\n
\nBetween 1890 and 1933, male birth fantasies became a widespread phenomenon in European culture. One of the key examples of male birth fantasies is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti\u2019s \u201cAfrican\u201d novel Mafarka the Futurist<\/em>. The novel\u2019s protagonist, Mafarka, gives birth to a child\u2014by his will power and by drawing on diverse formations of knowledge, from alchemy to theories of evolution. In addition to the consideration given the psycho-historical, cultural, and scientific contexts of male birth fantasies in the avant-garde, the contribution reflects on sibling encryptment within the relationship to the mother as one more aspect of a span of genealogy one might term \u201cMaternal Modernity.\u201d<\/div><\/p>\n
\nLe fantasme du male birth<\/em> se r\u00e9pand dans la culture europ\u00e9enne entre 1890 et 1933. Un exemple-cl\u00e9 du fantasme du male birth<\/em> est le roman \u00ab africain \u00bb Mafarka le Futuriste<\/em> de Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Le protagoniste du roman, Mafarka, donne naissance \u00e0 un enfant \u00e0 travers sa volont\u00e9, mais aussi en faisant appel \u00e0 diverses connaissances de l\u2019alchimie jusqu\u2019aux th\u00e9ories de l\u2019\u00e9volution. En plus de consid\u00e9rer les contextes psycho-historique, culturel et scientifique du concept du male birth<\/em> dans le cadre de l\u2019avant-garde, cet article consid\u00e8re l\u2019encodage de la fratrie \u00e0 travers la relation \u00e0 la m\u00e8re comme un autre aspect de l\u2019intervalle g\u00e9n\u00e9alogique qu\u2019on peut appeler \u00ab la modernit\u00e9 maternelle \u00bb.<\/div>
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Christine Kanz | Images: Adam Cmiel<\/strong><\/p>\n In Filippo Tommaso Marinetti\u2019s \u201cAfrican\u201d novel Mafarka il futurista <\/em>(Mafarka the Futurist)<\/em>, male omnipotence is fortified by male creativity; or rather, male omnipotence should be supported by a certain kind of male creativity. Mafarka, the protagonist of the novel (which was first published in French in 1909), is an Egyptian dictator who commands thousands of black prisoners. At the same time, he alone in the text gives birth to a child. This creative, maternal act, then, cannot be described as only a triumph over the senses and nature in general. The birth of Gazourmah, who is at once Mafarka\u2019s son and a new futuristic superhuman being, ultimately lets Mafarka himself become superfluous. Although the super baby\u2019s face has the features of a black male, Mafarka, whose own \u201cface was the colour of beautiful terra-cottas\u201d (8) and who scorns and humiliates black people, finally adores his son as a deity.<\/p>\n Mafarka il futurista<\/em> is set in Egypt, a deeply ambiguous Egypt. Take, for instance, the double-image of Mafarka as a Muslim, on the one hand, and as an Ancient Egyptian, on the other hand. Or consider the double-image of Mafarka as a wild, handsome, erotic Arab warrior and, at the same time, as a caring mother. Clearly, Mafarka is fascinated by femininity and maternity in a negative, but also in a positive, sense. He is depicted as an aggressive womanizer, whose exaggerated sexual drive, on many occasions, turns into sadistic violence. However, he is also characterized as motherly, as having maternal feelings towards his younger brother, as well as towards his newborn son. Mafarka is filled through and through with femininity. The image in the foreground of the modern athlete, who is cruel and omnipotent, is undermined behind that scene by traditional female attributes based on emotions, the body, and the senses.<\/p>\n The very introduction to Mafarka il futurista <\/em>culminates in a sort of male birth manifesto, according to which \u201cmen [\u2026] give birth prodigiously\u201d and \u201cthe mind of man is an unpractised ovary [\u2026]\u201d (3). But at first Marinetti exhorts his \u201cfuturist brothers\u201d to \u201cscorn woman\u201d (1). The \u201cbrothers\u201d should \u201cfight the gluttony of the heart, the surrender of parted lips\u201d (2). In the same vein, Mafarka opposes monogamy, fearing the love for and of a single woman: \u201cI want to conquer the tyranny of love,\u201d he declares, \u201cthe obsession with the one and only woman, the strong Romantic moonlight bathing the front of the Brothel\u201d (2). His \u201cbrothers\u201d should not be like \u201cmiserable sons of the vulva\u201d who \u201cstrangle the roaring Future and incalculable Destiny of man\u201d (3).<\/p>\n Mafarka\u2019s mysteriously produced child embodies the significance of male birth fantasies in the context of the early twentieth century avant-garde. Gazourmah not only has a black face, but also, and perhaps even more striking, Gazourmah is a machine\u2014an airplane, to be precise. Gazourmah spreads the wings of an airplane, which enable him to produce \u201ctotal music\u201d (205), music made from factory noise or the sounds of traffic.