The Fire and the Tale by Agamben Giorgio

Author:Agamben, Giorgio [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

On the Difficulty of Reading

It is not about reading and the risks that it entails that I would like to talk but rather of an underlying risk, that is, of the difficulty or impossibility of reading; I want to try and talk not of reading but of unreadability.

All of us have experienced moments when we would like to read but cannot—in which we obstinately flip through the pages of a book, but it literally falls from our hands.

In the treatises on the life of monks, this was actually the risk par excellence to which the monk succumbed: sloth, the meridian demon, the most terrible temptation that threatens the homines religiosi manifests itself especially in the impossibility of reading. Here is the description provided by Saint Nilus:

When the slothful monk tries to read, he stops agitated and, soon after, drifts off to sleep; he rubs his face with his hands, stretches the fingers and reads a couple of lines, mumbling the end of each word he reads; mean while, he fills his head with idle calculations, counts the number of pages he still has to read and the sheets of notebooks; he hates letters and the pretty miniatures he has before his eyes, until finally he closes the book and uses it as a pillow for his head, falling into a brief and deep sleep.

Here the soul’s health coincides with the readability of the book (which, in the Middle Ages, is also the book of the world), sin with the impossibility of reading, the becoming unreadable of the world.

In this sense, Simone Weil spoke of a reading of the world and of a non-reading, an opacity that resists every interpretation and hermeneutics. I would like to suggest to you to pay attention to your moments of non-reading and opacity, when the book of the world falls from your hands, since the impossibility of reading concerns you as much as reading and is perhaps equally or more instructive than it.

There is also another more radical impossibility of reading, which not so many years ago was totally common. I am referring to illiterates, these men who have been too quickly forgotten, who, at least in Italy, were the majority of the population only a century ago. A great Peruvian poet of the twentieth century has written in one of his poems: por el analfabeto a quien escribo, “for the illiterate to whom I write.” It is important to understand the meaning of this “for”: it should be understood not so much as “so that the illiterate may read me,” given that by definition he will never be able to, but rather as “in his place”—like when Primo Levi used to say that he witnessed for those who were called Muslims in the Auschwitz jargon, that is, those who could not or would not have been able to witness, since, shortly after entering the camp, they had lost all consciousness and sensibility.

I would like you to think about the special status of a book

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