Powers of Reading, by Peter Szendy

Reviewed by Dominik Zechner

Peter Szendy, Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks, trans. Olivia Custer (New York: Zone, 2025), 208 pp.

I’m writing ‘bout the book I read
I have to sing about the book I read
I’m embarrassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart
When I found out you wrote the book I read^[1]

If reading Peter Szendy’s Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks left me humming a song by the Talking Heads, this effect corresponds to the very heart of the matter. For Szendy, reading is indeed an event of the senses, but contrary to popular intuition, its privileged sense is not the eye but the ear: one hears the act of reading, listening for its pitch and timbre, the velocity of its soundwaves. A privileged verb in this regard is “to auscultate” (29, 123, 162, 171), which names the medical technique of listening to the internal sounds of the body, typically using a stethoscope. Perhaps we must imagine Peter Szendy’s eyes closed as he sounds out the corpora of Hobbes and Goethe, Italo Calvino and László Krasznahorkai, listening for heart murmurs and unusual bowel movement. Readers familiar with Szendy’s oeuvre will not be surprised by his auscultative method, because it directly connects to the author’s extensive work in sound studies, as it is gathered in volumes such as Listen (2008), Hits (2012), and All Ears (2017).^[2]

How does one read with the ear? The question is posed most urgently during a time of unprecedented audiobook availability and consumption. Rather than affecting only those who listen for their private predilection, this cultural shift pervades all levels of readerly perusal, as became obvious to me during a recent conversation with a graduate student, who admitted, quite shamelessly, that she exclusively listens to all the books assigned in her class on the modern novel. The two acts need not be exclusive, however. Think of Piper Ratliff, the daughter of a well-to-do Southern family on the most recent season of The White Lotus, where she could be seen listening to the audiobook of a fictionalized Buddhist self-help title, while simultaneously holding a physical copy to underline important portions. “Identity is a prison,” runs one sentence she highlights, and its irony not least applies to the reading scene, which, Szendy teaches us, is never self-identical. According to Powers of Reading, it would be wise not to write off Piper’s decadent strategy of immersive reading as a biblio-prosthetic obscenity confined to the present age. Rather, Szendy recognizes in the audiobook’s pet sounds the latest stage of an extensive historical development, whose origins he traces back to Antiquity.

There, he finds the elusive figure of the ἀναγνώστης, the slave reader, who lent his voice to the text, faithfully transmitting its contents to his master, the one who receives the reading; Szendy calls him readee. At once marginal and essential, the anagnost brings the text to life, speaking for and as the sentences he broadcasts, while simultaneously disappearing like any technological medium beneath the representations his voice carries. This disappearance is of great importance to Szendy, who reads it in terms of a historical internalization. History has not done away with the reading slave but dislodged his position and subdued his being into sheer unnoticeability: “we also continue to encounter the anagnost in ourselves when we read silently—at least this is the hypothesis I am proposing. When we open a book, it is always in some sense an anagnost who begins to read in us” (42). Testing this hypothesis, Szendy departs from the literal reading slave as we find him, for instance, in Plato’s Phaedrus and Theaetetus, to discover his most improbable reincarnations, for instance “in cigar factories in Cuba, where lectores read for the cigar workers, a practice that spread to Spain and the United States, and to Mexico and the Dominican Republic” (9). In his apparent passivity, the modern reader has anything but abdicated these lectores and anagnosts, and rather internalized them, such that “when I read silently, whispering in my inner self, I listen to myself reading. That is, I am already an audiobook for myself” (15).

Dear reader, if it feels like a trap, you’re already in one
Dear reader, get out your map, pick somewhere, and just run
Dear reader, burn all the files, desert all your past lives
And if you don’t recognize yourself
That means you did it right^[3]

Avant la lettre, the American poet Taylor Swift emerged as a formidable proponent of Szendy’s anagnosology when, on the final track of the “3am Edition” of her 2022 album Midnights, she insisted that reading’s beginning must always precede us. Rather than turning my inner anagnost on and off at will, what occurs when I read is an exposure to voices of myriad past anagnosts who come upon me, enveloping and invading my intimate reading moments. My reading will never be mine, for there’s a great reading that antecedes me, forcing me “to experience a radical expropriation” (129). The reader grapples, as Taylor Swift well understood, with a constitutive misrecognition that marks the scene of reading, in which a voice that no longer belongs to me imparts to me a text that is not mine: “The gap that opens up at the heart of the reading subject’s interiority, the otherness to oneself that wedges itself in there (that has always been wedged in there), is the spacing from which a new politics of reading may emerge” (15).^[4]

