ABSTRACT
Curatorship—the practice of curating—is, to put it bluntly, a dangerous practice. Contemporary debates over curatorship thus will be more adequately understood and reckoned with as aspects of this more fundamental discourse. A very great deal is therefore at stake in the critique of curatorship. In a Bildungsroman, subjectivity or identity is understood not as permanent or fixed or unchangeable, but rather as an ongoing, dynamically evolving process: a continuing creation or fabrication and the dynamism of curatorship. One of William Shakespeare’s most famous, complex, and challenging plays was called The Tragedy of Hamlet, King of Denmark. Sigmund Freud’s fascination with Shakespeare’s Hamlet concerned what is repressed in memory—phenomena that would later return in another form or in another place in one’s consciousness, a return of the repressed. Deleuze, Guattari, and Hjelmslev always insisted upon the open-endedness of texts and books and upon their being occasions for continuity through the creativity and artistry of users.
