SOURCE: "Woman and Modernity: The [Life]Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé," in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, edited by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 183-99.

[In the following essay, Martin discusses Andreas-Salomé's polemical engagement with Freud on the issues of narcissism and gender difference, noting her resistance to the rigid categories of orthodox psychoanalysis.]

Alice Jardine begins her study of the "Configurations of Woman and Modernity," or Gynesis, by staging an encounter between American feminism and contemporary French thought. Cognizant of the inevitable risks of homogenizing both actors in her standoff, Jardine outlines the tension between the two in terms that have an uncanny familiarity—in terms of a conflict between feminism, "a concept inherited from the humanist and rationalist eighteenth century about a group of human beings in history whose identity is defined by that history's representation of sexual decidability, and contemporary French thought which has put every term of that definition into question." It is, of course, a profound reduction to imagine that feminist theory and politics are so neatly caught between a political feminism that seems to assume and hence reproduce the very representations of difference it wants to subvert, and a theoretical modernity that has itself been accused of subordinating the discontinuities of the social to the totalizing self-referentiality of philosophical deconstruction. However, for the sake of argument, let us acknowledge that the tensions in feminist practices between empiricism and its philosophical/theoretical critique not only exist but could operate productively. It was my own interest in those tensions and reciprocal interruptions that led to my preoccupation with Lou Andreas-Salomé, whose figurations of self and woman refuse the alternatives masculine/feminine, rational/irrational, life/style, who cannot be turned into an advocate for one or the other side of those hierarchical divides.

Salomé has survived the exclusionary practices of conventional literary historiography on the basis of her liaison with famous male modernists, her appeal for, and her putative power over, such master stylists of the feminine as Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, in short, on the basis of what is both fetishized and trivialized as her "lifestyle." We are alert to the ways in which women and "deviance" are made safe by being turned into issues of lifestyle that demand no more of those upholding the norm than fascination and tolerance. What fascinates biographers and critics most in the case of Salomé's lack of conventionality are the marriage she refused to consummate with the Orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas and the friendships and/or affairs with such masters of the modern as Rée, Nietzsche, Rilke, Beer-Hofmann, Ledebour, Wedekind, Hauptmann, Tausk, and Freud. What fascinates them less are the scores of women she is said to have "unsettled." The sustained fascination is in large part a consequence of her failure, as the biographers see it, to have left a clear record of those relations and of herself, the failure to demarcate clearly the line among friendship, intellectual exchange, and sexual liaison; she continues to fascinate because of the difficulties she creates in all attempts to separate out the intellectual from the erotic, scenes of pedagogy from scenes of seduction, norms from their transgression.

One response to the bases of her fame would be to suppress the fascination with what is called lifestyle and elevate her as male moderns have most recently been elevated, on the basis of her texts and the isolation of those texts from biographical, not to mention biological, contingency. But to suppress biographical contingency in favor of textuality has done little to undo the traditional biographical monumentalization of male heroes, or anti-heroes, and tends in any case simply to perpetuate a reduction of modernism to a question of language and form. The alternative is not to reprivilege the biographical but to renegotiate the relations between empirical and textual, without falling back on naive referentiality, or onto claims to an unspecific politics of language. It seems to me crucial that discussions of the modernist project address that which was and continues to be central to its provocations and its limits, its participation in what might be called a politics of subjectivity, of sexuality and gender, which is inextricably linked to questions of language and literary form, but involves different forms of social practice and institutional supports. It is in this context that I address the significance of Salomé as figure, and the importance of her own work. What has made her both object and fetish is precisely that which makes her important for us to take seriously, her resistance to various forms of institutional legitimacy, her refusal to occupy the positions held out for her within a number of discursive orders, that is to say, to occupy any one position in those orders, from the family, religion, and moral convention, to philosophical, literary, or psychiatric schools. It is, of course, a question not simply of exclusion from these institutions but of the tension between forms of legitimacy and illegitimacy, between the privileges that underwrote her access to male cultural elites and the strategies with which she negotiated her relations to them. It is within a context of shared privilege that her stated differences from her male colleagues/lovers/friends must be considered; the difference that will be most pertinent here is her insistence on the negotiation of social constraints and boundaries, as opposed to their emphasis on transgression and negativity.

