Vice-Presidential Plenary Seminar: Reading and Its Vicissitudes

The title of this plenary seminar is intended to echo the English translation of Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay entitled “Drives and Their Vicissitudes.” Of course, I have never been able to resist the alternative rendering of Schicksale in “Triebe und Triebschicksale” as “destinies,” since the libidinal economy that psychoanalysis discovers insinuates the inescapability of the unconscious for any “ich” that would deign to displace an “es.” Yet even if the unconscious seemingly unfolds like a fate that cannot be completely averted (if at all), the organism will nevertheless strive to “die” only in its own way, as Freud subsequently claims, by deflecting alternative routes.

To the extent that the drive to forestall one’s end in order to secure it in one’s own time is generative and, perhaps, infinitely so, it resembles the interpretative work of reading and re-reading texts that defy closure. If the prospect of such closure is, for beloved texts, a fantasy we never genuinely hope to fulfill, then reading itself behaves like a drive that is fated, happily, never to achieve its aim.

In the spirit of viewing reading as a drive, the topic of this seminar might serve as a prompt to model the cathected and generative valences of interpretation: how one reads as co-extensive with the rhythms of (how one) desires. What are the textual objects and approaches that have repeatedly inspired the most satisfying or freeing forms of meaning creation as a paradoxically “death-driven” deferral of closure?

In this vein, I am inviting a few of my favourite readers to speak self-consciously about your own reading practices as they illuminate your “peculiar” archives, your “obsessions” with certain authors or texts, or even fields that initiate new inquiries and intelligibilities. Alternatively, presenters might also consider the conditions upon which artful reading flourishes or succumbs to the “discipline of the market,” fading curiosity, and a puritanical hatred of intellect. What are or can be the destinies of reading under these conditions in and beyond our classrooms where textual pleasure is squandered or embraced?