Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé

Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salomé's significant engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations of some of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salomé's contributions to contemporary discourses on meaning, perception, memory, and the unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salomé's historical, social, and intellectual contexts, this new reading utilizes a theoretical frame informed by thinkers such as Benjamin, Bergson, and Freud, and current theoretical perspectives by Irigaray, Grosz, and Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salomé - committed as she was to the "double direction" of rigorous thought and individual nuancing - refocused dominant visions of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity through a female lens. In a "disenchanted world" (Weber), Andreas-Salomé offered an image epistemology or "aesthetics of b(u)ilding," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, that seeks to retrieve the multilayered past embedded in individuals and cultural forms, thus providing positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference, experience, narcissism, and creativity in modern life.