Szendy’s observation directs itself against naïve notions of reading that seek, in the friendly encounter with the text, to edify and strengthen the sense of self by looking for identification and for representations that promote relatability. Yet, if reading happens in the trap or gap that splits the reading subject, identification is at a primordial loss as reading’s monologue disintegrates into a polyphony of voices. These voices constitute “the internal phonodrama that plays out within each of us every time we read” (78). The staging of this drama helps us to better understand what is meant by the strange title of Szendy’s study: what exactly are the “powers of reading”? Do they come in the guise of monarchical might, institutional force, or sheer annihilating violence?^[5] Szendy’s answer is nuanced, in that it deems the onslaught of reading powerful enough to split the reading subject, whose monolithic silence unfurls to display “the micropolitical drama that plays out in it” (44). In other words, the sheer violence of reading becomes political precisely as a negotiation of the multitude of voices that emerge from the “gap” in the subject. While these voices have certain assigned roles—the anagnost, the readee, the author’s lapidary voice as it’s chiseled into the text—Szendy insists that there is no fixity to their distribution.

One way to recast the phonodrama is by rereading, because each return to a text transforms the initial passivity with which we absorb it into a mode of active pursuit—“given that, as it is reread,” the text “is judged, analyzed, criticized,” and “also disassembled, decomposed, dismembered into its constituent parts” (55). These parts do not just pertain to the structural elements of a given text—the chapters, sentences, phrases, or figures of speech of which it consists—but also the phonodramatic roles that underprop its delivery: “Rereading thus foreshadows the possibility of reshuffling the roles: not only the members of the discursive organism, the parts and articulations of the corpus of the text that is read, but also, above all, the bodies of those who read and the relationships of domination in which they are caught and rearranged” (55f). The phonodrama is thus never a neutral scene; its “vocal theater” disguises a “microscene of power,” indeed, its analysis makes obvious “the micropowers that operate in the reading activity as though they had been swallowed” by the reader (24f). Reading, then, is another name for a division in the subject that sets free a multitude of voices whose dramatic confrontation is regulated by an ever-dynamic power relation.

Szendy stresses the role of the body in reading—as emphasized by the act of “swallowing” the phonodramatic powers—which raises important questions about the corporeality of reading and its linguistic determination. “Before he really starts to read,” Szendy observes, “before giving himself over body and soul to the one who will speak through him,” the reader “is already no longer quite himself, is already partly another” (49). Reading is the colonization of the body by other voices who overtake and tear asunder the reader’s vessel. What’s ingested and regurgitated in reading is the other’s discourse, a language whose powerful capsules concentrate reading’s multitude of voices only to explode them in the reader’s stomach. Reading is an act that risks the body: it wounds and splits it, pumps it up on that alien substance called “language” to form other bodies out of this one body. In this sense, reading is always also a reading of wounds—what Paul Celan called wundlesen.^[6]

To the extent that the powers of reading can wound us, their phonodrama is policed and sometimes even brought to court. For instance, Szendy revisits the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert for offenses against public morality and religion following the serialization of his novel Madame Bovary in the Revue de Paris, paying close attention to the ways in which both prosecution and defense framed the act of reading. Szendy reminds us that such juridical scenes are nothing extraordinary but that “the courtroom is a projection of the internal phonodrama that plays out within us every time we read” (78). What happened to Flaubert—but also to Baudelaire, Zola, Wilde, Joyce, and others—is thus the literalization of legalistic questions that entangle, throttle, guide, and motivate the process of reading whenever it occurs. If Szendy is correct, then reading would always commence with (or as) a violation of moral norms, and thus with a charge whose superegoical expungement the reader’s inner advocate frantically strives for.

But she can read, she can read, she can read
She can read, she’s bad
She can read, she can read
She can read, she’s bad
Oh, she’s bad^[7]

Perhaps it took Peter Szendy’s theory of reading to attune us more fully to what Interpol were articulating over two decades ago in their obscure single “Obstacle 1.” Is the bad reader the one who just doesn’t get it—or is she bad because she relentlessly probes the moral boundaries delimiting the reading exercise? “She can read, therefore she’s bad” is not the Cartesian maxim of anagnosology as much as it recalls the work of the Marquis de Sade, whose Philosophy in the Boudoir tells of the 15-year-old Eugénie’s initiation into the immoral tenets of libertine philosophy. The instruction culminates in the brutal torture of Eugénie’s own mother, thus severing herself from all traditional and moral obligations. The torment is complete once the mother is “sewn up” and sent back to her husband.

