Jacques Lezra

This dissertation addresses the relation between the definitions of reading that function formally within the texts of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Descartes, and the historical and epistemological narratives that have traditionally served to explain or to replace that function. It argues that the non-coincidence of formal and semantic categories is a constitutive aspect of Measure for Measure, Don Quixote, and Descartes' Second Meditation, and that this non-coincidence arises at moments when questions of form are brought into the category of the aesthetic. Linguistic events may be understood to produce patterns of regression or displacement which coincide with a turn to patterns of linguistic substitution and valorizations of specific figures of speech . ;Icarus Reading is also concerned with the question of the historical "effect" or "ground" of such practice--particularly the question of the institutions and the ideologies that reading makes necessary. The apparent homology between aestheticization and the formation of ideology arises to supplement the absence of two related concepts, intention and subjectivity, without which the categories of form, matter, and "content" cannot be organized into a recognizable phenomenology of reading. ;The argument takes three directions: first, it re-casts the distinction between form and content in terms of the tropological distinction between substitution and institution. Secondly, it seeks to show how another classical distinction, that between form and matter, itself serves to efface such "traumas" by displacing the category of matter onto semantic units whose integrity is conceptually prior to the distinction. ;Finally, Icarus Reading identifies in each of these texts an effort to redefine the category of form as a rhetorical figure that functions to identify an absence. The dissertation concludes by considering the narrative that seems to join these linguistic "traumas" to their allegorizations, suggesting that its temporality resists being drawn into an analogy with the temporality of empirical events. This resistance generates an allegorical imperative that necessarily structures and makes radically uncognizable the relation between linguistic and empirical events