Reading Lou Von Salome S Triangles

READING LOU VON SALOMÉ’S TRIANGLES
BABETTE BABICH
For Rudolph Binion: in memoriam
Alma, tell us! / All modern women are

jealous. / Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?
…
How can they help being jealous? / Ducks
always envy the swans / Who get Gustav
and Walter, / You never did falter,
With Gustav and Walter and Franz.
— Tom Lehrer
Lou Andreas-Salomé is popularly known to have been the love of

Friedrich Nietzsche’s life.1 As a ‘collector’ of more or less famous men,
she would later be connected to Rilke and to Freud. Nor were these
relationships conducted seriatim and during the time she knew
Nietzsche, she enjoyed a quasi-triangular affair with Paul Rée. Here,
I raise the question of Nietzsche and women in the context of Lou von
Salomé’s articulation of her life as this outlines what we take ourselves
to know about her relationship to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche and Women

When I say that I will address the question of Nietzsche and women
I cannot mean that I will be talking about the women philosophers
of his time.2 Not only were women philosophers rare enough in
Nietzsche’s day but Nietzsche himself does not write about what
women there were, which last habit of non-attention and non-citation
continues to this day.3 Indeed, even women scholars — by no means
unlike their male counterparts — tend to limit their own citations and
references (by which I mean the representative scholarly work they
discuss) to certain scholars, silencing others. This excluding citation
practice also happens to constitute academic prestige: what
New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. Eight, Nos. 3 and 4 (Winter 2011 / Spring 2012), pp. 95–132.
© 2012 Nietzsche Society. ISSN 1091–0239.
96 New Nietzsche Studies
conventionally goes without saying is that the names everyone cites

are the only ones worth citing.4
It is a neat circle — like anything closed.
What Nietzsche did write about women and with reference to
woman scholars and authors (denouncing both George Sand — as a
‘writing cow’ — and George Eliot — as a ‘little moralistic female’)
encourages readers to infer that he wouldn’t have been fond of women
philosophers had there been more of them — as, for the most part,
there were not — and had he undertaken to engage them — as, for
the most part, he did not.
Instead, Nietzsche writes about the fairly generic feminism of his
day:
Woman wants to be independent, and to this end she begins to
enlighten men concerning “woman as such” — this belongs with the
worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what
must these clumsy efforts of feminine scientificality and self-exposure
bring to light! Woman has so much reason for shame… (BGE §232)
Here the issue for Nietzsche had little to do with equality per se
and in general he disputed the notion of equality, contending that the
demand for equality was itself an injustice. By contrast,“‘Equality for
equals, inequality for unequals’” (AC §57)5 would, he argued, be “the
true voice of justice.” (Ibid.) This Nietzsche also applied to the issue
of men and women:
To misconceive the fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to
here deny the most abyssal antagonism and the necessity for an
eternally hostile tension, here perhaps to dream of equal rights, equal
training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of flat-
headedness and a thinker who has proven himself flat on this
dangerous position — flat in instinct! (BGE §238)
With this, Nietzsche tends to reproduce some of the oldest and
even the most banal anti-feminist arguments there have ever been,
contending, rather traditionally (and a number of feminist readings of
Nietzsche simply replicate this traditionalist assertion), that his own
arguments are themselves “feminist,” and thus that he argues as he
does for women’s own sake. As Nietzsche condescendingly remarks:
“Would it not be in the very worst taste for woman to prepare in this
way to become scientific?” (BGE §232) In the same breath, he insists,
Babich / Lou’s Triangles 97
echoing Madame de Staël, “that it is a true friend to woman, who calls

to the women of today: mulier taceat de muliere!“ [let woman be silent
about women]!” (Ibid.)
Nietzsche’s general opposition to equality includes a sexism that
might seem disquieting from any perspective, particularly today but
also in his own day. Thus he privileges the male point of view again
and again — all to the distress of those who write on Nietzsche and
women, beginning with Nietzsche’s contemporary, the feminist
thinker Hedwig Dohm who includes a section on Nietzsche in her
1902: Die Antifeministen.6
Following a systematic chain of contravening remarks contra
Nietzsche’s contentions, Dohm calmly (and this relaxed quality is an
achievement) has recourse to Nietzsche’s reflective perspectivalism (as
I oppose this to analytic ‘perspectivism’), which she uses to answer
Nietzsche’s own claims. Thus she cites Nietzsche himself, recalling
not only his claim that society “in one sense or another requires
slavery” (BGE §257) but also his contention that “slavery, both in the
coarser and finer sense, is manifestly an indispensable means even of
spiritual breeding and cultivation.” (BGE §188) As we recall,
Nietzsche invokes oriental culture (referring to the cultural and even
architectural limitations of women’s sphere in society in ancient
Greece) contending that that slavish mentality continues to
characterize women:
how much “slave” yet remains in woman, for instance! — which
seeks to seduce others to good opinions of herself; it is the slave, too,
who immediately afterwards falls prostrate before these opinions, as
if she had not called them forth. (BGE § 261)
As Dohm points out:
Nietzsche names “de-feminification” the “clumsy and outraged
seeking to come together of the slavish and the bondsman” that
woman’s position in society’s existing order has in itself had and
still has. »As if slavery were a contrary argument and not much
rather a condition for every higher culture.« Possibly. Certainly
from the perspective of the slaveholder. But the slaves? Can it be
granted to them if they think otherwise? Can you blame them if
they think otherwise?7
What makes Dohm’s discussion of Nietzsche intriguing is that it

is a feminist critique deeply and sympathetically influenced by
Nietzsche’s own thought, an influence already manifest in Dohm’s
1894 novella, Wie Frauen werden. Werde, die du bist,8 which begins by
characterizing the ravings of an institutionalized old woman as not
unlike the speech of ‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.’
In her book Die Antifeministen, Dohm emphasizes the implausibility
of lumping all women together in a discussion of “what women
want,” whether in one way or another, and she does this well in
advance of Derrida, if it is also true that Derrida scholarship follows
the above mentioned trend and is for the most part, as Derrida also
was, unaware of her work. For her part, Dohm’s style is
unimpeachable: teasing Nietzsche for his all-too-traditional
sexism/ageism when Nietzsche writes “Woman learns how to hate in
proportion as she — unlearns how to charm.” (BGE §85) Here,
Dohm’s strategy is, again, strikingly Nietzschean. In this fashion, she
concedes every bit of Nietzsche’s original claim while nonetheless
pushing his metaphor to its last consequences — in yet another good
Nietzschean move.
If Nietzsche wants women’s magic, Dohm offers magic, happily
echoing Nietzsche’s own “panem et Circen…” (TI, Maxims and Arrows
§17):
Lady A. and lady B., perhaps; but »the female?« May the Circes,
whose profession consists in being charming, feel taken by this
incandescent light. They understand how to avenge themselves in
that, they transform the enchanted into ... how shall we say this? ...
certain four footed beasts.9
So much for the Foucauldian power of seduction and the fair
swinishness of (in this case masculine) desire as Homer originally talks
about the same and as Plato also has his Socrates talk about injustice
in the state. But the point remains at best a conflicted one. Thus the
conclusion of Dohm’s point-counterpoint critique of Nietzsche’s anti-
feminist leanings celebrates his achievements without finding that he
in the end speaks to her own claims even as“the shocking poet, the
artist who knew how to collimate all the arts into the moving material
of language.”10 Describing Nietzsche as “a painter of the word,”11
Dohm’s Nietzsche is a“sculptor” in the same sense:
From massive blocks of stone he chisels out the gods and supermen.
He is architect. From his thoughts are built churches with splendid
organs, castles with bold battlements, with slender observation
towers, soaring high into the ether, gleaming in new suns. Above all,
he is the musician of language.12
As Dohm expresses this point: the disquieting problem with
Nietzsche’s writer’s and poet’s prowess, even given his famous
brilliance and with all his extraordinarily critical philosophical insight,
is that it seems to bring no kind of advantage precisely when it comes
to women:
Friedrich Nietzsche! You, my greatest poet of the century, why do
you write about women so utterly beyond the good? A deep, deep
sorrow for me. It makes me even more solitary, more ancient, even
more aloof from them. Oh, I know it indeed: “Even great minds have
merely their five fingers wide experience.” Right next door its
thinking stops, and its infinite empty space and stupidity begins.
“Thus Spake Zarathustra.”13
In this sobering context, we may recall Nietzsche’s screed against
socialism, as against equal rights and the language of values and
democratic freedom, a point that may be significant to us in the
current politico-economic era, where we are (again) paying attention
to the rights of the few and the oppression of the very great many.
Nietzsche’s ‘challenge’ affirms the blindness of his own male
perspective and his conclusion here foregrounds this point of view
...we do not work for “progress”; we do not need to plug up our
ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future:
their song about “equal rights,” “a free society,” “no more masters
and no servants” has no allure for us. We simply do not consider
it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be estab-
lished on earth (because it would assuredly be the realm of the
deepest leveling and Chineserei); we are delighted with everyone
like us who loves danger, war, and adventures, who refuses to
compromise, be captured, reconciled, and castrated … (GS §377)
Although I can scarcely attempt this here, Dohm’s critique might
provide the basis for a politico-economic reading of Nietzsche. More
critically, in the spirit of New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement,
Dohm’s reflections ask how a critique of the established order might
be articulated, foregrounding the courage required for any political
movement that might still be able to come forth as an actual,

enduring movement? Countering the pragmatism she names
“Nietzsche-Macchiavelli,”14 Dohm proposes to invert the orienting
direction of Nietzsche’s advice for the sake of a truly radical reflection.
Here we are confronted by the philosophical conundrum Dohm
encounters in Nietzsche’s case: one can have the insight of a Nietzsche
and still and yet fail to see past one’s own limitations. This
conundrum persists for feminism and so on, and on, all the way
through to the sphere of political economy. Far beyond mere akrasia,
the problem remains as Marx observed: what must be changed is not
the philosopher’s understanding but the world itself.15
“… the satisfaction of a vulgar curiosity”