[1]<\/a> The standard reception of the novel sees the figure of Gazourmah as the embodiment of Nietzschean ideas of the \u00dcbermensch<\/em>. Certainly, the fascination with airplanes, machines, speed, energy, space and noise, around 1900, was a key trope of the European avant-garde, yet also an utterly male affair. But there are, I believe, further aspects to the crisis of the modern Western male subject, and the role of the Futurists therein, that cannot solely be accounted for within the conventional framework of a European history of ideas<\/em>, but rather, are infused with ambiguities generated by dichotomies, such as art\/science, man\/woman, nature\/technics, and last but not least, by the colonial encounter.<\/p>\n Given Mafarka\u2019s blatantly racist views, it is certainly odd that the lighter-skinned Mafarka gives birth to a son whose face is black. Indeed, in a moment of post-partum depression, Mafarka considers his own creation a failure. Gazourmah disturbingly resembles his black prisoners more than himself, thus casting doubt on Mafarka\u2019s ability \u201cto give [his son\u2019s] face the ideal harmony\u201d (186). But what is the significance of the artist\u2019s desire to project the alienation from his work onto the image of a bastardized, black child? The face is modeled after African masks, which were becoming increasingly available and valuable in the European art market. Consider, for example, the front cover of Carl Einstein\u2019s 1915 monograph Negro Sculpture<\/em>, a text that was extremely influential at the time. In fact, the original cover image selected for Einstein\u2019s book matches the description Mafarka gives of his son: \u201cI was able to design your wide almond eyes, your straight nose with its big mobile nostrils, your thick, insolent lips and broad jaw!\u201d (186). Like Einstein\u2019s African sculptures, Gazourmah is formed out of an amorphous black mass. And just as Africans, according to Einstein, adore their sculpture-like deities, Mafarka ultimately adores his own work, his son.<\/p>\n There are other parallels, too. Carl Einstein, as is well known, valorized the potency of the African art object over the beholder’s weakness and insignificance. Much in the same vein, Mafarka celebrates the annihilation of the artist-subject in favor of a greater force embodied by Gazourmah. \u201cThe oldest of us is thirty,\u201d Marinetti says in one of his manifestos, \u201cso we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts\u2014we want it to happen!\u201d (Marinetti, \u201cFounding\u201d 43). How does this half-male, half-female form of creativity support male omnipotence? And why are black stereotypes so important in mediating between male omnipotence, motherhood, and artistic creativity?<\/p>\n One main reason for Marinetti’s paradoxical appropriation of maternity as a source for a new form of creativity lies in the specific material itself that is required for this superhuman act: an organic, amorphous material outside of the tradition-laden Western canon, or in short, a virgin material. Thus, it is no surprise that Mafarka, creator of the dead female slime and pulp, gains inspiration from a mass of undifferentiated black females. Africa becomes the (muse-like) material that will provide Mafarka with the power to form the ultimate sculpture: a sculpture with \u201cnegroid\u201d (23: \u201cnegress\u2019s\u201d) features.<\/p>\n There is an uncanny parallel between Marinetti\u2019s use of the traditional triangulation \u2018mass\u2014fluidity\u2014femininity\u2019 (and here also: \u2018blackness\u2019) and Klaus Theweleit\u2019s analysis of Freikorps <\/em>constructions of femininity. Male bodies, Theweleit famously suggested in his book on male phantasies, become geometric because the soldiers\u2019 armored bodies have to be understood as a defense against boundlessness and flood, which is traditionally linked to femaleness. In much the same way, Mafarka\u2019s creations take shape out of the fluidity of black female bodies as a protection against \u2018femininity.\u2019<\/p>\n In Culture and Imperialism <\/em>(1993), Edward Said deduces the cultural crisis of modernity and its deep ambiguity from the modern artist\u2019s colonial experience. The artist\u2019s quest for a new formal language, Said claims, led him to draw on elements from both his own culture and that of the Other, a strategy Said calls \u201cnew inclusiveness\u201d (189). Hence, much like Said\u2019s torn modern artist, Mafarka creates a new being from the mass of despised black females. In the end, like the Western artist, Mafarka can relate to both cultures only with a mixture of \u201cfamiliarity and distance\u201d; he is at home in neither, never developing \u201ca sense of their separate sovereignty.