Difference, RB Pleasure of the Text

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Difference: Roland Barthes's Pleasure of the Text, Text of PleasureAuthor(s): Robert MiklitschReviewed work(s):Source: boundary 2, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 101-114Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/302940 .

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Difference:Roland Barthes'sPleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure

Robert MiklitschThe body is the irreducible difference.

Always remember Nietzsche: we are scientific out ofa lack of subtlety.-I can conceive, on the contrary,as a kind of utopia, a dramatic and subtle science,seeking the festive reversal of the Aristotelian pro-position which would dare to think,at least in a flash:There is no choice except of differences.

--Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland BarthesBarthes's Pleasure of the Text,,which begins with an epigraphfrom Hobbes (Atque metum tantum concepit tunc mea mater / Utparetet geminos, meque metumque simul), announces that thepleasure of the text, "like Bacon's simulator,"never apologizes, never

explains, and that its "sole negation" is to look away. But how is itthat it can never apologize or explain? What is "pleasure" (plaisir),what is "bliss" (jouissance), and what is the difference betweenthem? It is presupposed if only as a caveat that a taxonomical101


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description of the pleasure of the text is, in some sense, anoxymoronic enterprise: For if a "thesis" on textual pleasure isimpossible and an inspection improbable, then one is left, accordingto Barthes, with two alternative strategies. First, "bring together allthe texts which have given pleasure to someone... and display thistextual body, in something like the way in which psychoanalysis hasexhibited man's erotic body" (PT, p. 34). However, since such a laborwould result in mere explanation of the chosen texts, the projectwould inevitably bifurcate: "unable to speak itself, pleasure wouldenter the general path of motivations, no one of which would bedefinitive" (PT, p. 34). It is impossible, then, to write The Pleasure ofthe Textwhere the article ("the")is understood in its definitive sense.Thus, for Barthes, one

can only circle such a subject-and therefore betterto do it brieflyand in solitude than collectively and in-terminably; better to renounce the passage fromvalue, the basis of assertion, to values, which areeffects of culture.2Invoking Nietzsche, whose radical notion and practice of textualityfirst made it possible to learn "how to write" a text of pleasure,3Barthes recommends that the "stylate practice" (pratiquestyl6e),4toborrow from Derrida, should be circuitio and periphrasis, "goingaround"and "circumlocution." However,a perilous balance, which isto say a rigorous stylistic practice, must be maintained if one is toproduce a text of pleasure that does not collapse from its own distinc-tions and machinations. At one point in The Pleasure of the Text, forinstance, Barthes asserts that "pleasure can be expressed in words,bliss cannot" and, consequently, "criticism always deals with thetexts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss" (PT, p. 21). From a Der-ridean perspective, such a statement--composed of a seeminglysimple opposition and implicit hierarchy5-is suspect and, therefore,susceptible to a certain kind of deconstruction. That is, the oppo-sitional hierarchy can be reversed so that the previously subordinateterm is valorized, at which point it can be reinscribed into the text,twisting its "message," despite what the text seems, or seemingly"wants," to say.6"In" The Pleasure of the Text, though, despite its apparentlydefinitive title, despite the problems the text itself provokes,Barthes-it seems to me-maintains his poise. Hence, his text doesnot "need" to be deconstructed, or at least the issue is not asdesperate as it is with other, less "precocious," texts. However,this isa problematic we will return to again and again reading Barthes, anappropriate gesture given his textual strategy, but first we must betterinvestigate and determine the difference between a text of pleasureand a text of bliss, and their respective value(s).

Though a "precarious, revocable, reversible" paradigm,the op-position of pleasure/bliss focuses the question of the pleasure of the102


