Törleß and the Scene of Reading

Abstract

The article reads Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless) (1906) as a novel of the institution (Campe) in which diverse forms of violence are intertwined. Contrary to the assumption that Musil’s novel aims at the depiction of sado-masochistic transgressions, my argument focuses on a reading scene that mediates the novel’s various potentials of violence: only when Törleß reads Kant does it become clear which violence and which pain are meant by Musil’s text. The experience of reading becomes a masochistic act in the course of which the pleasure of the text is recast in terms of a negative textual jouissance. Musil’s novel, in turn, becomes readable not as an exhibition of schoolboys in disgrace, but as an exploration of the violent structure of practical reason itself.

1. Novels of the Institution

For those among us curious about the repercussions of what Barbara Johnson termed “the pedagogical imperative” (Johnson 1982), the first decade of the past century is a particularly significant timespan, especially from a literary perspective and especially within the realm of German letters. Beginning perhaps with Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (Small Town Tyrant) in the year 1905, a series of narratives is produced whose focus lies on the education of youth—primarily young men. Accordingly, the social institution of the school, in particular the boarding school, moves to the center of a most powerful collective literary effort that includes, in addition to Heinrich Mann, names such as Hermann Hesse, Frank Wedekind, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, and Robert Musil. The genealogical unfolding of this new pedagogical prose can be observed in the ensuing century, for instance with Friedrich Torberg’s Der Schüler Gerber (Young Gerber) or Ödön von Horváth’s Jugend ohne Gott (The Age of the Fish) in the 1930s, Siegfried Lenz’s Deutschstunde (The German Lesson) in the late 1960s, up to Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher) in 1983, and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s Die Absonderung (Seclusion) in 1991.1 To be sure, this tentative genealogy lays no claim to exhaustiveness, but merely demonstrates the remarkable prominence the problem of the pedagogical harbors within the German-speaking literary history of the 20th century.

Many of the texts in question could be termed Institutionenromane (“novels of the institution”), to deploy a concept coined by Rüdiger Campe in various recent publications on authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce.2 The novel of the institution differs from the longer and more visible tradition of the bildungsroman with which it nonetheless entertains a complex conversation. One of its essential traits relates to its episodic nature, which is to say, the novel of the institution does not offer a holistic account of its protagonist’s life, no elaborate and well-rounded biography, but a life broken up into episodes. The novel of the institution produces the close-up of a particular stage in a particular life, paying attention to the institutional power-structure and its discursive mechanisms that produce a specific form-of-life (see Campe 2016). This episodic character puts specific emphasis on the tracing of a threshold whose transgression signals the protagonist’s entrance into the institutional dispositif. This entry usually coincides with the novel’s opening: the narrative tracks the protagonists’ initiation, tenure within the institution, and eventual egress. The alternative to an orderly departure from the institution is often simply death—one need only consider Torberg’s Gerber who chooses suicide, or Kafka’s Josef K. and his execution at the end of The Trial.3

The institution’s inner life, which is to say, the intra-institutional mechanisms shaping specific forms of life, are structurally defined through the application of violence. On the one hand, this occurs in a traditional vertical fashion as the top-down deployment of a force whose agent would be the figure of the sadistic schoolmaster—a motif explored in many of the texts in question (consider, for instance, the aforementioned Professor Unrat, Walser’s Herr Benjamenta or Torberg’s Gott Kupfer). This vertical line of force, which establishes a clear hierarchy between pupils and the representatives of the institution, is complemented by a horizontal occurrence of violence according to which students turn against each other, aiming their aggressive potential at their peers and against themselves rather than at the institution and its direct representatives.4 The horizontal occurrence of violence immanent to the student body—in the double sense of the student collective and the body of a student—is often connected to the welling-up of adolescent sexuality, as it is perhaps most clearly expressed in Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless. As shall become clear in the course of this article, the negotiation of sexuality, desire, and enjoyment that Musil offers in his novel is not reducible to the intersubjective relationships it depicts, but manifests, perhaps primarily, on the level of its very textuality and, thus, as an experience of reading.