It is a classical, renaissance, modern, postmodern (transmodern)
chestnut to say that women play a ‘role’ in philosophy just when it
comes to sex, love, reproduction, all in addition to debating the
possibility of “equality” that Nietzsche (like Schopenhauer) disputes.16
Sex is foremost and women to be sure continue to be associated,
whether positively or negatively, with sexuality in literary and
theoretical connections but also on every visual, ontic level. Indeed,
to vary a certain philosophical joke, but I regret that I cannot but
mean this in all seriousness: show me what you call ‘erotic’ imagery
and I will show you a naked woman, or some other object, framed
from a man’s perspective.17
Even in the presumably rational sphere of philosophy, woman is sex
— so much so that Simone de Beauvoir herself reflects that as she
undertook to write on what she called “the problem of woman” as
socially manifest historically, cross-culturally and her own then
contemporary world, it turned out, rather to her surprise, not to be a
variation upon the standard philosophy of man. In other words, i.e.,
“what is man,” as this question was traditionally and scholastically
formulated. Much rather, it turned out that the “woman” problem
paralleled the “Irish” or “Jewish” problem and so on, with the
important and to this day not completely understood difference of an
utter lack of collective sensibility or solidarity. Thus arguing that the
second class status of women is hardly fixed inasmuch as “the nature
of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical

reality,”18 the problem in this case cannot be laid at the feet of either
nature or society:
If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the
essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change.
Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as
subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But
women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or
similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the
same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically
assume a subjective attitude.19
It was for this enormously complicated set of reasons that Beauvoir
found herself compelled to title her book The Second Sex — Le deuxième
sexe — with the consequence that some casual readers first assumed
that it was a book about reproduction, a modern, i.e., scientific or
biological study.20
For his own part and in good nineteenth century and supposedly
enlightened fashion, Nietzsche also considers the biology of sexuality
and reproduction to define “the female” when it comes to his own
articulation of the woman question. As his Zarathustra tells the old
woman in response to her invitation to him to talk about this very
question:
Everything about woman is a puzzle, and everything about
woman has one remedy — it is called pregnancy. Man is for
woman a means: the end is always the child. (Z, Of Old and Young
Females)
But Nietzsche only argues in the same tonality as do the most routine
of 19th century theorists (just as Dohm already has pointed out for us),
that is to say: including Freud and in the 20th century, Lacan as well.
In this regard, Nietzsche followed his teacher Schopenhauer in
speaking about woman’s change in appearance i.e., as she ages:
speaking of woman not as she is in herself or as subject but as object
from a male point of view. It should be underscored that a great deal
of contemporary “scientific” thinking of the socio-neuro-biological
kind continues to operate on this level: suggesting in a scientistic fit
of telic ratiocination that the ‘reason’ women are most attractive in
youth is not because, say, they are young and beauty is in general the
province of the young but and much rather and only in order to “fool”
men — here we may invoke Schopenhauer’s words as Nietzsche does
— into “taking care of them” for the rest of their lives, as if (and now
we might well be echoing Dohm), such actual caretaking were in fact
practiced as a rule in society (social statistics, for Dohm as for us today
point to greater impoverishment of women and children, as opposed
to men) — and as if the males of the species were not themselves also
(as most animals are) vastly more beautiful in youth. It is no accident
that the poet Hölderlin epitomizes the philosophers’ inclination to pay
a certain dissonant attention to beauty precisely as they themselves
begin to age, as Socrates, Nietzsche’s great “erotic” (TI, The Problem
of Socrates §8), only takes notice of Alcibiades when he ages (as
Hölderlin reflects). That Alcibiades gets the aging Socrates’ attention
does not mean (this is the point of Plato’s Symposium) that this 11th
hour attention suffices for Alcibiades, nor (and this is Nietzsche’s
point regarding slave morality) are such attentions sufficient for anyone
who lives for the sake of the attention of others. This is the
irremediable abjection of the subject of desire. For the other-directed,
for the one who is and seeks to be object for the desire or interest of
another, there is/can be no limit to neediness. Who, as Nietzsche asks
in his prelude to his ‘symphony’ Zarathustra, “can have oil and
kindness enough for them?” (GS §68).
For his part, Nietzsche’s still unparalleled achievement was to
articulate the contradictory force of women’s all-too-human, he would
say: all-too-feminine tendency to believe in and enact what society
believes about or holds of them, and even Beauvoir does not outclass
him here. Women continue to play to society’s view of themselves of
their own accord,21 and good son as he was of a preacher’s family,
Nietzsche also liked to call attention to the falsity of dress (this habit
had a courser side in the disparaging comments he later made about
Lou’s physical appearance and hygiene). At the same time Nietzsche
reflected upon the idealized aura attained thereby. Pointing to this
illusion in the aphorism Women and their action at a distance, he reflects
upon the image of skirts like a smooth gliding sail over the sea,
observing that a man might “almost [fast]” feel as if “his better self”
(GS §60) dwells there. This idealizing ideal, which he also criticizes
backwards and forwards contra Wagner as das ewig weibliche,

corresponds to the higher, fairer aspect of the human condition, here
described as a kind of promised land to be found “there” among
women.
There is a parallel here in conviction and its reversal, in A. E.
Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad,22 with its rapturous praise of beer and
such: Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man. Thus,
like Nietzsche’s phantom dream of woman, we find the poet late
converted in the spirit of St. Augustine, i.e., only ‘after’ he manages
to transport half way home or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer. Qua
interlude of the ideal qua ideal, Houseman’s sodden descent into
reality seems not unlike the contrast of Nietzsche’s“Breakfast” in his
short history of an illusion. As Houseman writes: and down in lovely
muck I’ve lain, happy till I woke again: the world it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet... For his own part, Nietzsche’s return to
reality is as dry as his intoxication and it transpires in his reflection on
woman that he has never left the security of land. Rather than the
dream of woman as “quiet, magical beings” (GS §60), Nietzsche’s
masculine complaint is that there is really, as on any sailing ship, “a
lot of noise, and alas a lot of petty, pathetic noise!” (Ibid.)
The more explicitly erotic dimensions of Nietzsche’s reflections are
coordinate with his analysis of the necessities visited upon those
without power in society.23 This powerless condition includes not only
women but anyone compelled by necessity to ‘act a part’ for a living,
like the “dreaming” greengrocer Sartre mentions24 but it will also
include any day laborer, to the extent that all workers (this is why a
coordination of Nietzsche’s analyses of women and of slave morality
is crucial) are actors of what is expressly not their own ideal, and to
this Nietzsche adds the artist, the actor, the Jew, etc.
The powerless are forced to dissemble and the point for Nietzsche
is that those with power are free not to have to dissemble: this is the
morality of strength as opposed to the morality of weakness. Thus,
and this is the key to Nietzsche’s analysis of slave morality in the first
section of On the Genealogy of Morals,25 as Nietzsche makes very explicit
in his own critical counter to Hegel, it is ultimately not the slave who
triumphs precisely where the slave’s perspective always or inevitably
triumphs. But the weakness remains and hence the achievement of

weak or slave morality is a lying achievement: because one deceives
oneself in this triumph and because one thereby loses oneself: the “soul
itself squints” (GM I:10) in consequence. This is the genesis of the
“neutral independent ‘subject,’ prompted by an instinct for self-
preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified.” (GM
I:13) As Nietzsche explains the ideal of this subject
has perhaps been believed in more firmly that anything else on
earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the
weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that
interprets weakness as freedom and their being thus and thus as
a merit. (Ibid.)
The genealogy of any morality colors it: in the case of the morality of
weakness, one believes one’s own illusion. And, and this is the point
of the second section of The Genealogy of Morals, one forgives one’s own
inability to keep one’s promises, excusing oneself for one’s impotence
in advance.
The dissembling one affects for whatever advantage one hopes to
attain thereby ends — and the point is that this is true even after the
advantage has faded — by coming to live with one. The ‘small’
deception becomes part of how we find ourselves, part of who we
come to be. We are, without exception and in every case, what we do.
It is, as Aristotle observed long, long ago, our habits that make all the
difference and what we do makes us who are. But for Nietzsche who
always emphasized Pindar’s incarnate or physiologically lived
reflections, we can become who we are with all our heart or we can
refuse it or fail it. This means, as Nietzsche saw (and the consequences
are particularly hard on women — as he also noted) that the
deceptions that must be deployed in practice by members of the lower
levels in society also work directly upon them and in two ways.
Firstly, for the advantage they hope to gain by it: just assuming it
succeeds (for we note that it can be merely transitory and it is always
contingent), think of the charms or illusions of women, charms that
work best when young, less well a little later, as Nietzsche savages in
one of his seven couplets on women: “Young: flower bedecked grotto.
/ Old: a dragon, tally ho.” (BGE §237).
The slavely moral deception is proof against enlightenment, and

this too is Nietzsche’s answer to both Hegel and Marx, the dynamic
is a durable one just because it alters one’s ability to see oneself with
clarity. Thus the problem, the challenge of becoming the one you are
is the problem Nietzsche always explored, after Schopenhauer and as
Heidegger also takes this up, indirectly for his own part, in Being and
Time, as the problem first of all of knowing who one is and to begin
with.
As “little dressed-up lie,” about which decorative deception
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra complains in Concerning Marriage and Children,
a woman misrepresents or lies not only to those she means to impress
or seduce but to herself. She believes her own illusion. Thus when
Nietzsche writes “To seduce one’s neighbor to a good opinion and
afterwards confidently to have confidence in this good opinion of one’s
neighbor” — sometimes this is called by the new age name of the
power of positive thinking — we note that the key to his aphorism is
the reflection: “who succeeds in this artifice as well as women —?”
(BGE §148; cf. §145)
Beyond its misogyny, Nietzsche’s observation also includes an
arguably unpopular (to the extent that sexism remains socially
popular) insight into the dangers to women themselves as those who
‘buy’ into the social ideal, wear makeup, commission elective or
‘cosmetic’ surgery, and dress to please men and as they do so telling
themselves, as many do, that all their makeup and all their
uncomfortable dress is to please themselves. The implicit contradiction
of the current anti-rape movement called “slut walk” plays in the
space of this conviction: women ought (as there is no doubt whatever
that they ought) to be free to dress in order to provoke men and men,
however provoked, ought (as indeed they ought) to leave them
undisturbed.
And yet, as Nietzsche would have objected, as Jean-Paul Sartre also
pointed out in his own musings on bad faith where Sartre managed
to place a young woman’s romantic dissembling front and center, in
the case where the man in question were to remain too undisturbed
this too would be disturbing. Unlike Sartre. Nietzsche did not make
this observation, though he might have done, as we have already
noted that Nietzsche discusses women’s dress, indeed their scanty