Let me proceed with Salomé's performative defiance of the split between life and writing, on the one hand, and their reduction to one another, on the other. Salomé claimed over and over that all of her writing was autobiographical. She wrote fiction, "scholarly" studies of Ibsen, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, numerous reviews, theoretical essays on the psychology of religion, eroticism, and femininity, and psychoanalytic treatments of all of the above; she also kept journals, and corresponded widely. What gives her writing its autobiographical quality and appeal is not self-representation but the continual repetition and recasting of certain themes and questions that invite but also frustrate attempts to get at the real Lou Andreas-Salomé. Salomé's fiction is inevitably read as thinly veiled autobiography in part because her novels and stories are expositions of questions that are posed by way of biographical anecdote in her theoretical work. Certainly, the most explicitly autobiographical of all her publications, her memoirs, works to turn her into her own figuration of the narcissistic woman, a Nietzschean Freigeist ["free spirit"], free from the prejudices of habit and moral convention, absolutely at home in exile, autotelic and impregnable, but without anxiety or the compulsion to self-overcoming. Salomé seems to have endlessly displayed but never represented herself, to have always been her own object of analysis without ever having made an object of herself even in explicitly autobiographical writings—writings that have a strangely anonymous and universal quality. Salomé revised and rewrote not only manuscripts meant for immediate publication but her diaries and journals as well. This constant remaking of herself in writing, that which she and Nietzsche celebrated as the importance of style, has confounded her biographers who cannot get at the origin, the truth behind what comes to be seen as deceptive mask or masquerades. Certainly, Salomé refused to subject herself to the kinds of truth in representation required of the complicit confessor. It would seem that she saw the relation between her life and her writing in terms of the attempt to produce cultural forms in spite of convention, not for the sake of transgression, but in the service of style, of life/style. Nietzsche once remarked that he had never known anyone who could match Salomé's brilliance in turning her experience, her psychic life, into speculation and analysis. I would like to take a brief look at how that compulsion, if not that brilliance, is borne out in Salomé's memoirs.

Certainly, her memoirs, Lebensrückblick, written in the twenties and early thirties, demonstrate an interesting relation between self-display and anonymity. The memoirs conceive her life as an enactment of the epistemological and experiential challenges of modernity. The first chapter of her memoirs, entitled "My Experience of God," begins with her conception of her own birth as a disappearance, a coercion into human being, and it continues with the narration of her, as any subject's, difficulties with the sacrifices demanded of every human subject. The result of her own resistance to those sacrifices was what she called her Zuruckrutsch, a sliding back, and the regressive narcissistic production of a God of infinite generosity, one who authorized her desire to have and be all. The death of this god, as well as the confrontation with the incommensurability of life and its forms, of desire and its representatives, of fantasy and its marriage to reality, had as a consequence, according to Salomé, both a profound demystification of a moral and social order robbed of self-evidence and a profound reverence for, and gratitude toward, the life that lived through but was not encompassed, mastered, or exhausted by the conscious self. According to Salomé, her childhood Zurückrutsch left her with an at least fantasized relation to an original indeterminate unity, without God, but equally without danger of falling out of the world. Precisely because of her relation to a pre-subject/pre-object indeterminate All, she, that is, woman, was more susceptible to the loss of self, to transferences of her desire onto god substitutes, or god-men as she called them. The task for woman in a godless universe, then, was conceived as continual disengagement from transferential relations without falling out of love, a negotiation of the feminine capacity for receptivity and submission to desire, and the human need for self-assertion. Her own relation to the modern world, one whose structures and forms of authority were no longer under-written by God, was not to leave the world but to be in it differently, to resist subjection to the social without defying her implication in it. The memoirs are conceived as her attempts to engage in the world without succumbing to its fraudulent claims to authority/inevitability. Her god-men were, as she wrote over and over, the occasion for the coming into being of her desire and her thought, not the source or the ends of them. Hence the increasing importance to her of the symbolic significance of the Father/God, and of the principle of infidelity.