The modern novel of the educational institution and its exploration of the pedagogical imperative bears on the concept of Zucht (breeding), a term that combines the semantics of growing (züchten), rearing (aufzüchten), and disciplining (züchtigen). Musil’s titular term Zögling (pupil) takes part in this semantics which is based on the verb ziehen (to pull), which in turn is the root of the verb erziehen (to educate); the pedagogical imperative, at least as far as the German language is concerned, is one of violent pulling, pulling up, and pulling out. The scene of education, thus, becomes readable as an allegory of breeding. What it breeds is no form of biological life, however, but the specific forms of violence that move behind and between interacting subjects and that determine the institutional enframing of these well-bred forms-of-life. Musil’s novel of the educational institution is principally geared toward the multiplication of the very violence it simultaneously serves to represent. Which is to say that violence is not merely a theme depicted in his novel but a name for the force that composes and undoes its formal edifice. In a doubled sense, then, his novel of the institution generates a mediation of violence: on the level of presentation, it gives appearance to violent interactions, yet beyond and beneath what is depicted and depictable, the principle of its formal constitution is itself subject to violence. The novel’s thematic content is itself a representation of the violence it breeds. Yet if the novel’s very being is itself subject to the violence it represents, it will inevitably fail to control this violence as the forms of violence that are at work here are more manifold and profound than any judgment about their representation would allow us to determine.

Reading Musil’s Törleß, it immediately becomes evident that the institutional structure, its disciplinary mechanisms and direct representatives, increasingly recede into the background while the horizontal occurrence of violence among the pupils occupies more and more narrative space. It is with good reason, then, that the scholarship on Musil’s novel has put much weight on the maltreatment of the pupil Basini, whose body is in the focus of his peers’ violent fantasies and acts. An occurrence of violence that is neither directly issued by the institution (as vertical force), nor aimed directly against the institution (for instance in the form of a student rebellion), is however still on some level sanctioned by the institution. It is for this reason that Campe can, in passing, state that in the sadism directed against Basini’s body “the foundational force returns, which, in the legalistic as in Musil’s sense, is the institution’s mystical foundation” (Campe 2007, p. 33; my translation). Implicitly invoking Jacques Derrida’s argument in Force of Law, this formulation sees in the horizontal occurrence of violence among the pupils a return of the very violence originally needed for the foundation of the institution itself. “[T]he operation that consists of founding, inaugurating, justifying” the institution, writes Derrida (1990, p. 941f), requires “a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust.” In other words, this line of thinking argues that institutional contexts rely on a foundational act whose violence the institution cannot account for. The violence that finds representation in the institutional form and within the institutional confines is, therefore, an offshoot (a Zögling, if you will) of the more originary violence, itself not subject to any already instituted authority, that conditions the very possibility of the institution itself.

In the sense of Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence,” with which Derrida’s text entertains a complex conversation, this violence could be termed “rechtssetzend” (“law-positing”), as opposed to the preservative form of “rechtserhaltend” (“law-preserving”) violence responsible for the perseverance and prolongation of whatever has been instituted. The latter maintains the institution while the former founds it. Thus Benjamin conceives their relationship as one of event and its representation, for instance when he laments that the German parliaments “lack the sense for the law-positing violence that is represented in them” (Benjamin 2021, p. 49; my emphasis).5 Any kind of institution in existence functions as a representation of the foundational violence that brought it into existence, which entails that this founding violence is not subject to representation: it is the unrepresentable substrate of all representational processes. Part of what I would like to suggest in this article is that the novel of the institution negotiates this tension of a violence representable and unrepresentable, albeit in a way that implicates its own formal principles: the violence at work within the institution is not only depicted by the novel of the institution—its own formal possibility owes itself to a kind of foundational violence that subsequently enables its representation.6

The relation Campe discerns between the performative violence that endows the institution with its existence and the intra-institutional practice of sadistic violence mirrors a central argument Gilles Deleuze pursues in his Presentation of Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze makes an important distinction between the psychosexual disposition of masochism and that of sadism: while the masochist, he argues, is interested in drawing up covenants and reaching contractual agreements, the sadist seeks to build institutions.7 The observable occurrence of sadistic violence within the confines of a given educational institution is, therefore, no negligible epiphenomenon. Rather, this violence is to be understood as an echo of the foundational violence responsible for the institution’s very coming-into-being. In Deleuze’s sense, this foundational—or law-positing—violence is already sadistic, which suggests that inherent to every institutional apparatus—whether its purpose be educational, medicinal, carceral, etc.—is a sadistic element of violence that represents the institution’s very condition of possibility.

