Dominik Zechner, "The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the NewBooks Network. Today I'm speaking with Dominic Zechner, assistant professor of German language and literature, Rutgers University. We're discussing Dominic's book, The Violence of Reading, Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain. This book explores the experience of reading through an analysis of various writers and philosophers. With probing insights, Dominic's book develops a theory of pain and its relationship to language. Dominic, thanks for joining me today on the NewBooks Network. Thank you so much for having me. Of

Of course, it's wonderful to have you on. I think this book is a fascinating book. It's very interdisciplinary. It's one of those books that you really just treat so many different subjects. You look at films, you look at philosophers, you look at novels. And I really find that it makes for the reading experience. It really makes it for a great reading experience. But before talking about the book, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background.

Oh, sure. I am originally from Vienna, Austria, where I went to college. And then I decided to move to US for grad school. And I did my PhD at NYU in German literature. And then that ended in 2019, which is when I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to start a postdoc at Brown University.

And that was actually the reason this book came into existence, because at NYU, my research revolved around the work of the German-speaking modernist writer Franz Kafka. That was what my dissertation targeted. And my postdoc, however, at Brown was hosted at the Pembroke Center for Women's and Gender Studies.

And so it made little sense for me to continue working on a Kafka book in that context. And so I thought, well, you know, I have this time as a postdoc at Brown. Why don't I start a new project? Which is unusual. It's unorthodox because usually after grad school, what people will do is take their dissertations and turn them into books, right? And in my specific case, that didn't make all too much sense because

because of this new context I was in. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to do something else. I was very interested at the time in like pedagogical scenes of violence, you know, and narratives that deal with students, with teachers and how violence occurs in these narratives. And so I started looking there. But then over time, as I, as I

read more and as I kept fleshing out this new project, what I became really interested in was the relationship between textuality and violence and even more generally reading or language rather and pain. And so one after the other, I wrote these chapters and that's what amounted to the violence of reading. After my postdoc at Brown,

I, uh, in 2020, I started my position at Rutgers as an assistant professor and, uh, um,

parallel to finishing The Violence of Reading, I also finished a Kafka dissertation, which led to the very, and turned it into a book manuscript, which led to the very odd situation that last year in 2024, I had both monographs come out at the same time, Kafka and Your Problem with Finitude and The Violence of Reading. So that is the geniality of it all.

That's interesting. And I think it's obviously many people will take that step of just doing the dissertation, but it's probably good in many ways to just get the sophomore book out of the way. I know there's probably a lot of scholars out there who do the dissertation and then they're struggling to get the second book out. You mentioned at the very beginning of the book that you don't read for fun or rather you don't really...

know what it means to read for fun. So could you elaborate on this? Why not? Well, that's I mean, it's become kind of a running joke. But when I when I when I meet someone, you know, and I told them someone new and I told them what I do.

As a literature professor or professor of poetry or whatever, the question you first get is, so what do you read for fun? And the thing is, I don't really. I read everything. I really don't know what it feels like to read a book simply for fun.

to have a good time with it. I always think, how would I teach this? What would I write about this? How does this fit into this larger argument that I'm pursuing in my head? And so the workaround I found is that I can really enjoy it if someone reads to me. So

So, you know, if you're in a situation where you are not carrying out the act of reading and you're rather listening, that's then more... Because then I'm basically... I can't take notes, right? I can't write down what's going on because that's always what I do. I write...

I underline things, I circle things, I write stuff down on the margin, no matter what I read. But when I just listen to someone else read to me, I can't do that. And so then it becomes more enjoyable. But yeah, that's...

That's what at least my experience looks like. Yeah, that's interesting. So you're a note taker. You do a lot of marginalia. Totally. I rarely read on screen. I do it with papers that are great for teaching, but I don't...

I like to read novels. I don't have a Kindle. I need actual pages, and then I need to have this very specific Japanese pencil that I use, and then I underline stuff, and I circle things, and I write down my thoughts. And that's really helpful because...

