A passage towards death, or the phenomenology of no longer reading

Abstract

This article examines the interruption of the phenomenological experience of reading caused by an encounter with a particularly striking sentence or passage. More specifically, the text interprets the passage of language from text to reader as a moment of quotation whereby language is inscribed within the register of biological life. Drawing on the work of Blanchot and Benjamin the article suggests that this capture of a textual fragment, its transfer into the reader’s memory, simultaneously challenges and reaffirms the violence of conceptuality Hegel identified at the heart of language.