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Reviewed by:
  • Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler
  • Muriel Cormican
Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé. By Gisela Brinker-Gabler. New York: continuum, 2012. vi + 165 pages. $100.00.

In this book, Gisela Brinker-Gabler sets out to demonstrate how Lou Andreas-Salomé emphasizes the process aspects of writing and theorizing not just in terms of how writers and theorists craft what becomes the “final” document but also in terms of the incomplete and transitory nature of even the final product. To this end, she focuses on the concept of “Umriss” as it appears in the subtitle to Andreas-Salomé’s famous essay “Der Mensch als Weib: Ein Bild im Umriss.” Brinker-Gabler uses this term “Umriss” to develop a path to understanding Andreas-Salomé’s non-systematic, associational thinking as her implicit insistence on the fact that all writing, all theory, even in its so-called “finished” form is merely a point of departure, a useful fiction, something that generates more thought and invites attempts at understanding without suggesting that one can ever “master” or “know” the “other” (the object of understanding), whether animate or inanimate.

In Chapter One, Brinker-Gabler offers a discussion of gender difference that jumps off from Andreas-Salomé’s essay “Der Mensch als Weib” but is not so much a close reading of the essay as it is a more general overview of a variety of gender [End Page 518] and feminist theorists’ ideas and how they intersect with Andreas-Salomé’s ideas. Her explications promise to be of interest to anyone trying to gain insight into feminist and gender theories of the twentieth century. Under numerous subheadings, we are offered comparisons of Andreas-Salomé’s project of elucidating gender difference to similar projects by, among others, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and Nietzsche. Bringing Andreas-Salomé into dialogue with others in this way provides for mutual illuminations.

Chapter Two focuses on “the different dimensions” of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “imagistic register” and connects them to “other intellectual developments at the turn of the century” such as Symbolism and the emergence of memory studies (52). Key for Brinker-Gabler here is how Andreas-Salomé employs the emblem or Sinnbild, drawing on familiar images but giving them a new twist by altering the context. Thus, for example, she can invoke the image of the snail, something normally associated with domesticity, to represent Woman’s independence. After a thorough overview of research on the emblem (55–60), Brinker-Gabler applies aspects of that research to “Der Mensch als Weib,” arguing that the style and structure of the essay are emblematic: “If this [a narrated image of Man and of Woman] were a symbol, it would elucidate itself; in other words, it would elucidate what is familiar. Andreas-Salomé, however, defamiliarizes the image and provides her own instruction as [to] how to read the position of Woman” (61).

In Chapter Three, she analyzes the posthumously published Russia with Rainer, again underscoring Andreas-Salomé’s emphasis on process. She does not seek to present an image of Russia as it “is” but rather as something that is “becoming” and cannot be represented in static narratives or images. Ironically in this context, Andreas Salomé focuses on the relatively static Russian religious icon, but Brinker-Gabler reads this focus as the author’s attempt to point to the multi-layering of the past, present, and future in her understanding and depiction of the Russia she experienced with Rainer Maria Rilke and wrote about as something open and unresolved. AndreasSalomé regretted what she perceived as educated Russians’ overdependence on Western ways and values in their desire to bring Western knowledge to the Russian peasantry whom they clearly loved but proved unable to encounter as equals. They therefore failed to make them participants in the evolution of Russia. Challenging notions of the superiority of Western enlightenment and civilization, the icon, as nonperspectival painting, represented for her the possibility of seizing the Russian past in “its potential for future becoming” (90). It also pointed to the possibility of an exchange between educated and uneducated Russians and thus of the reintegration of the pre...

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