Abstract

Reading literature allows for an experience of the Other1 that necessarily implies distance, blindness and unsurpassable separation. The writer reaches the reader through text, the sole means for the reader to encounter the writer in her work. Writing and reading are essentially and inescapably mediated activities where the two poles reach each other through a curtain or a screen, a mask without a face. A writer may read her own text, or she may give it to others, but she can never read it in their place. Rather, they encounter one another through a written text, a representation of a representation of the writer's thoughts, which translates their speech into a purely graphic representation devoid of intention and...