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text for Barthes. To isolate one of his terms for descriptive andstrategic purposes, we might begin by asking, What is pleasure? Yet ifit is true that pleasure cannot be understood without recourse to itsdifferential complement (bliss), we can also reverse the process andanswer the question (What is bliss?) by provisionally submitting thatbliss is the excess of pleasure. With this preliminary definition inmind, we can return to and answer our first question: a text ofpleasure, according to Barthes, is one which "contents, fills, grantseuphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it,is linked to a comfortable practice of reading" (PT, p. 14). Insomewhat tautological terms, it gives the kind of pleasuretraditionally associated with, and thus expected from,the kind of textit is (where "kind" implies genre). A nineteenth-century novel, forexample, typically "tells a story," has a plot which moves, has pace,turns pages; has an Aristotelian structure-beginning, middle, andend; has "round,"developing, and recognizable characters; is usuallywritten in the third-person narrative7 and frequently with anomniscient point-of-view; represents the natural world in all itsmanifest plenitude (true to a sense of mimesis in which the word hasa seemingly intimate relationship to the "things" it signifies); etc.8Since the text of pleasure comforts the reader and makes himfeel content by virtue of its stable point of view and continuous nar-rative,since it grants himeuphoria (i.e., displeases only to please) andsatisfies his convention-derived expectations of the kind of text it isand thereby insures his reading practice (so much so that, while orafter reading it, he feels: This is what a text should be), it certifiesthose texts from which it derives and whose history it proliferates anddoes not rupture. In other words, it institutes the general, becomesnormative,generic, not to be transgressed (oronly at the cost of incur-ring the wrath and displeasure of the conventional reader).In EdwardSaid's terms (derived in turn from Foucault), a text of pleasurepossesses "authority"which, according to his "fourfoldscheme," isnot only (1) "the power of an individual to initiate, institute, es-tablish-in short, to begin" where (2) "this power and its product arean increase over what had been there previously," but (3) "the in-dividual [or work of art]wielding this power controls its issues" and(4) "maintains the continuity of its course."' Consequently, it not onlyauthorizes itself by virtue of its increase over previous texts, butauthorizes later texts as well, guaranteeing a certain kind of dis-course by making it readable, respectable-a respectable form ofreading pleasure. Yet it is obvious with respect to Said's secondsense of authority that even a text of pleasure represents a kind of"advance-guard"(where "kind"is a matter of degree) since, in somesense, it exceeds and displaces "what had been there previously."10However,although it can transgress its conventions in some sense, tosome degree, it also always glosses over this violation. Theconventional aspects of a text of pleasure, for example, exceed anddisplace, in turn, those elements which distinguish it from its pre-decessors; it relegates to the background, for the pleasure of thereader and at the expense of a more radical expose, that which itseems to foreground.

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Hence, for Barthes, a text of pleasure is "classical" and, sinceit is a product of the culture or "dominant ideology" from which itemerges and which it reflects, can be spoken of as "intelligent,""ironic," "delicate," "euphoric," "masterful," etc. Opposed to it is atext of bliss, one which

imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts(perhaps to the point of a certain boredom),unsettlesthe reader's historical, cultural, psychological as-sumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values,memories, brings to a crisis his relation withlanguage (PT,p. 14).Whereas a text of pleasure "milks" us, a text of bliss weans us and,therefore, repeats that original moment of loss by which we find our-selves (stade du miroir); it unsettles our presuppositions abouthistory, culture, psychology; it undermines our faith in a cogito whoseself-consciousness authors itself and its integrity; it forces us torecognize that, instead of a tool which we use (and abuse),language-in a work of art-speaks us. I loosely translate Barthesunto the above vocabularies of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault andHeidegger respectively not because he explicitly refers to them in ThePleasure of the Text (though he does, both implicitly and explicitly11)but because it would have been impossible for him to have conceivedof a text of bliss without their speculative discourses, discursivetheories which rigorously problematize received notions of "self,""speech," "history," and "Being". Furthermore,like their discourse,Barthes' Pleasure of the Text linguistically and structurallymimics itsown subject so that his notion of "pleasure," for instance, isinseparable from the "precarious, revocable, reversible" context inwhich it appears.12 Hence, just as Heidegger antimetabolicallyformulates the "relation" between language and Being as "the beingof language: the language of being,"'3so Barthes writes: "Pleasure ofthe text, text of pleasure" (PT, p. 19). Which is to say that, since the"pleasure of the text" and the "text of pleasure" are the same (thoughnot identical), there is no difference-in a metaphorical sense-be-tween reading and writing (a text of pleasure).14Barthes, then, could not be an ecrivain, one who plays with,and on, words (as he does in The Pleasure of the Text)without themeticulously-figured analyses of the aforementioned theorists of dis-cursivity, who are not simply ecrivants (the obverse of ecrivains) sincetheir texts are neither simple nor univocal, unplayful nor unprob-lematic. Words, words, words. Bythis time, it should be apparent thatpart of the problem of differentiating between the "pleasure of thetext" and the "text of pleasure" or, less generally, a "text of pleasure"and a "text of bliss," at least on a descriptive level, is linguistic:

[B]ecause French has no word that simultaneouslycovers pleasure (contentment) and bliss(rapture)... "pleasure" here (and without our being104


