Olivier Zunz . La philanthropie en Amérique. Argent privé, affaires d’Etat, Paris

If The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus will not easily be tamed, it might be because in the bricolage of its very writing something keeps eluding its reading. To paraphrase the opening of the text, The Age of Wire and String does not offer itself up to the reading act so much as, from the outset it aims to “read itself” in the course of what, for the nonce, might be called an “autography,” short-circuiting all connection with its reading. What is thus implemented is a strategy of resistance, faced with which the reader happens to wander in a language terrain that remains alien—a language severed from the possibility of inheriting it, the usufruct of which the reader cannot enjoy. The text, in the fictionalizing of its very language, thus subsides in the very act, or the performance of its writing—a writing without destination, thus forcing the reader to reconsider most of the conventions on which reading is grounded

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