There are, you see, two ways of reading a book, each grounded in a different image of thought. In the first, the book is treated as a vessel of representation—an object containing a signified essence, to be deciphered and interpreted in accordance with a logic of recognition. This is the reading of mediation, where concepts are extracted, one after another, as if each were a determination subordinated to the generality of meaning. The book becomes a nesting doll of other books, each enfolded within or enclosing the last. Annotation, commentary, exegesis—all fall under this regime, governed by the law of the Same and the model of resemblance. This is reading as infinite deferral within the dogmatic image of thought. But there is another way, an intensive reading that operates transversally, machinically. Here, the book is no longer a container but an intensive multiplicity, a divergent series, a system of singularities in flux. One no longer asks what does it mean? but how does it function?—how does it connect, what circuits does it form, what thresholds does it cross? The book works or it doesn’t, like an experiment that either produces a singular event or fails to effect any difference. In this mode, reading is no longer representational but productive, diagrammatic. It ceases to be a hermeneutic act and becomes an act of involution, of folding and unfolding between heterogeneous series. This is reading as encounter, as becoming: where the book is torn from itself and forced into conjunction with other machines—bodily, political, material, affective. And in this tearing, this love of proximity and experimentation, reading becomes an ethics of immanence: not interpretation, but participation.