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able to anticipate) sometimes extends to bliss,sometimes is opposed to it. (PT, p. 19)There is no way to absolutely distinguish pleasure from bliss for des-criptive purposes either on a linguistic or structural level becausethere is no clear-cut distinction between them which would be valid allof the time: the difference between them is undecidable. Now, as wehave seen, this is clearly a problemon a number of levels. Yet as withDerrida's use of antithetical terms (such as his play on, and with, thepharmakon in "Lapharmacie de Platon"15),Barthes takes advantageof what for some would be a disadvantage, a handicap (i.e., linguisticambiguity), by acknowledging the problem as such-instead ofglossing over it-and then strategically problematizing the question,What is the difference between pleasure and bliss? This tacticalgesture allows him to accommodate his project to its linguistic andstructural ambiguity. One of the devices displayed in The Pleasure ofthe Text is Barthes' use of shifting personal pronouns to riddle thespeaker's status as a univocal and unified "author";the followingpassage, for instance, is written in the first person singular, the"empirical 'I'":

[O]nthe one hand I need a general "pleasure" when-ever Imust refer to an excess of the text, to what in itexceeds any (social) function and any (structural)functioning; and on the other hand Ineed a particular"pleasure," a simple part of Pleasure as a whole,whenever I need to distinguish euphoria, fulfillment,comfort ... from shock, disturbance, even loss,which are properto ecstasy, to bliss. (PT,p. 19)Following Barthes' lead, I will henceforth put pleasure in quotations("pleasure")when it is being linguistically and/orstructurally opposedto "bliss" (which will henceforth also be put into quotations) andleave it unmarked when it is being used in its ecstatic sense (bliss).Having delimited the linguistic difference between "pleasure"/"bliss" according to a static and external scheme, we must nowdetermine more precisely how Barthes structurally problematizes thequestion of the pleasure of the text. Not unlike the way in whichTynyanovintroduced the notion of what was later called "foreground-ing" by the Prague Circle in order to account for those diachronicelements of a work of art which Shklovsky's synchronic model couldnot account for,16Barthes similarly problematizes the undecidable dif-ference of the pleasure of the text by internalizing the texts ("plea-sure"l"bliss") within the reading/writing subject, one whosimultaneously reads as he writes, and vice versa. Hence, a particulartext is neither wholly a "text of pleasure" nor a "text of bliss": it isalways already both.

Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his fieldand in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an105


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anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and con-tradictorilyparticipates in the profound hedonism ofall culture... and in the destruction of that culture.(PT, p. 14)A text of bliss, then, would be one in which "bliss" exceeds, or is fore-grounded at the expense of, "pleasure." However, unlike Tynyanov'sdiachronic/synchronic reading subject, Barthes' is "anachronic";thissubject, who is no "subject" in the Cartesian sense and who issubject to neither diachronic nor synchronic analysis, is both dividedand duplicitous, conventional and iconoclastic: "he enjoys the con-sistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (thatis his bliss)" (PT, p. 14). Yet given this "subject split twice over,doubly perverse," both the subject of the text and the text of thesubject, How is the pleasure of the text produced in the ecstaticsense, where it is defined as bliss?Using Sade, whose work for Barthes is-as it were-a locusclassicus of the pleasure of the text, text of pleasure, Barthes arguesthat the pleasure of reading him "clearly proceeds from certainbreaks (or certain collisions)" when/where "antipathetic codes comeinto contact.""7In Sade's Philosophy of the Boudoir, for instance,pornographic scenarios are alternated, as the somewhat oxymoronictitle intimates, with long and long-winded passages of "philosophy"(or philosophizing). This juxtaposition of antipathetic codes or "redis-tributionof language" is always and only achieved, for Barthes, by a"cutting":

Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist,plagiarizing edge ... and another edge, mobile, blank(ready to assume any contours), which is never any-thing but the site of its loss. (PT, p. 6)"Pleasure," to reintroduce the differential terms of The Pleasure ofthe Text,refers to that language of a text which is conformist, canoni-cal, conventional, whereas "bliss" refers to its other kind of language,which is subversive, iconoclastic, mercurial.'8Again, this is not asimple or "innocent" oppositional hierarchy:"neither culture nor itsdestruction is erotic," neither "pleasure" nor "bliss" produces thepleasure of the text, in the general sense. Hence, Barthes does notprivilege either the "subversive" or "conformist" edge of languagesince that would mean merely re-instituting and re-institutionalizingeither one or the other, a hierarchial pleasure of the text (where, forexample, "pleasure" would always be subordinated, and thereforeinferior,to "bliss")."The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is theedge of violence," Barthes acknowledges, but

what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam,the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes thesubject in the midst of bliss. Culture thus recurs asan edge: in no matter what form. (PT, p. 7)106


