Object Choice: All You Need Is Love

Klaus Theweleit, Object-Choice: All You Need Is Love... (Verso, 1990) Klaus Theweleit is one of those guys you probably should be reading if you have any interest in philosophy; very few people in the English-speaking world, however, have. This no doubt partially because only two translations of Theweleit have appeared in English, Male Fantasies (only volume I of which is available these days, for some silly reason; I've been trying to get hold of vol. II for a decade without success) and Object-Choice. No matter that the latter is a smaller piece of a draft of a much larger work, Theweleit's Freud bio, which is in turn part of a much large work. Will we ever see it? Who knows? But at least you can pick this up, which is roughly equivalent to being able to rent Matthew Barney's The Order without the rest of the Cremaster Cycle being available. Whereas Male Fantasies is a monstrous, imposing doorstop of a book, Object-Choice is slight, coming in at 112 pages. It is also more of a personal project, or so it seems from reading this one; it could be the fog of memory (I read Male Fantasies a decade ago), but I remember that one being drier, fuller of facts and footnotes. No less readable, mind you, I love it. But Object-Choice almost seems like Theweleit sitting across the table from you at a party, tossing back handfuls of peanuts while poking at Freud's theories of object-choice, relating them all back to events taking place in Freud's life while he was coming up with them. As a side note, the back copy makes great fanfare of the idea that all this started with Freud's fifteen hundred letters to his future wife Martha Bernays, in the course of which she became the first subject of Freudian psychoanalysis; the text itself, however, only mentions that in passing, spending more time focusing on Freud's relationship with Carl and Emma Jung. In any case, you'll probably either latch onto Theweleit or hate him. But you can't do either until you read him. *** ½