Abstract :
This essay examines the movement set in motion by reading to formulate the act of reading as an experience that transforms both the identity of the reader and the significations gathered in a text. I first focus on the Canadianpoet-essayist Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose (2012) to discuss “where” we go when we read and what happens to readerly identity during the act of reading. I then turn to Derrida’s work to study the implications that reading’s motions have on the rapport between text and reader. I argue that both Robertson and Derrida highlight the importance of reading in initiating a dialogue/pact between text and reader. They formulate an ethics of reading through an analysis of this pact, which foregrounds the dialogic nature of thinking and being. The pact between reader and text, self and alterity, is mutually binding and keeps them both suspended, postponing any closure of meaning. I furthermore demonstrate that Robertson and Derrida define reading by practicing it. As Robertson defines it, by staging a reading of Hannah Arendt and Pauline Réage, and as Derrida defines it by reading Paul Celan, they become enfolded in a multi-referential reading community. They place emphasis on the vitality of multiple, often illegible, agencies at work in textual encounters, and assert that readerly identity and textual meaning find the source of their creative potential in this illegibility. The essay develops a poetic- philosophical approach to theories of reading, and contributes to the existing scholarship on theories on authorship/readership and textual interpretation.
NaturalLanguageKeyword :
Reading , poetry , readerly identity , Robertson , Derrida
