The Labour of Reading

by | 16 Jan 2025

Two mothers read a letter. One knows how to read and the other doesn’t. The mother who knows how to read reads and then faints. ‘Until the day she dies her eyes, her mouth, and her movements will never again be the same.’[1] The words ‘strik[e] her mind, immediately as a brute fact… Everything happens as if the pain were in the letter itself, and jumped out from the letter to land on the face reading’.[2]

This example, and its characterisation of the experience of reading, come from an essay on reading written by Simone Weil in the spring of 1941. The letters being received by mothers were no far-fetched hypotheticals: they were a daily occurrence. Prevalent then, too, was the violence that Weil associates with the experience of reading. 

There is, for Weil, a ‘mystery’[3] about this experience of reading; something remarkable in how some ‘black marks on a sheet of white paper’ can, once one learns to read them, strike us, ‘seize[] us by surprise’, ‘punch[ us] in the stomach’.[4] The meaning is so immediate, that we ‘are thrown down just as if were had been hit; even much later the sight of the letter remains painful’.[5]

These marks on the page come to us ‘from the outside’; what we learn to do, as we learn to read, is make ourselves susceptible to these appearances; we become vulnerable to that which ‘seize[s] us as if they [the meaning of the words] was external…real’.[6] It is, once again, the immediacy and the violence of reading, and the manner in which it strikes us as if coming from the outside, experienced as something external and real, that grips and interests Weil. 

The appearances we read, Weil continues, need not be marks on a page. We can call other processes of making sense ‘reading’. We read ‘the sky, the sea, the sun, the stars, human beings’ and indeed ‘everything that surrounds us’.[7]The process is so automatic that we only notice it when it goes awry, as when, for instance, ‘at night, on a lonely road, I think I see a man waiting in ambush’ and realise, upon further inspection, that it ‘is actually a tree’; then I come to realise that I have read, and experienced, ‘a human and menacing presence that forces itself on me…mak[ing] me quiver even before I know what it is’.[8] The reading of the tree, in the next moment, also strikes her as a ‘sudden presence’,[9] even if a less menacing one. 

For Weil, what I experience when I read is more than an object that I have interpreted in some way. Again, it is more immediate and more violent than this. Thus, for instance, ‘if I hate someone, he is not on one side and my hatred on the other; when he comes near me it is odiousness itself that approaches’.[10] The meanings that strike me ‘tak[e] possession of my soul and shap[e] it from one moment to the next’.[11]

The effect of this immediacy and violence of reading is especially pronounced in times and places when we learn to read others as dangers, such as under conditions of war. Then, ‘there is something vile about these beings that penetrates through the eyes to the soul of armed men along with the sight of their clothes, hair, faces, something that asks to be annihilated’.[12] It is all done in a ‘glance’: ‘these armed men read along with their hair colour and flesh the evidence that says it is necessary to kill them’.[13] ‘Each reading’, says Weil, ‘when it is current, appears as the only real, only possible way to look at things’.[14]

The immediacy and violence of reading, leading to the necessity of action, is a skill – more consequent, yes, in certain times and places, but just as present in more mundane examples: of the blind man reading the world with his stick,[15] or of the ship captain reading the waves, the boat becoming ‘an extension of his own body…an instrument by which to read the tempest’.[16] As a skill, it is taught – ‘A man, a head of state, declares war, and new meanings rise up all round forty million people’; a group of ‘armed men’ is taught, by a ‘general’s art’, to read other human beings as dangers to be annihilated.[17] ‘War, politics, eloquence, art, teaching’ – all this ‘essentially consists in changing what’ others read.[18]

Does all this mean, however, that reading is just this: an experience of immediacy and violence, which leads inevitably to necessary action? Here, buried in the middle of her essay, Weil suggests something else is possible – another way of reading. She works her way towards this alternative mode by noting the possibility of ‘proofreading’ and how ‘difficult’ it is; when one proofreads, ‘one has to force oneself to read a different kind of meaning, not that of words or phrases, but of mere letters, while still not forgetting that the first kind of meaning exists’.[19] This takes practice, for it is difficult not to read, difficult not to understand, with the above immediacy, violence, and necessity. 

