From Word To Word

As should be clear by now, the space of the home is a subject that is of great concern for me, so I was sincerely pleased to learn that my friend, whom some of you will know as TC from her comments on this site, has begun a blog of short quotations and photos and reflections on the meaning of home.  TC’s comments have often caused me to think differently and more deeply through the idea of home over the past two years or so, and two of her book recommendations, George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, have become a significant part of my personal canon, so I will enjoy the opportunity to read her in the coming months, and I think many of you will as well.

I have only just begun reading Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, and already I have the need to write about it.  This does not bode well for any of you who might be following along with me.  You might have to prepare for a steady diet of Illich’s reflection on the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor over the next few weeks.  I apologize in advance, sincerely.

In his introduction to the book, Illich says, “No one should be misled into taking my footnotes as either proof of, or invitation to, scholarship.  They are there to remind the reader of the rich harvest of memorabilia – rocks, fauna, and flora – which a man has picked up on repeated walks through a certain area, and now would like to share with others.  They are here mainly to encourage the reader to venture into the shelves of the library and experiment with distinct types of reading.”

I love this passage for several reasons.

First, I think that the image of walking along the path and collecting the things that are found there is an apt image for the kind of scholarship that I value.  The walker is not interested in cataloging the flora and fauna of the path exhaustively, nor in classifying them rigorously.  The walker is interested in becoming familiar with the area, with the things that are there every day, with the things that are only rarely there, with the things that make this path singular.  The walker is looking and seeing, is listening and hearing, is finding and gathering, and is also, most significantly, sharing with others what has been found.

The kind of scholarship that Illich is describing with this image proceeds with a similar gait and a similar pace.  It is an invitation to walk with someone who has read and thought and written on certain intellectual paths, with someone who can point to the things that are there to be seen and heard and found.  It does not ask that I replicate a set of results.  It asks that I follow the path that another has made familiar so that it can become familiar to me also.  This is exactly the kind of scholarship that I want to model.

Second, by applying this idea of scholarship to his footnotes, Illich causes me to read his footnotes differently.  They cease being justifications for his scholarly claims and become recommendations for the books and writers and ideas that he has found and loved.  They become the textual equivalent of a verbal phenomenon that is familiar to anyone who talks with others about books and writers.  They say, “Oh, by the way, while we’re on the topic, such and such a book talks about this idea in interesting ways,” or they say, “I remember author so and so said something that relates to this point.”  In other words, they are all the places that our conversation could have gone but did not, all the things that it brushed against and took into itself but did not dwell upon.  They are all the places where our conversation might go next, when we meet again.

Third, Illich’s image is also an encouragement for his readers not to stop at his text, but to read through it to those that he has read himself, to go into the libraries and find the books that he is recommending, to read these things for ourselves.  It is never sufficient, he implies to read about another book or writer, however valuable such reading may be.  It is always necessary to read further and more, to read the many other books that one book always recommends,  even if this process will never be complete, perhaps because it will never be complete.  To read through the book in this way is to take the footnotes as recommendations to more and further reading, as possibilities, as conversations to come.

Illich takes himself at his own word in this respect, as he always does.  The footnotes of In the Vineyard of the Text are often very long, comprising more than half the page in many instances, and they could easily be passed over as either too boring or too intimidating to merit the time and effort that reading them would take, but his footnotes are as different as he claims they are, or perhaps I come to read them differently just because he has made such a claim.  I find them often conversational in tone, unafraid to reference an almost irrelevant anecdote or to recommend a particular book with a kind of personal fervour, and I sometimes find myself reflecting on them as much as the text itself.  Most interestingly, they also make me wonder what other textual conventions might be used in this way, against themselves, in order to foster a reading that is more open and more convivial.

