For the true writer, he had once declared, to write is an intransitive verb: one does not write something, one simply writes.
This is a great little book. I’ve come out of it with what feels like a solid, not uncritical overview of Roland Barthes, which makes up a little for so little of his catalogue being available in English or Kindle. I also feel better equipped to continue with WRITING DEGREE ZERO.
“Reactive formations: a Doxa (a popular opinion) is posited, intolerable; to free myself from it, I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion, itself becomes a new Doxa, and I must seek further for a new paradox.”
One thing I enjoy about Barthes is that he makes hard, clear statements while still giving the impression that he’s looking over the statement’s shoulder to see if there’s a newer and more attractive one somewhere behind it. He’s always on the move, never dogmatic, playing around and having fun with words. Semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, the death of the author and the return of pleasure: it’s all just play for Barthes.
‘Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic,’ Barthes writes, ‘it is the gap between them that becomes so . . . it is not violence that impresses pleasure; destruction does not interest it; what it desires is the site of a loss, a seam, a cut, a deflation, the dissolve that seizes the reader at the moment of ecstasy’ (p. 15/7). A naked body is less erotic than the spot ‘where the garment leaves gaps’
Similarly, this book can’t help but be great fun, even when the author occasionally feels the need to scowl or hold his nose. Which in itself adds to the entertainment.