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Chapter 11. Guilty Reading
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Chapter 11 GUILTY READING Usually this taking care of the commentary is just considered to be the necessary condition of something called scholarship, but I invite all to consider the possibility that scholarship can be a more or less polite name for reading avoidance (which does not presume that we know what reading, without the avoidance, is). Thomas Pepper Writing has no sooner begun than it inseminates itself with another reading. Jean-Michel Rabaté Reading . . . must not claim to reveal hidden meaning, to translate the text into which its proper, literal language of meaning; reading must pose itself as an act which sets the text to work, as a work which deconstructs textual oppositions to testify to figural differences. Bill Readings I W hat is it to read? How are we to answer this question? Is it answerable? Will we have done with it at the end of this chapter? The very difficulty of answering lies in the apparent simplicity, the naked transparency of this 251 question. All at once it appears readable and yet, for all that, remains to be read, if not unreadable. We cannot escape this problem. II 1968 seems like a good year from which to begin, and to which to return , if we are to speak of the question of reading, and to talk about this act of reading, moreover, that does not assume itself to be innocent. Indeed , it appears desirable, if not necessary, as an introductory polemical gesture or opening gambit—as a means of seeking to read reading—to state that guilty reading “began” in the year in which Reading Capital was published, even though it has been suggested that a more significant moment of which a kind of reading was the product was not, in fact, this year at all. Rather, another provisional starting point might be the Algerian War of Independence. For example, Robert Young begins White Mythologies: Writing History and the West with the following statement : “If so-called ‘so-called poststructuralism’ is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence—no doubt itself both a symptom and a product.”1 That is not true, of course, strictly speaking. It is neither true nor not true. As a statement concerning the beginning of reading, it is at least guilty of a kind of rhetorical manipulation in the interests of reading differently , so to speak. But, then, neither is the statement with which we began true, absolutely. However, these appear to be readings, of sorts, even if they avoid reading or acknowledge, indirectly, that reading is deferred . They might perhaps be “strong readings,” if this phrase is read as suggesting that they are not readings at all, but are, instead, statements that are keen to present a position, regardless of reading. If they have any virtue, these two statements at least present the possibility of a spacing of “beginning-to-read.” No single origin, therefore. This is still a guilty act. We have just admitted as much, though not in so many words. And guilt, the admission, and the concomitant question of responsibility implicated in any guilty act, is also an appropriate place from where to start, even if the moment of introduction is both a double gesture, a deferral, and an excuse. Nevertheless, one has to begin somewhere, perhaps where one always begins, in the folds of a citation. The first clause of the previous sentence 252 Reading to Come [54.162.130.75] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:26 GMT) offers one possible answer to a question put by Roland Barthes as the title of an essay: “Where to begin?.”2 It also echoes a comment made by Geoffrey Bennington—“We must begin somewhere, but there is no absolutely justified beginning”3 —which, in beginning the third division of his “Derridabase ,” is not so much a beginning, not a beginning as such, as it is a reiteration, a recapitulation, of remarks made by Jacques Derrida, first in Of Grammatology: The first gesture of this departure and this deconstruction, although subject to a certain historical necessity, cannot be given methodological or logical intraobitary assurances. . . . The opening of the question, the departure from the closure of a self–evidence, the putting into doubt of a system of oppositions . . . these errant questions are not absolute beginnings in every way, they allow themselves to be effectively reached, on one entire surface, by this description which is also...