«Reading what was never written»: Constellations of the letter between Benjamin and Mallarmé

Abstract

 “Rethinking reading and investing it with a critical function”. Pic and Alloa present with this formula the concept of Legibility (Lesbarkeit) in Walter Benjamin, linked to the irruption of a surprising figure of reading: «Reading what was never written». In the present essay It will be considered the scope of this formula in the encounter between Benjamin and Mallarmé, showing how the reading of the unwritten is linked to the "starry reading" through the poetic experience of Mallarmé's Coup de dés. The image of the constellations, a reading of stars that refers us to the childhood of the world's ways of reading, will allow us to outline the "imaginative use of reading" that makes its way both in Mallarmé's writing and in Benjamin's thought, making that "this practice" acquires an unusual critical, even revolutionary power.