2. Masochistic Economies

Returning to Musil’s Törleß, the question arises as to whether a focus on sadistic forms of violence, as foundational as they might be, suffices to explain Musil’s protagonist and his disposition. Törleß’s own relation to these foundational acts of sadistic violence appears to be rather complex. According to Carl Niekerk, the Zögling’s situation is not reducible to the sadisms that for Campe reflect the institution’s violence of self-positing. The vector of violence that targets Basini, for instance, is contrasted by Törleß’s identification with the victim, which for Niekerk suggests as “a foundational masochism in Törleß’s comportment” (Niekerk 1997, p. 552; my translation). It would be too naïve, however, simply to read this masochism as the equivalent counterpart to the sadistic outbursts that are grouped around it. It is more plausible that, within the confines of the sadistic institution, Törleß’s masochistic passivity opens up something like an eroto-pedagogical counter-program that traces the stages of his inner development. Niekerk suggests the existence of three such stages: first, the Zögling makes friends with two young men, Beineberg and Reiting, whose aggressive image of masculinity crassly contradicts Törleß’s tender being, pushing him into the quasi-feminine position of passive observer.8 Second, unable to contribute to the increasing instances of sadistic violence aimed at Basini, Törleß finds scopophilic pleasure in his passive disposition, which allows him to identify with Basini and experience his victimization from a secure place. Third, Törleß moves beyond his identification with Basini and renounces the pleasure it produces in favor of a stance of moral superiority (see Niekerk 1997, pp. 556–58).

Musil stages this final elevation as a tribunal that has Törleß testify in front of the school leaders at the very end of the novel.9 While being questioned, Törleß defends himself with long-winded quasi-philosophical deliberations. His stance grows increasingly “defiant” (“trotzig”) as his audience’s ambiguous reaction to his ponderings causes him a “feeling of arrogant superiority [einer hochmütigen Überlegenheit] over these older people who seemed to know so little of the human spirit” (Musil 2001, p. 155; see Musil 2000, p. 135f). The impression of his moral exceptionality is so strong that he physically elevates himself above the tribunal’s members, symbolically assuming the position of the one who passes judgment: “He now stood up straight, as proudly as though he was the judge here [so stolz, als sei er hier Richter], and he looked right ahead, past the men” (Musil 2001, p. 155; see Musil 2000, p. 136).

Niekerk points out that the three stages of Törleß’s masochistic development closely correspond to the schema Freud proposed in his 1924 essay “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Despite its brevity, this text offers Freud’s most elaborate confrontation with the subject matter. Freud’s basic assumption consists in construing the phenomenon of masochism as an effect of “the coalescence, which is so important for life, between the death instinct [Todestrieb] and Eros”—a process taking place early on in the formation of an organism (Freud 1961, p. 164; see Freud 1975, p. 348). At this early point, masochism coincides with what Freud here calls “Ursadismus” (“primal sadism”).10 Subsequently, Freud’s presentation of masochism distinguishes three stages that neatly correspond to Niekerk’s reading of Törleß. On the one hand, there is the so-called “feminine masochism.” Aimed at the development of essential dependence and passivity, it is mirrored in Törleß’s feeble masculinity and his hesitation before the scene of violence as he recoils from the hazing of Basini. On the other hand, there is “erotogenic masochism,” the actual mode of seeking pleasure in pain, reflected in Törleß’s identification with the beaten victim. Lastly, Freud introduces a third form of masochism that transcends the first two toward the spiritualized sphere of morality; it becomes manifest as Törleß’s “arrogant superiority” in front of the school tribunal (see Freud 1961, p. 161). My point here is not to probe the conceptual alignment between Törleß’s development and Freud’s schema so as to gauge its plausibility. Instead, I would like to apply some pressure to the third form of masochism, which Freud locates in the sphere of morality and which, as I shall demonstrate, comes to the fore in Musil’s novel also in moments other than the Zögling’s testimony before the tribunal.