dress:
Satisfaction even protects one against catching cold. Has a
woman ever, knowing that she was well-dressed ever caught a
cold? — I am presuming that she was hardly dressed at all. (G-D
§25)
With respect to literature, Nietzsche argues that some women (a
mocking allusion which, so we should later be able to see, applies to
Lou, i.e., to the subject to follow) practice literature only to effect,
that is only in order that there be an effect or to draw attention to
themselves.
What were corsets in the 19th century are still with us today in
skintight clothing and both items are characterized by discomfort.
Such clothes, then and now, are worn to show women’s bodies off to
best advantage. To whose best advantage and in what sense? The
more important question might well be the further question: why is
it that men do not dress like this, i.e., ceteris paribus, for women’s
erotic appreciation or delectation?26
Men, be they heterosexual or homosexual, dress for themselves,
which is to say that they dress for one another but they do not dress
for women. By contrast, women dress for men (here we would need
a cultural hermeneutic of dressing or of clothing) and women, just as
Beauvoir argues at length, judge other women on just such a male
standard.27 With such hermeneutic considerations of dress and
appearance we are back to posing or role playing, as Nietzsche
argued. And a studied attraction weakens or dilutes — this we may
call the Kleist effect or perhaps or also the Keats effect28 — what the lover
of beauty, no matter whether male or female, might regard as beauty.
The different patterns of dress between men and women, male and
female are probably the best indicators to date of the differing claim
to subjectivity between men and women, male and female and if the
subject is already at issue, the one whose existence is dedicated to the
effort to be object for that subject — nota bene, not just one subject,
the idea of attractiveness or beauty is that everyone attuned to it
should also be moved by the same attractive ideal, a beautiful woman
moves all men to desire or at least to appreciate the idea of desire and
inspires envy in those in competition with her (and that competition,

as Beauvoir was fond of arguing, would be every other woman she
meets, also to the great annoyance of feminist theorists who would
like nothing more than to preserve standard feminine styles of self-
presentation now — this is the point of the ‘new’ feminism same as
the old sexism — ‘re-claimed’ as an expression of womanhood, as if it
were ever anything but such an expression).
Again, we recall Nietzsche’s melodious appeal, in his actio in distans,
as it also inspires the title and the substance of Derrida’s Spurs,29
When a man stands amidst his own noise, in the midst of his own
surf of ventures and projections: there he glimpses quiet, magical
beings gliding past him, for which happiness and seclusion he
longs — these are women. (GS §60)
Elfriede Jelinek, author of the novel Women as Lovers,30 has
explained with unsettling honesty (this would be, pace Sloterdijk,31
what genuine cynicsm might look like in our times) that a woman’s
“value” corresponds to her erotic capital which she is always (already)
in danger of losing, and here we are back to the very terms of
Nietzsche’s reflection on the matter of feminine appeal:
… Nothing is from the beginning more alien, opposed, hostile, to
the female than truth, — her great art is the lie, her highest concern
is appearance and beauty. Let us admit it, we men: we honor and
love exactly this art and this instinct in women… (BGE §232)
Love’s Figures
Beginning with the Orphic tradition, beginning with Heraclitus and
Empedocles, love is part of philosophy. Thus Plato attributes a
discourse on love to Socrates, as Socrates in turn attributes such a
discourse to Diotima, the Mantinean hetaira and priestess of love —
and for whose paid companionship Socrates acquires the wherewithal
(so we are permitted to assume) from his friends. It is also from Plato
that we deduce love’s geometry: its figures and figuring or calculation,
for love is all about triangulation and we read Plato’s Socrates and not
Xenophon’s when we read Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols where he
names Socrates as also having been “a great eroticist.” As Anne
Carson underscores for us, and I borrow her emphasis for this essay,
love is about triangulation.32
Alexander Nehamas illuminates this seductive, authorial irony in

a didactic context as he reads between Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain and Plato’s Euthyphro to explain that at issue is the
literary/philosophical figuring ultimately playing upon the reader who
is written into the dialogue from the start.33 This is indeed Plato’s
very own point in his Phaedrus: a dialogue on love and lovers’ speeches
or seducer’s/suitor’s suits and as Plato illustrates the working efficacy
of the triangle at more than one ironic level in Lysias’s written speech
addressed to Phaedrus tuned by way of Socrates’ counter-discourse of
love presented as spontaneously spoken (and attributed to the
inspiration of the same Diotima encountered in the Symposium).
But the Mantinean Diotima is not regarded as a philosopher for
own part. An ideal, quasi-mythic figure, Diotima was also a favored
name for Hölderlin and she appears in his Hyperion. We also know,
some scholars are proud of this, that Hölderlin had a kind of specialty
in illicit love affairs — one of which early love affairs (I note that
Hölderlin’s admirers dispute this) resulted in a child and cost the
woman in question, this is not in disupute, one Wilhelmine Marianne
Kirms, the paid companion of Charlotte von Kalb her position in the
household where both Hölderlin and Kirms were employed.34 We
know — what is more important, we want to know — next to nothing
further about Kirms herself.
At issue here for me, as already noted for Carson more generally
in erotic lyric poetry, is triangularity as structural form rather than in
the fantasy sense of the ménage a trois, corresponding to Nietzsche and
Lou and Rée’s plan to live together as Lou reports this plan. In this
sense, one cannot but apply the resources of hermeneutic
phenomenology to what popular scholarship, as if eager to reduce the
background needed for scholarly research, now names media
archaeology.35 In this case however, H. F. Peters goes back to the
biblical Song of Solomon for the epigraph he affixes to his thus titled
book on Nietzsche and Lou, “How fair is thy love, my sister, my
spouse! How much better is thy love than wine!”36 One might think
here of Hegel’s praise of sisterly love on the model of Sophocles’
Antigone — but scholars rarely incline to this model (apart and of
course from Peters himself who also writes on Nietzsche and his own
sister).37
And in addition to scuttlebutt about Nietzsche’s relation to his
sister (whom Nietzsche scholars happily blame for just about
everything), Nietzsche is also accused of having (or wanting to have)
relationships with married women and women old enough to be his
mother. I note in passing that the same reproach is never used with
Lou with respect to men old enough to have been her father, who was
himself already old enough to have been her grandfather.
Triangles and Troikas: Photographs as Writing

Like Lou’s Lebensrückblick, only first published by Ernst Pfeiffer in
1951, Peters’ study includes photographs. For whatever reason, our
absorption with Lou is fixated on the graphic. Books on Lou and
Nietzsche have included pictures ever since Lou herself made them
public in her first book on Nietzsche, written and published, to the
dismay of his family and friends, during the time of his incapacity
(1890-1893) and including pictures of Nietzsche and facsimiles of his
letters.38
Love or eros, qua “sweet-bitter,” here to use the language of
Carson’s study of her classical thematic, is and can only be an erotic
figure as a sign or mark of loss.39 And we, post-feminist as we are,
especially in a post-Lacanian discipline such as art history or
comparative literature or philology and even philosophy tend to be,
have gotten used to the power of figures of lack or loss. Thus we are
assured a kind of eros in the case of Lou von Salomé, Lou Andreas-
Salomé. The result is abject fascination in the case of Rudolph Binion’s
psychoanalytic account.40
The point here is that our fascination survives Binion’s historical
account as it survives David Allison’s insightful philosophical analysis,
indebted it is to Ernst Pfeiffer and Curt Paul Janz, where both
Binion’s and Allison’s accounts are mediated, as are others, by Charles
Andler and so on and on.41
For it is Andler who hypothesizes the staging of the pathetically
triangular and very famous studio photograph of Lou and Rée and
Nietzsche. Andler describes the puzzle of the 1882 Lucerne
photograph as including a crouching Lou Salomé in a garden cart —

which Lou also describes for us as “little (far too little!)” in her
posthumously published memoire.42
Lou von Salomé with Paul Rée and Nietzsche. Jules Bonnet, Lucerne, 1882.
A quasi-isosceles angled placement, the triangular gestalt is

already sketched in Andler’s account which sets Lou at apex and
Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée as the two opposing angles; each
man fitted with armband traces yoking them to Lou crouching in the
cart, holding the two reins in one hand with a small whip festooned
with lilacs in the other, the entirety, Lou tells us, at Nietzsche’s
behest.43
Andler’s footnote anticipates Lou’s memoires, down to the detail
of the lilacs she mentions, just because Andler himself is able to refer
for didactic emphasis and doubled reverse ekphrasis, to Bernoulli’s
book on Overbeck und Nietzsche, which was itself violently contested
both by Lou as also by Nietzsche’s sister as it was based upon — and

hence the overdoubling — Overbeck’s own memoires.44
Yet the triangular diagram outlined by the Lucerne photograph
hardly corresponds, in spite of Andler’s suggestion, to the etchings or
tapestries that depict Aristotle on all fours, bearing the paramour of
Alexander the great, Phyllis, ‘playing horsey’ on his back.
Nevertheless David Allison takes time to detail Andler’s suggestion
as a thought-tableau, in good accord with the depiction of woman as
the danger to the soul’s progress (St. Ignatius of Loyola calls her the
ideal disguise of the ‘enemy’ himself) figuring as she does in the
Narrenschiff (and not incidentally also in Hogarth). Given this very
formal discrepancy, my alternative model sets Nietzsche and Rée in
the ox-cart traces of Kleobis and Biton drawing their mother to
Hera’s temple.45
Altar, representing Kleobis and Biton. Terme di Diocleziano, National Museum of Rome.
‘Good boys’ by anyone’s standards, the kouroi, Kleobis and Biton

