“Let me (not) read you” : countersigning Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116

Abstract

This is an attempt to carry out a reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) by following the complex movement of the ‘pas’ (step/stop) that both invites and limits interpretation. Not only does Shakespeare’s sonnet demand such a reading, thus prospectively and retroactively entering a dialogue with Blanchot and Derrida’s writing, but the sonnet also enacts the iterable logic of the signature and countersignature by reading itself in terms of the (im)possibility of reading. Exploring the possibility of defining love through various forms of negation and slippery metaphors, Sonnet 116 is always already implicated in a discourse on singularity and the general law, the proper and the common, the mark and the re-mark that invites further countersignatures despite the impression that the numerous commentaries on the sonnet through the ages might have exhausted the poem’s openness to new readings.