The Speculative Body





Writing intervenes and interrupts the process of becoming absorbed in and by the reading of texts, before onešs resistance can be broken and dissolved by the digestive juices of the dialectic. The residual trace remains as writing, not aufgehoben into the next stage of consciousness; not as total memory, but as repetition: rereading and writing are productions rather than accumulations of knowledge. That is, repetition in the sense that the words, once read, thought and written (and perhaps published), will always be the same words but the readeršs consciousness will change as surely as the "meaning" is transmitted or missed, interpreted or misinterpreted. If the words were simply voiced or heard at a lecture, the speaker could always change them to suit the occasion and thus wouldnšt they then be more transitory and less permanent, though Hegel would have us think them more "essential," that is, closer to the Spirit? There would only be superficial repetition in this case, just as rote memorization would be superficial knowledge because the words, the type itself, would not have passed through the digestive apparatus of the dialectical machine. One doesnšt just swallow the system whole, but in "bits," bit by bit (piecemeal), and the process of reconstituting the original words is not as efficacious nor as important as making those words onešs own words and thoughts (perhaps publications, commentaries), through the process of swallowing, digesting and excreting them through the experimental/experiential body of the reader. This process then shifts, and is no longer simply a hermeneutical act following the strict guidelines of the "laws" of the text, but is rather an epistemological intervention in the form of writing, secreting back into language the fundamental questions in regard to the acquisition of knowledge. New words transform the mind of the reader and are reformulated in the process of writing which, as an intervention, is an act of active rereading (of active forgetting more so than memorization), that does not simply reconstitute facts and opinions but actually produces knowledge by questioning the very process of what it means to transmit "meaning."





|