ABSTRACT
The existence of the reader-consumer of the text demands a counterpart, namely, the writer-producer. Every writer is first and foremost a reader. For the traditional understanding of text, the text is a logocentric construction which bridges the gap between reader and writer, a “work” that connects these two activities even as it holds them apart and reinforces their distinct identities. The fundamental metaphysical questions regarding the integrity and identity of the work of literature must therefore be explored in relation to the hyletic body of the text. The act of reading is the ideological production or construction of the reader through an always violent confrontation with the text’s hyletic disruptions of identity. This ideological confrontation between the reader and the text both destroys identity and establishes it; reading establishes as violent both the identity of the reader and that of the text.
