Nietzsche Paperback – 16 October 2001

Nietzsche na perspectiva de uma psicanalista admirável. O essencial, reconheço, é meditar a filosofia nietzschiana, mas não há dúvida: esse livro aprofunda o entendimento de Nietzsche. Sugiro ler simultaneamente com o Nietzsche de Gianni Vattimo.

Any follower of Nietzsche has to include Salome's book as a must read. It is the only narrative that includes a deep reading of his works combined with a face-to-face person-to person encounter. The latter is the most important..Of all the secondary sources on Nietzsche her's is the most insightful and the closest to the truth of who Nietzsche really was: a genius and a puppet put on the world stage to articulate a philosophy that would justify right wing reactionary idiocy.

Lou Salomé conoció mejor que nadie a Nietzsche, fue su discípula y escribió sus impresiones más personales sobre el filósofo. Dibujó a un hombre enfermo, mayor y en declive. Nada que ver con su superhombre, pero de inteligencia sutil y brillante y una gran sensibilidad. Nada que ver con el proto-nazi que muchos han querido ver en sus teorías (Nietzsche es un poeta, usa una retórica tan literaria que siempre es ambiguo y sugerente, pero no era un monstruo sólo un hombre que deseaba estar sano y disfrutar los placeres de la vida con intensidad y delicadez a la vez...

you would not read this book to understand nietzche's philosophy. it is not even clear to me why anyone needs to understand neitzche's philosophy. but lou salome is this crazy incredible lady. while married she become lovers with rilke and remained his intimate correspondent for all his life. she became intimate with nietsche. and later conquered freud, so to speak. so to me this book is an interesting artifact of this incredible woman's mind -- you don't read this book except as a way of knowing salome's mindfullness after rilke and nietzsche. that is, you read this book to learn something that you have to extrapolate from and fit into your life. it is not a passive reading. it is not school learning or becoming educated. it is trying to understand what sort of mind a woman would have that has done such gloriously free and courageous acts such as standing and lying toe2toe with three of the most visionary humanitarian thinkers -- it's an artifact. you read this to be your own archeologist into the human psyche. the content itself literally is of little interest if you want to become an expert in philosophical thinking in order to be a professional. this book isn't that at all. nobody would publish something like this today -- that is, without the hindsight of knowing who nietzsche and salome are now -- at the time this was published, that wasn't apparent, and without that apparentness, this book is no longer a kind of book our educated culture tolerates -- it is too subjective and does not follow any accepted rules of discourse that are recognized by our cultural canon. that is, you don't read this book for any of the reasons it was written or published. you read it because of who nietsche and salome turned out to be in terms of our intellectual flowering. of course, he was destroyed by his sister, who allowed the fascists to make shameful use of him the same way they made ill-use of evolution to justify genocide. you take nietzsche and darwin and if you are powerful enough you get 70-100 million dead without anyone believing they were not morally justified in their actions. nowadays, people seem to once again need religion to justify such pain and suffering for personal advantage. so i think everyone should buy this book and try to make sense of its author -- this is after rilke and N, but i think before freud. a snapshot of a brillian mindful woman articulating her extraordinary experiences ...

Unlike any other book on/about/by Nietzsche I have read, this one has a direct and personal angle. Here is an intelligent, educated woman writing about a man SHE KNEW and whose work she studied and helped him with. Her book is well-written, clear and lacking in any technical jargon, either philosophical or psychological. Not a bad choice for someone who has some familiarity with Nietzsche's work and wants to see just who he was.She paints a clear and believable portrait of a man who created his philosophy by wrestling with his own life, it's joys and pain. Thus we see not just that his work was incomparable, but the process that brought it into being was incomparable. As another reviewer said, an excellent addition to Nietzsche studies, especially showing what he went through to create what he did. There are those who will point out that Nietzsche's writing of "the overman", "the warrior" and such types is ironic considering he was polite and sickly. But it turns out in his own life, in his own mind, he was fighting a battle.