Title The return of the feminine

Author(s) Fong, Ho-yin, Ian.; .

Citation

Issue Date 2007

URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/53128

Rights The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patentrights) and the right to use in future works.

Abstract of thesis entitled

The Return of the Feminine: Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke

Submitted by

Ian FONG Ho Yin

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

at The University of Hong Kong

in May 2007

The “feminine” discussed throughout this thesis does not primarily refer to women, but describes a kind of thought which emphasises the non-existence of origins and single truth, and the impossibility of maintaining single identity. This thesis treats the “feminine” as a non-systematic way of thinking which challenges the existence of thought based upon knowable, objective assumptions, and the idea of time existing in a linear progression. It does not focus on truth as demonstrable, but on (re)interpreting. This thesis discusses how “feminine” thought works within the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the poetic writings of Rainer Maria Rilke. The admiration of these writers for Lou Andreas-Salome suggests the importance of giving attention to her. She illuminates the fact that the challenge to patriarchy lies in fighting for the liberation of oppressed women, and in promoting the destabilising effects of “feminine” thought on the patriarchal ideology, phallogocentrism.

Chapter one discusses how both sexes are repressed to think within a patriarchal mode relying on single truth and the priority of masculine identity. If the return of “feminine” thought is subversive to phallogocentrism, the stability of patriarchy and sexual stereotype will be disturbed. Chapter two discusses how Nietzsche’s writings generate readings of the “feminine,” while giving due acknowledgement to his misogyny. It draws attention to Salome’s characterisation of him in terms of sado-masochism. Chapter three shows how

eternal recurrence can be seen as a tragedy to the subject who clings onto an identity but is afraid of eternal becoming. Part one on Nietzsche shows that he who advocates “feminine” thought cannot escape from the patriarchal power in marginalizing women.

Chapter four shows how Freud cannot have a systematic thinking in the conception of masochism, as seen in his discussion of dreams, narcissistic women, and crime. Chapter five, discusses the conception of the “return” in Freud, and argues that there is only passive repetition which can be resulted from repression of the death instinct. The discussion of the death instinct illuminates the “nature” of psychoanalysis. With reference to the “‘Wolf Man’ Case,” chapter six discusses the working of more “feminine” thought in Freud’s discussion of the relationship between cause and effect, and between an earlier and a later event. Chapters on Freud show his awareness of the limitation of psychoanalysis, and show how psychoanalysis can be seen as a developing on-going body of thought. These chapters, together with those on Nietzsche, show how philosophy and psychoanalysis have their limitation in drawing on “feminine” thought. Chapter seven, which begins with a reading of Rilke as hysterical, according to Salome, examines how Rilke’s poetic writings free him from the limitations of socially validated and normative sexual difference with reference to the non-sexed angel in the Duino Elegies and love in “The Prodigal Son” in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Chapter eight discusses how Salome’s life and works suggest ways for improving women’s conditions in patriarchy, and draw attention to the destabilising effects of “feminine” thought. (495 words)

The Return of the Feminine: Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke

by

Ian FONG Ho Yin

方浩然

B.Soc.Sc, CUHK; M.A. HKU.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong.

May 2007

Declarations

I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is

made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report

submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other

qualifications.

Signed …………………………………………..

Fong Ho Yin, Ian

ii

Acknowledgments

This thesis, from a single punctuation mark to the main arguments, can hardly exist

without Professor Jeremy Tambling, whose confidence in my ability has always been more

than mine, and whose short course on postmodernism in fall 1997 enticed me to enter the

challenging and interesting realm of literature, and subsequently to read an MA in Literary

and Cultural Studies offered by the Department of Comparative Literature, The University of

Hong Kong. Since then, I have been learning the ways to approach literature and critical

theory – reading one in parallel to the other – whether in his class, his office, his home,

restaurants, or in a hurry to and from these four places from the early morning to midnight,

with him and/or his other graduate students. Professor Tambling creates a serious, inspiring

academic atmosphere that sparkles and sustains my passion to read, write and discuss topics

extensively ranging from film, opera, play, music, fine arts, literature, poetry (from the

classical period to modern and postmodern time) to literary and cultural theories. I have

always been stunted by his crave for and breadth of knowledge, his non-depleted energy, his

sincerity in research and knowledge production, his speed in reading and writing, and his

escalating expectation on but intimate care for his students. As his student, I realize that I

have more mental energy in reading and writing than I know, and enjoy doing research in a

serious and patient way. Above all, from him, I taste the smell of books. He has set up a

leading example of a real scholar and paved for me a path I cannot imagine to take before

meeting him. I am lucky that this thesis can be finished under his supervision and can witness

the process from being his student to his friend.

This thesis cannot be in this complete stage without invaluable comments from my

thesis examiners: Dr. David Alderson, Professor Ackbar Abbas, and Dr. Paul Smethurst.

I would like to express my gratitude to the following scholars who inspired me during

my studies in the Department of Comparative Literature: Professor Ackbar Abbas, Dr. Patricia

Erens, Dr. Mette Hjort, Dr. Esther Cheung, and Dr. Mirana Szeto. I would also like to thank

Dr. Susan Ingram for her advice on Lou Andreas-Salomé.

I would also like to thank the organizer and the audience of the departmental seminar

series in the Department of Comparative Literature of The University of Hong Kong. The two

papers entitled “Criminals and Guilt: An Instance of Nietzsche in Freud” presented in

iii

February 2005 and “Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction” in September 2005 became the

earlier versions of chapter four and six respectively. I am grateful to Professor Daniel White

of Florida Atlantic University who showed his interest in and commented on my paper

entitled “The Birth of the ‘Abysmal Thought’ as a Woman: On the Relationship Between

Eternal Return and Femininity” (which became the earlier version of chapter three) presented

in the Humanities Conference in the University of Cambridge in August 2005, organized by

the Common Ground.

The friendship of Dr. Lo Wai Chun sustains me through the process of writing this

thesis. In his company, I never feel intellectually alone. His endless encouragement conjures

in me confidence enough to teach in a course on eternal recurrence in Philosophia Cultural

Society, the subject matter of which gave direction to this thesis.

My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Paul Kong, Dr. Anita Lee and Kitty Lin for their

meticulous reading of and critical comment on my drafts amidst their hectic schedule, and to

Chan Wai Chung for sharing with me his readings of Blanchot, Derrida and other critical

theorists. I would also like to thank Issac Hui and Adrian Tam for their invaluable input to this

thesis. The timely help from Hung Yu Yui is unforgettable. I am lucky that I could meet

students of the Gender Studies course. They give me joy and insights, and, some, friendship.

Special thanks go to Bacchus Fung (Hei) and Carrie Wong (Siu Chun). Like Rilke who has an

angel in the final stage of his life, I have, in the final stage of writing, which is horrible, an

angel to rescue me. She is Tiffany Tang.

Mr Jim Jan Zen and Ms Monica Au Yeung are more than my bosses in American

International Assurance Company (Bermuda) Limited. They appreciate my naughtiness and

serve as my life educators. Never can I forget my ex-colleague Benny Tan, who always

encourages me to finish this thesis with beers.

This thesis is a material form of my love to my family, one that would otherwise have

remained unspoken but understood. Thanks for the understanding of my wife’s family as well.

The life-long care and tolerance of Chan Yuk Yue has always been in my heart. She not only

drives this thesis to completion but also eases my worry in the risk of taking up an intellectual

career.

iv

Contents

Declarations ............................................................................................................................ iv

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................... ii

Chapter One: Introduction: The “Feminine” as a Mode of Thought................................. 1

I – The Subject Matter: The “Feminine” or Women ................................................... 1 II – Sexual Difference in Modes of Thought .............................................................. 4

Masculine Thought................................................................................................ 12 Feminine Thought ................................................................................................. 17

III –The “Feminine” as “Weak” Thought.................................................................. 23

Chapter Two: Nietzsche’s Understanding of “Woman” .................................................... 27

I – Ambivalence towards “Woman”.......................................................................... 28 II – Behind Nietzsche’s Ambivalence ....................................................................... 31 III – Overman and “Woman” .................................................................................... 36 IV – The Whip........................................................................................................... 38 V – Sadism, Masochism and Bisexuality.................................................................. 42

Chapter Three: Eternal Recurrence: A Tragic Thought.................................................... 47

I – Introducing the Concept....................................................................................... 47 II – Eternal Recurrence as a Challenge ..................................................................... 50 III – Zarathustra’s Ambivalence towards eternal recurrence..................................... 54

“On the Vision and The Riddle” ........................................................................... 54 “On Involuntary Bliss”......................................................................................... 60 “The Convalescent” ............................................................................................. 61 “The Other Dancing Song”.................................................................................. 63 “Zarathustra’s Prologue” and “The Sign” .......................................................... 63

IV – Ecce Homo: Eternal Recurrence in Dionysian Music....................................... 65

Chapter Four: Freud and Masochism ................................................................................. 70

I – Freud on His Dreams ........................................................................................... 71 II – The Narcissistic Woman ..................................................................................... 74

Salomé and Narcissism ......................................................................................... 75 “The Affirmative Woman” .................................................................................... 77 Narcissism, Affirmation and Masochism .............................................................. 78

III – Freud on Crime and Guilt ................................................................................. 79

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Nietzsche’s Psychological Interpretation of Crime and Guilt............................... 81 Freud’s Understanding of “On the Pale Criminal”.............................................. 82

IV – Woman, Crime, Patriarchal Fantasy.................................................................. 83

Chapter Five: From Repetition to the Death Instinct ........................................................ 87

I – Repetition............................................................................................................. 90 Repetition and the Pleasure Principle .................................................................. 90 Repetition “Beyond the Pleasure Principle’......................................................... 92

II – The Death Instinct .............................................................................................. 93 Speculation............................................................................................................ 94 Multiple Interpretations of the Death Instinct ...................................................... 95

III - Psychoaoanalysis Beyond the Pleasure Principle ............................................ 101

Chapter Six: Psychoanalysis and Problems of the “Origins”.......................................... 105

I – The “Wolf Man’s” Primal Scene........................................................................ 106 II – Questions of the “Origins” ................................................................................111

Recollection or Construction ............................................................................... 111 Undecidability of Causal Relationship ................................................................112 Undecidability of Temporal Relationship ............................................................115 The “Past” as the Creation of the “Present” ......................................................116

III – Freud’s Positioning of Psychoanalysis............................................................ 120

Chapter Seven: Art and the “Feminine” ........................................................................... 123

I – Rilke and Hysteria ............................................................................................. 124 The “Prodigal Son”............................................................................................ 126 Hysteria and Art.................................................................................................. 128 Hysteria and Psychoanalysis .............................................................................. 130

II – Existence and Terror of the Angel .................................................................... 131 Completeness of the Angel .................................................................................. 132 The Incompleteness of a Human Being............................................................... 134

III – Transformation ................................................................................................ 141

Chapter Eight: Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Affirming Woman, and the “Feminine”.... 147

Salomé’s Conception of Woman ............................................................................. 150 Salomé’s Response to Patriarchy ............................................................................ 155

Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 162

1

Chapter One: Introduction: The “Feminine” as a Mode of Thought

I – THE SUBJECT MATTER: THE “FEMININE” OR WOMEN

This thesis attempts to articulate ways of reading the “feminine” in the writings of

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1938) and Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875-1926). The “feminine” discussed throughout the thesis describes a kind of thought,

rather than primarily referring to women. Although the focus of this thesis is on the

“feminine,” it is not meant to negate feminist concerns for women, who suffer in their social

relationships with men, and are victims of patriarchy. There is one woman to be discussed in

this thesis: Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) who had her own response to patriarchy.1 The

discussion of her appears in the last chapter.

To feminists, using Toril Moi’s understanding, “[f]eminism … is a political project

dedicated to ‘the struggle against patriarchy and sexism.’”2 Liberation of women from

patriarchy is the primary concern of the feminists. The importance of Moi (who is much

influenced by Simone de Beauvoir whom she regards as “the greatest feminist theorist of our

time”3) in the feminist movement, which accounts for the thesis’s reference to her writings in

understanding the liberation of woman, is that she can bridge two understandings of women.

One may be summarised as looking at the sexes in terms of biological determination and the

other sees them as culturally defined. Moi goes back to Beauvoir’s concept of “lived

experience,” and says, “A woman is someone with a female body from beginning to end, from

the moment she is born until the moment she dies, but that body is her situation, not her

destiny”4. “The body as a situation is the concrete body experienced as meaningful, and

socially and historically situated” (74). The body is a crucial part of “lived experience.”5

1 Lou Andreas-Salomé will be referred to by Salomé throughout the thesis. 2 Toril Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.,

USA: Blackwell, 1990) 3. See Michael Payne’s “Introduction.” 3 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge,

1995) 91. For Moi’s discussion of de Beauvoir, see Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir and What is a Woman? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 3-15.

4 Toril Moi, What is a Woman? 76. 5 See Moi, What is a Woman? 74. Moi says, “It is no coincidence that the sentence ‘One

is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ introduces the volume of The Second Sex that bears the title ‘Lived Experience…’” This is the title of Book Two of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997) In Vintage edition (1997) the title of Book Two is translated as “Woman’s Life Today.”

2

Therefore, from Moi’s understanding of Beauvoir, “only the study of concrete cases – of lived

experience – will tell us exactly what it means to be a woman in a given context. It is

impossible to derive the definition of woman from an account of social norms alone, just as it

is impossible to derive the definition of ‘woman’ from an account of biological facts alone”

(76).6 Women are not required somehow to prove that they are ‘real’ women, to prove that

they can conform to someone else’s criteria for what a woman should be like (77). Moi

criticises the situation where “patriarchal oppression consists of imposing certain social

standards of femininity on all biological women, in order precisely to make us believe that the

chosen standards for ‘femininity’ are natural.”7 Such “natural standards” of “femininity,” as

Moi criticises, are the negative of masculinity under patriarchal ideology (16). Such standards

make the woman believe that she is anatomised as inferior to man. Moi rejects biological

determinism (anatomy is destiny) as a way of defining women.8 She says, “it still remains

politically essential for feminists to defend women as women in order to counteract the

patriarchal oppression that precisely defines women as women.”9 It is, therefore, not

surprising to see that she praises The Second Sex as “a liberating read” because it is “a book

that does not require women somehow to prove that they are ‘real’ women, to prove that they

can conform to someone else’s criteria for what a woman should be like” (77).10

From this reading of women, to find the “feminine” in both men and women may seem

to play in the hands of those who would think that if men can be feminine, there is no feminist

struggle to be waged; so ignoring real oppressive social relations of women with men, and the

importance of politics to liberate women from patriarchal oppression. I am aware of the

power of patriarchy, which shows itself in social relationships: paying no regard to these

social relationships implies ignorance of women’s oppression in patriarchy. Any politics must

fight against this situation. However, it is also worth pointing out that even if men, compared

with women, are in a more privileged position in patriarchal society, they are oppressed in a

different way under phallogocentrism, an ideological weapon of patriarchy, though less

6 Moi is using de Beauvoir to criticise Judith Butler who says anyone can be a woman.

For Moi’s criticism of Butler, see What is a Woman? 3-5, 40-57, 72-9 and 89-90. 7 Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir 10. 8 Moi says that Butler at this point follows de Beauvoir (Moi, What is a Woman? 74).

For Moi on Freud, see Toril Moi, “Is Anatomy Destiny? Freud and Biological Determinism,” Whose Freud?: the Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000) 71-92.

9 Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991) 9.

10 Moi, What is a Woman? 77.

3

oppressed than women. Phallogocentrism is a term which combines phallocentrism and

logocentrism.11 Logos is a Greek word meaning speech, logic, reason, and it includes the

Word of God. Logocentrism can be seen as the belief in perfectly self-present meaning and in

metaphysical presence.12 The importance of presence as the basis of western thought is

inseparable from phallocentrism, which denotes a system that privileges the phallus as the

symbol or source of power.13 To understand the mechanism of phallocentrism, I refer to

Lacan’s discussion of the “paternal metaphor.” Without the “paternal metaphor,” meanings

collapse. Thought is impossible without language. Language shapes the possibility of thought.

It is structured under the name of the Father. It is structured around the transcendental

signifier or “paternal metaphor.” “It is the fundamental metaphor on which all signification

depends: for this reason, all signification is phallic.”14 The “paternal metaphor” involves the

substitution of name of the father for the absence of the mother.15 Phallocentrism helps us to

understand the notion of logocentrism that presence is primary, and is beyond doubt; and that

the world may be seen as an object, an objective thing out there for the self to master.

11 Derrida first discussed phallogocentrism in “The Purveyor of Truth”: “One might be

tempted to say: Freud, like those who follow him here, does nothing else but describe the necessity of phallogocentrism explain its effects, which are as obvious as they are massive. Phallogocentrism is neither an accident nor a speculative mistake which may be imputed to this or that theoretician. It is an enormous and old root survives the burned or torn-up paper, and endures by dint of not letting itself be divided.” (96-7). See Derrida, Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 31-113. For logocentrism, Derrida uses this word in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) to discuss the attention of western philosophy gives to speech over writing when referring to Saussure: “The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also phonocentrism: absolute promixity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality meaning” (11-2). Derrida also discusses logocentrism when he criticizes Freud of being logocentric. See “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) 196-231, 197. Derrida uses the word “phallocentrism” in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche), trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 61. Spivak says, “A social structure … centred on due process and the law (logocentrism); a structure of argument centered on the sovereignty of the engendering self and the determinacy of meaning (phallogocentrism); a structure of the text centered on the phallus as the determining moment (phallocentrism) or signifier. See Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) 170.

12 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981). See Barbara Johnson’s Introduction viii-xxxv, especially ix.

13 Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 179, n.5. 14 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Hover, New

York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996) 127. 15 See Evans’ reading of Lacan’s conception of the paternal metaphor in Evans, An

Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

4

If both men and women are repressed figures under phallogocentrism, the idea of the

“feminine” becomes important because it suggests a way to contest this patriarchal weapon. It

is hard for both women and men to think outside phallogocentrism in patriarchal society. They

are repressed to think in a phallogocentric way. Even if social relations were liberated, women

would be still trapped in phallogocentrism. While fighting for oppressed women in patriarchy

is essential, this thesis is more concerned with how it is possible that phallogocentrism can be

contested by “feminine” thought; in other words, the liberatory effect of the “feminine” as that

which destablises patriarchy in one of its manifestations: the imposition of “masculine”

thought.

This thesis demonstrates how “feminine” thought works within Nietzsche, Freud and

Rilke. Through the discussion of Nietzsche with regard to the relationship between the

“feminine” and philosophy, of Freud for the relationship between the “feminine” and

psychoanalysis, and of Rilke for the relationship between the “feminine” and art, “The Return

of the Feminine” explores possibilities of a kind of thought contesting phallogocentrism, and

at the same time discusses Salomé’s response to the patriarchal system. So this is a thesis

interested in the “feminine” as a philosophical concept contesting phallogocentrism, and at

the same time in women like Salomé in challenging patriarchy. Before introducing my

readings of these four writers, I would like to begin by giving my understanding of

“feminine” and “masculine” thoughts: the evidence for the assertions that follow will appear

throughout the thesis.

II – SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN MODES OF THOUGHT

Putting modes of thought in sexual terms for discussion in this section shows how patriarchal

system is maintained through fostering “masculine” thought and at the same time repressing

what I call “feminine” thought under the working of its ideological weapon, phallogocentrism.

Before expounding what “masculine” thought and “feminine” thought are, it is important to

state why modes of thought are put in sexual terms. Although this thesis argues that both men

and women can have “feminine” thought, using the “feminine” to address one type of thought

runs the risk of committing cultural essentialism. Toril Moi is against the use of “masculinity”

and “femininity” in dividing things up. She says:

To speak of a generalized ‘gender identity’ is to impose a reifying or objectifying closure

on our steadily changing and fluctuating experience of ourselves in the world. If we use

the words “femininity” and “masculinity” to designate anything other than sex-based

stereotypes, we may find that we have locked ourselves into precisely such a rectified

concept of gender. (Moi, What is a Woman? 81-2)

5

Hence, casting some kind of thought as “feminine,” Moi would argue, is to reinforce the

subordination of women. In response to this criticism, it is, first of all, necessary to discuss if

it is possible not to categorize things into genres.

This thesis argues that, to follow Lacan, when a subject starts to learn language under

the Name-of-the-Father, he/she starts to learn to classify things into genres, because he/she is

already so classified. It is at this moment that he/she enters the symbolic order; and

phallogocentrism takes its effect on him/her; and he/she becomes a “docile” subject in

patriarchy.16 In the symbolic order, it is impossible not to categorize things into genres. (In

French, the word genre also means gender.) Above all, such categorical difference is not

objective or purely different; but it is a hierarchical difference. This point can be explained

with reference to Derrida’s critique of binary oppositions. On pairs of binary opposition,

Barbara Johnson in her “Translator’s Introduction” to Derrida’s Dissemination comments that

the polar opposites (good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error,

identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. woman, soul vs. body, life vs. death, nature vs.

culture, speech vs. writing) structure Western thought, and they do not stand as “independent

and equal entities” (viii). The second term in each pair is considered the negative, corrupt,

undesirable version of the first, a fall away from it. Hence, absence is the lack of presence,

evil is the fall from good, error is a distortion of truth, etc. In other words, the two terms are

not simply opposed in their meanings, but are arranged in a hierarchical order which gives the

first term priority, in both the temporal and the qualitative sense of the word. In general, what

these hierarchical oppositions do is to privilege unity, identity, immediacy, and temporal and

spatial presentness over distance, difference, dissimulation, and deferment (viii). Hence,

claiming that things are simply different ignores the ideological implication of binary

oppositions. The word “difference” is not simply difference. The relation between things in

each end of binary opposition is hierarchical, a structure of power. One of the hierarchical

differences in patriarchy, which this thesis discusses, is sexual difference. Such hierarchical

relationship is further elaborated by Levinas. According to Levinas,

It is not woman who is secondary; it is the relationship with woman as woman, and that

does not belong to the primordial level of the human element. A difference was necessary

that would not compromise equity: a difference of sex; and from then on, a certain

pre-eminence of man, a woman whose arrival comes later and who is, as woman, the

appendix of the human element. Now we understand the lesson. The idea of humanity is

16 I am using the argument of Foucault on “docile bodies” in Foucault, Discipline and

Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1997) Part III.

6

not thinkable from two entirely different principles. There must be sameness [le même]

common to others: woman was taken from man, but came after him: the very femininity

of woman is in this inaugural after-thought.17

Not to think in terms of sexual difference within the patriarchal system, or try to think

of sexual difference in this system on an equal term, does not much change sexual inequality

because within patriarchy men always are primary in relation to women. Gender stereotyping

is not the result of whether we consciously think in terms of sexual difference or not.

Patriarchy, through its weapon, phallogocentrism, makes its impact on a subject

unconsciously once he/she starts to use language.

Lacan’s discussion of the symbolic order is useful here. To Lacan, a subject is placed in

the symbolic order when he/she starts to use language. If we follow Saussure’s definition of

language, i.e. a system of differences without positive terms,18 a subject in the symbolic order

is defined by what it is not, and, therefore, realizes his/her lack. In the Four Fundamental

Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan says, “[The lack] emerges from the central defect around

which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in relation to the Other

turns – by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all

in the field of the Other” (205).19 Also when a subject is placed in the symbolic order, he or

she is forced to take up a sexual position. We are sexed not just because of biological

difference, what Lacan calls, in discussion we shall return to in chapter seven, a “sexed living

being,” but also because of symbolic positions. One can only be defined by what one is not.

One cannot be defined positively. Such a lack creates a desire for the other in order to define

oneself sexually. Dylan Evans’s reading of Lacan is useful here: “For Lacan, masculinity and

femininity are not biological essences but symbolic positions, and the assumption of one of

these two positions is fundamental to the construction of subjectivity; the subject is essentially

a sexed subject” (178). Lacan’s claim that a subject is “only a sexed living being” (205)

17 Derrida, “En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me voici,” Texts pour Emmanuel

Lewis (Paris: J. M. Place, 1980) quoted in Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, “Choreographies: Interview,” trans. Nancy J. Holland, Feminist Interpretation of Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) 23-41, 41, fn. 5. As evoked by Levinas, Derrida (with reference to Genesis) points out that: “It is not feminine sexuality that would be second but only the relationship to sexual difference. At the origin, on this side of and therefore beyond any sexual mark, there was humanity in general, and this is what is important” (34).

18 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Balley et al. (London: Peter Owen Limited) 120.

19 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alain Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Hogarth Press, 1977).

7

comes from his criticism of Aristophanes’ discussion of Eros in The Symposium (205). In

Plato’s discourse, Aristophanes points out that the sexes were three in number in the first

place: male, female, and the union of the two. Being threatened by their strength, Zeus cut

them into two. After the division, each yearns for the other half.20 Lacan criticises the point

that Aristophanes’ myth, picturing the pursuit of the complement, is misleading because it

suggests that it is the other, one’s sexual other half, that the living being seeks in love. Instead,

Lacan interprets the lack as showing that the subject is “only a sexed living being.” The drive

through which this sexed living being is induced into his sexual realization is, to Lacan, a

death drive which represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being (205).

Love is not to complete the missing whole in a subject.21 Once being born as a sexed or

fragmented being, the primal loss exists.

The desire to improve sexual relation within patriarchy through thinking without

reducing things into sexual difference underestimates the power of ideology, and/or

overestimates the autonomy of a subject. This thesis points out that to change social relations

between men and women, it is necessary to work on language as it is given within the

symbolic order. As Irigaray says, “[I]n order to change the economic structure, it is necessary

to change the structure of language.”22

Under patriarchal ideology, women are not perceived as pure other, but other in relation

to men/the same. From the reading of Levinas, Derrida says, “[T]he possibility of ethics could

be saved, if one takes ethics to mean that relationship to the other as other which accounts for

no other determination or sexual characteristics in particular. What kind of an ethics would

there be if belonging to one sex or another became its law or privilege?”23 Women are

incorporated into the “same” in patriarchy. Using Levinas’ logic, only by treating woman as

20 Plato, Symposium, trans. Hayden Pelliccia (New York: The Modern Library, 1996)

41-3, 189e-191c. 21 Samuel Weber criticizes Aristophanes’ point that he ‘seems to state unequivocally that

human beings were originally whole and one, and that only as a result of ‘injustice’ were they condemned, punished and estranged from their original unity; that Eros entails the striving to return to this lost unity, to restore that original wholeness.” Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) 153. This criticism followed his criticism of Freud’s sense of repetition: “all repetition repeats an original identity, that it seeks to restore: the lovers, their original unity; life, its original death; the text, the original intention of its author” (149). The difference between Aristophanes and Freud, to Weber, is that the former is on Eros and the latter is on death (159). For the discussion of Freudian sense of repetition, see chapter five of this thesis.

22 Irigaray, “Language, Persephone and Sacrifice: An Interview,” Borderlines 6 (Winter 1985): 30-2, quoted in Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine 10.

23 Derrida and McDonald, “Choreographies: Interview” 34-5.

8

“pure other” would the ethics of sexual difference be rectified.

Such a pure other can be further understood when it is reinstated in psychoanalytic

terms. To Lacan, woman’s otherness is not only in relation to men but also to woman herself.

He says, “Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as

she is this Other for him.”24 And “[t]here is no symbolization of woman’s sex as such.”25

Moi criticises the use of the concept of femininity because she thinks it refers to stereotypes

of actual women, and the way they are represented, but Lacan seems to be more interested in

seeing the woman - and hence femininity - as twice Other, and so exceeding any prior

knowledge (or preceding gender stereotype) - both Other for herself, and Other for the man.

Moi is correct to say that patriarchy establishes sexual difference in a way of putting women

in subordinate position. Her interest is in the imbalance of social relations between men and

women in patriarchy. Psychoanalysis, while seems to reinforce sexual stereotyping by making

women as the opposite to man, works in another way by showing that some thought, i.e. the

“feminine” thought (which, to put in Lacan’s sense, as twin other to both woman and man)

contests patriarchy. Seen in this light, psychoanalysis is not in favour of patriarchy, but may

even acknowledge that phallogocentrism is the dominant ideology. While Moi fights against

patriarchy at the level of social relations and emphasizes the place of woman in actual

situation, psychoanalysis brings in the concept of phallogocentrism, and shows the power of

patriarchy at the level of ideology. Then it may become useful to talk about “feminine”

thought. Psychoanalysis, Levinas’ arguments, and deconstruction derived from Nietzsche

would insist on women as not in a position of subordination but as Other, which is, of course,

a critique of patriarchy.

Instead of reinforcing sexual inequality, naming a mode of thought as “feminine” in this

thesis is to expose the situation in which the oppression of a kind of thought, i.e. the

“feminine” one, in both men and women by phallogocentrism, is related to the oppression of

women in patriarchy. The situation of “feminine” thought is different from that of woman as

the latter is incorporated into the same. Therefore, categorizing a mode of thought as

“feminine” does not intend to reinforce sexual difference in cultural terms, but rather to

subvert it. If “feminine” thought is subversive to the symbolic order by standing as an

unassimilable other, and if it exposes the ideology of patriarchy, such subversion will upset

24 Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 732, quoted in Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of

Lacanian Psychoanalysis 220. 25 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses 1955-56, trans.

Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Routledge, 1993) 176.

9

the stability of patriarchy and hence sexual stereotypes. Then, linking gender issues with

philosophy, as well as social relation, is not to separate theory and practice. Instead, they are

fused.26 Once the thought is changed, one can only live otherwise.27

Even so, it is important to see how successful “feminine” thought can work in the social

contexts; in other words, it is important to see if it is possible for a man to think in a

“feminine” way in the patriarchal system without behaving in a patriarchal way in society, or

if a man who is oppressive to woman can think in a “feminine” way. Thinking, as said, may

be impossible without language. Patriarchal ideology works through language in an

unconscious way. Hence, the possibility of conflictual behaviour happens: while men can

think consciously in a “feminine” way, they may unconsciously fall into misogynistic attitude

towards women; or while women can be “feminine,’ they are willing to remain in a

disadvantageous position.

While “feminine” thought can be seen as a subversive force to patriarchy, the latter is

strong enough to withhold such subversion. Therefore, this thesis has no intention to simplify

the complicating relationship between modes of thought and social relations; and we need

Foucault, feminism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction at the same time in dealing with such

complications; and it is important to note the implications of the influence of Salomé on the

work of Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke, whose revisions and readings of “feminine” thought are

discussed in this thesis.

Bearing in mind such a complicating relationship between modes of thought and social

relations, while claiming that Nietzsche’s conception of “woman” refers to a kind of thought,

but not to biological women, this thesis does not deny that misogyny is also present in his

writings. Yet it is also interesting to note in an opposite way that Nietzsche was very

26 Agnes Heller says, in Radical Philosophy, trans. James Wickham (Oxford: Blackwell,

1984) that “in philosophy there is no separation between theory and practice: Theory and practice are always fused” (51).

27 Agnes Heller proposes that the job of philosophy is to answer the questions: How should one think? How should one live? And how should one act? Philosophy is not just to interpret, but to change as well. At the end of the book, “[P]hilosophy, radical philosophy, has to become praxis, so that praxis becomes theoretical. The philosopher mediates between what is and what ought to be, not as a philosopher but as a person: as one person amongst millions, as one of those who want the world to be a home for humanity” (Heller, Radical Philosophy 186).

10

important to feminist thinking in 1890’s.28 Freud has been used in feminist writings though

he is criticized for his sexual stereotyping.29

The two chapters on Nietzsche in this thesis (one on “woman” and the other one on

eternal recurrence) show that while someone like Nietzsche tries to think through questions of

patriarchy and “woman,” and their writings help us to understand feminine thought, misogyny

is still inherent in the text. This shows that even a figure who advocates “feminine” thought

cannot escape from the power of patriarchy in marginalizing women through its ideological

weapon, phallogocentrism.

Interestingly, while using “woman” as a metaphor, instead of directly approaching what

a “woman” is, shows Nietzsche's conflictual attitudes towards women and gender, these

attitudes are less apparent in Freud, who does not write in a metaphorical way (though Freud

may be criticized for his sexist position). Ernest Jones writes in his biography of Freud:

“There is little doubt that Freud found the psychology of women more enigmatic than that of

men. He said once to Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been answered and

which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine

soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”30 Freud’s question “What does a woman want?”, for

Lacan, cannot be answered within the symbolic order. As said before, Lacan argues that “there

is no symbolisation of woman’s sex as such,” because there is no feminine equivalent to the

“highly prevalent symbol” provided by the phallus.31 The enigma of woman (which is the

name of Sarah Kofman’s book on Freud) shows that woman cannot be defined adequately

within the symbolic order. It threatens this order and hence is dangerous to patriarchy. Woman

is the other to patriarchy. This otherness can never be incorporated into the same. This makes

28 Hinton Thomas even praises Nietzsche for his inspiration of feminism in “The

Feminist Movement and Nietzsche,” Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890-1918 (Dover: Manchester University Press, 1983) 80-95. See also Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) 236-51 and Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyten, 1996) She says, “I … wanted to show how and why so many of the women of Nietzsche’s generation, whether they knew him personally or not, were prepared to overlook his misogynic remarks, such as the (by now) infamous passage about the whip, or look beyond them. The answer seemed to lie in the liberalizing effect he had exerted on their whole lives, for which they clearly felt profoundly grateful” (165)

29 See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975) and Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction (London: Macmillan, 1982).

30 See Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. (London and New York: 1955) vol 2, 468.

31 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 1955-56, trans. Russell Grigg, (London: Routledge, 1993) 176.

11

Freud think that woman is enigmatic. Nietzsche’s writings on woman in metaphorical ways

can be treated as Nietzsche’s avoidance of what woman is or can be seen as Nietzsche’s fear

of woman; and it may also be possible that such fear turns into hatred.

In an opposite way, though Freud understands woman from what man is not (this may

be some feminists’ point of attack), he still cannot get hold of what the woman is. Freud tries

to associate activity with man, and passivity with woman. Passivity is understood as the

opposite of activity. However, if woman is something outside symbolic order, she cannot be

understood as the opposite of man. Then the term passivity is not the opposite of or does not

come after activity. Although Freud assumes sadism before masochism and prioritises activity

over passivity, he is sometimes forced to think otherwise. Discussions of these topics suggest

that passivity is not opposite to activity, but is primary to it. Throughout his career, he keeps

on thinking of what woman is, but cannot find any satisfactory answers. Woman’s enigma

keeps on disturbing him, and makes him unable to develop a single reading on the issues of

masochism, sadism, the death drive, and femininity. This will be discussed in the next

chapters. His theory on these areas cannot be progressed steadily in a “masculine” way but

keeps on going back for revaluation. “Feminine” thought keeps on taking effect on him. The

woman’s enigmatic nature makes psychoanalysis not a fixed, but a developing on-going body

of thought, an “open” system, neither systematic nor non-systematic. Interestingly enough,

while Nietzsche approaches “woman” metaphorically and avoids talking about what

“woman” is, his potential misogyny keeps coming back in his writings.

Nietzsche’s problems in dealing with the subject of woman are also not found in Rilke’s

writings. If what we have discussed so far comes up to an understanding that patriarchy is

inescapable, Rilke’s writing, especially his poems, suggests the way to go beyond the

symbolic order; in other words, writing helps us to free from phallogocentrism, and to be the

“feminine.” Writing contests patriarchy outside patriarchy through utopist thinking which can

be shown in Rilke’s writing on angel in Duino Elegies and love in “The Prodigal Son” in The

Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

While “The Return of the Feminine” is addressed through discussing the relationship

between gender and philosophy in Nietzsche, the relationship between gender and

psychoanalysis in Freud, the relationship between gender and art in Rilke, the subject

addressed in Salomé takes a different angle. Salomé is praised by Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke.

The chapter on Salomé will discuss how far their admiration for her is attributed to her attack

on patriarchy in a way in which they cannot attempt.

12

Masculine Thought

Before moving on to the chapters on Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke and Salomé, I would now like to

give a provisional, and perhaps too schematic reading of what I understand as the

characteristics of masculine thought. This reading is not intended to suggest either the

“masucline” or the “feminine” can be seen in essentialist terms, it is just to give a rough sense

of what I mean in using the terms. It should be remembered that as the “feminine” is not to be

identified with the female, so to discuss “masculine” thought is not to be thought of as an

attack on the male, or on masculinity. It means to say that “masculine” thought is not a

necessary property of masculinity, but is the property of patriarchy which works through

phallogocentrism; in other words, “masculine” thought is appropriated by phallogocentrism to

reinforce the power of patriarchy. What follows is much indebted to my fuller readings of

Nietzsche and Freud, and will be expanded on in my later chapters.

Obsessed with “masculine” thought, a subject believes in the existence of “origins,” and

desires to possess a single identity. “Masculine” thought disallows ambiguity, contradiction

and even plurality, which knock out originality and singularity. Freud says, “a multiplication

of penis symbols signifies castration.”32 Fear of castration can be seen as fear of losing

originality and singularity. “Masculine” thought provides a subject with a frame, which gives

him security to see the external world by setting up a boundary between the inside and the

outside with an ambition of “incorporating” the latter. At this point, I am using Freud’s terms.

He says, “At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are

identical. If later on an object turns out to be a source of pleasure, it is loved, but it is also

incorporated into the ego […]”33 The “masculine” subject tries to construct an interpreted

world by reducing all “difference” into “the same”;34 otherwise the other will infringe upon

the subject’s boundary, and he/she will lose his/her singularity.

32 Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head” (1940[1922]), The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18, trans. & ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001) 273-74.

33 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 113-38, 134.

34 The phase “imperialism of the same” is used by Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) 39. He says, “The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same. It is other with an alterity constitutive of the very content of the other. Other with an alterity that does not limit the same, for in limiting the same the other would not be rigorously other […]” (38-9).

13

Behind identity building is the assumption of the presence of the present or the moment.

The word “moment” in German, Augenblick, means, in the Bible, “the twinkling of the eye”

(I Corinthians, 15:52). It comes and goes at the same time. A moment can never be

approached; before we can articulate what the moment is, it has gone. When the moment has

passed, a subject is, then, aware of its presence, and constitutes it as an event; in other words,

the event exists in the “trace.” In Derrida’s words, “[t]he trace must be thought before the

entity.”35 The absence of the ‘moment’ suggests that the ‘moment’ has already been a trace. If

the moment or the present can only be traced, it exists at a distance, and, hence, whether the

present can be returned to, repeated or re-present itself is uncertain. The past and the present

are moments of time. When every origin and the present are not clear, nothing can be returned

to. It cannot be sure that everything recurs in the same way. It is, therefore, possible that what

we think is the return to the same turns to the different. Origins are absent. Only repetition is

(at) the origin. Every return is a detour without the existence of the main road. Every return is

seen as a new start.

The work of memory creates an illusion that what has happened took place in the same

way as before. Memory draws us to interpret the two separate events which happened at

different times as the same and draw the conclusion from it that they are linked by repetition.

However, to follow Freud, memory is only a trace of an event, which is less than an event

itself. (See my discussion of Freud’s comment of memory in Chapter 6.) It exists before and

creates the event. Then drawing from the trace of an event to conclude that a past event is

repeated by a recent event is an illusion. To follow Nietzsche, animals have no collective

memory. No prey will not have a memory to say that it repeats the fate of its predecessor that

it was eaten up by a predator. Repetition is not the greatest burden to animals because they do

not have the concept of it. They are “forgetful animals.”36 Every event is a new experience to

them. Nothing will return eternally to them.

Imagine the following situation:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and

35 Derrida, Of Grammatology 47. 36 See Vanessa Lemm, “The Overhuman Animal,” A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming

Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004) 220-39. She says, “The forgetfulness of the animal is indispensable to the promise of an overhuman future” (220). A Nietzschean Bestiary is a collection of essays which shows the importance of animals in Nietzsche’s writings. For the discussion of the metaphorical discussion of animals in Nietzsche’s writings, see Christa Davis Acampora, “Paws, Claws, Jaws, and Such: Interpretation and Metaphoric Modalities,” A Nietzschean Bestiary 285-300.

14

innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy

and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will

have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.37

If every suffering is eternally repeated, the “masculine” subject will desire it because each

pain is realistically felt, and assumes the existence of the moment or the present which carries

it. Each return of pain signifies the “I” which is masculine enough to bear it. The “masculine”

subject thinks masochistically; and enduring pain is the sign of “masculinity.” The

“masculine” subject can be seen as the Stoic, as described by Nietzsche, who is:

[T]aught by experience and ruling himself by idea! He who otherwise only looks for

uprightness, truth, freedom from deception, and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack,

in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimulation, just as the other did in his

happiness; he shows no twitching mobile human face but, as it were, a mask with

dignified, harmonious features; he does not cry out and does not even alter his voice;

when a heavy thundercloud bursts upon him, he wraps himself up in his cloak, and with

slow and measured step walks away from beneath it.38

Suffering is hard to bear, but it is less unbearable than the disappearance of identity, the

boundary protecting the “masculine” subject from the outside, the uncertainty. The

“masculine” subject will only allow himself to suffer but not to be destroyed. In using

Nietzsche’s words, which criticizes stoicism, this “masculine” subject undergoes the process

of “self-tyranny.”39 This subject believes in the presence of origins, the present and the truth

that generated from it.40 When the presence of origins and presence are illusion, what they

believe as truths can be seen as phantasies; and they may live in their “masculine phantasies”

37 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random

House, 1974) S.341. 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Extramoral Sense” (1873),

Philosophical Writings, trans. Maximilian A. Mügge, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Caroline Molina y Vedia (New York: Continuum, 1995) 87-99, 99.