could thus be counted as ‘sons’ of Hera (and hence as‘brothers’ to the
celebrated Castor and Polydeuces). The lineage matters when it comes
to the still salacious discussion of the relation between Lou, Nietzsche,

and Rée, but it is also relevant that Nietzsche and Rée would certainly
have seen themselves as kouroi, despite their age difference with
respect to Lou, and in spite of their own relatively advanced ages
(given Greek standards for youth).
The figure of Kleobis and Biton drawing their mother to the
temple of Hera also has the virtue of setting Lou in the position of a
maternal family relative just as she herself insisted on a domestic, not
an erotic relationship and Lou recalls a pet name from her youth “«
Mütterchen »” [little mother]. 46 Again and again we are told that Lou’s
announced intentions toward the two and toward many others were
explicitly not erotic: all Hera, no Aphrodite.47 In her memoires,
Andreas-Salomé describes her very platonic vision of such a domestic
arrangement in her life with Rée, down to a shared study with books
and flowers, but emphasizing “two bedrooms,”48 and the dynamic axis
of a life shared on a stage, to and fro, from either side to the center.
As to what became of Kleobis and Biton when the oxen to draw
their mother’s oxcart could not be called from the fields to bring her
to the festivities to honor Hera, who valiantly hitched themselves to
her cart in the place of the oxen to carry her to the celebration in
honor of the goddess? Well, the story goes that the two sons drew the
cart with such alacrity that their mother arrived well in time for the
rites. Proud of their devotion, their grateful mother prayed that
evening to the goddess of the hearth that they be afforded the highest
distinction befitting a mortal. Her prayer did not go unanswered and
her two sons died before the dawn.
And this would have impressed the same Nietzsche who repeats the
wisdom of Sophocles’ Silenus in his first book: if what is best of all,
but perforce impossible for the sons of woman, never to have been born,
the second best, the highest option for mortal men, is death as soon
as possible.49
By triangulating Lou as mother and Rée and Nietzsche as
corresponding diascouri (Kleobis and Biton), the figure in question
has iconic exactitude at least when it comes to the sheer number of
involved figures for a total of three persons, one woman and two men
as well as a two wheeled cart, a feature otherwise lacking in other
readings featuring Aristotle and Phyllis). Given the aformentioned

plan for a triune domestic partnership (this is the “trinity”) together
with Nietzsche’s already growing sense of fatality vis-à-vis his own
chances with Lou contra Rée (as this also emerges — and this is almost
from the start, in his letters), a certain fatality echoes in Nietzsche’s
staging, assuming indeed that we are to trust Lou’s account of the
inspiration for Bonnet’s studio photograph in Lucerne.
Nevertheless, perhaps given Andler’s prodigious footnote and
seemingly still more prodigious influence of that same footnote, the
preferred reading in the literature has mostly not been the troika
described, Kleobis and Biton carting their mother (a figure, once
again, inscribing Lou as Nietzsche’s and as Rée’s “little” mother, a
position which domestic relationships between men and women often
tend to mirror, one way or another) in a domestic triangulation (note
that via Hera the trinity becomes a “holy trinity”) but and much
rather interpretations in the literature truncate three figures to a more
manageably erotic two, in the case of Aristotle on all fours with
Phyllis on his back — an allegory, in Andler’s helpful explanation, of
“woman” triumphing over “philosophy” — an interpretation that
indeed also functions as a wish fulfillment.50
Below I explore our “faith” in Lou von Salomé less with respect to
the iconography of staged photographs than to what we know about
her relationship to Nietzsche and to Rée and the many others in her
life.
I shall argue that it is significant, and worthy of some reflection to
note that we might still suspect, here and there, to cite Umberto
Eco’s recent Tweet: “Il criterio è semplice: sospettare, sospettare sempre. The
criterion is simple: suspect, always suspect.”51 Here, almost everything
we know on such matters, we know rather directly from Lou alone.
And this at least ought to give us an occasion for questioning.
Writing Lou
The literary historian, the late Rudolf Binion recalls his personal
encounters with Ernst Pfeiffer whom he came to know in his archival
research, for as Binion observes, Pfeiffer was Lou Andreas-Salomé’s
literary executor and all access to the archives was through him. But
as Binion notes, Pfeiffer lacked critical sensibility when it came to

Lou:
in his official estimate Lou was all candor, self-awareness,
selflessness, as incapable of a mean motive as of an intellectual
error, her every word a blessing and her every act a reverence.52
Binion’s account is not a little ironic and we can easily understand
Susan Ingram’s characterization of Binion’s historical study as “male
and hostile.”53 But, male or not, Binion undertook one of the most
exceptional readings of intellectual history on this topic. Nor have
recent accounts superceded Bionion’s study on this level and to the
extent that he undertook an engagement with her, it is important to
underline that any review of Lou’s life depends on Lou’s self-
reconstruction for the simple reason that her notes and diaries
determine all such accounts.54
Lou, who would wait until Nietzsche’s collapse to write on
Nietzsche (in 1890-1893) and wait again until after Rée’s death to
write on Rée, also took extraordinary care to delay her own
autobiography. As more than one commentator has observed: she was
herself her own legacy. If Nietzsche wanted to give birth to himself
and nearly did so, insisting in his Ecce homo on a kind of half-mortal
existence, “to articulate this in the form of a riddle, as my father,
already dead, as my mother, I live and grow old” EH, Why I am so
wise, §1), Lou secured a still more ambitious project of immortalization,
as her own God, Mortal-Divine, Child, Glorified Heroine, Self.
Biographer after biographer likewise tells us that Lou invents
herself. Nor where the margin of illusion coincides with self-deception
can we say to what extent Lou herself was not taken in. What matters
here is that her readers are taken by her, and manifestly so, just as
those who met her in life seemingly were, from Nietzsche and Rée to
Rilke and Freud. Even Freud and that alone should give us pause: from
philosophy and medicine to poetry and the founder of modern
psychoanalysis.
We can start as Lou, does in her chapter The Experience of Love,
[Liebeserleben], with Hendrik [Hendrijk] Gillot, her Dutch tutor-
pastor,55 but also with Nietzsche, as this concerns us most in the
current context, and not merely the question of whether she did (or
whether she did not) kiss Nietzsche, or and also, even more than a
kiss (nota bene, this same skepticism might hold no matter whether we
are speaking of Nietzsche or Gillot, etc.). To this I would even add,
as Binion has given us good evidence to do so, a salutary skepticism
regarding Rilke’s primacy as her erotic initiation, even if we concede
her virginity to begin with and in any case.
Gillot thus confirms/baptizes Lou as Lou, literally and
unmistakably so given the text from Isaiah 43:“Fear not, I have
chosen you, I have called by your name, you are mine.“56 Lou tells us
that she scripted the confirmation herself, designing it as “almost like
the words of a wedding.”57 And this too would turn out to be true, at
least in the unreal fashion that crossed lovers from time-immemorial
have understood, especially those whose love is adumbrated in the
atmosphere of religious sentiment. The name Gillot gives her, Lou,
would be crucial for her European life, as opposed to the otherwise
unpronounceable, save in a Russian mouth, Ljolja (Peters writes Lolya
and, Binion tells us that she was called Lelia).58
And there are other triangles that emerge from this, as we are told
that no matter where she traveled — and as we note below, she
subsequently went on to publish under the pseudonym “Henri Lou”
— Lou would always keep Gillot's photograph on display.
Hendrijk Gillot
Christened Louise, we are to suppose that without Gillot, Lou
would never have been named as such. No doubt, so we read Lou’s
asseveration of her status to him “from that day on, since I came to
be, what I became through you: your girl.”59 And why should we not
believe this?
In the case of Lou von Salomé, we believe all kinds of things. We
believe that under Gillot’s tutelage Lou learns to read Kant in
Dutch.60 What is certain is that Lou leaves Russia precisely on the
occasion of this affair, fleeing Gillot and scandal. The flight worked:
the scandal dissolved and we “know” of her virginity on the same
terms: for Lou tells us so. Here we may note that her relations with
the man who became her husband, Carl Friedrich Andreas would
seem to constitute an exception to her relations to other men. But in
many ways the relationship with Andreas is more of the same:
triangulated as it is always was by way of Gillot whom she asks to
travel to Berlin to marry them. The marriage, like the confirmation
ceremony, is, so Lou tells us, a sacramental encounter with Gillot.
Nor, if we consider Andreas here, would an unconsummated
marriage be the rarest thing in the world.
And what is consummation in a marriage or in any love-affair?
Better to ask and to begin with: what is a sexual experience in
general? Is it one encounter or is it two or three or thirty? Is it a
joyful or disappointing or bitter experience? Under protest?
Underwhelming? Or merely an experience first accepted and then
resisted, so that if an encounter had once occurred and were thereafter
refused, it would soon become the very thing of which the Germans
have a rueful saying, it was so long ago, that is no longer true. Is there a
rape when an encounter is accomplished under false pretences,
deception, illusion? Is the seduction which leaves the seduced
consumed with regret, resentful for what? for being as the saying
goes, deceived? also a rape. Theft at gunpoint is theft; theft by way of
falsification, deception, misrepresentation, confidence games, false
promises, is also theft. Violent violation or violation by subtler means:
we are speaking of degrees.
Lou for her part, later reports her memory of being awoken by the
sound of her husband choking for breath with her own hands around
his throat. She tells us that found herself, half awake, strangling
Andreas as he tried to take her as she slept61 — an image of
murderous sleep inversely like Althusser, who did in fact kill his wife
in her bed. The marriage with Andreas if it was not about sex for Lou
on her own account of what she emphasizes as her life-long girlishness
— though she does tell us at length about Andreas’ nakedness during
his nocturnal perambulations and his naked encounter, shades of
Derrida and his cat, with their dog, a large Newfoundland like the
Wagner’s dog,62 and about his “pure body” and bathing habits (“mit
orientalischem Ernst”)63 — provided on almost every level everything
Lou needed in order to live the life she did live and so too, for such
things are always mutual, Andreas as well.
God is the double-echo that finds expression in the title of her first
novel in 1885, Im Kampf um Gott, signed with the pseudonym Henri
Lou. If we recall that Gillot’s first name was Hendrijk which is
acoustically not dissimilar to Henri,64 Lou obviously, vicariously split
her name, androgyne, from the start.
And then there is Rilke, with whom we know, thanks to Lou, and
if we believe her — and my point will be that we do — that there was,
finally, an entrance into some sort of erotic life (I say “some sort”
inasmuch as Rilke is not presented, at least as Andreas-Salomé tells
the tale, as an erotic hero). And then there is Freud, not quite an
erotic adventure but still an intellectual one, if we trust the analysts
Appignanesi and Forrester, who offer us a detailed accounting of the
complex array of associations and assessments involved. In the end,
the friendship even there was also a gently contested one, as Biddy
Martin observes that Andreas-Salomé’s 1928 essay “Consequences of
the Fact that it Was Not Woman that Killed the Father” does what
Sarah Kofman was to do somewhat differently fifty years later,”65 to
wit, to deploy Freud’s work on narcissism against him.
Here the complex array of affiliations and appellations and
triangles: Lou von Salomé and Hendrijk Gillot, or her pseudonym,
Henri Lou, or Nietzsche, Rée, and Lou or Lou Andreas-Salomé and
Nietzsche/Rilke/Freud and so on, the entire array matters immensely
as the literature on Lou Andreas-Salomé also testifies.
Concentrating on Lou and Nietzsche (can we say: Friedrich and von
Salomé?) I have argued that the context of her life up until their
meeting matters for our understanding of their encounter. I also argue
that it also matters when we speculate as we do about their supposed

