Reading Blindly attempts to conceive of the possibility of an
ethics of reading--"reading" being understood as the relation to an
other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification,
and therefore prior to any attempt at assimilating what is being
read to the one who reads. Hence, "reading" can no longer be
understood in the classical tradition of hermeneutics as a
deciphering according to an established set of rules as this would
only give a minimum of correspondence, or relation, between the
reader, and what is read. In fact, "reading" can no longer be
understood as an act, since an act by necessity would impose the
rules of the reader upon the structure of what (s)he encounters; in
other words the reader would impose herself upon the text. Since it
is neither an act nor a rule-governed operation, "reading" needs to
be thought as an event of an encounter with an other--and more
precisely an other which is not the other as identified by the
reader, but heterogeneous in relation to any identifying
determination. Being an encounter with an undeterminable other--an
other who is other than other--"reading" is hence an unconditional
relation, a relation therefore to no fixed object of relation.
Hence, "reading" can be claimed to be the ethical relation par
excellence. Since "reading" is a pre-relational relationality, what
the reader encounters, however, may only be encountered before any
phenomenon: "reading" is hence a non-phenomenal event or even the
event of the undoing of all phenomenality. This is a radical
reconstitution of reading positing blindness as that which both
allows reading to take place and is also its limit. As there is
always an aspect of choice in reading--one has to choose to remain
open to the possibility of the other-- Reading Blindly, by
extension, is also a rethinking of ethics; constantly keeping in
mind the impossibility of articulating an ethics which is not
prescriptive. Hence, Reading Blindly is ultimately an attempt at
the impossible: to speak of reading as an event. And since this is
un-theorizable--lest it becomes a prescriptive theory-- Reading
Blindly is the positing of reading as reading, through reading,
where texts are read as a test site for reading itself. Ostensibly,
Reading Blindly works at the intersections of literature and
philosophy; and will interest readers who are concerned with either
discipline. However as reading is re-constituted as a
pre-relational relationality, it is also a re-thinking of
communication itself--a rethinking of the space between; the medium
in which all communication occurs--and by extension, the very
possibility of communicating with each other, with another. As
such, this work is, in the final gesture, a meditation on the
finitude and exteriority in literature, philosophy--calling into
question the very possibility of correspondence, and
relationality--and hence knowledge itself. For all that can be
posited is that reading first and foremost is an acknowledgement
that the text is ultimately unknowable; where reading is positing,
and which exposes itself to nothing--and is in fidelity to
nothing--but the possibility of reading.
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