Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Noted: Roland Barthes

Two from The Pleasure of the Text:
. . . any completed utterance runs the risk of being ideological. (p.50)
And:
Everyone can testify that the pleasure of the text is not certain: nothing says that this same text will please us a second time; it is a friable pleasure, split by mood, habit, circumstance, a precarious pleasure (obtained by a silent prayer addressed to the Desire for ease, and which that Desire can revoke); whence the impossibility of speaking about this text from the point of view of positive science (its jurisdiction is that of critical science: pleasure is a critical principle). (p. 52)

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