Introduction: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature
In the Introduction, the author proposes a mode of reading that would expose the misunderstanding that is constitutive of both the literary and the political. A reading of the figure of the “blind” reader in two primal, early modern scenes of reading taken up by Ricardo Piglia in his 2005 El último lector [The Last Reader] is then taken up, suggesting that the blind reader might be that reader who—desperately close to the text—is attuned to its marks of invisibility, to those elements of unreadability that serve as an aporetic demand for more (blind) reading. The motif of opacity, or invisibility, recurs throughout Anarchaeologies vis-à-vis a cluster of concepts—misunderstanding, error, equivocation—to which the author turns in order to imagine new interpretative possibilities not only within literary criticism, but within ethical and political thinking as well.