“Reizend”: German as the language of queer autotheory in Robert Tobin's “Confessional: Sexuality and textuality”

Abstract

German as a language has often been rejected because of its historical associations with orders and violence, only to once again be respected and admired for its capacities of philosophical precision as well as for its musical lyricism. Loving German, however, is not easy: making modern German the language of literature often presents itself as an exercise through which the violent resonances of the language are to be worked out, as is evident in, for example, the works of Hertha Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and Maxim Biller. For Robert Tobin, as he shares with us in his posthumously published essay, “Confessional: Sexuality and textuality,” German meant something different altogether. Originally written as a preface to his book Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (2000), the essay was ultimately not included in the publication, following some objections that were raised by the publisher, being finally rediscovered on an errant floppy disk only two months before Bob's death. Having thought the essay lost, Bob was able to start working on it again and had planned to make the text the centerpiece of a memoir-project entitled Cancer Journals.

I was amazed when I read in the essay that, for Bob, German became the language of gay desire, the language of his coming-out. In “Confessional: Sexuality and textuality,” Bob comments on his own journals from the early 1980s which were written during a year abroad in Munich: “I find it highly significant that my first confession about homosexuality is written in German.” One of his early remarks about homosexuality in December 1981, in a paragraph about a woman he found attractive, reads like this: “Verbunden mit dieser Frage ist warum ich athletische Männer reizend finde.” (Reizend is of course also the use of the word “reizend” here). Bob's first experiences as a gay man and the linguistic construction of his gay identity are written down in German.

In his choice of German as a language of gay desire, Bob doesn't necessarily partake of an established literary tradition. Yes, German is the language of both sexology and psychoanalysis, as well as their Marxist re-readings. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about sexuality up until Foucault and the emergence of queer theory has in many ways been a German—a German Jewish—project, and Bob, with his last book Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex (2015), was of course one of the important scholars who illustrated this key point. As we know, Germany was also the country of the first LGBTQ+ movement in the twentieth century, centered around Magnus Hirschfeld, and his forerunners, such as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs. Yet, in these contexts, German was the language of science and politics, not of desire, highlighting the dissonance in Bob's approach to sexuality in a German linguistic context. “How did German literature become queer to me? And how did I become queer through German literature?” (Tobin, “Confessional”).

Parts of his journals are written in German. One might assume that sharing personal feelings and thoughts is more difficult in a foreign language because of the linguistic limitations of the writing subject. Yet at the same time, speaking a foreign language also means experimenting with words, testing their meaning and consequences: “it is like speaking in a dream” (Tobin, “Confessional”). Some writers have suggested, therefore, that the limitations with which one works in a foreign language can have a paradoxical effect. Alice Kaplan, whom Bob quotes in his essay, writes: “The simplicity of our communication moves us, we're outside of cliché, free of easy eloquence, some deeper ideas and feelings make it through the mistakes and shine all the more through them” (210).

Following Bob's self-reading process, the queer textuality of his German language journals lies in their irony. Yet the dialogue Bob performs in his “Confessional” further complicates the situation. This queer poetics, I want to suggest, should also be considered in the larger context of autofictional and autotheoretical writing of the past fifty years.

To begin with, the corpus of writing from the bequest of Robert Tobin allows us to juxtapose the academic and the autobiographical, while his “Confessional” represents a third type of text by revisiting and commenting on the earlier non-academic texts. Initially, Tobin's texts are separated by the law of genre and do not perform the seductive and suggestive conflation of literature and philosophy, a textual style popularized in the context of “French theory,” a specifically American take on continental thought and writing.

With its self-commentary, Tobin's “Confessional” adds a theoretical dimension to the autobiographical text, thus deconstructing the assumption that the autobiographical in itself—keeping a diary—already functions as an expression of the truth of the subject. The temporal split between the two scenes of writing amounts to an epistemological split: the former self reports experiences that the later self comments upon from a distance. The “naiveté” of the former is analyzed from an altered position following his coming-out as a gay man. Categories from a history of sexual subjectivity previously discussed in Bob Tobin's academic work reappear in the meta-text: the author reads his former self through a lens provided by the history of sexuality and queer theory.

With these textual maneuvers, Tobin inscribes himself into a larger tradition within literary criticism at least since the texts of Roland Barthes, particularly Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida, which bring together personal experience and theoretical reflection. An incomplete list of this genre of writing specifically influenced by post-structural theory would also include Jacques Derrida's Postcard and the writings of Avital Ronell and Wayne Koestenbaum. Autofiction or autotheory of this kind can present itself as a literary alertness to language in the production of theory (following Derrida's notion of writing), or as a theoretical reflection on autobiographical writing (as in Barthes). Both terms point toward the constructed character of the self either through narrative forms or conceptual framing, and thus work against the fantasy of an authentic expression of the self in writing. Textuality develops in a back-and-forth movement between theory and autobiography.

It was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick whose work created a rupture within this writing tradition as employed by academics in the last third of the twentieth century. Sedgwick used autotheoretical writing to move away from the conceptual framework of her earlier work, a project continued by writers such as Paul B. Preciado and Maggie Nelson, as I have argued elsewhere (Rehberg). Whereas Sedgwick's texts from the 1970s to the 1990s considered the structural force of language as that which binds the subject to historical formations, from the late 1990s onward her project was to make the body speak, to develop a poetological concept of autotheoretical writing drawing on affect and gender.

While Tobin's writing thematically belongs to this latter group of queer writers, his account of gender and sexuality, particularly in commenting on his former self, is more analytical than affective. Following writers such as Foucault and Halperin in his autotheoretical “Confessional,” he deciphers the structures of power and historical formations that conditioned his earlier experiences. Tobin reads his own life as exemplary for the discursive formation and historical forces of an era. The author who prefigured such an itinerary is of course Didier Eribon, the gay sociologist and biographer of Foucault, whose autofictional Returning to Reims was particularly successful in Germany. For me, these traditions, related to the theorizing of oneself as an author of sexuality, may better help us to determine the unique place and originality of Robert Tobin's writings in the context of German studies.