| Chapter 1: | Blindness, or What Is This No-Thing We See? |
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Every time there is a sensation in the phantom limb, it is an event, unknowable until the moment in which it is felt; it is both preobjective and presubjective, preceding both the cognitive subject and also the very object of cognition itself. So, even as the phantom-limb pain is treatable in the realm of the imagination, this is a treatment of its symptoms; the cause, and the very status of the sensation itself, remains unknown and ultimately unknowable.
Just because something is not written on a page does not mean that it is not there. Perhaps in order to read properly, one must always respond to both what is and what is not—or at least seems not to be—there. 16 Perhaps, then, reading is the effect—the sensation—that lies beyond both the reader and the text; it is something that can only be experienced in its singular situation and known, at best, only retrospectively. Or, more radically still, one must always treat the absent as a (potential) present; it is, after all, the ghosts—the phantoms that haunt the text—that maintain the unknowability of the text, that keep it from becoming a book.
The Book as a (Death) Sentence
The moment a religion shifts from a movement, a constantly changing, morphing, and becoming, into stagnancy—being, a doctrine, a book (and, more precisely, a prescriptive book)—all