The Possibility of Criticism: A Response to Nelly Richard's "The Language of Criticism: How to Speak Difference?"

If a book‚ its letter‚ can no longer reconfigure its traces and always responds with the same grimace to whoever interrogates or manipulates it; if a book definitively has no mother or father that can help and justify it in its spectacle of black against white‚ and has to fatally avail‚ with no other choice‚ to the starch of its signified; if this is so‚ then a book says only what a reading of it says. Whatever it may be, the reading victoriously erects itself over the book‚ producing its “originality.” And although the desire of someone may be to kill it‚ or make it say things that embarrass it‚ even that reading gives life to the book. The reading both demolishes and gives life to the letter. Although it attempts to close it‚ it opens it. It opens it in order to close it. Because without a reception‚ a publication is a crypt that no one visits. Regarding the reception of the publication Sobre arboles y madres, Patricia Marchant‚ its author, quoted the following from Nicanor Parra: “Not before ten years can one know the value or the lack of value of a book.” And, he added‚ “If in the moment of its appearance, it does not sell and is not criticized—except for the isolated criticism of a friend or a personal enemy‚ or in the case of genius—you can bet that you are dealing with a book that was born dead.”

Among the many readings that can be leveled at a book‚ I can imagine only one that any book would try to avoid suffering. And this is not the one that kills a little‚ like Nelly Richard’s reading does to The Unmodern Crisis of the Modern University—to kill a little is to give life; but the one that definitively finishes it off‚ exhausting its signified in an account that capitalizes on it to the point where nothing more, besides it‚ can be read in the book‚ and the account imposes itself as the text that must be read. But is something like this possible? Is it possible to exhaust the signified of a text? Is there an exhaustible death under the letter? In any case the book universally fears being exhausted by a reading that makes it dispensable. In this sense every book is “fear of God.” Fortunately for the books, God is no more than the university “super I” of themselves.

A book is the history of its reception. Not everything that circulates as a publication and offers itself up as a book is one. That a bound object is or is not a book depends not on its starting point but on its arrival, on the history of its reception. And the reception begins on the day of its launching, in the scene of its presentation. There a book is treated for the first time, or carved up, which is what happened to The Unmodern Crisis of the Modern University in Nelly Richard’s presentation‚ a text categorically tilted toward one of the poles with which the book‚ as I read it, undecidedly plays: Closure, asphyxia, the end of meaning and the possibility of meaning, the apocalypse of criticism, etc.

To tilt a book on the day of its presentation traumatizes it on its first day. That is a temptation that many of us have and that, in general, we repress, with the consideration that a traumatic beginning could overwhelm the newborn. To be presented by a reading that politically installs it in the autocomplacency of the transited intellectuals is to make the poor book blush on its first day‚ and it weakens its primordial politics—especially if, as I see it‚ it provides a reading of the transition...