Recent linguistic analyses indicate a dramatic rise in the use of the word obsession over the last decade, a surge coinciding with a remarkable shift in its meaning. Although the term acquired its modern sense through a transition from a theological frame of possession to a psychoanalytic discourse of pathology, today obsession has largely lost its pejorative connotations. Rather than signaling a fixation, it functions as a socially acceptable expression of admiration or enthusiasm (“I’m obsessed!”). 

The very etymology of the term denotes obsession’s ambivalence. Originating in Latin as a military metaphor (obsidere), it evokes the image of a subject besieged by an intrusive force. The German Besessenheit (“being possessed”) makes this passivity even more explicit: “obsession” only exists as a condition of being overtaken. Despite historical transformations and across myriad uses, obsession continues to unite two seemingly contradictory impulses: the desire for complete mastery over an object juxtaposed with a longing to surrender, to relinquish mastery altogether—to become possessed. 

This constellation raises a broader theoretical question: does obsession reside in exceptional objects, in the psyche of the observer, or in the social and cultural structures through which particular objects come to command extraordinary attention?

For Paul Valéry, the obsessive quality lies not in any particular object or representation, but in the mode of its appropriation. His idée fixe is defined not by its content but by its operation: a thought returns with compulsive persistence until it functions as an intellectual idol that organizes experience and resists critical revision. For Freud, obsession, like religious ritual, transforms the logic of signification itself. Everyday expressions become detached from their metaphorical meanings and are taken literally, producing a closed symbolic world governed by rigid interpretive rules.

Literature has long explored obsession as both a theme and an aesthetic mode of address. From Ariosto's Orlando Furioso to Melville’s Moby-Dick, from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men to Junji Ito's Uzumaki, literary texts not only stage the tension between mastery and surrender, desire and compulsion, but also ask the reader to engage in an obsessive reading.  

In this seminar, we want to examine how cultural theories of obsession might serve as a critical tool for literary analysis, and conversely, how literary texts shed light on the theoretical and aesthetic modes that structure obsessive reading. We invite proposals across disciplines, on topics including but not limited to:

• conceptual histories and semantic transformations of obsession
• paranoid reading and hermeneutics
• repetition, ritual, and compulsion across media
• archives, hoarding, and encyclopedic writing
• digital cultures of obsession from fandom to self-obsession
• affect, desire, addiction, and attachment.