the one who reads

I was going to write a somewhat lengthy review of two books I read recently on affect, but I became distracted in my own mind by a tangential topic of why I would do that. The main reason is that I often notice book reviews from Scu and Craig in the blogroll and pop over to see whether those books could be instrumental for my immediate purposes, some day swell a bibliography, or should be avoided. It is also comforting to me that someone out there is reading all these books which I am sure another someone put a lot of time and thought and emotion into composing. This is a nice fiction because it fosters the possibility that someone is also reading me and my writing. In a Kantian (or Nietzschean) way, I try to imagine that no one is reading this but I do it because this is what I would will to be doing (and in fact it is what I am doing!). But still, I am not insensitive to the fantasy of the one who reads, and I think it is evidence of this that I take the time to write in a public forum (a blog) where I might facilitate this fantasy for others.

Why the one who reads? I am positing this figure as a metamorphosis of a couple Lacanian figures, especially "the one who knows." More than having an analyst know what is wrong with me (or the world), I simply want to be seen by the analyst-figure. And while having a "reader" out there, someone who sees into the text and draws out its essence, is close to the internalized sur/sous-veillance of the father, I again think the fantasy of the one who reads shows a milder, smaller claim of desire. Rather than modern oversight that is invasive, forceful and costly in terms of labor-time, the fantasy of the one who reads is a post modern (or something) fantasy of glancing knowledge. Rather than fantasizing about the drastic relocation and examination of the Clinic, this desire is just "to be seen," to be briefly, casually admitted into the doctor's space, have him strike a few glancing sparks of illumination from my personal surface, and be returned to circulation. (To borrow further from the discourse of the pomo, we could say the modern power systems exerted force on deviant persons as if they were master narratives needing to be ripped to shreds; in contrast, once everyone must be regulated in direct relation to biopolitis, the amount of attention given to individuals must be more cursory). We don't have time to treat every philosopher, critic, theorist, artist as if they were important (meaning, brutally dissecting their arguments, wrangling with everyone ambiguity)--most of us don't even have the time to keep up with all the books we would like to read, if all the books we should be reading.

This isn't meant as a criticism of those who provide book reviews. I sincerely value the opinions of those critics (and bloggers) I read and take their evaluations to heart, and hope to contribute something back to that sphere of information. Even if no one reads it.