Unlike the two preceding stages, this third manifestation of masochism does not take place on an intersubjective plane involving the relation of multiple agents whose comportment toward one another would be determined by the parameters of activity and passivity, acting and being acted upon, doing and observing, etc. Instead, moral masochism occurs within the organism itself, as a conflict transpiring between ego and super-ego insofar as the latter functions as the host of subjective conscience. The super-ego, Freud writes, “came into being through the introjection into the ego of the first objects of the id’s libidinal impulses—namely, the two parents. In this process the relation to those objects was desexualized; it was diverted from its direct sexual aims” (Freud 1961, p. 167). This development is critical for overcoming the Oedipus complex and yields the installation in the subject’s conscience of a moral authority, whose executive force is “borrowed,” as it were, from the parents. Desexualized and introjected, these original objects of libidinal craving are now transvaluated into sources of coercive power.

Decisive for the connection with Musil is that Freud, in this context, makes explicit reference to Immanuel Kant whose moral philosophy he considers to be a direct manifestation of the final, post-erotogenic form of masochism. He argues that moral masochism takes the shape of an exaggerated need for punishment addressed to the bad conscience located in the super-ego. For Freud, the introjection of parental authority, which finally caused the construction of the super-ego—a process that effectively displaces the Oedipus complex—marks the origin of all subjective morality: “In this way the Oedipus complex proves to be … the source of our individual ethical sense, our morality [Quelle unserer individuellen Sittlichkeit (Moral)]” (Freud 1961, p. 167f; see Freud 1975, p. 351). As the philosophical witness to this genealogical claim, Freud proceeds to invoke Kant, stating that the latter’s “Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex” (Freud 1961, p. 167). The categorical imperative, in other words, is an expression of the violent potential that became funneled into conscience when the parents’ external authority was introjected to establish the super-ego. Kant’s moral maxims, thus, become readable—to Freud, at least—as articulations of the super-ego’s oppressive violence. They are not derived from the laws of reason but find their organic foundation in the desexualizing introjection of parental authority. In this sense, the categorical imperative arises as the effect of a transvaluation of power.

A consideration of Musil’s novel that takes into account Freud’s schema must deem it much more than a curious coincidence that the name Kant also plays a rather significant role for the experience of young Törleß. This is not merely to say that Törleß’s moral masochism implicitly invokes a Kantian stance. The problem is explicitly negotiated on the thematic level. Recall a central episode: discombobulated by his math lessons, Törleß grapples with the referential nature of irrational numbers, which causes him to seek advice from his teacher. Waiting for his interlocutor in the instructor’s small apartment, Törleß notices a book lying there, later revealed to be one of Kant’s defining works. At the beginning of his treatise on what he calls “cynical reason,” Peter Sloterdijk gives a brief account of this passage in which he identifies the Kant volume in question as the Critique of Pure Reason (see Sloterdijk 1987, p. xxxi). In Musil, however, and these words are spoken by the math teacher, we read that the book that has captivated the Zögling’s attention “contains the defining aspects of our actions” (“die Bestimmungsstücke unseres Handelns”; Musil 2001, p. 86; see Musil 2000, p. 77). Hence, we have every reason to assume that the episode does not revolve around pure but practical reason, and that, in his free time, Törleß’s teacher deepens his understanding of Kant’s moral philosophy.11 As the exact title is never mentioned, the dubious Kant volume must either contain the Metaphysics of Morals, its Groundwork, or Kant’s Second Critique; in any event one of precisely those texts that “contain the defining aspects of our actions,” and which, according to Freud, articulate the moral consequences of the spiritualized and desexualized final form of masochism.

After the ominous textual encounter, Törleß’s mind appears haunted by the teacher’s Kant book. We read that, the very next day, the Zögling sets out to purchase “the cheap edition of the volume he had seen in his teacher’s room” (Musil 2001, p. 89). He reserves the break after first period to start exploring the text, yet the unfolding scene of reading yields immediate disappointment: “filled as it was with parentheses and footnotes, he couldn’t understand a word, and when he conscientiously followed the sentences with his eyes, he felt as though an old, bony hand was twisting his brain out of his head [als drehe eine alte, knöcherne Hand ihm das Gehirn in Schraubenwindungen aus dem Kopfe]” (Musil 2001, p. 89; see Musil 2000, p. 80). It takes him half an hour to reach the second page when he abandons the reading process in exhaustion—“there was sweat on his brow.” Sloterdijk reflects laconically on the scene: “Torless’s [sic] outbreak of sweating after two pages … contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism” (Sloterdijk 1987, p. xxxi). It is a truth, however, that discloses as much about the structure of masochism as it does about the workings of practical reason. It is difficult to miss the fact that the scene of reading makes itself readable as a masochistic rite of sorts, releasing a pleasure in pain whose source is the encounter with the text. The Barthian pronouncement of a plaisir du texte is recast in terms of a negative textual jouissance. Even though it hurts to read, Törleß pushes himself to keep going: “But then,” Musil writes, “he clenched his teeth and read another page until break-time was over” (Musil 2001, p. 89). The act of reading becomes a masochistic procedure.