I had a chance to go by the EBC library today and search through the discards.  I was doing so primarily to make a point to my class that it is possible to find good books just about anywhere, but my visit proved much more productive than I expected.  I found a number of books that were interesting but for which I was not necessarily looking, the sort of books I thought I would find:

D. Mackenzie Brown – Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue
Friedrich Schleiermacher – On Religion
R. J. Kaufmann, editor – G. B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus – The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Frederick Buechner – The Sacred Journey
Martis Esslin, editor - Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays
Hugh Kenner - Samuel Beckett
Sigmund Freud – Totem and Taboo

More excitingly, I also found a novel by one of my favourite and most elusive authors: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams.  I have written at length about Charles Williams before, so I will not do so again.  I will just say that I love his books and was disappointed to find, when I got home, that Many Dimensions is one I already own. On the other hand, simply discovering it among the discards, so unexpectedly, was a profound delight, and I will now have something to give Dave Humphrey when we meet on Wednesday night.

I have been thinking lately about the nature of the work of art in the age of what I will call digital replication.  This thinking has led me in some disparate directions that I cannot possibly follow all at once, so this post will probably be the first of several that follow a loosely related set of ideas.  I have no real conclusion in mind, not yet, so consider this the textual corollary of thinking aloud.

As my title suggests, I have been thinking this question of digital replication through Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  I first read this essay in a university theory class, then read it again some time later in order to better understand a friend’s article, and then read it again just recently as I was preparing to write this post.  It is a marvelous essay, and I will return to it in a moment, but I think that I should probably begin where so much of my thinking seems to begin, over a cup of coffee with Dave Humphrey.

Actually, on the night in question, I think I was drinking an oatmeal stout rather than a coffee, and I was listening to Dave theorize about why I prefer to search out books in yardsales and thriftstores rather than just to buy them online.  It suddenly occurred to me that I had already begun to answer this question some time ago in a post on dying texts, where I made a distinction between the physical book, which was falling apart as I was reading it, and the work of writing, which was embodied in many such physical books and in other forms as well.  I began to wonder whether my fascination with rescuing discarded books was an expression of a kind of fetish for the physical book, not in and of itself, because I am reader rather than a collector of books, but as the singular place where my own story intersects the story of the work of writing.  In other words, perhaps my fetish is with the book as the physical marker of a literary experience, as one of the elements that produces this experience, as a tangible synecdoche for this experience.  It is not that I am confusing the literary work with the form in which it happens to be embodied, but that my experience of the literary work is so dependent on it being embodied in one form or another that this form itself becomes an inextricable part of my experience.

This explains, I think, at least in part, why I love used bookstores and yardsales and thriftstores, because the books that I find there have stories that began far before I found them, so the intersection of their stories and mine is far more interesting.  They have inscriptions on their titlepages, and makeshift bookmarks, and notes in their margins, and coffee stains, and the pricetags of long forgotten booksellers.  They also have the story of where and when I happened to stumble upon them, the story of how their stories and mine happened to become entangled.  I love these stories about books.  I love them as much as the stories that the books contain.  I love them because they inform my reading of the literary work that they share with me, because they help make that reading and that experience what it is.  My fetish, in other words, is for story of the physical book as an element in the production of my literary experience.

Of course, every book, whether bought new from the mass bookseller or used online or digitized for my electronic reader, every book will have such a story, but some of these stories will be more interesting than others.  If a friend and I both place an order for copies of the same book online, their stories, at least for us, are practically indistinguishable from each other, and they are also practically indistinguishable from any number of other such orders placed by people around the world.  We will all have had our different reasons for placing that order, of course, but each copy of that book will have been published in the same place, shipped in the same ways, ordered from the same forms.  There is a story here, certainly, because there is always a story, but it is a story that is hardly worth telling, at least not without stomach churning levels of irony or boredom or both.