\u201d[4]<\/a> Ambiguities such as these illustrate that the modern project of cementing male autonomy can never be fully completed.<\/p>\n In the colonial contact zone\u2014probably more so than in the heart of Freikorps<\/em> Germany\u2014there is no end to the project of fortifying the male. Between bronze and black, between Egypt and Sudan, black and white, the abject female never really disappears. That the female can never be totally erased takes a specific form for Mafarka, who cannot let go of his beloved deceased mother. This love relation is so powerful and symbiotic that its constitutive ambivalence causes anxiety.<\/p>\n One can question this text\u2019s futuristic impulse by demonstrating the presence of the past within it. This persistence of the past is inherent in the very ambiguity of modernism, as Walter Benjamin demonstrated throughout his work. Man\u2019s \u201cdesire\u201d to give birth to children is as old as mankind itself. As noted, the creation of \u201cMan,\u201d[5]<\/a> as described in Genesis 2:7, can be read as a male birth fantasy while the gods Kronos, Zeus, Prometheus, and Pygmalion are known to have conceived the fantasy into reality.<\/p>\n That the extraction of matter from dead bodies of black women provides the inspiration for the creation of black-faced Gazourmah recalls the Jewish legend of the Golem. According to this legend, the Golem is a product of mother Earth and the Divine Spirit turned creative word. It is especially during the twentieth century that the Golem myth resurfaced in a number of texts and films, including Gustav Meyrink\u2019s Golem<\/em>-novel and Paul Wegener\u2019s silent movies featuring the Golem<\/em>. The Golem is linked to motherless birth, to unformed mass, or even is referred to as embryo (Huet 243). He comes to life through the word and proves, in modern incarnation, a giant who kills his own creator\u2014again like Gazourmah, who finally kills Mafarka, his mother-father.<\/p>\n Passatismo<\/em>, the obsession with things past, was for Marinetti the worst insult. Instead, he aimed for an \u201cunwritten beginning\u201d that would free him from the authority of all literary predecessors. Marinetti was intent on developing a new kind of poetics, without traditional tropes. For Marinetti, \u2018birth\u2019\u2014both as a metaphor and as a metonymy\u2014belongs to the male sphere. Birth is often used as a traditional metaphor for the process of writing, and as such, it opposes woman to man as the producer of the work of art. Hence, in evoking this gender stereotype, Marinetti did not overcome passatismo<\/em> at all. At the same time, \u2018birth\u2019 is a matriarchal trope, standing for a primary female domain. And so, as Mafarka\u2019s desire to create a new world without the help of the \u2018vulva\u2019 inevitably entails men capable of giving birth to children, Gazourmah\u2019s birth must be read literally, as enacting a shift toward the male sphere that ruptures what historically has been a biologically argued metonymic chain: birth\u2014woman\u2014domestic sphere\u2014family.<\/p>\n Clearly, a re-writing of the female trope \u201cbirth\u201d is<\/em> only possible by a return to the past. Marinetti networks a variety of traditional images of motherless birth within the history of science, specifically, the history of alchemy as precursor to chemistry. Marinetti also invokes the theory of evolution, while (fictionally) foregrounding modern bioengineering methods. Considering Gazourmah\u2019s superhuman or, if you will, post-human qualities, one is struck by two extraordinary features: his oversized male sexual organ and the airplane wings attached to his body. Both pieces of bodily armature render him especially fit for the male technological future Mafarka envisions. But this idea of acquired bodily modifications was actually not so completely out of order at the time\u2014at least not when viewed from a certain evolutionary biologist\u2019s standpoint, namely that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829).[6]<\/a><\/p>\n Nature has produced all the species of animals in succession, beginning with the most imperfect or simplest, and ending her work with the most perfect, so as to create a gradually increasing complexity in their organization; [\u2026] and every species has derived from its environment the habits that we find in it and the structural modifications which observation shows us. (126)[6]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Lamarck\u2019s first law states that often used organs will \u201cgradually\u201d strengthen, \u201cdevelop,\u201d and be \u201cenlarged\u201d while disused organs will weaken and shrink in the course of time, \u201cand progressively diminish [their] functional capacity, until [they] finally disappear\u201d(113).