39 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966) S.9.

40 See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000) 369-92.

15

without awareness.41 Nietzsche’s comment on the Stoic can be seen as a comment on these

masculine phantasies:

Of course, when he does suffer, he suffers more: and he even suffers more frequently

since he cannot learn from experience, but again and again falls into the same ditch into

which he has fallen before. (99)

The same mistake, which they cannot learn from experience (which teaches the absence of

origins and the present), is, if we use Nietzsche’s comment to look at “masculinity,” that a

“masculine” subject may refuse to believe that “masculinity” may be seen as a matter of

construction instead of purely an essence.42 The “masculine” subject believes that he/she

possesses the truth and asserts his/her power over the other to follow his/her truth. At this

point, we see an interesting paradox: whereas the masculine wants to take the position of the

centre to define the other, he, at the same time, lacks the ability to define himself and needs

something outside of himself to secure an unchanging “masculine” identity. In that sense,

who is at the centre is ambiguous.43 He/She with masculine thought constructs his/her

“masculinity” in his/her “cloak” and “with slow and measured step walks away from beneath

the heavy thundercloud” which smashes his/her constructed “masculinity.” The “masculine”

subject refuses to accept the ambiguity between “the outside” and “the inside.” On this

ambiguity, Derrida says:

The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple

exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned

outside the outside, and vice versa.44

41 This phrase is borrowed from the title of the book Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit.

A book with two volumes on fascism. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History vol. 1, trans. Stephen Conway (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987) and Male Fantasies: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror vol. 2, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

42 On the subject of construction of masculinity, see Maurice Berger et al. (eds.), Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Norman Bryson, “Géricault and ‘Masculinity,’” Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994) 228-59. Bryson uses Géricault’s paintings to argue the point that masculinity is constructed in a way to reinforce the political order of patriarchy.

43 Kaja Silverman uses an interesting title which suggests that while the masculine in the centre defines the other, he is at the same time at the margin because he needs the other to define him. See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

44 Derrida, Of Grammatology 35.

16

This “masculine” subject, who is obsessed with his/her existents, forgets the possibility of

“existence without existents.”45 Levinas often uses the phrase, “there is” (il y a), to replace

the word, “existence.” On the subject of “there is,” he says:

Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put

this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of this nothingness itself?

Something would happen, if only night and the silence of nothingness. The

indeterminateness of this “something is happening” is not the indeterminateness of a

subject and does not refer to a substantive. Like the third person pronoun in the

impersonal form of a verb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action,

but the characteristic of this action itself which somehow has no author. This impersonal,

anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being, which murmurs in the depths

of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is.46

He points out that the night, which “involves the total exclusion of light,” is “the very

experience of the there is” (58). “In the night, where we are driven to it, we are not dealing

with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that;

there is not “something.” This “something” which implies the existence of individual

“existent,” “this” or “that,” out there which the “masculine” subject desires. In the night,

individual “existence” is dissolved in the nothingness which is “an absolutely unavoidable

presence” (58). To Levinas, it is not the dialectical counterpart of absence and cannot be

grasped through a thought. It is immediately there. There is no discourse. Nothing responds to

us, but this silence (58). Being in the “existence,” the individual “existent” or identity cannot

be maintained. The boundary between the inside and the outside disappears.

Such disappearance may put a subject into a state of melancholia.47 The masculine

subject is the type of person Freud would describe as having “a characteristic tendency … to

construct speculative systems.”48 This subject is keen on constructing these systems in order

to protect his “existent” state from being destroyed by “existence.” These systems are the

45 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Hague: Nijhoff,

1978) 57. On the relationship between “existence” and “existent,” see 57-64. In his reading of Levinas’ book, Tambling reads “what Levinas calls the ‘self-identical existent,’” as typically “masculine.” See Jeremy Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death,’” Essays in Criticism 54.4 (2004): 351-2.

46 Levinas, Existence and Existents 57. 47 Juliana Schiesari discusses the gender of melancholia in her book, The Gendering of

Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

48 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology 59-97, 91.

17

product of “the activity of the mind which has taken over the function of conscience and

which has also placed itself at the service of internal research, which furnishes philosophy

with the material for its intellectual operations” (91). Freud’s analysis of the construction of

speculative systems out of “masculine” paranoia can be seen as his reading of Nietzsche’s

critique of the Stoic who is ruled by ideas and abstractions. (To reiterate, Nietzsche says that

the Stoic “wraps himself up in his cloak” from a heavy thundercloud.) The speculative or

abstractive activity may be, for Adorno “the melancholy science” in which “the philosophers

once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence.”49 Adorno criticises the point

that “since philosophy’s conversion into method, the melancholy science has lapsed into

intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life.

What the philosophers once knew life has become the sphere of private existence and now of

mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production,

without autonomy or substance of its own” (15). The “masculine” subject who is the Stoic

cannot understand Nietzsche’s “joyful wisdom” which, in opposition to the “melancholy

science,” is a kind of wisdom which cannot be deduced from masculine thinking (which

suggests the continuity from the past to the present, the existence of origins and essence as

natural truth).50

“Masculine” thought in this sense can be seen as a product of phallogocentrism. Belief

in metaphysical presence and in all signification as centred around the phallus makes a subject

with masculine thought believe in truth, origin and presence which his single identity is based

upon. Through the use of language centred around paternal metaphor, he can master the world

with knowledge. However, what is believed in the autonomy of “masculine” thought has been

appropriated by phallogocentrism.

Feminine Thought

Possessed by “feminine” thought, insofar as this is possible, and not the name of something

which must be moved towards, the subject faces the impossibility of maintaining single

identity, which a “masculine” subject believes in because this type of thought does not

49 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N.

Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2002) 15. 50 The title of Nietzsche’s book, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, is translated by Kaufmann

in English as The Gay Science, instead of The Joyful Wisdom. According to him, “[t]he German Wissenschaft does not bring to mind only … the natural sciences but any serious, disciplined, rigorous quest for knowledge” (“Translator Introduction,” The Gay Science 3-26, 5). The gay science would mean this type of quest for knowledge in a manner of light-hearted defiance of convention (5).

18

assume any continuities as essential between past and present. In this sense, “feminine”

thought is seen in this thesis as a mode of thought which does not assume the existence of

“origins,” or present or single identity. This type of thought challenges phallogocentrism,

which upholds the existence of single truth. Seen in this light, “truth” is “feminine” in nature.

This understanding of “truth” can be summarized in the aphoristic question raised in the

preface of Beyond Good and Evil:

Supposing truth is woman, what then?

The word “woman” here does not refer to an actual woman, but is used as a metaphor which

refers to a kind of “truth” which is not, to put it in a post-Nietzschean term, phallogocentric,

and hence is not the subject within patriarchal discourse; in other words, “woman” (the idea

of “truth”) is the other which attacks metaphysical presence. Then, it is not surprising for

Nietzsche to question philosophers who cannot answer this question, “what then?”.

The answer is found in his previous writing, “Truth and Lies in Extra-moral Sense”

when he asks, “What therefore is truth?” His answer is:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human

relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned,

and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of

which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become

powerless to affect the senses; coins with their images effaced and now no longer of

account as coins but merely as metal.51

What human beings grasp are only “the metaphors of the things […] [which] do not in the

least correspond to the original essentials”.52 The relation between the thing and the metaphor,

as Sarah Kofman puts it, is the relation between the father and the son or grandson in which

the son cannot generate the father, nor grandsons the original sons.53 Rationality makes man

forget this irreversible process and think that he arrives at a feeling of truth. Nietzsche further

criticises the point that as a rational being he submits his actions to the sway of abstractions,

paler, cooler ideas and will scarcely believe that these ideas remain only as the “residuum of a

51 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Extramoral Sense” (1873),

Philosophical Writings, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Caroline Molina y Vedia (New York: Continuum, 1995) 87-99, 92.

52 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Extramoral Sense” 91. 53 Sarah Kofman, “Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis,” The New Nietzsche:

Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: MIT Press, 1977) 201-14, 207.

19

metaphor”.54 “Truths” are only metaphors which can only point to another one which again

points to another one and so on.55 The play of metaphors is the play of simulacrum without

pointing to the truth. With the absent origin, the concept of the simulacram deconstructs the

binary opposition between “truth” and “non-truth.”

Plato's sense of truth, which can be seen in his Symposium in a discussion between

Agathon and Socrates on Eros, is the target of Nietzsche’s critique. In response to Agathon's

saying, "I can't argue against you, Socrates. Let's accept that things are as you say." Socrates

replies, "It's the truth you can't argue against, my dear friend Agathon. It's not at all difficult to

argue against Socrates."56 Plato, through the mouth of Socrates in his Symposium, seems to

argue that there is truth out there for anyone who loves to discover wisdom. However, with

reference to Nietzsche’s quotation above, Plato’s sense of truth is, not transcendental, but

“illusions”, “worn-out metaphors” and is like “metal” losing its function as a coin with the

effacement of the image. Plato's error is that he thinks that his metaphor (simulacrum) can

replace the essence of love and he refuses to accept that what he can generate is only “a copy

of a copy of a copy and so on,” which is termed by him mimesis (a term he dislikes). As he

thinks that he can speak for the truth, he falls in his own trap, i.e. he dislikes what he insists

on. He believes in the existence of a group of philosophers who undergo such a deed of

discovering truth and create the concept of wisdom. Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, explains the

meaning of the title of his other book, Twilight of the Idols (1889), “the old truth is

approaching its end,”57 Nietzsche says:

“All truth is simple.” Is that not doubly a lie?58

Plato’s insistence on truth can be seen as lying because it could be seen as, in Nietzsche’s

words again, “the prejudice of reason,” which is one of the examples of “a heavy, all-too

54 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Extramoral Sense” 92-3. 55 A similar idea is shared by Gary Shapiro on his comment on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

See Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Shapiro shows that “The texture of Zarathustra is indeed highly metaphorical and imagistic.” See Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 41. He continues, “ … the view put forward in Zarathustra’s address seems to be something like this: a metaphor is always a metaphor of another metaphor which in turn is a metaphor of another … ad infinitum.” (58)

56 Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999) 36, 201c. 57 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Ecce Homo in On the

Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1976) S.1.314.

58 Nietzsche, “Maxims and Arrows,” Twilight of the Idols S.4.

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heavy seriousness,” (Preface to Twilight of the Idols): melancholy science, not joyful wisdom.

Twilight of the Idols, to Nietzsche as said in its preface, is a hammer, a tool for the

“revaluation of all values,” used by Nietzsche to have a declaration of war on this seriousness.

(Twilight of the Idols is the first book by Nietzsche discussing the “revaluation of all values.”)

Plato is one of the idols he criticizes strongly. To him, as said at the end of the text’s preface,

idols are “not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as

with a tuning fork: there are […] none more hollow.” The reason for his criticism on this

seriousness and idols can be inferred from the following passage:

Formerly, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance,

as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, conversely,

precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence,

substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled

into error. (“‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” Twilight of the Idols Section 5)

Anyone who believes that there is “a unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood,

being” is caught in error, lies. It is the same error applied to Plato who believes there are

philosophers, “a unity, identity,” who can discover the truth. Nietzsche describes this error as

“crude fetishism” in Twilight of the Idols in the passage after the above quotation:

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic

presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presupposition of reason.

Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego,

in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance

upon all things – only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” (“‘Reason’ in

Philosophy,” Twilight of the Idols Section 5)

The idea of a philosopher, a doer behind the doing, is a fetish. On this, Nietzsche in

Twilight of the Idols says satirically in a separate section called “How the ‘True World’ Finally

Become a Fable”:

The true world – attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.

Nietzsche makes a specific, satirical comment on Plato: “I, Plato, am the truth” (485).

In this sense, Nietzsche regards Plato as a fetishist who presupposes the omnipotence of

“reason” which believes in the ego as a doer, as the cause of something and who is a person in

fear of the unknown. In “Four Great Errors” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche criticises the

view that the will to truth is just the reflection of the fear of the unknown. He says:

To derive something unknown from something familiar relieves, comforts, and satisfies,

besides giving a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger,

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discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any

explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid

of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of

them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one

“considers it true.” The proof of pleasure (“of strength”) as a criterion of truth. (Section 5)

Following Plato’s tradition which assumes the existence of ideal forms and rejects “alteration,

change, any becoming as proof of mere appearance,” philosophers have a worry which is

described by Kofman: “To philosophize is not to dis-cover: the ‘truth’ is like a woman who

must not be unveiled lest one find she has nothing to hide.”59 The philosophers dare not to

accept nakedness. They prefer a veil to cover it. They are fetishists in a Freudian sense. Freud

says:

[T]he fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once

believed in and – for reasons familiar to us – does not want to give up.60

Obsession with the fetish is the result of the “masculine” horror of castration. Therefore, in

the child’s mind, Freud says, “the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything” (353). Such

reaction is called by Freud “disavowal” [Verleugnung]. What Nietzsche says in “Four Great

Errors” in Twilight of the Idols, which has been just quoted, i.e. “any explanation is better

than none” (S.5), can help to explain the Freudian term, “disavowal.” However, this

better-than-nothing explanation is only considered as “true” in order to satisfy “the causal

instinct” which is conditional upon “the feeling of fear” (S.5). Philosophy, which Nietzsche

criticizes in Beyond Good and Evil as inexpert about “woman,” is the manifestation of the

“disavowal” of “the return of the feminine,” the absence of the present and of origins.

Heraclitus, Nietzsche’s favourite pre-socratic philosopher, may possibly be the first

philosopher who helps us to understand “feminine” thought. In Philosophy in the Tragic Age

of the Greeks (1873),61 Nietzsche quotes the proclamation of Heraclitus:

I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of

the nature of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of coming-to-be

59 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (London: Athlone Press,

1993) 175, fn.12. 60 Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis,” Standard Edition 22, trans.

and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 1-182, 352. 61 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne

Cowan (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1962). Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975).

22

and passing away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured;

yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into

before. (51-2)

Nothing is rigidly and persistently endured. The existence of “being” is unacceptable to

Heraclitus. To him, there is only “becoming.” However, “becoming” in Heraclitus’ sense is

not the becoming of something because this kind of becoming assumes the existence of

essence to be returned to. To Heraclitus, there is only eternal “becoming.” Each stage of

“becoming” is preparing for the next stage and so on. In Deleuze’s words, it may be wrong to

say “becoming of being,” but “becoming of becoming.”62 Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche can

help us to understand Heraclitus’ thought, and his influence on Nietzsche. In his reading of

Nietzsche, Deleuze says, “The sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that multiplicity, becoming

and chance are objects of pure affirmation.”63 On this, Deleuze elaborates:

For multiplicity is the difference of one thing from another, becoming is difference from

self and chance is difference “between all” or distributive difference. Affirmation is then

divided in two, difference is reflected in the affirmation of affirmation: the moment of

reflection where a second affirmation takes the first as its object. But in this way

affirmation is redoubled: as object of the second affirmation it is affirmation itself

affirmed, redoubled affirmation, difference raised to its highest power. Becoming is being,

multiplicity is unity, chance is necessity. (189)

Affirmation is a goal that can never be attained. This suggests that one should

continuously overcome/destroy one’s being. Nietzsche’s concept, “the overman”

[Übermensch] and his phrase, “transvaluation of all values”64 can be seen as Nietzsche’s

interpretation of “feminine” thought (The concept of overcoming will be discussed in Chapter

62 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone

Press, 1983). 63 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 197. 64 In Derrida, “Otobiograhies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper

Name,” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie McDonald (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985) 1-40 he suggests that there are two ways of reading Nietzsche, as well as Heidegger and Marx. He says, “There can always be a Hegelianism of the left and a Hegelianism of the right, a Heideggerianism of the left and a Heideggerianism of the right, a Nietzscheanism of the right and a Nietzscheanism of the left, and even, let us not overlook it, a Marxism of the right and a Marxism of the left” (32). Attempting to read Nietzsche’s writings as a closed system may be a Nietzscheanism of the right, and in the context of this thesis, belongs to the “masculine” reading which tries to control Nietzsche’s thinking to serve its own purpose. The Nazi reading of Nietzsche may be this kind of male fantasy. Behind this fantasy is the paranoic fear of becoming feminine.

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Two with particular reference to the difficulty encountered in such a process. Such difficulty

which is also shown in Nietzsche will also be discussed in Chapter Two.)

In reading Heraclitus’ thought, Nietzsche thinks that “ordinary people fancy they see

something rigid, complete and permanent.” However, to Nietzsche, Heraclitus sees that

“[e]verlastingly, a given quality contends against itself and separates into opposites;

everlastingly these opposites seek to re-unite”(54). Under Heraclitus’s influence, nothing is

permanently stable. Everything can be destroyed by an opposite force. “Everything forever

has its opposite along with it” (52). Heraclitus’s way of thinking is not Hegel’s dialectics

which assumes that a totality can be achieved. For Heraclitus, no total truth can be grasped.

To him, the idea of non-existence of truth can be only thought intuitively, but not rationally.

Philosophers who are driven by rationality and have, in Nietzsche’s words, the “will to truth”

(Beyond Good and Evil 1) cannot understand it because they do not believe the existence of

truths outside phallogocentrism. They are the “species of philosophers” whom Nietzsche

criticizes in Beyond Good and Evil. They assume that totality, or essence, exists behind all

contradictions. They query: “How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example,

truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? […] Such origins are

impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of the highest value

must have another, peculiar origin – they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive,

deceptive, paltry world, from this turmoil of delusion and lust” (9-10).

Putting Nietzsche’s aphorism in Levinas’ sense, “truth as a woman” is the end of the

imperialism of the same. “Truth as a woman” is a recognition that men cannot possess “truth”

without becoming the other, that is, without becoming “woman.” Becoming “woman” is the

subject of my thesis. Obviously it does not refer to becoming a literal woman: this thesis is

not about transexualism, but becoming “feminine.” The discussion on “truth” helps us to

understand that “feminine” thought cannot be assimilated by phallogocentrism. As a result,

this kind of thought has to be repressed, or marginalised by phallogocentrism.

III –THE “FEMININE” AS “WEAK” THOUGHT

Let us try to restate the issues in different, but related terms, as derived from the Italian

philosopher of hermeneutics, Gianni Vattimo. “Masculine” thought, under the working of the

ideological weapon of patriarchy, i.e. phallogocentrism, can be seen as a systematic way of

thinking in search of truth stemming from the existence of metaphysical presence. “Feminine”

thought, which emphasises the importance of contradiction, the non-systematic, and

negativity, can be seen as a critique of phallogocentrism. At this point, Vattimo’s idea of

weak thought (pensiero debole) as a critique of modernity can be used to substantiate the

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difference between “feminine” and “masculine” thought. In one of his interviews, Vattimo

describes “weak thought” in the following:

Its content is an ontology of weakness. “Weak thought” is by no means a weakness of

thinking as such. It is just that, because thinking is no longer demonstrative but rather

edifying, it has become in that restricted sense weaker. … In a strong theory of weakness,

the philosopher’s role would not derive from the world “as it is,” but from the world

viewed as the product of a history of interpretation throughout the history of human

cultures. This philosophical effort would focus on interpretation as a process of

weakening, a process in which the weight of objective structures is reduced. Philosophy

can consider itself neither as knowledge of the external, universal structures of being, nor

as knowledge of the external, universal structures of episteme, for both of these are

undone by the philosophical process of weakening.65 (452-3)

Demonstrative function focuses on demonstrating truth whereas edifying one aims at

interpreting. “Feminine” thought can be seen as edifying (as shown in Heraclitus’ thinking)

whereas “masculine” thought can be seen as demonstrative (as shown in Plato’s thinking, if

we follow Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato, “I Plato am the truth”). The former thought is a

thought towards the edification of humanity whereas “masculine” thought tends toward the

development of knowledge and progress. Since “feminine” thought is no longer

demonstrative but rather edifying, it is in this sense that it is weaker. If there is truth, there

must be a foundation to lie upon or origin to develop from. Such “strong” thought leads to the

idea of modernity. On modernity, Vattimo says,

[M]odernity is in fact dominated by the idea that the history of thought is a progressive

“enlightenment” which develops through an ever more complete appropriation and

reappropriation of its own ‘foundations’.66

I see the idea of “foundations” as a kind of thought which is based on the idea of truth as

single, and to be established through a single process of logic and rationality. Then the idea of

“foundations” can be seen as Vattiomo’s understanding of phallogocentrism; and “masculine”

thought can be seen as “strong” thought which determines to progress, and which brings out

the idea of modernity in order to perpetuate patriarchial structures, whereas “feminine”

65 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “‘Weak Thought’ and the Reduction of Violence:

A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo,” trans. Yaakov Mascetti, Common Knowledge 8.3 (2002): 452-63.

66 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) 2.

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thought as its contestant has to be repressed. The idea of “overcoming,” in Vattimo’s words,

is the ultimate value which works at the expense of the past.67 Vattimo says, “The idea of

‘overcoming’, which is so important in all modern philosophy, understands the course of

thought as being a progressive development in which the new is identified with value through

the mediation of the recovery and appropriation of the foundation-origin” (2). (This sense of

“overcoming,” as Vattimo says, is different from Nietzsche’s sense of “overcoming” which

emphasizes that even the ideas of foundations have to be overcome.) But the past has never be

overcome. It can never be devoured by the present, but is repressed. What is repressed will

return to shock the subject.68 Seen in this light, “The Return of the Feminine” shows how

Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke deal with the return of the repressed or the other (of which the

subject has no control) - “feminine” thought; or how this thought works in their writings.

If the idea of progress is attributed to “masculine” thought, the idea of “return” is

attributed to “feminine” thought. This can be seen as another reading of “The Return of the

Feminine.” “Feminine” thought can be seen as “weak thought,” which does not assume the

continuity of time, challenges the existence of foundations and attacks the idea of progress

brought by modernity; or to put this understanding in Vattimo’s word, “feminine” thought

undergoes “a process of weakening, a process in which the weight of objective structures is

reduced.” While modernity is based upon “foundations,” in Vattimo’s understanding,

“feminine” thought could be seen as a contestant of such “foundations.” The “masculine” is

aligned with modernity whereas the “feminine” may be aligned with a certain postmodernism.

While “masculine” thought aims at demonstrating progress as truth, “feminine” thought

aims at edifying which focuses on interpreting /reinterpreting. The former thought focuses on

“what it is”. The latter focuses on “what it becomes.” Since the latter thought carries no sense

of essentialist thinking, every reinterpretation by “feminine” thought is a new interpretation. If

such reinterpretation has to be seen as repetition, such repetition is not repetition of the same,

but of the different. “Repetition,” placed in this understanding, is only a parody concept. “The

return of the feminine” can be read as “the return of the different.” Such a return destabilizes

the integrity of the subject. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Freud’s death drive and Rilke’s

67 At this point, Vattimo’s discussion of Arnold Gehlen’s conception of post-histoire (or

“post-history”) can be referred. According to Vattimo, “Gehlen argues that post-histoire designates the condition in which ‘progress becomes routine.” (Vattimo The End of Modernity 7) For Vattimo’s discussion of Gehlen’s conception of post-histoire, see 7-8 and101-107. See Gehlen, “Die Säkularisierung des Fortschritts,” in vol. VII of his collected works, entitled Einblicke, ed. K.S. Rehberg (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978).

68 Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) 124.

26

angel all show the inadequacy of a subject and on the idea of its spontaneous activity. The title

“The Return of the Feminine” studies how edifying thinking rather than demonstrative

thinking works in Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke.

27

Chapter Two: Nietzsche’s Understanding of “Woman”

Cruel people being always masochists also, the whole thing is

inseparable from bisexuality. And that has a deep meaning. The

first time I ever discussed this theme was with Nietzsche (that

sadomasochist unto himself). And I know that afterward we dared

not look at each other.

- Salomé, Freud Journal 143

This chapter examines the possibilities of “feminine” thought taking effect on the subject of

patriarchy, using Nietzsche’s writings. The emphasis of this chapter is to discuss how

Nietzsche’s writings can be productive of interesting readings of the “feminine,” while at the

same time inevitably acknowledging misogyny in his writings. There is a complex relation

between “feminine” thought and the social relations between men and women, as manifested

in Nietzsche’s writings, which, at one time, refers “woman” to “feminine” thought, and, at

another time, refers to actual women. Such complications show Nietzsche’s ambivalence

towards what Salomé calls his “bisexuality,” a term which may be interpreted in a large

number of senses: perhaps referring to sexuality, perhaps to the idea that Nietzsche was a

‘woman’, or ‘feminine’, or referring to the idea that ‘the original man was bisexual’

(Coleridge in 1824, according to OED), or perhaps suggesting that all his thinking about

gender-relationships was deeply conflictual, as will be shown in this chapter.

Becoming “feminine” is to think “feminine.” To reiterate what is discussed in chapter

one, this kind of becoming is not, in Deleuze’s sense, as discussed in chapter one, the

becoming of something, but of “becoming.” This is a perpetual “overcoming.”

“Overcoming,” a Nietzschean word, involves “death” within life, which does not refer to

physical death, but the death of past identities. Each identity, if there is one, is continuously

overcome by a new one. This kind of “death” involves a plural sense. Henceforth, the word,

“overcoming,” is different from the meanings given by OED which offers the first meaning of

the verb “overcome” “to get the better of, defeat, overpower, prevail over (an enemy, person

or thing opposing one, etc).” These meanings may give an impression that overcoming is

active and involves an assertion of power over the other. “Overcoming,” in the Nietzschean

sense, as argued in this thesis, is not asserting power over the other, or even the self, because

even the self has to be continuously overcome and it is then hard to say if the self exists; and

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Nietzsche’s “Overman” (Übermensch) is offered as a sacrifice, rather than as achieving of

anything.1 Overcoming can be seen as a Nietzschean interpretation of “feminine” thought.

Nevertheless, it is not easy for “feminine” thought to take its “overcoming” effect on one’s

mind because the mind-set is predominantly phallogocentric. The case of feminine thought is

particularly evident in Nietzsche’s writings in which “woman” is described metaphorically.

The case is different when Nietzsche describes real women.

To start with, let us see if Nietzsche’s writings can be read in a feminine way by

referring to Derrida’s discussion of styles of Nietzsche’s writings. This point will be followed

by showing the conflictual attitudes of Nietzsche towards “women.” This ambiguity will be

further elaborated by referring to a conversation that Salomé reported having with him.

I – AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS “WOMAN”

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says, “I shall perhaps be permitted more readily to state

a few truths about “woman as such” [Weib an sich] – assuming that it is now known from the

outset how very much these are after all only – my truths” (Section 231). “Truths” in

Nietzsche’s sense is plural, or “feminine” as set in the context of this thesis. Nietzsche’s

“truths” about “woman as such” is elaborated by Derrida in Spurs:

[T]here is no such thing either as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche’s text. In fact, in

Jenseits [Beyond Good and Evil], it is in a paragraph [in S.231] on women that one reads

“these are only my truths” (meine Wahrheiten sind). The very fact that “meine

Wahrheiten” is so underlined, that they are multiple, variegated, contradictory even, can

only imply that these are not truths. Indeed there is no such thing as a truth in itself. But

only a surfeit of it. Even if it should be for me, about me, truth is plural. (Spurs 103)

When Nietzsche sees truth as plural, it can be argued that Nietzsche’s writings are not

homogeneous, and free from contradiction. Commenting on Nietzsche’s aphorisms on woman,

Derrida in Spurs, the subject of which (as he claims) is woman (Spurs 37), says:

[I]f the aphorisms on woman cannot be assimilated - to each other, first of all, and to the

rest - it is also because Nietzsche did not see too clearly into these matters, with a single

wink of the eye, in an instant; and that such a regular, rhythmical blindness, never to be

done with, takes place within the text. Nietzsche is a bit lost there. Loss occurs, and this

can be asserted, as soon as there is hymen.

1 See Sebastian Gurciullo, “Eternal Return as Désoeuvrement: Self and Writing,”

Journal of Nietzsche Studies 14 (Autumn 1997): 46-63, 55.

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Nietzsche is a bit lost in the web of the text, like a spider, unequal to what he has

produced […]2

To Derrida, Nietzsche did not see too clearly into the contradictory nature of his discussion of

“woman” with a single wink of the eye, in an instant. Instead, “a regular, rhythmical

blindness” takes place in Nietzsche’s texts. He cannot see his contradictions in his readings of

“woman.” Derrida attributes Nietzsche’s contradictoriness to his styles of writings. The texts

of Nietzsche on “woman” cannot be reduced to a unitary or homogeneous thought. For

Derrida, in one instance, Nietzsche writes in one way, in another, he writes in another way.

What matters is only question of styles (hence, the subtitle of Spurs is Nietzsche’s Styles).

And no style reconciles with, or is more true than, the other. Derrida says:

That Nietzsche had no illusions that he might ever know anything of these effects called

woman, truth, castration, nor of those ontological effects of presence and absence, is

manifesting the very heterogeneity of his text. (95).

With regard to style, Derrida says, “the English spur, the French éperon, is the ‘same word’

as the German Spur: or, in other words, trace, wake, indication, mark” (41). An identity of a

writer can be shown by his or her writing style, the trace he/she left on a piece of writing. The

word “style,” according to Derrida, refers to the weight of some pointed object which may be

a quill, stylus, stiletto, or that which advances in the manner of a spur, like the prow of a

sailing vessel. After offering his interpretation of the meaning of style, Derrida describes the

characteristic of “the spurring style” as “the oblongi -- foliated point (a spur or a spar) which

derives its apotropaic power from the taut, resistant tissues, webs, sails and veils which are

2 This translation by Ruben Berezdivin is from Jacques Derrida, “The Question of

Style,” The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation 176-189, 186. This article consists of selections from “La Question du style” first published in Nietzsche aujourd’ hui (Union Générale d’Editions, 1973). A revised and extended text of the complete article, translated into English, Italian, and German, has been published under the title The Question of Style (Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1976). Spurs is the English translation. See the “Acknowledgments,” The New Nietzsche v-vi. The translation in Spurs misses “the aphorisms on woman” (101).

30

erected, furled and unfurled around it” (41). It can be inferred that the power of the

“masculine” (spur) derives its power from the “feminine” (sails or veils, etc).3

Such a relationship between the “masculine” and the “feminine” helps us to think of the

relationship between style and writing. Style derives its power from writing; in other words,

style gives an illusion of identity, and is “masculine” in this sense, but writing dissolves

identity, and is “feminine” in that sense. Interestingly, without writing, style cannot exist. A

singular style is a fetish. On this, Derrida uses the frequently cited expression from Boileau,

“style is the man himself” [“le style, c’est l’homme meme”], together with Freud’s statement

in “Fetishism,” “the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis,” to criticise phallocentrism

sarcastically by saying that “if style were a man, then writing would be a woman” (57).

Derrida suggests that writing in style is the attempted assertion of unity and consistency.

The heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s writings is shown in his writings’ “feminine”, or in

Vattimo’s sense, “weak” thought, which attacks the idea of Hegelian totality. In Ecce Homo,

under the section, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Nietzsche says that the meaning of style

is “to communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of signs, including the

tempo of these signs,” and continues by the statement that as “the multiplicity of inward states

is exceptionally large in [his] case, [he has] many stylistic possibilities” (EH S.4, p.265).

Nietzsche’s styles which are in plural form destroy the illusion of identity which is based

upon singularity, and the fetish (S 107). No totality can be found in Nietzsche’s text. (S 135)

Each writing style replaces the previous one or each writing style produces another Nietzsche

which even contradicts the previous ones. It is difficult to say that in Nietzsche’s writings

there is a consistent “I” who is misogynistic. Nietzsche is veiled. What is unveiled is only the

metaphorical “Nietzsche” replaced by another one. “Nietzsche” is discursive. Therefore, in

what follows, “Nietzsche” discussed is not the historical Nietzsche but “Nietzsche” in his

writings.

3 Derrida may get the idea of “sails” and “veils” from Lacan’s discussion of metonymy in

Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) 161-97, “I shall refer only to the example given there: ‘thirty sails.’ For the disquietude I felt over the fact that the word ‘ship’, concealed in this expression, seemed, by taking on its figurative sense, through the endless repetition of the same old example, only to increase its presence, obscured (voilait) not so much those illustrious sails (voiles) as the definition they were supposed to illustrate” (156).

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II – BEHIND NIETZSCHE’S AMBIVALENCE

Nietzsche’s styles constitute his “multitudes.” On “multitudes,” he says, “Suffering from

solitude is … an objection – I have suffered only from ‘multitude’.”4 Similarly, his

contemporary, Walt Whitman, writes:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then … I contradict myself;

I am large … I contain multitudes.5

If Nietzsche contains “multitudes,” he contradicts himself easily. Therefore, even if we

assume Nietzsche can think in a “feminine” way, he may be unaware of his patriarchal

thinking. Derrida does not say clearly under what conditions Nietzsche refers “woman” to

feminine thought and under what conditions to woman, and does not focus on the feminist

criticism of Nietzsche’s blindness to his misogyny. (Jane Gallop points out that Derrida, in

Spurs, “works to make sure that Nietzsche’s figuration of woman is not seen as singular,” and

uses Nietzsche to criticize “feminism’s desire for a singular concept of woman” (127)6)

Derrida does not deconstruct Nietzsche’s contradiction. Nietzsche says, at the very beginning

of “Why I Write Such Good Books,” (a section on his commentary on his previous works) in

Ecce Homo, “[he is] one thing, [his] writings are another matter” (Section 1, 259). What he

says may hint that he is misogynist as a man in patriarchy but feminine in his writings

contesting patriarchy.

His contradiction can be seen in his aphorism, which was discussed in chapter one in an

affirmative manner, “truth as a woman.” Using Nietzsche’s aphorism, “truth as a woman,” to

understand “feminine” thought cannot free Nietzsche from misogyny. “Truth as a woman” is

a metaphor. It refers to “feminine” thought; and such a reference is relatively free from

misogyny; but the “Preface for the Second Edition” (1886) of The Gay Science writes

otherwise:

Perhaps truth is the woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps

4 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in On Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter

Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 258. 5 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Complete Poetry and Collected Prose: Leaves of

Grass (1855); Leaves of Grass (1891-92) Complete Prose Works (1892); Supplementary Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1982) 87.

6 Jane Gallop, “‘Women’ in Spurs and Nineties Feminism,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 126-34.

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her name is – to speak Greek – Baubo?

She makes Demeter laugh by pulling up her skirts and showing her belly. What is unveiled is

another veil on which a figure which is supposed to be Dionysus has been drawn.7 Baubo

destroys the distinction between depth and surface, between the naked and the covered,

between modesty and immodesty, and, above all, destroys the difference based upon the

phallus: she provides the warning to the phallogocentric male of the possibility of castration.

“Truth” as a woman, as shown in Baubo, eliminates the difference between truth and error.

Baubo is used as a metaphor to refer to, in my word, “feminine” thought. The use of

metaphor is not value free, instead, ideological. It reflects the patriarchal value set on woman.

Then it is possible that Nietzsche uses his concept of woman to refer to “feminine” thought

metaphorically, which is evident in his another aphorism, “she does not want truth.” It appears

to be similar to “truth as a woman,” and as a complementary statement, but it is not. He says

in Beyond Good and Evil:

[S]he does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been

more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth – her great art is the lie, her

highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. (Section 232)

Nietzsche’s two aphorisms discussed show that “truth” is a “woman” (“feminine” in this

thesis’s understanding) but woman is not truth. She does not equate with truth; instead, she is

good at lying. We can read Nietzsche’s understanding of feminine thought from the two

aphorisms as a sign of Nietzsche’s misogyny, which is produced by patriarchal discourse.

Man is the only truth in patriarchy. Woman is treated, in this sense, by Nietzsche as “the

negative, corrupt, undesirable version” of man in binary opposition. Such understanding of

woman leads to the criticism of Irigaray. She challenges Nietzsche by saying: “But woman?

Is not to be reduced to mere femininity. Or to falsehood, or appearance or beauty.”8

Kofman says, “More than anything else, judgments on ‘woman’ are symptoms” (198).

In one way, this symptom points to the patriarchal discourse on woman in general. In another

way, this symptoms points to Nietzsche’s relationship with women in particular. On this,

7 Sarah Kofman, “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” Nietzsche’s New Seas:

Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, trans. Tracy B. Strong, ed. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988) 175-202, 196.

8 Luce Irigaray, “Veiled Lips,” Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 75-120, 77.

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Kofman says, “That which is ‘arrested’ in him about women is arrested most particularly on

the image of his mother that he carries in him” (198). Her diagnosis of Nietzsche’s symptoms

is based upon what Nietzsche says in Human All Too Human, Section 380: “Every man

carries within him an image of woman that he gets from his mother; that determines whether

he will honor women in general, or despise them, or be generally indifferent to them.”9

Like Kofman, Krell attributes Nietzsche’s misogyny to his relationship with his mother

and sister. He asks, “May we not reduce them all to one … which says that the admiration or

contempt a man feels toward woman derives from the image of womankind which his mother

has fashioned in him? If we recall those recently discovered pages of Ecce Homo (6, 267-69)

in which Nietzsche suggests that his mother and sister were the two irrefutable objections to

the eternal recurrence of the same, then the case seems closed.”10 Krell goes on to investigate

the case and says, “Everything that Nietzsche or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra celebrates in or

about the female – as a symbol of life, truth, creativity, and eternity – we can accordingly

reduce to overcompensation; in other words, it does nothing to improve the imbalanced

relationship between women and men. Such romanticism does not banish misogyny but

decorates and confirms its rule.” (3)

We may criticize Kofman and Krell’s argument of Nietzsche’s misogyny as reductive.

However, they shed light on what Derrida does not focus on; in other words, they both show

that we cannot ignore Nietzsche’s more complex relationship with women when we work on

Nietzsche’s reading of feminine thought. Distancing women can be seen as possibility of his

avoidance of direct confrontation with women, or in Krell’s words, a way of postponing the

discussion of women. Krell develops this point with reference to Nietzsche’s discussion of the

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996). 10 David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 3. In this thesis Nietzsche’s original German text will be referred to. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe 15 vols. ed. von Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1967-77). It will be referred to as KSA with appropriate volume and page number. The reference in Ecce Homo that Krell uses is from Nietzsche, KSA 6.267-69.

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power of “woman at a distance” in The Gay Science. In The Gay Science (1882),11 Nietzsche

discusses “the magic[,] and the most powerful effect” of “woman,” under the section title,

“Women and their action at a distance” (S.60). In articulating this “magic” and “effect,”

Nietzsche in this section compares a “woman” to “a large sailboat”:

Then, suddenly, as if born out of nothing, there appears before the gate of this hellish

labyrinth, only a few fathoms away – a large sailboat, gliding along as silently as a ghost.

Oh, what ghostly beauty! How magically it touches me! Has all the calm and taciturnity

of the world embarked on it? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place – my happier

ego, my second, departed self? Not to be dead and yet no longer alive? […] As the boat

that with its white sails moves like an immense butterfly over the dark sea. Yes! To move

over existence! […]

It seems as if the noise here had led me into fantasies. All great noise leads us to move

happiness into some quiet distance. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in

the midst of his own surf of plans and projects, then he is apt also to see quiet, magical

beings gliding past him and to long for their happiness and seclusion: women. He almost

thinks that his better self dwells there among the women, and that in these quiet regions

even the loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream about life. Yet!

Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there is a lot of noise, and

unfortunately much small and petty noise. The magic and the most powerful effect of

women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, action in distans; but this

requires first of all and above all – distance. (60)

The effect of woman can be elaborated with reference to Derrida’s metaphorical

discussion of “woman” in Spurs under the section called “Distances” (which includes the

quotation from section 60 of The Gay Science). Derrida finds that one is forced to appeal to

the Heideggerean use of the word Entfernung which is “at once divergence, distance and the

11 David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche's work sites

in word and image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) say, “Even though this book was initially conceived as a continuation of Daybreak (Nietzsche described it as Books 6-10 of that work), its contents turned out to be markedly different. […] In the retrospect of the 1886 preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche called his book a work of convalescence […]” (127). According to Walter Kaufmann, the translator of The Gay Science, the title of Book Four is named “Sanctus Januarius” because Nietzsche feels that his own blood has become liquid again. (221, fn) The Gay Science contains five books. According to Kaufmann, “Book Five was written after Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, and added only in the second edition [1886], picks up themes introduced earlier.” See Kaufmann, “Translator’s Introduction,” Gay Science 15. For the commentary of The Gay Science, see Kathleen Marie Higgins, Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

35

distantiation of distance, the defer of the distant, the de-ferment, it is in fact the annihilation

(Ent-) which constitutes the distant itself, the veiled enigma of proximation” (49-51).

