UC Irvine

Although hermeneutics continues to predominate in humanities departments wherever semantic claims about phenomena are advanced (and not solely where `the hermeneutical' is explicitly invoked), its destiny remains unwritten. Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Gilles Deleuze conceptualized reading as a more retorse movement than the circular totalization that hermeneutics traces. Following their leads, this thesis advances the potential for an act of reading which no longer serves the behest of discourse [Redesinn], articulation or recognition. The first chapter, "Derrida's Afterlife of Reading: the Paris 1981 Gadamer Encounter," frames the intervention by elucidating the points of contention between hermeneutics and deconstruction. It demonstrates the logic of conciliation by which Gadamerian hermeneutics seeks to integrate deconstruction within the positioning of living discourse [Redesinn]. Derrida's afterlife of reading, in contradistinction, conceives of a positioning of textuality after it has been prescribed according to discourse. In the second chapter, "The Precise Illegibility of de Man," interpretive precision is re-conceived outside the province of mimetic representation. In tracing de Man's return to an etymology of precision as "cutting off," a praxis of reading outside models of equivalence and understanding finds its quintessential expression in the de Manian allegory. Finally, in the third chapter, "Reading with Pause and Muscles: Deleuze's Theatre of Sensation," a nascent Deleuzian concept is developed and its broad implications are considered. Best emblematized by the entr'expression of the Leibnizian Baroque, Deleuze's `reading' breaks with a phenomenological hermeneutics, and its model of recognition, for a line of flight at the threshold between the faculties. This dissertation addresses those for whom the destiny of reading remains yet unwritten.