You know, I'm also getting older and I don't remember everything I read. And so then going back for the copy and see what did I think when I read this particular passage, it's really helpful to have it all mapped out on the page through my tracings.

This book is built on many different readings of novels and philosophical work. So when you were putting together the bibliography for this book, how did you think about what would go in it? What were you looking for in these various texts that you analyze?

that's such a good question because one thing, and it goes back to what we talked about before, you know, this, this, this, the problem of dissertation writing and what like first books look like. And I, what I, what I find dissatisfying about a lot of academic books that come out, I guess both in a European and in the American context is that

Oftentimes, you will identify one problem, you know, one motif, and then you will select three or four authors in whose work you will explore this motif and how it is executed and how it shows up. And then if you translate that into a book structure, what you have is

an introductory chapter, and then you have chapter one dealing with author A, chapter two dealing with author B, and chapter three dealing with author C. And that is fine, I guess, but it's not really a compelling book architecture. And so what I decided to do when I sat down to plan The Violence of Reading was to say, well,

I want to have chapters that are structured around concepts. I want to have a concept at the core and then I will cluster or I will gather authors around that concept that speak to this concept, that help me figure out what the concept is. And that is sometimes a poet, sometimes it's a filmmaker, sometimes it's a novelist, and oftentimes it's a philosopher or a critical theorist.

which is why I don't have these chapters dedicated to single authors. Rather, I have them dedicated to theoretical problems or concepts. And then there is a variety of authors that help me figure out what's going on with this concept.

the concept you examine in the book and you look at it in many different ways is this general notion of, of pain or violence when it comes to reading. So can you just situate us, like how do you think about pain and reading and the relationship between the two? Yeah. Yeah. So one, one central concept is definitely, um, what I call linguistic pain and, um, and

And this is actually a notion, so linguistic pain, quote-unquote, is a notion that Judith Butler introduces in their work Excitable Speech when they think about the specific kind of pain that language is responsible for, right? So if I hurt someone by using hate speech or invective language, what type of pain is created that way, right? And for me, that's a really interesting

intriguing question because traditionally the relation between language and pain has been viewed as rather oppositional. Paradigmatic for this idea is Elaine Scarry's book, The Body and Pain, where she thinks about torture and what happens to language when you're being tortured. And there, pain and language are understood as mutually exclusive. And

More than that, even, pain is introduced as what Scarry calls language destroying. So in a state of, the idea would be that in a state of pain, your language simply collapses, your entire linguistic faculty collapses. And henceforth, you are unable to communicate your experience, which renders pain than an uncommunicable experience. And this argument has

has dominated the discourse on pain and its relation to language for many, many years. But I find it inherently problematic. I find it really dissatisfying, especially with respect to what at least seems to me to be a rather simplistic concept of language that's at stake here. You know, of course, you can say that in a state of injury or in a state of pain,

it becomes difficult for you to speak coherently, to make sense. But that does not mean that all languages simply evacuate it, right? What about prayer? What about a plea, a desperate plea? What about body language, right? What about various gestures of which you might still be capable? What about

the whole area of non-propositional or non-grammatical language, such as screaming or howling or clamoring, right? There's one point where Deleuze speaks of the clamor of being. I'm really interested in that. So, so first of all, I think we have to recognize that even in pain, there still is language. It's just not like logical language. It's not communicative language. It's not propositional language, but there is language. And secondly, I,

What is attacked in pain or what undergoes a collapse in pain is language's communicative, or to put it more broadly, language's representational capacity. What we lose in pain is the ability to represent, I would say. In other words, it may well be the case that

Pain is not representable in language. I can't represent to you my pain because I'm so pained by it. But it's this very breakdown of representation which...

is indicative of a kind of pain, right? And this idea then allowed me to connect this discourse that goes on in scary to aesthetics and to this aesthetic experience that is called the sublime, right? If you think of Khan, for instance, a sublime experience is precisely that which overwhelms your sense perception and

and thereby shuts down your representational faculty, right? So Kant says the sablan can only be represented negatively. You can't have like a coherent image of it. You can only represent it by the breakdown of representation itself. And I think something like that is going on in Paine

Because what's so interesting is that this breakdown of representation, even in Kant, is described as being painful. But what's so fascinating about this pain is that it can't register anywhere because it cannot be felt. Your sense perception is deactivated. So we're dealing with like a second degree kind of pain, a pain that arises because our very ability to feel pain is shut down.