Distance implies difference: Nietzsche gives a space for “woman” as other. “Woman”

standing at a distance implies she is different. However, what is distant from her is not what

she is, but the distance itself, because she has no essence in herself. This is the application of

Derrida’s term, différance, “deferred difference,” in the understanding of Nietzsche’s

“woman” as described in The Gay Science. In Derrida's essay, “Différance,” the

understanding of différance is related to "temporization" and "spacing." The discussion of

"temporization" in “Différance” starts with the relationship between the sign and the thing.

The sign represents the present in the absence of the thing. When we cannot grasp or show the

thing or when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the

sign.12 The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. The circulation of signs defers the

moment in which we can encounter the thing itself. The concept of the sign assumes the

presence of the present. However, if the present is absent, what is deferred is differences

without positive terms. This constitutes the spatial sense of différance.13 “Woman’s”

non-essentiality makes her exist on the surface only. In this section, Derrida writes:

Perhaps woman is not some thing which announces itself from a distance, at a distance

from some other thing. In that case it would not be a matter of retreat and approach.

Perhaps woman – a non-identity, a non-figure, a simulacrum – is distance’s very chasm,

the out-distancing of distance, the interval’s cadence, distance itself, if we could still say

such a thing, distance itself. (Spurs 49)

Even if a “woman” approaches proximity proximately, she is still distant. This constitutes

“the veiled enigma of proximation” in Derrida’s sense. The enigma of Nietzsche’s “woman”

comes from the condition that “woman” is veiled but that what is behind the veil is another

veil. It is “the depthless depth,” using Derrida’s word (Spurs 51), that constitutes the enigma.

She always stands at a distance with no possibility of reaching her essence. The distance is the

“chasm” that cannot be reached. What can be reached is only the surface. She can only be

known on the surface. This is “the veiled enigma of proximation.” This enigma breaks down

12 For the discussion of detour, see Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” Difference in

Translation, trans. Joseph F. Graham (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985) 165-207. Tours carries the meaning “turn” and “tower.” Tower of Babel implies that all kinds of language are turns or detours without reaching the whole.

13 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986) 1-27, especially 9-11.

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the binary opposition between “retreat” and “approach.” She cannot be approached but she

does not retreat. She acts at a distance.14

Derrida’s reading of woman as “action at a distance” illuminates what I call

“feminine” thought in Nietzsche. Krell’s Postponements shows that Nietzsche is in fear of

woman, who brings the other to him through sensuality, in other words, brings his death.

Krell’s argument is that Nietzsche early in his career planned to write a drama but then

perpetually postponed, “a drama that turns on questions of woman, sensual love, and tragic

death” (ix). Krell says, “The plans extend over the period 1870-1886, and perhaps even

beyond. It is a period that embraces almost all of Nietzsche’s major publications and spawns

all his principal ideas: eternal recurrence of the same, overman, will to power, genealogy, and

the revaluation of all values” (ix). Postponing the encounter of “woman” happens during the

period in which Nietzsche was developing his “feminine thought.” Putting Derrida’s and

Krell’s arguments together, Nietzsche’s conflictual attitudes towards woman become clearer.

Nietzsche can face feminine thought, but not quite the woman.

III – OVERMAN AND “WOMAN”

The following passage will further discuss a controversial section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra

on the role of “woman” for a man in patriarchy, who thinks in a “masculine” way, in

becoming overman. This section is called “On Little Old and Young Women.” It is about a

meeting between Zarathustra and a little old woman. In this meeting, Zarathustra is invited by

her to speak about women. It is not surprising that Zarathustra avoids talking about women,

and only discusses a man’s needs from women, because he begins his speech by saying:

“Everything about woman is a riddle.” This riddle has been explained in The Gay Science that

“woman” only exists on surface and distances herself from a distance. On the need of a man

from a woman, Zarathustra in “On Little Old and Young Women” says:

A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most

dangerous plaything. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1.18)15

14 In response to woman’s action at a distance said by Nietzsche and picked up by

Derrida in Spurs, Luce Irigaray goes further and criticises that “[d]istance does not come from her, even if, for him, her seduction operates at a distance.” See Irigaray, “Veiled Lips” 106.

15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1976). It will be cited as Thus Spoke Zarathustra with appropriate book and section.

37

Nietzsche does not explicitly say what “a real man” and a “woman” are. “A real man” may be

referred to a man who thinks in a “feminine” way, or a man who thinks in a “masculine” way.

Different interpretations of this metaphorical phrase generate two opposing reading of this

quote. We can read “woman” as a figure to be conquered in order to reinforce man’s

superiority in patriarchy. She belongs to a weaker sex for man’s pleasure. According to

Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche noted that what a woman leans on in her weakness “is not in all

circumstances power that she has actually recognised, but power that she wants and has

imagined,” and the weaker a woman feels, “the more power she will feel in him who ‘gives

her support.’” “The weakest woman,” he wrote, “will make every man into a god.”16 Then it

may be possible that Nietzsche treats woman as plaything in a literal sense. This is only a

man’s projection of a woman’s image onto women.

But “woman” in the quotation can also be read as “feminine” thought, which is the

most dangerous plaything a man needs in order to become the overman. “Plaything” is not to

be read in the literal sense. Hence, playing is not to treat “woman” as a doll, but as “pure and

fine, like a gem, irradiated by the virtues of a world that has not yet arrived.” Then, “[i]n one

sense, the role that Zarathustra would have woman play is analogous to that of Zarathustra,

who also sees his brothers as his children, and hopes to evoke from them the birth of the

overman. Zarathustra, too, is a dangerous plaything for man, looking for the child within him,

waking up destructive as well as constructive instincts in hopes of something better.”17 In

play, consciousness is suppressed and the subject is driven by instincts or drives, as discussed

in The Genealogy of Morals. Therefore, when speaking about “woman” in “On Little Old and

Young Women,” Nietzsche says:

Let your hope be: May I give birth to the overman.

To Zarathustra, “a real man” has the capacity to become an overman because as Zarathustra

says in the same section:

In a real man a child is hidden – and wants to play. Go to it, women, discover the child in

man!

The child can be read in a metaphorical sense as a thought that has still not yet entered the

symbolic order or in some sense an escape from its rule. Then, “a real man” does not refer to

16 Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 133. 17 Tamsin Lorraine, “Nietzsche and Feminism: Transvaluing Women in Thus Spoke

Zarathustra,” Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) 119-29, 122.

38

a man who holds a privileged position in patriarchy, but refers to a man who is capable of

thinking in a feminine way.

IV – THE WHIP

After Zarathustra’s speech on “woman,” the little old woman answers him:

Many fine things has Zarathustra said, especially for those who are young enough for

them. It is strange: Zarathustra knows women little, and yet he is right about them. Is this

because nothing is impossible with woman? And now, as a token of gratitude, accept a

little truth. After all, I am old enough for it. Wrap it up and hold your hand over its mouth:

else it will cry overloudly, this little truth.

The truth is:

If you go to women, do not forget the whip.

I am going to offer various interpretations of this statement. Nonetheless, none of the

interpretations can be proved without criticism as all of them are speculative and inadequate.

The statements can be read with reference to Thomas H. Brobjer who points out Nietzsche’s

double senses. In one sense, this statement may imply Nietzsche’s contempt against women.

On this, Brobjer says, “This hostility and contempt seems to have two major causes; the first

is the so-called natural feeling of contempt and antagonism between the care-taking mother

type and the more adventurous father type” (186).18 In the other sense, this statement may

imply Nietzsche’s criticism of feminism. Brobjer says, “The cause for his hostility toward the

first […] is that feminism based on the assertion of equality […] that Nietzsche denies in

general and regards as nihilistic and destructive to the highest achievements of humankind”

(185). This interpretation shows Nietzsche’s misogyny which is against feminists’ fighting for

women’s peculiarity and equality with man. George Brandes in his letter to Nietzsche says,

“When you [Nietzsche] write about women you are very like him [August Strindberg].”19

On the other hand, the advice of the little old woman does not say explicitly who should

take the whip. It leaves the possibility that the whip can be held by a woman when coming to

18 See Thomas H. Brobjer, “Women as Predatory Animals, or Why Nietzsche

Philosophized with a Whip.” A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004) 181-92.

19 Kathleen J. Wininger, “Nietzsche’s Women and Women’s Nietzsche,” Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche 236-51, 240.

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her. Carol Diethe compares the two English translation of the German sentence, “Vergiß die

Peitsche nicht!”: (1) Hollingdale’s translation: “Do not forget your whip!” and (2)

Kaufmann’s: “Do not forget the whip!” to cast away the misogynist position of Nietzsche.

With reference to Pieper’s argument, she said that the whip referred to could belong to the

woman to be visited just as plausibly as to the visiting man” and “the woman might be acting

in the role of supervisor to make sure that the man fulfills his destiny of striving to become

the Übermensch. The whip can be seen as a circus whip (or the lion-tamer’s whip), instead of

a horsewhip for beating.20 It can then, just possibly, be seen as “a symbol for

self-overcoming.”21 Then, it is possible that the woman does not take the position of the

tamed, but that of the tamer of man to supervise man in the process of overcoming.

On the woman’s holding the whip, there is an interesting biographical detail which is

worth pointing out. Nietzsche initiated Paul Rée and Salomé to take a photo in a

photographer's studio in Lucerne on May 13, 1882 after the third unsuccessful marriage

proposal to Salomé. This was to encourage the holy trinity to study and live together in the

following winter in Vienna. Nietzsche suggested that they visit a photographer's studio, where,

under his arrangement, he posed himself in a playful mood and Rée pulling the arms of a

goat-cart, driven by “Lou” [Salomé] who was perched behind them, holding a whip entwined

with flowers in spite of strong objections on the part of Rée who suffered throughout his life

from a pathological aversion to the reproduction of his features (See Figure 1).22 The picture

suggests that Salomé who takes the whip in the photo refers not to an actual woman, but can

be read metaphorically which refers to “feminine” thought.

20 Kathleen Marie Higgins, in “The Whip Recalled,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 12

(Fall 1996): 1-17, writes, “The whip is not a horse whip, or a variant thereof, meant for beating or hitting, but a circus whip (or the lion-tamer’s whip), which signals control over the cat and tiger in woman (but which is not used to hit or beat)” (Quoted in Brobjer, “Women as Predatory Animals” 186).

21 See Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Women 64. For details of her arguments on the whip, see the section “Nietzsche, Lou Salomé and the Whip” 63-6.

22 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs, trans. Breon Mitchell, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (New York: Paragon House: 1990) 48. For a description of the picture, see Salomé, Looking Back 168, n48, Angela Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work (New York: M. Bell Ltd., 1984) 39 and David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and On the Genealogy of Morals (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) 113.

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Figure 1. Salomé, Paul Rée, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Lucerne, May 1882.23

Salomé’s poem, “A Prayer to Life” (Hymnus an das Leben), can help to make such a

reference more understandable. It is a poem which Nietzsche set music to and renamed as

Hymn to Life (Hymnus an das Leben). The last stanza of this poem runs as follows:

Jahrtausende zu sein! Zu denken!

Schliess mich in beide Arme ein:

Hast Du Kein Glück mehr mir zu schenken –

23 Taken from David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche, 114 with courtesy of

Dorothee Pfeiffer, Lou-Andreas-Salomé Archive, Gottingen.

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Wohlan – noch hast Du Deine Pein.

[Millennia – long to be! to think!

Enclose me fast in both your arms:

If you’ve no happiness left to give me –

Well then! you still possess your pain.]24

Nietzsche recalled this in Ecce Homo: “that Hymn to Life (for mixed choir and orchestra)

whose score was published two years ago by E.W. Fritzsch in Leipzig […] is not by me: it is

the amazing inspiration of a young Russian woman who was my friend at that time, Miss Lou

von Salomé. Whoever can find any meaning at all in the last words of this poem will guess

why I preferred and admired it: they attain greatness. Pain is not considered an objection to

life: “If you have no more happiness to give me, well then! You still have suffering.” Perhaps

my music, too, attains greatness at this point.”25 Suffering as set in Salomé’s poem to

Nietzsche is not for assertion of subjectivity; instead, it is a Dionysian suffering. Nietzsche’s

music attains greatness under Salomé’s influence because his music turns towards Dionysian.

Dionysus is the suffering god who eternally preaches “the importance of overcoming at

every moment” and “the eternal Yes to all things.” These are regarded by Nietzsche as “the

concept[s] of Dionysus” which are what Zarathustra preaches.26 Dionysus’ suffering is a

source of joy, a joy in the process of “becoming of becoming.” Suffering is seen as an

affirmation, instead of negation or castration, of life.

If we think of Dionysus’ suffering as a form of masochism, it is different from seeing

suffering as a form of negation of life as personified by the Crucified. It is, as Nietzsche says

in Ecce Homo, “Dionysus versus the Crucified.” During life, suffering is affirmed for its own

sake whereas in the Christian way of thinking, life is negated and therefore, it is not affirmed

for its own sake, but for salvation. In Dionysian suffering which destroys the possibility of

individuality, the body gains ascendancy over the mind during suffering which disintegrates

24 Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work 28, 229. 25 See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 296-7. Shortly after the completion of the musical

composition “Hymn to Life,” Nietzsche wrote to Salomé, “it costs me the greatest effort to come to a decision to accept life” (Sept 8, 1882). There is another poem by Salomé called “To Pain” which moved him to tears every time he read it (Letter to Peter Gast dated 13 July, 1882). See Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).

26 See Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Ecce Homo Section 6.

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the subjectivity into ruins. Dionysus’ suffering within the body, in destroying singularity, has

a ‘feminine’ aspect, whereas Christ’s, suffering for the mind, is “masculine.”

From Salomé’s poem about suffering to Salomé in the photograph holding the whip,

the whip there does not seem to be an assertion of the dominance of the single subject. The

whip can be understood by looking at the second quotation in which it appears:

Keep time with my whip, you shall dance and cry! Or have I forgotten the whip? Not I!

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra 3.15.1)

The whip is used to keep time with life, instead of inflicting pain so that he can share the

wisdom and experience the joy by dancing.27 However, life warns:

“O Zarathustra, don’t crack your whip so frightfully! After all, you know that noise

murders thought – and just now such tender thoughts are coming to me.” (Thus Spoke

Zarathustra 3.15.2)

If he cracks the whip frightfully, “feminine” thought is “killed.” It is “weak” thought which

dies out when whipping noisily in order to assert subjectivity. Instead, whipping is for

marking time for playing Dionysian music and dance, which promotes joy in suffering.

Nietzsche takes more than one stance on the question of whipping. The whip can be

used to hit a woman out of misogyny, to be hit by a woman or mark time in order to

experience Dionysian suffering, or, in other words, to think in a “feminine” way.

V – SADISM, MASOCHISM AND BISEXUALITY

His contradictoriness, or ambivalence, is evident in a conversation between Salomé and

Nietzsche about cruel people, masochism and bisexuality as quoted in the epigraph. The

27 Jennifer Ham says, “The whip, which, like many other instruments of power and

authority in Nietzsche […] will be reinterpreted, transvalued, changed from a symbol of corporal punishment to one of artistic performance and dance.” The whip discussed in “The Other Dancing Song” is read by her as “the whip of animal training, or perhaps simply an instrument for marking time in music” (199). See Jennifer Ham, “Circe’s Truth: On the Way to Animals and Women,” A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) 193-210, 198-9.

43

conversation took place in Tautenburg between June 25 to Aug 27, 1882, and is recalled in

Salomé’s Freud Journal dated 11 May, 1913 under the heading “Cruelty – Compassion.”28

To Salomé, this recalled conversation is about the “enigma of cruelty.” Cruelty which

implies a degree of intimacy constitutes an enigma to Salomé. Cruelty is only imposed on the

beloved object and increases in proportion to love.29 Exercising cruelty on the beloved

involves compassion which to Salomé has multiple meanings: “identification from sympathy

(homosexual libido) (143); identification based on the thought that the same thing might

befall oneself; identification from direct or displaced guilt feeling […]” (143).

“Cruel people being masochists” is a way to confirm their identities, which need the

other for such confirmation through their acting cruelly to them. Cruelty confirms identity, but

it is evident that there is a desire to escape identity, hence another form of masochism, and

this relates to Nietzsche’s contradictory relation to women, both wanting to beat and be beaten.

We can see that Salomé relates this to an ambivalence in Nietzsche which she calls

bisexuality.

Here is another interpretation of Salomé’s understanding of the relationship between

cruelty and masochism which can be inferred from the photo of Nietzsche, Salomé and Paul

Rée, as shown in the previous section. It can be inferred from the photo that Nietzsche can be

seen as willing to be whipped by Salomé. Based upon this speculation, the ego is not cruel to

the other, but to itself by passing on the power to punish itself to the superego; in other words,

it likes to be punished.

If Nietzsche is “sadomasochistic unto himself,” as Salomé said in her Freud Journal, it

may be because he tries to treat masochism as primary and Dionysian-like, i.e. as bringing

about the breakdown of individuality; in other words, he looks for his own dissolution.

Klossowski says, “[T]he physical agent of my self [le suppôt physique de moi-même] seems

to reject any thoughts I have that no longer ensure its own cohesion […]”30 Masochism,

instead of affirming one’s identity, aims at dissolution of identity. Then, sadomasochism,

28 Livingstone mentions that fragments of Nietzsche’s writing preserved from that period

indicate that they probably talked about such things as the readiness for absolute self-destruction, good and evil, cruelty, love of self as desire for self-destruction, marriage and the religiousness of the free-thinker (Salomé: Her Life and Work 47). This fragment can be found in Nietzsche, “Tautenburger Aufzeichnungen,” KSA 10, passim.

29 See Salomé, The Freud Journal (May 11, 1913), trans. Stanley A. Leavy (London: Quartet Books, 1987).

30 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1997) 28.

44

other than the masochism which the ego endures for the guilt imposed by the superego, is no

different from masochism which brings the breakdown of identity. Cruel people are

(sado)masochistic because cruelty is the ability to transvalue/destroy all values including

one's own values. The type of thinking that dominates cruel people is passive, “feminine.”31

Salomé’s comment on Nietzsche discloses the fact that bisexuality is the origin. It is cruel and

not cruel and seen as a transgressive activity which disrupts the symbolic order.

Her comment may be based upon what Nietzsche writes on Oedipus in The Birth of

Tragedy. In the book, he discovers something important which allows him to think “feminine”

and to admit the possibility of becoming a woman.

Oedipus uses his wisdom to solve the riddle and asserts his individuality, i.e. being the

king and husband, but at the same time he destroys his individuality and creates his

doubleness, i.e. as king/husband of the queen and son of the queen. However it is not the

riddle/wisdom that creates incest (doubleness). Instead, wisdom can be born only from incest.

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy,32

There is a tremendously old popular belief, especially in Persia, that a wise magus can be

born only from incest. With the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Oedipus in mind, we

must immediately interpret this to mean that where prophetic and magical powers have

broken the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and the real magic

of nature, some enormously unnatural event – such as incest – must have occurred earlier,

as a cause. How else could one compel nature to surrender her secrets if not by

triumphantly resisting her, that is, by means of something unnatural? It is this insight that

I find expressed in that horrible triad of Oedipus’ destinies: the same man who solves the

riddle of nature – that Sphinx of two species – also must break the most sacred natural

order by murdering his father and marrying his mother. Indeed, the myth seems to wish to

whisper to us that wisdom, and particularly Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural

abomination; that he who by means of his knowledge plunges nature in to the abyss of

destruction must also suffer the dissolution of nature in his own person. “The edge of

wisdom turns against the wise: wisdom is a crime against nature” … (9.68-9)

31 To Deleuze, masochism is not the other form of sadism; he is in doubt of the concept

of sadomasochism. He says, “Even though the sadist may definitely enjoy being hurt, it does not follow that he enjoys it in the same way as the masochist; likewise the masochist’s pleasure in inflicting pain is not necessarily the same as the sadist’s.” See Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1997) 46.

32 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music,” The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967) 15-146. It will be referred to as “The Birth of Tragedy” plus section number plus page number.

45

Incest is discovery of the biformity, the bisexuality, the doubleness, of nature. As an act

which disrupts narrative, it weakens the general knowledge of time which states the

proposition that the present leads to the future. From Nietzsche’s reading of Oedipus’s

tragedy, the future (incest) determines the present (riddle-solving, becoming the king and

marrying the mother). The progressive thinking is reinterpreted and reversed. It then leads to

the insight that contradiction or irreducible doubleness, what Freud will call ‘ambivalence’ is

the origin, and hence makes non-contradictory identity impossible. Oedipus is both the

husband and the child of his mother. If we use this sense of doubleness as generated from the

reading of incest as a cause to read transvaluation, we reach a deeper meaning as suggested by

Salomé in the quoted conversation. Transvaluation cannot destroy all values because these

are not unitary, but split. It cannot overcome an irreducible doubleness brought by incest.

Oedipus’s wisdom does not lie in his ability in solving Sphinx’s riddle, but is his

understanding the fact that origins are plural in sense, and the principle of individuation is

impossible. That is his Dionysian tragedy. Nietzsche says, “The tradition is undisputed that

Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus and that

for a long time the only stage hero was Dionysus himself. But it may be claimed with equal

confidence that until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero; that all the

celebrated figures of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus, etc. – are mere masks of this

original hero, Dionysus.” (The Birth of Tragedy 10.73) Dionysus is twice born. Such duality

defeats the belief that origin is single. If origin is plural, it is difficult to uphold an absolute

identity. Interestingly enough, from Greek mythology, we know that Dionysus is bisexual.33

From the case of Dionysus, we can understand in a better way how sadomasochism is related

to bisexuality. Bisexuality cannot be understood in a psychoanalytic sense in which

femininity is understood as the opposite of masculinity. Bisexuality cannot be understood

within the realm of sexual difference. It is a concept which precedes the symbolic order which

assumes the origin is single. It is unquestionably feminine.

Nietzsche’s fear of looking at Salomé shows his shame of his ambivalence towards his

(sado)masochism, bisexuality and his otherness. It is interesting to ponder if Nietzsche writes

his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, out of an insight into bisexuality, and then understands its

horror in making identity impossible. Throughout his writings, the encounter of his

bisexuality is postponed. While embracing the idea of eternal overcoming (defeating the idea

of what one is), he cannot overcome his fear of coming back to encounter his bisexuality until

33 The bisexuality of Dionysus is discussed in Krell, Postponements 34-7.

46

his last book, Ecce Homo. It is only in this book that the discussion of Dionysus comes back

and he thinks carefully of how one becomes what one is (the subtitle of Ecce Homo).

Nietzsche’s fear of bisexuality, according to Salomé, shows ambivalence towards

woman, but a desire towards thinking he identifies with being a woman, being feminine. But

he cannot approach feminine thought without difficulty.

47

Chapter Three: Eternal Recurrence: A Tragic Thought

Only with a quiet voice and with all signs of deepest horror did

[Nietzsche] speak about this secret. Life, in fact, produced such

suffering in him that the certainty of an eternal return of life had

meant something horrifying to him.

- Salomé, Nietzsche1

I – INTRODUCING THE CONCEPT

The idea of eternal recurrence is introduced (though not by its name) by Nietzsche in an

aphoristic passage in The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 341:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness

and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once

more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and

every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your

life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider

and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal

hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of

dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon

who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would

have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this

thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you.

The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable

times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed

would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than

this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

To Nietzsche, there are a thousand formulae for us to understand the idea of eternal

recurrence.2 His discussion of the idea of eternal recurrence is not only found in The Gay

1 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Siegfried Mandel (Urbana and Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 2001) 130. It was first published in 1894 as Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken [Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man in His Works].

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Science (1882), but also in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) and Ecce Homo (1888). He in

each book adopts a different style to conceive it: The Gay Science is aphoristic in style; Thus

Spoke Zarathustra is a metaphorical work3; and, Ecce Homo is a mock-autobiography, and is

a reading of his previous works. Stylistic difference shows that the idea of eternal recurrence

cannot be seen as a single concept, and Nietzsche has inherent problems, or ambivalence, in

approaching this idea, ranging from horror to the deepest excitement.

Before introducing the difficulties inherent in his concept, it is necessary to see how

Nietzsche understands eternal recurrence. The original German phrase of “eternal recurrence”

is “Ewige Wiederkunft.”4 Nietzsche preferred the noun “die Kunft” to its synonym in the

construction “die Wiederkehr.” According to Geoff Waite, it is likely because “Kunft” derives

from the common verb “kommen” (“to come”) whereas “Kehr” derives from “kehren” (“to

turn”) – which implies mere mechanical, circular reiteration without adaptation to changing

historical or political circumstances.5 Nietzsche’s preference of Kunft(‘to come’) to Kehr (‘to

turn’) may imply “the eternal recurrence of the different.” “To come” signifies every

recurrence is a new arrival. Only the different recurs. In this sense, this thesis argues that

“eternal recurrence,” is more preferable than “eternal return” as the English translation of

“Ewige Wiederkunft.”

In my reading in this thesis, the idea of eternal recurrence may be seen as a return of the

different. It contests phallogocentrism which believes in metaphysical presence, linear

temporality and stable singly-sexed identity. Nietzsche says, “Eternal recurrence [...] is a

‘hammer in the hand of the most powerful human, --.’”6 The most powerful human can be

read as the overman [Übermensch] who uses the hammer for revaluation of all values. In this

sense, the concept of “man” has to be overcome; and therefore, the overman is not a

“masculine” concept at all. The criterion for revaluing all values is the ability to revalue every

2 See David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay

Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and On the Genealogy of Morals (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) 124.

3 This idea is indebted to Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) 41. His idea is referred in chapter one, fn. 55.

4 In the original German version of “The Convalescent” (3, 13), “Der Genesende”, Zarathustra said, ‘Und ewige Wiederkunft auch des Kleinsten! […]’ [And the eternal recurrence of the smallest […]. See also Nietzsche, KSA 4 270.

5 See Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 323.

6. Nietzsche, “Nachgelassene Fragmente, Sommer-Herbst,” Keirische Gesamtausgabe, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967ff) 7/2:295, quoted in Waite 526 n317. According to Waite, the long dashes indicate that the text is illegible to the editors.

49

return as different; in other words, revaluing or reinterpreting, in Vattimo’s sense, is not to

show what the world is, but how it becomes. The idea of eternal recurrence can be seen as a

kind of “weak” thought.

This chapter is going to show how eternal recurrence can be seen as a tragedy to a

subject who clings on to an identity but is afraid of eternal becoming. Each return is a force

which destroys every possibility of maintaining an identity. Klossowski (who influences

Blanchot’s, Deleuze’s and Foucault’s readings of Nietzsche) proposes that eternal recurrence

is seen as “the doctrine of the vicious circle.”7 He says:

The doctrine of the vicious circle, which is a sign of forgetfulness, is grounded in the

forgetfulness of what we have been and will be, not only for innumerable times, but for

all time and always. We are other than what we are now: others that are not elsewhere,

but always in this same life. (53-4)

In the same life, we have to perceive ourselves as other than what we are now. It is a parody

concept or in Klossowski’s concept, “a simulacrum of doctrine.”8 Perceiving eternal

recurrence as a parody concept requires the ability of forgetting origins and the past. A

patriarchal subject, who has a belief in metaphysical presence lacks the ability to forget.

The difficulty in conceiving the idea of eternal recurrence is that it has both a liberatory

and self-torturing effect on a subject at the same time. While embracing the liberation brought

7 For Klossowski’s interpretation of eternal recurrence, see Klossowski’s lecture of 1957,

“Nietzsche, le polythéisme et la parodie” (“Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody”) in Un si funeste désir (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Maurice Blanchot describes this as “one of the most important writings on Nietzsche in French.” in “The Laughter of the Gods, ” Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 169-82, 180. Deleuze praised it for having “renewed the interpretation of Nietzsche.” See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: The Athlone Press, 1994) 312, note 19 quoted by Daniel W. Smith, “Translator’s Preface” to Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle vii. Michel Foucault comments this book which was first published in 1969, it “is the greatest book of philosophy [he has] read with Nietzsche himself.” (see Smith, “Translator’s Preface” vii) The Baphomet which was published in 1965, can be seen as “allegorical version of the Eternal Return.” (Smith ix), though he says “The Baphomet (gnosis or fable, or Oriental tale) should in no way be seen as a demonstration of the substratum of truth in the semblance of doctrine that is Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, nor as a fiction constructed on this personal experience of Nietzsche.” See Klossowski, The Baphomet, trans. Sophie Hawkes and Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1988) 166. For the commentary on Klossowski’s interpretation of eternal recurrence, see Blanchot’s “The Laughter of the Gods,” 169-82; Douglas Smith, “Wilful Acts, Diminishing Returns: Deleuze and Klossowski,” Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872-1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 140-84. This is a comparative study of Deleuze’s, Klossowski’s and Foucault’s readings of Nietzsche; Ian James, “Simulacrum and the Play of Parody in the Writing of Pierre Klossowski,” French Studies Vol LIV, No. 3, 299-311.

8 This term is quoted by Blanchot, “The Laughter of the Gods” 181.

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by eternal recurrence from the burden of the past, it is hard for a subject to accept the

dissolution of subjectivity followed by liberation. Even if Nietzsche embraces the idea of

eternal recurrence as the return of the different, he is ambivalent towards it. This can be seen

in his reaction to the suggestion as recorded by Salomé in the epigraph. Horror of the eternal

recurrence comes from his awareness of its threat to maintaining an identity. This chapter also

examines if such horror may, if we follow Krell’s argument in Postponements, postpone

Nietzsche’s approach to eternal recurrence from The Gay Science, to Thus Spoke Zarathustra

and Ecce Homo. Throughout this discussion, I will focus on Zarathustra’s response to “the

idea of the eternal recurrence,” which Ecce Homo regards as “the fundamental conception” of

Thus Spoke Zarathustra.9

II – ETERNAL RECURRENCE AS A CHALLENGE

Let us begin with section 341 of The Gay Science, as quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

If every painful and every joyful event will be re-presented, it is “the greatest weight” to a

subject because he/she is entrapped in “the eternal hourglass of existence” and cannot escape

from everything including identity and emotion, which are associated with all the past events

in his/her life. If the past is the weight, the word “once more” adds additional pressure to this

weight; and the past becomes “the greatest weight” in every “once more.”

Faced with this “greatest weight,” the demon offers two kinds of responses. The first

response manifests a kind of melancholic feeling that nothing can be done because everything

that happens has happened and will happen again. The subject is desperate and throws

himself/herself down. He/She cannot change anything past. Facing this “vicious circle,” the

only thing a subject can do, as suggested by the demon, is to “gnash his or her teeth” and

“curse the demon.” The past is levied upon the present “I” in the form of memory. If a subject

thinks that a new event which is identical to the past will happen again, it means that there can

be no forgetting of the past. As a consequence, memory makes the subject incapable of

reinterpreting a present event as anything new from the past. The subject can only draw the

conclusion that the past returns. This response reads eternal recurrence as return of the same.

Every pain will be the same pain as before; every joy will not be more joyful than before. Past

controls everything in present and future. The only redemption from the past cannot be sought

in the present life.

9 Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Ecce Homo

Section 1, 295.

51

Such thinking assumes the existence of metaphysical presence, e.g. God. Belief in such

presence draws the association of the past to the present and to the future. Putting this

thinking into Vattimo’s sense, this is a “strong” reading. Each event acts as a burden for a

subject to seek for future redemption which can be seen as progress. The subject will not read

each event as it is, but to see how it can be fitted for certain assumptions for future

redemption.

Before going further, from the question asked by the demon who says, “If some day or

night a demon …” and the first response suggested by the demon, we can see that the idea of

eternal recurrence is not to be seen as a cosmological concept which can be proved

empirically, but rather as a crucial psychological test to contest phallogocentric thinking.10

Eternal recurrence, to Nietzsche, is not an ontological concept. It “does not aim at a

metaphysics of the ‘hereafter’ (‘Jenseits’) but at a philosophy of the ‘here now’

(‘Diesseits’)”.11 Instead of following Plato to say that empirical reality is mimetic in character,

Nietzsche holds an opposite view: empirical reality is not a copy of the world of ideal forms.

Eternal recurrence is not preparing for progressive development brought by “strong” thought.

It is not a belief of love of after-life, but amori fati (love of fate). Nietzsche says:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be

different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary,

still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary – but

love it. (Ecce Homo, p. 258)

If metaphysical presence is absent, there is nothing to return to. Each event is discrete, and

has no relationship with the past and the future. The “I” does not see the return as the return

of the past, because there is no ‘I’ and no present for the return to return to.

If there is no present for the past to return to in the future, what returns must be the

different, that is bisexual, “feminine.” This reading takes us back to the second response

suggested by the demon in section 341 of The Gay Science: “You are a god and never have I

heard anything more divine.” This divine force leads the subject, as said in the end of section

341 of The Gay Science, “to crave nothing more fervently than [the] ultimate eternal

confirmation and seal [,]” instead of thinking eternal recurrence as the “greatest weight.” This

eternal confirmation is not a confirmation of being, but confirmation of “becoming,” if we

10 On eternal recurrence as a test, see Eric Oger, “The Eternal Return as Crucial Test,”

Journal of Nietzsche Studies 14 (1997): 1-18, especially 6. 11 Nietzsche, KSA 4 133, 185.

52

follow Deleuze. Therefore, the demon says, “If this thought gained possession of you, it

would change you as you are or perhaps crush you.” The “I” has to overcome in each

confirmation. Overcoming the belief in the concept of “I” can be understood with reference to

Blanchot’s concept of “the neuter”, as expounded in The Step Not Beyond.

The Step Not Beyond uses the neuter, the “he/it” (le “il”), to substitute for the “I.” The

translator of this book, Lycette Nelson, says, “I have translated ‘le il’ as ‘the he/it’ throughout

because ‘il’ is both the masculine personal third person pronoun and the impersonal third

person pronoun. Since there is no neuter pronoun in French, Blanchot uses ‘le il.’”12 He/It is

not a determinate pronoun which refers to a particular and distinct subject. It does not relate to

any person. Then the relation between the subject and the neuter is not unique. The neuter

resides in every place and no place. It gives no identity to a subject. Blanchot’s understanding

of it is that:

The relation to the “he/it”: the plurality that the "he/it" holds is such that it cannot be

marked by any plural sign; why? ”they” [ils] would still designate an analyzable, and thus

maniable, whole (3).

He/it can never be reduced to the same, as Levinas says in Totality and Infinity, “He and I do

not form a number.” With this characteristic, “he/it is the very relation of the self to the other”

in two senses: infinite or discontinuous and with relationships always in displacement, and in

displacement in regard to itself, without anything that has to displace itself, displacement also

of that which would be without place (5). The “he/it” is used to substitute for the “I” because

Blanchot believes that:

The self is not a self but the same of myself, not some personal, impersonal identity, sure

and vacillating, but the law or rule that conventionally assures the ideal identity of terms

or notations (4).

Therefore, “I” is only “hypothetical, even fictional” and “a canonic abbreviation, representing

the law of the same, fractured in advance” (6).

Following Blanchot's argument, there is no “you” or “I” in each eternal recurrence

because they are only “canonic abbreviations.” Blanchot says, “[T]he same, that is to say,

myself, in as much as it sums up the rule of identity, that is, the present self. But the demand

12 See Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (New York: State

University of New York Press, 1992) 138, fn. 1. Nelson gives a brief introduction to the neuter on pp. ix to x.

53

of the return, excluding any present mode from time, would never release a now in which the

same would come back to the same, to myself” (11). Then only the neuter will return in

displacement infinitely or discontinuously. Every return is a disaffirmation of identity. In

Blanchot's words, “To come again would be to come to ex-center oneself anew, to wander”

(33). The subject has to approach the other in every return from the outside. Blanchot says,

“The ‘re’ of the return inscribes like the ‘ex’, opening of every exteriority […]” (33).

Each return implies the beginning of Dionysian tragedy. Nietzsche explains the concept

of the “tragic” in the following:

Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life rejoicing over

its own inexhaustibility evening the very sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I

called Dionysian, that is what I understood as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic

poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous

affect by its vehement discharge – Aristotle misunderstood it that way – but in order to be

oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity – that joy which includes

even joy in destroying.13

Aristotle’s catharsis sense of tragedy which gives confirmation of an identity is the opposite

of Nietzsche’s understanding of tragic effect. Section 342 of The Gay Science begins with the

statement, “Incipit tragoedia,” which means “The tragedy begins.” Walter Kaufmann, the

English translator of The Gay Science, comments on this section in the footnote: “This

aphorism, which concludes Book IV [of The Gay Science] and thus stood at the end of the

original edition of The Gay Science, is almost identical with section 1 of “Zarathustra’s

Prologue,” which opens Nietzsche’s next book [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. But in The Gay

Science Nietzsche printed it as a single paragraph, like all of the numbered sections of The

Gay Science, regardless of their length, while in Zarathustra it is broken up into twelve very

short paragraphs, in keeping with the style of Zarathustra.” (274, fn) This section of The Gay

Science or the prologue of Zarathustra writes that Zarathustra is prepared to go under. The

reason Zarathustra gives is that he has too much wisdom and needs to share it with others. He

says, “Behold, I am sick of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need

hands outstretched to receive it; I want to give away and distribute until the wise among men

enjoy their folly once again and the poor their riches. For that I must descend to the depths …

I must go under…” “Going under” in German is Untergang which is the word for the setting

13 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 562-3. Nietzsche reiterates the passage in Ecce Homo

273.

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of the sun, and also means “to perish”.14 This word implies that Zarathustra begins to

experience his tragedy; in other words, he submits to the power of Dionysus, and begins to

take the second response suggested by the demon.

III – ZARATHUSTRA’S AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS ETERNAL RECURRENCE

In Zarathustra, the second response, which starts the tragedy, is positioned as the only means

of redemption from the past; in other words, this response is the only means to get rid of the

control of the past, “the greatest weight.” Zarathustra says in “On Redemption”:

“To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed

it’ – that alone should I call redemption.” All “It was” is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful

accident – until the creative will says to it, “But thus I willed it.” Until the creative will

says to it, “But thus I will it; thus shall I will it.”

The phrase “Thus I willed it” implies that the past, which “I willed,” has happened but has

already gone, and is now nothing to do with the present “I.” The past has been forgotten. Each

event is a discrete one and has no relationship with past ones.

To accept eternal recurrence is to accept tragedy, but Zarathustra cannot do it. He is

dominated by the power of masculine thought, which, in the light of chapter 2, we may say is

not bisexual. I will show below Zarathustra’s ambivalence in the sections of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra which discuss the idea of eternal recurrence:

“On the Vision and The Riddle”

The ambivalence is manifested in “On the Vision and the Riddle” in which Zarathustra is

challenged by eternal recurrence. This is the section about Zarathustra’s recounting of his

experience with eternal recurrence on land to a group of sailors, while he was on board. This

recounting shows his return from the land to the sea. In his recounting, Zarathustra says that

he must try to climb up a mountain to defy “the spirit of gravity, his devil and archenemy,”

which draw him towards the abyss. Such a return shows that he has insufficient strength to

hear the burrowing of the abysmal thought, eternal recurrence. (Let me digress at this point by

explaining how eternal recurrence is called ‘abysmal thought’. In OED, the word “abyss”

(abime or abysm in the older forms of English taken from the French; and abyssus in Latin)

14 See Walter Kaufmann (trans. & ed.), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part - Editor’s

Note,” The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1976) 115; and Gay Science footnote to section 342.

55

refers to “a bottomless gulf; any unfathomable or apparently unfathomable cavity or void

space; a profound gulf, chasm, or void extending beneath.” It is also used in heraldry, to

denote the centre of an escutcheon,’ which is “the shield or shield-shaped surface on which a

coat of arms is depicted.” The depiction is in a pattern of mise-en-abîme. OED defines it as

the “self-reflection within the structure of a literary work” and “a work employing

self-reflection.” It can be seen that what is mise-en-abîme relates to a vision that repeats

eternally. Multiplication of images does not lead to a confirmation of identity, but to a loss of

single origin and subjectivity. Vision leads to the loss of identity. Zarathustra says, “Is not

seeing always – seeing abysses?”15 In the abysmal image, only void, “depthless depth,” can

be visualized. It is a feeling of dizziness because seeing at the edge of the abyss makes a

subject disappear into the void. It is not nothing can be seen but there is no one to see.16 Then,

the abysmal thought is not a thought which can be thought of by a subject because

subjectivity is stripped off in the eternal recurrence of nothingness. The abysmal thought

cannot be seen as a thought of eternal recurrence of the same because everything is shattered

and nothing can remain the same as before.)

In his recounting, his first hearing of eternal recurrence comes when “the half dwarf,

half mole, lame,” which sits on him, drips leaden thoughts into his brain:

O Zarathustra you philosopher's stone! You threw yourself up high, but every stone that is

thrown must fall. O Zarathustra, you philosopher's stone, you slingstone, you star-crusher!

You threw yourself up so high; but every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to

yourself and to your own stoning - O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone,

but it will fall back on yourself. (my italics)

It is a passage which is similar to section 341 of The Gay Science. In The Gay Science, the

demon utters the idea of eternal recurrence, and offers two responses. In Thus Spoke

Zarathustra it is the dwarf who is described as “half dwarf, half mole” who performs the role.