[8]<\/a> The second law states that these acquired characteristics will be \u201cpreserved by reproduction to new individuals [\u2026]\u201d (113),[9]<\/a> meaning: it states the inheritance of acquired characteristics. If necessary, certain new organs would be present immediately after birth\u2014just so as to fit the needs of the individual in his or her specific environment, \u201cas a result of efforts\u201d (108).[10]<\/a> And so, as a result of Mafarka\u2019s efforts, Gazourmah is endowed with acquired characteristics, in this case airplane wings, which are necessary for living in a futurist world.<\/p>\n It is certain that if we grant the truth of Lamarck\u2019s transformational hypothesis we must admit that we look for the creation of a nonhuman type […].\u00a0We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and without a smile we declare that wings are asleep in the flesh of man.\u00a0[…]\u00a0This nonhuman and mechanical being, constructed for an omnipresent velocity, […] will be endowed with surprising organs: organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks.\u00a0From now on we can foresee a bodily development in the form of a prow from the outward swell of the breastbone, which will be the more marked the better an aviator the man of the future becomes. (91)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In the same text, Marinetti also declares that the new futurist human being will be the fruit of the male will<\/em>[12]<\/a>, which revalorizes, as much as it contradicts, the earlier inclusion of Lamarckian evolutionary development.[13]<\/a><\/p>\n Following Laurence Rickels\u2019 mourning-and-incorporation-theory, there must have been a dead and not yet or not adequately mourned sibling of the author himself behind the incorporated body and birth in this text.[14]<\/a> Already a reading on the fictional<\/em> level (still following Rickels\u2019 main idea) could lead to a different interpretation: from this perspective it would not only be the mother, but also his dead little brother Magamal, whom Mafarka could not mourn adequately. The mother then would have shared her part in this unconscious mourning:<\/p>\n The mother is always in a position to hide secret treasure in her child\u2019s body which she has trained, arranged, and mapped out; she can thus deposit the unmourned corpse of one of her children in the body of another little one who survives. The mourning that never took place is covertly and ambiguously entrusted to a surviving child who must carry a dead sibling and mourn in the mother\u2019s place. (11)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Is the birth of Mafarka\u2019s son the result of an ex-corporation? Is his son\u2019s body the formerly incorporated \u201cunmourned corpse\u201d of his late little brother, an encrypted result of aberrant mourning, and thus the young \u00dcbermensch<\/em> of the future a remnant of the past?<\/p>\n A full<\/em> adaptation of Rickels\u2019 psychoanalytic-autobiographical mourning-model would require looking for a possibly inadequately mourned sibling of the author<\/em> himself.[15]<\/a> Consequently, a closer look at Marinetti\u2019s biography would be necessary. Indeed, Marinetti did lose a brother two years his senior, who died shortly after Marinetti commenced his study of law in Pavia and Geneva. Marinetti then immediately gave up his studies and focused on his own preference: he began writing.[16]<\/a> G\u00fcnter Berghaus insists on the imminent influence of this family disaster on the onset of Marinetti\u2019s writing, stressing that brother Leone\u2019s death was also important enough to be included in Marinetti\u2019s autobiographical text \u201cWonderful Milan\u2014Traditional and Futuristic\u201d: \u201cMy brother Leone, beautiful boy of genius, [\u2026] stopped in his tracks [\u2026] by heart disease [\u2026] my inconsolable mother spent her life weeping at his tomb stone at Cimitero Monumentale\u201d (58).[17]<\/a><\/p>\n It is key to Rickels\u2019 theory of unmourning that the encrypted loss not so much contradicts as virally replicates and dismantles the unicity of thematic readings of works of mourning (whether Oedipal or pre-Oedipal in focus). Haunting is always multiple occupancy. In the Mafarka <\/em>novel, Magamal\u2019s death as unacknowledged is carried forward as the wish to give birth, which the loss of the mother conceives. It is not Magamal, but the undead mother who is the identifiable remnant in the text, haunting Mafarka day and night. Thus, in my reading of Marinetti\u2019s novel, but also of texts by Kafka and selected German authors of that time,[18]<\/a> it is the dead mother who carries the weight of those who never really disappear.