Imprisonment and excessive femininity : reading Ulrike Meinhof's brain

The female criminal’s brain, in formalin, sits in the dark inside a jar, inside a box, in a storage cupboard in the basement of a university: the layers of containment, of imprisonment, betray more a ‘biological hazard’ than a straightforward ‘biological specimen’. This multiply contained brain belongs to Ulrike Meinhof, one time radical journalist turned figurehead of the German political terrorist group Rote Armee Faktion (RAF), popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. As it came to light only in 2002, following her death in custody in Stammheim Prison on 9 May 1976 and unbeknownst to her family, Meinhof’s brain was removed during autopsy and preserved for future study. Neuroanalytical techniques being insufficiently developed at the time, neuropathologist Ju¨ rgen Pfeiffer obtained Meinhof’s brain and stored it at the University of Tu¨ bingen where it languished for just over twenty years. In 1997, again without formal or family clearances, the brain was transferred into the possession of Professor Bernhard Bogerts – an expert in biological schizophrenia – at the University of Magdeburg for dissection and analysis. Whilst it is not entirely unusual for a brain to be removed during autopsy, the various registers within which this specific brain was brought to resonate in 1970s West Germany bear thinking about.2 Importantly, the removal of Meinhof’s brain poses the question of how gender is implicated in the production of terrorism. The state’s clandestine removal, secreting away and dissection, without formal consent, of Meinhof’s brain betrays a preoccupation with the need to contain the female terrorist – to continue to imprison her post mortem. The imprisonment of Meinhof’s brain is a response not only to the threat of female terrorism but also to the threat of femininity more generally. The construction of the female terrorist/the feminine as threat is the consequence of the way that the political has been conceived in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. In particular, the imprisonment of Meinhof’s brain points to the ways the ideal of freedom has been posited in masculine terms. Freedom is understood within Enlightenment thinking as the dispensation of reason. By contrast, the feminine has been represented as the embodiment of unreason. It is precisely the imprisonment of Woman – her exclusion from the political and its structuring ideal of freedom – which Helene Cixous describes as ‘decapitation’. The ‘loss of woman’s head’, that is, is a condition of the possibility of ‘freedom’ in Western culture. Ultimately, efforts to decapitate Meinhof are always futile in that they produce an excess that problematises the very boundaries that establish containment as a possibility and dissembles the operation of control. Reading the trajectories of Meinhof’s brain through the lens of decapitation, this article traces a series of double movements implicit in the brain’s containment, excision and eventual dissection in order to interrogate how this doubling disturbs the discursive coherence of the freedom to which reason aspires and, in so doing, opens up the possibility of critique. In its deconstruction of the seamless circulation of masculine reason, Meinhof’s brain constitutes a site upon which the implosion of the Western Enlightenment notion of freedom is marked. As such, the critique rendered possible by Meinhof’s brain probes the limits of the political.