Starting from the notion that meaning is determined, that is to say, the possibility of polissemy and the opening up of meaning – proposed by contemporary criticism – concerns the disputes about interpretation and thus paying no attention to the reader’s fundamental need of engagement with reading, we express here the idea that such a point of view tends to confuse the inherent freedom of the act with a certain necessity of control of meaning that dominates the atmosphere of criticism nowadays. However, freedom – essential to reading – founds a space where reading acquires a proper dimension, not authorizing nor justifying the arbitrary game of interpretations.