ABSTRACT
In my chapter, I want to start out from Karen Barad’s notion of onto-epistemological entanglement in conjunction with what she calls “diffractive reading”. In Barad, reading is the dynamic and non-hierarchical interlacing of texts/theories as well as the co-creation of the (physical) world by measurement. In this sense, diffractive reading brings Literary/Cultural Studies and Science Studies together. Consequently, in the second section of my chapter, I want to deepen the Science Studies perspective on co-creative reading by looking at Blumenberg’s notion of the legibility of the world in the context of his analysis of reading/writing the human genome. Blumenberg reminds us that (diffractive) reading must be seen as a quintessentially human activity, albeit, as I argue, one that leads to a particularly deep onto-epistemological entanglement in Barad’s sense. Therefore, while New Materialism often advocates nonhuman agency, also in the concepts of onto-epistemological entanglement and diffraction, diffractive reading should be seen as an anthropological and – in the light of recent claims that we live in a geological period characterized by human interference into the shape of the earth – an Anthropocenic critical concept. It offers a new understanding of Literary/Cultural Criticism but is also, in the sense of Critical Studies, a tool to both analyze and intervene into human interference with planetary nature.
