Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé

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.