J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading: Literature After Deconstruction by Éamonn Dunne (review)

One of the central questions Éamonn Dunne addresses in his remarkable study of Hillis Miller's work as literary critic and theorist is how one does justice to what one reads. While this is the main focus of the book's chapter titled "Just Reading," the question is pursued throughout and is never really allowed to subside. On the contrary, Dunne doubles up or doubles down on the question more than once when he reminds us that it is not just Miller's as he reads and writes about literature or theory but must also be, a fortiori, his own, Dunne's. Dunne, above all, would do justice to Miller's oeuvre, which is itself a manifold exploration of what it might mean to do justice to another's writing.

But if justice can never be merely a matter of calculation, of applying the law to a case that is thereby made to fall fully within it, then it will somewhere have to entail a leap outside the bounds of what is known or even knowable. In other words, if it is possible to do justice, then this act (doing justice) must somewhere, somehow allow for the incalculable. This means that the possibility of doing justice in reading is indissociable from the impossibility of realizing this in the full presence of knowledge to itself, without remainder. Consequently, one will never know in the present that one is or has been just as a reader.

For Dunne, this logic of the impossible possibility, of the impossibility (to take over Derrida's mode of spacing out the differance of possibility/impossibility) of justice is essential to his understanding of the significance of Miller's oeuvre. It is one of the reasons he completes the title and the name "J. Hillis Miller" by using a phrase with possibilities: "and the Possibilities of Literature." In his preface, Dunne outlines very lucidly some of the possibilities of that titling phrase. The question it suspends—rather than answers—is precisely that of how to read and thus how to read rightly, justly, doing justice to what one reads. He writes:

This is one reason why my title refers to possibilities of reading, and why I also believe that good reading, perhaps the only kind of reading worthy of the name, comes about as an inaugural event that changes one's views about what that "how to" in reading actually means.

(x, emphasis in the original)

The question "how to" hangs suspended from those acts we call reading. Acts worthy of that name are of the same good kind, Dunne believes. They lead one to suspend the question of "how to read" from an "inaugural event," whereby something radically unfigurable, secret, unaccountable, or unknowable hovers at and marks the limit of known possibility.

According to Dunne, this secret, unaccountable something is fascinating; it fascinates the reader who is Hillis Miller:

The strength of Miller's work is that it is endlessly fascinated and fascinating as a result. I have been drawn to these writings by a shared fascination with what is unaccountable in works of literature I have read, studied, and taught over the years. This book was written in the hope that this fascination might proliferate and perhaps even instruct, though one can never know for sure what will happen in the event of it being read.

(xi-xii)

Notice how fascination proliferates through this passage, as if it were right away fulfilling the promise or hope it utters here—that "this fascination" proliferate. Miller's work, we read, is "endlessly fascinated and fascinating as a result." Something begins to repeat here but also to divide onto at least two surfaces, fascinated and fascinating, touched and touching. It is the spacing of a certain difference within it that proliferates as fascination. Thus, when one speaks, as Dunne does here, of "a shared fascination," one cannot entirely know what that means. For...