Re-reading the Encyclopedia means rewriting it through self-investment

Evidence

Is neither the absolute spirit present in the reading of the Encyclopedia, nor the absolute objective spirit present in the encyclopedia as a book. It is actualized in the final, concrete identity of this book’s reading… . This concrete identity of the subjectivity of the speculative reader and the objectivity of the speculative text forbids us to consider their relation in the guise of a ‘having’, a possession …, a form of repetition… . A comprehensive reading of the Encyclopedia thus demands a personal engagement with its content; it is literally an adventure calling on the reader’s own self… . If the self of the reader must create the content of the Encyclopedia, in return the substance of its content must be at one with the reader, which means that to bring the Encyclopedia back to life means to create it again for and in oneself: to re-read the Encyclopedia is to rewrite it. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1243

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The claim that reading = rewriting, with no ‘outside the text,’ evokes Derrida’s ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ which Malabou herself invokes at 1244 — connects to the reader’s interest in who controls the redefinition of a figure.

Related

• Reading the Encyclopedia means rewriting it through personal engagement (similarity 0.93)