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A number of critics of Barthes have, it seems to me, misread orignored this caveat.19In The Pleasure of the Text at least, Barthesdoes not sanction the "erotic" or "leftist" elements of a text ofpleasure-not to say, less precisely, an "erotic" or "leftist" text ofpleasure-and, therefore, cannot be accused of implicitly assuming,and yearning for, a utopian (vis-a-vis "atopian"20) state of textuality,wholly free of ideology. Infact, he explicitly argues to the contrary:

There are those who want a text (an art, a painting)without a shadow, without the "dominant ideology";but this is to want a text without fecundity, withoutproductivity, a sterile text.... The text needs itsshadows; this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit ofrepresentation, a bit of subject. (PT,p. 32)Rather than "pleasure" or "bliss," it is "the seam between them, thefault, the flaw, which becomes them." In a non-metaphysical sense,this in-between or difference between "pleasure" and "bliss" Barthescalls tmesis, a site (not merely in a spatial sense) when/where the"cutting" occurs, "the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance."However, since this "cutting" is neither the product of a staticopposition nor a dialectical synthesis but the consequence of a"drift,"where everything is "wrought to a transport at one and thesame time," where everything literally"comes-at a first glance,"21tcan never be recuperated.

Arguing against an "entire minor mythology" which wouldmake of pleasure a "rightist notion," allied to "everything abstract,boring, political," Barthes adopts a Nietzschean tone of sarcasm:[W]elcome to our side, you who are finally coming tothe pleasure of literature!.... On the right, pleasureis championed against intellectuality, the clerisy: theold reactionary myth of heart against head,sensation against reasoning. ... On the left,knowledge, method, commitment, combat, are drawnup against "mere delectation".... On both sides,this peculiar idea that pleasure is simple, which iswhy it is championed or disdained. (PT,pp. 22-23)

According to the ecstatic sense of pleasure (bliss), its essentiallymarginal "nature," Barthes continues:Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it isnot a naive residue; it does not depend on the logic ofunderstanding and on sensation; it is a drift, some-thing both revolutionaryand asocial, and it cannot betaken over by any collectivity, any mentality, anyidiolect. Something neuter? It is obvious that thepleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it isimmoral but because it is atopic. (PT,p. 23)

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Tmesis or "cutting," then, is precisely that which produces thepleasure of the text and which appears, on a linguistic or structurallevel, as "pleasure"l"bliss". One can never recuperate but only pointto, never grasp, never comprehend, bliss. As in Heidegger whereBeing is given (es gibt Sein: literally,"it[Being] gives Being"),a text ofbliss is something given, something that seizes a reader orwriter-not something he can produce at will, when he wants to, whenhe wants it. Furthermore,it is not something whose motion a writercan predict in advance or, in retrospect, something a reader or criticcan recuperate.Since bliss "does not occur at the level of structure oflanguages but only at the moment of their consumption," since it iscontingent on the reader's drift which is always precocious and unpre-dictable, "the author cannot predict tmesis because he cannotchoose to write what will not be read" (PT, p. 11). Hence, the authormust write a text which "cruises" the reader; allowing the text tospeak for him, Barthes writes:

I must seek out the reader (must "cruise" him) with-out knowing where he is. A site of bliss is thencreated. It is not the reader's "person" that is neces-sary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dia-lectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: thebets are placed, there can still be a game. (PT, p. 4)Giventhis unpredictable site, this "present" which is no presence, tra-ditional literarycriticism cannot deal with a text of bliss because it isonly concerned, according to Barthes, with a "tutor text, its past orfuture bliss" ("you are about to read, I have read"):

