Product Description
by William Egginton (Author)
In this book, William Egginton argues for the centrality of a psychoanalytic notion of interpretation for philosophy and literary theory.
Front Jacket
This book is about interpretation as it pertains to literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. It argues against certain trends of thought that claim we should do without interpretation by demonstrating that interpretation, as described by psychoanalysis, is already a fundamental aspect of all human experience. Egginton examines the idea of interpretation developed by Freud; how that notion was in turn changed by Lacan; the debate around psychoanalytic interpretation staged by philosophers like Deleuze and Derrida; and finally how a psychoanalytic notion of interpretation is necessary for even the most basic experience of consciousness.
Back Jacket
This tightly wound and carefully crafted treatise reads like wonderful detective fiction. It brings together dominant twentieth-century interpretive practices usually understood to be in opposition to one another in order to focus on a singular object of interpretation they have in common: that of the philosopher's desire. In tying together psychoanalysis, phenomenological hermeneutics, deconstruction, and literary practice, this book makes a significant contribution to the current fields of psychoanalysis and criticism in general and establishes its author as a leading theorist of psychoanalytic commentary.--Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University
Author Biography
William Egginton is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Perversity and Ethics (Stanford, 2006) and How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity(2003).
