Epistemological Violence between Affect and Aesthetic: Rationalist Rhetoric in the Novel of Ideas

Robert Musil’s modernist epic The Man Without Qualities is a novel written against a background of fascist uprisings in Europe, as well as a quintessentially Viennese text written in the wake of the emergence of the Wiener Kreis and their logical positivism. These two factors make it a suitable novel for analyzing the intersection between rationality and fascism, in a way that sheds new light on how rationality is aestheticized, naturalized, and romanticized. These processes support and reinforce each other. By exploring the functioning of rationality and highlighting the novel’s implicit affectivity, this paper sheds light on the importance of extra-rational ways of knowledge-making, making it possible to consider fascist practices of self-fashioning and aestheticizing rationality through acritical affective lens.