I call this a transcendental pain, a pain that doesn't register anywhere. It's just sort of there. And so if we pursue this train of thought, which admittedly is a complicated one,

We move from the representation of pain to the pain of representation and the pain of representation's breakdown. And there is a chapter in the book, I think it's chapter four, where I offer a reading of Robert Musil's novel, The Confusions of Young Turles, where something similar is going on because there you have this boarding school pupil who,

who one day sits down to read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. And the reading experience is super painful, so much so that he feels Kant's bony old hand corkscrewing his brains out of his skull.

And so you could say, as the reader of this scene of reading, he could say, well, Kant is just hard to read and that's the pain of it all. But I think there's something more going on because what Ternus is reading in that moment is the critique of practical reason. So it's the very text itself

that talks about thwarting our sensual experience by the transcendental moral law. And it's this very thwarting that is itself a painful process. But again, it's a pain that doesn't register anywhere because there is no sensuality left.

to which it can attach itself because sensual experience has been thwarted. So it's a transcendental type of pain. It's the painful experience that arises when the experience of pain itself has become impossible.

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You mentioned at the very beginning that part of the initial interest of this project for you was thinking about relationships between teachers and students. And then you have this section of this novel that you look at, The Confusions of the Abiturless, of a student trying to read but struggling to read. Obviously, there's been so much in...

popular culture right now discuss so much discussion around students difficulties with reading uh their inability to read because of social media and all these things like that and i'm wondering like for you is that an element that comes into play in terms of how you're thinking about this particular novel to your own experience with maybe students that is that is a good question i think there's two different levels that we have to take into account here um i i

well, I could tell so many anecdotes now about my own teaching, but one...

One thing that really surprised me last semester when I talked to my students about reading longer texts is that more and more they told me that, yeah, we are doing the reading. We're doing what you are assigning. But what we are actually doing is we...

we feed the PDFs into a voice generator, into like a reading app. And then this AI voice reads the readings back to us. And that's how we can focus. They call it immersive reading. But for me, that was a very alienating thing to encounter because they are purposefully, they're deliberately focused

making, putting themselves in a passive position. They're deactivating themselves as readers. And then this AI voice is reading to them and that's how they are sucking up the information. But I think that this has something to do with what I'm, what I'm trying to get at in the book, because I am reading, I am thinking about reading in terms of the difference between activity and passivity. And,

And when you think about, I mean, the scene of reading itself is such an interesting situation for me because in a sense it marks a limit experience. The scene of reading is a threshold, I would say, between on the one hand, phenomenal experiential reality where, you know, to go back to what I said before, where our sensuous bodies are situated, the way I'm situated here at my desk right now,

And on the other hand, you have the linguistic reality of the language to which you are exposed when you read, right? The language of the book that you read. And my thesis in a book is something like this exposure of the body to literary language unmoors it, unmoors the body from the referential anchorage in phenomenal reality. It unmoors it and it transforms it. And

Part of what I discovered while reading through the philosophical, the theoretical, the literary canon whose authors populate the book is that

Reading does not just activate the body. It effectively produces a body, a whole new body pumped up on language that is sort of born out through the act of reading. Now, if you look at this historically, you could say that

Reading has become increasingly passive, right? And I guess my students are the combination point of that where it's like you're not even reading anymore. You're being exposed to this AI voice that feeds you the language.

