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Hmm. That Tom of Finland has chosen to ellide a clause there is interesting, Ganesh. Restored, Richard Miller's translation of the first couple of sentences in that section of Barthes' text actually read as follows:
"Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as ... ."
In writing thus about textuality/sexuality, Barthes is proposing an aesthetics (some would say an erotics) of the text based on bodily pleasure. He certainly makes use of Freudian concepts - in the paragraph following the one you have quoted, for example - as he describes what happens, or what we do in the process of reading as we make sense or otherwise of texts. He considers such things as pace, the propensity to skip passages, the intensity of reading, and so on.
Although what Barthes wrote after 1968 is considered post-structuralist, rather than structuralist, he was primarily a semiotician, and in The Pleasure of the Text , I think he is still preoccupied with opposing pairs of concepts, namely the readerly/writerly (or lisible/scriptible) text, and two sorts of bodily/textual enjoyment: plaisir 'pleasure' and jouissance roughly, 'bliss'. 'Jouissance' is a really difficult word to translate directly into English, but it carries meanings of ecstasy, sexual pleasure, delight.
'Readerly' texts appear to be those which are overdetermined in the sense that the proliferation and repetition of textual cues and clues are such that readers can be in no doubt about the text's preferred meanings, even if they choose to resist these and read against the grain. Such texts according to Barthes, provide and are associated with (bodily) comfort, refinement and plaisir . 'Writerly' texts, on the other hand, are those which require much greater effort on the part of readers - readers in effect become *writers*. These texts are often unsettling or provide the unexpected; they produce discomfort. One of Barthes' examples is a novel by Sollers. Such novels may be written in a seemingly unintelligible stream of consciousness style, contain puns, portmanteau words, even retreat into a private language. But the heightened form of pleasure which they provide, often deriving from gaps or holes or breakdowns in reading, he typifies as jouissance . Reading's no longer a matter of intuiting the whole, but rather seeing the (w)hole.
Hehehehe.
A la Barthes (that is, if we don't deconstruct his binary concepts first), over the next few months until Bloomsday, I reckon we can look forward to the sight of a number of orgasmic 'lithers en plein travail over in BOOKS, as they read/write James Joyce's Ulysses , eh? |
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