[19]<\/a> Mafarka cannot let his dead mother go; the abject female can never be totally erased, and the modern project of cementing male omnipotence can never be fully completed. The idealization of motherhood and maternity is the key feature of Cultural Modernism. It finds its most cogent expression in male birth fantasies and, implicit in these fantasies, in the rejection of fatherhood. What is more, Mafarka\u2019s ambiguous relationship to his \u2018product,\u2019 Gazourmah, the machine man who is half-human half-airplane, even suggests that the Futurists\u2019 technophilia\u2014destined to produce new and improved overmen\u2014is not free of fear. The secret of birth, otherwise the exclusive property of women, the organic, material process that takes place inside, gives way to a masculinist crypto-technology of the dead (to which, according to Rickels, actual mothers are, in fact, given to contribute over their dead children). Male birth fantasies represent the turn toward the organic that must be brought under control. In playing on a variety of traditional images of motherless birth (for example, the construction of an artificial womb; Marinetti, Mafarka<\/em> 151), Marinetti foreshadows modern technologies of reproduction, in which, by the looks of it, the perennial fantasy attributed to men will cease to be fiction.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> This suggests a parallel with Luigi Russolo\u2019s Arte dei rumori<\/em> and the Futurist fascination with noise and machines.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> See Sigmund Freud, Das Medusenhaupt<\/em> 47.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> See Arnold Lionel Haskell and Jacob Epstein 42.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> According to Said, members of a colonizing nation\/culture see and feel the other\/the abject culture\/nation, \u201cwith a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their [the different cultures\u2019] separate sovereignty\u201d (xxi).<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> See \u201cDas 1. Buch Mose\u201c\/\u201cGenesis\u201d 2:7, 6.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> It flourished after having been published as a German \u201cVolksausgabe,\u201d or folk\u2019s edition, in 1909, furnished with an introduction by famous Ernst Haeckel (1834\u20131919) who did his best to direct general attention to this in his view important evolution model. Nowadays, it seems, this theory that had been regarded for so long as containing remarkable errors, has become interesting again after genetic research has acknowledged a certain truth in epigenetic theory and in the hereditary of acquired characteristics or even acquired genetic<\/em> modifications.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Thus, all in all he assumes \u201cthat by the influence of environment on habit, and thereafter by that of habit on the state of the parts and even on organization of any animal may undergo modifications [\u2026]\u201d (Lamarck 127).<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> \u201cFIRST LAW. In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears\u201d (Lamarck 113).<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> \u201cSECOND LAW. All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long be placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young<\/em>\u201d (Lamarck 113, emphasis mine).<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> \u201cWe shall shortly see [\u2026], that new needs which establish a necessity for some part really bring about the existence of that part, as a result of efforts<\/em>\u201d (Lamarck 108, emphasis mine).<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> See Wolfgang Lef\u00e8vre 52.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> \u201cOn the day when man will be able to externalize his will and make it into a huge invisible arm, Dream and Desire, which are empty words today, will master and reign over space and time\u201d (Marinetti, \u201cMultiplied\u201d 91).<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Hal Foster suggested a different reading of this contradiction: \u201cFor Marinetti the futurist subject must accelerate this process, speed this evolution, for only then might man \u2018be endowed with surprising organs: organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks\u2019 [\u2026]\u201d (122).<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> See Laurence A. Rickels: Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts<\/em>.