The reading to come, or writing as an "archive of non-sensuous similarities"

Abstract

Through a way of expository interpretation, we will address how, in "Doctrine of the similar" and in "On the mimetic faculty", Walter Benjamin presents reading and writing in light of the decline of the archive’s historicist character and the classicist model of similarity. This double decline is intertwined with the reinvention of the determining ground that constitutes the aesthetic experience of reading perception, conceived through the semiosis of non-sensuous similarities. Non-sensuous similarities become perceptible and recognisable as such through the transposition of the conditioned-unconditioned conceptual difference from the framework of an idealist theory towards a radical rhetorical criticism, in which the status of the symbolic ceases to be subordinate to a subjective-transcendental doctrine. This transposition will consider both Sprache (language, speech, discourse) and writing within the kairological dimension of the act of reading and its equivocal transmission, which is yet to come.