On the nature of this mole, Debra B. Bergoffen says, “This mole, now paired with the dwarf

15 Shapiro reads Nietzsche’s statement as “a question about our ocular and perspectival

experience.” He says, “In one influential tradition, vision is what reveals things all at once; it is a mode of access to things in their sheer presence … For seeing is seeing Abgrüne, that is, looking into areas where there is no ground, where the more intensely we look, the more the ground falls away.” See Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 176.

16 This idea is indebted to Levinas, who discusses insomnia at night: “It is not that there is my vigilance in the night; in insomnia it is the night itself that watches.” See Levinas, Existence and Existents 66. Blanchot says in the similar way in The Step Not Beyond, “I do not know; there is no ‘I’ to not know.” See Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond 68.

56

as the spirit of gravity, is charged with the crime of alienating us from ourselves. Linking the

principles of metaphysics to the dictates of morality, Nietzsche, having found the mole guilty

of being the ground of the metaphysical principle of identity, charges it with being

responsible for the ethical principle of universality encoded in the morality of good and

evil.”17 Hamlet calls his father an “old mole.” (see i.v. 170) In this sense, “the half dwarf, half

mole” carries patriarchal power, and will not offer the second response to Zarathustra as the

demon, which is evil to patriarchy, will do in The Gay Science. The significance of the old

mole whispering eternal recurrence shows that Zarathustra in this section tends to read eternal

recurrence as the return of the same under masculine thinking appropriated by

phallogocentrism. He prefers to see himself as Apollonian, rather than to submit himself to

the dissolution of identity associated with Dionysus.

After the dwarf’s saying, Zarathustra feels that everything oppresses him and he feels

that twosomeness (him and the dwarf) was more lonesome than being alone. The presence of

the dwarf reminds Zarathustra that he is alone in facing the past which he wants to avoid. The

struggle between “up” and “down” shows that he wants to beat this “half dwarf, half mole”.

He said:

[T]here is something in me that I call courage; that has so far slain my every

discouragement. This courage finally bade me stand still and speak: “Dwarf! It is you or

I!”

This “half dwarf, half mole” is the heaviest stone inside him. He is the symbol of his

depressing moment in the past which Zarathustra wants to throw away, instead of facing it

again, lest he will fall down and loses his independence. But the dwarf says, “Every stone that

is thrown must fall.” The past personified as the dwarf, like a stone, always comes back to

oppress him. The dwarf symbolizes the abject in Zarathustra, which is neither his subject nor

object. David Allison points out that the very weakest moment of personal depression or

resignation is a feeling of abjection.18 On abjection, Kristeva in Powers of Horror says:

What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something

else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject

has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I. If the object, however,

through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which,

17 See Debra B. Bergoffen, “On Nietzsche’s Moles.” A Nietzschean Bestiary 247. See

also David Farrell Krell, Infectious Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) ch 5.

18 David Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche 124.

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as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject,

on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place

where meaning collapses.19

Zarathustra could not expel the dwarf, which is the past which confirms his identity. His

attempt to get rid of the dwarf would at the same time ‘abject’ himself as well. Kristeva uses

food loathing, which she regards as the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection,

to discuss the relationship between the abject and the subject:

[…] “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their

desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through

which “I” claim to establish myself.20

The most disgusting thing cannot be vomited; in other words, if something can be vomited, it

is no longer disgusting.21 However, the dwarf is the most disgusting thing to Zarathustra

because the dwarf forms his non-alienating part. To resist his abjection, Zarathustra's only

resort is to bear the dwarf. Therefore, he said,

“Stop, dwarf!” I said. “It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two [...]” (3, 2, 1)

“You or I” implies that only the stronger can maintain his independent identity. The weaker

will be swallowed by the stronger. Zarathustra, whose thought is struggling towards

ambivalence, is also at this moment the follower of the Stoic, Cicero, who says:

[Soldiers] who cannot bear the sight of pain throw themselves away and lie stricken and

slain, whilst those on the other hand who have faced the attack very often quit the field

victorious. For the soul has certain analogies to the body: weights are more easily carried

by straining every nerve of body: relax the strain and the weights are too heavy; quite

similarly the soul by its intense effort throws off all the pressure of burdens, but by

relaxation of effort is so weighed down that it cannot recover itself.22

19 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 1-2. 20 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 3-4. 21 This is indebted to Derrida who says, “The word vomit arrests the vicariousness of

disgust.” See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11. 2 (Summer 1981): 25. 22 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London: William Heinemann and

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971) 209.

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It seems that Zarathustra follows Cicero's advice to strain every nerve of his masculine body

and mind to well up his courage to face his abjection and then feels the burden become lighter.

He is the Stoic. In the battle with his dwarf, his abjection, his past, he says with courage,

Was that life? Well then! Once more! (3, 2, 1)

This proclamation means that he has the courage to will for the return of the same pain, no

matter how disgusting it is. Every return of pain is just a further confirmation of his identity.

He wills for a negative masochistic return of the same, no matter how disgusting it is. This

type of masochism is negative because it is not tragic in any sense. Courage to suffer is

important to maintain his subjectivity in face of eternal recurrence. He has no ability to

destroy the dwarf; otherwise, he will be destroyed as well.

At this point, Zarathustra takes the first response to eternal recurrence, as suggested in

The Gay Science by gnashing his teeth at the demon, but does not have sufficient courage to

take the second response. Courage for taking the second response is the courage to “see all

seeing as abyss” without dizziness; in other words, it is the courage to will the Dionysian

tragedy and hence the return of the different.

His lack of this courage can be seen when he suddenly hears a dog howl nearby, and

says:

Had I ever heard a dog cry like this for help? And verily, what I saw – I had never seen

the like. (3, 2, 2)

Under the threat of his identity being destroyed by eternal recurrence, he projects his

paranoiac feeling onto the dog.23

After hearing the dog howl, Zarathustra sees a heavy black snake hung out of the mouth

of the shepherd who is writhing, gagging, in spasms with distorted face. The facial expression

of the shepherd shows the similar paranoiac feeling as Zarathustra does. In response to this

scene, Zarathustra cries out:

“Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!” (3, 2, 2)

If the head of the snake implies the past, an origin which guarantees the existence of an

identity, biting off the snake is to destroy the existence of an origin and hence that of an

23 See Gary Shapiro, “Dogs, Domestication, and the Ego,” A Nietzschean Bestiary

53-60.

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identity; and if the past is the abject, biting off the past is at the same time destroying the

concept of “I.” This can be seen as a metaphorical interpretation of the tragic effect of eternal

recurrence. When the shepherd “spews the head of the snake,” he bursts out with

non-human laughter. Zarathustra notes the change of the shepherd:

No longer shepherd, no longer human – one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on

earth has a human being laughed as he laughed. O my brothers, I heard a laughter that

was no human laughter […]

The laughter is tragic; or, in Blake’s words, “Excess of joy weeps.”24 The laughter is “the

concept of Dionysus.” (Ecce Homo, p.306) Blanchot’s reading of eternal recurrence with

reference to laughter can be applied. In his reading of Klossowski’s interpretation of eternal

return, Blanchot says, “For the eternal return indeed must … also come to desire the return of

the gods, that is, the gods as return” (“The Laughter of the Gods” 181). Belief in the existence

of the origin is belief in the existence of God creating the universe. With Nietzsche’s notion,

“God is dead,” no origin can be returned to: we are left with a biform nature which creates.

What can be returned to is the different. Then, the gods must exist in plural form. Blanchot

then quotes from Klossowski, “when a god wanted to be the only God, all of the other gods

were seized with uncontrollable laughter, until they laughed to death.” (181) Plurality of gods

destroys the notion of metaphysical presence to return to, and of redemption from the past in

afterlife.

Witnessing the change of the shepherd, Zarathustra laments at the end of “On the

Vision and the Riddle”:

[O]h, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!

The inability to go on living is masochism. The inability to die is the self-preservative instinct.

Blanchot comments, “what was frightening was the calm speech that seemed to use the ‘I’

24 William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Portable Blake,

ed. Alfred Kazin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 253.

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only to be afraid.”25 Zarathustra’s ambivalence towards eternal recurrence is again shown in

“On Involuntary Bliss,” “The Convalescent” and “The Other Dancing Song.”

“On Involuntary Bliss”

The terrifying feeling continues in “On Involuntary Bliss,” one section after “The Vision and

the Riddle”:

Alas, abysmal thought that is my thought when shall I find the strength to hear you

burrowing, without trembling any more? My heart pounds to my very throat whenever I

hear you burrowing. Even your silence wants to choke me, you who are so abysmally

silent. As yet I have never dared to summon you; it was enough that I carried you with me.

As yet I have not been strong enough for the final overbearing, prankish bearing of the

lion. Your gravity was always terrible enough for me; but one day I shall yet find the

strength and the lion's voice to summon you. And once I have overcome myself that far,

then I also want to overcome myself in what is still greater; and a victory shall seal my

perfection. (3,3)

The strength to hear the abysmal thought burrowing comes from the courage to read the

abysmal thought in a tragic way. If he still wants to maintain the “I,” the only resort he can

rely on will be postponing this encounter. He says in “On Involuntary Bliss”:

25 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond 11. The ending of Blanchot’s Death Sentence can be

seen as his reading of the tragic effect of eternal recurrence. It says, “As for me, I have not been the unfortunate messenger of a thought stronger than I, nor its plaything, nor its victim, because that thought, if it has conquered me, has only conquered through me, and in the end has always been equal to me. I have loved it and I have loved only it, and everything that happened I wanted to happen, and having had regard only for it, wherever it was or wherever I might have been, in absence, in unhappiness, in the inevitability of dead things, in the necessity of living things, in the fatigue of work, in the faces born of my curiosity, in my false words, in my deceitful vows, in silence and in the night, I gave it all my strength and it gave me all its strength, so that this strength is too great, it is incapable of being ruined by anything, and condemns us, perhaps, to immeasurable unhappiness, but if that is so, I take this unhappiness on myself and I am immeasurably glad of it and to that thought I say eternally, “Come,” and eternally it is there.” See Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton (New York: Station Hill, 1999) 186. Blanchot, and perhaps Klossowski’s approach to eternal recurrence is outside the language of psychoanalysis, as much as Blanchot does not often seem to discuss Nietzsche openly (yet Blanchot is unthinkable outside Freud and Nietzsche); hence though the thought from outside appears to be feminine in Death Sentence, it is not presented in the terms of bisexuality, or of sexual difference. These metaphors of otherness must be addressed in various ways: in Salomé’s comment on masochism, Nietzsche’s bisexuality and sadomasochism, Nietzsche’s understanding of “woman,” of the tragic effects of bisexuality and of eternal recurrence, Freud’s psychoanalytic studies of masochism, of the death drive, of repetition, of the primal scene, and Rilke’s concept of the complete “angel” and of the “Prodigal Son.”

61

“It is time!” But I did not hear, until at last my abyss stirred and my thought bit me (3, 3).

Note the acceptance of violence against the self in the speech.

“The Convalescent”

This is a section about Zarathustra’s encounter with eternal recurrence. In “The

Convalescent,” he thinks that he has gathered enough strength to call up “his abysmal

thought” and says:

I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle; I

summon you, my most abysmal thought! (my italic) (3, 13)

Abysmal thought is not an idea which can be possessed. It is problematic to say “my abysmal

thought.” While enduring past suffering affirms identity, the encounter of eternal recurrence

forces Zarathustra to give up his identity. Therefore, the consequence of Zarathustra's

summoning up the abysmal thought is predictable:

No sooner had Zarathustra spoken these words then he fell down as one dead and long

remained as one dead. But when he regained his senses he was pale, and he trembled and

remained lying there, and for a long time he wanted neither food nor drink. This

behaviour lasted seven days (3, 13, 2).

The reaction of Zarathustra when approaching eternal recurrence is like that of a spectator

being petrified upon seeing Medusa’s head.26 Nietzsche writes to himself: “In Zarathustra 4:

the great thought as Medusa’s head: all features of the cosmos become immobile, a frozen

death struggle [Todeskampf].”27 In order to know the effect of Medusa, it is important to see

how Medusa is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 4:

Of ruined woods he reached the Gorgons land,

And everywhere in fields and by the road

He saw the shapes of men and beasts, all changed

To stone by glancing at Medusa's face.

But he, he said, looked at her ghastly head

26 Bernard Pautrat picks up the relationship between eternal recurrence and Medusa. See

Pautrat, “Nietzsche Medused,” Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) 159-73.

27 See Nietzsche, KSA 7/3.74, quoted in Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 325.

62

Reflected in the bright bronze of the shield

In his left hand, and while deep sleep held fast

Medusa and her snakes, he severed it

Clean from her neck […] (ll. 782-788)28

Since her evil power is not dissipated with decapitation, Medusa's head is affixed to the centre

of Athena’s shield to strike her foes with dread (II. 802-3). Medusa’s head is attached with

snakes as her hair. Her hair is like a woman’s private parts. The terror of Medusa is given by

Freud’s formula: “To decapitate = to castrate.”29 Decapitation is equal to losing the power to

maintain identity. It is equal to castration. Her hair is frequently represented in works of art in

the form of snakes.30 To Freud, the snake is ‘a multiplication of penis symbols’ which

signifies castration. Freud describes the reaction towards Medusa:

For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation

to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the

fact. [...] To display the penis (or any of its surrogates) is to say: “I am not afraid of you. I

defy you. I have a penis.” Here, then, is another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit.31

Using Freud’s understanding of Medusa to read Zarathustra’s reaction towards eternal

recurrence, in order to uphold his identity, the only response Zarathustra can give is to stiffen

his body like an erect male organ and claim that this stiffened body has an apotropaic effect.

These reactions are disavowals of loss of identity (being castrated) in face of eternal

recurrence.

After waking up, Zarathustra seems to have a leap of faith in understanding the idea of

eternal recurrence, and realizes that “there is no outside” and “the centre is everywhere” (3,

13, 2). It seems to point out that Zarathustra knows the impossibility of maintaining an

identity. Similar to the shepherd, in his recount, we know that the snake crawls down his

throat and suffocates him, and Zarathustra finally bites off its head and spews it out. This

leads to the speculation whether he is ready to give up his identity in the encounter of eternal

recurrence, and laugh a non-human laughter.

28 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 29 Freud, “Medusa’s Head” 273. 30 For example, Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, Medusa, 1598, Florence, Galleria

degli Uffizi. 31 Freud, “Medusa’s Head” 274.

63

“The Other Dancing Song”

His desire to give up his identity can be seen in this section in which his desire is

metaphorically described as his intention to leave his life. His intention is inferred from the

speech of his life to him:

I know you are thinking of leaving me soon. There is an old, heavy, heavy growl-bell that

growls at night all the way up to your cave; when you hear this bell strike the hour at

midnight, then you think between one and twelve – you think, O Zarathustra, I know it,

of how you want to leave me soon.

Zarathustra answers hesitantly, “but you also know –” and whispers something into her

ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses.” Allen S. Weiss says, “What this ellipsis,

this silence, does not permit us to hear is the enunciation of the Eternal Return.” 32 Life

personified as woman with long hair and his whispering of eternal recurrence to life which is

a woman, draws us to a biographical detail about Salomé and Nietzsche, as described in the

epigraph. After his speech to life, he says:

And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool

evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than

all my wisdom ever was.

It is interesting to know if his weeping is joyful at dissolution of identity; in other

words, if he can get rid of the greatest weight by understanding that tragedy is joyful, so

beginning to take up the second response as suggested by the demon in The Gay Science.

“Zarathustra’s Prologue” and “The Sign”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra follows The Gay Science, and starts the tragedy; however, the

tragedy is postponed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The mission of “going under” does not

follow through the book. In the end he goes back to his own cave. In relation to this point,

David Krell says, “Each of its four parts tries to end with downgoing. Tries but fails.

Postpones the Untergang.”(53)

Although in the “Prologue” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra emphasizes that he

has to leave his cave and “go under,” in the last section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The

32 Weiss, “Impossible Sovereignty: Between The Will to Power and The Will to Chance,”

October 36 (1986): 129-46, 142.

64

Sign,” he chooses not to “go under”. He says that he has to return back to his cave because he

cannot find the right disciple. It is a clinging on to identity, an avoidance of Dionysian tragedy.

In the “Prologue,” he speaks to the sun:

“You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?[”]

In the last section, he returns to this dialogue:

“You great star,” he said as he had said once before, “you deep eye of happiness, what

would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?”

His not “going under” implies his fear of death and of dissolution of identity. In “The Sign,”

the question of “over” and “under” returns again:

Zarathustra has ripened, my hour has come: this is my morning, my day is breaking: rise

now, rise, thou great noon!” Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he left his cave, glowing and

strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.

He wants to “rise,” to go “over” and feels the joy after approaching the abysmal thought in

the mountain. However, he is afraid of descending into the abyss and of returning back to his

earliest saying in the “Prologue”. He is afraid of losing the “I” and therefore keeps on saying

“my hour,” “my morning,” “my day.”

Krell says that “Nietzsche’s principal thought and heaviest burden, eternal recurrence of

the same, necessitates our looking into the question of Zarathustra’s death, which is postponed

indefinitely. This postponement has something to do with woman and sensuality.”(53) Krell

helps us to read the problems of approaching eternal recurrence – whether this confirms

identity or dissolves it - in the light of Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards woman. Krell

comments that “many sketches and plans of 1870-1 indicate a far more significant role for

woman in The Birth than the role she eventually receives.” (38) To Krell, Nietzsche in Thus

Spoke Zarathustra invokes women less in his writing than in his notebooks. Bataille’s

definition of eroticism can help to understand the relationship between woman, sensuality and

death, and hence shed light on Krell’s criticism of Nietzsche’s postponing the encounter with

the woman: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.”33 Then an

erotic encounter is tragic, because it is the abandonment of identity. “Death,” which does not

refer to physical death, but the death of past identities (as said in chapter two), is inevitable.

No wonder the subtitle of Krell’s Postponements is “Woman, Sensuality and Death in

33 Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San

Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962) 11.

65

Nietzsche.” While Nietzsche advocates the idea of eternal recurrence as the return of the

different, the relationship between woman, sensuality and death – those things which are

other to the phallogocentric philosopher - makes Nietzsche have difficulty in thinking of

eternal recurrence without the horror which is brought by the threat of complete abandonment

of identity in the approach of the woman, the absolute other. It is difficult to know how to

read this, but it may imply a resistance to the woman as the castrating figure, as Derrida

suggests. To think, even unconsciously, of the woman as destructive is not the same as

eroticism, assenting to life up to the point of death. Nonetheless, insofar as Nietzsche assents

to eternal recurrence, he does also assent to eroticism, and to a masochism that undoes the ego.

He thinks in a bisexual mode.

IV – ECCE HOMO: ETERNAL RECURRENCE IN DIONYSIAN MUSIC

The discussion of eternal recurrence is absent in Nietzsche’s books written after Zarathustra.

It is not until Ecce Homo that Nietzsche comes back to the discussion in detail.34 The subtitle

of Ecce Homo, “How One Becomes What One Is,” suggests a more affirmative attitude

towards eternal recurrence. When commenting on his Zarathustra, Nietzsche in Ecce Homo

writes that “the idea of the eternal recurrence,” the “highest formula of affirmation that is at

all attainable,” belongs in August 1881:

it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.”

That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful

pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me.35

Nietzsche recalls in Ecce Homo that one of the preconditions of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the

rebirth of the art of hearing, i.e. music. Nietzsche regards the sudden and profoundly decisive

change in music a few months before August 1881 as a rebirth (which can be guessed as his

break with Wagner). In Ecce Homo, the relationship between music and eternal recurrence

can be seen, and will be discussed in the following.

In chapter two, we understood that Nietzsche’s admiration for Salomé’s poem, “Prayer

to Life,” and this admiration makes him set music to it. His comment on his composition in

34 Aaron Ridley says, “One of Nietzsche’s best known thoughts, the thought of eternal

recurrence, figures largest in The Gay Science and Zarathustra. It then drops out for Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy, Twilight and The Antichrist, before reappearing in Ecce Homo, where he still seems quite attached to it.” Aaron Ridley, “Nietzsche’s Greatest Weight,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 14 (1997): 19-26.

35 Ecce Homo 295.

66

Ecce Homo is immediately followed by how his Zarathustra came into being in the following

winter and all the unfavourable circumstances, e.g. coldness, rain and sleeplessness at night,

affecting his health. Linking the two events together, if possible, takes us back to the

beginning of the section on Zarathustra in Ecce Homo that “rebirth of the art of hearing was

among its preconditions.” This rebirth can be seen as the rebirth of the Dionysian music

which is discussed in his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1873).

At this point, before relating music to eternal recurrence, I am going to give a brief

description of how Dionysian music is discussed in The Birth of Tragedy.

The Dionysian music is articulated in Section 2 of The Birth of Tragedy which says:

The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of music in

general) is carefully excluded as un-Apollinian – namely, the emotional power of the tone,

the uniform flow of the melody, and the utterly incomparable world of harmony. In the

Dionsyian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties;

something never before experienced struggles for utterance – the annihilation of the veil

of māyā [illusion], oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself.36

The Dionysian dithyramb, following “the concepts of Dionysus” (i.e. to reiterate what was

discussed in chapter two, “the importance of overcoming at every moment” and “the eternal

Yes to all things”), attempts at annihilation of the “principium individuationis” [principle of

individuation] (Section 1); and, hence, it shows that single identity is a fiction or a fetish. This

music can bring the tragic effect “through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance.

(Section 24). For two sounds heard together shows the impossibility of maintaining

singularity. Nietzsche says, “The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the

joyous sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced

even in pain, is the common source of music and tragic myth.”

The tragic feeling is expressed in the last stanza of one of the Dionysus dithyrambs

called “Ariadne’s Plaint” which writes:

No!

come back!

with all your torments!

All the streams of my tears

run their course to you!

and the last flame of my heart,

36 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Section 2.

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it burns up to you.

Oh come back,

my unknown god! my pain !

my last happiness! […]37

Annihilation of individuality is painful but joyful at the same time. (This reminds us of the

tragic laughter of the shepherd in “On the Vision and the Riddle”). It is only through such

annihilation can “primal unity” be approached. This unity embodies “primal contradiction,

and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure” (Section 5), in other words, this

unity is Dionysian in nature. At this point, we can see the influence of Schopenhauer on

Nietzsche’s tragic thought. He quotes from Schopenhaur’s description of will in the following:

“Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves,

howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail bark: so in the midst of a world of

torments the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium

individuationis” (Section 1). Then, Nietzsche reminds us of Schopenhauer’s awareness of the

opposite:

In the same work Schopenhauer has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes

man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the

principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an

exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost

depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis, we

steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most

intimately by the analogy of intoxication. (Section 1)

To approach the will or the primal unity, music, which is Dionysiac, is best. Nietzsche says,

“Although the phenomenal world and music are two different expressions of the will, music is

in the highest degree a universal language. It is “the immediate copy of the will.” It “gives the

inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things” (Section 16). Music does not

need the image and the concept, but merely endures them as accompaniments (Section 6).

Even so, Nietzsche reminds us that music is not the will. He says, “[F]or music, according to

its essence, cannot possibly be will. To be will it would have to be wholly banished from the

realm of art – for the will is the unaesthetic-in-itself; but it appears as will.” (Section 6)

Based on the relationship between the will and music, it is not surprising for Nietzsche

37 Nietzsche writes Dithyrambs of Dionysus in 1888. See Friedrich Nietzsche,

Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1984) 57.

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to say that the world can only be justified as aesthetic phenomenon; in other words, art is the

best means to bring the tragic effect to a subject; or the best form to facilitate the working of

“feminine” thought. It is under this circumstance that Nietzsche imagines that Socrates may

hear a voice in the same recurring dream to suggest him to practise music (Section 14). This

voice can be seen as leading him back to “a realm of wisdom from which the logician is

exiled” (Section 15). To put Nietzsche’s advice in my words, the “realm of wisdom” belongs

to “feminine” thought.

The understanding of Dionysus’ dithyramb helps to understand the aphorism, “music is

a woman” as articulated in Nietzsche Contra Wagner.38 Here, “woman” is ambiguous

because it may refer both to “feminine” thought as well as a sensuous woman.

Eternal recurrence destroys the existence of metaphysical presence. When “origins” are

absent, then, as Blanchot says, “In the beginning was the return …”39 The thought of

acknowledging that everything returns and begins again can be seen as the strongest

affirmation. Blanchot says, “The strangest thought that everything returns, begins again, is the

strongest affirmation of modern atheism”(180). This affirmation is Dionysian in nature.

Concluding his comment on Zarathustra in Ecce Homo, he makes a final point:

Among the conditions for a Dionysian task are, in a decisive way, the hardness of the

hammer, the joy even in destroying. The imperative, “become hard!”

Unlike postponing the approach of the tragic effect in Thus Sopke Zarathustra, it seems that

Nietzsche who calls himself “the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,” (Twilight of the

Idols, p.563) embraces this tragic effect in Ecce Homo. It is interesting to see if Nietzsche

himself is going to take the second response suggested by the demon. Klossowski’s

understanding of eternal recurrence can be used to summarize this chapter:

Between the level of consciousness and that of active forces, there is what we call a fit of

ill-humour, by which we mean something suffered at the hands of active forces, and

which cannot be envisioned at the conscious level, except afterwards.40

Language can make the envisioning work at the conscious level. It is this conscious level

which is dominantly phallogocentric, where we see eternal recurrence as the return of the

38 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Nietzsche Contra Wagner: Out of the Flies of a Psychologist,”

The Portable Nietzsche, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1976) 668. 39 Blanchot, “The Laughter of the Gods” 181. 40 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle 52.

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same, and are hesistant in embracing the tragic effect of eternal recurrence. Klossowski

continues:

“We cannot renounce language, nor our intentions, nor our willing; but we could evaluate

this willing and these intentions in a different manner than we have hitherto evaluated

them – namely, as subject to the ‘law’ of the vicious circle.” (53-4)

What Klossowski says can imply that we cannot think outside language and get rid of

the influence of phallogocentrism, but we can challenge it through a different manner in order

to accept the tragic effect of eternal recurrence, e.g. music as suggested by Nietzsche –

remembering that ‘music is a woman’ - or through poetry, as another kind of music, as

suggested by Rilke at the end of the First of the Duino Elegies:

Ist die Sage umsonst, daß einst in der Klage um Linos

wagende erste Musik dürre Erstarrung durchdrang,

daß erst im erschrockenen Raum, dem ein beinah göttlicher Jüngling

plötzlich für immer enttrat, das Leere in jene

Schwingung geriet, die uns jetzt hinreißt und tröstet und hilft.

[Is the story in vain, how once, in the mourning for Linos,

venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness, and how,

in the horrified space an almost deified youth

suddenly quitted for ever, emptiness first felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps?] (ll.91-95)41

In Part two on Freud, through the discussion of masochism (chapter four), the death instinct

(chapter five) and the primal scene (chapter six), the focus shifts to Freud in order to see if

Freud encounters similar difficulty as Nietzsche does in understanding the concept of

“woman” and in considering the possibilities of the idea of eternal recurrence.

41 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender

(London: Chatto and Windus, 1975) 26-7.

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Chapter Four: Freud and Masochism

There might be such a thing as primary masochism.

(Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 328)

Salomé referred to Nietzsche as “that sado-masochist unto himself,” and linked the issue with

bisexuality. In this chapter, I shall move from masochism in relation to Nietzsche to Freud

and masochism. Freud first discusses masochism in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915).

These essays show that masochism is secondary to sadism and is seen as an affirmation of

identity because it gives power to what Freud will call the superego.1 In Beyond the Pleasure

Principle (1920), “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), and Civilization and Its

Discontents (1930[1929]), he changes his view, and speculates on the possibility of primary

or original masochism. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud says:

The account that was formerly given of masochism requires emendation as being too

sweeping in one respect: there might be such a thing as primary masochism – a possibility

which I had contested at that time [the time when he wrote Three Essays and “Instincts

and Their Vicissitudes].2

This masochism is seen as shattering identity. At this point, I am indebted to Leo Bersani.

According to him, while Freud argues that a “normal sexual aim,” which refers to copulation

of a man and a woman, is the teleological position of sexuality while seeking for pain is the

major perversion in the Three Essays (105), Bersani finds a counterargument in Freud’s

position: ‘sexuality would not be originally an exchange of intensities between individuals,

but rather a condition of broken negotiations with the world, a condition in which others

1 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey, ed.

Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) 243; Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), Penguin Freud 7: On Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) 72; and Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 125.

2 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology 328. For Freud’s discussion of primary masochism, see also, Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology 409-26, 418. He also adjusts the relationship between sadism and masochism by adding footnotes in 1924 to Three Essays and “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” See Three Essays 71-2, fn.2, and “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 125, fn.3.

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merely set off the self-shattering mechanisms of masochistic jouissance.”3 Jouissance, to use

Lacan’s term, is the feeling of the pleasure of the other.4 Masochistic jouissance would be

feeling pain and so turning oneself into the other; in other words, breakdown of identity is the

result. In Bersani’s term, the self is “shattered.”

Masochism has two aspects, as we have discussed: it is from the superego, and so

protective of identity, and it is also the drive that breaks down identity. This chapter will

articulate how Freud conceives the idea of masochism with reference to his works on dreams,

on women and on crime.

I – FREUD ON HIS DREAMS

Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards masochism is seen in his postponements of writing on

“woman,” and on eternal recurrence. The discussion of Freud’s concept of masochism starts

off by examining his first psychoanalytic work, The Interpretation of Dreams if Freud also

postpones writing on woman. Commenting on his writing up to the time of The Interpretation

of Dreams, Freud writes in “In the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914): “My

publications, which I was able to place with a little trouble, could always lag far behind my

knowledge, and could be postponed as long as I pleased, since there was no doubtful

‘priority’ to be defended. The Interpretation of Dreams, for instance, was finished in all

essentials at the beginning of 1896 but was not written out until the summer of 1899.”5 The

editor of The Interpretation of Dreams, with reference to Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess,

says, “Freud worked intermittently on the book from late in 1897 until September, 1889.” (38)

Even when he finished the manuscript, he did not publish it immediately. The intention to

publish it is discussed by Freud himself in the Dream book when he interprets his dream in

3 Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1986) 41. This point is repeated in Leo Bersani, “Is The Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987): 197-222, 217. He says, “For on the one hand Freud outlines a normative sexual development that finds its natural goal in the post-Oedipal, genitally centred desire for someone of the opposite sex, while on the other hand he suggests […] a shattering of the psychic structures themselves that are the precondition for the very establishment of a relation to others.

4 For Lacan’s discussion of the jouissance of the other, see The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 183-5.

5 Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement” (1914), Standard Edition 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 7-66, 22, quoted by the editor James Strachey of The Interpretation of Dreams 42.

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which Brücke sets him some “strange task” (585).6 Freud describes his dream as follows:

“[I]t relates to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs, which I saw

before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without noticing their absence in myself and

also without a trace of any gruesome feeling” (585). Freud interprets the dream below:

The dissection meant the self-analysis which I was carrying out, as it were, in the

publication of this present book about dreams – a process which had been so distressing

to me in reality that I had postponed the printing of the finished manuscript for more than

a year. A wish then arose that I might get over this feeling of distaste; hence it was that I

had no gruesome feeling [‘Grauen’] in the dream. But I should also have been very glad

to miss growing grey – ‘Grauen’ in the other sense of the word. I was already growing

quite grey, and the grey of my hair was another reminder that I must not delay any

longer.7

Postponing the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams shows, to Sarah Kofman,

Freud’s fear of woman which in return, implies his fear of death. In her book, The Enigma of

Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, Kofman reads the term used by Freud ‘Grauen’ as man’s

fear of woman which is at the same time a fear of death. She says,

“[I]f we recall that Freud uses the same term, Grauen, to designate the feeling

experienced by most men when confronted by a woman’s (the Mother’s) genitals

(represented symbolically by the Medusa’s head) – a feeling of horror that may well

make one’s hair turn grey (grauen) overnight – we may wonder whether “these strange,

unknown things” that Freud reveals in The Interpretation of Dreams are not more

specifically concerned with woman’s sex, the Mother’s, upon which the dreamer has

dared to cast his glance, at the risk of being blinded, of being castrated, and of seeing his

mother, like Jocasta, hang herself.” (29-30)

She says earlier in her book that anxiety over death underlays his decision to publish a text

that he had held back a long time. (21)

The relationship between woman and death is discussed by Freud in “The Theme of the

Three Caskets” (1913) with main reference to King Lear. To Freud, it is a play about, in his

6 Freud worked at the Vienna Physiological Institute (“Brücke’s laboratory) from 1876

to 1882. Ernst Brücke (1819-92) was its head. See the translator’s note in The Interpretation of Dreams 621, fn.

7 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 615-6, quoted in Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1985) 21.

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words, “a man’s choice between three women.” In Freud’s interpretation of King Lear,

Cordelia, the third daughter who is regarded as the excellent one, makes her goodness

unrecognizable. This makes Freud equate concealment and dumbness. Using psychoanalysis,

Freud tells us that “in dreams dumbness is a common representation of death.” (239) Hence,

to Freud, the third one always signifies death. While the third one refuses to express her love

as the first two do, the old King Lear disowns the third daughter, and divides his kingdom by

the first two daughters. Freud says, “The free choice between the three sisters is, properly

speaking, no free choice, for it must necessarily fall on the third if every kind of evil is not to

come about, as it does in King Lear.” (245) Freud’s comment means that even the king does

not choose the third one and tries to avoid death, he still dies. Then no matter which daughter

he chooses, the choice must fall on the third one, the Goddess of Death.

The approach of woman is the approach of death. In “Three Caskets,” death involves

physical death, which entails dissolution of identity. This is seen with Oedipus. Oedipus is

both the husband and the child of his mother. Both identities conflict and cancel each other.

Incest confuses the category of a single identity. Freud writes his Oedipal complex as a

self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams. Kofman says, “To publish one’s dreams is to

make known to everyone one’s own (fantasmatic) incestuous relations.” (29) It could be

argued that letting his incestuous desire known is his invitation to punishment, i.e. invitation

to death, as the extreme form of masochism. The delay in publishing The Interpretation of

Dreams is delay of death and of the encounter of masochism, like Nietzsche’s postponement.

If everyone, to Freud, whether actualized or not, has incestuous desires, death is already in

one’s life. Delay in publishing can be seen as disavowal of this desire.

In his analysis of his dream, he writes that the grey in his hair is a reminder that he

cannot delay publishing the book any longer. The approach of death makes Freud learn the

wisdom of Oedipus coming from incest, and transgressively accept the destabilization of

identity which is implied in incestuous desire. Kofman says, “[T]he publication of The

Interpretation of Dreams is to transform Freud into a superman, make him a rival of that

Oedipus who “resolved the dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise.” (23) Maybe, the

approach of death gives him the wisdom to publish the dream book to confront the enigma or

‘horror’ of woman; in other words, it gives him the courage to try to expose himself to

masochism so that, in Nietzsche’s terms, primordial existence can be approached. Kofman

says, “[Freud] who seeks to know the deep mysteries of nature must not be afraid to violate

natural laws, to appear to everyone as a monster, horribile visu: such is the lesson of the

Oedipus myth, as Nietzsche had already exposed it in The Birth of Tragedy.” (30).

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II – THE NARCISSISTIC WOMAN

Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment

which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their

choice of object. […] Such women have the great fascination for men, not only for

aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of a

combination of interesting psychological factors. For it seems very evident that another

person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own

narcissism and are in search of object-love. The charm of a child lies to a great extent in

his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain

animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts

of prey. […] It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind – an

unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned. The great

charm of narcissistic women has, however, its reverse side; a large part of the lover’s

dissatisfaction, of his doubts of the woman’s love, of his complaints of her enigmatic

nature, has its root in this incongruity between the types of object-choice. (82-3)

From the above passage, we know that the “enigmatic woman” Freud confronts is the

narcissistic woman. In the essay “On Narcissism” (1914), Freud says that a human being has

originally two sexual objects – himself and the woman who nurses him; and be postulated a

primary narcissism in everyone.8 Later, the male has to repress his primary narcissism in

favour of object love. In contrast, “[w]ith the onset of puberty the maturing […] seems to

bring about an intensification of the original narcissism, and this is unfavourable to the

development of a true object-choice […]” (82).

Freud says that a narcissistic woman has a great fascination for those who forfeit their

narcissism and are in search of object-love. She is self-sufficient, and does not need an

identity. The enigma of a narcissistic woman is constituted by her apparently not entering into

the symbolic order. She cannot be named in language. A narcissistic woman then appeals to

both men and women who are sexually divided in the symbolic order, because she seems to

appeal to a polymorphous bisexuality which precedes the sexual differentiation which takes

place in the symbolic order.

Kofman comments that as attributing narcissism to some women, Freud is aware of

8 Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 81-2. Freud first started his discussion of

narcissism in 1910 in Three Essays, “they [the homosexuals] take themselves as their sexual object” (56, fn.1).

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“the radical otherness of woman” (33). Woman is the other to both man and woman who are

placed in the symbolic order. She is not a construction of patriarchy, but rather a threat to it.

She exposes the fact that the symbolic order cannot embrace everything. Instead of preserving

the self, for a narcissistic woman, the truth is “the surpassing of the self” (59). Instead of

putting woman’s enigma under patriarchal construction, writing an essay on narcissism is

Freud’s attempt to approach the other, that which cannot be understood in psychoanalytic

terms. Kofman writes, “To write about female sexuality is to disclose a dangerous secret, is on

one way or another to display openly, to dis-cover, woman’s fearsome sex.” (20) While in the

“Femininity” lecture (1933)9 he points out that the woman cannot be what she is defined as

psychoanalytically: she remains enigmatic. (Obviously this statement involves its own danger

of bearing patriarchal fantasy about women.) Freud at the end of the lecture suggests to his

readers who want to know more about femininity that they should “enquire from [their] own

experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give [them] deeper and more

coherent information” (135).

Salomé and Narcissism

Freud’s conception of narcissism may come from his impression of Salomé. Kofman says,

“[‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’] was written – and this is perhaps no accident – during a

period when Freud was particularly attracted to Lou-Andreas-Salomé” (50). Appignanesi and

Forrester say that such a description of narcissistic woman is the best psychoanalytic portrait

of Salomé.10 Apart from the description of narcissistic woman in the essay influenced by

Freud’s impression on Salomé, there is a description of cats in the essay on narcissism which

was influenced by an anecdote which Salomé wrote in her Freud Journal dated 2 February

9 Freud runs thirty-five lectures on psychoanalysis: the first four lectures (1916 [1915])

are on “parapraxes”; the fifth to the fifteenth lectures (1916 [1915-16]) are on “dreams”; and the sixteenth to the twenty-eighth lectures (1917 [1916-17]) are on the “general theory of the neuroses.” They are all regarded as “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis” which are collected in Standard Edition 15 & 16. The twenty-ninth to the thirty-fifth lectures (1933 [1932]) are regarded as “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis” which are collected in Standard Edition 22. “Femininity” lecture (1933) is Freud’s thirty-third lecture on psychoanalysis. Sarah Kofman’s criticism of it is in The Enigma of Woman. See also Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, “Freud’s Femininity: Theoretical Investigations,” Freud’s Women (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992) 397-429.

10 Appignanesi and Forrester, “Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘The Fortunate Animal’” Freud’s Women 240-71, 259.

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1913.11 It was about Freud and his “narcissistic cat” Salomé observed during her one Sunday

afternoon at Freud’s home:

While Freud maintained his office on the ground floor, the cat had climbed in through the

open window. He did not care much for cats or dogs or animals generally, and in the

beginning the cat aroused mixed feelings in him, especially when it climbed down from

the sofa on which it had made itself comfortable and began to inspect in passing the

antique objects which he had placed for the time being on the floor. He was afraid that by

chasing it away he might cause it to move recklessly in the midst of these precious

treasures of his. But when the cat proceeded to make known its archaeological

satisfaction by purring and with its lithe grace did not cause the slightest damage, Freud’s

heart melted and he ordered milk for it. From then on the cat claimed its rights daily to

take a place on the sofa, inspect the antiques, and get its bowl of milk. However, despite

Freud’s increasing affection and admiration, the cat paid him not a bit of attention and

coldly turned its green eyes with their slanting pupils toward him as toward any other

object.

Freud then asked Salomé why she had become so deeply involved in psychoanalysis. Salomé

did not give any relevant answer. Appignanesi and Forrester point out the importance of the

intervention:

[I]t is almost as if Freud is asking her to reflect on her similarity to the cat and asking her

what she, Lou, so like the cat in her narcissistic feline distance and self-containment,

wants from him. (259)

Apart from comparing women to cats in the discussion of narcissism, Freud also compares

women with children, the large beasts of prey, great criminals, and humorists. (see Narcissism

essay 83) These comparisons, as Kofman says, “give Freud’s text Nietzschean overtones, and

one may wonder whether the narcissistic woman described here may not take her model from

Nietzsche (if only through the mediation of Lou Andreas-Salomé), from what Nietzsche

would call the affirmative woman” (53). Kofman finds in both Nietzsche’s and Freud’s

writings the association of cats to women which, to Kofman, is “an independent animal,

indifferent to man, basically affirmative, a Dionysian animal like tigers and panthers.” (53)

On the description of cats, she quotes from Nietzsche: “The cat takes pleasure in a voluptuous

feeling its own power: it gives nothing in return” (54).

