Freud 1
What I appreciate about The Future of an Illusion [FOI] is that it is short enough to read and straightforward enough to grasp. I have read the text just about each time I have offered the course, so that makes it about four times. I am reading the text yet again, this time through the eyes of a “blogger”. I must confess that I am finding the richer than I remembered. There is so much to discuss. Blogging it makes me look at it with even more critical eyes. That is part of the point of scholarly blogging. I hope my students can get a bit of the blogging bug, or at least gain some useful experience in approaching a text slowly and critically. We shall see.
The flip side of finding a text so intriguing is that there is always a danger that one becomes so fascinated by a topic that one abandons one’s prior field or person of interest and falls in madly love with this new and exciting paramour. Maybe it will be a fling and you regain your senses, but maybe not.
I remember taking a Kant seminar from Pierre Keller when I was at working on my PhD at Claremont. He told us that Kant had not always been his research field. He first was focused on Aristotle. How could anyone dump Aristotle for Kant, I wondered. Well, Pierre found Kant so confusing, so aggravatingly dense and baffling, that he spent hours and hours trying to untangle the text. Of course, you have to do that in the original German. So Greek was switched to German. Before he knew it he was smitten.
I shall take the risk since there is not much chance of my forsaking Aristotle for Freud.