Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

there must be an attention to, a reading of, the small, the unnoticed, the little, and a blindness to a large, the whole. In this way, there is a potential for the mysterious and the wonderful to appear, and perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the phantoms that haunt the text. After all, one can only see ghosts with the third eye.

But first, perhaps we must begin to think of what this blindness that we are thinking of is in the first place. And, perhaps more accurately, what this blindness that we are thinking of is not. Is it when we do not see that we are blind, or is it that we are blind when we do not see: is blindness what we do not see, or does blindness shape what we see in the first place? In order to examine the question, how does one read properly, that is, ethically? one is faced with the issue of blindness and what it is one does not see, cannot see. Hence, we have to first examine blindness itself and its relation to reading. Since there is a link between seeing and knowledge (captured perfectly in the phrase “Seeing is believing”), we have to reflect on the relationship between what we can and cannot see, and, more specifically, if what we cannot see is always already part of what we see. This would open the consideration of the possibility of knowing and the very limits of knowledge itself, after which we will read texts that attempt to think reading itself, that attempt to think the possibility of reading. For if we only attempt to speak of—write about—reading without reading anything, we might then just be speak-writing of everything but reading. By attempting to read, perhaps we can begin to meditate on what the text is as such, what the object that we are reading is (if it even is an object), and how we can start to approach it. And since reading is the relationship between the reader and the text, we must then turn our attention to how reading affects the reader; the effects of the text, and reading, on the body, in the body, of the reader. In this way, we might be able