THE DEATH OF "GOD," THE LIMITS OF "MAN," AND THE MEANINGS OF "WOMAN": THE WORK AND THE LEGENDS OF LOU ANDREAS-SALOME (SIGMUND FREUD, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, GERMANY)

Like her contemporaries, Lou Andreas-Salome was preoccu- pied with the social and epistemological implications of gender and sexuality in the crises of modernity. This study of her work emphasizes the significance to her of psychoanalysis which she ultimately took to be the answer to the epistemological challenges of her age, and an articulation of her own conceptions of femininity and eroticism.

The thesis examines her work on female subjectivity and eroticism by way of in-depth readings of exemplary essays, prose fiction and literary critical studies. The bulk of the study turns on the questions of her personal and intellectual encounters with Nietzsche and Freud, the ideological constraints at work in previous appraisals of them, and the possibility of a feminist reassessment. Feminism figures as a critical practice which lends Salome's work and life an intelligibility and significance it has not had in other appraisals. There is, however, no unitary feminist discourse to which this project appeals. It is part of the purpose of the study to specify the limits of a feminism dedicated to replacing traditional phallocentric representations of "woman" with equally prescriptive and constraining representations of its own. What is at stake is a refusal to relegate Salome's life and work to the margins of the histories of "great men" without falling back on overdrawn claims to autonomy and absolute difference, in short, to conceive identity and "self" differently.