| Summary: | Reader’s Block narrates, among other things, the gradual disappearance of subjectivity: reduced to a shadow of itself, it barely subsists in a darkening world where writing is increasingly illegible for lack of light. Thus, the « reader’s block » punningly referred to in the title is less an expression of a hermeneutical crisis than the consequence of a physical impossibility, as the many allusions to blindness also suggest. This situation gives rise to a tragic form of experimentum linguæ; in turn, this is key to a Modernist aesthetics which promotes asceticism and the deliberate acceptance of an essential poverty understood, in the last analysis, as a form of liberation. In Reader’s Block, blindness and dispossession—including the loss of subjectivity and self—are what make it possible to embark on a groping quest for words, guided by an ethical and mystical awareness of language which privileges tactility at the expense of interiority, which is simultaneously denounced as an illusion.
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