The Romance of Theory
Erotics and Study in Benjamin, Foucault, and Obama
As always, I want to take a moment to explore a thought irrelevant for my doctoral research.
A tenuous thread unites Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and former U.S. president Barack Obama: the romance of theory. Each figure entered the world of theory because of a purely personal experience of romantic attraction.
German-Jewish early 20th century writer Walter Benjamin is the key figure here. He experienced a double attraction. I will say something about this and then link Foucault and Obama to him.
First, as a too-young boy, Benjamin studied under German pedagogue Gustav Wyneken in the German Youth movement. This apprenticeship supplied him with his first critical attitude: that of the revolutionary force of young people. His essay ‘The Life of Students’ is the finest example. It was only after his union with Wyneken that he could speak of a “richer generation of children and youths” who serve as “the great transformers whose task it is to seize upon new ideas” (Benjamin [1915]: 45, 43). And, indeed, we should consider this a ‘union’, for Wyneken was a profuse advocate of pederasty: the practice of sexual relationships between adult men and young boys.[1] We can ask – and this is all we can do – if Benjamin was drawn to this critical moment by a sexual relationship.[2] [3]
Second, as a young man, Benjamin pursued Latvian actress Asja Lācis across southern and eastern Europe. Benjamin found, in her, both a lover and the illumination of Marxism. As is well documented in his Moscow Diaries text, Asja drew Benjamin to critical reflection, new films, literature, and extended reflection on his membership in the communist party. The following passage is typical:
“Yesterday afternoon I was in a pastry shop with Asja. They serve cups of whipped cream there. Asja had a cup with meringue, I had coffee. We sat in the middle of the room, facing each other over a small table. Asja reminded me of my intention to write something critical of psychology.” (Benjamin [1985: 18)
Asja repeatedly appears as the spark for Benjamin’s critical thought and the inventory of critical materials. It is only with their romantic relationship that we get Benjamin’s decisive turn towards Marxism. The fruitfulness of his 1930’s period could never occur without her.[4]
Philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, writing on Lācis, formulates the problem nicely:
“For anyone who has known the creative intensity of the erotic and the political as a double awakening, wherein work and passion are not separate corners of life but fused intensely into one, the decisive significance of their relationship will come as no surprise.” (Buck-Morss 1989: 21)
Missing in Buck-Morss’s reflection is an understanding of the violence of this erotic link. Both moments in Benjamin are transgressions: the former a victim of pedophilia, the latter a participant in adultery.[5]
We can now turn to Michel Foucault and Barack Obama.[6] [7] Writer James Miller recounted a now-famous moment in Foucault’s life:
“When the American novelist Edmund White once asked him how he got to be so smart, Foucault characteristically joked that it was all due to his lust for boys: "'I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school,'" White recalls Foucault saying, "'so I was sent off to a new school'" (which in fact happened). In this new school, Foucault continued, " 'there was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. "'In a sense,' " Foucault concluded with a flourish, "'all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys..'” (Miller 1993: 56)
And, in a shockingly similar register, the former president recounted his own sexual university years in the following way:
“Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.” (Obama 2020: 23)
In both cases, just as in Benjamin, romantic and sexual interest incites study.[8] But they contain slight differences. Benjamin finds theory in the moment of romance and sexual attraction. In both moments, he gains an educated whilst infatuated. In Foucault, desire is the force that leads him to study – it kicks things off, not necessarily making theory itself erotic. In Obama, theoretical understanding is not even necessary. Instead, it is a performative act. The key bit is the capacity to act as though he understands Marcuse or Fanon. This should not be surprising: a proper understanding would’ve given pause to the three-hundred drone strikes.
Let me wrap this up here. Benjamin, Foucault, and Obama all demonstrate the effect of romantic attraction on theoretical education. Against the desexualized study of Immanuel Kant or the modern natural scientist, these figures – and I really mean Benjamin – offer a model of a properly integrated life, a life in which romantic attraction and theoretical study are one.[9] [10]
[1] This argument requires two additional steps. First, a close reading of Wyneken’s Eros text. Second, a comparison of Wyneken’s politics, later French debates around consent laws (see Foucault), and the Ancient Greek politics of sexual tutelage.
[2] An interesting idea: conduct a symptomatic reading of Benjamin’s early texts in an effort to uncover a repressed sexual violence. Pay specific attention to any notes on the ‘erotic’. This would require a careful parsing of the influence of psychological writings on his thought, particularly Carl Jung.
[3] An intriguing thought: compare Benjamin’s participation in the youth movement with Jürgen Habermas’s near-opposite participation in Hitler youth. This would require a catalogue of Frankfurt School scholars’ political activity as young men. I suspect Theodor Adorno displayed a predictable apolitical period of study in secluded libraries.
[4] A problem: women appear throughout this essay in an exclusively secondary role. They work to incite the thought of a man, never granted their own primary critical faculties. I believe that this is a product of my case selection. A few potential solutions: Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir. A further turn towards away from heterosexual relationships would obviously help this issue.
[5] A potential route forward: consider Georges Bataille’s work – a tenuous collaborator of Benjamin’s – on transgressions.
[6] My arrangement explicitly calls to mind recent allegations against Foucault (Guesmi 2021). The French philosopher, the allegation goes, journeyed to North Africa and raped extremely young boys. This allegation fits into his well-documented fight against French consent laws and advocation for sexual freedoms. Like Benjamin and Wyneken, we need to ask if and how these supposed cases of sexual abuse informed Foucault’s writing. An interesting question: can sexuality ever be purely personal, totally separate from scholarly work? Perhaps his interview ‘The Danger of Child Sexuality’ is a good place to start.
[7] Do not take this pairing as a similar invitation to explore any allegations of sexual violence in Obama’s life. To connect this with far-right conspiracies of the Epstein list would be to tarnish this whole reflection.
[8] Another interesting question: is there a significant difference between the romantic, sexual, and erotic here? Is the emphasis on bodily sexual urges somehow different from the romantic imagination of a life together? Do these relate to theory differently?
[9] A potential next step: bring new developments in ‘auto-theory’ into this constellation.
[10] Another path forward: locate this relationship within Marxist debates on ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Do these lives offer an erotic model of ‘praxis’?