11 Nietzsche also has a discussion on cat. See Martha Kendal Woodruff, ““The Cat at

Play: Nietzsche’s Feline Styles,” A Nietzschean Bestiary 251-63.

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“The Affirmative Woman”

Though there is no reference to “the affirmative woman” in Nietzsche’s writings, to Kofman,

“affirmative” is a Nietzschean term, which may not be irreconcilable with “narcissistic,” a

Freudian term.12 Kofman may use Freud’s reading of narcissistic women to create “the

affirmative woman” from Nietzsche’s writings with reference to Derrida’s Spurs. In his

critique of Nietzsche’s writings, Derrida says, “He was, and loved, such an affirmative

woman.”13 (Derrida’s statement, “Nietzsche is a bit lost in the web of the text …” (186) can

be treated as his critique of Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards ‘woman.”) Derrida creates the

“affirmative woman” in Nietzsche’s writing styles with reference to the response “Yes” found

in the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Derrida writes in “Hear say yes in Joyce,” “For Nietzsche, yes

always finds its chance with a certain kind of woman…” (287) This woman can be an

“affirmative woman.” Molly Bloom in the end of Ulysses says, “… and yes I said yes I will

Yes.”14 “Yes” is an affirmative response. But it does not affirm anything. To affirm is to

affirm affirmation; or to put it in Deleuze’s term, it is the “becoming of becoming,” but not of

being. Derrida says:

“The yes says nothing and asks only for another yes, the yes of the other, which …

implied in the first yes. The latter only situates itself, advances itself, marks itself in the

call for its confirmation, in the yes, yes. It begins with the yes, yes, with the second yes,

with the other yes, but as this is still only a yes that recalls (and Molly remembers, recalls

to herself from the other yes)” (299)

A response is the response to the other. “Yes” is the only response. In Derrida’s reading of

Freud’s “The Dora’s Case,” “the unconscious knows nothing of no.” (288) The invitation of

the other must be acknowledged and responded in an affirmative manner. The answer “No”

still implies “Yes” if we understand the meaning of “disavowal” [Verleugnung]. In this sense

“Yes,” an affirmative answer, is spontaneous.

12 See Kofman, The Enigma of Woman, “since we are dealing with a text (Narcissism

essay) dating from 1913, when Freud had not yet made a connection between narcissism and the hypothesis of the death drive” (53, fn. 30).

13 Derrida, “The Question of Style,” The New Nietzsche 187. Another translation writes, “He was, he loved this affirming woman.” (Derrida, Spurs 101) Derrida’s critique runs as follows: “Nietzsche is a bit lost in the web of the text, like a spider, unequal to what he has produced – like a spider, I say, or like many spiders, those of Nietzsche, those of Lautréamont, of Mallarmé, of Freud and Abraham. He was, and he dreaded, such a castrated woman. He was, and he dreaded, such a castrating woman. He was, and he loved, such an affirmative woman” (Derrida, “The Question of Style” 186-7).

14 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gable (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) Ch. 18, Line 1608-9.

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The call of the other precedes saying yes. Such a response assumes “the memory of

yes.” Responding by saying “Yes” is always a passive or “feminine” act; but the response is

also affirmative since it accepts responsibility. It turns a passive action into an affirming

action which involves “a commitment, a willingness to say “yes” again.15 The yes of the

other is what I mean by “the return of the feminine,” the appearance, not in the form of a

settled identity, of the person – male or female - who says yes, who accepts responsibility and

who responds to the other. To affirm, to respond, or to say “Yes” is not a response to confirm

an identity, but a response that precedes the utterance “I.”16

Narcissism, Affirmation and Masochism

It is interesting for Kofman to link the narcissistic woman and the affirmative woman together.

However, if we take the discussion of the symbolic order for consideration, the narcissistic

woman goes further than the affirmative woman. The affirmative woman stands within the

symbolic order. The process of affirmation destroys a subject position in the symbolic order.

In that sense, affirmation carries a masochistic effect. On the other hand, the narcissistic

woman does not think herself of having a single identity because she stands outside the

symbolic order (therefore, she is enigmatic to Freud). Affirmation is not necessary to her. The

subject does not perceive itself as what it is not. She does not need to respond to the other.

She is self-contented. There is no lack in this subject. She is in the imaginary, but not in the

symbolic order. The subject is not sexually differentiated. It can be seen as both man and

woman. In this sense, it is bisexual. It is appealing to both man and woman who are sexually

divided.

It is then interesting to see if Freud idealizes Salomé as a narcissistic woman. The

answer requires us to go back to Salomé and Nietzsche’s conversation, as recorded by

Salomé:

Cruel people being always masochists also, the whole thing is inseparable from

bisexuality. And that has a deep meaning. The first time I ever discussed this theme was

with Nietzsche (that sadomasochist unto himself). And I know that afterward we dared

not look at each other. (Freud Journal, 143)

15 This point is indebted to Derek Attridge (ed.), Jacques Derrida, “Introduction,” Acts of

Literature, trans. Nicholas Royle (New York: Routledge, 1992). “‘Yes’ breaches time as well as space, as it always involves a commitment, a willingness to say ‘yes’ again” (254).

16 See Derek Attridge, “[A]n affirmation that ‘precedes’ (not temporally or logically) even the utterance ‘I’ …” (254).

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If we assume that Salomé is narcissistic, Salomé’s fear of looking at Nietzsche may show her

shame at her ambivalence towards her own narcissism. Then this assumption cannot be held

because a narcissistic woman is self-contented, and therefore, never feels shameful of what

she is. She is rather becoming an affirmative woman, but lacks the courage to say “Yes” by

taking up the responsibility to respond to the other, and the courage to face her masochism.

Ronald Lehrer, in his book discussing Nietzsche’s presence in Freud’s thought,

comments on the conversation between Nietzsche and Salomé: “One can only wonder here as

elsewhere about the extent to which Nietzsche’s ideas or something approximating them may

have reached Freud through Andreas-Salomé.”17 Applying Lehrer’s saying, it is possible that

Nietzsche and Salomé’s conversation influences Freud’s two conceptions of masochism: the

latter is both from the superego, and so protective of identity, and it is the drive that breaks

down identity.

Before moving on to the next section on crime, it is important to note that in the essay

on narcissism, Freud relates great criminals to narcissism by saying:

Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel

our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from

their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a

blissful state mind – an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since

abandoned. (83)

It could mean that Freud treats great criminals, as in my words, “feminine”; and it is

interesting to know how Freud relates the discussion of criminals to narcissism, and discusses

under what circumstances criminals will submit to either forms of masochism in his essay on

criminals which is called “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt” (1916).18

III – FREUD ON CRIME AND GUILT

In “On The Genealogy of Morals” (1887), Nietzsche says that Schuld [guilt] has its origin in

the very material concept Schulden [debts] (2, 4). Freud’s interest in the discussion of guilt is

17 Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: On the Origins of a

Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 145.

18 This essay is the third essay in Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work” (1916), Penguin Freud 14: Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1990) 291-333.

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first found in “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt” (1916) and then in Civilization and Its

Discontents. This section will explore the former essay. In “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt”

(1916), Freud finds that some of his patients suffer from an oppressive feeling of guilt, of

which they do not know the origin. They are not conscious of whom the debt is owed to.

After they, the doers, have committed misdeeds, this oppression is mitigated, but is not

dissipated because the debt costs them a life to repay. The existence of a life-long debt can be

proved when giving psychoanalytic treatment to his patients, Freud found that “the misdeeds

were committed while the patients were actually under [his] treatment, and were no longer so

youthful” (317).

This obscure and oppressive feeling leads Freud to write "Criminals from a Sense of

Guilt" in order to answer two questions:

(1) What is the origin of a sense of guilt before the deed, the crime? (i.e. what is the debt?)

and;

(2) Is it probable that this kind of causation plays any considerable part in human crime?

(in other words, is it possible that crime is committed not because of sense of guilt? ).

Regarding the first question, Freud in this essay proposes that the origin of this sense of guilt

is derived from the Oedipus complex. It is a reaction to the two great criminal intentions:

killing the father and having sexual relations with the mother. Freud says, “In comparison

with these two, the crimes committed in order to fix the sense of guilt to something came as a

relief to the sufferers” (318). He reminds us that “the conscience of mankind, which now

appears as an inherited mental force, was acquired in connection with the Oedipus complex.”

(318) (In “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud moves his argument from the

Oedipus Complex to Kant’s Categorical Imperative by saying “Kant’s Categorical Imperative

is […] the direct heir of the Oedipus complex” (422).) In this essay, Freud deconstructs the

relationship between crime and guilt by saying that guilt is the cause and crime the result.

(The comparison with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is obvious.)

As a response to the second question, i.e. “is it probable that this kind of causation

(crime from a sense of guilt) plays any considerable part in human crime,” he ends this essay

with reference to Nietzsche's “On the Pale Criminal” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

A friend has since called my attention to the fact that the “criminal from a sense of guilt”

was known to Nietzsche too. The pre-existence of the feeling of guilt, and the utilization

of a deed in order to rationalize this feeling, glimmer before us in Zarathustra sayings

“On the Pale Criminal”. Let us leave it to future research to decide how many criminals

are to be reckoned among these 'pale' ones. (318-9. In the editions before 1924, Freud

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wrote “obscure sayings,” instead of “Zarathustra sayings”, see 319, fn. (It seems as if

Freud is giving Nietzsche a half-acknowledgement.)

It is interesting to see that while saying “In order to answer the second question we must go

beyond the scope of psychoanalytic work,” Freud acknowledges Zarathustra's discussion of

the psychology of the pale criminal. Before commenting on Freud’s response to the second

question, we need to know how crime is discussed in “On the Pale Criminal” (Vom bleichen

Verbrecher) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1, 6).

Nietzsche’s Psychological Interpretation of Crime and Guilt

“On the Pale Criminal” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1, 6) is about Zarathustra’s interpretation

of the trial and execution of the pale criminal.19 The criminal in “On the Pale Criminal” is

“pale as death” out of shock. This shock is caused by being limited by a boundary, which is

first set by his soul whose divided passions first told him that he “wanted blood.” Therefore,

he “thirsted after the bliss of the knife” and committed murder. The “pale criminal” suffers

the soul’s misinterpretation of his passions. Zarathustra comments:

Behold this poor body! What it suffered and coveted this poor soul interpreted for itself:

it interpreted it as murderous lust and greed for the bliss of the knife.

Worse still, his “reason” gives him another interpretation for his action in place of the one

given by the soul because his “reason” interprets the reasoning given by the soul as not

utilitarian enough to justify committing a crime. It therefore persuades him:

“What matters blood?” it asked; “don’t you want at least to commit a robbery with it? To

take revenge?”

“[H]e listened to his poor reason.” The consequence is:

[I]ts speech lay upon him like lead; so he robbed when he murdered.

He allows himself to be constructed in a way that he makes him think of himself as a

utilitarian killer. Both his reason and the judge channel him towards becoming a single

subject. He cannot shake his head (reason) because, as Zarathustra says, “the lead of his guilt

19 For the summary and commentary of this section, see Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s

Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986) 43-44; and Greg Whitlock, Returning to Sils-Maria: A Commentary to Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) 72-5.

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lies upon him.” He has been told by the red judge that he must have a rational justification for

his misdeed, i.e. robbery. A misdeed requires an evil motive; and this evil motive constitutes

an evil subject. This leads to a conclusion that he commits crime because he is a criminal. He

believes in himself as the doer of the deed, and therefore as a criminal by nature.20 This

criminal image makes him suffer; but at the same time the pale criminal needs the red judge

to confirm his “pale” identity and his self-hatred is then confirmed.

He suffers from two levels of interpretation: one is given by his reason which

Zarathustra calls “madness after the deed”; the other is by his soul which is “madness before

the deed.” Such suffering makes Zarathustra comment that a quick death is the only

redemption. Zarathustra says, “There is no redemption for one who suffers so of himself,

except a quick death.” This death shows the complete subjection to the superego if we

understand it in Freudian term.

Freud’s Understanding of “On the Pale Criminal”

From the acknowledgement of Nietzsche’s “On the Pale Criminal” in the last paragraph of

“Criminals from a Sense of Guilt” as quoted, we know that Freud is aware of Zarathustra’s

analysis of the pale criminal, and he establishes a relationship between “criminals from the

sense of guilt” and “the pale criminals.” As Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish, guilt

stabilizes the self and gives it a pale identity by making the subject feel that he has a motive

and a justification for how he feels. In Freud’s words, the ego actively surrenders power to the

superego to punish it by imposing guilt on itself.

The ego wants to be (mis)judged by the external force in order to be loved. (This is an

example of what Lacan calls méconnaissance) The subject wills its paleness.

Freud does not talk about whether masochism can shatter a sense of guilt. At the time of

“Criminals from a Sense of Guilt” (1916), Freud is aware of the possibility of a unique

criminal who is not one out of the sense of guilt. He says, “Among adult criminals we must

no doubt except those who commit crimes without any sense of guilt, who have either

developed no moral inhibitions or who, in their conflict with society, consider themselves

justified in their action” (318). This criminal may be similar to the criminal who is described

by Walter Benjamin of having a “destructive character”. Benjamin says:

20 Foucault says in the second volume of The History of Sexuality, “[O]ne constituted

oneself as the subject of one’s acts.” See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) 89.

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[T]he law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-à-vis individuals is not explained by

the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that

violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue

but by its mere existence outside the law. The same may be more drastically suggested if

one reflects how often the figure of the “great” criminal, however repellent his ends may

have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public.21

The great criminals who are outside the law in Benjamin’s sense can be read as in the

situation, as suggested by Freud, in which they “consider themselves justified in their in their

action.” “Their conflict with society” can be read as a force which “undermines the legal

system” or breaks down patriarchal order, makes it a ruin.22

But Freud does not attempt to investigate such a possibility of this criminal because it,

as he says, “goes beyond the scope of psychoanalytic work.” He ends the essay by saying,

“Let us leave it to future research to decide how many criminals are to be reckoned among

these ‘pale’ ones.” (319) Hence, Freud does not attempt to discuss the great criminals in

relation to narcissism and “affirmation” in my sense.

As quoted, in 1924, Freud wrote “Zarathustra's saying” to replace “obscure saying” in

the last paragraph of the criminal essay. 1924 was the year in which he changed his thinking

of masochism substantially. It is possible that such changes made him rethink the relationship

between crime and the sense of guilt, and read crime from another sense of masochism which

is primary or original. This masochism which is related to the death instinct will be discussed

in the next chapter.

IV – WOMAN, CRIME, PATRIARCHAL FANTASY

It is possible that Freud, a subject appropriated by phallogocentrism, in “On Narcissism: An

Introduction,” may develop conception of the narcissistic woman and the great criminal out of

his “masculine” thinking. There is another or opposite way to read Freud’s writing of

narcissism and crime with reference to René Girard’s conception of mimetic desire. Girard

reads Freud’s narcissism in the following: “[The coquette] is not unaware of the fact that

21 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,

Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 277-300, 280-1.

22 For the discussion of Benjamin’s conception of ruins, see Charles Rosen, “The Ruins of Walter Benjamin,” On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988) 129-75.

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desire attracts desire. In order to be desired, then, one must convince others that one desires

oneself. This is in fact how Freud defines narcissistic desire, a desire of the self for the self

[…] If the coquette seeks to be desired, it is because she needs to have masculine desires

directed outward her in order to sustain her own conquetry […] She is no more self-sufficient

than the man who desires her […]”23

Girard’s criticism points out the fact that men desire narcissistic women; and in order to

be desired, the woman poses herself to love herself only.24 A narcissistic woman is the

product of man’s fantasy towards woman in order to compensate for his lost narcissism. She

is the other of the same. Then Salomé may be nothing other than the mimetic desire of Freud.

While Kofman praises Freud’s conception of narcissism as a means of approaching an

undoing of an identity, she also criticizes him by adding Girard’s criticism of narcissism as a

myth by saying: “female self-sufficiency was simply one of [Freud’s] own fantasies” (63).

She asks:

Does he admit that woman is the only one who knows her secret, knows the solution to

the riddle and is determined not to share it, since she is self-sufficient, or thinks she is,

and has no need for complicity? This is […] a painful path for man, who then complains

of woman’s inaccessibility, her coldness, her “enigmatic,” indecipherable character. Or

does Freud proceed, on the contrary, as if woman were completely ignorant of her own

secret, were disposed to help the investigator, to collaborate with him, persuaded that she

must be, that she is, “ill,” that she cannot get along without man if she is to be “cured”?

This path, reassuring for man’s narcissism, seems to be the one Freud chooses. (66, my

italics)

Following Kofman’s speculation, Freud may like to see a woman as completely ignorant of

her own secret and becoming an accomplice of a man by surrendering the discourse on her

narcissism to man. In this way, Freud lives in his own narcissism by creating a system to

23 Kofman, Engima of Woman, 60. 24 We should be alert to Girard’s misogynistic position. He assumes that the woman is

the object of desire and the desiring subject is always the man; woman can only be the object of desire and she desires what the man desires. Toril Moi criticizes the point that “Girard’s theory of mimetic desire cannot account for women’s desire.” See Moi, “The Missing Mother: René Girard’s Oedipal Rivalries,” What is a Woman? 313. To her, Girard excludes the mother from the Oedipal triangle. A Son’s desire for his mother is the mimetic desire of his father. The result is that heterosexuality becomes an inborn instinct in human beings. Then woman, as an opposite to man, can only desire an object a man already desires. Reading his theory, Moi wants to show that Girard assumes that the desiring subject is always male and the object is female. Then, Girard’s criticism of Freud commits the mistake of misogyny.

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confine a woman out of paranoia, as Kofman comments, in order not to see the enigma inside

her. Then two readings of narcissistic woman exemplify the inherent difficulty of “On

Narcissism: An Introduction” which, like Nietzsche’s, reflects Freud’s ambivalence towards

women. As a masculine subject in patriarchy, Freud feels comfortable if narcissism is a

creation within a patriarchal fantasy/system. Similarly, with Freud’s understanding of great

criminals as narcissistic, the concept of narcissism may seem to be used to confine the

understanding of great criminals within psychoanalytic terms. Both the narcissistic woman

and the narcissistic criminal only exist in patriarchal fantasy.

To summarise, while dominated by masculine thought, feminine thought always comes back

to weaken his “masculine” thought. This is shown in his understanding of masochism as seen

in his discussion of his dreams (which indirectly leads to his encounter of woman and death),

narcissistic women, and crime. He cannot have a systematic thinking on these subjects. In his

first psychoanalytic work, he says in The Interpretation of Dreams, “It has been objected on

more than one occasion that we have in fact no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to

interpret, or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them as they

actually occurred.” (656) There are eight German editions of The Interpretation of Dreams in

his life. The editor of the English edition says, “Throughout the succeeding editions, Freud

was more concerned to add material, rather than to cut anything out.” (36) On the conception

of masochism, as quoted, while writing in the main text, he refutes them in the footnotes in

his later years. On femininity, he is aware of the insufficiency of psychoanalysis in answering

the enigma of woman. Freud’s psychoanalysis is an open system which is not a fixed, but a

developing, on-going body of thought.

Freud’s psychoanalysis works on both science and art at the same time. Peter

Loewenberg says, “The only public award Freud won was literary – the Goethe Prize of

Frankfurt – which included the delivery of an address ‘illustrating his own inner relation to

Goethe.”25 In his “Autobiographical Study,” Freud recalled that neither in his youth, “nor

indeed in my later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a doctor. I was

moved, rather, by a sort of curiosity, which was, however, directed more towards human

concerns than towards natural objects; nor had I grasped the importance of observation as one

of the best means of gratifying it. My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I

25 Freud, “The Goethe Prize” (1930), Standard Edition 21 207-214, 206, also quoted in

Peter Loewenberg, “Psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic science,” Whose Freud? 96-115, 97.

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learned the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the

direction of my interest.”26

Although Foucault in History of Sexuality criticizes psychoanalysis for its defence of

patriarchy, it is still possible to say that Freud’s psychoanalysis shows the working of

patriarchy and exposes its fragility, as shown in Civilization and Its Discontents. However,

from Girard’s criticism of Freud’s narcissism, it is equally possible that Freud’s writings, like

Nietzsche’s, show his conflictual attitudes towards woman. Kofman’s says, “[W]oman as

penis envier would not be able to inspire man’s mimetic rivalry.” (65) On the one hand,

Freud’s narcissistic woman is his masculine fantasy; on the other hand, he may be well aware

of the fact that woman is not simply a penis envier. Woman’s enigma is more than what

patriarchy can construct.

26 Freud, Standard Edition 20 8, also quoted in Peter Loewenberg, “Psychoanalysis as a

hermeneutic science,” Whose Freud? 96.

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Chapter Five: From Repetition to the Death Instinct

To ignore the death instinct in Freud’s doctrine is to

misunderstand that doctrine entirely.

- Lacan, Écrits 301

Eternal recurrence, as discussed in chapter three, can be seen as the interpretations of

“repetition” by Nietzsche from The Gay Science through Thus Spoke Zarathustra to Ecce

Homo. Freud’s conception of repetition is discussed in this chapter. His follower, Lacan,

regards “repetition” as one of the fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis. Freud was

interested in the subject of “repetition” since Studies of Hysteria (1895), a joint work with

Josef Breuer, which argues that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences (58).1 In his later

work, Freud argues that the hysterics are “‘fixated’ to a particular portion of their past, as

though they could not manage to free themselves from it and were for that reason alienated

from the present and the future.”2 In other words, the hysterics cannot get rid of the repetition

of the past.

Repetition for Freud is closely linked with repression, and is seen as a process of

remembering. On the relationship of repression, repetition and remembering observed in his

neurotic patient, Freud in “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914) says:

The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts

it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course,

knowing that he is repeating it.3

To understand the reason why repetition is an act of remembering, and the conscious cannot

know that an action is a repetitive action, we have to understand the relationship between

repression and repetition. In “Repression” (1915), Freud says:

1 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Penguin Freud 3: Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed.

James and Alix Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). 2 Sigmund Freud, “Fixation to Traumas – the Unconscious” (Lecture XVIII), Standard

Edition 16: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 273.

3 Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), Standard Edition 12 150. This essay is Freud’s recommendations on the technique of psychoanalysis to his students.

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[T]he essence of repetition lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a

distance, from the conscious. (147)4

What was repressed still exists, but resides in the other "psychical system," i.e. the

unconscious, which is "dark" to the conscious mind. The repressed is “an instinctual

impulse,” or to be precise, “an instinctual representative.” Freud says,

An instinct can never become an object of consciousness – only the idea that represents

the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented

otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself

as an affective state, we could know nothing about it.5

The repressed always seeks the chance to intrude into consciousness. However, in order to

escape the censorship of the conscious mind, the repressed presents itself in such extreme

forms of expression as neurotic symptoms, psychopathological behaviours in everyday life

and dreams. They show, in Freud’s words, “a return of the repressed” (“Repression” 154).

They are alien, and, hence, frightening to the patient.

The process of repression is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the

results of which are permanent. Repression demands a persistent expenditure of force

(“Repression” 151). This results in the persistent return of extreme forms of expression to

the conscious. This shows that repetition is the result of the repression of the instinctual

representative. A subject cannot remember that he/she is repeating the repressed. However,

even if he/she is aware of his repetitive behaviour, he/she still does not know what is repeated

and cannot escape from the compulsion to repeat.6 The “compulsion to repeat” replaces “the

impulsion to remember.”7

This chapter first shows how Freud distinguishes two forms of repetition in the earlier

chapters of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): active and passive repetition, but argues

that the distinction between the two forms of repetition needs not be sustained if origins

cannot be guaranteed; and that there may be only one form of repetition, i.e. the passive one. I

4 Freud, “Repression” (1915), Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology 139-65. 5 Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology 159-222,

179. 6 According to James Strachey, the editor of Standard Edition, “[‘compulsion to repeat’]

seems to be the first appearance of the idea, which, in a much more generalized form, was to play such an important part in Freud’s later theory of the instincts.”” See Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” 150.

7 Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” 151.

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will also discuss how Freud develops his thinking of the death instinct in the later part of

Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As repetition is the result of the repression of instinct, I argues

that passive repetition can be the result of the repression of the death instinct [Todestrieb].8

At the beginning of “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud says that Trieb, an instinct, is

“indispensable” in psychology (114).9 About an instinct, Freud says,

The advance of knowledge … does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions. Physics

furnishes an excellent illustration of the way in which even “basic concepts” that have

been established in the form of definitions are constantly being altered in their content.

A conventional basic concept of this kind, which at the moment is still somewhat obscure

but which is indispensable to us in psychology, is that of an “instinct” [Trieb].10

An instinct is not a scientifically precise idea, and is a speculative concept for Freud. Lacan

writes that “every drive is virtually a death drive.”11 The discussion of the death instinct

therefore paves the way for understanding the “nature” of psychoanalysis.

8 The English translation of Todestrieb taken by Standard Edition is “the death instinct.”

For the reason for adopting this translation, see James Strachey (ed.), Freud, “Notes on Some Technical Terms Whose Calls for Comment” (1966), Standard Edition 1, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001) xxiv-xxvi.

9 Following Freud, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis Lacan regards Trieb as another “fundamental concept” [Grundbegriff] in psychoanalysis (162). Lacan reads “the unconscious,” “repetition,” “the transference,” “the drive” as the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. See The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 12.

10 Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” 113-4. 11 Lacan, Écrits 848, quoted in Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian

Psychoanalysis 33. Following the speculative nature of the instinct as proposed by Freud. Lacan comments on the discussion of the death drive in Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997): “I don’t even say that at this point of speculation things still have a meaning. I simply want to say that the articulation of the death drive in Freud is neither true nor false. It is suspect; that’s all I affirm” (213).

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I – REPETITION

Repetition and the Pleasure Principle

In “The Uncanny” (1919)12 and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), two of Freud’s

important writings on repetition, he borrows Nietzsche’s term, “eternal recurrence,” to

describe his interpretation of repetition: in the former essay, he uses the term “the constant

recurrence of the same thing” (356); and in the latter essay, the term “perpetual recurrence of

the same thing” (292) (While Freud uses Nietzsche’s term in his discussion of repetition, he

does not acknowledge Nietzsche. The case is different when he uses Schopenhauer’s concept.

The full reference to Schopenhauer is given in a footnote.)13 The two references apparently

suggest that Freud reads eternal recurrence as “eternal recurrence of the same.” The return of

the same is a kind of repetition, which, in Freud’s sense, is “the re-experiencing of something

identical” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 308). This return gives a sense of pleasure to the

self. This pleasure was described by Freud earlier in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):

If one of the ordinary symbols for a penis occurs in a dream doubled or multiplied, it is to

be regarded as a warding-off of castration.

[…]

Dreams of “doubling” and “multiplying,” which bear the meaning of repetition, manifest

the desire for protection of identity from being castrated. (474)

This case is apparently seen as a form of “active” repetition. While I briefly discuss how

Freud works on “active” repetition in the earlier chapters of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I

have to stress that this is not how Freud will continue to see it in this book.

Freud in chapter three of Beyond the Pleasure Principle gives four examples of

apparent “active” behaviour. They are: the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time

by each of his protégés, and who seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; the

man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend, the man who time after time in the

course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and

then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one and

12 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919), Penguin Freud 14: Art and Literature trans.

James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990) 335-76. 13 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 322, fn.2. Freud’s reference to

Schopenhauer can be found in footnote 19 below.

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the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and

reaches the same conclusion. (see 292) These examples of “active” behaviour are similar to

the child in the fort/da game who tries to master the passive situation, as discussed in chapter

two of the book.

To see how Freud reads “active” repetition in the earlier chapters of Beyond the

Pleasure Principle, it is important to see the working of the pleasure principle. According to

the first chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the mental apparatus, regulated by the

pleasure principle, endeavours to maintain a homeostasis which is a position of avoidance of

unpleasure resulting from an increase in the quantity of excitation and a production of

pleasure achieved by reducing excitation as low as possible or at least keeping it constant

(275-6). The pleasure principle, therefore, follows from, according to Freud, the principle of

constancy which was inferred from Fechner’s principle of the “tendency towards stability”

(277).

Chapter five of Beyond the Pleasure Principle points out that the working of the

pleasure principle requires the effective operation of the binding force of the mental apparatus.

According to Freud, “the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type of

bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge” (306).

Freud calls these processes “primary” psychical processes which are found in the unconscious.

In the mental functioning, the mental apparatus will bind the instinctual excitation reaching

the primary process (307). This binding process is regarded as the “secondary” process. Its

failure will result in unpleasant experiences caused by sustaining a high level of excitation.

Freud says, “[O]nly after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the

dominance of the pleasure principle […] to proceed unhindered” (307).

The pleasure principle seems to explain and solve the problems of repetition which

bother the subject who is trapped by repetition, as this is announced by the demon in The Gay

Science. The explanatory power of the pleasure principle which keeps the subjectivity calm

from disturbances seems to create an impression that this principle is a product of

“masculine,” or “strong” thought. But if origins are fictitional, then every repetition is return

of the different. Each return, by using the words of the demon in The Gay Science, “crushes”

a subject since he or she has no preparation for it. The binding force becomes inoperative.

This reinforces what I have said earlier that all repetition is passive. The distinction between

active and passive repetition cannot be made. The pleasure principle can only be assumed, but

not guaranteed. Freud at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle writes,

In the theory of psychoanalysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken

by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. (275, my italic)

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The pleasure principle is the result of speculative work; and Freud is prepared to reinterpret

repetition in another way through the discussion of the death instinct. Before that, we must

first look at how Freud reads a repetition which is “beyond” the pleasure principle.

Repetition “Beyond the Pleasure Principle’

Freud gives one example to passive behaviour in Beyond the Pleasure Principle after

discussing the four examples of the “active” behaviour: the woman who married three

successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on

their death-beds.14 At the end of chapter three of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud

speculates that there is a type of “compulsion to repeat” which seems “more primitive, more

elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides” (293-4). The

pleasure principle is overridden if the binding process cannot work. He then says in chapter

four of the book that there is a protective shield keeping the mental apparatus from outside

stimuli. When this shield is broken, the mental apparatus is susceptible to stimuli, the binding

process is paralysed and the pleasure principle is suspended. As a result, the subject is under

continuous attack from the outside. Freud “describes as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from

outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” (301). Freud leads

us back to chapter two of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which he discusses “severe

mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk of life and war

leads to ‘traumatic neurosis’” (281). In this neurosis, neurotics “run into danger without being

prepared for it.” As a consequence, they are “fixated” to trauma,” a situation in which

“dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristics of repeatedly bringing the

patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another

fright” (282). In this sense, repetition works beyond the pleasure principle.

Each return does not affirm identity, but shatters it. This leads us back to Freud’s

discussion of repetition as warding-off castration in The Interpretation of Dreams, and leads

us to re-think that repetition, instead of reaffirmation of identity, can mean the opposite. Then,

dreaming of “doubling” and “multiplying” shows the castration fear of a dreamer. Freud, in

the essay called “Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910) shows that a word can carry

double and contrasting meanings. Repetition becomes an uncanny experience. Repetition as

warding-off castration assumes the existence of origins: that, if possible, would be the “return

14 Freud uses Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata to illustrate a repetition of this fatality

(Beyond the Pleasure Principle 293).

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of the same”: the desire for a thought which is based on identity has produced, or is produced

by, the castration fear. When the origin is absent, repetition is not the return to the same. It

blurs the boundaries between copy and origin, symbol and thing it symbolizes, imagination

and reality.15 Exposing such undecidability, repetition cannot ward off castration, as was said

in The Interpretation of Dreams.16 Instead, it exhibits castration-fear: the subject is placed

into a passive position. Also, it is not surprising that Freud names a force behind this

repetition the “daemonic” force, which paralyzes “masculine” thought, and acts, like

Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence, as a “hammer” to phallogocentrism.17

Being trapped in passive repetition, the subject remains in a high level of excitation and

cannot return to homeostasis. As a result, the subject is kept in, in Derrida’s term, a state of

“dissemination,” which “shows through substitutional repetitions, a succession of divisions of

experience, testifying to castration anxiety.”18 Up to this point, this type of repetition cannot

be explained by the pleasure principle in which everything is to be bound, instead of being

“disseminated.”

II – THE DEATH INSTINCT

The suspension of the pleasure principle is not only due to the continuous attack from the

outside but also from within, as said in chapter four of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (300).

In chapter five of the book, Freud speculates that behind this compulsion to repeat may be an

instinctual impulse which refuses to obey the secondary (binding) processes and remains in an

unbound state without keeping the excitation constant or as low as possible, in other words, it

does not respect homeostasis.

This impulse is named by Freud the death instinct. In chapter six of Civilization and Its

Discontents (1930[1929]), upon reviewing his speculative work on the death instincts in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud says:

15 This is seen as, in Derrida’s words, “the paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the

blurring of the boundary lines between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’, between the ‘symbol’ and the ‘thing it symbolizes.’” See Derrida, Dissemination 220. For a discussion of this quote, see Jeremy Tambling, “On Not Being Able to Sing: Filming Les Contes D’Hoffmann,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42.1 (2006): 22-37, 28.

16 Tambling says, “Freud’s readings of repetition in “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”) and in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) discuss undecidability. (“On Not Being Able to Sing: Filming Les Contes D’Hoffmann” 28)

17 “Hammer” is the word used in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols: Or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer. See my discussion in chapter one above.

18 Tambling, “On Not Being Able to Sing: Filming Les Contes D’Hoffmann” 28.

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“The death instincts operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that,

of course, was no proof” (Civilization and its Discontents 310).

Speculation

Freud is aware of the fact that his task is not to prove the existence of the death instinct

because, as discussed, it operates silently. Such silence makes it, in Derrida’s words, “resist

analysis in the form of non-resistance.”19 Freud, at the beginning of chapter four before

introducing “beyond the pleasure principle,” says:

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider

or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out

an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead. (295)

What can be speculated on can be rejected or reinterpreted in another way. Speculation does

not bind itself into single and unitary thought. It is a process of “weakening” an objective

truth. It allows ambiguities, contradiction, and possibilities. In this sense, speculation belongs

to “feminine” thought, or it can be considered as “weak” thought. I would propose that Freud

struggles in maintaining consistency in his thinking of the death instinct, but speculation

disallows him from keeping hold of what he is thinking of without re-interpreting; in other

words, speculation undoes systematic thought. In the process of speculation, he cannot

maintain an identity in a way that a consistent thinking can be made. After speculating on the

possibilities of the death instinct, he asks himself if he is convinced by his speculation. Freud

says:

My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade

other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe

in them. (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 332)

Although he does not convince himself, interestingly, it does not mean that he rejects the

value of speculation, or that he thinks that speculation is less useful than empirical

observation in the conception of the death instinct. He says:

It is true that my assertion of the regressive character of instincts also rests upon observed

material – namely on the facts of the compulsion to repeat. It may be, however, that I

19 This follows Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf,

Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), “[Repetition Compulsion] has no meaning (death drive) and it resists analysis in the form of nonresistance […]” (24).

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have overestimated their significance. And in any case it is impossible to pursue an idea

of this kind except by repeatedly combining factual material with what is purely

speculative and thus diverging widely from empirical observation. The more frequently

this is done in the course of constructing a theory, the more untrustworthy, as we know,

must be the final result. (333)

Science serves no better job in the conception of the death instinct. Although Freud says that

“[t]he deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position

to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones,” “the uncertainty of our

speculation has been greatly increased by the necessity for borrowing from the science of

biology” (334). The uncertainty to Freud is owing to the fact that “biology is truly a land of

unlimited possibilities” (334). When using biology to help us to understand the operation of

the death instinct,

[w]e may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what

answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may

be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.

(334)

Multiple Interpretations of the Death Instinct

To understand the death instinct, we must therefore be prepared to accept multiple

interpretations of the death instinct; they cannot be reduced into unitary thought. In what

follows, I am going to articulate how Freud changes his speculative reading of the death

instinct as shown in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Derrida’s and Lacan’s reading of the

death instinct as well.

Freud first starts his speculative reading of the death instinct in chapter four of Beyond

the Pleasure Principle in which he says that it is

an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity

has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is

a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent

in organic life. (308-9)

This state is elaborated by Freud as:

an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which

it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are

to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal

reasons – to become inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that “the

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aim of all life is death” [...] (310-1)

On this, Freud has no hesitation to refer to Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the latter part of the

essay. Freud says, “For him, death is the ‘truth result and to that extent the purpose of life.’”

(322).20 However, he, as discussed, does not give the same acknowledgement to Nietzsche

when he uses a Nietzschean term to illustrate the concept of repetition as shown at the

beginning of this chapter. Freud further elaborates “the circuitous paths”:

For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and

easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still

surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to

make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous

paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us

to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life. (311)

Freud terms “the conservative instincts” the death instincts. On these, he says,

the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of

mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure

that the organism shall follow this own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways

of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism

itself. (311)

The compulsion to repeat activated by the death instinct, to Freud in chapter four of the book,

can be seen as instinctual in character and helps to explain why the subject succumbs to

passive repetition, and why the pleasure principle (of homeostasis) becomes inoperative, as

discussed in the previous section on repetition.

But Freud changes his thinking in the last chapter of the book. While he uses biology to

state that the pleasure principle cannot explain the death instinct in the earlier chapters, he

uses biology to say the opposite in the last chapter of the book. To see how Freud changes his

thinking, it is necessary to reiterate that the pleasure principle is a tendency to “free the

mental apparatus from excitation,” and the death instinct is to put the subject back to “an

earlier state of things” which shows “the inertia inherent in organic life.” Then the death

instinct has the tendency to free the organic life from excitation. This makes Freud conclude

20 In saying so, Freud quotes from Schopenhauer, “Über die anscheinende

Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen,” Parerga und Paralipomena (Essay IV) Vol. 1, Leipzig (Berlin, 1862), in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hübscher (Leipzig, 1938) Vol. 5, 236.

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Beyond the Pleasure Principle by saying that “the pleasure principle seems actually to serve

the death instinct” (338).

This reading of the death instinct states that there is an origin to return to, through

circuitous paths. Repetition is a means to return to the original position from which the

subject has once departed. Returning to this origin gives a sense of perpetual identity and a

constant homeostasis. This reading of the death instinct sees each repetition as return of the

same. Freud uses traumatic neurosis to illustrate that neuroses in trauma are forced into

repetition passively by reminding them that they survive after the traumatic event. This

“reminder” spreads a message that they should have died, should have dissolved. But the

repetition of this death message does not lead to dissolution of subjectivity. Although the

death instinct breaks down the protective shield sheltering the subject from the external, the

identity is not destroyed by the external stimuli because this instinct bring subjects back to

their own death so that their identities can be perpetually maintained by bringing them back to

equilibrium, the original and proper place.

Derrida interprets the idea of “dying for internal reasons” as an attempt to die a “proper

death.” He says,

Therefore one must send away the non-proper, reappropriate oneself, make oneself come

back [revenir] (da!) until death. Send oneself [s’ envoyer] the message of one’s own

death.21

If such a proper death has not been reached, the death instinct will keep reminding the self by

sending the same death message to oneself repeatedly.22 The death instinct does not lead to

the dissolution of subjectivity. It is rather the opposite, i.e. building up and perpetuating one’s

21 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan

Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 355. 22 In interpreting the death instinct as a drive toward the end through repetition, Peter

Brooks in Reading for the Plot says, “Yet repetition also retards the pleasure principle’s search for the gratification of discharge […] [R]epetition can take us both backward and forward […] [There is] a postponement in the discharge which leads back to the inanimate” (102-3). Brook call this “Freud’s masterplot.” In applying this masterplot in the process of reading a narrative, he says, “[B]eginnings are the arousal of an intention in reading, stimulation into a tension […] The ensuing narrative […] is maintained in a state of tension, as a prolonged deviance from the quiescence of the “normal” – which is to say, the unnarratable – until it reaches the terminal quiescence of the end. […] As Satre and Benjamin compellingly argued, the narrative must tend toward its end, seek illumination in its own death. Yet this must be the right death, the correct end. The complication of the detour is related to the danger of short-circuit: the danger of reaching the end too quickly, of achieving the im-proper death” (103-4). See Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative,” Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 90-112.

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identity. This instinct is rather a force for appropriation. The role of the death instinct shifts

from a demon to an angel whose role is to be a messenger to maintain the proper. (The

“angel” and “personal death” will be discussed in chapter seven with reference to Rilke’s

Duino Elegies and “The Prodigal Son”) Derrida says, “The drive for the proper would be

stronger than life and than death.”23 The death drive makes life repeat the same (the proper)

and send away the different (the improper). Death is a return to the quiescence of the

inorganic world where the self once departed. This is an attempt to put life into an intelligible

thing for a subject to comprehend and confirm an identity he desires. This reading of life and

death cannot answer the question asked by Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov when

he talks about “ lov[ing] life more than the meaning of life?”24 He says, “I love those sticky

little leaves in the spring and the blue sky, that’s what! You don’t love those things with

reason, with logic, you love them with your innards, with your belly, and that’s also how you

love your own first youthful strength” (306).

