Another reprint from Mastodon.
Okay, just One More Paragraph of Barthes ; the second and final part of the section called “Brio”.
It begins:
“The brio of the text (without which, after all, there is no text) is its will to bliss…”
Now “bliss” here is «jouissance», which is the more orgasmic kind of pleasure, in contrast to the milder and more civilized kind which is «plaisir».
Along with the very Nietzschean “will to” («volonté de», as in «volonté de puissance»), we get a delightful alternative to the Will to Power: the Will to Climax.
“…will to bliss: just where it exceeds demand, transcends prattle [le babil], and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives — which are those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come flowing in.”
The notion of overflowing, of surplus, is very Zarathustra (“I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart”). I didn’t really get the thing about adjectives, though; why those rather than verbs or nouns?
I asked ChatGPT 4.0, as one sometimes does these days, and it said inter alia that adjectives “give color, texture, mood, judgment, and shape to the otherwise neutral facts that nouns and verbs present. In other words, adjectives provide a sense of subjective interpretation and perspective.” I thought that was pretty plausible.
It remains odd to me, though, that the doors through which subjectivity flow in are seen as constraints which the overflowing abundance of the Will to Bliss wants to break through.
Again perhaps this is more poetry than truth-claim, and I shouldn’t worry about it too much. But on the other hand perhaps Barthes really wants me to think about this overflowing bliss as something opposed to or at least constrained by “the ideological and imaginary” (or the doors that allow those to flow in). I’m not sure what that would look like.
In the original, it is not literally to “break through the constraint of adjectives”; it is rather (at least in this edition) «de forcer la main mise des adjectifs», which is (I think?) a bit overloaded between “to force the hand” and “to overcome the stranglehold” (whence presumably Miller’s calmer “constraints”).
Not sure yet if that helps any. :)
ceoln 
Hm?