SOURCE: "The 'Alluring Abyss of Nothingness': Misogyny and (Male) Hysteria in Otto Weininger," in New German Critique, Vol. 66, Fall, 1995, pp. 123-45.

In the following essay, Kavka discusses the ways in which Weininger's virulent misogyny and anti-Semitism appear to have been symptoms of widespread male "hysteria" over the nature and place of women in fin de siècle European society.

In May 1903 there appeared in Vienna a study entitled Sex and Character [Geschlecht und Charakter] by an unknown 23-year old, Otto Weininger, who could not be immediately placed either as a sexologist, biologist, empirical psychologist, or philosopher. In the preface to the work, the author undertakes to "place the relations of the sexes in a new and decisive light" and thus to go beyond the common scientific categorizations "to the heart of psychology," but a psychology understood from a "purely philosophical" standpoint.¹ Weininger claims nothing less than to have...