Michel de Certeau talks about this, for instance, that in medieval times, texts were always embodied and enacted, right? In the sense that when you read something, you would enunciate it. You would read them out loud. You would put your voice into it and you would put your body into the performance of reading. And

In modern times, this spectacle of embodied reading disappears and we start to read silently. We start to read for ourselves, right? Reading becomes then a solitary experience.

In this sense, reading appears to be an essentially passive undertaking, contemporary reading, an act of the mind rather than of the body, right? But in my book, I try to challenge this perception, and I do so by constructing a theory of reading as a theory of implicit violence. And I found confirmation of this violence in

this strain on the body, this exertion of the body all over critical theory and modern literature. At the very least, at the very least, one would have to admit that reading marks an encounter of ambiguous consent, right? Which is to say that

you may consent to reading this or that text, but you cannot really determine in advance what this text is going to do to you, right? How the text is going to change you, how it's going to rattle you. So there is something invasive about reading

Something really uncomfortable about that invasion. You know, when things of William Burroughs, who said that language is a virus from outer space. So the question becomes, what is that virus of language doing to you and to your body?

And I think that's a question that is asked when you read. You know, reading asks to what an extent can the body even bear the language to which it is exposed, right? And my answer would be that reading produces a body. Roland Barthes is one of the theorists to whom I turn, and he calls this an overwhelmed body.

you know, a body that is permanently bleeding out, which is why I call the reading scene an allegory of bleeding, channeling echoing Paul de Man. It creates, reading creates a body

capable of suffering, of bearing the pain of reading. And this body is no longer anatomical or biological or phenomenal, right? This is not what's going on. It's a body made by language, pumped up on language. And reading is the bearing out, the poetic production of this body. And I say poetic in the sense of the Greek poiein, which is the root of poetry. Poiein means to produce, to make. Heidegger translates it as bringing forth.

So one useful way, to me at the very least, one useful way of defining reading is as the bringing force of an overwhelmed body. Yeah, wow. That's extremely fascinating. And it makes me wonder, and this is something that you discuss in the book, that if we know, if you know that reading is something that's painful or that's violent, yet still spend...

a lot of time engaging in it, there's something masochistic to it, of course. So could you talk about the masochistic component of this? Yeah, sure. So this is, this is, this was, I guess, there's an aspect of the book that's, that's a bit, that was, that was unplanned. But yeah, because of what I, I guess, because of what I just explained, there, there's,

There is a psychosexual situation that imposes itself as an object of inquiry when you explore the problem of reading, and that situation is called masochism, right? You think about masochism as this violent encounter of bodies, but before there even is any physical contact, masochism

that masochism is the mediation of violence to the signifier, right? If you look at Venus in First, for instance, which is Masochist Leopold von Sacha Masoch's Venus in First, which is a novel that serves as the foundational text or is considered the foundational text of what is called masochism.

what you will find is there's just so much reading going on in that book. Already in the frame narrative, the way it is all set up is that the main character, Severin, has fallen asleep while reading Hegel. And then within the core narrative of the novel, you have all

all sorts of books circulating, reading lists, letters, contracts. So play with signifiers, play with written traces and how to decipher them, how to interpret them. That's what masochism is first and foremost. It's a language game. And I think that this violence of masochism also implicates the reader because we as the readers of the novel are reading people read.

And that's what enthralls us. One way to put it is to say, as soon as you start reading, you're caught in someone else's desire. And I think that's what the lesson that masochism teaches us.

And that's also what differentiates it from sadism, for instance. You know, one text I refer to and one theorist I refer to in this regard is Jules Deleuze, who wrote a really interesting commentary on Masoch's novel. And Deleuze was very adamant about making a distinction between masochism and sadism. And one way to make this distinction is to say that, and this goes back to what we said before about teaching,

Deleuze says the masochist is a pedagogue, an educator, because the masochist has to teach you the ways of his desire. Whereas the sadist is not doing that. The sadist is treating you like an object. The sadist is more like a scientist, or Deleuze calls it an institution builder. He says the masochist is an educator while the sadist builds institutions. The sadist is interested in giving orders, right, but not really interested in reading. So one

One way of rephrasing the distinction would be to say that the masochist reads, reads all the time, reads his desire, makes you read his desire, reads all these contracts, letters, and books that are circulating in the masochistic situation, right?