As I was thinking these things with Dave, sipping on my stout, I found myself recalling the opening section of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, where Benjamin analyzes how the ability to reproduce the work of art has altered our relation to the work of art as such, so I dug out the essay when I returned home.  It is, as I have already said, a marvelous bit of thinking, and I would like to spend a great more time on it than this present space will allow me.  The central ideas for my own purposes, however are these:

Benjamin argues that the age of mechanical reproduction and it ability to produce innumerable physical copies of an original work of art “withers the aura of the work of art.”  By this he means that reproduction undermines the work of art’s authenticity and jeopardizes its authority as an object, because “it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”  He still maintains the idea of the original, arguing that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art” lacks the original’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” but he argues that the aura, the authenticity, and the authority of this original is undermined by mass reproduction.

His reasons for this are fairly simple.  He first argues that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” and that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.”  He then suggests that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” and therefore distances is also from the original work of art.  This distance, obscuring the singular history of the work of art, also withers its authority and authenticity, its aura.

One interesting implication of this line of reasoning is that it opens the possibility for reproductions to take on the kinds of authority and authenticity that were once reserved for the original.  If, as Benjamin says, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history that it has experienced,” then a reproduction certainly obscures the authenticity of its original through the distance that it imposes between itself and the historical singularity of its original, but it also becomes a historical singularity in and of itself and becomes capable of founding its own authority and its own authenticity.  In other words, the ability to produce copies of the work of art makes possible the kind of fetishism that I was describing earlier.  It reduces the value of the original, because this original is no longer the only place where the work of art finds a form, but it opens the possibility that the copies will become originals of a sort as they take on their own history, and this history may actually increase their authenticity beyond that of their original, if they are signed by the author, for example, or owned by a celebrity.  Mechanical reproduction, therefore, devalues but does not eliminate the original, and produces many physical copies that can themselves obtain value as they take on a singular history.

All of this brings me to a possibility that first occurred to me as I was sitting there with Dave over my pint, though I did not then have the benefit of Benjamin’s terminology to articulate it: if the age of mechanical reproduction introduces the possibility that a copy might take on its own authority and authenticity, the age of digital replication ends this possibility definitively.    The reason for this is that the digitized replication is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy.  These replications are always indistinguishable.   They always substitute for one another perfectly.  There is, in other words, no original, or perhaps there are only originals, and none of these originals are subject to history in a way that can mark them as singular and therefore authoritative or authentic.  History leaves them untouched, unmarked, so they are incapable of taking on the aura of authority or authenticity.

This means that the digitized replication can never become a fetishized object in the way of the mechanical reproduction, because it will never be possible for its story to become singular and to intersect with the story of the reader.  I will never find notes in the margin of an etext or a signature on the cover of an mp3 file.  I will never find their stories in a thriftstore or a garage sale.   In the mode of their physical existence, they are as different from the book as the book is from the oral recitation.  This new mode of existence, I think, needs to be the subject of some serious reflection, and I hope to do some of this reflection in future posts.

For the moment, though, I will close with a confession of sorts.  While I am not certain whether digital replication is essentially better or worse than mechanical reproduction, I must admit an intense nostalgia for the stories and the histories that mechanical reproduction enables.  My own understanding of the literary experience is so entirely wrapped up in the physicality of the book and in the history that produces it as an authentic and authoritative object, even if for no one but myself, that I cannot imagine reading apart from these things, and I can only see the digital replication as a kind of loss, whatever benefits it might also have.  Perhaps these are the questions that I will need to explore next.

As I wrote a few weeks ago in a post on teaching literature and teaching reading, I will be asking my students to learn a little differently this fall, to learn without essays, without exams, without traditional lectures, even without mandatory texts.  Instead, they will be going with me to a used bookstore, where they will buy five books of their own choosing.  They will then be responsible to read these texts and to blog their responses to this reading on their own blogs, which will all be aggregated with the class blog into a blog planet.  In order to provide a model of what this kind of reading and writing might look like, I will be reading and writing along with my students in exactly the ways that I am asking of them, but I would like them to have many such models, to see the many approaches that skilled and interested readers might bring to a text.