[C]riticism is always historical or prospective: theconstatory present, the presentation of bliss isforbidden it; its preferred material is thus culture,which is everything in us except our present. Withthewriter of bliss (and his reader) begins the untenabletext. This text is outside pleasure, outside criticism,unless it is reached throughanother text of bliss: youcannot speak "on" such a text, you can only speak"in" it, in a fashion. (PT, pp. 21-22)As Andr6 Malrauxonce said, the only response to a work of art isanother work of art: a text of bliss, because of its unrecuperative"presencing" (Heidegger's Anwesen), makes critics writers (ofanother text of bliss). Criticism, for Barthes, should be just asperiphrastic, stylistically speaking, as a text of bliss.Having now delimited the linguistic and structural differencebetween "pleasure"l"bliss," it is left to determine the "clinical" (andhistorical) difference between them from which, according to a tra-ditional scheme, the other two derive. Again: the pleasure of the textis neither "pleasure" nor "bliss" but that "cutting" which producesthem. Otherwise, in terms of the history of pleasure, we are left with108


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such questions as: "Is pleasure only a minor bliss? Is bliss nothingbut extreme pleasure?" (PT,p. 20).The answer will determine how weread and write the history of modernism:For if Isay between pleasure and bliss there is only adifference of degree, Iam also saying that the historyis a pacified one: the text of bliss is merely thelogical, organic, historical development of the text ofpleasure. (PT,p. 20)

Ifthere is no difference in kind but only in degree between "pleasure"and "bliss," then there is no possibility for genuine ruptureor discon-tinuity in literary history: "the avant-garde is never anything but theprogressive, emancipated form of past culture"(PT,p. 20). Hence, thehistory of modernism is read as linear, horizontal,and is writtensolelyin terms of its similarities and genealogies. Inthis sense, there is nodifference as such, only differences of degree: "today emerges fromyesterday, Robbe-Grillet s already in Flaubert,Sollers in Rabelais, allof Nicolas de Stael in two square centimeters of Cezanne" (PT,p. 20).The above "logic" is that process (as in the sense of "processing,""pasteurizing")by which the history of art,whether fine or literary,hastraditionally been constituted-hence the importance of "influence"and "schools." Ifan artist or writerdoesn't belong to a school, doesn'tbetray the influence of those that historically precede him, he isliterally eccentric, deviant, outside the history and descriptivecategories founded and centered by the historians and custodians ofart. Differences, then, are ironedout in orderto produce the illusion ofcontinuity, to make the "becoming" (in Nietzsche's sense) of art andartists intelligible, where-perhaps-discontinuity exists. If, insteadof this historicism and its positivistic principles, you believe, asBarthes does:

that pleasure and bliss are parallel forces, that theycannot meet, and that between them there is morethan a struggle: an incommunication,then ... history, our history, is not peaceable andperhaps not even intelligible. (PT,p. 20)

That is, if a text of bliss is always and only "the trace of a cut" (as intmesis) and not a "flowering,"then the historical subject, the subjectof the history of the text of pleasure, of modernity, instead of seeingthat history as a "fine dialectical movement," sees it as a series ofruptures, discontinuities, differences.22 This subject, consequently,"is never anything but a 'living contradiction': a split subject, whosimultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his self-hood and its collapse, its fall" (PT,p. 20).Which brings us in a roundabout way back to the beginning.Part of the problem of describing the difference between "pleasure"(plaisir) and "bliss" (jouissance) or, in English, "forepleasure" and"orgasm," is that there is no absolute difference between them, no109


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"point"(the Aristotelian stigme) at which it is possible to say that oneends and the other begins: When does pleasure end and orgasmbegin? Inhis preface to the English translation of The Pleasure of theText, Richard Howard remarks:The French have a distinguishing advantage, whichRoland Barthes...has used, has exploited in hisnew book about what we do when we enjoy a text; theFrench have a vocabulary of eroticism, an amorousdiscourse which smells neither of the laboratorynorof the sewer, which just-attentively, scrupu-lously-puts the facts. (PT,p. v)

But, as we have seen, despite the decided advantage of the Frenchlanguage and Barthes' strategic exploitation of it, stylistic andperspectival problems befall any attempt to establish an absolutedifference between "pleasure" and "bliss." In The Willto Power (699[March-June 1888]), Nietzsche provides one of the most provocativereadings of this dilemma in terms of "pleasure" (Lust)and "pain"or,more literally, "displeasure" (Unlust):

Pain is something different from pleasure-I mean itis not its opposite. If the essence of "pleasure" hasbeen correctly described as a feeling of more power(hence as a feeling of difference, presupposing acomparison), this does not yet furnish a definition ofthe essence of "displeasure." The false opposites inwhich the people, and consequently language, be-lieves, have always been dangerous hindrances tothe advance of truth.There are even cases in which akindof pleasure is conditioned by a certain rhythmicsequence of little unpleasurable stimuli: in this way avery rapid increase of the feeling of power, thefeeling of pleasure, is achieved. This is the case, e.g.,in tickling, also the sexual tickling in the act ofcoitus: here we see displeasure at work as aningredient of pleasure. It seems, a little hindrancethat is overcome and immediately followed byanother little hindrance that is again overcome-this game of resistance and victory arouses moststrongly that general feeling of superabundant, ex-cessive power that constitutes the essence ofpleasure.23

