On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

Interminable Reading

22 Interminable Reading For that reason, painting has, during its history, given such a privileged place to the subjects of the book and reading. The man reading, the woman reading, the male or female bookworm, reciter, or reader [la liseuse, la lectrice ou le lecteur] are themselves also typic personages, for their type is that of the inexhaustible modalization and modulation of the book by reading, and of reading by the book. What is represented in a scene of reading? A gaze engrossed in a volume, a volume open for that gaze and opened by it, a mutual attraction and penetration. Perhaps the painter can find there a model or Idea for what he himself conceives of as gaze: not the distant vision of the object, but the thing’s call to attention, the vigil before essence, the lookout for imminence. What comes to the reader is a world, and that world comes to mingle with the plurality of worlds that he allows to inhabit him. Reading is a mêlée of worlds, a cosmogony in its genesis or its last agony, the potential, exponential, but always asymptotic 23 characterization of a first and last congruence, taking place within the book but also between it and the cosmography of its time, whether that time be that of its writing or one of the times of its reading, one of those so numerous and varied times that occur once the book “endures the test of time,” as we say. So it is that the reader of Plato, Montaigne, Milton or Lucan, James or Kafka , never finishes characterizing anew by means of their names and their titles—Essays, Castle, Pupil, Pharsalus, or Paradise—the polymorphous and protean schemes, the different (a)risings of storms or fevers, falls into torpor or sadness, precise or fleeting silhouettes, the whole heraldry of a galaxy that is each time put back into play, reformed , transformed. It used to be said that the world itself was a great book: that didn’t mean that its destiny was sealed in some kabbalistic scrawl; on the contrary, it showed that one had always, again and again, to manipulate its code, recombine its letters, and finally rewrite it. However full its history was of sound and fury—as is written in a book, and then, again, on the cover of another book—that sound 24 and fury are ours to concern ourselves with, and it is their accents and traits, their graphology, in a way, or their grammatology that we must recognize . The people of the Book that we are are people— riffraff [engeances], generations, peoples, populations —to whom sense has not been given. Those to whom sense was given, a consistent and complete world, nature with its gods and powers, are people of the Song or Stele, of the Hieroglyph or Seal. For us, nothing has been given deriving from one or another of those figures. And the book isn’t a figure of that kind. Each such figure, in fact, possesses at the outset a stature and tenor, measure and authority. The book, by contrast, has no form of assurance, nothing other than a buried, perhaps undiscoverable character, not hidden but rather dispersed, elusive, unrecognizable. Every book dreams of becoming Hieroglyph or Song, Stele or Seal. Each one wishes to represent itself to itself as a rune, or else as a casket full of rare coinage. But that desire is itself vague, errant, and the book would cease being a book if it were to change into a stone or a coffer. 2 To us no sense was given, instead, the commandment to read, not in order to find a sense that would have been hidden from us or refused us but in order to enter, in a quite different mode, into the space of an Idea that is precisely nothing other than the true and essential Form of the absence of given sense. Each book forms or formulates that Idea, each one characterizes and reiterates the effort to open once more its tracing—sinuous, uncertain , linear, but discontinuous, fragmentary, aleatory, multiple in itself as much as curled upon itself, in each case interminably so. It nevertheless remains—or rather, emerges all the more strongly—that all books are compilations of hieroglyphs, collections of sacred characters , and assemblages of icons and emblems that comprise a cipher with inextricable permutations, which each reader in turn undertakes...