Szendy treats the scene in a pivotal chapter dedicated to “The Categorical Imperative of Reading.” Covertly inscribed in this title is the name Lacan, who pioneeringly cross-read the Kantian ethics with Sade’s expansive palette of radical transgressions, recognizing in sadistic perversion the hidden cruelty of pure practical reason whose only safe word is “keep going.” In fact, the 1963 essay “Kant avec Sade” preordains Szendy’s approach to the precise extent that it pays attention to the stitches across the mother’s sewn-up body. For “sewing is never far from being a figure for reading,” Szendy explains, all the more if one understands reading to be “a matter of punctuation or better, of the puncture of stitching, in other words the entering and exiting of the ‘upholsterer’s needle’ which binds the signifier and the signified together, thus ensuring the seam of signification” (70f). The craft of upholstery knows the term point de capiton or “quilting point” to name the stitch that holds the padding and fabric of a cushion in place. In Lacan, the stitch’s punctuation becomes the central trope for a temporary arrest of drifting signifiers, thus the one trope that can pause all tropological movement. While it’s misleading to think that it’s here that the signifier grasps its forever signified, the quilting point certainly has a significatory effect in that it retroactively organizes the signifying chain so that it appears to culminate somewhere, i.e., “mean” something. The wager of Szendy’s lesson in stitch-reading is that the reader always looks for the suture.^[8]

The irony of the mother’s sewn-up state is that it once again removes her from the touch: “the mother remains forbidden,” Szendy and Lacan concur. What remains forbidden about her is precisely that which forbids, because, while she may be the last to be violated, the mother is also the first to command the reading. Sure enough, the title page of Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir is adorned with a curious proviso: “La mère en prescrira la lecture à sa fille.”^[9] The epigraph assigns to the mother a metaleptic position, penetrated by the intradiegetic forces that her extradiegetic imperative legitimizes and sets in motion. The mother, then, embodies an allegory of the law of reading that both precedes and enables the text proper: “This law thus remains and must remain hors texte or outside the work, preserved in an epigraph while reinscribed, sewn back into the texture of the text itself, again and again, by these dotted stitches through which the reading voice passes in and out in such a way as to appear and disappear according to the intermittent anagnosological rhythm that is the very structure of its reading points” (73).

There is then one voice, one phonodramatic player, whose position is irreducible to the play and whose injunction sets the drama in motion and endows it with legitimacy. In Sade, it’s the mother’s voice that prescribes the very reading that will culminate in her own defilement. Once more, Szendy echoes Lacan when he submits that the mother must be v…d to be v…d, that is, voiced before she can be violated (cf. 73). Convinced that the maternal injunction affords an anagnosological generalization, Szendy hears in it the categorical imperative that must be in play whenever a scene of reading occurs. In fact, “the reading voice is constantly interwoven with this imperative—‘read!’—that accompanies or precedes it” (28). The irony of such an imperative hors texte is of course that it must be read in order to be followed. If you read the injunction “read!” you had already been reading, perhaps without knowing it. Even the command that compels us to read is only ever catching up with reading. By the same token, the negative injunction “don’t read!” must always be broken: if you fail to read it, you undermine its authority, yet if you succeed, you violate its law. Perhaps there is then no outside of reading…

A vexing moment in Nietzsche’s quasi-autobiography—the reader might recall it—has the philosopher avow a double genealogy whose division is marked by gender: “The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father, while as my mother I am still living and becoming old.”^[10] While the paternal position signifies decadence and decline, the mother stands for perpetual renewal. And, indeed, the mother’s prescription that tells us to read cannot but renew itself, resound again and again, drowning out its own imperious voice with ever more forceful injunctions. In other words, while the father punctuates the reading with his upholsterer’s needle, always gunning for the fiction of closure, the mother will encourage us to read on. Moreover, Nietzsche’s musing exposes reading’s shifting sex, repeatedly dividing and recutting the subject, again and again (cf. 89).

