“Peter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push and pull between temporalities and voices? Why do we keep leaving the text when we seek to obey the injunction to stay within its terms?
Questions such as these produce a fresh, even startling, consideration of a wide range of literary and popular texts, including Hobbes’ Leviathan, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kant’s moral injunctions, Sade, Valéry, Blanchot, and de Certeau, but also modern fiction, film, audiobooks, and hypertext. The power of reading turns out to belong to its surprising engagement with time and direction: the deliberate reader stays close but strays, tries to fill in the gaps but gets pushed back by a countercurrent. The key to the text is sought ‘outside’ only to be led back to the text and its failure to deliver a final answer. Equally at odds with older versions of literary formalism that insist on the self-referentiality of the text as well as contextualists who scour an external social order to discover the truth of the text, Szendy approaches that very conflict as an oscillation constitutive of reading itself. Paradoxically, reading is sustained precisely by what interrupts its teleological flow.
The result is a comic, profound, and timely reconceptualization of reading which rushes forward only to find itself pushed back into the heart of the text, which discovers that this incessant breaking from the text, this headlong rushing ahead to the world outside the text is a sequence of overreach, delay, and return that forms the ragged rhythm of reading itself. Powers of Reading is a patient, brilliant, and illuminating inquiry into the crosscurrents of voice and address, one that speaks to the speed and complexity of our time, how we are upended by our forward propulsions, to consider how multiple voice, action, and passivity are all rearranged in the scene of reading.”— Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley
“What was—and is—reading? Ranging from a playful analysis of what it feels like to be read to, to an erudite account of judicial systems that alternately censor books and condemn readers to read them, to a revelatory reconstruction of the role of the slave in Plato’s dialogues, this elegant series of essays uses a wide range of literary and philosophical texts to launch an inquiry into the philosophical stakes of an everyday practice.” — Leah Price, Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University
“Szendy offers us one of the most acute political philosophies of reading of our time. Reading inverts the Hegelian dialectical process of freedom, to the extent that there exists, in each reader, a slave who commands and a master who obeys. Literacy coincides with the birth of an inner voice that, even if whispering and always on the verge of disappearing, forces us to decipher, making it impossible to say what we didn’t know. From Plato to Sade, from neurology to hermeneutics, the law of reading appears as what it is: the inescapable burden of responsibility.” — Catherine Malabou, Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine
