在《閱讀的寓言》中，保羅德曼嘲諷地說：「閱讀的行為絕非單純，遠遠不是。它是所有罪惡的起點」（194）。本文企圖將邪惡重新納入閱讀當中；邪惡，更精確地說，指的是蛇所提出來的永恆問題：上帝真的不淮你吃花園裡任何一棵樹上的果實嗎？這個問題始終未被解答；或許，這個問題並沒有任何的答案。唯有這個問題保持著無解，我們才能避免讓閱讀成為一個以自我為中心、抹拭任何文本的現象學行為。經由保持問題的不確定性和未知性，並將閱讀重建為一種可以試驗任何事（保括閱讀本身）的試鍊，如此一來，閱讀可以被視為一種在文本和讀者之間一種先於關聯性的相關性；這也許是非法的、暴力的，但卻是對文本負責、對閱讀的可能性保持忠誠。為了達成以上所言，本文將透過Werner Hamacher、Jean-François Lyotard、Jean-Loup Thébaud、Slavoj Žižek，及Avital Ronell的理論來辯証閱讀為一種卓越的倫理關係。本文將試圖踐越哲學和文學之間的界線，特別是有關外在和限度的觀念。本文指出刪節號並非寫作中異常的標點符號；它是寫作和閱讀行為的本質。唯有每個句子中的刪節號的存在被承認（無論它是否被明確標示），才能避免整體性（totality）、抹除（effacement）、與無回應（non-response）的恐佈姿態。因此，通常被視為句子之外，且超出其知識限度的，方才是使句子變成一種不斷問句的關鍵。也因此，刪節號正是容許閱讀發生、並且持續發生的關鍵。所以，在這種概念之下，閱讀不僅是種非現象學的行為，也是推翻現象學的一種手段：閱讀唯一揭露的，就只有閱讀的可能性。

In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man quips, “not that the act of reading is innocent, far from it. It is the starting point of all evil” (194). This paper seeks to re-inscribe evil into reading, and evil in the precise sense of the eternal question of the serpent—“did God really ask you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?”—the question that is never answered; and that perhaps does not have an answer. For only if the question remains as such do we manage to avoid reading as a phenomenological act, centred in the self, and which effaces all texts. By retaining the uncertainty, and unknowability of a pure question—and a reconstituting of reading as testing, testing everything including itself—reading can then be thought of as a pre-relational relationality between the text and the reader; illegitimate and violent, but responsible to the text, and in fidelity to the possibility of reading. In order to do so, this paper will negotiate reading as the ethical relation par excellence through the works of Werner Hamacher, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Loup Thébaud, Slavoj Žižek and Avital Ronell. As such, it will attempt to tread the boundaries of philosophy and literature; and in particular the notions of exteriority and finitude. This paper will posit that the ellipsis is not an aberrant punctuation of writing, but the very figure of writing, and reading, itself. For only when the ellipsis is acknowledged in each sentence—whether it is seen or not is irrelevant—is the terroristic gesture of totality, effacement, and non-response avoided. Hence what is usually seen as exterior to the sentence, and beyond its limit of knowledge, is what allows the sentence to be a continual question; by extension, the ellipsis is precisely what allows reading itself to occur, and to continually occur. Hence, this will be a thinking of reading that is not only a non-phenomenological act, but an event that undoes phenomenology itself: reading as an event that exposes itself to nothing but the possibility of reading.