One can be forgiven for wondering, faced with a work composed thousands of years ago, 'what can the author of this work possibly have to say to me?' Life in early twenty-first century America has few parallels to ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, or China, so how could an author of that period have anything substantive to say about our political life or problems. And of course they can't. Because they are dead: a state that overwhelms any putative shortcomings tied to their gender or other identities.

But this only means that we have asked the wrong question. It's true that a text requires some person or persons who formed the words into their current shape: rarely a single person, especially when we are talking about ancient texts, but rather a host of transcribers and redactors, composers and collators, not to mention, in the case of epic poems, those who passed on versions of the poem in oral form. In the case of Gilgamesh, indeed, we have an array of transcribed variants, of different lengths and stages of completion, in different languages, ascribed to different periods of time and different locations, and no identifiable author at all. The current standard English version is as much the product of late twentieth century translators, and the choices they have made, as it is that of the redactor of the Old Babylonian version on which that standard version is based.

The case is extreme, perhaps (though not unusual), but reminds us that the text cannot simply be reduced to the intentions of the author. At least as important to the realization of the text is the reader. Certainly the text isn't 'just what we make of it.' But the production of the text entails a kind of "dance" (I am picking up this word from Derek Attridge, writing about poems), between the kind of reader the text invites us to be, and the kind of text we create by being the kind of reader we are. The form of the text informs the reader how it intends to be read, we might say, and at the same time forms us as its readers. But it takes two to tango: our reading also furnishes the text with its (however incomplete and contingent) form.

This implies that the relevance of a text to our own lives depends at least partially on our willingness to enter the dance as equal partners. Or, perhaps better, the question whether and how a given poem, treatise, or aphorism does so can only be answered by means of the dance itself.