A little later, Weil returns to this ability to read otherwise, and its difficulty – its labour:

I possess a certain power over the universe that allows me to change appearance, but it is an indirect one that requires work; it isn’t there by simply wishing. I put a sheet of white paper over a black book and I no longer see black. This power is limited by the limits of my physical strength. I also possess a certain power to change the meanings that I read in appearances and that are imposed on me. However, this power is also limited, indirect, and it, too, requires work.[20]

Here, some other kind of reading opens up before us, readers of Weil’s essay. Faced with this kind of labour, the appearances, which earlier struck us immediately and with such necessity, begin to generate ‘phantoms’, ‘opposing ideas’;[21] we start generating appearances as appearances. This labour of reading, this difficult practice, reads not necessities but contingencies. It is less a process of replacing one sudden appearance that seizes us, that throws us down, with another. It is more a process of allowing appearances to accumulate, welcoming them in their multitude, and thereby also slowing down the connections between appearance and action, between what is experienced as real and what is felt to be that which must be done. 

If learning to read, with immediacy and necessity, is a skill that requires training – like the blind man learning to see with his stick, and the ship’s captain learning to navigate the seas – can this other kind of reading be learnt too? What would be the pedagogy of this other kind of reading? What kinds of texts might enable it? What kinds of arts of language would invite us to read in this way: slowly, obliquely, doubly, indirectly, allowing appearances to multiply, spreading out the gap between reality and action, carving reality at the joints, opening it up, cracking it?

Weil herself was of course a voracious reader. In particular, she was a reader of the classics, especially the Ancient Greeks. There, in Homer’s Iliad, for instance, she famously found resources – moments of poetry, sparks of attention amidst the endless slaughter – that moved her to attend to her war-time surroundings differently, to see even the perpetrators as victims of a much larger character, force.[22] Reading the Ancient Greeks, and indeed translating them, Weil taught herself to be attentive as well as to see the value of attention. This, for her, was her labour of reading otherwise; her pedagogy of attention. 

I shall not dwell here on Homer, and Weil’s reading of it, for others – especially my friend, Emilios Christodoulidis – have shown me how much there is to learn from Weil’s reading.[23] Instead, let me briefly point to two texts, also from Ancient Greece, which we may wish to draw on in our search for a pedagogy of reading otherwise. 

The first is the ancient Greek logographer, and metic of Athens, Lysias. In his speech – most likely an imaginary, fictional speech – written to be spoken by Euphiletus in his defence against an accusation of murdering Eratosthenes,[24]Lysias deploys a range of techniques to invite us, the audience, and at once the citizens of Athens, to read differently. The story involves a sweet-tongued charmer, Eratosthenes (literally the one ‘skilled in love’), seducing Euphiletus’ wife; it also involves, in his own self-presentation, Euphiletus being naïve and not reading the signs, which ought to have made him suspicious (the creaking of the doors at night, the makeup his wife wore despite being in mourning). 

Employing the already by then age-old technique of enthymising, Lysias cleverly invites us both to become suspicious as well as to treat Euphiletus as so naïve that he could never have laid a trap (as he was accused of doing), luring someone he didn’t like (Eratosthenes) into his home so that he could murder him on the pretext of adultery. Planting clues earlier in the narrative, which he invites us to notice (to enthymise) later, Lysias could be said – as he is in James Fredal’s reading[25] – to be training us to read the danger signs, to be wary of charming, sweet-speaking tyrants (like Eratosthenes – also the name of one of the Thirty Tyrants that killed Lysias’s brother), and thus to be vigilant citizens, to remain alert to the prospect of losing democracy. Lysias, a metic in Athens, could be said to be teaching the Athenians the art of reading attentively: to not be duped, to not be caught up in a culture of immediate meaning, to retain the ability to see appearances for what they are – appearances, and not realities that translate into necessary action. 

The second comes from a little earlier in time: Gorgias and in his Encomium of Helen.[26] Gorgias, the fellow lambasted by Plato as a money-hungry peddler of falsity, turns out, on a second reading, to be a pedagogue of democracy (no wonder Plato was so scared of him). In his Encomium, his speech in praise of Helen, though also doubling as a speech in her defence – this short text is jam-packed with doubles, with parallels, with opposites – Gorgias constantly invites us to notice what he is doing: ‘I shall proceed to the beginning of my intended speech and I shall propound the causes which made it reasonable for Helen’s departure to occur’.[27] Famously, at the end of his speech, he returns again to the first-person and tells us: ‘I have removed by my speech a woman’s infamy, I have kept to the purpose which I set myself at the start of my speech; I attempted to dispel injustice of blame and ignorance of belief, I wished to write an encomium of Helen and an amusement for myself’.[28]

Don’t take me seriously, Gorgias seems to be saying. All I’ve done is, by the powers of my eloquence, to convince you to overturn your conventional belief that Helen is guilty (for the Trojan War). But what is Gorgias doing? Why does he appear to undermine himself? Why does he signal himself to us as a speaker, using all the tricks of speech that he also tells us, throughout the speech, are so powerful? After all, in the Encomium, Gorgias likens speech to something that has force and violence, to the luring eroticism of beauty, to the beautiful sounds of song, to the addictive and reality-altering power of drugs, to the glint of shields seen in battle causing panic and fear, and thus to wholescale emotional and physical turbulence – to seizing, throwing down, and fainting. 

