Posted in the weblog (rather than inflicting it all on Mastodon)!

Returning to my (far-too) close reading of "The Pleasure of the Text".

More Barthes: Communauté https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/08/19/more-barthes-communaute/

#barthes #weblog #text #amreading

Posted! Barthes and Murray and various books and the history of Scotland and... Once again based on a recent post here. :)

Good and Bad Books are Hard to Finish https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/good-and-bad-books-are-hard-to-finish/

#books #reading #amreading #barthes #murray

Being #Barthes , he casually drops in the word #doxa as though it had some clear meaning. (This is still The Pleasure of the Text.)

I suppose he means it in the mild sense of "opinion", of something believed but falling short of knowledge, as he says

«le temps de la doxa, de l'opinion, et celui de la paradoxa, de la contestation. Un troisième terme manque, autre que le plaisir et sa censure».

and here he's being cute with "doxa" vs "paradoxa", comfortable opinion vs disturbing paradox, calm pleasure vs chaotic bliss.

But still one can't entirely ignore the way translators of the bible translated the Hebrew word kavod (כבוד) for God's Glory into the Greek doxa (δόξα) for reasons probably lost to time.

So in referring to the comforting pleasure of opinion, is he reminding us that even the Glory of God is from many angles (angels?) just another part of the Opiate of the Masses?

So I've decided to (try to) read #Barthes more quickly now, not stopping to try to make sense or ramification of every paragraph.

If I were someone who writes (wrote?) in books, I might be scrawling on the pages here: "what?", "no!", "what can this mean?", "obviously false, but poetic", "intriguing in its wrongness".

Is pleasure vs bliss a property of a text, or a property of how a particular reader experiences a text? I think he sees no reason, has no desire or intention, to be consistent on that. Okay!

#amreading #writing #text

This #Barthes stuff is so dense, I decided trying to do it in Toot-sized bits was a mug's game, at least for what I wanted to write tonight; so I posted direct-to-weblog: https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/07/15/calm-and-explosive-joy/

No AI involved :) just the Text of Comfort and the Text of Ecstasy. (Or what you will).

#barthes #reading #writing #text #amreading

I posted about what #bard and #chatGPT did when asked a slightly nontrivial question about #Barthes .

Generative AI on Barthes' Jouissance https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/07/15/generative-ai-on-barthes-jouissance/

#AI

Posted this to the weblog, too:

https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/brio-part-two/

#amreading #Barthes

Maybe some day soon I'll try another entire paragraph. :)

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. :)

#Barthes #Nietzsche #bliss #reading #amreading #writing #text

Gathered the current crop of #Barthes posts together for the weblog:

The Pleasure of the Text https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/07/08/the-pleasure-of-the-text/

#reading #writing #amreading #eroticism

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... :)

8/8 #writing #text #amreading #Barthes #philosophy

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_?. . .')."

6/? #writing #text #amreading #Barthes #Nietzsche

"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?)

5/? #writing #test #amreading

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).

4/? #Barthes #writing #text #amreading #reading

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).

1/? for this particular thread. #writing #text #amreading

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? 🤔

#Barthes #writing #reading #text #amreading #eroticism

Ah, 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!

#barthes #writing #reading #French #translation #text #eroticism

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! :)

#barthes #writing #reading #French #translation #text

Love and want to encourage the impulse to draw what you're reading. from #Barthes Sade Fourier Loyola, this is a phalanstère.

#Foucault, #Barthes, the Author, the Text - and #ChatGPT

https://overland.org.au/2023/02/from-work-to-text-and-back-again-chatgpt-and-the-new-death-of-the-author/

"One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852."
--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

#amreading #barthes #cameralucida