Freud’s discussion in the last chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Derrida’s

analysis of Freud’s death instinct show that it leads to confirmation of identity. This reading of

the death instinct does not see repetition as masochistic in the sense of bringing the ego to an

end.

If, however, there is no “origin,” or natural beginning from which things begin, then it

is problematic to read repetition driven by the death instinct as a means of returning to such

origins.25 I am going to suggest another reading of the death instinct offered by Lacan. As a

start, we look at how Lacan translates “Triebe” and “Todestrieb.” He suggests that “Triebe” be

better translated as “the drive” than as “the instinct,” and “the death drive” is preferable to

“the death instinct” as the English translation of “Todestrieb.”26 When stating the nature of

“Todestrieb” by comparing the difference between “the drive” and “the instinct,” Lacan says:

“The drive as such [The death drive], insofar, as it is then a destruction drive, has to be

23 Derrida, The Post Card 356. 24 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New

York: Bantam, 1970) 306. 25 See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Aesthetics, Method, and

Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000) 369-92. See my discussion in chapter six below.

26 For Lacan’s comment on the translation of Triebe, see “The Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious” (1960), Écrits 292-325, 301. For Lacan’s comment on the death drive, see Lacan, “The Deconstruction of the Drive,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 161-73, “The Partial Drive and Its Circuit,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 174-86, and “The Death Drive,” The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 205-17.

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beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can

it be if it is not a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration?”

(Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 212)

The death drive, as Lacan says, “challenges everything that exists.” It is “a will to create from

zero, a will to begin again” (211). Such a challenge makes the subject begin anew for every

moment by seeing that every moment is a new moment. If repetition is activated by the drive,

it does not drive back to the origin because repetition is not from something within.27

While Freud explains the death instinct in biological terms, Lacan situates it in the

symbolic order:

The death drive is to be situated in the historical domain; it is articulated at a level that

can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain, that is to say, insofar as a

reference point, that is a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the

functioning of nature. It requires something from beyond whence it may itself be grasped

in a fundamental act of memorization, as a result of which everything may be recaptured,

not simply in the movement of the metamorphoses but from an initial intention. (211)

The death drive here to Lacan is not read as a conservative force, but as a destructive one in

and for the symbolic order. It breaks the boundary between the “I” and the other. The subject

in repetition, activated by the death drive is described by Lacan as follows:

This subject, which is properly the other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to

show its circular course. It is only with its appearance at the level of the other that what

there is of the function of the drive may be realized. (Lacan, The Four Fundamental

Concepts of Psychoanalysis 178-9)

The subject is dislocated and becomes the other, and realizes that, in Lacan’s words, “his

desire is merely a vain detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other” (183).

Jouissance is beyond the pleasure principle (184). Seen in this light, the death drive is a

destructive force through erotism in Bataille’s sense. Subjectivity is disaffirmed.

Compared with Lacan’s reading of the death drive, the death instinct, as speculated by

Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is rather conservative. However, Freud in

27 For the discussion of Lacan’s reading of repetition, see Bruce Fink, “The Real Cause

of Repetition,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 223-32.

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Civilization and Its Discontents reads the death instinct in a different way. He reads it as a

destructive force. On this, he says,

[A] portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an

instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be

pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing,

whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any

restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the

self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding.28

Although Lacan sees the death drive as “a will to begin again,” or “will for an Other-thing,”

with the aim of catching “the jouissance of the other,” he still acknowledges that Freud’s

thought “requires that what is involved be articulated as a destruction drive, given that it

challenges everything that exists.”29 If we follow the last sentence of The Genealogy of

Morals, “man would rather will nothingness than not will,”30 the death instinct can be seen as

a form of mastery over the other ready to accept nothingness rather than giving up on its will,

its belief in itself.31 Then Freud’s reading can be seen in a fuller way when his idea of the

will for destruction is linked to the idea of the will to nothingness. The death instinct can be

seen as the drive in civilisation to destroy itself. That is part of a cult of the self, as with the

idea of making sure that the self goes to death in its own way, that is, securing its own identity

even in death. The archive-fever that Derrida describes goes along with this: it is the wish to

abolish history, and all records, all archives, in a destructive drive that recalls the slaughter of

the Jews, and other genocides.32 The death drive seen in this light, is neither passive,

affirmative nor masochistic, but destructively egotistic.

28 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Penguin Freud 12:

Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and other works, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) 310. A similar passage is found in “Economic Problems of Masochism,” in which Freud calls the death instinct “the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (418).

29 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 212. 30 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce

Homo 13-163. 31 This point is indebted to Jeremy Tambling. In his reading of the concluding paragraph

of The Genealogy of Morals, he says, “[T]he will takes the form of a drive towards destructiveness.” See Tambling, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 39. Tambling’s reading of Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer is that “all action which the Schopenhauerian spirit encourages actually come out of revenge and ressentiment” (39).

32 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 10-3.

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The speculative study of the death instinct is important for Freud’s development of

psychoanalysis. In reviewing this study, Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontent:

To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed [in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle], but in the course of time [Eros and an instinct of death]

have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in another way. (311)

In the following section, I am going to discuss how the study of the death instinct helps to

illuminate the “nature” of psychoanalysis.

III - PSYCHOAOANALYSIS BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

As discussed, Freud at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle only assumes the

working of the pleasure principle. At the end of book, after stating that the pleasure principle

serves the death instinct, he says:

We must be patient and await fresh methods and occasions of research. We must be ready,

too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no

good end. Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism

they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his

views. (338)

Freud does not think that the pleasure principle may be able to explain every repetition. If the

pleasure principle is the guiding principle of psychoanalysis, it is possible that speculation is

already inside psychoanalysis. Speculation does not start with the readings of the death

instinct, but at the very beginning. On the nature of “analysis,” Freud explains:

Why “analysis” – which means breaking up or separating out, and suggests an analogy

with the work carried out by chemists on substances which they find in nature and bring

into their laboratories? Because in an important respect there really is an analogy between

the two. The patient’s symptoms and pathological manifestations, like all his mental

activities, are of a highly composite kind. […] [A] chemist isolates the fundamental

substance, the chemical “element”, out of the salt in which it had been combined with

other elements and in which it was unrecognisable. In the same way, as regards those of

the patient’s mental manifestations that were not considered pathological, we show him

that he was only to a certain extent conscious of their motivation – that other instinctual

impulses of which he had remained in ignorance had cooperated in producing them. (my

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italic)33

Freud’s choice of the word “analysis” implies the importance of unbinding or disintegrating

the highly composite elements repressed in the unconscious in the work of psychoanalysis.

Derrida in “Resistances of Psychoanalysis,” describes this as “the movement of dissolution

that urges towards destruction, that loves to destroy by dissociating” (23). This serves as,

according to Derrida, one of the motifs of psychoanalysis, i.e. the philolytic motif (love of

loosening) (19-20, 23). This motif leads psychoanalysis to move beyond “the pleasure

principle” which focuses the importance of binding and integrating the self in homeostasis.

Another motif, i.e. the archeological or anagogical motif (20), as discussed by Derrida again,

is the regressive or archeotropic movement which has the tendency of returning to the past.

Two characteristics of the death drive, i.e the tendency of returning to the past

(archaeological) and the destructive and aggressive character (philolytic), as Derrida says,

have “ an analytic [loosening] structure or vocation” (24). Then, psychoanalysis is rather

“beyond the pleasure principle” than “the pleasure principle,” in its tendency to undo itself, to

loosen its own arguments.34

However, we can read Freud’s psychoanalysis in another way. Even speculation keeps

Freud continuously revising his ideas, for him, in Derrida’s words, “the destruction drive is no

longer a debatable hypothesis” (Derrida, Archive Fever 10). In reviewing his conception of

the death instinct in Civilization and Its Discontent, Freud says,

“In none of my previous writings have I had so strong a feeling as now that what I am

describing is common knowledge and that I am using up paper and ink and, in due course,

the compositor’s and printer’s work and material in order to expound things which are, in

fact, self-evident. For that reason I should be glad to seize the point if it were to appear

that the recognition of a special, independent aggressive instinct means an alteration of

the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts.” (308)

From this passage, Derrida comments that Freud “will have not only to have announced some

news, but also to have archived it” (Derrida, Archive Fever 9). Derrida’s comment on Freud’s

passage shows the contradictory aspect of Freud’s psychoanalysis, i.e. the patriarchal

character in Freud’s thinking which insists on holding to a doctrine, and wanting that to be

33 Sigmund Freud, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1919a[1918]),

Standard Edition 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 157-68, 160.

34 Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis 117-8.

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part of the psychoanalytic “archive,” which would give to Freud and Freudianism a definable

authority and guarantee a succession.

We can summarise this chapter by saying that the death instinct activates passive repetition,

and can be seen as a force which the self tries to appropriate, by using it to assert itself, and its

being, and by its will to the destruction of others: making that part of its will to power. We

can speculate that this is what Freud means when he talks about the murderous power of the

superego. Freud says, “What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure

culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into

death…”35 But we can also see the death instinct as working to undo systems of thought.

Then, Freud seems to see something deeper in the death instinct: the tendency in

psychoanalysis to loosen itself, and to destroy its own systematicity. In that sense,

psychoanalysis becomes speculative, affirmative by not being dogmatic, and so “feminine,”

aware of the other which disrupts any impulse towards systematising, or controlling the other

through its own authority, or patriarchal, masculinist assumptions.

A concluding point I want to make is that the relationship between masochism and the

death instinct is rather complicated because the death instinct may or may not be read as

“masochistic” in my sense of undoing identity. If the death instinct is seen as a tendency to

die in one’s own way, it is not merely “masochistic.” If it is seen as a drive towards “the

jouissance of the other,” then in its eroticism, which Bataille comments on, the death instinct

is indeed “masochistic”: it assents to life up to the point of death.

Freud’s speculative reading of the death instinct helps to substantiate the readings of

“masochism,” as these were discussed in chapter four. As said in the previous section,

“Multiple Interpretations of the Death Instinct,” when the libido (which includes the life

instinct) encounters the death instinct, it makes the instinct innocuous by diverting that

instinct outwards. Freud calls the instinct that is diverted outwards “the destructive instinct,

the instinct for mastery, or the will to power.”36 Any restriction of the aggressiveness of the

death instinct directed outwards would be bound to increase self-destructiveness. On this,

Freud says in “The Economic Problem of Masochism”

[I]t remains inside the organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual

35 Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology

350-408, 394. 36 Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” 418.

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excitation …, becomes libidinally bound there. It is in this portion that we have to

recognize the original, erotogenic masochism. (418)

I want to point out that the dual aspects of the death instinct show the patriarchal thinking in

Freud. Recognizing “the original, erotogenic masochism” in the death instinct, Freud tends to

read masochism as part of the formation of a single subject, and not to read masochism in a

sadomasochistic way which, if we follow the argument in chapter two, destroys the

possibilities of maintaining ideas of origins. Without giving due acknowledgement to

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, which focuses on “the return of the different” and the

impossibility of maintaining origins, Freud does not take note of the area of thought which

may be summarized by Nietzsche being said to be “sadomasochistic onto himself,” as Salome

said. Interestingly enough, the (sado)masochistic aspect of the death instinct, i.e. “the

jouissance of the other,” is picked up by Lacan.

“Original, erotogenic masochism” is, ironically, confirmation of identity because it

drives the subject to die in one’s own way. Then any crime emerging out of this masochism

could not be “affirmative” in my sense. At this point, I want to go back to the last sentence of

“Criminals From a Sense of Guilt,” as discussed in chapter four:

Let us leave it to future research to decide how many criminals are to be reckoned among

these ‘pale’ ones. (319)

We can re-read the paleness as constituted by the superego, and brought about by the power

of the Panoptical gaze of the judge. The masochism drives criminals to seek their own deaths.

This echoes what Zarathustra says, as discussed in chapter four, “There is no redemption for

one who suffers so of himself, except a quick death.” This death shows the complete

subjection to the superego. Such masochism cannot be used to produce a transgressive figure

who was not the pale criminal, but a docile body who tries to assert his/her will to power

under the “disciplining and punishing” of state power, if we follow Foucault. On the other

hand, if we could associate the death instinct with the kind of “masochism” which tends

towards “the jouissance of the other,” the transgression which would result would be

“affirmative,” with all the implications I am trying to give that word.

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Chapter Six: Psychoanalysis and Problems of the “Origins”

The causes of his infantile neurosis lay concealed behind [the

dream].

Behind the content of the dream there lay some such unknown

scene […] then it must have taken place very early.

The activation of the scene [...] had the same effect as though it

were a recent experience.

- Freud, “The ‘Wolf Man’ case”1

Chapter five deals with Freud’s understanding of repetition and discusses the point that

repetition shows the working of repression, and that repetition is related to masochism. This

chapter deals with the counterpart of repetition, repression, and that it problematizes the

question of origins. Freud says that the theory of repression is the cornerstone on which the

whole structure of psychoanalysis rests.2 As a psychoanalyst, Freud says that his/her role is to

suggest to his/her patient that “when he was a child he had some experience or other, which

he must now recollect in order to be cured” (“The ‘Wolf Man’ case” 286).3 To put it the other

way round, the repetitive occurrence of neurotic symptoms is an act of remembering the

repressed.

The first two epigraphs to this chapter suggest that a past event, which is concealed

behind a dream and develops the neurotic symptoms, did really take place but is not known.

Because of their inaccessibility to any knowledge, as suggested by the second epigraph, “[t]he

scenes from infancy are not reproduced during the treatment as recollections, they are the

product of constructions” (284). Without this construction, the past can never be brought to

the patient. The causal relationship between a past event and a dream cannot be definitive.

Although the past event leads to the dream, without the dream, it cannot be possible that the

past event can be made conscious to the patient. In that sense, origins become uncertain. Each

1 Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (The “Wolf Man”)

(1918[1914]), Penguin Freud 9: Case History II, trans. James Strachey et al., ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979) 227-366, 263, 264, 276.

2 Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement” 16. 3 In “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1919a[1918]), Standard Edition

17, Freud says, “The work by which we bring the repressed mental material into the patient's consciousness has been called by us psycho-analysis” (159).

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return of, but not to, the past is a contemporary experience. The actual occurrence of the

primal scene is less important than its psychical phenomenon; in other words, it cannot exist

outside memory, which is treated by Freud as a trace of an event. In this sense, it can be

possible for psychoanalysis to read eternal recurrence as the return of the different, as I hope

to show. This chapter, with reference to Freud’s study of the “primal scene,” an unknowable

past event, in “The ‘Wolf Man’ case” (1918[1914]),4 points out that the existence of a past

history cannot be proved in whatever sense, but can only be speculated on.

I – THE “WOLF MAN’S” PRIMAL SCENE

In order to understand how the primal scene is “constructed,” it is necessary to briefly

introduce “The ‘Wolf Man’ Case.” The “Wolf Man,” is the pseudonym Freud gave his

Russian patient Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff, who came to Freud for psychoanalysis in

January 1910 when he was twenty-three.5 His first course of treatment was from February

1910 to 1914, when Freud regarded the case as completed. Freud wrote the “Wolf Man” case

as a report, based upon the treatment in this period, in October 1914 and finished it in early

November (228). The following is a brief interpretation of the “Wolf Man” case based upon

his description.6 According to Freud, the “Wolf Man” had lived an approximately normal life

during the ten years of his boyhood which preceded the date of obsessional neurosis. His

health had broken down in his eighteenth year after a gonorrhoeal infection, and he was

entirely incapacitated and completely dependent upon other people when he began his

psychoanalytic treatment several years later (232-3). During the treatment, Freud found that

4 This case history is regarded by James Strachey, the translator and editor of The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, as “the most elaborate and no doubt the most important of all Freud's case histories.” See James Strachey’s Introduction in Freud, “The ‘Wolf Man’ case” 228.

5 The Wolf Man was born on 24 December 1886 (243, n.1.). 6 It should be noted that Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle 269-338 says that

psychoanalysis is “an art of interpreting.” Its job is “to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from his own memory” (288). Hence, his description of the “Wolf Man” can be seen as his construction; and hence another construction is also possible. His saying is repeated in An Autobiographical Study (1950[1925]), trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1950) “the work of analysis involves an art of interpretation” (74). For other accounts of “The ‘Wolf Man’ case,” see Muriel Gardiner (ed.), “The Memoirs of the Wolf-Man,” The Wolf Man by the Wolf Man (New York: Basic Books, 1983) 3-133 and Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man: Conversation with Freud’s Patient – Sixty Years Later, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum, 1982). For its analytical description, see Peter Brooks, “Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding,” Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 264-85.

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the “Wolf Man” could not get rid of an anxiety-dream7 during his early childhood (at the age

of around three to five up to the age of eleven or twelve).8 The “Wolf Man” described it to

Freud in the following:

I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. [...] Suddenly the window

opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting

on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The

wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails

like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something.

In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. (259)9

To confirm his description, Freud says that the “Wolf Man” added a drawing of the tree with

the wolves (259-60) (see Figure. 2). The dream can be related to his encounter with wolves

through “Little Red Riding-Hood” and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats” during his

childhood (260-2). Although Freud states the dream must be related to the two fairy tales, he

thinks that they:

would not be of a nature to be replaced by [the] sense of reality that outlasted the dream.

The dream seemed to point to an occurrence the reality of which was very strongly

emphasized as being in marked contrast to the unreality of the fairly tales. (264)

7 Freud in An Autobiographical Study says, “[I]f [external or internal stimuli] threaten to

break free and the meaning of the dream becomes too plain, the sleeper cuts short the dream and awakens in terror (Dreams of this class are known as anxiety-dreams)” (82).

8 Freud added the chronology of the events in “The ‘Wolf Man’ case” in 1923 (365, n.1). 9 For Freud’s record of the “Wolf Man’s” recollection of the dream, see 259-63.

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Figure 2. A drawing of the tree with the wolves by the Wolf Man.

Taken from James Strachey, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (The “Wolf

Man”) (1918[1914]), Penguin Freud 9: Case History II, trans. James Strachey et al, ed.

Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).

The first two epigraphs suggest that the cure for the Wolf Man's illness requires tracing back

through his anxiety-dream to unconscious events which happened in his childhood.

The following is Freud’s “reconstruction” from the materials in the dream and the

conversation with the “Wolf Man.” At the age of about one and a half years, the Wolf Man

was suffering at the time from malaria and was, Freud believes therefore, put in his parents'

bedroom. Because his birthday was on Christmas Day, Freud believes that the attack of the

illness was in summer. While the Wolf Man was sleeping in his cot in his parents' bedroom,

he woke up, perhaps because of his rising fever, at possibly five o' clock, he witnessed his

parents dressed in white underclothes and their coitus a tergo [from behind], three times

repeated. He was able to see his mother's genitals and his father's organ. The postures which

Freud believes the Wolf Man saw his parents adopt is that the man stands upright, and the

woman is bent down like an animal. The posture of his father in the “constructed primal

scene” (271) coincides with the posture of the wolf in the picture he drew and the dream he

described: the wolves were shown standing upright, with one foot forward, with its claws

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stretched out and its ear pricked. Freud terms the coitus a tergo of the parents of the Wolf

Man “primal scene” [Urszene] (270).

The manifest content of the dream, Freud believes, reproduces the unknown material of

the scene in some distorted form, which perhaps is even distorted into its opposite which is

shown in the interchange of subject and object and of activity and passivity (264). According

to this line of thought, Freud believes that the sudden opening of the window of its own

accord in the Wolf Man’s dream may point to the scene in his childhood in which the Wolf

Man suddenly woke up from sleep and saw something. "The attentive looking of the wolves"

in the dream should rather mean the attentive looking of the Wolf Man. Also, the

motionlessness of the wolves in the dream must be interpreted as the Wolf Man having seen

the violent motion in his childhood. The six or seven wolves appearing in the dream, Freud

believes, shows the influence of the fairy tale, "The Seven Little Goats" in which six are eaten

up and they represent his father and mother who are dressed in white during coitus a tergo in

the latent dream thoughts.

The wolf phobia which is shown in the Wolf Man’s anxiety-dream is interpreted by

Freud as the substitute for the fear of his father (265). Freud believes that the “Wolf Man’s”

recollection “asserted most definitely that he had not been terrified by pictures of wolves

going on all fours or, as in the story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, lying in bed. The posture

which, according to [Freud’s] construction of the primal scene, he had seen the woman

assume, was of no less significance […]” (272). The fear, to Freud, must be limited to the

sexual sphere (272-3). Then, his fear, interpreted by Freud, “related only to the standing wolf,

that is, to his father” (280). Freud claims that the fear of the wolf replaces his repressed

passive and feminine sexual aim of “being copulated with by his father.” The fear is seen as a

masculine protest of the condition that to be sexually satisfied by Father requires being

castrated like Mother (280) (“masculine protest” is a term used by Alfred Adler10).

If Freud’s description of the “Wolf Man,” as said, can be seen as Freud’s construction,

10 Freud has a disagreement with Adler on the conception of “masculine protest.” On

this, Freud says, “Psychoanalytic research has from the very beginning recognized the existence and importance of the ‘masculine protest’, but it has regarded it, in opposition to Adler, as narcissistic in nature and derived from the castration complex. The ‘masculine protest’ is concerned in the formation of character, into the genesis of which it enters along with many other factors, but it is completely unsuited for explaining the problems of the neuroses, with regard to which Adler takes account of nothing but the manner in which they serve the ego-instincts.” See Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 86. For Adler’s discussion of “masculine protest,” see Alfred Adler, “Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in der Neurose,” in Fortschr. Med., 28 (1910): 486. The discussion of Adler’s “masculine protest” can also been seen in chapter eight of this thesis.

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another construction may also to be possible. Deleuze and Guattari cast doubt on Freud’s

“construction” as the only possibility and criticize the point that Freud reduces the

multiplicity of the wolves to the repetition of the same figure, i.e. his father, and then reduces

the explanation to the Oedipus complex. The term “multiplicity,” as suggested by Deleuze

and Guattari, implies that each wolf in the dream or illustration is a distinctive figure which

cannot be reduced to one symbol, i.e. a substitute of the father.11 They say, “For Freud, when

the thing explodes and loses its identity, the word is still there to lead the thing back to its

identity or invent an identity for it. Isn’t an ulterior adventure revealed here, that of the

Signifier, the despotic underhanded agency which itself is substituted for a signifying proper

names just as it substitutes the dejected unity of an object (declared lost) for multiplicities?”

(138) The word “multiplicity”, they say,

was created precisely in order to escape from idiotic dialectics, to succeed in thinking the

“multiple” in its pure state, to stop making it into the numeric fragment of a lost Unity or

Totality, or on the contrary the organic element of a Unity or Totality to come – and to

distinguish rather the different types of multiplicity (142).

Using the Oedipal complex to explain the Wolf Man’s anxiety dream, Freud shows that the

dream is the conflict between masculinity and femininity (i.e. bisexuality which is not, as

argued in this thesis, something beyond symbolization). This may explain Deleuze and

Guattari’s criticism of Freud’s reducing the dream into totality, instead of multiplicity.

However, Freud later in the essay shows that although this reasoning applies to “The ‘Wolf

Man’ Case”, the explanation of the anxiety dream by “masculine protest” against femininity

does not explain large classes of cases. Freud says,

To insist that bisexuality is the motive force leading to repression is to take too narrow a

view; whereas if we assert the same of the conflict between the ego and the sexual

tendencies (that is, the libido) we shall have covered all possible cases. (352)

(Freud takes note that a moral conflict of this kind is lacking in the Wolf man case.) The

conflict between the ego and the sexual tendencies is discussed in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. The beginning of chapter five of the book writes that the ego instincts

arise from the coming to life of inanimate matter and seek to restore the inanimate state;

whereas the sexual instincts for preservation of species. By studying the libidinal

11 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “May 14, 1914. One or Several Wolves?” trans.

Mark Seem, Semiotexte 2 (3): 137-47. This essay is commented on by Lawrence Johnson, The Wolf Man’s Burden (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001) 138-40.

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development of children in its earliest phases, Freud later in this chapter came to the

conclusion that “the ego is the true and original reservoir of libido, and that it is only

from that reservoir that libido is extended on to objects. (324-5)

The ego is its own sexual object. Freud then finds that:

“the original opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts proved to be

inadequate. A portion of the ego-instincts was seen to be libidinal; sexual instincts –

probably alongside others – operated in the ego.” (325)

The opposition then is not between ego-instincts and sexual instincts but between life

and death instincts. Freud applies this distinction to the dualistic nature of libido (325-6), and

disagrees with the monistic nature of the libido, which is neutral in character, as proposed by

Jung (325-6). Going back to the explanation of the anxiety dream in the Wolf Man case, this

is not the result of seeking autonomy under the masculine protest, but the result of the conflict

between the ego and the sexual instincts. The sexual instincts may serve for the preservation

of instincts or act as shattering of subjects as said in Three Essays. The ego instincts may go

outward and act as preservation of species or remain inward as a destructive force. The cause

of the anxiety dream is unknown. Without acknowledging the existence of libido, Adler’s

misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s will to power (which is force to destroy oneself, instead of

confirming oneself) is that “masculine protest” against being put in a passive situation.

Freud’s criticism of Adler and Jung that they cannot be claimed as psychoanalysts because

they deny the importance of libido and cannot understand its relationship to masochism. This

reaffirms what Freud says in An Autobiographical Study that, to reiterate, “the aetiological

significance of sexual life” is one of the “principal constituents of the theoretical structure of

psycho-analysis” (71).

II – QUESTIONS OF THE “ORIGINS”

Recollection or Construction

Freud’s interpretation of the Wolf Man’s dream is not to be confused with the Wolf Man’s

dream; or, we should say that there is no Wolf Man’s dream, but only the construction of it by

Freud, by the “Wolf Man” and by Freud’s commentators as well. The Wolf Man’s

recollection is no truer than Freud’s construction. On the value between recollection and

construction. Freud says that he is:

not of opinion that [primal] scenes must necessarily be phantasies because they do not

reappear in the shape of recollections. It seems to me absolutely equivalent to a

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recollection, if the memories are replaced […] by dreams the analysis of which invariably

leads back to the same scene and which reproduce every portion of its content in an

inexhaustible variety of new shapes. Indeed, dreaming is another kind of remembering

[…] It is this recurrence in dreams that I regard as the explanation of the fact that the

patients themselves gradually acquire a profound conviction of the reality of these primal

scenes, a conviction which is in no respect inferior to one based on recollection. (285)

Access to past events is built not upon discovering something repressed from the patient’s

mind and bringing it back to the present, but upon constructing the repressed inside the

patient's mind and convincing the patient of the primal scene which he cannot trace back and

which is not conscious to him. Later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud mentions that

the roles of a psychoanalyst, therefore, are to interpret whatever a patient tells him/her,

including the dreams, in order to construct the truth hidden behind the representation, and to

convince the patient of the analyst’s constructed truth (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 288). In

this case, the cure depends on the “Wolf Man’s” acceptance of the primal scene constructed

by Freud, which is never conscious to him.

Undecidability of Causal Relationship

The primal scene can be constructed, but also can be deconstructed. I want to discuss how the

origin is problematic by referring to Lukacher’s Primal Scenes where the author applies both

Derrida’s and Heidegger’s approaches to the analysis of primal scenes. I want to show, using

his book, Freud’s project governs in the reading of his study of the primal scene, and

deconstructs ideas of the present more than what Lukacher does.

“Origins” are discussed in Primal Scenes, applying both a deconstructive and a

Heideggerean approach in the analysis of the binary opposition of the primal scene (the

“cause” and, to him, “an earlier event”) and the dream (the “effect”, and to him again, a

“later” event) in the “Wolf Man.” Since Lukacher is more Heideggerean than Derridean, he

believes in the existence of the primal scene because he is committed to the possibility of a

philosophy of “presence.” In developing his arguments, Lukacher says, “I rely heavily upon

the work of Freud and Heidegger, for Freud’s notion of the primal scene and Heidegger’s of

the history of Being are the most profound theoretical efforts in modern thought to account

for the lack of what Heidegger calls a Letzbegrundung, a final transcendental ground” (12). It

can be seen that he tries to use Heidegger to read Freud’s idea of the primal scene, or to use

Freud to support Heidegger.

The similarity he draws between Heidegger and Freud is that both are interested in the

“unsaid.” Lukacher says, “Heidegger […] constructs a counterhistory, the history of Being,

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which is precisely a history of forgetfulness, a history of all those things that thinkers forgot

to say but that nevertheless determined their discourse” (12). What he says is that there is

something there but it is inaccessible. Lukacher says, “[I]n his notion of the primal scene,

Freud developed a theory of the “unsaid” and a technique for discovering the tropes and

figures that determine the shape of a patient’s discourse but that the patient himself can never

remember” (12). The inability to remember assumes the existence of an event but is

inaccessible. Lukacher, therefore, protects a potential in Freud towards scientific positivism –

which Nietzsche would roundly criticize – by putting him under the protection of Heidegger,

who seems, in this argument, to be contending for a determinate history of being: where

history implies its own causality. And of course, Freud’s investment in the primal scene as

sexual is disallowed in the non-sexuality of a single, probably masculine, “Being”.

Lukacher’s theoretical orientations make him useful in the argument of this section for

one thing (i.e. deconstructing the relationship between a “cause” and an “effect”), but not for

the other (i.e. deconstructing the relationship between an “earlier event” and a “later event”).

Because of the limitation of his book with regard to the latter argument, we need to turn to

Foucault on the idea of an event (which is discussed in the later section of this chapter called

“The ‘Past’ as the Creation of the ‘Present’.”.

Regarding the first argument about “cause” and “effect,” Lukacher’s argument on the

undecidability of causal relationship runs as follows:

deferred action is a mode of temporal spacing through which the randomness of a later

event triggers the memory of an earlier event or image, which might never have come to

consciousness had the later event never occurred. […] Deferred action demands that one

recognizes that while the earlier event is still to some extent the cause of the later event,

the earlier event is nevertheless also the effect of the later event.12

Since it is uncertain whether the primal scene or the anxiety-dream comes first, the

relationship between these two operates, in Lukacher’s understanding, under “a double logic

of causality” (causes that are also effects and effects that are also causes). He says:

What the primal scene establishes is that at the origin one discovers not a single event

that transpires in one temporal sequence but a constellation of events that transpire in

12 See Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca and

London: Cornell University Press, 1986) 35, 37-8. See also Brooks, “Fictions of the Wolf-Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding,” Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984) 264-85.

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several discrete temporal sequences. Everything depends upon the random seriality of the

events and upon the specificity of the narrative details that constitute them. (36)13

In this context, Lukacher defines the primal scene as “an ontologically undecidable

intertextual event that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and

imaginative construction, between archival verification and interpretive free play” (24). If

there is a causal relation between the earlier and the later events, the primal scene (the earlier)

is the cause of the anxiety-dream (the later). The former becomes a historical memory with

“archival verification.” However, the primal scene is absent, and is not the origin of the dream

in “the double logic of causality.” Its intertextual relationship with other events makes it less a

historical memory but more an imaginative construction. It cannot be verified by an archive

because no present and origin can be traced. However, it is not part of a “free play,” but, to

Lukacher, is associated closely with a “constellation of events” in the “Wolf Man’s”

childhood. Being situated in such a differential space means that the existence of the primal

scene can only be reached by speculation. It cannot be proved but at the same time is difficult

to be rejected. Lukacher adopts more a Heideggerean than a Derridean way to approach the

subject of the “primal scene.” The dream “grounds itself on” the primal scene which juts

through the dream.

Under the mechanism of the “double logic of casuality,” it is interesting to ponder how

the Wolf Man can get cured. Commenting on Freud’s treatment, the Wolf Man says:

If I wished to complete my treatment with Freud successfully, it was necessary for me to

follow [Freud’s] rule whether I wanted to or not.14

He cannot get convinced by a cause which is unconscious to him. The primal scene can only

be activated by the dream; and the primal scene makes the dream happen. To him such a

relationship is dubious. If we take a Nietzschean explanation, the “Wolf Man’s” insistence is

“the supposed instinct for causality” which comes from “the fear of the unfamiliar” and the

13 He writes with reference to the “Wolf Man” case to illustrate this point: “For example,

in the grandfather’s fairy tale, if the tailor had not hidden in a tree and if the wolves had not decided to build a pyramid that would enable some of them to climb into the tree and eat the tailor, the scene of coitus a tergo where the one-and-a-half-old Wolf-Man sees his father climb upon the back of his mother might never have been called back into the consciousness in the form of dream (36).

14 Gardiner (ed), “The Memoirs of the Wolf-Man” 88.

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attempt to discover something familiar in it – a search, not for causes, but for the familiar.15

If the “Wolf Man” could put up with the unfamiliar event and get rid of the belief in the

definitive relationship between the primal scene and the anxiety dream, he would have the

chance of getting cured. In other words, his cure requires the operation of feminine thought,

which requires him to weaken the belief in the definitive relationship between cause and

effect, and enables him to approach the other and not to think in a linear and progressive way.

Undecidability of Temporal Relationship

There is another explanation for the absence of the origins and the present, and Lukacher’s

work may not be able to deal with it. When the earlier event becomes the effect of the later

event, Freud takes note of the condition that:

the activation (German) of [the primal] scene [...] had the same effect as though it were a

recent experience. The effects of the scene were deferred, but meanwhile it had lost none

of its freshness in the interval between the ages of one and a half and four years. (“The

‘Wolf Man’case” 276)

The effect of the primal scene being regarded as “a recent experience” can mean that deferral

of being made aware of the primal scene does not assume the return of its original experience.

Whether the primal scene actually exists is unimportant to Freud. What is important is the

psychic phenomenon. Freud says:

I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient’s case

was a phantasy or a real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account, I must

admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter of very great importance.

(337)

Both masculine and feminine thoughts operate in Freud’s study of the primal scene. While he

wants to prove the occurrence of the primal scene, its uncertainty does not disallow his

conception of it. Freud's change of Nietzsche's “transvaluation of all values” into

“transvaluation of all psychic values” in The Interpretation of Dreams shows that, to him, no

values can exist beyond the psychic or nothing is beyond psychic representation.

Transvaluation can be regarded as overthrowing one psychic representation by another.

15 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann et al. (New York:

Random House, 1967) 297, quoted in Lukacher, The Primal Scenes 34. It is worth pointing out that The Will to Power is an unsafe text because it was manipulated by Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth Nietzsche. On this, see H.F. Peters, Zarathustra’s Sister: the Case of Elizabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: M. Wiener, 1985, c1977), 180-1.

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Derrida confirms it when he says, “Memory, thus, is not a psychical property among others; it

is the very essence of the psyche […]”16 Nothing can escape from mnemic representation.

The general characteristics of memory are permanently altered by the passage of an excitation

(SE 1 300). While deconstructing the presence of the past and the past as an origin, the

essence of the past is nothing other than a representation. It is not a return of the past; instead,

only a psychic representation of the past returns. In each encounter of the primal scene, the

subject receives a new excitation from it which is different from before. Each return requires

a new interpretation. Such thinking requires the thought which is non-single and “feminine.”

Lukacher deconstructs the relationship between the “cause’ and the “effect,” and points

out the problematic nature of origins. But his Heideggerean approach means his reading of the

primal scene imposes closure by assuming the existence of an “earlier” event (the primal

scene) and the return to the primal scene through the dream (a “later” event). Following his

discussion may not lead to a reading of the primal scene as “a recent experience,” as

suggested by Freud. To Lukacher, the primal scene is a past event that is to be remembered,

not a recent event to be experienced in a fresh light.

The “Past” as the Creation of the “Present”

Behind the idea of the primal scene lies the assumption of the existence of a “past event.”

However, what is past is ideologically created; in other words, there is no “pure past” event

leading to the present. Every event is single. At this point, when Lukacher’s application of a

Heideggerean perspective to read Freud’s primal scene shows an inability to read the primal

scene as a present crisis (he cannot deconstruct the relationship between an “earlier” and a

“later” events), other philosophers have to be applied to be drawn on. The first is Michel

Foucault whom Lukacher does not discuss much in Primal Scenes, but who is tied to

Nietzsche more than Heidegger and can be considered as an heir to Nietzschean thoughts. The

other one is Derrida who writes “Freud and the Scene of Writing” to comment on Freud’s

discussion of memory in the “Project.” Foucault’s discussion of the event is followed by

Derrida’s discussion of memory in the next section.

Commenting on events narrated by historians, Foucault says,

An entire historical tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular

16 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 201.

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event into an ideal continuity – as a theological movement or a natural process.17

In understanding this continuity, he continues,

An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a

relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned

against those who had once used it, a domination that grows feeble, poisons itself, grows

slack, the entry of a masked “other.” (380-1)

Such a historical tradition does not see an event as an event by itself, but as an event in a

chain of events. This tradition does not see an event as “a fragment, an accident,” which has

no relation to the past and the future.

Seeing an event as “a fragment, an accident” means seeing it as discrete. The event is

what Freud calls a recent experience. In the Freudian sense, the working of memory makes a

subject see an event in deferred action and treat it as a recent experience. Here we can go

beyond Lukacher. Seeing how Freud on memory is linked to Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s

discussion of an event, it suggests the importance of Derrida’s reading of Freud’s “Project for

Scientific Psychology” (1895) in “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” This, I will argue, allows

us to read the “Wolf Man” case as an argument for the absence of “origins.” The importance

of the “Project” is described by Derrida in the following:

Let us note in passing that the concepts of Nachträglichkeit [deferred action] and

Verspätung [delaying], concepts which govern the whole of Freud's thought and

determine all his other concepts, are already present and named in the Project. (203)18

In the process of the construction of memory, Freud says in the “Project,” “Facilitation is the

primary process of memory.” The word, "facilitation," in German, is Bahnung. Derrida tends

to translate Bahnung as “breaching,” which literally means “pathbreaking.” He says,

“Breaching, the tracing of a trail, opens up a conducting path which presupposes a certain

violence and a certain resistance to effraction.”19 Derrida's use of the word, “breaching,”

echoes the characteristics of the impermeable neurones, described by Freud. Traces which are

permanently marked on impermeable neurones are, therefore, “most powerful and enduring.”

(Beyond the Pleasure Principle 296). These traces are called memory traces. In this sense,

17 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 380. 18 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”. 19 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 200. See also 329, fn. 2 for the discussion

of Bahnung.

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memory is a trace of an event. It resides in the unconscious, carried by impermeable neurones.

From Freud's description of the characteristic of memory, it is shown that what can be

remembered is a trace of the origin, but not the origin. A “past event” is not felt and

remembered as an event until it is felt in the present. But what is felt is the trace. The effect of

“deferred action” is discussed in the “Project.”

Added to this, although the unconscious mental processes are “timeless whereas the

conscious mental processes are temporary,”20 memory has “a capacity for being altered by

single occurrence”21. What is marked in the neurons is then altered. A trace is overwritten by

another trace and is continuously deferred and is put into a detour. Not only is the original

event absent, but also the original psychical process is absent too. This helps us to understand

the argument put forward by Freud that the deferred effect of the primal scene makes it

become a recent experience. In the analysis of the dream of the “Wolf Man,” Freud interprets

“Suddenly the window opened of its own accord” as “Suddenly I woke up of my own

accord.” The window can be regarded as the symbol of the eye in OED. Freud’s “constructed”

primal scene starts with the “moment” (Augenblick) at which the Wolf Man woke up and saw

the copulation. He first saw it without being aware of its presence, and the effect of the past

event was not felt at that time but is felt in the present without seeing it. The primal scene

takes its effect in delay. It is felt during the recurrence of dream as a theatrical image which is

shown in an “obscene” way. “Obscene” not only means “sexually disgusting” but also,

“off-stage.” What is obscene is unrepresentable. This explains why by definition the primal

scene cannot be seen. If it is seen, it can be represented, and each experience of the primal

scene cannot be contemporary because of the burden of the memory of the past. The working

of the primal scene can be seen as the deferred action.

Freud says that if all the traces are equally well facilitated, then the characteristics of

memory would evidently not emerge. He says, “memory is represented by the differences in

the facilitations between the Ψ [impermeable] neurones.”22 Memory operates in difference in

a spatial sense and in deferral in a temporal sense, the characteristics of which render its

existence in différance (deferred difference).23 The primal scene can never be brought back.

20 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 299. 21 Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Standard Edition 1, trans. and

ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 281-392. 22 Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” 300. 23 For the discussion of différance, see chapter two. If the origins are lost and an event

exists in trace, who is the narrator behind the event becomes important. This shows the continuity of Derrida’s thinking from Writing and Difference to The Post Card.

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But as the working of memory is seen as deferred difference, the existence of the primal scene

as an earlier event becomes unimportant. The origin is lost.