Forme, this fragment-and it is importantthat it is a fragment, and anunpublished one at that-is a kind of blazon en abyme not only ofNietzsche's "philosophy" but of the powerful play of his texts, theirruptures and discontinuities, pleasures and blisses.For Nietzsche, then, as well as for Barthes, pleasure and blissare different but not opposed; instead the "relation" between them is110


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eccentric, asymmetrical. "In the text of pleasure," Barthes writes,"the opposing forces are no longer repressed but in a state ofbecoming: nothing is reallyantagonistic, everything is plural."Whichis to say at the same time, though differently, that the pleasure of thetext is the tmetic play of differences, the playful "cutting" of differentstyles.24 The pleasure of the text, text of pleasure is what Mallarm6called the "pure milieu of fiction" and what Derrida has termed the"chiasmatic invagination."25 When/where this mi-lieu ("half-space"and/or "place") or hymeneal "weaving" (as in tissue/text) occurs, thesubject of the pleasure of the text is no longer anything but a"fiction."26 After quoting Nietzsche-"We have no right to ask who itis who interprets. It is interpretation itself, a formof the will to power,which exists (not as 'being' but as process, a 'becoming') aspassion"-Barthes writes near the end of his text on, or I should sayof, pleasure:

Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, butas fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way ofimagining oneself as individual, of inventing a finalrarest fiction: the fictive identity. This fiction is nolonger the illusion of a unity;on the contrary, it is thetheatre of society in which we stage our plural:ourpleasure is individual-but not personal. (PT,p. 62)Commenting on Richard Miller's "resourceful" translation of jouis-sance as "bliss" yet, at the same time, lamenting that he can-ordoes-not translate it as "coming" ("whichprecisely translates whatthe original text can afford"),Howardshrewdly predicts that "a hardlook at the horizon of our literaryculture suggests that it will not belong before we come to a new word fororgasm proper-we shall call it'being' "(PT, pp. v-vi).Anyone familiar with Heidegger, not to say thehistory of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Derrida,will immedi-ately recognize the immense resourcefulness of such a linguistic de-termination, understood in all its sexual and intelligible senses. Allofwhich is to say that "being" so understood would allow one simul-taneously to problematize the "question of (the truth of) being" andthe "question of (the pleasure of) the text." Having problematizedboth discourses, which is neither a facile nor simple matter-asBarthes has shown with respect to "textuality" and Derrida"philosophy"--one would be in a position to reinscribe them intoeach other. Hence, "being"(as such) would be-come "being"(as jouis-sance); philosophy would become textuality, and vice versa, bothseemingly the same, but with a difference. Perhaps then the pathoswhich is the current climate of philosophy (whether theeschatological of Heidegger or the apocalyptic of Derrida)wouldbecome a melos, a new tone, a new climate-not the landscape of themind or the body but both, everything, coming at once, at a quickglance, into "being." Then, despite the unspeakability of the pleasureof the text, text of pleasure, one would trulybe in a strategic positionto read as one writes and to write as one reads a graphic discourse, a

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primerof pleasure.State Universtyof New York at Buffalo

NOTES1 Roland Barthes, ThePleasure of the Text(hereafterabbreviated as PT),trans.Richard Miller(New York:Hill & Wang, 1975), p. 34. I should note that withrespect to the use of the word "text"here (especially "text of bliss"), Bartheshas writtenin "TheStrugglewith the Angel"that it refers to "the productionofsignifiance and not as philological object, custodian of the Letter," theanalysis of which "endeavors to 'see' each particular text in its dif-ference-which does not mean in its ineffable individuality, orthis differenceis 'woven' in familiarcodes; it conceives the text as taken up in an open net-workwhich is the very infinityof language, itself structuredwithout closure; ittries to say no longer fromwhere the text comes (historicalcriticism),nor evenhow it is made (structuralanalysis), but how it is unmade,how it explodes, dis-seminates-by what coded paths itgoes off"(Image/Music/Text,el. and trans.Stephen Heath [New York:Hill &Wang, 1977], pp. 126-27).2 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text,p. 34. On the relationship between"opposition" and "value," see "Oscillation of value" in Roland Barthes byRoland Barthes(hereabbreviatedas RB), rans. RichardHoward NewYork:Hill&Wang,1977),p. 139.Trueto his Nietzschean genealogy (especially evident inThe Pleasure of the Text),Barthes both affirms "value"-the source of hier-archial oppositions--and, at the same time, is suspect of those same oppo-sitions (especially when they begin to rigidify into what he calls doxa). In"Conversionof value into Theory,"Barthes writes, "parodyingChomsky,"that

