Against Interpretation

new answers!! (maybe everyone was too busy fite-ing yesterday)

I haven;t read it. when I do, I will revive the thread, I promise!

I read it once but was not impressed; unfortunately I can't remember enough of it to post to your thread. Well, post more than this.

I liked it when I read it in high school, but not so much anymore. Her genealogies (art as ritual vs. art as mimesis) are too rigid and perfunctory (too Momosified?), and her preference for ritual is idealized, as if just excising Freudian or Marxist interpretations (which is, after all, what she was primarily attacking) could heal the high modernist rift between ahht and culture/society/commodification. But then again I haven't read it in a while so this could all be misremembered horseshit.

There's a passage in "Under the Sign of Saturn" (her best essay, IMO) where she updates and, I think, improves upon AI re the role interpretation should play:

"Precisely because he [Walter Benjamin] saw that 'all human knowledge takes the form of interpretation,' he understood the importance of being against interpretation wherever it is obvious. His most common strategy is to drain symbolism out of some things, like the Kafka stories or Goethe's ELECTIVE AFFINITIES (texts where everybody agrees it is there), and pour it into others, where nobody suspects its existence (such as the German baroque plays, which he reads as allegories of historical pessimism). 'Each book is a tactic,' he wrote."

Another good thread idea. Funny how there has not been a Camp one. Only a Geeza one.