So, I am extending an invitation to you, whoever you may be, to read and write along with us this fall.   You may do so very simply.  You need only to read what you would be reading in any case, without even the very rudimentary guidelines that I have set for my students, and then to blog about what your reading inspires in you, whenever and however often you feel so inspired.  Just create a category for your responses, something like Literature or Reading or whatever, and then send me the RSS feed for the category so that I can include it in the blog planet.   Of course, if this seems like too much commitment, you can also participate just by adding the blog planet to your reader and commenting on the posts that interest you.

If you want, you can even accompany us on our trip to the bookstore, for which I will post details shortly, or you can join us for our open discussions, which will be held during two or three of our classes this semester.  I will also be asking some of you personally to make guest appearances in our class discussions, and if you would like to participate in some way that I have not yet imagined, just let me know.  I am willing to explore anything that might make the learning process more open and more accessible.

My hope, in this invitation, in you, in your participation, is that it will produce precisely this openness and this accessibility.  I want to turn the focus of the learning process away from the requirements of the institution and toward the passions and the disciplines of reading and writing in the world, a reading and writing that you and I produce every day.  I want my students to find themselves engaged with people who read and write, not because they have something due tomorrow, but because they find something valuable in the very acts of reading and writing.  I want them, not merely to join a class for a semester, but to join a community of readers for life.

If you are at all interested in being involved with this project in any way, please let me know just leave a comment here or email me at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

Note:  This post has been changed several times to reflect some technical changes that I have been forced to make.

I wrote a post recently on the way that I read, but I have been reflecting since then that this description of my reading practise is grossly misrepresentative without a similar account of the way that I also misread.  If it is true, as my earlier post suggests, that reading well demands the discipline to read properly, it also true, to precisely the same degree, that reading well demands the desire to read improperly.  So, though I have already written about this desire in passing on earlier occasions, let me dwell on it now a little more fully.

To read according to desire is to read without regard for anything but the pleasure of the text.  It is to approach the text like a lover, to seek it out wherever it is and wherever it might be.  Those who read like this, who desire like this, who love like this, are always looking, through libraries and bookstores, through the bookshelves of friends, through the recommendations of others, through yardsales and thrift stores and fleamarkets.  When they find what they are seeking, they hunger and lust for it, seize and possess it.  They do not read it, but throw themselves into it, immerse themselves in it, like a madness or a desperation, and they find that they themselves have becomes seized and possessed.

This kind of reading does not remain distinct from the reader, does not leave the reader unaltered.  It permeates the reader’s being, marks it and changes it, leaves the signs of love on it, leaves the scratches and bites of a ferocious love.  The reader bears these scars with a wild and terrified joy, with a fearful pride, hoping and dreading that others will see the wounds and guess what has made them.

At night, lying in bed, the one who desires reading, the one who loves reading, wakes, haunted by the dream of the text, and rises and goes about the house, through the city, into the streets, and seeks, though it does not always find, and yet finds and embraces and does not let go and returns to the house and to the room and to the bed.  The reader who desires is always going and seeking and finding and returning.  The reader who loves is always loving again, and once more, and yet another time, but is never satisfied.  This is the desire without which any practise of reading, any discipline of reading, will be empty and void.

I know, I know, I have already posted once today, and at length, but I promise that this will be short.  I began reading Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives this afternoon, and came across a phrase that encapsulates my understanding of the world so simply and so truly that I felt compelled to share it.  “Every book in the world,” Bolano says, “is out there waiting to be read by me.”  I can hardly think of a more beautiful sentence.

Some people have taken me to task recently about what I mean exactly when I talk about reading well and about teaching good reading. Let me clarify.  What I certainly do not mean is that there is some set of essential techniques that most be followed in order to discover a text’s single proper meaning.  What I do mean is that good reading must be characterized by a certain attentiveness, a certain concern, a certain watchfulness, that it comes from an erotic  passion and a desire for the text, and that it comes to be expressed, necessarily though not essentially, through a personal practise of reading.  This practise and its techniques will not be the same from reader to reader, but they will be present in one form or another in every reader.