Salomé's memoirs related her development from her God, through her teacher/god-man Hendrik Gillot, by way of Nietzsche to Freud, as an increasing effort to disengage from the desire of/for others without denying the inevitability of mediation itself. It is significant, I think, that she told her own story, in her early fiction as well as in her memoirs (in which the conflicts are tempered, if not erased), in terms of encounters in which she narrowly escapes the death of consciousness, or of desire. She developed those encounters as sites of intra-and intersubjective struggle, indeed as sites of seduction. And she made quite clear that the most significant of all those encounters was her relation to the Dutch reform preacher Hendrik Gillot, whose teaching/preachings of German idealism she claimed to have chosen over religious orthodoxy, on the one hand, and arid rationalism, on the other. It was with Gillot that the adolescent Salomé began her study of the history of Western thought, and she describes his own conception of his project as that of bringing her out of the world of fantasy, childhood, romance, the East, and orthodoxy into the world of rationality, logic, the West. She describes her own deification of Gillot, the erotics of that deification, and the necessity of overcoming it as the paradigm of all subsequent idealizations. It is no surprise that her early fiction, described by many commentators as teeming with desire and youthful passion, without form, plot, or resolution, employs the figure of incest for her expositions of the confrontation of daughter-figures with those fathers in whom she comes to recognize herself.

"Woman," she once wrote, "runs a zigzag path between the feminine and the human." This was not a problem to be solved once and for all, but a conflict at the heart of culture and subjectivity, a conflict that bourgeois feminism, according to Salomé, attempted to solve in two equally unsatisfactory ways. Salomé situated herself in relation to Germany's bourgeois feminisms by insisting on a doubleedged polemic against the rationalist/humanist efforts to eradicate difference, and the romantic/metaphysical efforts to elevate femininity by way of its equation with motherhood and (hetero)sexuality. What makes women's lives in all their only apparent banalities significant, according to Salomé, are the ways in which they negotiate the double directionality at the heart of subjectivity from "Fall zu Fall."

At issue were not simply the rationalizations, normalizations, the iron cage of society, but the exclusion of women from the sphere of the social, from the possibility of the elaboration of their desire in the social. The emphasis on the impossibility of a solution, of resolution, is what interests me here, for it suggests that the modern crisis of the incommensurability of desire and language, desire and social positionality, desire and marriage in all of its metaphoric and analogical potential, opens up the very possibility for what Salomé calls woman and her strategic negotiations between resolution and dissolution. Hence, the lack of appeal for her of discourses of apocalypse and heroism that totalized domination in order to totalize liberation in an outside, often known as or conflated with woman, those false alternatives offered by the master narratives of modernism. It is in this context that her objection to what she saw as Nietzsche's totalizations becomes most interesting and clear.

Salomé's study of Nietzsche [Fiedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken], published in 1894, was the first major study of his work; it identified three major periods in his thought and identified the middle or realist period as his greatest achievement, that period in which Nietzsche most successfully disciplined his attempts to give life to the idea. Salomé's objections to the late period had to do with what she read as his paradoxical return to metaphysics, a return made inevitable by his totalizing critique of Reason and culture and his privileging of unmediated, instinctual, and autotelic will. The "Ubermensch," she wrote, is "pure, timeless conscious power." And Salomé describes this conception as the postulation of the motherless child, identifying this will to knowledge with a will to be god, with a desire to escape the constraints of the social, indeed of the human condition as such, as a paradoxical effect of Nietzsche's profound antimetaphysical claim to life. Despite what she would continue throughout her life to call their fundamental similarity, their religious natures, their Freigeisterei, Salomé also continued to claim that to have followed Nietzsche in his totalizing critique of Reason, his contempt for the Mensch des Geistes, and in his appeal to unmediated instinctual life would have meant going back in the direction from which she had been moving, back into an exclusion from the social, an isolation, and a masochistic containment in desire. For woman was threatened not only by the mediation and the containment of her desire but by a necessarily masochistic containment in it, a containment that has the mark not of unbridled nature but of a hopeless and, in the case of Nietzsche's metaphysical turn, willful blindness to one's inevitable mediation through the Other. In an 1899 essay ["Die in Sich ruhende Frau"] on "woman," Salomé had written that the demise of religion had left woman without a language for articulating the double directionality of the feminine. It is not uninteresting that she should have identified psychoanalysis as providing that language. And perhaps even more interesting that she refused to use its terms consistently, that is, that she insisted, in the words of Francois Roustang [in Dire Mastery, 1982], on turning psychoanalysis into a Russian novel.

