Reading
Possibility for a course: Start with a reading list made up of only one book, or even one article. Read that text carefully, with class discussion. Then do the same with everything it refers to. Then read the references in those ...
is never just the transmission of something from the past into the present. Reading goes backwards. We always read a text from and through a future which is strictly unforeseeable to it, even unimaginable. We read The Merchant of Venice after the Holocaust, Hamlet after Freud. Even if we declare ourselves non-Freudian, we are reading in a way profoundly different to that any Elizabethan reader did or could: there were no non-Freudians in Shakespeare's day, any more than there were Freudians.
This is not something which makes authentic reading impossible, a "reading-into" which risks putting any original meaning out of reach behind the screens of what we bring to it. On the contrary: that gap of futurity is what makes reading of any sort possible. It is not a gap between the text and the reader, between the object read and the subject doing the reading. It's a gap internal to textuality: without it, there are no texts, no reading. Texts are read from somewhere which is both internal to them and utterly unforeseeable to them. They are divided against themselves not because they are fallen, imperfect things, the only groping way we dull sublunary beings have of making sense, but because that division, that non-coincidence with itself, is what makes sense possible. It's not a restraint on sense, but its very possibility.
Texts are not unitary. The basic model is not a single unitary object, but a number of things, potentially all quite different, facing each other across a gap. Even within a single text, something is always reading something else, being read through something else, being read from elsewhere. This elsewhere is a future, in that it has not yet happened; it is an absolute future, in that it is not a provisional gap which will be filled in at some time yet to come, but something which has to remain open for there to be a text, or reading.
We read backwards. We never read a text in full prior knowledge of everything that text knows and everything it has read. At some point or another, we have no choice but just to jump in. If there's anything we don't know but need to, we pick some of it up from context. If we're interested enough, we actually go back and read the texts referred to. Not needing to know everything to begin with is what lets us start; to withhold starting until all the background reading's been done is to put off starting indefinitely. Ignorance is enabling. The same thing goes with writing a thesis. To refuse to start the writing until you've done all the reading is an excuse for not writing. Any writing is done in the face of its own ignorance.The question of reading is linked to the question of time.