Szendy gleans the same lesson from an encounter with Italo Calvino, whose work lets the reader’s gender fluctuate to the point of total neutrality: “If it is the case […] that readers do not preexist the reading (each time I read, the reading invents me), then neither does their gender: each time I read (each time I am interpellated as ‘you’), I am in the process of becoming a female reader or a male reader” (88). What articulates itself in this passage on the level of gender is the larger problem of embodiment in the scene of reading: while the reading body seems so securely anchored in its web of referential relations that allows us to differentiate between phenomenal and linguistic reality, the reader’s body—“caught, torn, stretched” (20)—is never not affected by the language ingested.^[11] This body metamorphoses, spun in a vortex of becoming that shifts both gender and genealogy. Inasmuch as reading conditions the very possibility of subjectification, it is simply “impossible to attribute this reading to anyone; it is what is yet to come ahead of the text and ahead of the reading subject. It is what barely appears on the horizon, now, and now, and now…” (90). It reads, in me and through me, thus providing the basis for processes of individualization without ever resolving itself into markers of identity, be they male or female. If reading holds the subject into its own neutrality, it always also un-reads it, in-determining what once was considered known and secured. It’s here that the power of reading becomes divine violence.

A throughline connects Szendy’s discussion of sadism and the question of gendered embodiment with an Ancient erotics of reading according to which the book is “an object of erotic substitution” (50). Exploring the pederastic relationship as it underpins Plato’s Phaedrus, Szendy assigns phonodramatic roles to the ἐραστής, the lover, and the ἐρώμενος, his beloved. While the pederastic relation fixes their positions, viewing the adolescent ἐρώμενος as the object of affection and admiration, delivered to the mentorship of the older ἐραστής, who courts, protects, and educates the apprentice, Szendy recognizes in reading and its theater of micropower the possibility of shifting the roles and overturning the hierarchy. In Plato’s dialogue, the parts seem clearly assigned when Phaedrus appears as Lysias’s ἐρώμενος. Yet, as Socrates invites the boy to take a repeated look at his master’s speech, the positions begin to slide: “whereas during the first reading, Lysias was penetrating Phaedrus [through the ear, that is, by dint of language], who was penetrating Socrates, this time Socrates penetrates Phaedrus, who penetrates Lysias” (55). Szendy’s rough presentation notwithstanding, the important factor in this constellation is Phaedrus’s relay function, as he can occupy both the position of ἐρώμενος as well as that of ἐραστής toward his mentor. Perhaps a similar power play is at work when Faust’s assistant Lust, in Valéry’s rewriting of the great myth, only ever reads in the subjunctive, such that it “seems impossible to be certain that she actually reads; her reading remains hypothetical, impossible to determine” (136). The lust of the text resides in its perpetual indeterminacy.

You spent the evening unpacking books from boxes
You passed me up so as not to break a promise
Scattered polaroids and sprinkled words around your collar
In the long run, you said you knew that this would happen^[12]

It is quite impossible to listen to Maximo Park’s wistful “Books from Boxes” and not recognize as its implicit ghost writer one Walter Benjamin, who, in 1931, unpacked his boxed-up library. Reflecting on the disposition of the book collector, Benjamin was interested in the dialectic of sammeln (“gathering”), to the precise extent that it takes place along the threshold of creative chaos and the boredom of order. And while he insists that the collector is more of a non-reader than a bookworm, fetishistically coveting the collectible rather than reading it closely, his speech nonetheless touches on the essence of reading.^[13] Indeed, the German verb lesen (“to read”) originally meant as much as “to gather,” “to collect,” which signals its kinship with the Latin legere.^[14] In a primordial sense, the reader gleans, culls, and binds, offsetting the text’s centrifugal dissemination.

Szendy develops a theory of reading that seeks to take into account both order and chaos, binding and centrifugal drift, to counteract a tradition that has “massively emphasized gathering over dislocation” (98). This emphasis is prominent in Heidegger, for instance, who insisted that reading must gather us upon that which has “already claimed our essence” (cf. 99). Reading’s categorical imperative (“read!”) is therefore always a command to keep it together, tightening the hermeneutic grip by gathering the text as that upon which the self itself is gathered. Szendy speaks of reading’s “systolic phase” in which the phonodramatic voices “draw together, tending to blend into a single voice” (94). Systolic gatherings do not just concentrate the text to project a unified meaning, they also consolidate the reader as a single, recognizable identity. Szendy is quick to remind us, however, that this identity is, if not an outright fiction, then at least dialectically attuned to its own disidentification: each systolic phase comes at the cost of a diastolic dispersal, “in which the voices move away from one another” (94).