<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> This statement references a personal conversation with Rickels following my public talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara, February 20, 2007 on which this paper is based.<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> See Luce Marinetti Barbi, \u201cReminiscences of my Father\u201d 52.<\/p>\n [17]<\/a> My translation, from the Italian original: \u201cLa grande Milano tradizionale e futurista\u201d: \u201cMio fratello Leone bel ragazzo geniale [\u2026] frenato [\u2026] da malattia di cuore [\u2026] Mia madre Amalia inconsolabile viveva piangendo fra la sua tomba al Cimitero Monumentale [\u2026].\u201d<\/p>\n Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften<\/em>. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenh\u00e4user (with the assistence of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem). 7 volumes. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972. Print.<\/p>\n Berghaus, G\u00fcnther. \u201cFuturism and Technological Imagination.\u201d Message to Christine Kanz. 19. September 2008. E-mail.<\/p>\n Die Bibel oder die ganze Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testaments. <\/em>Trans. Martin Luther. Philadelphia: National Pub. Co., 1967. Print.<\/p>\n Einstein, Carl. \u201cNegerplastik.\u201d Gesammelte Werke<\/em>. Ed. Ernst Nef. Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1962. 80-104. Print.<\/p>\n Epstein, Jacob. Let There Be Sculpture<\/em>. New York: G. P. Putnam\u2019s sons, 1940. Print.<\/p>\n Flores, Kate. \u201cThe Judgement.\u201d Franz Kafka Today<\/em>. Eds. Angel Flores and Homer Swader. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. 5-24. Print.<\/p>\n Foster, Hal. Prosthetic Gods<\/em>. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2004.\u00a0Print.<\/p>\n Freud, Sigmund. \u201cDas Medusenhaupt.\u201d Gesammelte Werke<\/em>. Vol. 17. Ed. Anna Freud et al. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1940-1953. 45-48. Print.<\/p>\n —. Gesammelte Werke<\/em>. Ed. Anna Freud et al, with the assistance of Marie Bonaparte. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1940-53. Print.<\/p>\n —. Studienausgabe<\/em>. Eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1969-1975. Print.<\/p>\n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust<\/em>. Texte und Kommentare<\/em>. S\u00e4mtliche Werke, Briefe, Tageb\u00fccher und Gespr\u00e4che<\/em>. Vol. 7.1 and 7.2. Ed. Albrecht Sch\u00f6ne. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. Print.<\/p>\n Haskell, Arnold Lionel and Jacob Epstein. Sculptor Speaks<\/em>. A Series of Conversations on Art.<\/em> New York: B. Blom, 1971. Print.<\/p>\n Die Heilige Schrift: Das Alte Testament<\/em>. Nach dem 1912 vom Deutschen Evaglischen\u00a0Kirchenausschu\u00df genehmigten Text. Stuttgart: W\u00fcrttembergische Bibelanstalt,\u00a01963. Print.<\/p>\n Horney, Karen. \u201cDie Flucht aus der Weiblichkeit. Der M\u00e4nnlichkeitskomplex der Frau im Spiegel m\u00e4nnlicher und weiblicher Betrachtung.\u201d Internationale Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Psychoanalyse<\/em> 12 (1926): 360-374. Print.<\/p>\n Huet, Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne. Monstrous Imagination<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n Kafka, Franz. Tageb\u00fccher. <\/em>Kritische Ausgabe. Vol. 1. Ed. J\u00fcrgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1982. Print.<\/p>\n Kanz, Christine. \u201cDifferente M\u00e4nnlichkeiten. Kafkas \u2018Das Urteil\u2019 aus\u00a0gendertheoretischer Perspektive (Gender Studies).\u201d Interpretationsmethoden am <\/em>Beispiel von Franz Kafkas \u201cDas Urteil.\u201d<\/em> Eds. Oliver Jahraus und Stefan Neuhaus.\u00a0Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. 152-175. Print.<\/p>\n —. Maternale Moderne. M\u00e4nnliche Geb\u00e4rphantasin zwischen Kultur und Wissenschaft (1890\u20131933)<\/em>. M\u00fcnchen: Fink, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n Kaus, Rainer J. Erz\u00e4hlte Psychoanalyse bei Franz Kafka: Die Deutung von Kafkas <\/em>Erz\u00e4hlung Das Urteil. <\/em>Heidelberg: Universit\u00e4tsverlag C. Winter, 1998. Print.<\/p>\n Lamarck, Jean Baptiste. Zoological Philosophy. An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals<\/em>. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1984. Print.<\/p>\n Lef\u00e8vre, Wolfgang. Die Entstehung der biologischen Evolutionstheorie<\/em>. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1984. Print.<\/p>\n Marinetti Barbi, Luce. Reminiscences of My Father<\/em>. Trans. Lawrence Rainey. Modernism\/ Modernity 1 (1994) 3. 45-54. Print.<\/p>\n Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista. Una sensibilit\u00e0 italiana nata in Egitto<\/em>. Ed. Luciano De Maria. Milano: A. Mondadori, 1969. Print.