love affair, which indeed we know about solely through Lou, even the
report of the same to Nietzsche’s sister and to the Wagner circle in
Bayreuth also is adumbrated in this way, that is through Lou’s
account, communicated as this is, second hand to Nietzsche’s fury. I
note although commentators rarely advert to this that Nietzsche’s
letters to Lou after he learns what she is said to have said about him,
especially with regard to what she says to others in his absence — here
is Lou’s triangle with society once again — shows a rare anger. In this
most controlled of authors — and Nietzsche is controlled both in his
theoretical writing and his letters to his friends — we are confronted
with the most uncannily human loss of control as anger takes him
over. To this Lou-mediated quality, and as we have seen this is
challenging enough to keep in mind, I argue that we do well to keep
our reflections less focused on the frisson of erotic ecstasy than the
religious or aesthetic.66 Religion matters however much we think we
know about the relation between Nietzsche and his God or between
Nietzsche and religion as religion bears both on Lou’s tutelage
under/her love for Gillot, as well as her meetings and discussions with
Nietzsche. In particular, in the context Nietzsche characterizes as the
Orta weather “coloring” their sojourn at Lake Orta in their visit to the
pilgrim sanctuary of Sacro Monte, which the two of them visited away
from the company of Madame von Salomé and Paul Rée. At Sacro
Monte di Orta, religion and art come together, including every
perspective form of ecstasy, a literal vision of vision, as well as a
tableau of erotic temptation.
Arguably this last was among the advance attractions of the
vacation locus for Lou, given her reference to “painted devils”67 as she
writes of these to Rée communicating (or inspiring) her desire to
travel with the two of them, both Nietzsche and Rée, to visit Orta in
particular. All of this permeates the “entzückensten Traum”68 to use
Lou’s account of Nietzsche’s description of their encounter, as we take
Lou’s word (she is our only source) for the terms Nietzsche used to
describe the ecstatic event of their shared, private, excursion on Sacro
Monte, just as we should also recall that Lou would later write to
Malwida von Meysenbug on the 18th of August in 1882, of
Nietzsche’s inherently “religious nature.”69
It is not the religious-artistic, it is much rather the more erotic

details that interest us today — which is also what it means to say that
God is dead. Hence we have no idea how to read Henri Lou’s Im
Kampf um Gott except for the hints of what it tells us about Nietzsche
and Rée and Lou. In this, we might compare the challenges of
reading Lou’s first novel to Nietzsche’s own self-reflective observation
that
The worst readers of aphorisms are the friends of the originator, if
they make a point of referring the general to the particular instance
to which the aphorism owes its origin: this potpeeking reduces all the
author’s efforts to nothing, so that rather than a philosophic
attunement and instruction, they rightly achieve nothing but the
satisfaction of a vulgar curiosity. (HH II, §129)
Nietzche’s “Topfguckerei” allusion to our desire to satisfy a “common
curiosity” is well-placed but it matters to note that as he writes this,
Nietzsche has yet to fall even from the lowest heaven as, Lou tells us
(again) that Nietzsche exclaims upon first meeting her in Rome.70
An invert muse, that is a woman who does not inspire men to
write, but whose own writing is inspired by men, it is significant that
Lou’s writing only begins after her encounter with Nietzsche and Rée
(and it is relevant that both of them serve her as editors,71 ironically
and this should be underlined just to the extent that Nietzsche’s
primary ambition for her had originally to do with his desire for a
helper — as many of his friends also helped him with his writing as
amanuensis, reading out loud to him). And it matters that Lou’s
writing seems, so commentators are united in observing, to be more
or less about neither Nietzsche nor Rée but about herself. As
Nietzsche writes of women and literature, seemingly with Lou in
mind, “The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a
small sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if
someone notices it and to ensure that someone does notice.” (TI §20)
The Vicissitudes of Status and Caste: First and Last Names

Countless commentators write “Lou” — just where, precisely where,
we do not refer to Nietzsche as Friedrich (forget Fritz or, for
Anglophone sensibilities, perhaps: ‘Freddy’). Among philosophers, I
have argued that it is significant that Hannah Arendt is nearly always

emphatically Hannah Arendt just where Heidegger goes (and can go)
by his last name alone.72
The story told of Hans-Georg Gadamer in the decades in the
1960’s and 1970’s when professorial status was under debate in
Germany is relevant here. Gadamer seemed to be nodding off at a
table where a debate raged over whether to use the name-and-title
neutralizing and vaguely socialist and even communist Herr Kollege, or
Herr Prof. Dr., or Herr Prof. or just Herr, and so on and on. The
punchline of the anecdote has Gadamer opening his eyes and offering
a brilliant clarification of the signifying function: Sagen sie rühig Herr
Gadamer. Professoren gibt es viele, aber nur einen Gadamer. [You can just
call me Herr Gadamer. There are many professors, but only one
Gadamer.]73 And indeed, we do speak of Gadamer or Heidegger but my
point when it comes to Lou is that Heidegger is never called Martin
apart from the context of a love story (where the point is a matter of
intimacy not parity), where it is quite common in Heidegger’s case to
speak of Elfriede as well as Hannah.
When it comes to academic mastery, the paradigm of such love
stories is that of Héloïse (note the first name) and Abelard (note the
last). And just this medieval reference is relevant with respect to
Nietzsche and Lou as Allison reminds us that The Gay Science was
written under the aegis of love.74 Thus it is relevant, as Allison argues,
that Nietzsche titles this his most ‘alchemical’75 book by alluding to
the provençal song tradition. For my part, I argue elsewhere that the
The Gay Science was intended to re-articulate76 the point of Nietzsche’s
un-received first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music)77
as a songbook, as it were, of the songs of the European masters of
song, the knight poets as Nietzsche writes, who embodied in their
lives and songpractices nothing less than the scholastic tradition of
Europe itself in university discourse/dispute.78
The scholastic tradition matters in the case of Peter Abelard,
extraordinarily gifted among the master or academic troubadours, in
just the ways detailed in The Gay Science, where nota bene indeed, even
here Nietzsche will need to return to make the point a second time,
adding a cycle of songs at the end, not quite at Abelard’s level but
still and yet including a seemingly complete roster of the range of

troubadour, as Nietzsche also lists these in his notes and provides song
exemplars of Meistersinger rhyme modalities in his series added to the
fifth edition of The Gay Science, Songs of Prince Free as a Bird.79
The same figuration of names, like Héloïse and Abelard, the second
called by his family name, the first figure, that would be the lady,
named on a first-name basis, like Nietzsche’s reference to his “friend
Lou” in his letter to Gast (13 Juli 1882), where were he instead
referring to his friend Heinrich von Stein he would not write (and this
is the case no matter how we count all the arguments of a Köhler,
every last one of them) of his ‘friend Henry.’ First name for the ladies,
last name basis for the gentlemen, continues as a pattern we still
know and still employ in daily life. Whether we know the lady herself
or not, we nevertheless presume to call her by her first name: even
when we are speaking of a powerful woman (Angela, Hilary,
Margaret) rather as if — exactly as if — we ourselves knew her
personally and were on sufficiently intimate terms with her to call her
by name, just where we keep our distance from, and so show our non-
intimacy, which is also a sign of respect, for the man we call only by
his last name: Abelard who is (for a number of reasons) never called
Peter.
My question is a simple one but it is not limited to this case alone:
countless commentators write of “Lou,” just where we do not refer to
Nietzsche as Friedrich.80 We thus know something about the
transfiguration of Louise reborn as Lou and the complex story she tells
to herself with regard to the provenance of her name as baptism,
confirmation, wedding ceremony.
But that would be Lou’s problem. What exactly is ours?
And again, because it will bear repeating, it happens to be
massively common to refer to a male philosopher solely by his family
name.
Why do we not do the same for women? Why is Arendt almost always
emphatically referred to as Hannah Arendt even for those who write
about her philosophy and her politics? We talk about Jaspers,
Adorno, Scholem.This point bears reflection just where we tend not
to say Jean-Paul when we speak of Sartre and not Maurice but
Merleau-Ponty, we do not say Jürgen when we speak of Habermas or