With the working of memory, each return to the primal scene through the dream is a

recent experience, a return of the different. In that sense, the primal scene is not singular, but

must be seen as a plural. The phenomenon of the primal scene is “eternal recurrence of the

different.” The cure is the ability not only to deconstruct the causal relation between the

primal scene and the dream, but also to see the past event as not an event in the past but as a

contemporary opened up for interpretation so that the burden of the memory of the past can

be relieved. To Lukacher, the cure to Freud is to see the incalculability of the event and this is

similar to Nietzsche’s saying “Yes” to life. But he cannot see that the cure to both Nietzsche

and Freud is not only to see the incalculability but also the destruction of the binary

opposition between the earlier and the later events (Lukacher, Primal Scenes 31). The Wolf

Man believes in the existence of the primal scene as the earlier event and the cause, and finds

Freud's “construction” of his unknowable primal scene "far-fetched." He says:

Freud traces everything back to the primal scene which he derives from the dream. But

that scene does not occur in the dream. [...] That scene in the dream where the windows

open and so on and the wolves are sitting there, and his interpretation, I don't know, those

things are miles apart. It's terribly far-fetched.24

The Wolf Man inclines to accept the seduction by his sister as the primal scene, and thinks

that it contributes to the major cause of his neurosis because it can be recollected: “Here we

have a recollection. It is not a fiction, not an inference, and not a construct.”25

Breaking down the binary opposition between the dream (the earlier event, i.e. the

cause) and the primal scene (the later event, i.e. the effect) makes the primal scene exist in an

absent or abysmal form. Blanchot, who writes on the idea of eternal recurrence in The

Step/Not Beyond, questions the possibility of the approach of the primal scene and comments

in The Writing of the Disaster:

(A primal scene?) [...] This term is ill-chosen, for what it supposedly names is

unrepresentable, and escapes fiction as well; yet 'scene' is pertinent in that it allows one at

24 Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man: Conversations with Freud’s Patient - Sixty Years

Later, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum Books, 1982) 35, quoted in Lukacher, Primal Scenes 136.

25 Obholzer, The Wolf -Man 37, quoted in Lukacher, Primal Scenes 137.

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least not to speak as if of an event taking place at a moment in time.26

His comment can be seen as a link between Freud on the discussion of the primal scene and

Nietzsche on the discussion of eternal recurrence. In Freud, each return of the primal scene is

"a recent experience." It is never what it was and what it will be. There is no essence in the

primal scene which can be represented by any forms of writing, including fiction. It is a scene

or the "ob-scene" which cannot be seen; and it is not an event which can be returned to. Then,

Freud’s understanding of the primal scene can be seen as a deconstruction of ideas of origins

and the present since the binary oppositions between a “cause” and an “effect,” and between

an “earlier” event and a “later” event are broken down. This sense of the primal scene is

similar to the Nietzschean sense of “redemption.” Getting rid of the burden of the memory of

the past in the Wolf Man case can be seen as a way to become the overman. From Blanchot’s

understanding of the primal scene, the “Wolf Man” may be wrong to say that it is an event

which can be recollected or returned to. His critique of Freud by saying that Freud is

constructing a fiction for the primal scene may also be wrong. Sticking to the primal scene as

the cause of, and as the earlier event to the anxiety dream is a desire to keep his subjectivity

secure from the threat of the primal scene. He fears the return of the primal scene as the return

of nothingness; in other words, he fears the approach of the other: what I call “the return of

the feminine.” Such fear leads to the unsuccessful psychoanalytic treatment of his neurotic

disease.

To summarise, I have argued that Freud’s writing up of the “Wolf Man” case shows that the

relationship between cause and effect, and between an earlier and a later events is undecidable.

In the “Project,” Freud finds that each recurrence of an “event” to the memory is new to it.

Each return of the psychical phenomenon is different. The “Project” shows the impossibility

of returning to a “past event”; in other words, each return is “the return of the different.”

III – FREUD’S POSITIONING OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud does not perceive psychoanalysis as a system which attempts to explain everything. In

the writing up of “The ‘Wolf Man’ Case”, it seems that Freud is a patriarch who does not

allow any deviance from his psychoanalytic explanation. At the very beginning of “The Wolf

26 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans Ann Smock (Lincoln and

London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) 114. For a discussion of the primal scene, see 114-6.

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Man Case” (1918[1914]), we see its political implication. Freud uses this essay to criticize

Jung and Adler, in relation to “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914), as

shown in this footnote by Freud:

This case history was written down shortly after the termination of the treatment, in the

winter of 1914-15. At that time I was still freshly under the impression of the twisted

re-interpretations [Umdeutungen] which C.G. Jung and Alfred Adler were endeavouring

to give to the findings of psycho-analysis. This paper [“The Wolf Man”] is therefore

connected with my essay “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement.” […] It

supplements the polemic contained in that essay, which is in its essence of a personal

character, by an objective estimation of the analytic material. (“The ‘Wolf Man’ Case”

233)

In “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” Freud protests strongly against the

theories of Adler and Jung by saying that:

these theories controvert the fundamental principles of analysis […] and that for this

reason they should not be known by the name of [psycho-]analysis. […] When I come to

the points at which the divergences occurred, I shall have, it is true, to defend the just

rights of psycho-analysis with some remarks of a purely critical nature. (50)

In An Autobiographical Study, Freud explains how Jung and Adler controvert “the

fundamental principles of analysis.” Jung refuses to recognize the importance of infantile

sexuality and of the Oedipus complex and Adler repudiates the importance of sexuality

entirely (96). Strachey says when Freud discusses the dissident views of Adler and Jung, he

takes a more belligerent tone than in any of his other writings (4).

Freud takes up arms to defend himself against his opponents who threaten his

orthodoxy in psychoanalysis in the “History” essay and An Autobiographical Study. It leads

the readers to ponder whether Freud deliberately uses the words “History” and “Infantile” as

the full title of “The Wolf Man,” “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” to emphasize

the importance of knowing the patient’s history from infancy as the only way to cure neurosis.

In “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” Freud writes:

Psycho-analysis could explain nothing belonging to the present without referring back to

something past. (10)

The analysis done by Jung and Adler who refute the importance of infantile sexuality, to

Freud, is doomed to failure and disallows them from using the name of psychoanalysis.

To Salomé, as a student of Freud, practicing psychoanalysis requires courage to

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confront something that disturbs one’s conscious mind. In Looking Back: Memoirs, she

says,27

[P]sychoanalysis had to wait so long for its founder -- for one who was capable of

wanting to see on the path before him what others had always carefully skirted. He alone

achieved a sufficient degree of impartiality (rather than some hard-won self-control, or a

perverse attraction for the disgusting) to confront what was repulsive or offensive without

allowing it to upset him. ... It was precisely the purity of his unbiased attention (that is,

the absence of a mixture of secondary motives and impulses) which resulted in his

ruthlessly determined approach to knowledge, refusing to draw the line even at that

which was respectfully hidden: and so it happened that someone totally committed to

logic, the complete rationalist, was the one who indirectly discovered the irrational. (96)

Regarding “The ‘Wolf Man’ Case,” Freud is hesitant in deciding to make a report of it. He

says, “Many details, however, seemed to me myself to be so extraordinary and incredible that

I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them. […] Anyone who could succeed

in eliminating his pre-existing convictions even more thoroughly could no doubt discover

even more such things” (239). Although Freud defends psychoanalysis in an assertive way, a

patriarchal way, Freud’s psychoanalysis as shown in the “Wolf Man” case demonstrates the

working of more “feminine” thought when he is working on the undecidability of the

relationship between cause and effect.

Freud is concerned that psychoanalysis is a discipline of discovering origins in solving

the present neurotic symptoms. Any attempt to deviate from it cannot be claimed as

psychoanalysis. His psychoanalytic explanation of the “Wolf Man Case” is not as patriarchal

as he does in fighting his opponents. The undecidability of the relationship between cause and

effect shows that we can never know what the primal scene is. The nature of the drive is

uncertain. Sexual instincts are only the vicissitudes but not the origin. (This is Lacan’s

understanding of the drive.) Then, if Freud insists on loyalty to him, what is to be loyal is

ambiguous. Freud’s sense of loyalty seems to be the opposite to Nietzsche’s saying, “Only

when you deny me will I return to you.” However, this thesis argues that both advocate

feminine thought.

27 Salomé, Looking Back.

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Chapter Seven: Art and the “Feminine”

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Ordnungen? Und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts

als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,

uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

[Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

order? And even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength

of his stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing

but beginning of Terror we’re just able to bear,

and why we adore it so is because it serenely

disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.]

- Rilke, “The First Elegy” (ll. 1-7)1

As shown in the previous chapters, Salomé’s relationships with Nietzsche and Freud facilitate

the discussion of the impact of the “feminine” on Nietzsche and Freud. From her, we have

discussed how the concept of bisexuality is important to Nietzsche, and we have realized how

Freud develops the conception of narcissism. In this chapter, by first introducing Salomé’s

comment on Rilke, I will discuss the “feminine” from another perspective, i.e. from Rilke’s

two artistic works: “The Prodigal Son” in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and

the Duino Elegies (which Rilke took ten years (1912 – 1922) to complete). The discussion of

the former focuses on the “Prodigal Son’s” refusal to be loved. Love can be seen as the

marker of dependency. The refusal of being loved is the intention to retain completeness. The

1 Rilke, Duino Elegies 24-5.

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discussion of the latter work focuses on the study of the angel (which is not “the Angel of the

Christian heaven.”)2 In the Elegies, the angel is a complete figure and dwells in the sphere of

the invisible. I suggest that the invisible is the sphere which is beyond the symbolic order, and

that the angel is the image of a complete figure. This chapter argues that the attempts of a

sexually-divided human being to reject parental love and to access the invisible illuminate the

responses to patriarchy, but such response results in hysteria.

I – RILKE AND HYSTERIA

Before writing the Duino Elegies, Rilke wrote on his physical condition to Salomé:

The fact remains that from a purely physical standpoint I am quite unbearable to myself;

certain bad habits, which I formerly always used to reach through as through bad air, are

solidifying more and more, and I can conceive of their shutting me in someday like walls.

The oversensitivity of my muscles, for example, is so great that a little gymnastics or an

in any way exaggerated posture (as in shaving for instance) results at once in swelling,

pain, etc., phenomena which are then followed by fears, interpretations, distresses of

every sort as though they had just been waiting: I am ashamed to admit to what extent,

often for weeks, this fateful circle dances about me in which one misery does the other

every favour. (Letters 20 January 1912)

His condition meets the hysterical symptoms articulated by Freud and his collaborator, Breuer,

in Studies on Hysteria (1895):

neuralgias and anaesthesias of very various kinds, many of which had persisted for years,

contractures and paralyses, hysterical attacks and epileptoid convulsions, which every

observer regarded as true epilepsy, petit mal and disorders in the nature of tic, chronic

vomiting and anorexia, carried to the pitch of rejection of all nourishment, various forms

of disturbance of vision, constantly recurrent visual hallucinations, etc. (54)

In “Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality” (1908), Freud finds in one case

of a hysterical attack, where a patient simultaneously plays both parts in the underlying sexual

phantasy: “the patient pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman),

2 See the letter to the Polish translator dated 13 November, 1925 in Rainer Maria Rilke,

Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 2 vols. (1892-1910, 1910-1926) trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1947, 1948). It will be referred to as Letters plus date.

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while she tried to tear it off with the other (as the man)” (94). He points out that uncovering a

sexual phantasy is not enough to bring about the resolution of the hysterical symptoms unless

psychoanalytic treatment has prepared for a symptom’s having a bisexual meaning.3 Hysteria

then can be seen as how the body resists the way in which it is named and placed in the

symbolic order.

Rilke’s hysteria can be traced in Salomé’s account of his upbringing in her Freud

Journal:

Rilke is disposed to oversensitivity both by his heredity and his upbringing (the parents

nervous people, unhappily married and separated, he himself brought up as a girl to take

the place of a dead sister, then homeless and shoved around from school to school,

military and others) […] (138)

Rilke was brought up as a girl. His body tells him that he is a boy, but he is a girl in his lived

experience. Rilke’s condition fits Freud’s description of hysteria. It is not surprising that

Salomé treats Rilke as “a typical hysteric.” (Salomé, Freud Journal 138)4 According to

Angela Livingstone, Salomé’s biographer, “Being a body at all was frightening to him.” (125)

Hysteria takes the form of profound reaction to the body as abject or to a fear of sexuality.

The fright may be the result of being placed in the symbolic order. After describing Rilke as

“a typical hysteric,” Salomé says that he does not know to whom he belongs (Salomé, Freud

Journal 138). Rilke as a heterosexual man, so defined in patriarchal terms, does not know

which sex he belongs to. Similarly, Salomé describes Nietzsche as bisexual. It seems

3 Freud, “Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality” (1908), Penguin Freud

10: Psychopathology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) 92-4. In 1895, Freud and Breuer could only find the psychical mechanism, not the causes, of hysteria (69). Freud pointed out in Dora’s Case (1905[1901]) that understanding the dreams of hysteric is important to the cure of hysteria (39). Freud says further, “The dream […] is one of the detours by which repression can be evaded” (44). In this sense, understanding dream can understand the cause of hysteria as the fulfillment of phantasy and such phantasy is sexual in nature. If male homosexuality is a state of a woman being trapped in a male body, hysteria is the opposite. See D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 154-6. See also Jeremy Tambling, Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and Kafka (Palgrave: New York, 2001) 229, fn.24. On hysteria, Alice James, sister of Henry James, “called her hysteria a battle between her body and her will.” See Jeremy Tambling, Henry James (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 110. Her feeling in her hysteria is like at the sea’s “dark waters closed over me.”

4 After understanding Rilke’s physical condition in his letter to her dated January 20, 1912 as discussed above, it can be predicted that she would write to Freud on September 27, 1912 requesting him to be his student so that she can learn how to practise psychoanalysis on Rilke.

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inevitable that ideology should constitute the subject by way of sexual difference, but it is

apparent that to do so oppresses the male as much as it oppresses the female. Any taxonomy

which expects sexual difference to coincide with lived experience is doomed to failure, and to

reify a sense of what the sexes should be. Whatever criticisms might be made of Salomé, it is

essential to see that she knows that men cannot be masculine, cannot even be men.

Lacan’s analysis of hysteria is useful. Unlike Freud who treats hysteria as a set of

symptoms, to Lacan, “hysteria concerns the question of the subject’s sexual position”: “Am I

a man or am I a woman?”5 A hysteric cannot answer this question because he or she is both.

Lacan says, “[O]ne of the sexes is required to take the image of the other sex as the basis of

its identification.” (Lacan, Psychoses 176) It has to be a single “image” because the other sex

is inherently split which is not simply masculine or feminine. Identity is always in a repressed

position. The care he receives from his parents makes Rilke unable to say whether he was a

man or a woman. Rilke’s condition is similar to the “Prodigal Son” described by Malte

Laurids Brigge in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “When [the Prodigal Son] was a

child, everybody in the house loved him. He grew up knowing nothing else and came to feel

at home in their softness of heart, when he was child”6.

The “Prodigal Son”

The story of the “Prodigal Son,” as told by Malte in The Notebook, is “the legend of him who

did not want to be loved” (210). The love which the “Prodigal Son” receives, I will say,

frames him a particular identity. It alienates him. Malte asks, “Shall he stay, imitating with a

lie the vague life they ascribe to him, and grow to resemble them all in his every feature?”

(212) The answer is: “No, he will go away.” (212) I will read his intention to leave as to

search for himself beyond the symbolization which has been imposed on him, and to think of

the possibility of not being identifiable. Malte informs us that it occurs to him years later that

not to love is impossible for he loves again in his solitude. (212) In his solitude, love still

exists. He loves himself, and therefore splits himself into the lover and the beloved.

Like “The Lost Son” in Luke chapter fifteen, the “Prodigal Son” described by Malte in

The Notebook returns home at last after thinking of his childhood. In thinking of his

5 Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis 78. 6 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M.D. Herter

Norton (New York and London: Norton, 1992) 210.

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childhood, Malte says:

[The Prodigal Son] thought above all of his childhood, and, the more calmly he reflected,

the more unachieved did it seem to him; all its memories have about them the vagueness

of premonitions, and their counting as past made them almost future. To take all this once

more, and this time really, upon himself – this was the reason he, the estranged, turned

home. We do not know whether he remained; we only know that he came back. (215)

He “comes back,” but he may not “remain.” This may be seen as his reading of the return of

the different. He reads past events as contemporary experience. Everyone in the home loves

him in the same way when he returns; but he does not care any more. They have no effect on

him. Malte says:

For he recognized more clearly from day to day that the love of which they were so vain

and to which they secretly encouraged one another, had nothing to do with him. He

almost had to smile at their exertions, and it became clear how little they could have him

in mind. (216)

His reaction to the same love differs; or we should say his past “I” is dead. This draws

association to the story of the “Lost Son” described by Jesus in the Bible. In the story, a man

has two sons. The younger one requests his share of his father’s property when he is still alive.

Later this younger son sells his share and leaves home with the money. He soon squanders all

the money. He regrets and returns home. His father forgives him, and celebrates for his return.

His forgiveness infuriates the elder son. In response to him, the father says:

It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is

alive again; and was lost, and is found. (Luke 15:32)

The “Prodigal Son” in The Notebook, like the “Lost Son” in Bible, reborn. In the end, Malte

says:

Er war jetzt furchtbar schwer zu lieben, und er fühlte, daß nur Einer dazu imstande sei.

Der aber wollte noch nicht.

[He was now terribly difficult to love, and he felt that One alone was able for the task.

But He was not yet willing.] (216)

His squandering can mean symbolically that he has the desire to lose the burden levied on

him by patriarchal ideology through his parental love. The rebirth signifies the birth of

“feminine” thought inside him. He is looking for the love of One, but He is not yet willing.

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He is now patiently waiting for his love. Malte says, “He almost forgot God over the hard

work of drawing near him, and all that he hoped perhaps to attain with him in time was “sa

patience de supporter une âme [his patience in enduring a soul]” (215).7 God’s love is

different from his parental love. His parental love is like the rays of their feeling which

consume him in them. God’s love penetrates him with the rays of his feeling. (212) With such

love, his singularity can be destroyed. The parental love which gives him identity becomes

unimportant.

Although Rilke points out that The Notebook is fictitious and is not autobiographical.

Rilke wrote to Countess Manon zu Solms-Laubach:

Malte Laurids has developed into a figure which, quite detached from me, acquired

existence and personality, and interested me the more intensely the more differentiated it

became from myself. I do not know how far one will be able to deduce a whole existence

from the papers. (Letters 11 April 1910)

The relationships between hysteria and art, and between hysteria and psychoanalysis

articulated in the following sections cast doubt on his saying. In this sense, the “Prodigal Son”

told by Malte is more than fictitious. He is a person whom both Malte, the narrator, and the

author identify with.8

Hysteria and Art

Hysteria resulting from the repressed bisexual fantasy is important for creativity. According

to Biddy Martin, “Salomé was drawn to [Rilke’s] sexual ambiguity; Rilke seemed both

masculine and feminine at once, exemplifying for her the basis of creativity in a primary

narcissism and fundamental bisexuality.”9 Rilke is seen by Salomé as a narcissistic man.

Both “primary narcissism” and “fundamental bisexuality” are beyond symbolization. They

are repressed when the subject is placed in the symbolic order. Hysteria is repetitive

behaviour in a form of remembering a former bisexuality.

7 The English translation is given by the translator, see 237. 8 This point is developed from Volker Durr who says, “Quite fittingly Malte sees the

Prodigal Son as one who also left home because he did not want to be loved. And with him Malte completely identifies.” See Durr, “Personal Identity and the Idea of the Novel: Hegel in Rilke,” in Comparative Literature 39.2 (Spring 1987): 97-114, 113.

9 Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (Life) Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991) 40.

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In her essay on narcissism, Salomé links poetry and recollection to hysteria adding,

“Poetry is the extension of the life of childhood, a life which the adult must sacrifice for the

sake of practical existence. Poetry is perfected recollection. Nothing goes more deeply into

the impressions of childhood than the unveiling of the repressed, and nothing strives more

vigorously for liberation through recollection than the life of one’s childhood, even when it is

still fenced in by the commands and prohibitions of adults” (23).10 After pointing out the

importance of poetry to recollection, she says, “[T]here can be no hysterical amnesia in the

absence of the infantile amnesia” (24). It implies that before poetry can bring back the

repressed recollection (bisexual phantasy), hysteria has taken place: Rilke to Salomé is the

“typical hysteric” in this sense.

Salomé in her memoir comments on the process of Rilke’s artistic creation:

From his youth on, Rainer found it particularly difficult to await the return of the next

period of productivity because of his weak constitution: his body was not only upset by

such waiting, but went into hysteria. Thus, a hesitant readiness for artistic action was

replaced by morbid sensitivity, excitability, pain, yes even fits, which dragged his whole

body along with them. (82)

Eudo C. Mason in his biography on Rilke comments on his artistic process in a similar way:

had discovered there was a certain regular rhythm, in his psychic processes, by which his

very torments, if allowed to accumulate and intensify themselves unimpeded, would in

the long run, through a kind of almost automatic reaction, suddenly swing round into

their opposite, establishing in him, at least temporarily, a divine euphoria, in which his

creative powers awakened and his poetry was, so to speak, dictated to him. This process

10 See Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung (“The Dual Orientation of Narcissism”) in

Psychoanalytic Quarterly 31.1-2 (1962): 23. This essay first appeared in Imago 7 (1921): 361-386. Salomé made this point earlier in her letter to Freud dated 10 January 1915 after reading Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914). In this letter, while focusing on narcissism, she discusses the relationship between the work of an artist and his own most intimate and infantile nature. See Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters 23. In the footnote to this letter, Pfeiffer points out the fact that Salomé’s discussion of “the narcissistic transformation into artistic creation” in her essay on narcissism refers to Rilke. For the discussion of Salomé’s sense of narcissism, see chapter eight.

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Rilke called “reversal” (Umschlag).11

Rilke treats hysteria, if he claims his condition as hysteric, as part of the “regular rhythm” of

his creativity (it can justify the doubt on his denial about his autobiographical nature of the

Notebooks). Such “reversal” or return brings back the lost and forgotten past. However,

poetry is not a representation of what happened in the past, but is seen as a heuristic work by

seeing the forgotten past in a new light. In the process of poetic creation, the subject is in pain,

and cannot think in a “masculine” way; subjectivity undergoes continuous disruption. Poetic

creation then shows the working of “feminine” thought.

Hysteria and Psychoanalysis

Mason says that in December 1911, Rilke was driven to “the brink of mental collapse,” and

had “no guarantee that the hoped-for ‘reversal’” would indeed come and rescue him at the last

moment.” It is at this critical moment that he thought of undergoing psychoanalytic treatment

(78). Rilke wrote to Salomé:

You know perhaps, dear Lou, that since sometime early in the year Gebsattel has had m[y]

w[ife] under treatment, - with her it is a different matter, her work has never helped her,

while mine, in a certain sense, was from the beginning a kind of self-treatment […].

(Letters 20 January 1912)

On 24 January 1912, the day before he completed the First Elegy, Rilke wrote to Salomé

about his resistance to psychoanalysis:

I know now that analysis would have sense for me only if I were really serious about the

strange reservation of not writing any more […] Then one might have one’s devils

exorcised, since in ordinary social life they really are only disturbing and painful, and

should the angels by some chance leave as well, one would have to construe that too as a

simplification […]. (Letters 24 January 1912)

On the same day, he wrote to Emil Baron von Gebsattel (his intended analyst) that he had

decided not to proceed with the proposed treatment for the same reason:

11 Eudo C. Mason, Rilke (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963) 76-7. To

Mason, this reversal is the reason for the fact that Rilke liked to be in Duino throughout the winter of 1911 in seclusion, which could help him to concentrate, and to clarify his mind as nothing else could.

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[B]y the most serious deliberations I have arrived at the result that I may not allow myself

the expedient of analysis, unless I were really resolved, on the far side of it, to begin a

new (possibly noncreative) life […] [A]s far as I know myself, it seems to me certain that

if one were to drive out my devils, my angels too would get a little (let us say), a very

little fright and – you do feel it – that is exactly what I may not risk at any cost. (Letters

24 January 1912)

Foucault may support Rilke’s decision when he argues the point that psychoanalysis is a

means to normalize the subject. The result of normalization of sex is the production of the

disinfected soul which paralyzes creativity.12

According to Mason, a few days before the “reversal” had actually taken place, like

Nietzsche who heard the idea of eternal recurrence, Rilke heard a voice calling:

Who, if I cried, would hear me from out of the orders of angels? (78)

This starts the “First Elegy” written in 1912. Rilke’s understanding of “hysteria,” if he treats

his condition as hysteria, can be seen as the result of the condition in which a human being

cannot be the angel and is denied access to the invisible. Being possessed by the angelic mind

imposes a heavy burden on Rilke’s human body. With such a burden, it can be easy for Rilke

to turn into a hysteric. Rilke’s sense of “hysteria” can be further understood with the

discussion of his sense of existence and of the angel.

II – EXISTENCE AND TERROR OF THE ANGEL

In October 1911, Rilke visited his friend, Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis-Hohenlohe, at

Schloss Duino, near Trieste, and, from her departure in the middle of December until her

return in April 1912, he remained in the castle alone.13 In the letter to Frau Elsa Bruckmann

on (i.e. before the start of the Duino Elegies), he writes in Duino of the importance of being

alone:

12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). Foucault criticizes Freud of having “normalizing impulse” (119) and psychoanalysis of “aiming at controlling and administering the everyday life of sexuality” (150).

13 J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, “Introduction,” Duino Elegies 10. For the biographical details of Rilke in the Duino period, see Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Helen Sword and Ralph Freedman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996) 317-333; and Mason, Rilke 70-91.

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I have long wanted to be here alone, strictly alone, to go into my cocoon, to pull myself

together, in short, to live by my heart and by nothing else. […] [I]f something quite

unexpected does not come, it may be the right thing to stay, to hold out, to hold still with

a kind of curiosity toward oneself, don’t you think? That is how things stand, and if I stir

now everything will shift again; and then hearts are labelled, like certain medicines:

shake before taking; I have been continually shaken in these last years, but never taken,

that is why it is better that I should quietly arrive at clarity and precipitation. (Letters 14

December 1911)

To Rilke, being alone in his “cocoon” without stirring is crucial to wait for “something” to

come in an unexpected way. This “something” comes from within. It is “the

incomprehensible, incredible wonderfulness of his existence” (Letters 14 January 1912, to

Gebsattel), which can be seen as what he described in 1925 (i.e. after finishing the Duino

Elegies) as the “invisible” in which the angel lies.

On the relationship between the invisible and the angel, Rilke wrote in this letter:

The Angel of the Elegies is the creature in whom that transformation of the visible into

invisible we are performing already appears complete […] The Angel of the Elegies is the

being who vouches for the recognition of a higher degree of reality in the invisible. –

Therefore “terrible” to us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still depend on the

visible.14

Completeness of the Angel

The angels dwell in the sphere of the invisible.15 To understand his sense of the invisible

existence is to understand his description of the angel in Duino Elegies. The word “elegy”

14 This, excluding the last sentence, is quoted by Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets

For.” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 89-142, 134. It is also found in the commentary by Leishman and Spender in Duino Elegies 87.

15 Though Rilke’s conception of the angel bears no religious ties, Michel Serres’ description of the angels of the monotheist tradition in Angels: A Modern Myth can still help to understand Rilke’s understanding of the angel. Serres says, “The angels of the monotheist tradition (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) are invisible – but are capable of becoming visible. They appear and then disappear. It is said that they move through space at the speed of their own thoughts” (7). This is a novel-like book which gives a general understanding of angels with reference to pictorial works from the past to the present. For Serres’ account of how to read his book, see Michel Serres, “Legend,” Angels: A Modern Myth (Paris: Flammarion, 1995) 293-7.

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refers to “a song of lamentation, especially a funeral song or lament for the dead.” Rilke notes

that “[w]hen one makes the mistake of holding up to the Elegies or Sonnets Catholic

conceptions of death, of the beyond and of eternity, one is getting entirely away from their

point of departure and preparing for oneself a more and more basic misunderstanding”

(Letters 13 November 1925, to Witold von Hulewicz). In that sense, Duino Elegies, to Rilke,

assure and celebrate the consciousness of the “intimate and lasting conversion of the visible

into an invisible,” and can be treated as a lament for the death of a subject when encountering

the angel. The encounter is described in the epigraph to this chapter. Compared with a mortal,

deficient human being, “each single angel is terrible” [Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich].16

Encountering the angel is to place oneself in invisible existence. It is a sphere beyond the

symbolic order; and hence the terror of the angel is constituted by the fact that subjectivity

cannot be maintained. In a Nietzschean term, it is the loss of Apollinian individuality.

Among the various poetic descriptions of angels by Rilke in the “Second Elegy,” one of

the most important characteristics is that they are like:

Spiegel: die die entströmte eigene Schönheit

Wiederschöpfen zurück in das eigene Antlitz.

[mirrors, drawing up again in their own

outstreamed beauty into their own faces.] (ll. 16-17)

The angel is his own mirror. There is no gap between this ideal image and himself; or, there is

no desire of the ideal image because when the angel passes its own beauty to the mirror, it

returns its beauty back to its face again. There is no lack in the angel. Any language, which is

built on absence (if we follow Saussure’s definition of language as a “system of differences

without positive terms”), which attempts to describe the angel is destined to fail. He dwells in

the invisible because he stands beyond the symbolic order. The angel does not need the other

to define himself. He is a complete figure. He has no identity crisis because he has no lack but

16 The Second Elegy writes similarly: “Jeder Engel is schrecklich [Every Angel is

terrible]” (l. 1)

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enjoyment,17 and is not possessed by desire. The concept of “I” is unknown to him. He does

not need to know who he is. Every outgoing will go back to the angel. Repetition to him is not

a return of the different which is a means to overcome himself.

Overcoming is masochism. It involves death within life. When the angel is a complete

figure, he is immortal, and does not need any suffering and overcoming. Only human beings

need continuous overcoming of their sexually divided identity.

The Incompleteness of a Human Being

When looking at a mirror, a human being, in contrast, loses his/her own beauty to it. Rilke

writes in the “Second Elegy”:

Denn wir, wo wir fühlen, verflüchtigen; ach wir

atmen uns aus und dahin; von Holzglut zu Holzglut

ebeb wir schwächern Geruch.

[For we, when we feel, evaporate; oh, we

breathe ourselves out and away; from ember to ember

yielding a fainter scent.] (ll. 18-20)

A human being “evaporates” or “fades.” This fading of the subject is, in Lacanian term,

aphanisis.18 On this term, Lacan says:

the subject appears first in the Other, in so far as the first signifier, the unary signifier,

17 I am indebted to Stuart Schneiderman, An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became

Undivided (New York: New York University Press, 1988), “[T]he angels are consistently defined as subsisting in a state of unalloyed and perpetual bliss, which leaves nothing to be desired […]” (134). For his discussion of the relationship between angels and desire, see 134-6. The subtitle of his book How the sexes became undivided shows that the angel is beyond sexual difference. For his discussion of the question of the sex of the angels, see 177-204. However, it should be noted that Rilke’s angel is not only beyond sexual difference, but also is not the feminine which is already beyond sexual difference. Although Schneiderman’s discussion of the desire and the enjoyment of the angel are useful for the arguments in this chapter, I have to point out that there is no reference to Rilke’s angel in his book, which, in a psychoanalytic perspective, particularly Lacanian one, is about the discussion of the angel in Western civilization which has been ignored since the Middle Ages. In his introduction of the book he says, “The habit of speculating about angels was buried under mounds of derision in the Renaissance, and with the exception of a few daunting neoscholastic spirits, it has remained precisely there” (2). He asks, “Why is it that angels are no longer taken seriously?” (2)

18 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 207-8.

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emerges in the field of the Other and represents the subject for another signifier, which

other signifier has as its effect the aphanisis of the subject. (218)

When the subject looks at himself/herself in the mirror, he/she is put in the movement of

fading (aphanisis). Aphanisis is, in Rilke’s sense, “evaporation.” The fading of the subject in

favour of the other is an attempt to identify with the other. This identification comes from the

inability of the subject to define itself outside the other.

This lack can be seen as the consequence of being situated in the symbolic order. The

angel is complete and has no concept of “I” because he does not need the other to define

himself. Looking at the face of the angel is similar to looking at the mirror; the result is

aphanisis for the humans.

The “fading” of a human being in “the strength of the strong existence of the angel”

makes Rilke ask in the “Second Elegy”:

Fangen die Engel

wirklich nur Ihriges auf, ihnen Entströmtes,

oder ist manchmal, wie aus Versehen, ein wenig

unseres Wesens dabei? Sind wir in ihre

Züge soviel nur gemischt wie das Vage in die Gesichter

Schwangerer Frauen? Sie merken es nicht in dem Wirbel

ihrer Rückkehr zu sich. (Wie sollten sie’s merken.)

[Do the angels really

only catch up what is theirs, what has streamed from them,

or at times, as though through an oversight, is a little of our

existence in it as well? Is there just so much of us

mixed with their features as that vague look in the faces

of pregnant women? Unmarked by them in the whirl of their

coming back to themselves. (How should they remark it?)] (ll. 30-36)

What Rilke says in the encounter between the angel and a human being is similar to the

situation described by Louis Aragon’s “Contre-chant”:

Vainement ton image arrive à ma rencontre

Et ne m’entre ou je suis qui seulement le montre

Toi te tournant vers moi tu ne saurais trouver

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Au mur de mon regard que ton ombre rêvée

[In vain your image comes to meet me

And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find

On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.]19

The “you” in the poem can be seen as a human being whereas the “I” is the mirror. The

mirror can only show but the human being cannot enter it. The human being can comfort

himself/herself by saying that, in the continuous loss of himself/herself to the angel, the angel

becomes stronger because he/she is inside him. But that is only the illusion of the human

being. He/She cannot enter the angel or the mirror, which can only show. The angel does not

love. They are indifferent to the existence of the human being. The angel is his own mirror.

Every return will come back to him.

On the other side, the lack within the “I” creates a desire to complete itself, but only

through the other. The desire for a complete whole of the incomplete human being is

discussed by Aristophanes’ discourse on Eros in The Symposium, as discussed in chapter one.

There, I have referred to Lacan’s criticism of Aristophanes’ narrative. Lacan suggests that the

desire that the bisexual creatures, the hermaphrodites, feel in The Symposium, which is

expressed in the energy of their movements, points to a problem which he explains in terms of

human beings being born as a “sexed living being”. A sense of tragedy does not just come

from the conflict within the symbolic order, but from a state prior to it. Lacan says:

[S]exuality is represented in the psyche by a relation of the subject that is deduced from

something other than sexuality itself. Sexuality is established in the filed of the subject by

a way that is that of lack.

Two lacks overlaps here. The first emerges from the central defect around which the

dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in the relation to the Other turns –

by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in

the field of the Other. This lack takes up the other lack, which is the real, earlier lack, to

be situated at the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction. The real

19 This excerpt is discussed by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psycho-analysis 17. For Aragon’s “Contre-chant,” see Louis Aragon, Le Fou d’Elsa (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).

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lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being, in reproducing

himself through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real,

namely, that the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of

individual death.20

The first lack is the result of being situated in the symbolic order. The second lack, which is

anterior to it, comes from the misencounter with the real. Lacan shows that because of being

born sexed, whether or not a subject is placed in the symbolic order, he/she is still in a state of

lack because he or she is destined to be a “sexed living being.” The creation of the angel

shows Rilke’s desire to go beyond sexuality and beyond a fantasy of the complete whole

being, who is both male and female. From a speculative, Lacanian argument, it could be said

that the angel is terrifying to the ‘I’ of the Elegies because he is non-sexed, beyond any

symbolisation, a figure of the real.

The lack of a human being, as discussed by Rilke and Plato, creates a desire to love in

order to form a complete whole. Freud’s discussion of love can help us to understand Rilke’s

discussion of love of a human being, which paves the way to articulate the completeness of an

angel further. Freud quotes Aristophanes’ passage in Symposium in chapter six of Beyond the

Pleasure Principle and builds on it to put forward a hypothesis that “living substance at the

time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since

endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts” (332). These instincts are drives towards

“a prolongation of life” (316) by “the coalescence of two individuals” (328).21 The part of

Eros directed towards objects is an act of loving. On the other side, as said by Freud in “On

Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), “being loved, having one’s love returned, and

20 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 205. 21 The origin of the sexual instinct, to Freud, cannot be derived from science, but from

“the theory which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 331). Therefore, he is not convinced himself and does not persuade other people to believe in his hypothesis (332). Despite so, he continues the discussion of the sexual instincts in the footnote which was put at the end of this chapter by saying that “the sexual instinct was transformed for us into Eros, which seeks to force together and hold together the portions of living substance. What are commonly called the sexual instincts are looked upon by us as the part of Eros which is directed towards objects” (334). For the criticism of the relationship between Freud’s speculation on repetition and Aristophanes’ discussion of Eros as a return to sexual completeness, see Weber, The Legend of Freud 146-64. Weber says, “The ‘fantastic’ aspects of this pseudo-myth are thus theoretically authorized, as it were, by Freud’s attribution of the story to an author who, more than most, can be presumed to have known from start to finish what he really wanted to say” (148).

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possessing the loved object, raises it [self-regard] once more” (94). The enrichment of the ego

is achieved because of the withdrawal of libido or sexual instincts from its object.

According to Freud, loving “involves longing and deprivation” and “lowers

self-regard” (94). Loving creates a masochistic desire for being devoured. If lovers both love

each other, they are then devoured by each other. Both disappear and evaporate. Freud’s

discussion of the relationship between loving and masochism can facilitate the reading of

Rilke’s “Love Song” (1907)22 (or this poem influences Freud’s discussion of love in “On

Narcissism: An Introduction,” perhaps through Salomé):

Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß

sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie

hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?

[…]

Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?

Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?

O süßes Lied.

[How might I keep my soul from touching yours?

How should I try to set it free,

to lift it higher?

[…]

upon what instrument have we been strung?

And what musician holds us in his hand?

How sweet the song!] (ll. 1-3, 10-12)

The song is sweet when the strings have been stricken to become one by the musician’s hand.

Rilke uses the strings to symbolise two lovers. They are joined together by something they do

not know. They love to be stricken by the musician’s hand because he can make the song

sweet. In other words, they seek for masochism because it is sweet. In the process of

masochism when the musician strikes the strings, they lose their distinctiveness and become

“us.” The enjoyment of love closely relates to the disappearance of individuality. At this point,

Rilke’s conception of love is on the side of death. Interestingly, the “us” in which

22 Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, trans. Stephen Cohn (Illinois: Northwestern

University Press, 1997) 24-5.

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individuality disappears is invisible and unknowable (240).23 Lovers can be seen as being lost

into nothingness.

Although the “Love Song” shows that being in love is like making a sweet song, the

“First Elegy” shows a temptation to free oneself from the lover:

Ist es nicht Zeit, daß wir

liebend

uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn:

wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im

Absprung

mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.

[Is it not time that, in loving,

we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering,

endured:

as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the

gathering out-leap,

something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.] (ll. 49-52)

Lacan’s discussion of the relationship between sex and death, as discussed in chapter one, can

help us to understand the reason for “freeing oneself from the loved one.” To reiterate, the

drive through which the sexed living being is induced into his sexual realization is, to Lacan,

a death drive which represents in itself death in the sexed living being.

Enjoying love in the “Love Song” and avoiding love in the “First Elegy” seem to

contradict each other. Freud’s discussion of Trieb (“instincts” in Strachey’s translation) can

help to resolve the contradiction. According to Freud in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” at

23 See the discussion of “Love Song” in Dorothee Ostmeier, “Gender Debates between

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé,” The German Quarterly 73.3 (Summer 2000): 237-52. Ostmeier says, “Whereas the first questions ask how to establish a distance between ‘I’ and ‘you,’ the last questions accept the loss of distance and ask for the controlling agent of the love relationship. They focus on the ‘we’ instead of the ‘I’ and ‘you,’ and the speaker accepts that s/he does not have any control over the relation to the ‘you.’ The desire for independence, for isolation, and for otherness […] is silenced by the reality of the ‘uns,’ an experience of a relationship which cannot be controlled. […] The ‘uns’ can be experienced, but the conditions for its presence are not known.”

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the very beginning of mental life, the ego is cathected with instincts and is capable of

satisfying them on itself. This condition is narcissism. At this time, the external world is

indifferent for purposes of satisfaction and the ego loves itself only. Because of the instincts

of self-preservation, the ego acquires objects from the external world with two opposite

feelings: first, if the objects are sources of pleasure, it “introjects” them, i.e. takes them into

itself; second, it expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure in the

mechanism of projection. The first feeling is love but at the same time, an incorporation of the

object. The second feeling is hate. Loving an object creates a desire to incorporate or devour it.