Recalling what has been said about Törleß’s masochistic development, the sheer complexity of this scene becomes tangible. For not only does Törleß in the course of the novel transgress the feminine and erotogenic stages of his masochism in order to assume, as shown previously, a stance of moral arrogance—but this development here becomes mediated through a textual encounter that in itself appears to be masochistic in nature, and that revolves around a text, which, according to Freud, contains the philosophical results of masochism in its final form. One of the various pressing questions raised by these complications bears on the problem of aligning the scene of reading with the stages of Freud’s schema. If the reading process is itself a masochistic act, which form of masochism does it make visible? Is reading a form of moral masochism? Or do we have to assume a different, fourth modality—a kind of textual masochism that becomes acute each time one forces oneself to plow through a difficult text? These vexing questions are further complicated by the fact that the text at stake actually contains the conceptual fruits of moral masochism, thus prompting one to ask whether the categorical imperative is indeed located in subjective conscience or in the book titled Critique of Practical Reason? Otherwise put, is it the categorical imperative that hurts us when we read Kant? Is there a moral imperative at work when we read in general? Or does reading function according to its own imperatives? Is reading an act that fundamentally adheres to or renounces imposed directives, be they moral or technical? “What calls us to read?” one could ask, echoing Heidegger. Was heißt Lesen?

3. The Pain of Pure Practical Reason

Musil was not the first writer to explore the relationship between Kant’s moral philosophy and (sexual) violence. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche famously claims that “the categorical imperative smells of cruelty” (Nietzsche 1989, p. 65 [II: §6]). In particular, Adorno and Horkheimer (2002, pp. 63–93), and later on Jacques Lacan (1989), explored the violence inherent in Kant as they suggested viewing the violent orgies we find in the works of the Marquis de Sade as consequent manifestations of Kantian enlightenment. Musil’s episode inscribes itself in the genealogy of this discourse, albeit not without redefining its parameters, for it reconfigures the problem in terms of a textual encounter and an experience of reading. An allegory of reading as allegory of breeding, Musil’s episode is not reducible to its presentation and representational content, as it marks a site of violence that indexes all other forms of force, coercion, pain, and pleasure that are negotiated and multiplied throughout the novel. The physical violence that finds thematic representation in the novel and is directed against Basini should not be considered separate from the type of violence Törleß experiences when reading Kant: read together, they lead us into the very core of the problem of representability, as they open the very relation between noumenal abstraction (Kant) and phenomenal experience (Basini). The allegory of reading Kant is what posits the field of this opening, and it offers the mediation of all forms of violence that breed forth within and throughout the novel—from the forms of violence that procreate throughout the text to the violence that breeds the text itself. The novel is both a representation and a vehicle of this violence, which, in the final analysis, also implicates our own encounter with the text. Reading the scene of reading extends the allegory of reading to us who, reading Musil’s Törleß, read Törleß reading Kant.

If it is the case that reading, in Musil’s novel of the institution, also always means violence and, thus, elicits pain, this structure includes our own position vis-à-vis the text. As a novel dedicated to the representation of violence, The Confusions of Young Törless inevitably implies a negotiation of the violence of reading and, thus, a negotiation of the kind of—law-positing—violence necessary to render representations perceptible in the first place. Which is to say that Törleß’s scene of reading Kant offers an important directive regarding the ways in which abstraction and representation, that which calls on us to read and the scene of reading itself, are linked. Their connection takes place in and as an allegory of reading that structurally overflows itself, breeding ever new forms of violence. The scene of reading encompasses the rift between representation and its possibility—the experience of moral masochism and its conceptual articulation—and offers the privileged site for the mediation of all forms of violence that permeate this novel of the pedagogical institution.

