The reader’s insistence on remaining himself blocks genuine reading

Evidence

In this way, it is the ‘knowing I’, prisoner of the ‘referential illusion’, who occults true reading. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot remarks: ‘What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s reality, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads – a man who knows in general how to read.’ This immodesty can even be the result of the very operation that ostensibly abolishes it. Its consequence is that the reader, instead of sticking to the text, looks for its intention. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1234

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘readability’ in the speculative sense: the immodesty of the knowing I, not lack of skill, is what threatens and occult the true reading.
• CANDY: ‘The immodesty of the reader who knows how to read’ is a quotable, tweetable paradox.
• XREF: connects to: Speculative reading demands the self lose form then recover it — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1224; Reading colonial sources requires disorienting oneself rather than finding stable meaning — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 699; Reading is never a neutral event — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 605

Broader Connections

• Speculative reading demands the self lose form then recover it #expands (0.90) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1224
• Reading colonial sources requires disorienting oneself rather than finding stable meaning #expands (0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 699