<\/p>\n —. Gr\u00fcndung und Manifest des Futurismus<\/em>. Manifeste und Proklamationen der europ\u00e4ischen Avantgarde (1909-1938).<\/em> Ed. Wolfgang Asholt and Walter F\u00e4hnders. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1995. 3-7. Print.<\/p>\n —. The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism<\/em>. Selected Writings<\/em>. Ed. W. Flint. Trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 1972. 39-44. Print.<\/p>\n —. Mafarka the futurist. An African novel<\/em>. Trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox. London: Middlesex UP, 1998. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cMultiplied Man.\u201d Marinetti: Selected Writings<\/em>. Ed. R. W. Flint. Trans. by R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 1972. 90-93. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cDer multiplizierte Mensch und das Reich der Maschine.\u201d Futurismus. Geschichte, \u00c4sthetik, Dokumente<\/em>. Ed. Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993. 107-110. Print.<\/p>\n —. Futuristische Dichtungen<\/em>. 3 Edition. Ed. Joan Bleicher. Trans. Else Hadwiger. Siegen: Universit\u00e4t-Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1987. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cTactilism.\u201d Selected Writings<\/em>. Ed. R. W. Flint. Trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 1971. 109-112. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cTechnisches Manifest der futuristischen Literatur.\u201d Manifeste und Proklamationen der europ\u00e4ischen Avantgarde (1909-1938).<\/em> Eds. Wolfgang Asholt and Walter F\u00e4hnders. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. 24-27. Print.<\/p>\n —. Teoria e invenzione futurista<\/em>. Ed. by Luciano De Maria. Milano: A Mondadori, 1968. Print.<\/p>\n Mecke, G\u00fcnter. Franz Kafkas offenbares Geheimnis. Eine Psychopathograph<\/em>ie. M\u00fcnchen: Fink, 1982. Print.<\/p>\n Rickels, Laurence A. Aberrations of Mourning. Writing on German Crypts<\/em>. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. Print.<\/p>\n Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism<\/em>. New York: Vintage Books\/Random\u00a0House, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n Theweleit, Klaus. M\u00e4nnerphantasien<\/em>. 2 Vol. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990.\u00a0Print.<\/p>\n This article is licensed under a \u00a0Creative Commons 3.0 License<\/a> although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing\u00a0under the\u00a0Canadian Copyright Act<\/em>.<\/p>\nEx-Corporation: On Male Birth Fantasies<\/h4>\n
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<\/a>While these elements can be easily recognized as stemming from the cultural archive of early twentieth century Europe, their combination with male birth seems unusual. Yet upon closer inspection, male birth fantasies are actually quite common in the culture of the time. They are present, for instance, in the psychoanalytical construct of male \u201cenvy of pregnancy,\u201d a term coined by psychoanalyst Karen Horney (365), and that was thought of as a parallel alternative to Freud\u2019s identification of female \u201cpenis envy.\u201d[2]<\/a> Male birth fantasies also remind us of the phenomenon of male child bed (couvade<\/em>), as described by the philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen and later anthropologists. Male birth fantasies also figure in texts by Franz Werfel, Frank Wedekind, Else Lasker-Sch\u00fcler, Ernst Wei\u00df, Ernst J\u00fcnger, and Franz Kafka. In film, we find Rotwang, the mad scientist in Fritz Lang\u2019s and Thea von Harbou\u2019s Metropolis<\/em> (1927), devising a technology that \u2018gives birth\u2019 to a female double within the blank of a robot. In Robert Wiene\u2019s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari <\/em>(The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari<\/em> 1919), Cesare is, if not born to, at least adopted by Caligari. Birth fantasies\/male motherhood fantasies are also discernible in sculptural work; for instance, Max Beckman\u2019s Adam and Eve<\/em> revalorizes the Genesis account of Adam as the creator of Eve, by depicting Adam as Eve\u2019s male mother. Jacob Epstein\u2019s 1915 The Rock Drill<\/em>, identified as \u201ca living entity\u201d[3]<\/a> by the artist himself, shows an embryo in its belly, while in Erwin Blumenfeld\u2019s Self Portrait<\/em>, a man gives birth to a woman, or at least, to a picture of a woman. Finally, we can also discern male birth fantasies in the Mannequins<\/em> or Waxdolls<\/em> used by the Surrealists to figure as male mother or as male Madonna with child (e.g. Lucien Vogel with a mannequin puppet or Hans Bellmer with his doll), and similar fantasies in some paintings, especially by Umberto Boccioni.<\/p>\nMale Birth as Analogy of Art Production<\/h4>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nThe Presence of the Past (Golem, Pygmalion, Prometheus and Alchemy)<\/h4>\n