Paul when speaking of Ricoeur or Michael when we speak of the late
Dummet, unless we want the honorifics of saying Sir Michael Dummet.
And I almost failed to note that we do not say Jacques in place of
Lacan or Alain when we mean to refer to Badiou. In fact, we do not
even say Slavoj to refer to Žižek. There are exceptions, Irigaray,
Kristeva, Kofman, but we say Mary Daly to speak of the feminist
theologian where we speak of the Jesuit Thomist Lonergan, leaving out
his first name (Bernard) and Martha Nussbaum where we can speak of
Cavell and we say Agnes Heller where we speak of Hardt and Negri and
Judith Butler or even Judy Butler where we speak of and Sloterdijk,
Baudrillard, Kittler.81
Of course it can be argued that it could go the other way, my point
is that it almost never does. Nor do we say Immanuel to refer to Kant
or David to speak of Hume, Sigmund to refer to Freud or Albert,
heaven help us, to refer to Einstein, but we also say Rosalind Franklin,
to name the woman crystallographer historians consistently leave out
of the discovery of DNA’s double helix. And then, here just
obliquely, there is Rilke as Lou Andreas-Salomé helps him to name
himself for posterity. We learn about his name (and how he came to
change his name from the array of names given him (Rilke was born
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke), five prefatory names
collapsed to one Rainer, just as Lou named him and instead of René,
to carry down with him in history as the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.
If Arendt and Heidegger had a love affair, I have argued that it
makes all the difference for what we know of ‘Lou’ that she for her
part has been able to construct her account such that it keep our
sights trained on the spirit rather than carnality. Where a man’s
genius tends to be unsullied by matters erotic (let us think indeed of
Goethe or any rock star), the reverse holds for women. This
awareness on Lou’s part seems to exemplify Rée’s aphorism regarding
the relatively pointlessness of half-way measures when it comes to
yielding a women’s favors: having given herself once, Rée observes,
there is nothing to hold back.82
Lou’s preternatural intimation of such an ontology of virginity, on
Rée’s terms: a loss consummated “once and always,”83 is also
expressed in Binion’s judgment that if she “left Petersburg sedulously

‘girlish, even childlike,’ yet set on doing whatever men did and
nothing else.”84 This same male-idealized and not incidentally male-
identified aspect on Lou’s part (she tells us this as well in her
reminiscences of her brothers) echoes in Nietzsche’s reflection in her
regard of the role of the eternal masculine as he writes of Lou’s “demi-
novel” in a letter written on his birthday in 1885 to Heinrich von
Stein in Berlin: “if it is surely not the eternal-feminine that draws this
girl upward, perhaps it is the eternal-masculine.”85 The words recur
in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, where he speaks of the higher or
“noble” woman’s opposition to the ideal of the eternal feminine,
which she replaces for her own part, by believing in the “Eternal
masculine…” (BGE §236). One might consider the formulation here,
with reference to Goethe and quoting Dante’s Italian, as an allusion
to Lou — if it were not indeed appropriate with reference to any
intellectual or spirited woman, and we are still awaiting a full
discussion of all the women around Nietzsche regarded, for once, on
their own terms.86
Thus Lou“contains” or articulates the contours of what was (and
what is to this day) said of the encounter between herself and
Nietzsche. Thus we “know,” unlike the relationship between
Heidegger and Arendt, that there was no actual sexual encounter
between them, so Lou tells us. Seemingly instinctively, although her
own sense of her life in society and of freedom doubtless aided her
instincts here, Lou “knew better” than to sully erotic affairs (or even
marriage) with anything like the assumption of consummate erotic
contact just and exactly to the extent that consummation elides
mystery and the erotic is all about the frisson: all expectation and
possibility.
Hence even when that same expectation may be forward working,
the charge is a retrospective one, as Nietzsche well before Freud had
already analyzed as the primary force of the path and the logical
preoccupation with the same as what Nietzsche named a Rückschluß
and which Freud referred to as Nachträglichkeit.87 Still and yet, we
either call Lou, ‘Lou’ — as I have been doing throughout — or we
recognize her by her father’s, that is her family name (von Salomé) or
we name her by her hyphenated married name.
Nietzsche writes himself into the company of the teachers when he

writes to Lou. Perhaps he surmised Lou’s receptivity to her first
mentor and in any case he knew her, met her from the start as a
student. He proposed to step into Guillot’s place as her teacher and
wrote to her of the kind of teacher he was/would be. Thus Nietzsche
did not merely or only want someone to act as his secretary and
practical assistant in household affairs, he wanted a — she could be his
— pupil.
For her part, of course, Lou never wanted to be so lucky.
Nonetheless, she tells us that she took Nietzsche at his word, as she
tells us she had done from the start with Gillot, when she exposed his
private proposition to public view in her family and then before
society. By the same token, she would always travel with a
photograph of Gillot, thus writing him into any relationship she had
with anyone who had any intimacy with her.
One could argue that by these triangular means Lou found her own
alchemy, her own trick for turning “muck” into gold, transforming
the power plays of a secret dynamic to her lasting advantage.
The first triangulated other in Lou’s relationship with Gillot would
thus have been society itself: the social, public sphere rather than the
private or intimate world. Intriguingly, this same public other
adumbrated her relationship with men throughout her life. Thereby
Gillot’s intentions toward her, whatever in fact the private story may
(or may not) have been, were thus exposed as intentions, plans,
desires, revealed as non-deeds, non-consummate. Qua exposed,
Gillot’s desire was thus rendered to public view as both base/debasing
and because inconsummate, impotent. As Lou herself overtly exposed
him by publically denouncing his intentions as intentions,88 it was not
Lou’s own desire or affection for Gillot (whatever that may have been)
neither was it the reality of any events that transpired between them,
no matter what these may have been, but Gillot’s desire on his own
solitary part, identified as selfish, just as, following the same pattern,
Lou would later accuse Nietzsche of having similarly selfish motives,
because intimately oriented, threatening (because not yet fulfilled,
where just this not-yet matters for) Lou’s social position as a young
girl.
The functioning of Lou’s triangulation of her relationship with

Gillot and through her family, the society that brought its judgment
to bear on that relationship, effective as it was on both Gillot and Lou
herself, would not have worked on Lou’s behalf in any other fashion.
The public view worked to defend her innocence where it would never
have avenged the loss of her virtue assuming she admitted as she did not
in fact admit to losing it, be it by rape or the seduction of innocence
that comes to light as a rape in retrospect.
Society only defends the innocent and Lou as it will turn out
throughout the course of her long life (by contrast with Nietzsche and
Rée) would live the life of an innocent.
Thus she would similarly denounce Nietzsche’s intentions in
Bayreuth as being precisely of the caliber of Gillot’s base and selfish
designs against her purity: intending her destruction as innocent.
Thus triangulated via not Rée but society, public mores, by choosing
unconventionality but never veering from the bourgeois ideal of
virtue, Lou’s innocence would be preserved, all without question.89
For what is more, we believe her.
Acknowledgments
For parts of this article, I have drawn from my non-illustrated earlier essay:
“Nietzsche, Lou, Art and Eros: The ‘Exquisite Dream’ of Sacro Monte” which
appears in Pascale Hummel’s edited book collection, Lou Andreas-Salomé, muse et
apôtre (Paris: Philologicum, 2011), pp. 174-230.
Endnotes
1. Joachim Köhler argues that Nietzsche was homosexual and this diagnosis may
be traced to Lou who suggested it to Freud. See Köhler, Zarathustras Geheimnis:
Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschlüsselte Botschaft (Nördlingen: Greno, 1989).
2. There are of course a number of studies on Nietzsche and women as well as on
Nietzsche and the women associated with him but the distinction I am making
concerns women philosophers.
3. I discuss this, including further literature, in Babich,“Great Men, Little Black
Dresses, & the Virtues of Keeping One’s Feet on the Ground,” MP: An Online
Feminist Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 (August 2010): 57-78. A truncated version
appears as “Women and Status in Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy, 160
(March/April 2010): 36-38.
4. I recommend in this respect, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s broader reflection