I have yet to confront the question as to why it must be Kant’s moral philosophy that is installed as the dangerous supplement that enthralls the Zögling to such unprecedented degrees. The explanation that Kant is a proper masochistic agent simply because the attempt to read the Second Critique, particularly as an untrained pupil, is bound to hurt is not satisfying. If the importance of the name Kant in Musil’s narrative is not coincidental, and if at the center of his allegory of reading Musil places Kant’s moral philosophy, and if this allegory breeds a kind of pain that is not reducible to the representation of physical abuse, then one ought to take a closer look at the role of pain within the structure of practical reason itself, the way it is outlined in Kant. Psychoanalysis sees in Kant the prime model for the spiritualization (Vergeistigung) of lower forms of masochism, culminating in the terror of subjective conscience. In order to explore this connection between the economy of masochism and the structure of practical reason, it is necessary to turn to Kant’s text itself and to inquire about the ways in which the categorical imperative is responsible for a specific type of violence that results in a specific type of pain. How are we to understand a pain that would issue directly from practical reason? Would this pain entangle its own kind of pleasure? And who would possess the sensorium to experience such painful affects, given that the laws of practical reason are elevated above the sphere of what is empirically accessible?

Kant does not extensively discuss this problem, but he touches upon it. At the beginning of chapter III of “The analytic of pure practical reason,” he discusses what he calls “the incentives of pure practical reason,” and seeks to justify the idea that a will determined by the moral law is still to be understood as a free will (Kant 2015, p. 60). This is to say that the determination of the will through the law of morality does not rob this will of its autonomy. On the contrary, by enacting a “rejection” of all those “sensible impulses” by which it could be opposed, the moral law guarantees the freedom of the will (see Kant 2015, p. 60). Hence, a free will is determined by the “infringement upon the inclinations” (“Abbruch, der den Neigungen geschieht”) insofar as these inclinations might elude or oppose the moral law (Kant 2015, p. 61; see Kant 1974, p. 192). In previous passages, Kant introduces “inclination” as that which mediates the will by orienting the action toward an object of pleasure (see Kant 2015, p. 53). The moral law seeks to suspend this field of mediation in order to directly determine the will, which is achieved by an eclipse of the sensible impulses, disallowing a prolepsis of the will into the world of pleasurable objects. According to this model, the possibility of pain is tied to that of gratification and reducible to the object a given action could intend, rendering its place entirely circumventable by a good, that is, truly moral action. If pain is a matter of inclination and if the moral act infringes on all inclination, then pain has no bearing on moral comportment.

However, the problem with which Kant is now confronted concerns precisely the affective nature of the “infringement upon the inclinations” brought about by the law of practical reason. He discusses this issue in a peculiarly aporetic passage: “For, all inclination,” he writes, “and every sensible impulse is based on feeling, and the negative effect on feeling (by the infringement upon the inclinations that takes place) is itself feeling [Gefühl]. Hence we can see a priori that the moral law, as the determining ground of the will, must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a feeling that can be called pain [ein Gefühl bewirken müsse, welches Schmerz genannt werden kann]; and here we have the first and perhaps the only case in which we can determine a priori from concepts the relation of a cognition (here the cognition of a pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure [das Verhältnis eines Erkenntnisses … zum Gefühl der Lust und Unlust bestimmen]” (Kant 2015, p. 61; see Kant 1974, p. 192f).

The negative pressure that the moral law exerts on feeling by obstructing our inclination, Kant observes, does not bring about the sheer absence of feeling but “is itself feeling.” On its quest to circumvent the feelings of pain and gratification with which various empirical objects could endow us if we intended them with our actions, the moral law does not establish a mere vacuum of feeling, but instead produces a new kind of feeling that arises when all ability to feel is thwarted. What comes to language here is nothing less than the possibility of a feeling stripped of all empirical inclinations, resulting solely from the cognition of pure practical reason.

