Spectral Delights From the Crypt. On the Necrophilic Style of Reading

The article attempts to read and ustilize the category of “crypt” from Jacques Derrida’s Fors to develop a different way of thinking about the literary text and reading strategies towards it. The author wonders how notions such as “spectre”, “crypt”, and “haunting” affect the perception of the condition of each reader, and what kind of reading pleasure they invite. Derrida’s vocabulary is supplemented here by the critical categories of Maurice Blanchot (e.g., his thinking about language – death), which allows us to look at the act of reading as a strategy for necrophiliac pleasure, which may offer another way of thinking about the experience of reading and writing, understood as confrontations with a spectral presence.