The aim of the working and reading group is to reflect on one's own interest and involvement in the doctoral project. With every project, in addition to questions of content, method and work practice, the question always arises: why is this topic or this project so important for me, for my very individual point of view?
I would very much like to sharpen our attention and sensitivity to this question with you, both in conversation and in reading together. An introductory reading would be, for example, the short text by Sigmund Freud on "Michelangelo's Moses". In it, Freud describes how he travels to Rome every year and has to visit this church where this Michelangelo statue stands, how he has to find out what this Moses is all about and then attempts a detailed analysis of this statue - an analysis of the relationship between the hand, the beard and the tablets of the law. This reading of his is subsequently beaten around the ears by all art historians because it is simply wrong, at least from an art historical perspective. Freud, however, held on to his analysis and his guiding interest in the statue of Moses throughout his life, even in his last book on the "Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion" from 1938. Besides Freud, other texts would also suggest themselves, for example by Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida or Stanley Cavell.