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The article analyses the latest discoveries in matters of cognition, and their importance concerning reading, and criticism. The three successive studies, to date, by Antonio Damasio all foreground the preconscious logic of affects, emotion only coming as a secondary outcome. These are revolutionary discoveries in so far as they reverse the recognized subordination of judgement to analysis. Such facts being established, the article proceeds to a review of different consequences to be drawn from such a Copernician turning of the critical tables : first in terms of the practice of duality, which makes it possible to establish hierarchies between genres, the prevalence of common traits in different genres suggesting the possibility of a pedagogy of reading based on a systematic and multipolar comparison between them, with implicit spin-offs in matters of devising new types of university syllabuses.