Interpretation is always provisional and promised to future readers

Evidence

Hegel may well be the first philosopher to think that the author is not a ‘fixed and solid subject’ but an instance of writing, conceived in the joint play and speaking of two subjects of enunciation: a speculative reader, and the one who wrote because he was, first and above all, a speculative reader. Interpretation is a production that presupposes the accident which gave it birth, which by the same token accepts that it cannot be definitive but promised to other readers. ‘Plastic’ reading has its place in an exegetical economy which, because there is nothing ‘outside the text (hors texte)’, places the text absolutely outside itself. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1244

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: For the reader’s enemy question: a figure whose redefinition escapes its definers mirrors interpretation that is never definitive but promised to others — the plasticity of the enemy-as-accident sliding into essence parallels this authorless textuality.

Related

• Speculative propositions exist only by being rewritten, never by initial reading (similarity 0.86)
• Reading a speculative proposition requires transforming meaning through interpretation (similarity 0.84)
• Reading Hegel requires a beginning that both foresees and does not foresee what follows (similarity 0.84)
• Speculative statements can only be read by being rewritten (similarity 0.83)
• Absolute knowledge depends on interpretive reading with no privileged author (similarity 0.82)
• The Hegelian future is neither foreseeable nor hidden but an in-between (similarity 0.82)
• Plasticity is experienced as the act of reading the speculative proposition (similarity 0.81)
• Readings that efface subjectivity to reach universality are actually particular and arbitrary (similarity 0.81)
• The future is neither fully visible nor invisible but frustrates anticipation by surprise (similarity 0.81)
• Philosophical propositions are fundamentally unreadable on first reading (similarity 0.80)
• Substance contains its own future reinterpretations as virtual attributes. (similarity 0.80)
• The future is neither wholly invisible nor foreseeable but surprises by precipitation (similarity 0.80)
• Philosophy’s self-knowledge is an act of reading, not passive contemplation (similarity 0.80)
• Reading a speculation means joining the proposition’s backward movement toward its origin (similarity 0.80)
• Hegel’s philosophy becomes an event when taken to its speculative limit (similarity 0.79)