Barthes - The Pleasure of the Text

loose notes

• a familiar theme: the reader is an author of the text. "The author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives..." (11)
• pleasure is aristocratic? "not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover - in order to read today's writers - the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers." (13)
• judgement of a text according to pleasure is incompatible with normative critique (13)
• dichotomy between pleasure and bliss
• pleasure is comfortable, comes from culture; bliss "imposes a state of loss", "discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." (14)
• "he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss)" (14)
• thinking about "bodies" (16)
• there is the analytical, scientific, rational body -- corresponding to "pleasure" within the bounds of culture, comfort (though maybe not? maybe even pleasure defies this kind of rationality)
• then erotic, sensual, experiential, unsettling -- corresponding to "bliss"
• pleasure is not just a weakened form of bliss -- "on the contrary, that pleasure and bliss are parallel forces, that they cannot meet, and that between them there is more than a struggle: an incommunication" (20)
• bliss exists only in the present: thus it is separate from culture, "which is everything in us except our present." (22)
• criticism and pleasure/bliss
• reading criticism: instead of being the confidant of critical pleasure, the reader is its voyeur (17)
• "criticism always deals with the texts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss" (21)
• bliss is unreachable except through another text of bliss: "you cannot speak 'on' such a text, you can only speak 'in' it, in its fashion" (22) => my Ocean Vuong essay
• difference is "beyond and alongside" conflict (15)
• right: "myth of heart against head", embracing humility of pleasure against haughtiness of leftist intellectualism. left: pleasure is simple, cannot compare to "knowledge, method, commitment" / knowledge itself is "delicious"
• yet pleasure "is not an element of the text...it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect...it is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral but because it is atopic." (23)
• analyzing texts that give pleasure => not subjectivity, but "individuality": "it is my body of bliss I encounter. And this body of bliss is also my historical subject; for it is at the conclusion of a very complex process of biographical, historical, sociological, neurotic elements" (62)
• "boredom...is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure." (26) I don't know what this means
• "dominant ideology" is "incongruous" => there can be no ideology but the ideology of the dominant class, the dominated taking on this ideology: social struggle "cannot be reduced to the struggle between two rival ideologies: it is the subversion of all ideology which is in question." (32-33)