Gorgias is indeed playing with us, but not to amuse himself, and amass riches while he is at it (though why not – why can’t he earn an honest living, not having inherited wealth like other aristocrats who don’t need to work?). On the one hand, Gorgias, through his beautiful, engaging, forceful speech, immerses us, engages us, and replaces one appearance (Helen is guilty) with another (Helen is innocent). But that, as he tells us at the end, is not his main aim –otherwise, why undermine (this is just ‘an amusement for myself’) the very message he has just sweetened and made us swallow? Why, again, alert us to his presence in his speech? Why tell us to keep listening, to keep watching, to pay attention to what he is doing? Why wrest us, suddenly, from what we were just feeling is a safe place to be – under the spell of Gorgias’s proof of Helen’s innocence?

Like Lysias, arguably, Gorgias is teaching his audience to read and listen otherwise; his sophistic pedagogy – full, as mentioned earlier, of strange parallels and beguiling juxtapositions – is not designed to make us entranced by new, gleaming truths (the eternal truths of the eternal forms, say). It is inviting us to be alert, to be vigilant, to read things twice, to think again – to suspend our immediate judgements as to what is real and what must then be done. This is a pedagogy of reading, a poetics of vigilance, an art of resistance to the seductions of tyrants, a call for minds to awaken and be capable of playing reflexively with appearances. 

Gorgias and Lysias, along with Homer in Weil’s reading, are not the only pedagogues of reading otherwise we might bring to the table. Reading Marx’s Capital is a similar experience – readers awaken! – of training in reading allusively, allegorically, satirically, indirectly, and thus reading differently, attentively. So is More’s Utopia – that most radical and imaginative of critiques of enclosing land, and the voracious greed and pride of land owners, in 16th century England. Both Marx and More, incidentally, were great fans of the Ancient Greeks – readers, like Weil, of playful Greek experimenters with language who knew a thing or two about the dangers of tyranny. We could do worse, then, than remind ourselves of the neglected legacy of Greek democratic rhetoric and poetics. 

I write this essay on Wednesday 6 November 2024. Reading the news this morning felt like being punched in the stomach. So did reading the news on Friday 24 June 2016. On those mornings, I wish sometimes I had lost the ability to read. But then I remember that there is another way, as difficult as it may be in these times, of learning to play seriously with language, as More and Marx did, of writing to encourage another kind of reading, of learning to read differently, read otherwise, to read reflexively and with the laughter of contingency and resistance to the charms of wealth and power. 

Maksymilian Del Mar is Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London


[1] Simone Weil, ‘Essay on the Concept of Reading’, from Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, ed. EO. Springsted, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, 21-27, at 22. 

[2] Id.

[3] Ibid. 21

[4] Id. 

[5] Ibid. 22.

[6] Id.

[7] Ibid. 23.

[8] Id.

[9] Id.

[10] Id. 23.

[11] Id. 24.

[12] Id.

[13] Id.

[14] Ibid. 25.

[15] Ibid. 23.

[16] Ibid. 26.

[17] Id.

[18] Id.

[19] Ibid. 23.

[20] Ibid. 26

[21] Id.

[22] Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, Ed. S. Miles, Penguin, 2005, 182-215.

[23] Emilios Christodoulidis, The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism, and Market Capture, Cambridge University Press, 2021, especially chapter 1.2

[24] Lysias, ‘On the Death of Eratosthenes’, in Lysias, trans. SC Todd, University of Texas Press, 2000, 13-24. 

[25] James Fredal, The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning, and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020, chapters 8 and 9. 

[26] Gorgias, Encomium of Helen, ed. and trans. DM McDowell, Bristol Classical Press, 1982. 

[27] Ibid. 21.

[28] Ibid. 27.

1 Comment

  1. Excellent. The association of the pedagogy of “reading differently” in order to demystify “appearances” and halt immdediate stereotypical ‘readings’ of an imposed meaning-order, with the unmasking of the faces of tyranny, is innovative and praiseworthy.

    Reply

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