1. In the preface to Male Fantasies, a 1977 psychoanalytic study of “the fascistic type” in Nazi Germany, author Klaus Theweleit interrupts himself mid-sentence with an ellipsis and writes:
“...at this point, the sentence seems to want to continue, ‘I begin to despair’ (but this is the reality of a frozen semantics, not, in the end, of any feeling I might have).”1
Theweleit then begins a new paragraph, leaving the previous sentence unfinished. When I read this passage, I was stunned. Think about what Theweleit is suggesting here: that he is not the writer of this text, but that the text is, in a sense, writing itself. The first half of the sentence naturally leads Theweleit’s pen to compose “I begin to despair,” but then he thinks, wait, I don’t actually think this—I’m not despairing—but I feel inclined to say it because of the structure of language (“a frozen semantics”).
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