Whereas the thetist prefers not to read. One of the texts that you examined, and this question might not necessarily directly relate to the way in which you treat it, but I find it interesting that it's chosen because I feel like it's a text that people read for masochistic reasons, or at least they take it on for masochistic reasons, is Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

all of the books. Yeah, I think it's Paul Luther de Blasstein. The first one is Swan's Way. But yeah, people take this on as the sort of challenge book. But can you talk about the treatment of reading in this book? Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe that's one of the primal scenes for theories of reading in the 20th century overall, because the reason I think one reason we have to

to Proust when thinking about reading is because Paul de Man does so in Allegroids of Reading he in his seminal text writes

about the act of reading, de Man goes to Proust. And he asks, what does the recherche teach us about the act of reading? And one conclusion that de Man arrives at is that you can never, when you are confronted with the scene of reading, you can never decide

ultimately, between whether what you're dealing with is a literal situation or it's a figurative situation that means something else, right? So whenever texts thematize reading,

what you're dealing with is an allegory of reading that bleeds out, that points to something else, which is why thematization presupposes the possibility of an unambiguous referential relation to literary language. However, the theme of reading can always be used as a text or a metaphor for something else, something

something that would not be reading. So you're caught in this, this is what Vanahamaha argues with regard to Deman. So you're caught in this constant double bind between are we literally talking about reading right now or is reading standing for something else? And Deman shows us through Proust that you cannot resolve this tension. He says that

And I'm very interested in this formulation. He says that the literal meaning of the scene of reading and the figurative meaning of the scene of reading fight each other with the blind power of stupidity. And so there's something stupefying about reading, reading. And I think that's also what...

what predestines reading, what fashions reading, the scene of reading to be such an important object of inquiry for understanding what language is doing, what language is doing to the phenomenon. Because what you could actually say is, well, I am reading Proust's

and Proust is showing me someone read. So what I'm actually seeing there is a confirmation of my phenomenal experience, right? I'm reading a book right now, and so I'm very much anchored in my experiential reality. But in fact, the opposite is happening. You are drawn into, by reading, reading, by setting up a scene of reading that reads a scene of reading, you're drawn into...

a vortex, a linguistic vortex that increasingly unmoors, un-anchors your referential anchorage.

So one way to explain this better would perhaps be to touch on another concept that is really important to me in the book, which I call the referential fallacy. And what I mean by that is precisely, going back to Hamacher and Duman, is precisely the confusion or the mistaking of

the linguistically constructed referent for the real thing, right? And there is a moment in Demand that I also refer to where he talks about autobiography, right? And he says, well, when we think about autobiography, we assume that there is a life and this life produces an autobiography. And then someone can read that autobiography to have access to this life.

So what I read in the autobiography is a confirmation of the life that has produced the autobiography. So if you read my autobiography, you get a confirmation of my existence, my life form, a self-written account of it. But then de Man asks, can't we, with equal legitimacy, claim that the autobiography produces the life of which it tells? That

that the writing itself produces the life of which it tells. And I'm very interested in this option, in this question, because that would again constitute an unmooring between, or a severance between phenomenal reality, experiential reality on the one hand, and linguistic reality on the other hand. Which is to say that

Instead of confirming the life experience that is its subject, the biography or the autobiography would inherently, essentially, structurally depart from this experience and produce another referent in its stead, a linguistic referent rather than a phenomenal object. So

What we have to do when we read is, I would say, read for this break, for the violent rupture between language and the empirical referent. Another way to describe reading would be to say that reading is the abandonment of the referent. Reading abandons the referent. Reading abandons the phenomenon. Reading abandons empirical anchorage.

and falls into the vortex of a linguistic reality that is marked by a violent rift that sets it apart from that empirical reality. But I think that more often than not, this is not being done, right?