Salomé approached Freud and psychoanalysis in 1911-12 at a critical moment in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Alfred Adler had left Freud's circle to found an independent psychoanalytic association, Carl Jung's departure was imminent, and internal conflict was at a height. It was also a moment of expansion, of the increasing interest in psychoanalysis outside of the narrow circles to which it had been confined. There is no doubt that Salomé was perceived to be an important because prestigious outsider, and Ernest Jones's perception of her as outsider contrasts significantly with her own conception of herself as part of the brotherhood, albeit with a difference, with the freedom to move in and out of their circles. Salomé would write her memoirs as a lifelong search for the exchange she found in her relation to Freud, the only pedagogical relation that displaced that hierarchical gender divide and inevitable appropriation characterizing other pedagogical exchanges, other all-too-conventional scenes of seduction and tragedy. It is, of course, impossible to explore all of the factors that contributed to that possibility. However, it is significant that Salomé's allegiance to Freud was not her only allegiance at the age of fifty, that their relation was sustained through correspondence, that is, at a distance, and that the position of student was not the only position available to her in relation to the person Freud, or to psychoanalysis. Indeed, it is on the basis of that association that Salomé takes up her own position as analyst and teacher. What concerns me here are the ways in which Salomé negotiated her relationship to psychoanalysis and Freud, and the significance of gender in those negotiations.

Both their unity and their differences were played out on the field of narcissism. From the beginnings of her stay in Vienna in 1912, Salomé used her own difference with Alfred Adler over his conception of the unconscious to support her unity with Freud. "I am absorbed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle," she writes to Freud in December 1920, "and you can 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; and yet it is only from this standpoint that Adler can be conclusively disproved, as I told him in Vienna" [Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, 1972]. Salomé understood the conception of passive instincts to be an advocacy for the unconscious in the face of Adler's overvaluation of the ego. Passivity meant an openness and receptivity to the life that lives through but is neither encompassed by, nor accessible to, the conscious subject—a yielding to that which exceeds and, from a certain point of view, may seem to threaten the ego and its demands for control and coherence. For her, what distinguished Freud's concept of the unconscious from Adler's was its bases in an inarticulable but material narcissism, from within which the ego sets itself apart, but from which it never fully departs. Given this narrative of the development of the ego, sharp distinctions between conscious and unconscious, ego and sexuality, masculine and feminine, active and passive are problematic, and it was this problematic that was at stake for Salomé.

Salomé explains the epistemological importance of Freud's narcissism concept in the following terms [in The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé, 1964]:

To hold fast to Freud's present concept of narcissism means to hold fast to psychology's right to its own media and methods no matter what. And that means to be allowed to write, with appropriate obscurity, its personal mark of X, even there where the psychic organization eludes it, instead of defecting into the alien clarity belonging to another side of existence called the physical.

In her critiques of Adler's recourse to simple determinism, Salomé emphasizes the connection between his overvaluation of the ego and his devaluation of femininity and passivity; she rejects his conception of masculine protest as the key to psychic development for reducing sexuality, the unconscious, the feminine to the status of fictions and tools.

