Voices

On The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain

Dominik Zechner’s introduction to The Violence of Reading, titled “Allegories of Bleeding,” gently puns on Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading, an important predecessor, as Zechner places questions concerning violence and pain at the forefront of his literary theoretical investigation into the vicissitudes, or violence, of reading. But whereas Elaine Scarry, whose classic The Body in Pain is another important interlocutor for Zechner, argues that pain cannot be communicated or translated (where pain, in other words, marks a limit to communication), Zechner argues that pain conditions both the possibility and impossibility of linguistic communication, our very being in language. Zechner does not so much argue that language encounters a limit at pain but rather that language is a pain, to borrow an idiom—but one that discloses an uncomfortable truth. It causes trouble. It frustrates. As Zechner writes in Chapter Five, “Sublime Suffering,” “pain does not merely constitute one among many conceivable problems for representation, but rather the problem of pain fundamentally conditions the very possibility of representation—so much so that every effort to represent something implicitly touches upon the problem of pain.” Zechner engages a range of literary and philosophical texts across the chapters of The Violence of Reading and through his investigation into pain as a fundamental conditioning possibility of representation, he offers a striking defense of close reading practices sensitive to the play (or pain) of trope and figure.
—Brian McGrath, Clemson University

The central motivation of the book is to destabilize the assumption of transparent reference and to insist not on an ontological but on
a philological difference between language and experience. In this framework, language and pain are not merely associated but fundamentally intertwined. Reading becomes the decisive site where linguistic and phenomenal experience undergo a process of mutual unbinding. […] The Violence of Reading is a philosophically rich and intellectually demanding work that challenges readers to reconsider the ethical and affective dimensions of interpretation.
—Qingchao Jia, Northeast Electric Power University

This book is provocative, compelling, and beautifully written. Zechner has transformed the pain of reading into a very pleasurable experience.
—Elissa Marder, Emory University

Dominik Zechner writes: “Instead of putting up a resistance to language as such, pain divests linguistic structures of their unreliable secondary functions”—communication, representation, etc.—“and discloses an occurrence of language divided from the constraints that subjugate its experience under the supremacy of phenomenal representation.” In other words, pain is poetry. As every Tumblr girl already knows.
—Olivia Kan-Sperling

On Kafka und das Problem der Endlichkeit

Zechners Kafka-Studien sind textnah operierende Denkbilder, Beiträge zu einer “Ethik des Lesens,” die die Widersprüche einer “verkehrten Unendlichkeit” nicht aufzulösen versucht, sondern gründlich beschreibt. So hellsichtig, so anregend hat seit Heinz Politzers Kafkas-Interpretationen aus den 1960er Jahren kaum einer untersucht, wie Kafka vom “Problem der Unendlichkeit” erzählt: in “einer strukturell unendlichen, zirkulär verfassten Stellvertreterlogik.” Dieses Buch gehört in jedes Kafka-Seminar.
—Michael Braun, University of Cologne

Zechners dichtes und teils sehr voraussetzungsreiches Buch blickt auf den knapp 250 Seiten nicht nur tief in das Verhältnis von Endlichkeit und Sprache am Paradigma Kafka, sondern enthält darüber hinaus tiefe Reflexionen über Kafkas Leser und
die Probleme, die sich auf dem Weg von der anfänglichen Endlichkeit zum Ende des Buches entfalten. Es ist deshalb nicht nur
als komplexe und reiche philologische Kafka-Studie zu betrachten, sondern bedeutsam in der spezifischen Öffnung des Existenziellen auf die Sprache hin. Zechner reflektiert, wartend beim Wort, mit und über Kafka hinaus Scham, Sorge, Klage, Schmerz und das, was aus menschlichem Drang in und aus Sprache drängt. Dabei ist dem Autor nachzusehen, dass es teils einige Zeit in Anspruch nehmen kann, seine Verwendung von Worten und ihre Verschiebungen zu verstehen. Vielmehr besteht darin gerade eine Stärke des Buches, das auf jeder Seite versucht, für das zu Sagende eine Sprache zu finden, die Balance hält zwischen der Endlichkeit und noch deren Endlichkeit selbst.
—Ioannis Dimopulos, Brown University

On Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology

Taken as a whole, this book stakes its “claim of philology” by estranging preexisting critical positions on Celan and fathoming his multivocal idioms as if for the first time.
—Feng Dong, Qingdao University

Mendicino, Zechner and their fellow contributors succeed in showing the extent to which Celan’s poetry and his concern for language as expression, medium of history, linguistic community and critical reflection concern us today. For “poems,” as Celan writes in the notes to The Meridian, are not “messages,” not “information”; they are rather, as he puts it, “underway on routes on which language becomes voice, […] encounters, routes of a voice to a perceiving you.”
—Reingard Nethersole, University of the Witwatersrand

Beautiful and very open in its structure, Thresholds, Encounters is an invitation to dialogue.
—Ilit Ferber, University of Tel-Aviv

The volume demonstrates an exemplary fidelity to a practice of philology that is attentive to language’s capacity for ungrounding its propositions. It would not be an exaggeration to describe these performances of reading as tours de force.
—Jason Groves, University of Washington, Seattle

On Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy

The volume constitutes a most welcome and necessary contribution not only to the ever-growing scholarship on Walter Benjamin’s work but, perhaps even more incisively, to contemporary debates around the function, mode, and value of education. This question—what is teaching for? How to educate?—receives various responses in the twelve contributions to the volume, responses that at turns seek to reformulate or suspend it. A particularly pressing version of this question, as the editors indicate in their fine introduction, derives from the fact that “the current moment urges us to reconsider the nexus between politics and pedagogy.”
—Jonas Rosenbrück, Amherst College

Recent scholarship on Benjamin has found new urgency in his writings on childhood, education, and pedagogy. The current collection of essays is a significant contribution to this growing body of literature. Anyone who reads Forces of Education will undoubtably recognize Benjamin himself as an angel of history, gazing upon the ruins of our educational institutions while nevertheless remaining in flight, propelled by the idea of education’s potential redemption.
—Tyson Lewis, University of North Texas