"allValue is rewritten - as Theory" RB,p. 179).For his understandingof therelationship between "truth"and "assertion," see also "Truthand Assertion"where he says, among other things, that "the aim of his discourse is not truth,and yet his discourse is assertive" (RB, p. 48).3 ForBarthes' own schematic readingof Nietzsche's influence on his laterwork(ThePleasure of the Text,RolandBarthes by RolandBarthes),see "Phases" inthe latter book (RB,p. 145).4 See Jacques Derrida's Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), where he refers to both a "stylatepractice" (pratique styl6e) and a "practiced stiletto" (pratique stylet) (p. 83).Both these stylistic strategies, or means of reinscribingthe newly-privileged

term,arewhat keeps a deconstruction frombeing merelya simple reversalof ahierarchicalopposition. "For he reversal,if it is not accompanied bya discreteparody,a strategy of writing,or difference of deviation in quills, if there is nostyle, no grand style, this is finally but the same thing, nothing more than aclamorous declaration of the antithesis" (p. 95).5 On Barthes'.strategic use of paradigmatic oppositions, see "Forgeries" inRoland Barthes by RolandBarthes, p. 92.6 This operation conforms, loosely speaking, to Derrida's practice ofdeconstruction. For his own exposition of it, consult Jacques Derrida,"TheExorbitant: A Question of Method" in Of Grammatology, trans. GayatriChakravortySpivak (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ.Press, 1976), pp. 226-34.

Formy understandingof it, see also Rodolphe Gasche's "DeconstructionandCriticism,"Glyph6, pp. 177-215.7 See Barthes' analysis of the "ambiguous fuctions" of the "preterite"with re-spect to narrationand the "thirdperson" narrative," he "cornerstone of Nar-ration," in Roland Barthes, WritingDegree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and

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Colin Smith (New York,Hill &Wang, 1968),pp. 30-34 and 34-38 respectively.8 As opposed to the traditional or nineteenth-century novel, the modernist orpost-modernistone subordinates "storytellng" to linguistic play and fictionalexperimentation;has an open-ended narrativethat investigates formal possi-

bilities and combinations; has flat, static and "grammaticalcreations" (e.g.,the use of pronouns instead of sur- or propernames);is writtenas often as notin the first or second person narrative, requentlywith a limited,fragmentedor"floating"(even contradictory)point-of-view; epresents or reflects on itself, isperformative; etc. See also Barthes' distinction between "classical" and"modern"discourse in WritingDegree Zero, pp. 44-52.9 EdwardW.Said, "The Novel as BeginningIntention,"Beginnings:IntentionandMethod (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 83. For the seminalessay from which Said's terms derive, see Michel Foucault's "What Is anAuthor?" n Language, Counter-Memory,Practice: Selected Essays and Inter-views (Ithaca:CornellUniv.Press, 1977),pp. 113-38.

10 On the undecidable difference between "works" and "texts" and their ec-centric relation to "classical" and "avant-garde"categories, see RolandBarthes, "From Work to Text" in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-StructuralistCriticism, ed. Josue V. Harari Ithaca:Cornell Univ.Press, 1979),p. 74. This latterdistinction between "work"l/"text"ould seem to parallelthatbetween a "text of pleasure" and a "text of bliss."11 Inthe previouslynoted schema (3n),for instance, Barthes places DerridaandLacanunder"lntertext" orSIZ,Sade, Fourier,Loyola,and L'Empire es signes.12 It should be obvious to anyone familiar with Barthes' Pleasure of the Text thatits subject is inseparable from its linguistic and structuralexpression: hencethe periphrastic style and alphabetical order. For example, the text shifts

