To Make the Hands Impure Art, Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy [Hardcover]

How can cradling, handling, or rubbing a text be said, ethically, to have made something happen? What, as readers or interpreters, may come off in our hands in as we maculate or mark the books we read?

For Adam Zachary Newton, reading is anembodied practice wherein ethics becomes a matter of tactin the doubled sense of touch and regard. With the image of the book lying in the hands of its readers as insistent refrain, To Make the Hands Impure cuts a provocative cross-disciplinary swath through classical Jewish texts, modern Jewish philosophy, film and performance, literature, translation, and the material text.

Newton explores the ethics of reading through a range of texts, from the Talmud and Midrash to Conrads Nostromo and Pascals Le M?morial, from works by Henry Darger and Martin Scorsese to the National September 11 Memorial and a synagogue in Havana, Cuba. In separate chapters, he conducts masterly treatments of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell by emphasizing their performances as readersa trebled orientation to Talmud, novel, and theater/film. To Make the Hands Impure stages the encounter of literary experience and scriptural traditionsthe difficult and the holythrough an ambitious, singular, and innovative approach marked in equal measure by erudition and imaginative daring.

Adam Zachary Newtons incisive insights into 'holding the book in hand' shed light on the esthetic and ethical implications encapsulated in the act of reading. Based on a broad spectrum of disciplines and sources--Emmanuel Levinas?Talmudic Readings, literary criticism (Edward Said, Mikhail Bakthin, Roland Barthes&), Analytical philosophy (Stanley Cavell), Medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophy (Ibn Hazm, Ibn Ezra&) to cite but a few--his 'ethics of reading' is an invitation to reconsider the interplay between the hand and the text not as grasping or appropriating but rather as 'proximity'; i.e. as a situation where 'one is drawn out of onesel³&