Abstract
In his Cours de poétique, Paul Valéry explained that aesthetic feeling is what remains when everything around us has collapsed. It's a kind of aesthetic cogito, Descartes-style : not " je pense, donc je suis ", but " j'éprouve la beauté, donc je suis ". Reading is an intense, all-encompassing activity. But what is reading ? The term in French designates two different, albeit complementary, activities. Knowing how to read is first and foremost knowing how to literally decipher a written text. But reading also means understanding and interpreting the text. This need for interpretation is fundamental, because the meaning of a text is not self-evident. There are many possible interpretations of a text, some of which are better and more valid than others. What we conveniently call the true meaning of a text is the result of a complex construction made by the reader. As Ortega y Gasset explains, to be able to speak, we have to keep many things quiet; silence is a condition of speech, and the reader, to reconstruct the message, must " laboriously construct [within himself] all the unspoken mental reality " in the text. " Read with seriousness and sincerity " : that's what's at stake. It's a question of epistemology and ethics. Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome is an excellent illustration of this " utopian task " of reading. And today, when inquisitorial-style reading and radical criticism of texts are on the increase (cancel culture, wokism, among others), we need to place these new ways of reading within a historical and cultural panorama of modes of reading and interpretation.
