Sigmund Freud haunts us, no doubt. But at a time when canons are being reexamined and intellectual genealogies (including hauntology) are being questioned, how relevant is it to excavate Freud and psychoanalysis more generally? Is it to undertake some sort of exorcism of our critical identifications, projections, and attachments vis-à-vis his work? There is a way, perhaps, to read Freud's text and our relation to it not in order to uncover Freud's truth or express loyalty to his theses and legacy. There is a way, no doubt, to enter through Freud's text not in order to find him at the end but precisely to lose him and upend in the process those readings that exclusively situate Freud within a specific genealogy of Western philosophy and theory.
As a scholar of theory and literature, I grapple with these questions all the time, recognizing that the voices of the thinkers we study...