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<\/a>In his Zoological Philosophy<\/em> (which, though first published in 1809, was most influential around 1900), Lamarck formulated two new evolutionary rules, which were based on the following assumptions:<\/p>\n\n
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<\/a>But Gazourmah also shares other features with the Lamarckian individual, such as being the product of a union of his father and the sun. In one scene of the novel, for instance, she-Mafarka lies stretched out on a lawn (131). Allowing herself to be penetrated by the rays of the he-sun, she-Mafarka seems to confirm Lamarck\u2019s view that the sun\u2019s light is the source of all life.[11]<\/a> Marinetti\u2019s text on \u201cMultiplied Man and the Reign of [the\u2026] Machine\u201d (which became part of his later infamous text From War, the World\u2019s Only Hygiene<\/em>, 1911-1915) actually describes the superman model of the future by explicitly referring to Lamarck:<\/p>\n\n
Conclusion: Mother\u2019s Mourning and Will<\/h4>\n
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<\/a>This turn to the will is another manifestation of ambivalence\u2014towards technology, Woman, and the Maternal. Man has to bring everything under his will power. But the male will<\/em> so often invoked by Marinetti cannot be the will of the male subject alone. In Mafarka il futurista<\/em>, it is Mafarka\u2019s late mother\u2019s painful mourning over her other son, Mafarka\u2019s late little brother Magamal, that triggers and enforces Mafarka\u2019s reproductive act, and thus the creation of the new futurist human being. Gazourmah is created according to his late mother\u2019s will or testament, which Mafarka internalized. Before and after Gazourmah\u2019s birth, Mafarka\u2019s mother appears as a sort of Fata Morgana<\/em> to mother-Mafarka (34, 193). His dead mother talks to him\u2014grieving over his late little brother. Finally, Mafarka believes that she gives him the order to give up his life for his son, the son that was created by her order and will. His potential motherliness fades away under the eyes of his mother and becomes a valuable good, taken over by his own mother. In sum, it is his mother who is the dominant figure throughout his life unto death.<\/p>\n\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nNotes<\/h4>\n
\n[18]<\/a> See e.g. my Kafka interpretation in Christine Kanz, Maternale Moderne<\/em> 90ff.<\/p>\n![\"web_y__07](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/web_y__07-end.jpg\")
[19]<\/a> An interpretation of Kafka\u2019s texts by Rickels also focusing on the birth theme might add plausibility to the importance of the mother figure\u2014in spite of the fact that Kafka also had an unmourned late brother. Rickels\u2019 reading implies a male pregnancy in Kafka\u2019s text The<\/em> Judgement. <\/em>Here it is Georg who gave birth to the \u201cfriend\u201d: \u201cThe \u2018birth\u2019 Kafka achieves with the writing of The Judgement<\/em> is conveyed within the story as Georg\u2019s creation of a phantom friend also to the extent that both deliveries circumvent while holding the mother\u2019s missing place. The phantom friend embodies \u2018the connection between father and son,\u2019 Kafka writes in his own exegesis of the story. This embodied connection is shadowed by the post\u2013\u2013the friend is phantom precisely to the extent that he is exclusively a letter-writing friend\u2013\u2013just as it embodies the loss between father and son, the two-year-old loss of the mother” (258). Moreover, also Georg\u2019s father would have participated in this pregnancy, at least this is how Kafka\u2019s comment concerning the \u201cbirth\u201d of the \u201cstory\u201d and regarding \u201cthe common ground\u201d between father and son could also be read:\u00a0 Their biggest common ground or hidden bond (\u201cihre gr\u00f6\u00dfte Gemeinsamkeit\u201d) the text says, is their connection (\u201cVerbindung\u201d) (Kafka, Tageb\u00fccher<\/em> 491, my translation). It must be a shared production or even their child on what is commented here\u2014at least this is suggested by the biological hint to the blood ties by Kafka himself: It is the friend that is, one can read in his diary notes, who belongs to the blood circle surrounding father and son (\u201cBlutkreis, der sich um Vater und Sohn zieht\u201d) and to which Georg\u2019s bride will never get access (Kafka, Tageb\u00fccher<\/em> 492, my translation).<\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/h4>\n
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