on this point in her discussion of the work of the late Dutch theologian,
Catharina Halkes, “Celebrating Feminist Work by Knowing It,” Journal of
Feminist Studies of Religion, 27.1 (2011): 97-127.
5. See for example BGE §257 and for further references and discussion, Babich,
“Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science and Modern Nihilism,” American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256.
6. Hedwig Dohm, „Nietzsche und die Frauen“ in Dohm, Die Antifeministen. Ein
Buch der Verteidigung (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1902), p. 20f.
7. Dohm, „Nietzsche und die Frauen,“ p. 25.
8. Hedwig Dohm, “Werde, die du bist!” Wie Frauen werden (Breslau: Schottlaender,
1894).
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 32.
12. Ibid. I have enormous sympathy with this description of Nietzsche’s musical
improvisational style as my own research on Nietzsche’s writing style attests.
Here it is significant that Dohm was herself a stylist of considerable versatility.
14. “Nietzsche-Macchiavelli gives woman advice as to how she ought to proceed.”
Dohm, „Nietzsche und die Frauen,“ p. 30.
15. See on this some of the reflections of the theorist Kalle Lasn, founder of the
magazine Adbusters, particularly the initial chapters of his book, Culture Jam: The
Uncooling of America (New York: William Morrow, 1999) as well as Micah
White’s articles in the Guardian and in Adbusters. For a powerful theoretical
analysis of the current political and economic situation in the US and Europe
and, unfortunately, much of the rest of the world, see Stanley Aronowitz, “The
Winter of our Discontent,” Situations: Project of the Radical Inmagination, Vol IV,
II (2012): 37-76.
16. I discuss this as well as part of Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil.”
17. I have raised this question elsewhere and take it further in Babich, The
Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and
Technology (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) as well as “The Birth of k.d. lang’s
Hallelujah out of the ‘Spirit of Music’: Performing Desire and ‘Recording
Consciousness’ on Facebook and YouTube.” Perfect Sound Forever. online music
magazine–Oct/Nov 2011. http://www.furious.com/perfect/kdlang.html.
18. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley, trans. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1972 [1952]), p. 19. [Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard,
1949)].
19. Ibid.
20. To be sure, the first chapter of Beauvoir’s text after her introduction does begin
with biology even including technical discussions of the ovum and so on. Thus
it is not entirely inexplicable that those who arrange to have the book
translated into English turned to a biologist. See for an initial discussion of
some of the problems associated with this choice, Sarah Glazer, “A Second Sex,”
Book Forum (Apr/May 2007) in addition to, among many others, Toril Moi, “It
changed my life!,” The Guardian (11 January 2008). Regrettably, the new
translation was not prepared by scholars of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy. See
for a (contentious and contested) account, the journalist, Carlin Romano’s “The
Second ‘Second Sex,’” The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 20, 2010) and for
a more recent review, Emilie Bickerton, “A Woman’s Situation: Simone de
Beauvoir Reappraised,” TLS (March 16, 2012 ): 14-15. Bickerton’s account is
limited to the degree that she attempts, in two pages, to provide an
retrospective evaluation of the legacy not only of The Second Sex but of
Beauvoir’s literary work as well.
21. This is evident already in Nietzsche’s discussion of what he calls the „dangerous
concept ‘artist’“ (GS §361) in the aphorism „On the Problem of the Artist.” I give
a reading of this aphorism elsewhere.
22. A. E. Houseman, “Terence, this is stupid stuff...” A Shropshire Lad, LXII, 1896.
23. I discuss just this point in my reading of Nietzsche’s GS aphorism, and see
allusion to this, note 16 above.
24. “A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not
wholly a grocer.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 102.
25. See my discussion of Nietzsche’s aphorism in Babich, “The Genealogy of Morals
and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic,”
in: Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 171-190 and “Zu Nietzsches Stil” in: Babich,
»Eines Gottes Glück, voller Macht und Liebe« (Weimar: Bauhaus
Universitätsverlag, 2009), pp. 9-29.
26. This is one of the points I explore in Babich, “Great Men, Little Black Dresses,
& the Virtues of Keeping One’s Feet on the Ground.”
27. Only Hollywood or the stage or an advertising set manages to be able to get
men to dress in a fashion dedicated, like women’s dress, to erotic appeal for the
opposite sex.
28. I discuss Nietzsche and Kleist in Babich, “Ex alquo nihil” and Erich Heller offers
a useful discussion of Kleist and Rilke in this context in Heller, The Importance
of Nietzsche: Ten Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 85.
29. Derrida’s Spurs is all about Nietzsche, famously taking woman as its subject,
just as Nietzsche writes about science and truth took women as his subject.
30. Elfriede Jelinek, Die Liebhaberinnen (Hamburg: Reinbek, 1975).
31. Babich, “Sloterdijk’s Cynicism: Diogenes in the Marketplace” in: Stuart Elden,
ed., Sloterdijk Now, (Oxford: Polity, 2011), pp. 17-36; pp. 186-189.
32. See the thus named chapter on this in Carson’s Eros, the Bittersweet (Champaign,
IL: Dalkey Press, 1998).
33. Alexander Nehamas, “Platonic Irony: Author and Audience,” chapter one of
Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley:
The University of California Press, 1998), pp. 19-45.
34. As André Alter points out, Pierre Bertaux will seize upon this not to defend
Kirms for his own part, heaven forfend, but to suggest that Hölderlin’s reasons
for leaving his employ had to do with Kirms’ dismissal as he was at fault. See
Alter, Hölderlin, le chemin de lumière (Paris: Editions Champ Vallon, 1992), p.
115, citing Pierre Bertaux, Friedrich Hölderlin: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). See for this reference to Pierre Bertaux and Kirms’
“uncertain fate,” Alter, Hölderlin, le chemin de lumière, p. 120.
35. But see, as an exception, the useful discussion in Jussi Parrika, What is Media
Archaeology? (London: Polity, 2012).
36. H. F. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé (New
York: Norton, 1962). Here one should refer to the complicated (because
universally agreed upon as having been or having had to be a forgery, whereby
we uniformly discharge any obligation to engage it) autobiography ‘attributed’
to Nietzsche during his madness, a condition wherein, indeed, anything goes:
My Sister and I, Oscar Levy trans. (New York: Boar’s Head Books, 1951).
37. Peters, Zarathustra’s Sister: The Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche (New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1977).
38. See for a classic example, Podach’s Friedrich Nietzsche und Lou Salomé, Ihr
Begegnung 1882 (Zürich/Leipzig: Max Niehans, 1937) in addition to other
examples cited here, above and throughout the notes below.
39. See again: Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet.
40. Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968).
41. Ernst Pfeiffer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, Lou von Salomé. Die Dokument ihrer
Begegnung (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1970), Curt Paul Janz, Nietzsche
Biographie, 3 vols. (Munich: Hanser Verlag, rev. 1993). See Allison, Reading the
New Nietzsche (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) for discussion and
further references, pp. 112ff.
42. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick. Grundriss einiger Lebenserrinerungen, aus dem
Nachlaß, hrsg. v. Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1979 [1951]), p. 100.
Lou’s memoires were brought out owing to the editorial efforts of Ernst Pfeiffer
in 1951 and again “revised” by Pfeiffer editor (with some bitterness towards
Binion’s reading in the interim) in 1973. In English as Looking Back: Memoirs,
trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1995).
43. Ibid.
44. Charles Andler, Nietzsche sa vie et sa pensée II. Le pessimisme esthétique de Nietzsche.
La maturité de Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1958 [orig: 1920-1931]), pp. 440-
441. The footnote includes references to medieval woodcuts and sculptures
depicting Aristotle on all fours and Phyllis on his back. See Carl Albrecht
Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: eine Freundschaft, 2 volumes
(Jena: E. Diedrichs, 1908). See, complete with illustrations, Allison’s Reading
the New Nietzsche, p. 156-157 and Frances Nesbitt Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender:
Beyond Man and Woman (Lexington: University of Virginia Press, 2005).
Cornelius Verhoen adverts to Kleobis und Biton in passing but returns to
Andler’s reading in his Do not Forget the Whip: Notes on a Pronouncement

of Nietzsche,” in: Paul van Tongeren, et al., eds., Eros and Eris (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1992), pp. 177-187. Hermann Josef Schmidt adds a Wagnerian
overdetermination with Fricka in his “Du gehst zu frauen?” in: Ralf Eichberg,
Hans-Martin Gerlach, and Hermann Josef Schmidt, eds., Nietzscheforschung, Bd.
1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994) pp. 111-134. Jean-Pierre Faye likewise
points to Wagner’s Valkyrie and the description of Fricka’s chariot in Faye,
Nietzsche et Salomé. La philosophie dangereuse (Paris: Grasset, 2000).
45. The figure of Kleobis and Biton was a popular illustration, well-known in
paintings and engravings like the elder Nicholas Loir’s 1649, Cléobis et Biton. In
addition, had they wished to do so, Nietzsche, Rée, and Lou would have had
the opportunity to see the altar itself during their sojourn in Rome. The scholar,
Christian Benne, in a forthcoming publication, has discovered another possible
iconic motif for the Lucerne photograph.
46. Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 84.
47. See Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 94.
48. Ibid.
49. Nietzsche, we know, is taken with this diction which he first quotes in The
Birth of Tragedy and then goes on to invoke Lessing’s son, who died the day he
was born. Hölderlin uses the Sophoclean phrase in question, me phynai, as the
motto for the second volume of his Hyperion.
50. Andler, Nietzsche sa vie et sa pensée, Vol 2, p. 441.
51. Twitter: Umberto Eco, @umbertoeco_ Italy/US, January 7, 2012, 1:45 Pacific
Time.Tweet.
52. Binion, Frau Lou, p. 557. Cf. Pfeiffer’s somewhat aggrieved response to
Binion’s reading in his postscript appended to Pfeiffer’s 1973 revised edition of
Andreas-Salomé’s Lebensrückblick.
53. Ingram, Zarathustra’s Sisters: Women’s Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural
History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 36.
54. See for example, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick as well as Lou Salomé,
Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1894) and see, too,
Pfeiffer’s edition of Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Lou von Salome, Dokumente Ihrer
Begegnung (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1970). Contrast this with Bernoulli’s Franz
Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche.
55. Binion describes Gillot as an “ultraliberal pulpit orator attached to the Dutch
legation in Petersburg” and “hence independent of local church authority,”
Frau Lou, p. 14. Binion also reminds us that Gillot lectured in German rather
than Dutch or Russian and Binion also tells us that Lou reconstructed Gillot’s
sermons from memory.
57. Ibid.
58. Andreas-Salomé herself is the source for this “Meinen Namen gab in der Tat er
mir wegen unaussprechbarkeit des russischen — ‘Ljolja’.” Lebensrückblick, p. 36.
59. Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 98. Andreas-Salomé reproduces her oft-cited