Often it is in the very same letters in which she takes up her critique of Adler that Salomé introduces her objections to Freud's own tendency to conceive of the unconscious as contingent upon, even derived from, the ego and its repressions; and she opposes those tendencies for their erasure of the positivity of desire. Her differences with Freud over questions of religion, artistic creation, homosexuality, and ethics always turn on his derivation of those phenomena from inhibitions in development, his conception of them as compensations or compromises. Salomé stood by her conception of the specificity of the development of a presymbolic narcissism and its expression in creative and intellectual as well as "symptomatic" behavior. Far from simply representing compensatory formations in the negative sense, "primitive" religion, infantile preoccupations, artistic production, even neuroses manifested for her the positivity of a desire that has its bases in narcissism. In notes written to Freud about the relation between phantasy and reality, Salomé addresses Freud's explanation of the relationship between artistic expression and repression by arguing that pleasure and creativity are derived not only from the pleasurable opening up of the repressed, but "still more perhaps on account of the objective element in the primal experiences that is regained in this way: precisely those experiences that were not even indirectly reanimated through object-libido, but that are made accessible only under the powerful touch of phantasy to all reaches of the conscious intellect—and in this way extend our personality, hemmed in as it is by object-libido, to spheres that were once its province and that it now regains" [Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters]. Again, a concept of the unconscious that is not subordinated to the demands or the strategies of the ego is fundamental to Salomé's project. And she blames developmental theory for the suppression of that creative, if regressive, direction of narcissism. What was at stake for Salomé was not obscurity or undecidability for its own sake but a challenge to the hypostasization of oppositions that set up rigid and antagonistic boundaries between the primitive and the civilized, between nature and culture, and perhaps most significantly, between sexuality and ego.

In response to what she saw as Freud's tendency to overemphasize the threat posed by sexuality to the ego, Salomé reminded Freud of what she took to be his own argument, that the relation between sexuality and ego has to do with the orientation of the boundary drawn between them. It is because of the rigid line drawn between them in "man" that narcissism's double directionality is clearer in "women." In an essay of 1928 entitled "The Consequences of the Fact That It Was Not Woman Who Killed the Father," Salomé does what Sarah Kofman was to do somewhat differently fifty years later, namely, she uses Freud's work on narcissism against him [in The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings, 1985]. Salomé's 1928 essay is emblematic of her rhetorical/interpersonal strategy of setting herself apart from the terms that she claims unite her with Freud. She and Freud agree that, in the words of Kofman, "woman's enigmatic quality has to do with her affirmative self-sufficiency and indifference, not with the veiling of an inadequacy or lack." "It is no accident," Kofman writes, "that Freud's essay On Narcissism was written in 1914, a time when he was particularly taken with Lou Andreas-Salomé." What Salomé and Kofman emphasize is the difficulty Freud has in sustaining the division he sets up in that essay between masculine anaclitic (ethical) and feminine narcissistic object choices, since the masculine object choice and the male's overvaluation of the object develop by way of the prior narcissistic cathexis of the self, by way of the feminine. Even more problematic are Freud's ultimate ethical condemnation of woman's narcissism and his claim that motherhood provides the appropriate ethical redemption. "The theorist is subject to the same forms of forgetfulness as the little boy," the same fraud, the forgetting which draws too sharp and self-evident a line between unconscious and conscious, desire and autonomy, pleasure and ethics. "All ethical autonomy," writes Salomé in "Narcissism as Double Directionality," "doubtless constitutes a compromise between command and desire … while it renders what is desired unattainable—given the ideal strictness of the value demanded—it draws what is commanded from the depths of the dream of all-encompassing, all sustaining Being." Freud cannot escape narcissism as the ground of ethics or of love, nor can he sustain what Salomé sees as the unnecessarily rigid dichotomy between narcissism and sociality, between self-sufficiency and ethics.

