EDITH KURZWEIL
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analyses. When we want to be interdisciplinary, we choose an inter–
disciplinary topic and address it from the different kinds of discourse .
For instance, in my university we now have a research group on the
theme of crisis: what is a crisis - in literature, philosophy, ideology,
religion, and so on. We go back to the sixteenth century, and look at
it in the seventeenth, the nineteenth and the twentieth century . In
order to analyze such an ambiguous topic, we do so in terms of lin–
guistics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, etcetera . Thus every
scholar is obliged to be on top of all these discourses, rather than
wait for the various specialists to supply their expertise.
EK:
In other words, as one used to say, you have to make it all your
own.
JK:
Yes, it supposes that you don't belong to your own discipline
alone, but that you broaden and enrich it.
EK:
Personally, I've always found this very appealing.
JK:
Well, it may seem
un peu dilettante,
but it's not.
EK:
I wanted to ask you something else, about your work as a psy–
choanalyst.
It
seems to me that it's one thing to be in therapy and an–
other actually to treat patients. You must have had a great deal more
training and, I assume, a didactic analysis, so that you really are en–
gaged in two enterprises. Do you find that the two mingle?
JK:
Literary criticism and the practice?
EK:
Yes . Do you find that seeing patients and sitting behind the
couch or across from it, whichever way you do it, and listening to
peoples' problems over and over again, helps you with your literary
activities?
JK:
Yes, it helps. And it does something else. I'll try to explain what
it does, and how this illuminates literary works. Theoretical develop–
ment, I believe, achieved a very high level of speculation, of abstrac–
tion, and thus brought something new into European culture . But
also this abstraction presupposes a split from practice that is a source
of a "malaise" in our culture. Hannah Arendt talked about it in the
controversey over distinctions between work and labor, and between
practice and speculation. Literary and philosophical work is specula–
tion. At the same time, you get more involved by helping people and
by changing real situations. After all, one of the post-Hegelian, that
is of the Marxist, issues was to unite separate fields of human activ–
ity. So far, the various solutions have been more or less dreadful, be–
cause they either betrayed the purity and sharpness of intellectual
work, or they proposed practical solutions that were dogmatic and
somewhat dangerous. Psychoanalysis, it seems to me, can bring them