letter to Gillot to frame her account of her friendship with Rée and Nietzsche.
60. This gives us the amusing prospect of taking Lou at her word for this while
Nietzsche scholars refuse the idea that Nietzsche might have been able to have
read Kant directly but had to instead depend on commentaries by Kuno Fischer
and the like. What a teacher Gillot must have been. To say the least.
62. Ibid., pp. 247-248.
63. Ibid., p. 250.
64. Henri Lou, Im Kampf um Gott (Leipzig: Wilhelm Friedrich, 1885). See for a
contemporary edition, Andreas-Salomé, Im Kampf um Gott, Hans Rüdiger
Schwab, ed. (Munich: dtv, 2007).
65. Martin, “Woman and Modernity,” p. 192. Martin refers to Kofman’s L’Énigme
de la femme. La femme dans les textes de Freud (Paris: Galilée, 1980).
66. I discuss this in the next issue dedicated to Gary Shapiro.
67. Lou to Rée, 25 April 1882, cited in Podach, Friedrich Nietzsche und Lou Salomé:
ihre Begegnung 1882, p. 28.
68. Andreas-Salmomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 307. Cited by Pfeiffer from her
“Brieftagebuch für Paul Rée, am 14 August: « Die Errinnerung an unsere
italienische Zeit kommt uns oft und als wir den <Textlücke> schmalen Stieg
aufwärts gingen, sagte er leise , monte sacro, – – den entzückendsten Traum
meines Lebens danke ich Ihnen‘.» – „ Ibid.
69. Binion emphasizes here that Lou goes on to draw a direct parallel between
herself and Nietzsche in this regard. Binion, Frau Lou, p. 54.
70. “ «Von welchen Sternen sind wir hier einander zugefallen.»” Andreas-Salomé,
Lebensrückblicke, S. 99.
71. See Tracy Strong’s 2009 lecture “In Defense of Rhetoric or How Hard it is to
Take a Writer Seriously: The Case of Nietzsche.” Forthcoming and on line
http://ucsd.academia.edu/TracyStrong/Papers/192475/Nietzsche_and_Rheto
ric.
72. I offer a preliminary discussion of this question, with specific reference to
Heidegger in Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, pp. 6-9.
73. I am indebted to Holger Schmid for this anecdote.
74. See Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche for discussion, pp. 112ff.
75. I use alchemical here in Reiner Schürmann’s articulation of its esoteric sense, as
he discusses this with reference to Meister Eckhart. See Schürmann, Des
hégémonies brisées (Paris: Trans Europ Repress 1996). See too, more broadly, with
respect to both alchemy and the esoteric or hermetic, Artur Boelderl, Alchimie,
Postmoderne und der arme Hölderlin. Drei Studien zur philosophischen Hermetik
(Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1995) as well as, with a focus on Nietzsche ’s
musical metaphoricity, Babich, “Nietzsche’s göttliche Eidechse: ‘Divine
Lizards,’ ‘Greene Lyons’ and Music” in: Ralph and Christa Acampora, eds.,
Nietzsche’s Bestiary (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 264-283.
76. Like most authors, like most singers, but above all: like most lovers, Nietzsche
demonstrates his hope that a point ineffective the first time might be successful
on a second telling. Nietzsche reworked the technical or scientific point of his
first book regarding ancient tragedy and the spirit of music and the tradition
of folk song — distinguishing between oral composition at the edge of written
composition and understanding tragedy not as drama but as the mystery
traditions themselves in the spirit of the divine service of the Greeks, as moving
tableau, as dance, in accord with, out of, the spirit of music. In this fashion, and
Nietzsche will do this for this rest of his life, Nietzsche retells the key points he
did not manage to communicate in his first book.
77. See Babich, “The Science of Words or Philology: Music in The Birth of Tragedy
and the Alchemy of Love in The Gay Science,” in: Tiziana Andina, ed., Revista
di estetica. n.s. 28, XLV (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005), pp. 47-78.
78. See for a discussion of this constellation, Babich, „Hören und Lesen, Musik und
Wissenschaft. Nietzsches »gaya scienza«,” trans. Harald Seubert and Heidi
Byrnes (with the author), in Beatrix Vogel, ed., Der Mensch Sein Eigenes
Experiment (München: Allitera Verlag, 2008), pp. 487-526.
79. See again, Babich, „Hören und Lesen, Musik und Wissenschaft.“
80. Thus we tend not to say as Nietzsche signed his own letters to his family.
Despite this, Nietzsche was not fond of Fritz, as we know from his
correspondence with his sister (who may or may not have liked being called a
llama) or perhathat he was not fond of hearing it from family members.
81. Of course in addition to exceptions there are also degrees. And the present
author is guilty of referring to Judith Butler in print as Judy Butler. I am a
contemporary and have been an acquaintance for so that such long the
familiarity comes naturally. The point is that use of familiar names is common
when it comes to women philosophers and shows familiarity whether that is or
is not so.
82. As Rée explains: “For the honor of a woman is lost once and for all by the first
slip.” The German is clear as it continues “es nutzt ihm nicht auf halben Wege
stehen zu bleiben...” Rée, Psychologische Beobachtungen (Berlin: C. Duncker,
1875), p. 79. See for the translation, Rée, Basic Writings, Robin Small, trans.
and ed. (Urbana, Illinois Press, 2003), p. 43.
83. Rée, Psychologische Beobachtungen, p. 79.
84. Binion, Frau Lou, p. 29.
85. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1986), Vol. 7, p. 100.
86. But see Carol Diethe, Vergiß die Peitsche nicht. Nietzsche und die Frauen (Europa,
2000) in addition to Klaus Gloch’s Nietzsche über die Frauen (Frankfurt am
Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1992) and see, earlier: W. H. Brann, Nietzsche und die
Frauen (Leipzig: Meiner, 1931) and Karl Schlechta, Friedrich Nietzsche und die
Frauen seiner Zeit (Munich: C.H. Beck‘sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1935).
87. See Duncan Large’s discussion of this in his “Wolf Man, Overman:
‘Nachträglichkeit’ in Freud and Nietzsche,” New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 6, Nos.
3 & 4 (Fall 2005) & Vol. 7, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring 2006): 83-96.
88. It works in the same way with witchcraft, and the exposed witch (it was just
this insight that empowered the inquisition) was manifestly a witch without
any fearsome powers.
89. Martin argues that the bulk of Nietzsche scholars denounce Lou but in my
review of the scholarship, the consensus seems to be that Lou was the love of
Nietzsche’s life and that she should have been more receptive to him. As I read
it, this is not a particular denunciation. If Lou is not in dispute, what is
disputed is his putative syphillis hence the aetiology of his madness. Elsewhere,
I argue that we lack evidence for the claim that Nietzsche had syphilis, and we
have some reason to suppose that ‘his collapse’ was staged (with good reason:
his pension was due to be cut by a third the coming year) and Overbeck reports
when he visited Nietzsche in response to his landlord’s wire, he found him
reading proofs (the last time he would have such an opportunity). Hence I
argue the claim that his madness was iatrogenic or caused by the drugs
administered to him by his doctors and hence a result of conventional
psychiatric medicine, then in its beginnings. For a discussion of this history
(including a note on Nietzsche), see Thomas Szasz, Coercion as Cure: A Critical
History of Psychiatry (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007), esp. p. 81.
Although this is not Szasz’s point, he does advert, via Stefan Zweig, to
Nietzsche’s own use of drugs (on p. 175). Thus Nietzsche’s self-medication
(whatever our moral views about it) must be distinguished from the effects of
the neuropharmaceutical drugs administered to him at different clinics, under
different doctors after his Turin ‘collapse.’ The late Lynn Margulis has invoked
Nietzsche’s case to draw attention to her argument that syphilis has a variety
of manifestations, a complex argument Ludwik Fleck sought to make by other
means (Margulis seems to have been unaware of Fleck’s work and had limited
or only popular knowledge of the debate on Nietzsche), but see, e.g., Margulis
et al., “Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme Disease & AIDS: Resurgence
of ‘the great imitator’?” Symbiosis, 47 (2009): 51-58. The spirochaete is a
pleonastic disease entity, changing form over time and in response to the
environment. By definition this makes diagnosis and treatment elusive.
Margulis is correct in pointing out that the late-stage manifestation of both
diseases have devastating effects and that both diseases are difficult to detect.
Yet adding complexity does not simplify an already complex affair. Even if
Nietzsche had taken no drugs throughout his life (which he did) and even if he
had syphilis or lyme disease (whether he had one or the other), the amounts
(like radiation exposue[s], the effects of such drugs are cumulative) and
combinations of those drugs administered to him in the last eleven years of his
life would have been sufficient— coupled, no less!, with the mercury salve
rubbed into his skin — for inducing ‘mental illness.’ Otherwise said, what was
done to Nietzsche was sufficent to cause utter and permanent brain damage.

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READING LOU VON SALOMÉ’S TRIANGLES

For Rudolph Binion: in memoriam

Alma, tell us! / All modern women are

Lou Andreas-Salomé is popularly known to have been the love of

Nietzsche and Women

conventionally goes without saying is that the names everyone cites

echoing Madame de Staël, “that it is a true friend to woman, who calls

What makes Dohm’s discussion of Nietzsche intriguing is that it

movement that might still be able to come forth as an actual,

“… the satisfaction of a vulgar curiosity”

of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical

backwards and forwards contra Wagner as das ewig weibliche,

triumphs. But the weakness remains and hence the achievement of

The slavely moral deception is proof against enlightenment, and

noted that Nietzsche discusses women’s dress, indeed their scanty

inspires envy in those in competition with her (and that competition,

Alexander Nehamas illuminates this seductive, authorial irony in

Triangles and Troikas: Photographs as Writing

photograph as including a crouching Lou Salomé in a garden cart —

A quasi-isosceles angled placement, the triangular gestalt is

both by Lou as also by Nietzsche’s sister as it was based upon — and

‘Good boys’ by anyone’s standards, the kouroi, Kleobis and Biton

to the still salacious discussion of the relation between Lou, Nietzsche,

readings featuring Aristotle and Phyllis). Given the aformentioned

as Binion notes, Pfeiffer lacked critical sensibility when it came to

that it also matters when we speculate as we do about their supposed

It is not the religious-artistic, it is much rather the more erotic

The Vicissitudes of Status and Caste: First and Last Names

have argued that it is significant that Hannah Arendt is nearly always

still and yet including a seemingly complete roster of the range of

Merleau-Ponty, we do not say Jürgen when we speak of Habermas or

expressed in Binion’s judgment that if she “left Petersburg sedulously

Nietzsche writes himself into the company of the teachers when he

The functioning of Lou’s triangulation of her relationship with

4. I recommend in this respect, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s broader reflection

Andler’s reading in his Do not Forget the Whip: Notes on a Pronouncement

59. Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 98. Andreas-Salomé reproduces her oft-cited

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