception'; and from this basis
Schluepmann describes the Enlightenment construction of
perception, especially in Kant's philosophy, as split
between general knowledge and individual experience (such
'splits' will recur throughout Schluepmann's book). For
Schluepmann, once Nietzsche has been enlisted as a symbol of
anti-Enlightenment, whose writings communicate 'the
individual perception as broken up by the rising mass
society', it is a matter of constructing an aesthetics
situated 'in the social space of the cinema, where the
experience of the individual is simultaneously that of the
mass' (11), and where a form of perception can be located
which, because it is constructed from the feeling generated
in the cinema auditorium, does not revolve around the gaze
and is not objectifying (12). The remainder of _Abendroethe
der Subjektphilosophie_ attempts to do just this. As with Nietzsche, any
attempt to reproduce Schluepmann's argument without the
elegant and aphoristic style is simply to miss the point in
more than one sense of the word, and this is doubly true in
translation. To make the matter even more challenging,
Schluepmann also knows both Nietzsche's works and his
historical context well enough that her argument
effortlessly and continually brings in new elements -- from
Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the women's movement, cinema
history -- to render her already dense text richly allusive;
to this she adds the occasional untranslatable wordplay, as
for example when she writes of 'die Differenz des Genusses
and das Genus der Differenz' (i.e. 'the difference of
pleasure and the gender of difference', 96-100). The
connections drawn, particularly between Nietzsche's
philosophical career (more than the content of his
philosophy) and the rise of cinema, are certainly
provocative. The individual reader will have to decide
whether all of this is brilliant or merely too clever, but
the book is as much a pleasure to read as it can be
frustrating to unravel (which, in my case, certainly
required the pleasure of re-reading, almost to the point of
eternal recurrence). To sum the argument up
very briefly, and perhaps less than coherently, in order to
reach some conclusions: Nietzsche's philosophical writings,
in their apparent self-consciousness, ultimately both
obscure and reveal Nietzsche's own essential lack of self.
Because these writings appear and are read *by women* during
the 1890s, the same period when women were discovering the
pleasures of cinemagoing (even though Nietzsche himself was
by this time no longer capable of appreciating or even
perceiving the cinema), and because Nietzsche's writings, in
a Derridean sense, proclaim not only the end of the
autonomous subject in Enlightenment terms but also the end
of writing itself, the cinema functions to take over from
Nietzsche's philosophy, and Nietzsche's writings in fact
culminate in the phenomenon of film: 'Film refers back to
writing, and the cinema to love as the incentive for
philosophy' (183). If this potted summary
fails to convince, it may be because, as Schluepmann herself
points out, she could not, after all, get there from here --
or rather, she has managed to get there but not by the route
that most of the book describes. As she admits only a few
pages from the end: 'The attempt to gain a
self-consciousness for the feminine love of the cinema from
the writings of Nietzsche has come to nothing'
('gescheitert'); and yet this is ultimately an emancipatory
development: 'This failure, however, also means a liberation
from subjection to the writing' (174). As for Nietzsche, he
has been reduced, as was already clear in his writing during
his lifetime, to a mere name, a brand name, so to speak:
'Zarathustra, the name as metaphor for his
[Nietzsche's] self, sets the example for the use of
the name Nietzsche as a metaphor by other authors' (177) --
including, obviously, Schluepmann. In other words, if you
like, Nietzsche turns out to be a bridge and not a goal,
here connecting not man and superman but philosophy and
cinema. Against the philosopher's
view of the cinema -- that is, the standpoint of the
'cinephile' -- as a 'tool for self-development'
('Selbstbearbeitung') to revive his lost faculties of
perception and of love, is opposed the view of the
'cineaste', who takes the love present in the cinema for
granted, and delegates to it everything which he cannot
identify: '. . . all content that refers to the reality
outside the cinema, all sentimentality and all unmasculine
bodily arousal. Thus is the masculine subject yet again
produced in the cinema' (185). Both cinephile and cineaste
are here pointedly represented as masculine figures.
