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Klaus Theweleit Books

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“His only means of discovering how his body functions is to take bodies apart, as a child might dismantle a mechanical toy. The child's aim is not to fathom the functions of mechanics itself, but to find answers to the riddle of its own existence. Analogously, the unresolved question that underlies the soldier male's impotent attempts to gain mastery over objects by tearing them apart, and thus rendering them knowable, seems to be that of the construction of his own self— a question which acquires tremendous explosive force in a body never rendered capable of experiencing itself in relation to other bodies. The soldier male cannot know what impels him to tear out his own entrails, what moves him to spill his own contents in an effort to discover what species of being he may be.”

War
Book:Male Fantasies, Vol. 2: Male Bodies - Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
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