pronouns(I,he, we) and point-of-view "Barthes," he text of pleasure)so that itis impossible to determine what it "means" in anytraditional sense (i.e.,wherethere is a linear and logical argument, instead of a series of fragmentary"proses," and a single or univocal "author," nstead of-as in contemporaryfiction-multiple and equivocal "speakers" or points-of-view).As is written onthe title page of Roland Barthes by RolandBarthes: "It must all be consideredas if spoken by a character in a novel." ForBarthes' own understandingof hisrecourse to the fragmentand alphabetical order,see "Thecircle of fragments"and "TheAlphabet"in Roland Barthes by RolandBarthes,pp. 92-95and 147-48respectively.13 In "TheNature of Language" (On the Wayto Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz[New York:Harper& Row, 1971]),MartinHeidegger says that "the being of

language becomes the language of being" (p. 72) which he then reformulatesas: "the being of language: the language of being" (Das Wesen des Sprache:Die Sprache des Wesens) (p. 81). In other words, the "relation"between thetwo terms is neither dialectical (and hence capable of synthesis) norsymmetrical, but eccentric-which is to say the terms are not identical butdifferent.14 Though implicit in ThePleasure of the Text,Barthes makes this moreexplicit inhis later work. See, for instance, "FromWork to Text," Textual Strategies,p. 79.15 See Jacques Derrida,La diss6mination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) where he readsPlato's use of the work pharmakon ("poison"/"potion")as an analogue forwritingin the Phaedrus, pp. 69-197.17 For a pr6cis of Tynyanov'sdialectical revision of Shklovsky's synchronic modelof literature, see "The Formalist Projection" in Frederic Jameson, Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 52-53 and92-93

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18 See Barthes' distinction between the "geno-song" and the"pheno-song"-which correspond to "bliss" and "pleasure"respectively-in"The Grain of the Voice," Image/Music/Text,pp. 182-85.19 This is not to say that the early, "utopian" (vis-a-vis "atopian") Barthes of

WritingDegree Zerois not guiltyof this criticism. In her "Preface"to that book,Susan Sontag notes: "As modern literature is the historyof alienated 'writing'or personal utterance, literature aims inexorably at its own self-transcendence -at the abolition of literature"(p. xvii). However, as she herself concludes,"WritingDegree Zerois early Barthes,seminal, but not representative" p. xvii).20 For Barthes'understandingof "atopia,"see the fragmentof that title in RolandBarthes by Roland Barthes, p. 49.21 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text,pp. 52-53.Similarly,Derridahas said of dis-semination (vis-A-vis nsemination):"Elle[le sens] laisse d'advance tomber" Ladiss6mination, p. 300) which Spivak in the "Preface" to Of Grammatology

translates as: "She lets it [the meaning] fall in advance" or, more colloquially,"It[dissemination]comes too soon" (p. lxvi).22 In"Thecaboose," Barthes observes: "theart of livinghas no history; t does notevolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitutefor it. Otherpleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures,nothing but mutations" (RB, p. 50). See also Friedrich W. Nietzsche'scorrelative understandingof "punctuations of will" (Willens-Punktationen) s"disjunctive periodicity" n The Willto Power,trans. Walter Kaufmannand R.J.Hollingdale(New York:RandomHouse, 1967),pp. 380-81.23 Nietzsche, The Willto Power,p. 371. For other fragments relatingto this prob-lematic, see "Theoryof the Will to Power and of Values," The Willto Power,

pp. 366-81.24 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 31. As early as WritingDegree Zero,Barthes wrote in "Is There Any Poetic Writing?,"his reading of "modernpoetry"as opposed to "classical language," that "when the poetic languageradicallyquestions Natureby virtue of its very structure,without any resort tothe context of the discourse and withoutfalling back on some ideology, there isno mode of writingleft, there are only styles" (italics mine, p. 52).Similarly,inSpurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Derrida understands the "question of style" inNietzsche as a "questionof writing"; f, as Nietzsche says, there is no "style initself" (Barthes' "mode"), f "thereis no such thingas a truth n itself" but"onlya surfeit of it" (Derrida),hen there must be a pluralstyle, a surfeit of "stylatepractices," "practiced stilettos" (p. 103).25 See, respectively, Derrida'sreading of Mallarme's"Mimique" n "La doubleseance" in La dissemination (Paris:Seuil, 1972), p. 242; and his "LivingOn:Border Lines" in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York:Seabury Press,1979),pp. 97-98.26 Foran instance of Barthes'understandingof "Fiction"-as-translation vis-A-visa "dialectic of value")see "Dialectics" in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,p. 69. See also his remarks by Roland Barthes on "theatre" and the"theatrical"in the same work,pp. 175 and 177-78.

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