| Chapter Intro: | Introduction |
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Like the fragment, it only has to be elliptical.
It only has to be an exception.
Every singular image can be reckoned exceptional.
And it puts an end to all the others. 17
It is only in blindness that we can see exceptions; it is only in exceptions that we can see when we are blind. Only through thinking in terms of the peculiar, the particular, the absurd, even, can we perhaps puncture the flattened book, rescue the text, the unread, the unreadable, such that the book can never be read, such that reading can continue. 18 Perhaps to do so, we must first attempt
To wrest the image from the representation principle.
The fragment is precisely where we can find reading as the event of an encounter. For it is only when each encounter is taken as an exception (and, by extension, that exception is the norm) that reading as an ethical event can be begun to be thought. If each encounter with the text is an encounter with a fragment, then no unity can be established; by extension, there cannot be an overarching whole which can establish itself as a rule and hence precondition the event of reading. Hence, each event of reading is a reading of a fragment, each reading is itself a fragment, each event of reading is also an event where reading itself is constituted.
There is much to learn from the proverb, “The devil is in the details”: it is the small things, the fragment, the particular, that prevents any totalizing logic from taking place, from unifying itself, from solidifying itself. Perhaps in this light, or darkness,