Reading Texts as Bodies: Object Agency in the Age of Human Empowerment

What is it about?

We scholars tend to project our own reading habits onto writings. This attitude repeatedly leads to misunderstandings and mistranslations of texts produced in communities that do not share our life and approaches to texts. I illustrate this danger by introducing the Huainanzi, a massive and extraordinarily constructed classic from the second century BCE that is commonly read as a philosophical text. I show that this standard interpretation is neither based on the Huainanzi’s self-evaluation nor on its earliest commentaries, since both depict the classic as a powerful text that can order the world via resonating correspondences triggered by its own texture. Hence, my essay reminds us that we run the risk of misunderstanding writings from a different cultural background if we are unaware of our own tendency to project our own reading habits onto other cultures past and present.

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