The pleasure of text

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Die Lust am Text ( Le plaisir du texte ) is an essay by Roland Barthes published in 1973 (Ger. 1974) . It is considered one of the paradigmatic texts of post-structuralism and a classic of the new French textual criticism . In retrospect, Barthes himself described this text as the beginning of a new phase in his thinking. With this essay he turns away from his strict, semiologically oriented systems thinking of structuralism . At the same time there are influences from psychoanalysis , Kristeva , Derrida and Nietzsche, which he quotes several times, clearly.

shape

The essay consists of a series of aphorisms and sentences that are unsystematically related to one another . In terms of content, the book does not convey a clear result, its statements often contradict one another. The sections also differ in character: We find short stories, political treatises, columnist treatises, philosophical considerations, playful brainstorming. It is a form that is reminiscent of moralism , i. H. of philosophical texts that deal with the good and the evil, the moral right or wrong life anknüpft. (He stands in the tradition of Abelard's Sic et Non .) This goes so far that he uses identical terms with different and sometimes mutually exclusive meanings. In this way, he himself calls for the approach in this text that he describes in the aphorisms: a form of reading that first has to say goodbye to “meaning”, “meaning” and “understanding”.

content

The pleasure in the text describes the reading act. In doing so, Barthes does not fall back on classical texts, as other literary theorists such as B. Wolfgang Iser do this in their theories, but rather deals with modernist texts that already evoke a certain form of reading . He chooses texts that do not convey a fixed meaning, but rather dissolve them in the free play of words. Fixed systems of thought, understood by Barthes as ideological and repressive , are supposed to be destroyed in these texts by an endless gliding and mixing of language. According to Barthes, the approach to these texts is less shaped by hermeneutics , i.e. by a desire to understand, and more by an eroticism . It is impossible to pinpoint the characters in any particular meaning. The reader is left to indulge in the tormenting, tempting goings-on and brief, provocative flashes of meaning and significance. The reader has to surrender to the text; there is no other way of approaching the text.

Barthes distinguishes between two forms of pleasure :

  1. The first - plaisir - is the conventional form: the reader enjoys making sense and building a coherent system from the text elements at hand. He understands the text within his personal thought structure and enjoys making sure of himself. On the one hand, it contradicts the second, but on the other hand it is also its prerequisite.
  2. This second - jouissance - can be translated as “ lust ”: not only the text, but also the human self collapses. Texts of this kind make people feel insecure, while drawing attention to the language itself and no longer to the content. In a masochistic act, the modernist text breaks the fixed cultural identity of the reader. He gives himself up completely to the dissolving drive of signs. This means a new bliss for the reader, equated with sexual orgasm .

This means that there is a certain requirement for the text to be read: it must be understood as a body. Barthes increasingly understands the act of reading as an act of devotion and exceeding discipline. The reader dissolves in the text, becomes its anagram and is sensually absorbed by it. The vanishing point of Barthe's thoughts is a consistent aesthetic of pleasure, which turns the text into a voice that belongs to the body and at the same time embodies the reader and through which the previous division between logos and eros is to be removed.

criticism

Terry Eagleton formulates a criticism of this technique of literary appropriation : The content-related criticism of this system must be based on the privatist approach. This theory reveals a general discomfort with systematic thinking and ignores the fact that the reader is part of a historical process. Every reader encounters a text integrated into a social and historical system. The dialogue with the text, which dissolves language and entails absolute devotion, presupposes - according to Eagleton - an existence in a purely aesthetic vacuum (and thus a laboratory atmosphere), which in this way never exists in an act of reading.

output

  • Roland Barthes: The desire for text . Translated by Traugott König. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-01378-5 .

literature

  • Terry Eagleton: Introduction to Literary Theory. 2nd Edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-476-12246-8 .
  • Le plaisir du text. In: Kindler's new literary dictionary. Volume 2: Ba-Bo. Study edition. Kindler, Munich 1996, DNB 947244158 , p. 281f.