"Donner a Lire": Unreadable Narratives

The purpose of this article is to stage an ‘improbable’ or ‘tangential encounter’ between the thought of Derrida and Ricoeur, focusing on their respective – and prima facie disparate – approaches to narrative and the act of reading. In the first instance, I provide an account of two pivotal narrative functions of Ricoeur’s theory, the world of the text and the world of the reader, with a view to explaining why any criticism of his alleged commitment to a referential reality is misplaced, but also to illuminating how these two functions are dialecticised by the productive act of ‘appropriation’ and a predominantly positive possibility of reading. Derrida’s thinking complicates this reading effort by introducing into its very heart an essential unreadability that cannot be construed in terms of a merely negative possibility. If the narrative text amounts to a call or an appeal for reading, this call is marked, for Derrida, by a necessary impossibility of reading that radically resists teleological organisation. Subsequently, faithful to my initial claim regarding an uncanny encounter between Derrida and Ricoeur, I suggest that an irreducible unreadability irrupts into the latter’s text curiously at the very moment, in the third volume of Time and Narrative, when he seeks to take sides in favour of a teleology of responsible reading.