About a quarter of a century ago, the concept of “intertextuality” sounded as intellectually sharp and as promising all over the international world of the humanities as I imagine the word “intermediality” must sound in the ears of German scholars today (for the interest in “media” and “materialities” of communication is much more of a specifically German phenomenon than German colleagues seem to imagine). And what does the shift of fascination from “intertextuality” to “intermediality” indicate ? Perhaps we can say that the long vanished enthusiasm for Intertextuality marked the peak and the near end of a time when the paradigm of the “readability of the world” dominated the Humanities without any competition. Regardless of whether they opted, in a more tradition-oriented style, for “hermeneutics” or, with more modernist ambitions, for “semiotics,” all scholars in humanities, during the 1970s and 1980s, shared the—hardly ever mentioned—premise that whatever object they would consider worthy of their attention had to be dealt with as a “text.” This premise had generated the subsequent expectation that the different parts making up the objects/texts in question referred to each other within the rules of one or the other “grammar,” a grammar whose understanding would allow the observer to decipher the very objects/texts in question as surfaces, and that all these surfaces would ultimately yield some meaning. Music or food, behavior or painting, machine or plant—there was nothing, in the heydays of intertextuality, that did not look like a text to us, a text that, based on a grammar, would carry a meaning. At the same time, it was the much cherished utopian dream of the humanists, twenty or thirty years ago, to bring together all these different “types of texts”—music-“texts” and food-“texts,” behavior-“texts” and even linguistic texts—in some meta-grammar of culture that we somehow imagined to become the equivalent of a cosmology. Seen from an historical angle, there was a hidden legacy of intellectual repression behind those humanistic dreams of universal readability and of multiple grammars. The motif of “readability” had first emerged at the dawn of Western modernity, when men abandoned the self-referential idea of inhabiting a cosmos that they had considered to be the work of divine creation and began to think of themselves as the eccentric observers of a world that was an ensemble of material objects. This very shift produced the subject/object-paradigm within which the subject would think of himself (or herself) as a disembodied entity capable of conveying meanings to the objects constituting the world. To the disembodied subject-interpreter of early Modernity, the world of objects must indeed have looked like a book. It was not before the early 19th century that the world-observing and world-interpreting Subject became obsessively self-reflexive; following a proposal by Niklas Luhmann, we can distinguish the early modern Subject as a “first order observer” from a 19th century “second order observer” who was privileged (or condemned) to observe himself or herself in the act of observation. One of many consequences stemming from the new and seemingly unavoidable habit of self-observation was the re-discovery of the human body and of the human senses as a condition of self-observation, a condition which, since early Modernity, had been bracketed by the subject’s self-image as a disembodied entity. If, however, the senses and sensual perception began to matter again, this implied that, as long as the world continued to be regarded “as a book”, this book was—metaphorically speaking—a book whose materiality could no longer be overlooked. And yet, we all know that there was no corresponding scholarly interest in the “materialities of communication” during those 19th …