Abstract This essay explores the practice of detecting crucial signs in unexpectedly encountered words and sentences. Beginning with Walter Benjamin, who presents “reading pure and simple” as the grasping of fleeting likenesses that alter the perceiver, the article treats three exemplary scenes of hearing and seeing in Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz that suggest that the interpretation of apparently circumstantial scraps of discourse can exert a life-changing power, for better and for worse.
Daniel Heller‐Roazen (Fri,) studied this question.
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