Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé (New Directions in German Studies Book 6)

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. "Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salom 's significant engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations of some of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salom 's contributions to contemporary discourses on meaning, perception, memory, and the unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salom '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-Salom - 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-Salom 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."--Bloomsbury Publishing This new study introduces the reader into Lou Andreas-Salomé's critical and creative engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations of some of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salomé's unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to meaning, perception, memory and the unconscious. Making use of conceptual frameworks of Irigaray and Benjamin, Freud and Kristeva, among others, Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salome displaces dominant visions of gender and sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity with multifaceted revisions through the female lens of a creative thinker. With her aesthetics of the "in-visible," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, Andreas-Salomé seeks to retrieve the multilayered past that is embedded in the present and to give positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference, experience, narcissism, and becoming. Introduction: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé Today 1 Umriss: B(u)ilding Woman or Sexual Difference 2 Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Aesthetics 3 I con: B(u)ilding Russia or Cultural Difference 4 Nachtrauer: B(u)ilding Rilke or Modern Creativity 5 (Un)doing Modern Thought Bibliography Index A exploration of Lou Andreas-Salome's critical and creative transformation of modern thought