Calm and Explosive Joy

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. :)

The Pleasure of the Text

Long-time readers will know that I am always starting up ambitious stuff, and then getting distracted and not returning to it for months or years or decades or ever.

Well, here we go again! :) This is mostly some posts from Mastodon, lightly edited and with maybe some links added, because it occurs to me that I might want to read this again, and it’s not easy (not possible?) to find old posts on Mastodon.

Woot, Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text” («Le Plaisir du texte») is short enough, and clearly (hm, not exactly clearly) fluently written enough, that I might just read the whole thing in parallel.

(My French is terrible, but at least I have a French, unlike basically any other non-English human language.)

A hardcopy of the English just arrived in the post, and I found this on the interwebs: http://palimpsestes.fr/textes_philo/barthes/plaisir-texte.pdf

Allons! :)

Ah, but language well-used is amazing! Sometimes I start reading a book like this and, wanting to stop and bask after every page or paragraph or sentence, eventually end up mislaying it before finishing…

«La culture ni sa destruction ne sont érotiques; c’est la faille de l’une et de l’autre qui le devient»

Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the fault-line between the two that becomes so.

(Richard Miller renders «la faille» here as “the seam… the fault, the flaw”, which is an interesting way to try to capture the ambiguity of the original; but I’ll take a simple “fault-line” and its geological connotation.)

This is fun: «au moment où il jouit» might, given the context, go into English as “at the moment that he comes” (or even “cums”); the French verb «jouir» is ambiguous between “enjoy” and “orgasm” just as the English “to come” is ambiguous between “move towards” and “orgasm”.

Google translate primly renders it as “enjoys”; Miller spells it out again, as “at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss”.

In fact this edition has a small “Note on the Text” all about how French, unlike English, has words for the erotic that are neither, as he puts it, coarse nor clinical. How educational!

Perhaps-relatedly, Miller translates «La déconstruction de la langue est coupée par le dire politique, bordée par la très ancienne culture du signifiant» quite reasonably as “The dismantling of language is intersected by political assertion, is edged by the age-old culture of the signifier”. I don’t know if the «bordée» has the same erotically-freighted additional meaning as does the English “edged”, but Barthes didn’t in any case italicize it. Maybe it’s just my naughty mind, but I see a little nudge-nudge wink-wink from Miller here. :)

That aside, it’s just a great sentence in itself. I’d be hard pressed to say that it means, exactly, but there it is.

(It is of course quite possible that Miller was just translating a different French text than the one I’m reading, and that one did have that «bordée» in italics. Notably, this English translation begins with a Latin quote from Hobbes, and this French one with a (quite different, if thematically related) French quote from Hobbes. So there’s that too.)

Diving back into a (slow, inept) parallel reading of the “The Pleasure of the Text” and «Le Plaisir du texte», we come to and let pass unnoticed various sentences which are rather delightful if not obviously true (or obviously not true), and note only

«L’endroit le plus érotique d’un corps n’est-il pas là où le vêtement bâille?»

The most erotic place on a body, is it not where the clothing gapes?

That gets no counterargument from me. :)

Followed immediately by the suggestion that «la perversion» is «le régime du plaisir textuel». Perversion is the realm of textual pleasure?

Some of us would like to think so. But are we really that edgy? 🤔

Back to Barthes “The Pleasure of the Text” / «Le Plaisir du texte», starting the section called “Brio”.

(Notably, the section breaks are denoted by inconspicuous inter-paragraph symbols, and the section titles occur only in the list of names and page numbers that come before (English) or after (French) the text itself).

The first paragraph of “Brio” (the one before the single occurrence of the word “Brio”) leads me to think about just what this text is.

It does not consist of statements that are easily evaluated as true, or even as putting forth plausible claims.

“If I agree to judge a text according to pleasure, I cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad.”

«Si j’accepte de juger un texte selon le plaisir, je ne puis me laisser aller à dire : celui-ci est bon, celui-là est mauvais.»

This is obviously wrong; of course he/you/we/one can.

The rest of the paragraph does not so much argue for the truth of the statement, so much as it puts forward more statements that are obviously not true if interpreted as written.

So I wonder if this is poetry, which one is intended to experience rather than to understand and believe (or not).

Or if it is a sort of personal truth; not so much that these statements are true in general, or even strictly true of Barthes, but that they state the way that Barthes chooses to behave (and perhaps recommends that we behave).

This approach perhaps works if we note that «je ne puis me laisser à dire» might be more directly translated as, not “I cannot go on to say” but rather “I cannot allow myself to say”.

It might be strictly-speaking true that one could, when judging a text according to pleasure, say “This one is good, that bad”; but Barthes cannot allow himself to do that, for the reasons stated in the rest of the paragraph (which are themselves to be taken as statements of things that he does and doesn’t allow himself to think or do, not necessarily statements of literal truth).

“The text (il en est de même pour la voix qui chante) can wring from me only this judgment: c’est ça! Et plus encore : c’est cela pour moi!”

“That’s it! That’s it, for me!”

Given the overall context, I think Barthes here is suggesting that the genuine reaction to «un texte selon le plaisir» is a singular and essentially orgasmic (what?) cry (scream? howl?).

(Although, to be pedantic, even some moans are louder and more ecstatic than others, eh?)

He brings Nietzsche in here, which feels extremely appropriate as for instance Zarathustra raises the same question as to say truth vs poetry as this does.

“This ‘for me’ is neither subjective nor existential , but Nietzschean (‘. . . basically, it is always the same question: What is it for me?. . .’).”

Good link to Nietzsche; my American Analytic School training points out that “subjective” and “existential” are generally considered rather applicable to much of Nietzsche.

Of course Barthes knows this, so we are left to think that he is either making, or taking for granted, some deeper point about the important differences between the three terms, which is basically left as an exercise for the reader.

Whee!

And that is that thread, for now.

It is worth noting that that is all from a single paragraph of this here essay, and it consists mostly of gesturing at deeper issues that one might run off and follow for an hour or a day or a lifetime.

Which is why I seldom finish this sort of thing, even when they are really short… :)

P.S. Perhaps amusingly, the statement:

‘. . . basically, it is always the same question: What is it for me?. . .’

appears to be Miller’s English translation of something written by Gilles Deleuze in “Nietzsche et la Phlosophie” about rather than by Nietzsche.

Unless I’m holding it wrong.

All for now! I may or may not read, and then write, and then repost here, more of this. We’ll see!