Unrepressing Philosophy: Interdisciplinarity as Feminist Critique in the Work of Siegfried Kracauer

Walter Benjamin once called his friend Siegfried Kracauer an "enemy of philosophy." Indeed Kracauer—disaffected relative of the Frankfurt School—has successfully repelled any definitive academic canonization to this day. Trained in architecture, philosophy, and sociology, and known for his prolific writing in film theory, cultural criticism, journalism, and fiction, Kracauer's Weimar-era work in particular confuses the basic terms of disciplinary intelligibility. Yet, it is precisely this disciplinary resistance that makes Kracauer most valuable to philosophy, especially its historically marginalized subfields and scholars. Drawing upon the tool of unrepressed philosophy developed by feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff, this article demonstrates how Kracauer's heterogeneous composition style itself can be interpreted as critical feminist methodology.

Siegfried Kracauer's Weimar-era work resists disciplinary classification. Particularly during his years at the Frankfurter Zeitung (1921–33) where he wrote for and then edited the feuilleton section of the newspaper, his work assumed a deliberately heterogeneous form.¹ As Inka Mülder-Bach notes, "Here [at the feuilleton], he was offered a field for experimentation," where his thought "could be converted into styles and genres that crossed the established boundaries between scientific disciplines as well as between journalism, literature and philosophy" (9). This heterogeneity is a source of originality and significance in Kracauer's Weimar-era writing. But, as Gertrud Koch observes, it has also been a source of vexation for many readers, contributing to his abandonment in many academic circles (3–4).

Yet, this disciplinary resistance is perhaps what makes Kracauer most valuable to philosophy, particularly its historically marginalized subfields and scholars. This paper draws out that possibility, advancing key affinities between Kracauer's Weimar-era work and the scholarship of feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff. I suggest Kracauer's heterogeneous compositions can be interpreted as what Le Doeuff calls "unrepressed philosophy." Unrepressed philosophy acknowledges the blended history of figurative and analytic language in philosophy, and embraces this impure and ambivalent constitution as a vital source of meaning. Moreover, unrepressed philosophy is also feminist philosophy, insofar as it endeavors to expose and abandon alienating schemas of thought, particularly those already within the discourse itself. Employing unrepressed philosophy as an interpretive lens will allow for a study of Kracauer's work that retrieves the philosophical value of its interdisciplinary nature and unlocks its feminist potential.

In what follows I explore the grounds for this interpretation. I contend Kracauer's heterogeneous form played a vital role in his larger theoretical ambition. Specifically, his endeavor to articulate the "extraterritorial," or unnoticed, phenomena of everyday life required him to draw upon a diversity of figurative and analytic terms. For in order to explore what available discourses customarily passed over, he had to engage unconventional modes of articulation. But Kracauer's style mirrors its content in a more profound way as well. On his account, the extraterritorial—when correctly exposed—could convey information about the Weimar Republic's ambivalent place in history: teetering between the fall of reason and the triumph of myth. The maelstrom Kracauer saw between these dueling forces manifests in the variegated style of his work, which blurs real-world description with metaphor, and metaphor with ontological speculation.

In this way, I suggest Kracauer's writing realizes Le Doeuff 's unrepressed philosophy: by interweaving figurative with analytic forms and capitalizing on their juxtaposition to communicate a larger claim about the nature of modernity in Weimar Germany. But the criterion of unrepressed philosophy not only helps us mine the significance of Kracauer's interdisciplinary style; it also helps us to mine the feminist potential of his work, in particular, his pieces on white-collar working women in the Weimar Republic. Accordingly, the final section of this essay demonstrates the kind of feminist critique that may be drawn from Kracauer's writing when the criterion of unrepressed philosophy is applied. This in turn suggests that in addition to interdisciplinarity—indeed, as part and parcel of it—feminist critique is a fundamental tool employed in Kracauer's umbrella project: to articulate the extraterritorial phenomena of daily life and thereby diagnose the...