Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading

by Jeremy Fernando

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.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2009

Reviews

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one else has written a review for this book, so I will in hopes of convincing anyone who's interested in this book to read it.

I would highly recommend this work to anyone who was a fan of The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death. Many of The arguments and references Fernando makes throughout this work are very similar to (and in some cases the same as) the arguments he makes in The Suicide Bomber, which in itself is a testament to the ingenuity of Fernando's thought. The book is also written in the same mystical prose Fernando is so well known for. Fernando's style helps the work to come to life so that many of the ideas he writes of are not only expressed as ink on paper (as if our reading of the text had some form of direct 1:1 access to the text), but are preformed through the very interaction between the text and the reader - the text constantly attempts to write on your body, to leave a piece of it with you as much as you leave a piece of you with it, and Fernando's prose accomplishes this by constantly veiling and unveiling, not showing us glimpses of other possibilities yet to be actualized and shutting them off in our face, but rather by reminding us of the specters of these possibilities that constantly haunt our own reading of his text.

The first two chapters of the book (along with the introduction and preface) offer a very concise introduction to much of Fernando's thought (Because is not every engagement with an other a reading?), a scathing critique of prescriptive literary theory, and brief critiques of Kantian, Levinasian, and Zizekian ethics. If you haven't read The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death I highly recommend you read the first two chapters of this work before reading it.

The following four Chapters (broken up into two sections) offer performative applications of Fernando's thought that simultaneously build on his theory - at the risk of saying too much it's best that you read these not really knowing what to expect going in (especially the last chapter) as that wouldn't really allow for the form of constructive thinking Fernando hopes to inspire through his performance.

The work is a short read at around ~150 pages, but do not be deceived and believe that you will be able to sit down and read it for an afternoon and walk away, because this is where the beauty of the work resides. Despite the work's short length it will make you want to come back to it and reread it again and again, and not only to come back to it, but even go back to reread every text you've read with a new frame of mind, to allow every text you've read to be read again so it reads into you as much as you read into it, so you can once again feel the struggle between reader and text and yet again come out changed for it.

"And it is in this situation of absolute blindness-Saul was blind, whilst blind to the cause of his own blindness, as we are too-that the Christian is born. It is in this blindness that the third-the Christian-that ruptures the binary opposition of Jew-Gentile is born...Saul had no idea that his moment of blindness, of notseeing, of not-knowing-his illegitimate leap of faith-would lead to the birth of a new term, a new possibility. Only in this way might something new occur."

"This then leaves me with a situation that is impossible. I have attempted to lay out a process of what happens whenever one reads; by showing that it is an interplay between the reader and the text in the negotiated third, in which every instance of reading is a different instance and every meaning or interpretation chosen is a pure choice (based on nothing but madness, chosen in blindness), I am left with a situation in which all that can be said is that every time one reads, what happens is reading itself, a reading of both the text and the reader her- or himself. In this sense, all that is left for me to do is to demonstrate reading itself"