Lou Andreas-Salomé Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Biddy Martin

Critical Essay by Biddy Martin

SOURCE: "Woman and Modernity: The [Life]Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé," in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, edited by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 183-99.

In the following essay, Martin discusses Andreas-Salomé's polemical engagement with Freud on the issues of narcissism and gender difference, noting her resistance to the rigid categories of orthodox psychoanalysis.

Alice Jardine begins her study of the "Configurations of Woman and Modernity," or Gynesis, by staging an encounter between American feminism and contemporary French thought. Cognizant of the inevitable risks of homogenizing both actors in her standoff, Jardine outlines the tension between the two in terms that have an uncanny familiarity—in terms of a conflict between feminism, "a concept inherited from the humanist and rationalist eighteenth century about a group of human beings in history whose identity is defined by that history's representation of sexual decidability, and contemporary French thought...
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