Dear Daniel, thank you for starting this discussion, and thanks as well for your question.

As you mention, there has been a critical tendency to be skeptical or even dismissive of interpretation in the last few decades. In the early 70s, Deleuze and Guattari derided psychoanalysis as suffering from "interpretosis" and mocked its obsession with reducing all assemblages to Oedipal triangles. This critical wave has had some longevity; as recently as a few years ago the great literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht published The Production of Presence, a book whose German translation was Beyond hermeneutics, and whose main argument was that literary and cultural theorists have for too long been obsessed with the meaning of phenomena to the detriment of other forms of experience and criticism.

"The Philosopher's Desire" is not a polemic against these positions; rather, my argument is that the explicit attack on psychoanalysis was too blunt, and has left a wake of guilt by association. Even at conferences I have attended this year I have continued to hear Deleuzian-inspired attacks on psychoanalytic theory's reductive interpretive methodologies, although it has been many years since I have actually encountered such a reductive interpretation in the flesh, as it were. One of the main points of the book, then, was to show how psychoanalytic practice, as described in foundational texts by Freud and Lacan, have long been engaging in forms of interpretation that are far from the simple parodies that theorists have often taken them for. One of the reasons it makes sense to use the term "interpetation" instead of jettisoning it as so much used baggage, then, is that for much of the term's history, and specifically in its psychoanalytic and philosophical-hermeneutic usages, it has connoted an active, productive power rather than the passive replacement of rich surface with dead structure that it has at times been made out to be.

It's a great idea Daniel, and thanks for joining us Prof. Egginton.
I'll respond to the question of "a shuttling back and forth between terms that produces meaning in its movement rather than finding meaning already there," and " it has connoted an active, productive power rather than the passive replacement of rich surface with dead structure that it has at times been made out to be."

I find this idea very interesting, but I can also sense resistance to it. Let me try to flesh-out what we are talking about.
Let's take as an example interpretations of paintings. The old basic way of interpretation of a painting was to show the underlining lines below it, how the painter structures it the painting, the energy and power it creates by a balance of pulls and pushes in the different directions. Now the assumption is that after the interpreter explains everything to us, the rulers s/he put on the painting in order to explain it to us, the blue print they uncovered for us, will be lifted and we will look at the original painting. We will then be able to see everything they explained on the original painting without the added blueprint. (This will work better if I could bring examples but I can't find any. I remember seeing movies about this, which might be on youtube, so if anybody sees one it would be good to add here).
By this view the interpreter comes and reveals the hidden structure which we can then see without the glasses the interpreter gives us.

An opposing view, which I think you share William, is that there is no longer an original picture. That the rulers the interpreter put on the picture are left there and no one can actually see the original picture anymore without the rulers, so to speak, being on top of it. For example, Laurie Anderson, in her great interpretive show on Moby-Dick, had a chapter which didn't appear in the book but only in the movie (or something like that. I don't remember exactly). Moby-Dick is no longer the original one but the accumulations of all interpretations after it.

Simple enough, but here it becomes trickier. In the discussion on ,Van Gogh,  Jean de Saint Blanquat mentions (post) :
"Emperor Justinian having said in his Code that "someone else's painting can become the property of a painter who paints something over it". Which was not the case for a writer writing something over someone else's manuscript."
(There is an ensuing discussion on that point there). Hence the interpreter in our case will become the owner of the painting and be considered the painter him/herself. I think this is difficult to accept for many people and the fact that interpreters want that role for themselves is not surprising.

But there is a deeper reason why interpretation has lost favor from the 70s as you say, and it is exactly because of this point. People are obsessed with authenticity and truth. The importance of the Urtext edition in music is mentioned by Edna Stern in her post in the discussion on the current obsession with Truth. People want to reach the original, the authentic, and telling them it is impossible, or worse that it is not important, is not very popular.

What do interpretations leave on a painting? On any art work? I think this is an important question in understanding interpretation as movement.

Hi Arthur, thanks for the reply and excellent question. Let me juxtapose your anecdote with another, perhaps apocryphal, but fun nonetheless. Apparently Picasso, in his later, more-famous-than-God days, was approached in a café by two art students who had found what they thought was one of his etchings in a street market. They showed it to him and asked if it was his, at which point he pulled out his pen and signed it, saying, "now it is."

The question you pose of what interpretations leave on a painting opens up the problem of interpretation beautifully. The example of the interpretation that reveals the underlying structure of a painting presents us with an image of the truth of a work of art that corresponds with what I call the philosopher's desire. The argument against this is not that there is no underlying structure, but rather that the image of truth presented by posing that underlying structure as the exclusive goal of interpretation deceives us in two ways: first, by belying the productive work of the interpretation (which had to decide, for example, that meaning in this case was equivalent to erased drawings, as opposed to any number of other pertinent factors) and second, by substituting an image (in this case the particular set of lines constituting the hidden drawing) for a symbolic process (answering the question of the painting's meaning).

When Picasso signed (or didn't) what might have been someone else's painting, did he hide the original? Did he plagiarize something that was not his? Did he add value to something valueless by the mere appropriation of it, as one might claim Duchamp did with the urinal? Or is it not possible that each of these interpretations has something to it, depending on the question we ask?