ABSTRACT
The very activity of thinking, which lies at the basis of epistemological, ontological, and veridical comprehension, is the reduction of plurality to unity and alterity to sameness. Simon Critchley presents a two-part reading protocol: A clôtural reading of a text would consist, first, of a patient and scholarly commentary following the main lines of the text's dominant interpretation. Second, in locating an interruption or alterity within that dominant interpretation where reading discovers insights within a text to which that text is blind. Clôtural reading differs from other methodologies because we are not trying to interpret the text in a traditional sense. And for Critchley, this act of locating alterity, the unassimilated other in the text is an ethical act. Critchley asserts that "the very activity of thinking", the act of conceiving, imagining, or bringing a person, place, object, event, or idea into our consciousness inevitably reduces what is complex and plural to something simpler.
