Ideally, these should be read simultaneously. Though just as we cannot live being both consciously aware of our interiority and exteriority—that is, aware of the material functionality of our bodies while perceptually inhabiting and understanding the world—the best approach is to read the texts as closely together as possible, paragraph by paragraph, as neither comes before the other. The texts coexist, and the aim is to enfold the text itself, to create the conditions in which “the inclusion (or occlusion, inocclusive invagination) is interminable” (Derrida 70).
The reading process will not be fluid, nor should it be. The awareness of the limits of the text—the “edges” (63) and “coiling” (68)—should invoke a plunge into the text’s three-dimensionality, a space that our material bodies inhabit. This depth, however, is not comforting. The tension between the texts, the penetration and loss of their boundaries in moving from one to the other, should, as when we become aware of our material bodies in their involuntary and uncanny palpitations, cause moments of rupture. In these bursts there lingers a sense of the erotic and desire: the intertwined texts are at play with each other as the end point remains elusive.
Returning to Derrida, here we will turn his impulse on its head. Where he asked: “What will I ask of La Folie du jour?” (66), here we ask: “What will Inside asks of us?” There can only be one answer, which comes from Georges Bataille: “Clearly, consciousness is the only issue. This book [The Tears of Eros], for its author, has only one meaning: it opens up consciousness of the self!” (142)