The repeated “dis-contraction” (155, 160, 203n59) of reading’s systole-diastole gives the act its specific rhythm.^[15] The unity and dissemination of the phonodramatic voices are subject to this rhythmic pulsebeat, which slows down to create the figment of identity only to speed up and let the voices overtake one another according to a formidable dromology of the reading act: “in the high-speed chase between these […] ‘you’s, he or she running ahead of each other, the infinitive of reading accelerates until it is about to take off from the text, to take leave of the text to project ahead of it” (92f). While reading passes through the systolic sutures only to rip new diastolic openings, the rhythmic oscillation of gathering and centrifugal drift finds its vanishing point in the infinitely removed infinitive of reading at lightning speed, where reading and non-reading, gathering and dissemination, unrecognizably collapse into one another: “the absolute speed that could skim over the text without touching it, seems to coincide with the absolute slowness that would remain at the threshold of the text without entering” (172). The power relation called “reading” unfolds and unfurls between these confusable poles of absolute reading and non-reading, as the speed differential of phonodramatic voices that admonish each other, incessantly and indecently: “Read!” “Slow down!” “Faster!!!”

1. Talking Heads, “The Book I Read,” Talking Heads ’77, Sire Records (1977), Track 7. ↑

2. See Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). ↑

3. Taylor Swift, “Dear Reader,” Midnights (3am Edition), Republic Records (2022), Track 20. ↑

4. That reading is a matter of gaps and blank spaces was an idea popularized by the aesthetics of reception. Wolfgang Iser, for one, recognized that “it is the gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process”; indeed, “the blank exercises significant control over all the operations that occur within the referential field of the [reader’s] wandering viewpoint.” Wolfgang Iser, “Interaction between Text and Reader,” The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, eds. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 106–119, 109, 114. That Powers of Reading does not mention Iser is all the more curious since Szendy is certainly aware of his work, as evidenced by a text from 2016, dedicated to the work of Samuel Weber. See Peter Szendy, “Loose Words, or Arche-Reading,” Points of Departure: Samuel Weber between Spectrality and Reading, eds. Peter Fenves, Kevin McLaughlin, and Marc Redfield (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 197–208, esp. 197f. A second reason this earlier text is noteworthy is the explicitness with which it addresses points of contention with the discourse of deconstruction that remain only implicit in Powers of Reading. Szendy follows Weber in suggesting that “[r]eading seems to have no room of its own, no ‘proper place,’ no autonomy ‘in the deconstruction of metaphysics.’ Which is to say that it does not have any proper role in the deconstruction of the proper” (“Loose Words,” 198f). However, even if one assumes Derrida’s work to un-differentiate the process of reading in the overbearing paradigm of écriture, one cannot read a single line of Paul de Man without recognizing that deconstruction reads and that reading deconstructs. ↑

5. In a recent publication, I raise the question of whether “part of the violence of reading resides in the oppressive weight of its absolute nature that turns even the staunchest refusal to read into an act of readerly perusal.” Dominik Zechner, The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 28. ↑

6. See Paul Celan, “Dein vom Wachen,” Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012), 179. ↑

7. Interpol, “Obstacle 1,” Turn on the Bright Lights, Matador Records (2002), Track 2. ↑

8. It’s a bit curious, in this regard, that Jacques-Alain Miller’s 1965 essay “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)”—which calls “suture” the process by which the subject is stitched into the symbolic order—finds no mention. The scene of reading is thus something like the absolute suture because it marks the very threshold between phenomenal experience and the linguistic reality of the language to which the reader is exposed and which she ingests (because she’s bad!). See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” trans. Jacqueline Rose, Screen 18.4 (1977–78): 24–34, esp. 25: “Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain if its discourse.” ↑

9. “The mother will prescribe its reading to her daughter” (45). ↑

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 222. ↑

11. “The violence of reading produces the body capable of experiencing the violence of reading.” Zechner, The Violence of Reading, 40. See also Dominik Zechner, “Anmerkungen zur Gewalt des Lesens,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 55.3 (2025): https://doi.org/10.1007/s41244-025-00390-5. ↑

12. Maximo Park, “Books from Boxes,” Our Earthly Pleasures, Warp Records (2007), Track 3. ↑

13. See Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 59–67, 62. ↑

14. The etymology of the English reading is markedly different, deriving from the Old High German rātan, rāten for “to advise,” “to deliberate” “to rule,” which, in turn, is the root of the modern German verb raten (“to guess,” “to give advice”). ↑

15. In this sense, reading takes place according to the “instinctual rhythm” which Kristeva located in literature’s genotext: “What we call the text differs radically from its contemplative simulation, for in the text the instinctual binominal consists of two opposing terms that alternate in an endless rhythm.” Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 97. ↑