So, since I feel capable of speaking for nobody else, let me share my own reading practise as an example of what I mean:

First, I read with sticky notes, many sticky notes, an unhealthy number of sticky notes.  In fact, my biggest question about readers of the past has to do with how they managed to cope without sticky notes.  I use them to flag quotations that I want to take, passages that I want to engage, ideas that I want to consider, connections with other texts, possible ideas for my own writing, and anything that might relate to the rather broad set of themes and images that I track through everything that I read.

Second, I read with a commonplace book, a hardbound notebook that I use to keep track of the books that I read.  Each book gets a place on a titlepage that indicates where it can be found within the notebook.  Each book’s own section begins with the date and a full bibliographic notation.  The notes consist mostly of quotations and my own responses to them, with the relevant page numbers in the margin.

Third, I read with a scribble book, a hardbound notebook that I use to write whatever else needs to be written.  This book has no premeditated form.  It includes everything from sketches for the composter I am building for the garden or the blocks that I am making for my kids, to notes from the conversations I am having with a friend over coffee or a coworker in a meeting, to drafts of things that I am writing for this blog or for my other projects, and to just about anything else that needs a place.

Fourth, I read with a whole range of computer files.  Usually these files are about a certain topic, or theme, or image, and I copy quotations or write my own notes into them toward future projects that will probably not, but just may, achieve a polished form at some point in the future.

Fifth, I read with this blog and with letters to friends.  When something strikes my imagination, I open a new post or a new email, and I jot the beginnings of something there that might eventually become something that I send.  I often use these media for the things that I would not otherwise know where to place: an interesting but academically insignificant literary connection, a personal or emotive response to a text, or a random piece of paper that I find in a used book.

Fifth, I read most books at least twice.  On the first reading, I read the whole book, thoroughly, stopping only long enough to mark the things that I may want to read or consider or write later.  On the second reading, I return to the most significant portions of the book, copying out quotations, writing responses, scribbling, thinking, pausing, reflecting.

Sixth, I read books with friends.  This is not usually a formal process where I read a book with a friend for the purpose of sharing it, though I sometimes do this also.  It is most often a process of sharing and recommending and discussing the books that I read as they naturally become relevant in the conversations that I have every day.  It is a process of making my reading a part of my living.

This is how I read.  There is nothing essential about the techniques themselves, only about the attention and the concern that requires such techniques in order to express itself.  My practise of reading is essential only insofar as it is the form that passion for reading has come to take in my life.  Your practise will be different, of course, but I would insist on this much: that you do find for yourself some practise of reading, something that forms your reading, in order for you to read well, and so that you can say also, “This is how I read.”

I have decided to approach my Survey of English Literature II course a little differently this fall.  It will be my fourth time teaching the course, and I have already experimented with it quite heavily the past two times I have taught it, but I have never been satisfied with the degree to which it, or any of my other courses, encouraged students to learn and read and write independently.  I always felt that I was perpetuating the very kinds of educational dynamics that I find so abhorrent.

A short while ago, however, Dave Humphrey posted on modes of lecturing or, perhaps, if you will pardon the neologism, on modes of unlecturing.  He was responding to another post by Kuis von Ahn, and I will not go into the details of the discussion, but I was particularly struck by something he wrote: “Let your own students produce the things they actually want. Let them build examples needed to teach these concepts. Let them critique and collaborate on the work, improving it iteratively. And let this process of collaborative learning and teaching become what happens in the classroom.”

What Dave is describing here is far more than collaborative teaching or experiential learning or any of the other classroom techniques that come in and out of fashion.  It is an approach that puts the onus for learning entirely on the students.  The students are responsible for determining what it is that they need to learn, for how it is that they would learn this best, for how their learning might best be supplemented, and for how this learning should be shared with their peers.  The teacher, far from abdicating the role of teacher, is then forced to teach truly, to enable, facilitate, encourage, model, and provoke the process of learning that the student has chosen.

