A reader points out that, in questioning the LLMs about Barthes in our last episode, our suggestion that the ecstatic potential of reading might be just an idiosyncrasy of Barthes’ is facially silly; of course text can be erotic, arousing, orgasmic! Erotica and pornography have always been some of the most common and widely-enjoyed uses of text, so what I am talking about?
This is not, however, what Barthes means by this, or at least I’m pretty sure it isn’t :), and this leads very nicely to the next section of the essay (“Split” / «Clivage»); a brief section which, by at least some accounts, lays out the essential theme of the book.
Here Barthes distinguishes between “Text of pleasure” («Texte de plaisir») and “Text of bliss” («Texte de jouissance»). And unless I am reading this entirely wrong, the difference between them has nothing to do with whether the subject matter is, outside the context of reading and being read, sexual or erotic. In fact, the two properties seem to be almost unrelated, which brings to mind an interesting paradox that I will save for a paragraph two.
What then differentiates the two kinds of text, if it is not that one is full of inherently erotic acts and situations, and the other is not? Barthes says in the first paragraph of Clivage that text of pleasure (the non-orgasmic kind) “makes contentment, fills, and grants euphoria”; “comes from culture and does not break with it”, and also “is linked to a comfortable practice of reading”; whereas text of bliss (of jouissance, of the little death) “imposes a state of loss” and “discomforts (perhaps to the extent of a certain boredom)”; it “unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories,” and “brings to a crisis his relation with language.”
Unless I am wildly mistaken here, Barthes is not talking about the eroticism of the merely explicitly sexual or romantic, but about a deeper (or just more metaphorical?) eroticism of discomfort, of having one’s assumptions unsettled, of being challenged or even tossed into the sea. If The Story of O is read as a text de jouissance, it would be because of this more complicated relationship between the text and the reader and the reader’s culture and assumptions, not (simply) because the reader might experience bodily arousal in imagining the heroine’s various physical predicaments.
If this is true, though, notice the fun: we can have a text which is wildly erotic, with all sorts of lavishly described sexual and ecstatic scenes and passages, and yet which makes the reader entirely comfortable and donne de l’euphorie, because the sex and the eroticism are presented and read so as to be entirely consistent with the reader’s culture and assumptions; it is therefore a (mere) text of plaisir. And on the other hand we can have a text entirely devoid of romance or material emotion or juicy frictions, of anything that would raise the hackles of the MPAA, and yet which upsets the reader’s assumptions, which imposes the lossiest of states of loss, which brings the reader to bafflement about his relationship with language. And this would be (wouldn’t it?) a text of bliss, of jouissance.
And I find this rather delightful. :) What does it say about the literalness of the idea of the two kinds of text? Does it mean that the metaphor of eroticism is inaccurate in our edge-case? Or does it mean that it is perhaps still true in some deeper (or…?) sense? Or that it is all really just poetry in the first place, and one shouldn’t overthink it, but just experience it as more or less true, more or less helpful or evocative, in one’s own encounters with various texts?
The second (and final) paragraph of the section may or may not help. It describes the reader who masters both of these texts (both of these flavors of encounter with text) as “anachronic” in what sounds like a good way: simultaneously participating in the hedonism of culture and the destruction of that culture, and both enjoying the consistency of the self («son moi») which is plaisir, and seeking its loss, which is jouissance.
Can we say that the comfort / bliss (ecstasy?) distinction is just simple and superficial in the case of ordinary vs. explicitly sexual texts, and deeper and more profoundly true in the case of the distinction between comfortable and challenging texts? We probably can. :) One could construct a whole, I don’t know, psychological ontology around a comfortable vs ecstatic distinction at various levels of analysis, if one liked.
The last sentence is a bit of a puzzler yet again; this person who can master both, who is thus un sujet anachronique, is described as “split twice over, doubly perverse” (deux fois clivé, deux fois pervers). It’s possible that we’re reading our own fondness for the outré into Barthes when we assume that being deux fois pervers is a good thing; but in any case why deux fois? Earlier we noted briefly that Barthes identifies various interesting things happening at edges, at splits, at fault-lines. We can easily see the sujet anachronique as existing at, as riding on, the split between text of pleasure and text of bliss, but that’s only une fois clivé, non? Perhaps le sujet is split once by each style of reading, but I’m not exactly clear how that would work. Worth thinking about, perhaps. :)
ceoln 