Kant argues that the feeling arising from the suspension of all feeling is a feeling nonetheless—and the name he gives this feeling, which signals the infringement upon inclination and, thus, denies its own status as feeling, is “Schmerz” (“pain”). This pain, however, is no longer the predicate of our relation to an empirical object, nor is it tied to an affective spectrum that it shares with the feeling of gratification; instead, it constitutes a transcendental kind of suffering, a feeling a priori. The moral obstruction of empirical pain is itself pain, albeit one that no longer resides in the sensible but is produced by the moral law itself. To the extent that every sensible impulse is based on feeling, Kant deems transcendental pain the type of feeling that persists when all inclination is thwarted, hence a feeling that suffers the sheer absence of its expression in the sensible. This absence is articulated in a kind of pain that is entirely disconnected from the empirical. It is a pain unfelt. Impossible to be retranslated into sensible impulses, this pain occurs in the structure of pure practical reason itself, as the a priori connection of reason to displeasure. In a sense, the pain of practical reason expresses the inability to express its own feeling through the sensible, rendering it a feeling pained by the inability to feel. The pain of pure practical reason is a feeling that feels the impossibility to feel.

It is doubtful whether Freud had this passage in mind when positing Kant as the model for what he calls “moral masochism.” In fact, the passage from the Critique of Practical Reason offers the possibility of reconfiguring Freud’s understanding of masochism with regard to the lawful structure of pure practical reason: if Kant posits an a priori relation between the cognition of pure practical reason and the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and if the only evidence of this relation is the pain that issues from the moral law as it thwarts our subjective inclinations and sensory impulses, then he implicitly recognizes the structural possibility of what one could term transcendental masochism. This masochism does not owe itself to the increasing spiritualization of masochistic desire whose final manifestation would locate itself in subjective conscience—rather, the feeling it introduces structurally precedes all empirical relations as its motivation is the law of morality itself, entirely independent of any sensory data. The cognition of this law relies on a violence whose eradication of feeling produces its own kind of feeling: an a priori discomfort that resides beyond what is empirically representable. Kant, thus, offers the possibility of a transcendental masochism of pure practical reason in which the law of morality and its relation to pleasure and displeasure are put at stake.

The brief analysis of Kant makes obvious why Törleß’s scene of reading deserves such close attention. It paradigmatically posits the scene of reading at the very place of any possible mediation between empirical representations and abstract formal principles. In the case of Musil, this means that the allegory of reading confronts the violence depicted in the novel with the very violence that underpins the possibility of this depiction. Ironically, Kant himself is introduced as the coveted object of gratification whose thwarting would be the mandate of the very moral law whose nature Törleß seeks to comprehend in the masochistic act of reading. His experience remains suspended between, on the one hand, the empirical trifle of reading too difficult a text, so difficult that reading hurts—and, on the other hand, the transcendental implications of the object of the textual encounter, namely Kant’s practical philosophy.

The allegory of reading Kant thus mediates the entire spectrum of violence and the experience of pain whose various offshoots permeate Musil’s novel. As the ur-site of violence, the site of violence a priori, Törleß’s scene of reading breeds transversal forms of pain and offers the ontological basis for the phenomenal depiction of violence that drives the novel’s plot. Its phenomena ghost through the various backrooms, stairwells, and attics that make up the novel’s diegetic context—but they find their counterpart in an a priori violence that thwarts all sensibility and empirical representation. A structural analogy connects the violence that founds the institution to the violence exerted by practical reason: both are law-positing in nature. As the violence within the institution mediates the violence that has founded the institution, the scene of reading Kant mediates the noumenal, law-positing, unrepresentable violence of practical reason with the represented violence that transpires among empirical phenomena. No other moment of violence depicted in Musil’s novel is capable of such mediation; it is only in the scene of reading that the violence that formally motivates action (Handeln as well as Handlung, action and plot) collides with the violence of the act itself.

It would be a fallacy to reduce the novel’s concept of violence to the sadistic acts committed against Basini, disconnected from the violence of reading. The experience of encountering Kant opens up the entire potential of violence, from the empirical violence the novel is able to represent to the foundational violence a priori that eclipses all presentation. Between them lies the violence of reading that allegorically extends itself to our own encounter with Musil’s text. To the degree that the allegory of reading interpellates us and our scene of reading the book titled The Confusions of Young Törless, its sheer excess puts into question the ontological status of the text, together with its representational capacity. It offers the breeding ground for linguistic violence in all its guises: from the imperatives that coerce Törleß’s actions, and the performative violence that institutes the institution, to the inscriptive power that gives the novel its form.