Beware the “alibi of photocopies”! Photocopies are indis-pensable instruments. They allow you to keep with you atext you have already read in the library, and to take homea text you have not read yet. But a set of photocopies canbecome an alibi. A student makes hundreds of pages ofphotocopies and takes them home, and the manual laborhe exercises in doing so gives him the impression that hepossesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts thestudent from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo ofaccumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens tomany. Defend yourself from this trap: as soon as you havethe photocopy, read it and annotate it immediately. If youare not in a great hurry, do not photocopy something newbefore you own (that is, before you have read and annotated)the previous set of photocopies. There are many things thatI do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxedas if I had read it.