Summer Reading. 1.

Starting today, and over the next couple of weeks, excerpts from longish pieces you might consider taking to the beach or the porch or elsewhere in whatever form. Summer reading. Oh, we'll still point to the newsy stuff. But the pace won't be as hectic until things start roaring again sometime in August. And we begin with a piece that brings news to the notion of reading itself, "Six degrees of Nosferatu" by Thomas Elsaesser, from the February 2001 issue of Sight & Sound:

What is this surplus energy or meaning that brings forth these figures of excessive but also inextinguishable desire? Excess there is, yet is it actually a matter of desire? "We bring them the plague, and they don't even know it," Freud is supposed to have said to Jung the day the two of them disembarked in New York harbour in 1908.

[...]

Psychoanalysis and the cinema - born together, but on a collision course ever since. Freud was right: they are antagonists, but they came together against a common enemy it now seems it was their historical mission to kill - literature and the literary author. For the first 100 years, the technological media and psychoanalysis competed over literature's prime task and near-monopoly: representing, that is recording, storing and repeating, individual human experience. Cinema and psychoanalysis translated experience into images and sounds, texts and traces, manifest as physical symptoms or as phantom sensations.

Posted by dwhudson at July 16, 2003 9:14 AM