Dominik Zechner. The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain

Abstract

This Book Review examines Dominik Zechner’s The Violence of Reading, a philosophically rigorous exploration of how reading itself becomes a site of violence, pain and linguistic rupture. Drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Werner Hamacher, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, Zechner destabilizes naïve assumptions of linguistic referentiality and exposes the wound inherent in literary representation. Through close readings of philosophical, literary and rhetorical case studies, the author argues that pain is not merely represented in language but conditions the very possibility of meaning. The book offers an original contribution to literary philosophy, phenomenology and critical theory by rethinking reading as an ethically and affectively charged encounter.