Dave and I have discussed these ideas before, and we had a chance to discuss them again shortly after he posted. During this conversation, he made several suggestions, and I suddenly realized what it was that I wanted to do with the course this year.  Let me explain.  Then you can all tell me exactly how and why it will cost me my career.

The first day of class will be much the same as any other:  introductions, administrative details, etcetera.  The second class, however, will be held at a local used bookstore, where the students will be asked to buy five books from the time period covered by the course.  These books can be of any length and of any genre and of any variety.  They need meet only a single criterion, one unilaterally enforced by myself: No crap.

The students will then be responsible to read the books, think about them, reflect on them, and then post responses to them on a group blog that I will create for the class.  They will also be asked to comment on each other’s posts.  There will be no assigned format for these posts, but they will have the same criterion as the texts: No crap.

The classes, which may or may not be held in the classroom on any given day, will be primarily constituted by discussion.  The subject of this discussion will begin with the texts that the students are reading and with the posts that they have been writing, but it need need be restricted to these things.  Like any useful discussion, it will probably range in far different directions, though I will try to keep it circulating around questions of literature as much as possible.

I will also participate in this whole process.  I will buy five books, read them, and post on them.  I will comment on other posts.  I will participate in the class discussion.  Though my participation will necessarily be different at times, because of a differential in knowledge and experience of the subject that we will be discussing, and also because my goals will consciously include those of the teacher, I hope to encourage a discussion that permits each student to take the initiative in respect to the books that he or she has chosen, rather than relying on me for direction.

My goal is simple.  It is not to train literary scholars or literary critics.  It is not to produce academics.  If it were, my approach would be worse than useless.  My goal is to provoke my students into reading, into thinking, into writing, into sharing, into conversing.  It want to model for them an approach to literature that is based on passion and desire.  I want them to encounter something, even if it is only one thing, something that they love, something that will cause them to keep picking up the books around them in the hope of finding something else that they will love.

I want to stop teaching literature.  I want to start teaching reading.

Well, since I did promise Dave Humphrey that I would provide him a list of the fifty books that I think are most relevant to our time, and since I have already dodged this request on one occasion, and since he has reminded me of this situation more than once, here, at last, with many reservations, is my list.

Reservation the First: Though I have become more aware of the art of the list since I read Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, this list will have no art whatsoever.  It will be alphabetical by author’s surname, without specific commentary of any kind.

Reservation the Second: I have not yet read very much in my life, and I can obviously draw my list only from those books that I have read, so this list will be hopelessly deficient.

Reservation the Third: I cannot possibly compare literary works with philosophical works, so I have divided the one list of fifty books into two lists of twenty-five, one for literature and one for philosophy.  I know this is arbitrary, but will do it anyway.

Reservation the Forth and Most Serious: I am still completely uncertain of the criteria that one would use to determine which books are relevant to our times or any other times, so I am not sure how useful any list of mine will actually be.

However, for Dave’s sake and for the sake of anyone else who might conceivably care, these are the fifty books that I would say are relevant to our times.

Literature
Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot
Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones
Albert Camus The Fall
Albert Camus The Plague
J. M. Coetzee Foe
Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Simone de Beavoir The Blood of Others
Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Fydor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
Fydor Dostoevsky The Idiot
Alaxandre Dumas The Count of Monte Christo
William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
William Golding Pincher Martin
William Golding The Spire
Franz Kafka Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka The Trial
Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano
Dow Mossman The Stones of Summer
Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Hundred Years of Solitude
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

Philosophy
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse
Roland Barthes Mythologies
Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project
Maurice Blanchot The Instant of my Death
Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship
Martin Buber I and Thou
Michel de Certeau The Practise of Everyday Life
Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death
Jacques Derrida The Politics of Friendship
Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge
Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred
George Grant Philosophy in the Mass Age
Martin Heidegger On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society
Ivan Illich Tools for Conviviality
Soren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity
Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being
Georges Perec The Species of Spaces
Desmond Tutu No Future Without Forgiveness