Mark Whelan #4 Print

And I think that precisely this tension is what makes him a truly modern writer. The temptation is to simplify Freud, to reduce him to a simple natural scientist but it’s precisely in his writing that you find this modern complexity. Freud is the opposite of the simple guy who sees things the way they are and is then able to translate his insights into ordinary language. When Freud gets into his writing, in one way or another, he loses the thread. He writes in a state of trance. This is already for him a necessary condition for writing. And I think that the same goes for me —that it's precisely the more I am engaged with strictly scientific theories with the idea of truth and so on, the stronger my need is to write it in a different mode in a different style, in order to properly formulate it. For both Herzog and myself, it's very important where we place these two options the mode of scientific propositions and the mode of literary expression.