Instead of understanding that there is this rift, language is looked at as a representational medium that allows us to communicate without distortion phenomenal contents. And in the opening chapter of my book, I explore this a little bit and I discuss a short story that came out fairly recently in 2023 by Daniel Mason. And it's about

This therapy patient, this psychotherapy patient who becomes the subject of a case study written by the therapist, right? And the patient firmly believes that he, in his experiential reality, in his phenomenal reality, right?

is identical with the linguistically constructed subject of the case study. He sees no difference. He thinks that what the therapist wrote in the case study is who I am. I'm identical with this person. However, he then sits down to read the case study and he does not recognize himself at all. He does not

understand that that person on the page is supposed to be him and I think this misrecognition is so important because it precisely signals a drifting apart from a phenomenal a drifting apart of phenomenal and linguistic reality um

The construction of a linguistic referent is not a confirmation of the empirical subject. It is its disavowal. And part of accepting the violence of reading is to accept this disavowal. It means to recognize that there is this painful rift between language and lived experience. And when we read, I would say we are exposed to this rift.

You mentioned that contemporary work. I'm wondering if there are any other contemporary writers or novelists that you also see exploring these themes that helped you think about this topic. Yeah, I...

And this was actually a concern of mine because, you know, when you work as an academic, when you work as a literary scholar, there's often the danger of falling into the trap of becoming too canonical. And yeah, I talk about Kafka, I talk about Proust, I talk about Nietzsche, it's like the usual suspects, right? And so in the introduction to the book,

I made it a point to not do that and talk about very contemporary texts. And one is this story by Mason, and another is a movie by Darren Aronofsky called The Whale, based on a play that came out about 10 years ago. And the third text is an excerpt

um from the novel Greek Lessons by Han Kang whom I adore the the South Korean writer who also in a different way um shows how reading activates and produces an overwhelmed body um

and and and and and what i call an allegory of bleeding and uh i was very proud of myself because i i wrote this this passage on or these sections on on hankang before she was she received the nobel prize so um i recognize something there yeah yeah maybe whoever you read that next will

win the Nobel Prize in literature. With this study, I'm wondering if there's any way that you find yourself reading differently, having gone through maybe certain texts that you see with new eyes, or just as you move forward and read new novels and new works, if you're thinking about things in a different manner. Yeah, I think that I

In the course of my academic education and my work as a literary scholar, I think what has increasingly intensified is this sense that language is not a confirmation of experience, but language departs from phenomenal experience. And I think I'm increasingly convinced of that and I think

And when I teach, I try to convey this to my students. I think it's a really important lesson because I think that in our contemporary discourse, representation has made a really strong return, right? We think that language should accurately represent someone's lived experience. And that's a noble position to take on. But what you have to

about when you demand that is, is language even capable of doing that? And what are the pitfalls there? What are the breakdowns? What are the distortions that happen when you try to represent something? And, and so to, to teach this to students is very difficult because students come in

into the classroom with this idea. And if you've ever been in an English literature classroom, you will recognize phrases like, oh, you know, I could really relate to this. So I could really, you know, I could really see myself in this. So I could, this sort of reminded me of an experience I had. So what you're looking for

So this is a naive notion of reading, right? What you're looking for when you read naively is a confirmation of experience, a confirmation of the self. This is how the world is and language represents it accurately to me. And what I am trying to convey to students is that that is fallacious and that what language is actually doing is totally alienating you from experience and it causes a breakdown of the late ability and disorienting

We as literary scholars need to understand how that breakdown occurs and what its consequences are. And I think that's what sort of that is that might be the core issue to which the violence of reading is dedicated.

Yeah. There's a lot in this book, so much that we weren't able to cover because you do provide so many different readings of different texts and put them into really interesting conversations. So I definitely think if people found this conversation interesting, they should go and check out the book because there really is a lot more. The book is The Violence of Reading, Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain. Thanks so much for being a guest, Dominic. Thank you so much, Caleb. I really enjoyed this conversation.