Salomé's essay on the consequences of the fact that it was not the daughter who killed the father begins by explaining her title. The title refers, Salomé reminds her readers, to Freud's proposition that the first human crime (and the advent of culture) was the murder of the father. With this beginning Salomé acknowledges her indebtedness to Freud and her intention to work on woman's difference from within his narrative. The freedom she assumes in order to work both within and against Freud's terms characterizes both the method and the content of the essay. Indeed, the beginning of the second paragraph ventures the suggestion that if Freud's speculation is valid, is "so," then it cannot have been without consequence that the daughter remained free of the son's primal guilt. The "ist es so" (if it is true) marks the hypothetical nature of his and, by implication, her arguments, that which she would have called their symbolic as opposed to their truth value. Our myths, she once wrote to Freud, are that to which we resort when we reach the limit of what we can observe empirically and follow rationally. Following Freud's lead here, Salomé sets out to explain the process through which the son's murder of the father is transformed into a remorseful, deferential deification of the father on the part of the then conformist and obedient son. Salomé appeals to what she sees as the only instance of such deification/idealization accessible in our lived experience, namely, the idealization of the object in erotic love. Again, she takes up Freud's own work on masculine object choice, the aggressive as opposed to the passive type, characterized by an over-valuation of the love object and a dependence for one's sense of self on the reciprocation of that love. Her next move is to suggest that there is no natural basis for such object choice or for such idealization. Nothing prepares us for it in advance, she suggests, since what is prior is that lack of differentiation that Freud, she reminds us, called narcissism. She goes on to explain the lasting effects of narcissism in the relation between psyche and the body. As a consequence of the development of the ego and the separation between subject and object, the body becomes the material limit of our narcissism, in that it comes to mark the boundary between self and other, and is therefore experienced as if it were external to us; it is also the point of contact and connection through which the narcissistic remains at play—the body, then, as Grenz and Bindestrich, that to which we can have no unmediated relation, but can also not escape. Hence, by analogy, the inescapability of narcissism.

The masculine overvaluation of the object, its ethics, which has no natural basis, according to Salomé, can be said to involve a social intervention into a previously narcissistic state. The renunciation and the forgetting of narcissism require the threat and guilt over incestuous wishes and murderous fantasies. The son's fantasy of murdering the father involves a deep narcissistic wound, since the father is, after all, the son's future. The son, with his murderous omnipotence wishes, is transformed into a remorseful and obedient subject who overvalues the love object even as he misrecognizes what is actually his suppressed desire for a reunion in what he takes to be ethical ideals. The daughter, Salomé argues, need not suppress incestuous wishes so violently, need not fall out of love, at least if we take Freud's mythical narrative seriously; she is not forced, then, to internalize a prohibitive and punitive Law. Here Salomé subtly insists on the often forgotten distinction in Freud's own 1914 "On Narcissism" essay between ego ideal and superego or conscience, making conscience the fate of the male, and an unpunitive ego ideal, the daughter's difference. Salomé's woman is less likely to confuse desire with ethics, and hence her greater sobriety in relation to the Law. The daughter, Salomé writes, resolves her own tendency to idealize the Father through a series of ever more subtle, more refined sublimations without having to murder the father or repress her narcissistic sense of connectedness; hence the more peaceful coexistence of desire and self-assertion. Woman remains more "at home" in her materiality, no matter how sublimated, how spiritualized her relation to it. The sublimations required of her are articulated in terms of a rounding out, a growing and expanding that is horizontal, spatial, that does not depart for a point above or beyond, but reabsorbs the traces of a history that is never renounced. The man who has forgotten the desire at the basis of his ethics and his aspirations reacts more sensitively to external Law, vacillating between guilt and desire, between "natural rebelliousness that would destroy anything in its way" and the impulse to achieve his own worth in the approval of that punitive Other. For Salomé, the conflict between the desire for total independence from the Father and an equally strong desire to submit to Him explains the ambivalent relations of Freud's sons to their father. And the failure to work through this conflict, which has its basis in an only apparently paradoxical narcissistic desire for unity, makes men blind to their own desires, obliging them to separate mind and body, intellect and erotics, rational and irrational.

If there is lack, then, it is that of the son whose trajectory involves a linear, teleological, sacrificial verticality, the imperative to aspire and achieve with the illusory promise that identification with, and obedience to, the Father will reconstitute the lost whole. "It is no wonder," Salomé wrote elsewhere [in The Freud Journal of Lou AndreasSalomé], "that the male neurotic's desire to be happy is often expressed as a desire to be a woman," to be what she called that "regressive without a neurosis." In "Woman as Type," Salomé draws out the paradox that constitutes the daughter's difference and her advantage:

Woman is able to experience what is most vital as most sublimated. This mentalizing, idealizing draws its spontaneity from the fact that, in the transferences of love, their point of departure remains more palpably present for the feminineunitary nature throughout life.… The individual beloved person in all his factuality becomes for her transparent in all directions, a diaphane with human contour through which the fullness of the whole gleams, unbroken and unforgotten.