Then love is not different from hate which also causes the ego to destroy what it hates in order

to preserve and maintain itself. The characteristic of love manifests its ambivalence. Freud

says that “[i]f a love-relation with a given object is broken off, hate not infrequently emerges

in its place, so that we get the impression of a transformation of love into hate” (137).24

Freud’s discussion of it in this context seems to contradict what we have discussed of

love leading to the loss of identity (or in Freud’s words, “lowering self-regard”) and Rilke’s

sense of love as the disappearance of the lover’s subjectivity in the “Love Song.” The

contradiction can be resolved if we draw the relationship between the ego instincts and the

sexual instincts into discussion. In the footnote of chapter six of “Beyond the Pleasure

Principle,” Freud recognizes that “a portion of the ‘ego instincts’ is also of a libidinal

character and has taken the subject’s own ego as its object. “These narcissistic

self-preservative instincts,” Freud says, “had thenceforward to be counted among the libidinal

sexual instincts. The opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts was

transformed into one between the ego-instincts and the object instincts, both of a libidinal

nature” (335). The love which lowers self-regard is directed towards the object instincts. It is

24 For Freud’s discussion of the relationship between love and hate, see “Instincts and

their Vicissitudes,” 113-38, especially 131-8. If we treat “to love” as “lowering self-regard” and “to hate” as “enhancing self-regard,” whether loving an external object as a lowering self-regard or enhancing self-regard is unimportant, if we draw Lacan’s discussion of the drive for consideration. See Lacan, “The Deconstruction of the Drive” 161-73. Both acts as related to self-regard serve the sexual drive. The discussion of the nature of the drive (i.e. thrust, source, object and aim) shows that the same object can serve both forms of self-regard. Therefore, it is not surprising that the ego has an ambivalent attitude towards a loved object. The aim of the drive can never be fulfilled so that the drive just continuously takes the subject to the detour without reaching the destination. The movement of the drive is like the “arrow” described in the “First Elegy.” The “arrow” becomes something more than itself and stays nowhere. Lacan’s discussion of the drive can help us to put Nietzsche and Rilke together to show Rilke’s understanding of “becoming an affirming woman;” or how the idea of “becoming an affirming woman” helps to overcome the incompleteness of human beings as described by Rilke.

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shown in Rilke’s “Love Song.” The love which drives the ego to incorporate the object is

directed towards the ego-instincts. If the ego cannot be preserved, love should be avoided.

This can be shown in the “First Elegy” about the desire to “free [oneself] from the loved one”

(l.50).

Before moving on to the last section, let’s make a quick summary of this section. In the

encounter with the angel, a human being cannot enter the angel and become a fading subject.

The angel is a complete figure and is not sexually divided. He does not need an identity, and

has no need to become an overman. But the human must become the “arrow” described in the

“First Elegy,” and need “to endure the string” to “become something more than itself” and

“stay nowhere.” This can be seen as the Nietzschean sense of “overcoming.”

III – TRANSFORMATION

The completeness of the angel and the incompleteness of human beings can explain the

occurrence of Rilke’s hysteria. The desire for completeness constitutes Rilke’s hysteria. His

cure is the ability to turn from the visible in which the human lives to the invisible existence

which is the angel’s sphere.

The Duino Elegies can be read as the lament of the impossibility for human beings to

dwell in the invisible as the angel does. However, Rilke laments differently in the “First

Elegy”:

Ach, wen vermögen

wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menshen nicht,

und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,

daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind

in der gedeuteten Welt.

[Alas, who is there

we can make use of? Not angels, not men;

and even the noticing beasts are aware

that we don’t feel very securely at home

in this interpreted world.] (ll. 9-13)

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This can be seen as “his lament over the disappearance of the visible, his fear of the increase

of the invisible.”25 The compulsion to name things creates an “interpreted world” which

human beings live in. This “interpreted world” is shaped by phallogocentrism. The world can

be interpreted because it is ordered symbolically. But things are replaced by words or signs in

the symbolic world. A thing is described in its absence. The “interpreted world” created by

language is an absent world. It is the emptiness that creates insecurity “at home within our

interpreted world.” Such insecurity constitutes the “fear of the increase of the invisible.”

The different interpretations of Rilke’s lament lead to a question asked by Leishman,

the English translator of the Duino Elegies:

how are we to reconcile with his assertion that the Angel must recognize a higher reality

in the invisible than in the visible, his lament over the disappearance of the visible, his

fear of the increase of the invisible? (23)

The answer provided by Leishman is that:

the invisible depends on the visible as its necessary material, and that there can be no

transformation without material to be transformed. (23)

The incompleteness of human beings can be solved through this “transformation.” Rilke’s

sense of transformation is succinctly described by him in Sonnets to Orpheus:

Da stieg ein Baum.

[There arose a tree.] (ll. l.1)26

It leads to the question of where the tree arises. The answer is provided in the “Ninth Elegy”:

Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar

in uns erstehn?

[Earth, is it not this that you want – to arise

invisibly in us?] (l.68-9)27

25 Leishman’s “Introduction” to Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. J. B.

Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1957) 23. 26 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. C.F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1960) 2-3. J.B. Leishman translates as “A tree ascending there” (35) 27 Rilke in the letter to his Polish translator says, “Elegies and Sonnets support each

other continuously, - and I see an infinite grace in the fact that I was permitted to fill these two sails with the same breath: the little rust-coloured sail of the Sonnets and the gigantic white canvas of the Elegies” (Letters November 1925).

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In the letter to his Polish translator, Rilke says that the Elegies set up the norm of existence:

“only in US can [the] intimate and enduring transformation of the visible into an invisible no

longer dependent on visibility and tangibility be accomplished, since our own destiny is

continually growing at once MORE ACTUAL AND INVISIBLE within us.” The importance

of the Elegies shows that the visible is transformed into the invisible through the human

beings by poetry.

The importance of poetry in transforming the visible into the invisible helps to explain

why Freud finds something cannot be understood in psychoanalytic language, e.g. femininity,

or something invisible, e.g. the death drive. The enigma cannot be understood in terms of

psychoanalytic language; and he leaves the task to poetry. Although H.D. tries hard to

convince Freud of the importance of poetry to understand spiritual realties, for Freud H.D.’s

psychic visions are “symptoms” – even “dangerous” symptoms – of megalomania (418).28

However, Freud may understand the importance of poetry in creating the invisible like the

death drive and femininity but is ambivalent towards it. This can be seen in H.D.’s poem,

“The Master,” on her opinion on Freud:

I was angry at the old man,

I wanted an answer

a neat answer,

when I argued and said, “well, tell me,

you will soon be dead,

the secret lies with you.”

he said,

“you are a poet” […] (Part IV)29

28 H.D. Tribute to Freud (1956; reprinted., Boston: David R. Godine, 1974) and her

letters to Bryher quoted by Rachel Blau DuPlesis and Susan Stanford Friedman, “‘Woman is Perfect’: H.D.’s Debate with Freud,” Feminist Studies 7.3 (Autumn, 1981): 417-30. H.D. is the initials of the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) who was known by her initials. According to Duplessis and Friedman, she underwent psychoanalysis with Freud in 1933 (March through May) and 1934 (October through November). Tribute to Freud, written in 1942 and published in 1956, is the best known and most public account of her experience in psychoanalysis. “The Master” reveals a dimension of H.D.’s analysis which suggests Tribute to Freud only bears reference to the subtlest nuance and most oblique (417).

29 H.D., “The Master,” Collected Poems 1912-1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1986) 454-5. For the whole poem, see 451-60.

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Rilke is delighted at being taken into the invisible, not by psychoanalysis, but by the

Duino Elegies. Transformation seems to sort out the relationship between the Angel and the

human beings by Rilke who says in the “Ninth Elegy”:

Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsägliche, ihm

kannst du nicht großtun mit herrlich Erfühltem; im

Weltall,

Wo er fühlender fühlt, bist due in Neuling. Drum zeig

Ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlecht zu Geschlechtern

gestaltet,

als ein Unsriges lebt neben der Hand und im Blick

Sag ihm die Dinge. Er wird staunender stehn;

[Praise the world to the Angel, not the untellable: you

can't impress him with the splendour you’ve felt; in the

cosmos

where he more feelingly feels you’re only a novice. So show

him

some simple thing, remoulded by age after age,

till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.

Tell him things. He’ll stand more astonished.] (ll. 53-58)

The sharing of his jubilation with Salomé was made immediately after finishing the last elegy

in the evening of February 11, 1922:

Now I know myself again. It really had been like a mutilation of my heart that the Elegies

were not – here.

They are, they are. (Letters 11 February 1922)

The existence of the poetic works is not just its mere existence but takes him to “the mystery

of existence” in which terrifying “Angels” lie. His praise to them who bring him the terrifying

vision is articulated at the beginning of the last elegy:

Dass ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht,

Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln.

[Someday, emerging at last out of this fell insight,

may I lift up jubilant praise to assenting Angels!] (ll. 1-2)

Although the sphere of invisible existence is beyond sexual difference, the importance

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of “woman” in transforming the subject of existence is articulated in the last “Elegy”:

Abe rim südlichen Himmel, rein wie im Innern

einer gesegneten Hand, das klar erglänzende M,

das die Mütter bedeutet…..

[…]

Und wir, die an steigendes Glück

denken, empfänden die Rührung,

die uns beinah bestürzt,

wenn ein Glückliches fällt.

[But up in the southern sky, pure as within the palm

of a consecrated hand, the clearly-resplendent M,

Standing for Mothers..… (ll. 93-5)

[…]

And we, who think of ascending

Happiness, then would feel

the emotion that almost startles

when happiness falls.] (ll. 110-113)

The happiness of transformation is at the hand of “woman” who lives above. She is the

mother. In that sense, the influence of Goethe’s Faust is seen in the last “Elegy”:

MEPHISTOPHELES. They are – the Mothers.

FAUST. [starting] Mothers!

MEPHISTOPHELES. Are you awed? ( Part II, ll.6215-8)

[…]

FAUST. [with a shudder] The Mothers! Still it strikes a shock of fear. (ll. 6264-5)

[…]

CHORUS MYSTICUS

Woman Eternal

Draw us on high. (ll. 12110 – 12111)30

30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New

York and London: Norton, 1976).

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“Woman” on the one hand signifies the “mother.” She is important in bringing a subject into

the “invisible” which is beyond the symbolic order and therefore “lives above.” In the

relationship with the mother, the symbolic language is ineffective. (Perhaps we are in the

realm of Kristeva’s sense of the semiotic) On the other hand, this “woman” also signifies a

“feminine” thought in taking back the subject to go beyond itself.

Rilke’s writing can be compared with Nietzsche’s and Freud’s; and such a comparison serves

as a conclusion to this chapter. As said in chapter one, Nietzsche writes metaphorically. This

shows Nietzsche’s avoidance of direct confrontation with “woman.” As a result, his

conflictual attitude towards “woman” is evident. Freud is aware of the inadequacy of

psychoanalysis in addressing the question of “woman” sufficiently. While Nietzsche shows us

that the world can only be justified as aesthetic phenomenon and Freud has to delegate some

issues to art, Rilke’s poetic writings fill up the insufficiency of Nietzsche’s philosophy and

Freud’s psychoanalysis by carrying human beings to a sphere in which phallogocentrism

cannot control. But the escape from Apollonian individuality is not, the Duino Elegies, a

move to the Dionysian, i.e. towards the bisexual which overthrows identity. In that sense,

Rilke’s evasion of the sexual is a reminder of how much “being a body at all is frightening to

him.” If tragedy results from being a sexed living being, Rilke’s angel is the attempt to avoid

such tragedy.

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Chapter Eight: Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Affirming Woman, and the

“Feminine”

Human life – indeed all life – is poetry. It’s we who live it,

unconsciously, day by day, like scenes in a play, yet in its

inviolable wholeness it lives us, it composes us. This is something

far different from the old cliché “Turn your life into a work of art”;

we are works of art – but we are not the artist.1

The previous chapters have articulated how “feminine” thought acts as a response to the

dominant feature of patriarchy, i.e. phallogocentrism, in the writings of Nietzsche, Freud and

Rilke. Now, we turn to Salomé’s response to patriarchy. Salomé is important to the lives and

1 Epigraph in Salomé, Looking Back.

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the works of Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke.2 The importance of Salomé on them is shown in the

essay written by Freud entitled “Lou Andreas-Salomé” (1937) in memory of her death:

It was known that as a girl she had kept up an intense friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche,

founded upon her deep understanding of the philosopher’s bold ideas. This relationship

came to an abrupt end when she refused the proposal of marriage which he made her. It

was well known, too, that many years later she had acted alike as Muse and protecting

mother to Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet, who was a little helpless in facing life.3

The importance of Salomé to Nietzsche is discussed in chapter two; for example, we

2 Concerning Salomé’s influence on Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke, see Salomé, Looking

Back: Memoirs. She also writes separately on each of them: on Nietzsche alone, see Salomé, Nietzsche; on Freud, see Salomé, The Freud Journal. This Journal is a record of her study under Freud from October 1912 to April 1913. Mary-Kay Wilmers says in the introduction to this Journal, “In it she noted, not so much the things that she did, as what was said at the lectures and meetings she attended, the ideas that other people had and those they quarreled over, and her own thoughts about this” (vii). See also Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, trans. William and Elaine Robson-Scott, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (New York and London: Norton, 1972); and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Mein Dank an Freud: Offener Brief an Professor Sigmund Freud zu seinem 75 Geburtstag (Wien, 1931). On Rilke, see Salomé, You Alone are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Angela von der Lippe (New York: BOA Editions, 2003). For the discussion of her importance on them in the secondary readings, see Angela Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work, Martin, Woman and Modernity; Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1968); Appignanesi and Forrester, “Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘The Fortunate Animal’”; H.F. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962); Susan Ingram, Zarathustra’s Sisters: Women's Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 33-45; Freud and Andreas-Salomé, “Introduction: Lou Andreas-Salomé,” Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters 1-6; and finally Mary-Kay Wilmers, “Introduction” and Stanley A. Leavy, “Translator’s Introduction,” Salomé, The Freud Journal vii-xii and 1-27 respectively. On the discussion of her influence on Nietzsche and Freud, see Julia Borossa and Caroline Rooney, “Suffering, Transience and Immortal Longings: Salomé between Nietzsche and Freud,” Journal of European Studies 33.3/4: 287-304. On her importance on Nietzsche alone, see Diethe, Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip 41- 71; William Beatty Warner, “‘Love in a Life’: The Case of Nietzsche and Lou Salomé,” The Victorian Newsletter 67 (Spring 1985): 14-17; and Mike Gane, “In Transcendence: Friedrich Nietzsche and Lou Salomé,” Harmless Lovers? Gender, Theory and Personal Relationships (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). On her importance on Freud, see Lehrer, Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought and Karl M. Abenheimer, “Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Main Contribution to Psycho-analysis,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychological Jungian Thought (1971): 22-36. Concerning her importance on Rilke, see David Kleinbard, The Beginning of Terror (New York: New York University, 1993); Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke; Mason, Rilke; I. F. Hendry, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (London: Carcanet, 1985) and Dorothee Ostmeier, “Gender Debates between Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé,” The German Quarterly 73.3 (Summer 2000): 237-52.

3 Freud, “Lou Andreas-Salomé,” Standard Edition 23, 297-298, 297. Salomé records Nietzsche’s proposal in her memoirs in Looking Back 47.

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look at Nietzsche’s reaction to her poem “A Prayer to Life” (Hymnus an das Leben) (1881)

The person Nietzsche first shares the idea of eternal recurrence with is Salomé. Livingstone

says, “On May 5, 1882, Salomé and Nietzsche climbed Monte Sacro. Nietzsche told Salomé

in a quiet voice and with all the signs of deepest horror his doctrine of the eternal recurrence

(39).4 And we have looked at Salomé’s comment on Nietzsche as a sado-masochist unto

himself, and her reference to ‘bisexuality’.

The importance of Salomé to Rilke can be seen in the statement that he tells her many

times, “You alone know who I am” (Livingstone 127). Livingstone writes that Rilke and

Salomé are in a lovers’ relationship: “The friendship had grown fast into a love relationship,

which was to last for nearly four years [1897-1900]” (99).

Salomé’s importance to Freud has been seen in chapter four which discusses her

influence on his conception of narcissism. Salomé studied psychoanalysis under Freud from

October 1912 to April 1913. (The Freud Journal is a record of her study under Freud during

this period. Mary-Kay Wilmers says in the introduction to this Journal, “In it she noted, not

so much the things that she did, as what was said at the lectures and meetings she attended,

the ideas that other people had and those they quarreled over, and her own thoughts about

this.”5) Freud wrote to her on 10 November 1912:

I miss you in the lecture yesterday […] I have adopted the bad habit of always directing

my lecture to a definite member of the audience, and yesterday I fixed my gaze as if

spellbound at the place which had been kept for you.6

According to Livingstone, Salomé is “the second woman – and the only woman among

his colleagues – with whom Freud kept a long, continuous correspondence. … It was a sober

intellectual exchange, containing much discussion of scientific topics, on the basis of a firm,

unvarying and often-expressed friendship.”7

4 Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work. 5 Wilmers, “Introduction,” in Salomé, The Freud Journal vii. 6 See Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters 11. 7 “The letters were frequent in the first ten years; after that, partly because they did their

talking when Lou visited Freud and partly, no doubt, because of increasing age and absorption in work, they are less frequent, though still regular.” (Livingstone 176). For the correspondence between Salomé and Freud, see Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters.

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The admiration of Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke for Salomé suggests the importance of

giving a final focus on her in this thesis. However, the significance of discussing Salomé is

not solely because of her biographical relations to Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke; this would, of

course, fall into the fallacy of using Salomé to privilege the male position in patriarchy. I

suggest that her importance lies in the fact that she realizes the weakness of men which

cannot be seen by them because they are situated in a privileged position in patriarchy; in

other words, her response to patriarchy is within terms that they cannot attempt to articulate.

Another significance of Salomé is that she illuminates the fact that the challenge to patriarchy

lies not just solely on fighting for the liberation of oppressed women, or on promoting the

destabilising effects of “feminine” thought, but in both. Biddy Martin says, “ … [T]he

tensions in feminist practices between empiricism and its philosophical/theoretical critique

not only exist but could operate productively. It was my own interests in those tensions and

reciprocal interruptions that led to my preoccupation with Lou Andreas-Salomé …” (183).8 I

agree with that, and hence, this chapter will focus on, to use Biddy Martin’s words, “the

significance of Salomé as figure, and the importance of her own work” (185).

Even though this chapter is going to discuss how Salomé’s life and works suggests

ways for improving women’s conditions in patriarchy, and the destabilising effects of

“feminine” thought, her thought cannot escape the influence of patriarchy. This point will be

made at the end of this chapter after we have reviewed her conversation with Nietzsche, as

recorded in her Freud Journal.

SALOMÉ’S CONCEPTION OF WOMAN

Biddy Martin’s book on Salomé helps us to understand Salomé’s conception of woman.

According to Martin, Salomé reads a woman typically as a subject who works on the “doubly

directional” drives which are: “the impulse toward self-assertion or individuation on the one

hand and toward erotic submission and dissolution on the other.”9 “She is whole and

self-sufficient in and of herself by virtue of the interpenetration within her of the capacities

8 Biddy Martin, “Woman and Modernity: The (Life) Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé,”

Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. Andreas Huyssen and Bathrick David (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 183-99, 185.

9 Martin, “Woman and Modernity” 4.

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for self-loss and self-assertion” (230-1). Martin’s reading shows that Salomé’s understanding

of the narcissistic woman works by the doubleness of “self-loss” and “self-assertion.” In her

essay on narcissism, Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung (1921) (“The Dual Orientation of

Narcissism”), Salomé uses Narcissus (whom she may see as a bisexual figure) to illustrate

this idea. She says:

“Bear in mind that the Narcissus of legend gazed, not at a man-made mirror, but at the

mirror of Nature. Perhaps it was not just himself that he beheld in the mirror, but himself

as if he were still All: would he not otherwise have fled from the image, instead of

lingering before it? And does not melancholy dwell next to enchantment upon his face?

Only the poet can make a whole picture of this unity of joy and sorrow, departure from

self and absorption in self, devotion and self-assertion.10

When Narcissus asserts himself by gazing at the “mirror of Nature,” he loses himself by

seeing himself “as if he were still All.” He does not have an identity assigned by patriarchy

because he does not gaze at a “man-made” mirror. In the Freud Journal, (which Livingstone

reads as having for its chief themes, as woman and narcissism (Livingstone 157)), Salomé

has already written that narcissism is “transpersonal” (Salomé, Freud Journal 164). For

narcissism, as said in the Journal, “persists still in ‘self’-forgetting identification with all that

exists and hence in a rebirth of the ego in contrast to the contemplating, indulging self-centred

attitude” (165). In this kind of narcissism, it is impossible to maintain subjectivity. Salomé’s

view of narcissism was articulated in her letter to Freud dated 10 January 1915 in which she

declared her disagreement with Adler. Such disagreement shows that she is on the side of

Freud to work against Adler’s idea of “masculine protest” which insists on the power of the

ego. She writes in response to Freud’s essay on narcissism:

I cannot rid myself of the impression that one should to some extent differentiate the type

of narcissism here defined as true narcissism from that type which represents a quite

definite stage of development, in which the ego consciously chooses itself as object, i.e.,

it presupposes an object which it prefers to others, as is the case with self-admiration,

vanity etc. … [T]he frontiers of the ego are totally eliminated, affording in this way an

10 See “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism,” in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 31.1/2

(1962): 8-9. H.F. Peters quotes this passage in a different translation(268-9). For the commentary of Salomé’s ideas of narcissism, see Karla Schultz, “In Defense of Narcissus: Lou Andreas-Salomé and Julia Kristeva” The German Quarterly 67.2 (Spring 1994): 185-96, and Ban Wang, “Memory, Narcissism, and Sublimation: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Freud Journal,” American Imago 57.2 (2000): 215-34.

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escape from its subjectivity and from the opposition of the ego and the external world …

This distinction, and your concept of narcissism in general, has come to mean so

particularly much to me, because it was on this crux that my parting from A. Adler really

took place. … [A]s long as the concept of narcissism starts out from the priority of the

ego, to which the libido is attached, one cannot allow Adler the right to assess the whole

matter from the standpoint of the ego – as if the libido was something in the possession of

the ego, which it can turn, utilize, adjust to its ego-aims as it likes …11

According to Martin, “[f]rom the beginning of her stay in Vienna in 1912, Salomé had

explored her differences with Adler en route to consolidating her agreements with Freud.”12

Freud is anxious that she should not side with Adler on the issue of narcissism, that

narcissism is the attachment of the ego to itself.13

However, Salomé’s understanding of narcissism is slightly different from Freud’s. In

using Narcissus to illustrate her conception of narcissism, Salomé’s Narcissus shows both

“melancholy” and “enchantment.” Using H.F. Peters’ words, he may be “aware of his separate

existence, aware that he was no longer an integral part of earth, water and air.”14 When the

mirror is described as the “mirror of Nature,” it is no longer natural because this mirror is

already understood in cultural terms. The “mirror of Nature” does not exist. Separation from

nature is inevitable. The narcissistic subject is aware that he/she has to understand

himself/herself in cultural terms, and realizes his/her primal loss. In other words, he/she is

placed in the symbolic order and realizes his/her own lack. This results in melancholy.

Freud’s narcissistic woman is outside what Lacan would call the symbolic order. She is

self-sufficient and therefore she does not have Salomé’s sense of “melancholy.” Freud talks

about melancholy in narcissism. But such narcissism does not imply any sense of

self-sufficiency, and is not primary. Laplanche and Pontalis say, “[Primary narcissism] is

invariably taken to mean a strictly ‘objectless’ or at any rate ‘undifferentiated’ – state,

11 Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters 24 12 Martin, Woman and Modernity 202. 13 In Freud’s letter to Salomé dated 13 July 1917, he wrote, “[B]y the way of the

ego-libido you have observed how I work step by step, without the inner need for completion, continually under the pressure of the problem immediately on hand and taking infinite pains not to be diverted from the path. It seems that in this way I have gained your confidence.” See Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salomé: Letters 61.

14 Peters, My Sister, My Spouse 268-9.

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implying no split between subject and external world.”15 Secondary narcissism creates

separation of the ego from the external world. On the difference between primary and

secondary narcissism, Freud says:

At the very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in

process of formation or is still feeble. The id sends parts of this libido out into erotic

object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this

object-libido and to force itself on the id as a love-object. The narcissism of the ego is

thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects.16

In the secondary narcissism, the libido retreats back from a loved object to the ego; and the

ego is seen in relation to the other. Such a retreat can be regarded as an attempt to recover

primary narcissism. Because of the boundary between the ego and the external world, the

recovery is doomed to failure. Melancholy is the result. Freud says, “Melancholia … borrows

[some features] from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to

narcissism.”17 Only this secondary narcissism which Freud refers to in the discussion of

melancholy is similar to Salomé’s sense of narcissism.

Her narcissism is, despite its melancholia, closer to an affirmative sense. Based upon

her reading, melancholy can be read as the reaction against being constituted as a subject in

patriarchy, with the ‘departure from self’ that this involves. Civilization creates a melancholic

feeling, instead of the sense of guilt. A narcissistic subject is reluctant to surrender power to

the superego to punish it by imposing guilt on itself in exchange of a stable identity.

To Salomé, art can put woman out of a situation of melancholy. The subject, as the

epigraph suggests, becomes “a work of art,” instead of being seen as an “artist.” This shows

Salomé’s interest in the idea of “passivity.” In her letter to Freud dated 26 Dec 1920, she

wrote, “I have become more and more absorbed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. You can

easily imagine what pleasure this book has given me, since I was plagued by the worry that

you were not in agreement with me on the matter of the ‘passive instinct’.” In her letter to

Freud dated 10 January 1915, Salomé wrote, “For while creating[,] the artist is completely

15 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans.

Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973) 338. 16 Freud, “The Ego and the Id” 387. 17 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology 245-68,

259.

154

absorbed in his creation … It is only when he has awakened from this ‘unconscious’

explosion or else has not properly entered into it that he is thrown back into personal vanity,

i.e., into the surplus libido directed towards himself as a person.”18 On the accessibility of

narcissism, Salomé and Freud’s standpoints differ. This can be seen in Martin’s saying, “[A]s

Freud warned her, she did not let her commitments to him prevent her from identifying sites

of the recovery in adult life of just such undifferentiation. She remained interested in the

moments when that narcissistic undifferentiation was recovered in artistic creativity or sexual

love, to name two examples” (206).

Salomé’s discussion of narcissism shows that the woman with the capacities of

“self-love” and “self-assertion” is only an ideal woman. The narcissistic woman would be

melancholic as well. But to Salomé men are more remote from narcissism because they are

more “cultural” than women in patriarchal society. We can see how Salomé supplements

Freud’s sense of the narcissistic woman.

On the difference between men and women, Salomé writes in her Freud Journal, under

the topic “The Commonplace – Man and Woman”:

Men would be the weaker sex as seen from the position of woman, who is narcissistic and

cultureless, woman who perhaps never attains the final insights of the mind but instead

finds her being in the intuitive knowledge of life and mind. … Only in womankind is

sexuality no surrender of the ego boundary, no schism; it abides as the homeland of

personality, which can still include all the sublimations of the spirit without losing itself.

“So do thou give as giveth a woman who loves. The fruits of her giving abide in her

bosom. (March 12-14, 1913, p. 118)

Although Salomé talks about women, her conception can illuminate our discussion of

“feminine” thought, as that which builds up an “intuitive knowledge of life and mind.” Her

understanding of women can at the same time point out sexual difference. Instead of seeing

women as a victim of patriarchy, Salomé thinks that women in turn are stronger than men. I

think that Salomé perceives the ideal woman as “narcissistic” and “cultureless.” Her

understanding of the “cultureless” may be articulated with reference to Angela Livingstone

18 Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters 23.

Chapter seven has quoted from the same letter on Salomé’s discussion of the relationship between the work of an artist and his own most intimate and infantile nature.

155

and Biddy Martin. According to Livingstone’s reading of Salomé’s woman, men are read as

the “weaker sex” from “woman’s life-affirming point of view” (158). “[S]alome announces

woman as the animal of happiness” (158). Martin seems to agree with Derrida, in that she

uses his terms, when she says, “Salomé’s ‘woman’ was the affirmative woman, neither

castrated nor castrating – beyond castration” (5). To Livingstone, “Lou Andreas-Salomé’s

views on the nature of destiny of woman did not alter fundamentally through her

acquaintance with psychoanalysis’ (157). “[T]he girl – not having to avoid castration, which

has already taken place – does not develop so strong a super-ego (or internalized father) and

thus is not impelled into a strong involvement with the making of culture. None of this meant,

for Lou, any inferiority in the girl” (157). To me, both Livingstone and Martin share the same

view that Salomé’s ideal woman is affirmative. (Like Sarah Kofman, both Livingstone and

Martin associate the affirmative woman with narcissism while I tend to argue, as in chapter

four, that Freud’s narcissistic woman goes beyond the “affirmative” woman.)

SALOMÉ’S RESPONSE TO PATRIARCHY

Salomé does not conform to patriarchal expectations on woman. She says, “[I]n all three

forms of consummated love (marriage, motherhood, and the pure bond of Eros) I cannot

match the success that others may have had on occasion” (Salomé, Looking Back 20). In her

Freud Journal, she says, “One might even suspect that a woman who needs to make too much

of the claims of fidelity, ethics, marriage, and the like, so as not to be ashamed, is already in

conflict in having to justify her own instinctual life. That is, she has come to think too poorly

of herself and requires a sanction” (81). Her writing on her response to patriarchy appears in

her stress on “lived experience” or “lived life.” Livingstone comments on Salomé’s

philosophy of woman by saying: “Lou was constantly working out her philosophy by

reflecting on things she had unreflectingly done and caused, from the way she had lived and

was living. Her philosophical world was a direct outgrowth of her lived life …” (Livingstone

159, my italics).

At the age of eighteen, after knowing about how Hendrik Gillot spoke with her family

about marriage, “the shock to [Salomé] was that of a second loss of God.” Breon Mitchell, the

translator of Salomé’s memoirs says, “Gillot was a clergyman at the Dutch mission in St.

Petersburg, and was at the time the most important non-orthodox Protestant minister in the

156

city. Since he was a member of the mission and not subject to any of the reformed Portestant

church governments in Petersburg, he was relatively independent in his pronouncements.”19

Gillot’s importance to Salomé at that time can be seen in her description of him in Looking

Back: “ [He] was so fully real, whose will and wisdom had helped to set me free, [he] had

granted me the inner freedom through which I finally learned how to live fully” (15).

Nevertheless, to Salomé, his value to her does not mean that she can be possessed by him.

She writes a poem called ‘Deathbed Request’ (Todesbitte).20 Through this poem, she would

suggest to Gillot that he could possess her as his wife only if she died. In other words, she has

a desire to free herself from anyone who threatens her “freedom.” She never seems to have

consummated her marriage to Friedrich Carl Andreas, whom she wed in 1887. According to

Livingstone, Salomé has a compulsion “not to give her body to him.”21 Livingstone continues,

“This, she said, was like […] her own earlier refusal to go through with the church

confirmation: that, too, had been due to a strong inner necessity, for after a dream in which

she had heard herself interrupt the confirmation ceremony with a loud “No” […] Neither

could she make love with her husband pro forma. She argued to herself that married love and

sexual love were quite separate things: ‘by God, I have never understood why people who are

in love in a predominantly sensual way get married” (62).

This explains the reason for her virginity, as questioned by H.F. Peters. He says, “She

was … a successful writer, much envied and much admired, the intimate of some of the most

fascinating men in Berlin, Paris and Vienna – and still a virgin. … It will, of course, be

questioned whether a woman living as Lou did and arousing as violent passions could

possibly have remained a virgin that long – and it has been questioned.”22 Peters must be

referring to the period of time before she met Rilke. Both of her biographers, H.F. Peters and

Livingstone, think that Salomé believes that total union through consummation of love

means total surrender.23 Virginity means no surrender to man. Livingstone speculates on

Salomé’s sexual relationship with Rilke. She says, “It has been assumed that Lou was

19 Salomé, Looking Back 155 fn.12. For more details on Hendrik Gillot, see 155-7. 20 For the poem, see Salomé, Looking Back 15-6. 21 Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work 62. 22 Peters, My Sister, My Spouse 192. 23 H.F. Peters comments on Salomé’s understanding of sexual love: “Underlying the sex

urge, Lou says, is the desire for total union. … Total union means total surrender” (261). In Livingstone’s reading of Salomé, “a ‘full’ marriage would mean full slavery” (63).

157

pregnant by Rilke and that she probably bore his child. But no evidence at all is offered. It has

also been argued at length that she had an abortion” (106). Salomé’s biographer, H.F. Peters,

was informed of her pregnancy by one of his interviewees who says, “She told me that she

had been pregnant once but that she could not, or did not want to, become a mother. There

may have been deeper reasons, however, for her refusal to accept motherhood.”24 Apart from

the refusal of conventional womanhood in not wishing to be thought of as a mother (Ibsen’s

Hedda Gabbler may be compared with this), there is also an interesting relationship between

Salomé and Paul Ree which could be commented on.25 Livingstone describes their

friendship as “sexless” and as “challenging convention more heavily with a plan for their

together.” (35) 26 According to Livingstone, in 1882 Salomé wanted to set up a small

intellectual community which consists of herself and Ree only, with many visiting friends. (35)

Later, “Nietzsche,” Salomé says, “made himself a third member of our alliance.”27 (The

photo she took with Nietzsche and Ree, discussed in chapter two was taken during this

period.)

These biographical details may lead to speculation about Salomé’s lesbianism. Her

views of homosexuality or lesbianism can be seen in her Freud Journal under the entry of

“Inversion”:

[T]he invert should be afraid of his instinctual drive it might be not only on account of its

prohibited nature but also because in his case sexuality might exercise a destructive

influence on the ego instinct; it reaches a phase of the ego which is poorly oriented and

immature, although accentuated. …

It is going too far to understand kindness as merely a reaction and hence a manifestation

of repression … and to base civilized man on the homosexually repressed savage. The

savage, within the smaller circle of his environment, probably shows far more sociability

than we do – and animals like bees and ants really do put us to shame in this aspect. In

24 Peters, My Sister, My Spouse 272. Peters does not disclose the source of the

information. 25 For her relationship with Paul Rée, see Salomé, Looking Back 44-56. For the

biographical details of Rée, see 162-5. 26 Robin Small even suspects that Rée’s supposed homosexuality would help to explain

his emotionally intense but non-sexual relationship with Salomé. See Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 51.

27 Salomé, Looking Back 47.

158

animals and primitives this corresponds to the persistent “narcissistic identity” … (102-3)

Commenting on “Inversion,” Martin says,

[Salomé] challenges the assumed superiority of “the civilized,” “the heterosexual,” and

“the ego,” and the consequent warding off of the primitive, homosexual, and the sexual

itself. … [H]omosexuality draws the subject back into a form of sexuality dominant at a

moment when the ego was in its early formative stages and, hence, still weak. Even as

she adopts a great deal of developmental logic, she goes on to contest what she sees as

the argument that the repression of homosexuality is required to make civilization

possible. The narcissism that persists in ‘inverts,” according to Salomé, is the very ground

of sublimation in civilized man …” (210)

Based upon her opinion of “three forms of consummated love (marriage, motherhood, and the

pure bond of Eros), I will say that Salomé refuses to surrender herself to male fantasies or to

any fixed identity as prescribed by patriarchy, and explores the possibilities of non-patriarchal

relationship with men. Lesbians are “narcissistic” in Salomé’s sense which, in my

understanding, means that she is melancholic, at the same time that she is affirmative. “The

lesbian is the heroine of modernism,” 28 if we put it in Walter Benjamin’s sense, resisting the

way in which women are structured in the symbolic order. Therefore, they are affirmative in

my sense.

Salomé’s religious experience and her relationships with Gillot, Andreas, Nietzsche,

Rilke and Freud are included in her autobiographical work, Looking Back. In this book, she

explores non-patriarchal relationships with men, and shows her refusal to subordinate herself

to the identities assigned by patriarchy. While acknowledging all Salomé’s writing was

autobiographical, Looking Back, to Martin, is the most explicitly autobiographical piece of

her published writing. Commenting on it, Martin says, “The autobiographical quality and

appeal of her work arise not from self-representation per se but from the continual repetition

and recasting of certain themes and questions that invite, but also frustrate, attempts to get at

the ‘real’ Lou Andreas-Salomé.” (24) Susan Ingram comments on Salomé’s memoirs in a

similar way: “Lou Andreas-Salomé herself has done much to contribute to this tendency by

fragmenting Looking Back into distinct chapters, each encapsulating a formative ‘experience’

28 See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,

trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1997) 9-106, 90.

159

in her life – with God, with love, with friendship, with Russia, with Rainer, and so on. These

sections do not seem intended to be united into a larger narrative; they are autonomous pieces,

as though each were from a different jigsaw puzzle.” (37) Ingram points out that the German

for “experience” “Erlebnis” carries the focus of “the incommensurability and unrepeatability

of each event, in contrast with ‘Erfahrung,’ where events pool into a pond of greater

knowledge and even wisdom” (151, fn8). She quotes from Walter Benjamin’s differentiation

of Erfahrung and Erlebnis. In articulating impossibility of modern experience, Benjamin

says:

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly

consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it is so, the

less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of

a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis). Perhaps the special achievement of shock defence

may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in

consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents.29

Using Benjamin’s comment of “experience” to read Ingram’s comments on Salomé’s

memoirs, we may say that there is no unity of experience in Salomé’s life. Her memoirs are

about Erlebnis, but not Erfahrung. Through the memoirs, Salomé is going to explore her

possibilities, instead of reinforcing her identity or of closure of her life. The book opens up a

“multiple” Salomé. It marks her continuous interaction with society through her life and

works, and suggests, in my understanding, how the “feminine” thought works in her.

Salomé attended Freud’s Wednesday discussion evenings from 30 October 1912 until 2

April 1913 in Vienna. These meetings had started discussions of Freud’s ideas with a small

group of friends (most of them were men) since 1908 as meetings of the Vienna

Psychoanalytical Society.30 Salomé did not speak up in all these meetings. At the end of her

stay in Vienna, she gave her reasons for not speaking up:

Gentlemen, I have not wanted to enter the debate and I have let you do it for me but I do

29 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. Harry Zohn (London, New York: Verso,

1997) 117. 30 Livingstone says, “[The Society] still had a fairly small and select membership – there

were forty-two on its roll in 1912-13 (including four women), of whom about fifteen to nineteen (men) came to most meetings” (149). For the details of the membership, see Livingstone 235.

160

want to express my gratitude myself. I can thank psychoanalysis that it demands more

than the work of isolated scholars at their desks and hence admitted me here to a kind of

fraternity. … [C]leavages and conflicts are more likely to come to be in this group and

beyond it than elsewhere, and it is harder here than elsewhere to reconcile them without

endangering the coherence of the methods and the data. This will surely continue to be a

problem for some time to come, but it is the stamp of a progress motivated not only

intellectually but also personally, and as long as it abides by the ideal of the honest

community then it is also a beautiful thing and a joy, at least in a woman’s eyes, to see

men opposing one another in struggle. And it is all the more my duty today to perform the

other task, to give thanks. Thanks for all these evenings, even the tiresome ones, on

account of the man who presided at them and devoted his time to them. And thus the

tasks of the sexes in this world have been done separately and still in union. For men

fight. Women give thanks.31

Salomé’s affirmativeness here could be seen as not submitting to patriarchy, but as a kind of

thinking. There is an interesting pun on “thanking” [Danken] and “thinking” [Denken] by

Heidegger. He says, “Original thanking is the thanks owed for being. That thanks alone gives

rise to thinking of the kind we know as retribution and reward in the good and bad sense.”32

“All thanking belongs first and last in the essential realm of thinking. But thinking devotes its

thought to what is to be thought...” (143) Thinking and thanking go together, both affirmative.

The Freud Journal can be seen as the product of Salomé’s thinking after attending Freud’s

Wednesday meetings. To follow Derrida, if speaking assumes the presence of a subject,

writing then destroys subjectivity. She is not seen as a complementary to man, but is the

affirmative woman who, unlike man, refuses to be defined by the other. Therefore, she does

not need to compete with men when entering their activity. Salomé joins men’s activity

without posing a challenge to men. To Martin, this serves as a sign of exceeding the

constraints of “typical femininity” without having to imitate man (232-3). Martin at the

beginning of her book says, “Affirmative femininity … exposed man’s lack and his need, but

it also reassured him, protected him from the threat of direct challenge, and protected her

from the threat of rejection or reprisal” (5).

Even said so, Salomé is not free from difficulties in thinking in a “feminine” way. If

31 Salomé, The Freud Journal 130. 32 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck (New

York, London: Harper Perennial, 1976) 141.

161

we go back to the last conversation between Salomé and Nietzsche, as recorded by Salomé:

Cruel people being always masochists also, the whole thing is inseparable from

bisexuality. And that has a deep meaning. The first time I ever discussed this theme was

with Nietzsche (that sadomasochist unto himself). And I know that afterward we dared

not look at each other. (Salomé, Freud Journal 143)

Salomé’s fear of looking at Nietzsche, as discussed, may show her shame at her ambivalence

towards her own narcissism. Although her response to patriarchy cannot be attempted by

Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke, her conversation with Nietzsche may show that she lacks the

courage to face her “passivity.” If we understand passivity in a Dionysian term, she is

ambivalent towards her “tragedy” and “bisexuality.” She is less a narcissistic woman who

stands outside sexual difference than an affirmative woman who continuously fights against

an identity prescribed by patriarchy.

162

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