Nina Siegal: You have said of your book „Greed“ that „people are just marionettes of their social conditions.“ Do you think that exposing brutality between people can help expose social conditions? Or is there some other motivation to this process of writing?

Elfriede Jelinek: I am only able to write out of a feeling of rage at social conditions. That’s just the way I motivate myself to write; it’s my impetus. As Hegel says, human relations always lead to master-slave relationships. Violence goes from the top down, and in the end a child gets beaten or an animal is tormented. The weakest one always takes the blows.

You’ve been called a feminist writer. Do you like the term feminist?

I’ll always be a feminist, because as a woman you can’t be anything else. It’s not only the direct violence of men toward women, which expresses itself on so many levels, but also the much more subtle (and brutal) violence of the patriarchy in setting the norms to which all must conform. Even an artist like myself who has achieved something in her work is subjected to measurement by the male gaze, and it’s exactly the same thing with the female body as well.