The entire rest of «Le Plaisir du texte»

Way back when I started reading Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text” («Le Plaisir du texte»), I described it as “short enough, and clearly (hm, not exactly clearly) fluently written enough, that I might just read the whole thing in parallel.” And by “in parallel” I seem to have meant both the English translation and the French original together, and also talking about it at length in the weblog here as I read it.

Well, I didn’t do that. :) After posting quite a few things about the first few sections of it (quite likely writing more words about some of the short chapters than the chapters themselves contained), I kind of bogged down, and then I decided fekk it, and just read the rest of Richard Miller’s English translation, looking into the text only occasionally, and not weblogging about it at all. I think the last bit I weblogged about here was the chapter «Corps» (“Body”) way back here.

The rest of it is, well, to put it crudely, about the same. :) It’s very dense, very metaphorical (and sometimes similetic (if that’s a word)), and the kind of writing where negating any particular claim would often have little or no major effect on the overall work.

So it’s basically poetry? Sort of, perhaps. But not entirely. Or it’s poetry that wants us to think about intellectual things, and does it via entirely abstract imagery (if something entirely abstract can be called imagery).

Any given brief chapter (and many paragraphs, sentences) could support an entire monograph discussing the things that Barthes might mean by it, the references implicit or explicit that he makes, and how it all fits into the history of literary and aesthetic thought.

Which is to say, it’s really dense.

It may be in some sense trolling us, but to the extent that it’s doing that it’s doing it with great expertise. The things Barthes refers to (I’m pretty sure!) actually exist, and actually relate, albeit seldom in an obvious and straightforward way, to whatever it is that he might be talking about, even if arguably it may have been thrown in mostly just to thicken the stew.

And that’s really all that I’m going to say about that! I’m writing this really because the slim yellow volume is still knocking about beside my bed, and I’m trying to straighten the place up on this long weekend (taking Fridays off as Solstice approaches is a nice tradition), so I’d like to put it away as for the moment Done.

Also, where does dust come from? Whose idea was it???

More Barthes: Communauté and Corps

Back to “The Pleasure of the Text”. And ha, I’ve only just noticed that the (separated) section titles (the French version) are in alphabetical order! Perhaps intensifying the feeling that he’s just sort of writing down casually-related snippets, rather than making an organized argument for anything in particular. So far we’ve talked about (or not talked about) sections Affirmation through Clivage.

I’ve speed-read (comparatively) the next few sections, forcing myself not to wait to start a new bit until I’ve written down thoughts about the current one. I still feel like writing things down, though, so I will try writing one or more thoughts about each section as I go through at least some of them (well, two) again.

Communauté / Community: This is two, rather distinct, long paragraphs. The first says that Société des Amis du Texte, the Society of the Friends of the Text, would have nothing in common among its members but their enemies: those things that would make the pleasure of the text impossible. This is because “there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure”. Which is somewhat ambiguous between there being no agreement on which texts count as texts of pleasure, and there being no agreement about any particular facts about them. Either of which is fine; I do think there is a tension between “of pleasure” being a more or less inherent property of a text (as the wording “texts of pleasure” would seem straightforwardly to imply), and something like “reading for pleasure” which suggests that the for-pleasure part inheres more in the act of reading than in the text being read. Which makes more sense to me, really, but calls into question the whole idea that a “text of pleasure” is a thing. Hm!

The Société, the first paragraph agreeably notes at the end, would be one in which differences would be noted, but conflict “rendered insignificant (being unproductive of pleasure)”. Quite wise and Vulcan / IDIC. :) This theme sets off the second section of this section, a dense (as usual) paragraph which begins by characterizing conflict as what happens when you can’t competently deal with difference (very much my reading of Barthes’s usual gnomic complexity, upon which one could write much more), and segues from there to declaring that Barthes loves text because (again, roughly) it offers “a sort of islet” free of dialogue, feint, stratagem, and social interaction in general.

(There is also an enigmatic note that the scandal of bliss is that it is neuter, but so far that says nothing to me.)

So we get a picture of those who read for pleasure, having nothing in common but a shared enmity toward various annoying forces that would interfere with that reading, and among whom differences are observed, but do not lead to conflict. They read for pleasure asocially, in that (again, very much my interpretation) there is only the text, and even if the text can be seen as part of a vast and complicated social dialog and so on, in the moment of reading for pleasure it is only itself, only the text.

And that all works. :) I’m struck, though, by this thought that the whole idea of “texts of pleasure” and the division into texts of enjoyment vs. texts of ecstasy, may be rather arse-backwards, and it would make more sense to speak of reading for enjoyment vs. reading for ecstasy, with some texts perhaps being more conducive to the one rather than the other, but differently for different readers. I wonder how much that would change the perspective of the rest of the book.

Corps / Body: My, we are not covering the ground very fast, are we? :) I suspect we’ll just do these two sections in this little weblog entry; lots to think about already. I’ve read through the end of Guerre, but as I go over the ground again writing things down, new things occur to me that didn’t come up at first reading. Which is why this is such fun!

Corps starts by continuing the thought of the text as a singular atomic thing: “on the stage of the text, no footlights… there is not a subject and an object”. I like this notion of the text (and perhaps by extension the reading of the text) as a singular and a simple thing. Barthes then jogs slightly to the side, and makes an odd claim, perhaps related to the neuter nature of bliss in the prior section. We have, he says, multiple bodies; there is the body of “the anatomists and physiologists… the one science sees or discusses”, but there is also “a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations.”

The latter seems to me rather a subset, if seen perhaps from a different angle, of the former; both are squashy bundles of atoms with an ancient lineage and certain pleasure receptors, no? But Barthes says that this body of bliss is “utterly distinct from the first body” («sans aucun rapport avec le premier»). But then he also says that it is “another contour, another nomination”, which seems very different from “utterly distinct”, so ¿quién sabe? :)

“Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need.”

I wonder if this distinction between the erotic and the physiological, which Barthes seems to feel no obligation to explain or even to note as inobvious, is a French thing. Or is the idea that the erotic and the physiological are closely related, just me? Certainly “the most important sex organ is between the ears,” but still; the merely biological body is (intimately) involved, n’est pas?

The section ends with a nice mess on the same general theme: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when the body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.”

Just what is going on there? This refers, perhaps / presumably, to the erotic body again. But if the (erotic) body has different ideas from the reader, and the pleasure of the text involves those ideas, is the “I” of the reader not the one whose pleasure the pleasure of the text involves? I’m very unclear what Barthes is after here. Perhaps re-re-re-reading the next (and/or previous) sections will get me some clue. Some day. :)

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. :)

«Brio», part two

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. :)

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!