ON THE MARGIN

摘要

In principle, the book is unreadable, and it is in the name of the unreadable that it commands or that it calls for a reading, The unreadable is not what is too poorly formed, the erased, the scrawled: the unreadable is what remains closed in the overture of the book, what slips from page to page so as to remain grasped, glued, sewn into the binding, or else laboriously scribbled in marginalia looking to catch the secret, beginning to write another book. The unreadable is that which is not at all available to be read and from which alone something is given to be read. Of itself the book is virginal and sealed in itself, it begins and ends in this sealing, it is always its proper epitaph: here lies an unreadable. There is always a closed and unreadable book in the midst of every open book, held apart between hands that turn the pages, whose every revolution, every turning of recto into verso, begins again to incomplete the deciphering, the clearing of sense.