Schluepmann wishes to draw attention to the fact that,
examined along the guiding thread of love, the cinema ceases
to be an 'abstract subject apparatus' and becomes a public,
open space ('eine Oeffentlichkeit') in which women have
found acknowledgment and a context in communication with the
space itself, 'a place in the urban landscape where they
become doubly visible: as part of the audience and as
apparition on the screen' (186). With this reminder that
neglecting this feminine 'culture of love' since the 1960s
has led to the decline of the cineaste's cinema, the book
ends, positing a 'crisis of cinema' in analogy to the
'crisis of philosophy' and 'crisis of love' (that is, of
'the social forms of private, intimate life') that
Schluepmann has described at the end of the previous century
(20), but promising by the same analogy yet another
emancipatory potential: I take this to be the 'Abendroethe'
described in the title, as Kant's legacy in film theory
finally collapses in upon itself. So has Schluepmann in fact
produced a new aesthetic? By the end of the book she no
longer even seems much interested in doing so, as opposed to
clearing a space for other women to do so. Whether she has
even done that may only become clear with time, but it seems
unlikely that a dense little book in German is going to
change many minds in America or Britain. Perhaps, however,
German-speaking filmmakers and theorists will take up her
challenge and translate their own ideas, either into English
or into action. Moreover, does Schluepmann
really need to enlist Nietzsche, of all people, to
accomplish even this (I do not say, or mean, 'this little')?
I frankly don't know. As often with Nietzsche (admittedly
*my* experience of Nietzsche), much of the argument seems
less designed to show you the logical necessity of the next
proposition based on what has gone before than it is meant
to wear down your resistance; but as often with Nietzsche,
the trip is scenic enough that you cannot resent your
guide's taking you so far out of your way. In fact, in
trying to recollect the journey afterward, you have to think
that much harder to remember which sites were of real
importance. In this sense Schluepmann, like Nietzsche,
certainly succeeds in making you think; the idea of a
'straight read-through' becomes deeply ironic in dealing
with a book so heavily invested in both Nietzsche's and
Schluepmann's 'Erinnerung' (normally rendered as 'memory' or
'reminiscence', but in literal etymological terms a process
of 'interiorising'). For a reader who is not extremely well
acquainted with Nietzsche (and I would claim to be such a
reader), this process can indeed be almost paralytic; and I
am grateful to my graduate students in my recent seminar on
classical film theory for helping me break this
long-standing logjam by going through the basic premises of
that era of theory with me -- even though Schluepmann's book
was never mentioned in our discussions, it remained in the
background for me (that is, 'in Erinnerung') and gradually
began to stand out from that theory in relief. The one thing of which I
am certain is that I am going to re-read _Abendroethe der
Subjektphilosophie: Eine Aesthetik des Kinos_ yet again, and
I recommend it as a maddening and invigorating read to
anyone else who feels that feminist film theory needs a shot
in the arm -- even though this may not be it. Ontario, Canada Notes 1. Unless otherwise
attributed, all translations from the German in the
following are my own. 2. Heide Schluepmann,
_Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des fruehen deutschen
Kinos_ (Frankfurt am Main: Stromfeld, 1990). 3. See Sigmund Freud,
_Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious_, ed. Angela
Richards, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Pelican, 1976), pp. 142-6. 4. See Guenter Schulte,
_Ich impfe euch mit dem Wahnsinn: Nietzsches Philosophie der
verdraengten Weiblichkeit des Mannes_ (Frankfurt am Main:
Qumran, 1982). 4. Fragment 35 from
Notebook 36 (June-July 1885), as it appears in Friedrich
Nietzsche, _Writings from the Late Notebooks_, ed. Ruediger
Bittner, translated by Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 27. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Paul M. Malone, 'Thus
Spake Nietzsche?: Heide Schluepmann's _Abendroethe der
Subjektphilosophie_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 24, July
2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n24malone>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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