"Blitzlesen", or Fascism and Speed-reading: Deleuze, Cixous, Heidegger

Catalog description

Today everyone, it seems, is a lightning reader, or "Blitzleser". Rather than feel guilty about this, our course will ask: what would it mean to speed-read responsibly? Reading is, like democracy, always a matter of counting, of deciding which frequencies count (whether of letters, words, motifs etc.). Speed-reading risks overloading democracy with too much information and too many dots to connect, feeding paranoiac narratives in the style of QAnon or indeed Nazism itself. How to speed-read like a democrat? Our eyes will dart from Deleuze's claim that Cixous invented stroboscopic literature – difficult literature which only becomes readable when one reads quickly – to fascism's obsession with speed, which led Hannah Arendt to claim fascism desires "only a movement that is constantly kept in motion." Key authors include: Bernhard, Woolf, Martinetti, Deleuze, Guattari, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger. Media: The Lighthouse, Speed Racer.