Politics of Reading

What do we do when we read? And do we even do something, or, as Blanchot suggests, do we rather let be? While being true to Michel de Certeau’s plea for a “politics of reading” and an “autonomy of the reader”, we will question its binary logic (active vs. passive): 1. by looking closely at the (de)construction of a “sovereign reader” in Hobbes’ Leviathan; 2. by analyzing the reading imperative—“Read!”—as it is staged in Plato’s and, above all, in Sade’s erotics; 3. by taking seriously Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical intuition that one should “read what was never written”.