Salomé concludes her essay on the consequences of the differences between the sexes, an essay that consistently avoids anatomical determinations, by folding those differences back on themselves. For at the point of furthest development of his masculinity, the man exhibits submission, a giving of himself to his ideal that exposes the feminine-passive, the narcissistic moment that is always at work even in the most apparently total separations. Masculine and feminine approach the border of their difference and tend to become one another. If the masculine opens out onto the feminine in the drive to achieve, to become the father, motherhood constitutes at least the metaphorical point at which woman can be said to have opened onto the masculine; it combines the feminine capacity for giving with the masculine capacity to create, to protect, and to lead. In motherhood, Salomé argues, woman realizes her sublimated homosexuality. Indeed, motherhood has always elicited the fascination and envy of man both because it transgresses the conventional boundaries of femininity, reaching over into the masculine, and because it is an experience of the body that is denied him. For that reason, Salomé argues, the mother becomes the essence of that which is inaccessible, and figures for man as a symbol more than a real human being, a symbol of the inseparability, indeed, the ultimate undecidability of all human differentiations, that undecidability, that narcissism that must be repressed if masculine identity is to be secured. Woman exists for man somewhere between the Kreatiirlichem and the Uberpersonellem, a position of indeterminacy and a commonplace. This, of course, is not Freud's ethical mother, not the redemption of woman's narcissism, but its realization, the source of man's fascination and his horror.

Woman's position between the animal and the transcendental, this undecidability, became oppressive, Salomé continues, when the worship of god became the worship of man, and that undecidable figure, that Mittelding, was domesticated into the respectable wife. Whereas woman once belonged directly to the Vater-Gott, the worship of man and the domestication of woman cut her off from that world of possibility signified by the Father and unfulfillable by any human relation. Penis envy, writes Salomé, a form of desire for equality based in "ressentiment," emerged along with the possibility of the enslavement of woman by man. It is at this point, she suggests, that woman must struggle against the human male for access to that which is as naturally hers as it is his in its inaccessibility. Salomé's critique here of humanist glorifications of the human subject is directed at what she takes to be the assumption of a fraudulent complementarity that makes woman his lack and his completion. As soon as woman's access to her own desire is mediated through the human male, as soon as competition with him is her only hope of escape from domestication, the daughter begins to kill the father herself and, with "him," precious parts of herself.

The essay ends with a discussion of the implications of differences for the relations between the sexes. The only viable relation to the other, according to Salomé, is that based on the furthest possible development of the sexual differences within each one, rather than the projection of difference onto a supposedly complementary and ideal other half. Hence, the significance to her of Freud's notion of bisexuality, understood as a sexual indeterminacy that "can be awakened by the opposite sex, as a consequence of the other's profound approach, his understanding, and his embrace." So it is, Salomé wrote elsewhere, "that only slightly homosexual men see the universally human qualities in woman and are erotically disposed toward them" as opposed to the more exclusively heterosexual, selfrepressive man who prefers the feminine woman in the most circumscribed sense of the word.

Salomé's 1928 essay is typical of her excavations of the internal differences of psychoanalysis, excavations formulated as reminders to Freud of the implications of his own work, perhaps of his own slight "homosexuality." Clearly, Salomé made use of what she characterized as the daughter's good fortune in her relation to Freud, maintaining the privilege and pleasure of speaking in his name without giving herself over to his terms. Salomé avoided war with Freud just as she avoided submission to him by sustaining a relation that she described as one beyond fidelity and infidelity, enabled by her concomitant acknowledgment and destabilization of gender and genre lines—the fact that she refused the exclusive positions of insider and out, that she insisted (in the words of Francois Roustang) on turning psychoanalysis into a Russian novel, that she contaminated science with the philosophical and aesthetic, even as she credited Freud and psychoanalysis with correcting her tendency toward romantic mystification and hallucinated syntheses.