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

is not the hymen another shield, another veil, another blind, one that only appears to be broken, split, ruptured, only to reveal that one is within folds, layers, all of which reveal and unveil and hide at the same time? Like the splitting of the veil in the temple, all that is revealed is that the secret of God remains, an unknown, an unknowable, which can only be sometimes glimpsed.

Of course, the problem with forgetting is that it cannot be willed, determined, decided; it happens to one. In other words, one cannot count on forgetting, call on forgetting; not only does it happen to one, one might not even know, ever know, that forgetting has taken place. And once it has, there is no object to forgetting: the moment one can designate an object that is forgotten, one is back in the structure of memory. In other words, there is no referentiality to forgetting. Hence, one can never actually know of forgetting; it is always beyond the realm of knowledge. And since reading that is not merely a preconditioned hermeneutical decoding is premised on the possibility of forgetting, this suggests that we can never quite know when, or even whether, reading itself occurs.

This suggests that reading can no longer be constituted in the classical tradition of hermeneutics, as an act of deciphering meaning according to a determined set of rules, laws: this would be reading as an act where the reader comes into a convergence, at best, with the text. In fact, reading can no longer be understood as an act, since an act by necessity is governed by the rules of reading. Reading must be thought of as the event of an encounter with an other—an other who is not the other as identified by the reader, but rather an other that remains beyond the cognition of the self. Hence, reading is a prerelational relationality, an encounter with the other without any claims to knowing who or what this other is in the first place; an unconditional relation, and a relation to no fixed object of relation. As such, it is the ethical moment par excellence. ⁵