Some of the most relevant examples of textual analysis produced by Barthes are based on readings of literary works. This is one reason why critics had to move away from post-structuralist theories and discover ways in which intertextuality could be applied to the analysis of other texts. The book is now available as a Kindle ebook too. Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page.
Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Custom Writings reliable service for writing high-quality essays from scratch. Resources: Allen, G. London: Routledge. Barthes, R. Stephen Heath transl. The structuralist method, then, assumes that meaning is made possible by the existence of underlying systems of conventions which enable elements to function individually as signs.
This is as true of Levi-Strauss's models of kinship systems or myths as of narratologists' models of narrative grammar. Structuralism bases its methodology on Saussurian linguistics; its object can be any signifying practice, from fashion to folk stories. One of the first concerns of literary structuralism was with the analysis of narrative form. For Barthes, in , faced with the infinite number of narratives from which he was attempting to extract a principle, it was natural to compare himself to Saussure confronted by the heterogeneity of language, and to conclude that the structural analysis of narrative should take linguistics as its founding model.
So what of narrative analysis, faced as it is with millions of narratives? It also assumes that meaning and signification are both transparent and already in place, as well as the possibility of objective scientific verification of its findings. But the articulation of a formal structure or set of conventions cannot in itself guarantee any scientific status.
Macherey's critique is made on four grounds. First, he questions the status of the use of linguistics in literary criticism and the unproblematised transference of knowledge from one discipline to another.
This, he argues, disallows the claim for scientific status: 'scientific borrowing is not just a colonization, a new world founded from a fragment of the mother country. It goes back, he suggests, to the entirely unscientific hypothesis that the work has an intrinsic meaning though this doesn't imply that the meaning is explicit ; paradoxically this enables it to be read before it has been written.
To extricate a structure is to decipher an enigma, to dig up a buried meaning Criticism merely produces a pre-established truth; but that might be called an innovation, because ideally it precedes the work p.
They both hold that the work will reveal its secret, its 'myth of inferiority' and its nebulous origins. This assumption is pursued in Macherey's third criticism, that, for structuralists, analysis is the discovery of the 'rationality', the secret coherence of an object. Structure is in fact a simulacrum of the object, but a controlled interested simulacrum, since the copy of the object brings out something previously invisible, or.
For the new object, the copy or simulacrum, produces something which had previously been invisible or unintelligible. It is at this point of alleged contradiction that Macherey produces his most significant objection to structuralist literary criticism. To rediscover the structure is to construct a simulacrum of the simulacrum.
This method of analysis which allows for a confusion between reading and writing actually derives from the very traditional notion of the model pp.
The writer's production, the text, is merely an appearance; the object of the critic's gaze, is located behind or within it. Hence structuralism presupposes a 'theology of creation'. The organic structure, of interdependent parts creating a whole, is only a variant of a causal teleology.
As Starobinski puts it, The same scheme is often activated in doctrines which rise from superstructure to infrastructure, particularly those which aspire to unite a content which is latent in basic assumptions of manifest expressions of psychic, social, or economic life. It is not difficult to recognize a similarity of structure between these various explanatory activities, whether they assume analytic or deductive form; the theology of emanation lies behind them as their common model.
The word post-structuralism itself shifts the emphasis from any single meaning or theory towards an unbound movement through time and space, suggesting that there will never be, and can never be, any definitive 'theory of post-structuralism'.
As Lacan announced, three years later: Language is language and there is only one sort of language: concrete language - English or French for instance - that people talk.
For it is necessary that all so called meta-language be presented to you with language The establishment of a critical, even scientific, vocabulary is bound to produce falsification - for criticism, as language, has no ground from which to view its object, language, objectively.
Just as poetry became self-reflexive with Romanticism, so criticism becomes self-reflexive with post-structuralism. As a self-reflexive discourse, which constantly divides itself against itself and transgresses its own systems, post-structuralist criticism avoids becoming fixed, avoids becoming an established method. It is this self-critical, self-transforming aspect that is often found so irritating and so confusing in post-structuralist thinkers.
Looking mistakenly for a completed system, the reader finds it impossible to pin down and systematise a series of texts. Instead, all he gets is the uncertainty of, for instance, Lacan's 'Ecrits' 'Writings'.
The breakthrough occurs when he realises that his unease and uncertainty are not the product of a failure to understand, but an anticipated critique of the terms of his own will to knowledge.
The shift, or mutation, from structuralism to post-structuralism is clearest in the work of Barthes. I postulated the profit there would be in reconstructing a sort of grammar of narrative, or a logic of narrative, and at that period, I believed in the possibility of such a grammar - I do not wish to deny it. And if criticism recognises its own status as 'text', so its regard may be said to shift from the model 'behind' or 'within' the text to the signifying surface of the text it criticises.
At the same time, whereas the model implies an already constituted product, the more the surface of the text is analysed the more it can be seen in terms of 'textuality' - the interaction of reader and text as a productivity, the production of a multiplicity of signifying effects.
In turn this implies the questioning of the model of communication as a closed system, and of the attempt to fix a unified theory of sets of structural relations.
It may be seen from this how the premises of post-structuralism disallow any denominative, unified, or 'proper' definition of itself. Broadly, however7 it involves a critique of metaphysics of the concepts of causality, of identity, of the subject, and of truth , of the theory of the sign, and the acknowledgment and incorporation of psychoanalytic modes of thought. The writings for whom these names stand as points of authorship are often spoken of in association with structuralism, but it would be more accurate to say that they have been working within that problematic in order to produce its own self-subversion.
Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida are the names of problems, not 'authors' of doctrines. Their work is interrelated, but in no way homogeneous. Thus post-structuralist criticism either takes its point of departure from them or is measured against their critiques of other positions.
It remains to show how the heterogeneity of Saussure's work both enabled and demanded their work, and, within this structure, to suggest the implications of this work for literary criticism.
The effect of Saussure's work is to undercut its own positions, and thus to pose new problems. The distinction, for instance, between 'langue' and 'parole' has been criticised on a number of grounds.
First because, as Macherey argues, it produces an abstract, idealist system that lacks any relation to its exercise in specific historical and institutional practices. These rules define not the 'dumb existence of reality' nor a particular use of vocabulary, but the formulation and ordering of the objects themselves. It is this 'more' that we must reveal and describe.
As Gordon has pointed out in one of the best essays on Foucault's work, structuralism itself may be seen as the apex of the 'sciences de l'homme': for all the aggressively 'anti-humanist' ideology of some of its manifestations, [structuralism's] overall effect was emphatically one of reinforcing the implicit claims of the human sciences to constitute something like the self-evident rationality of the age. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date.
And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements [of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared. It may have realised the death of 'man', but not the death of a subject-centred discourse. Foucault's early work, Gordon suggests, was in effect asking two questions: 'how are the human sciences historically possible, and what are the historical consequences of their existence?
Foucault's later work has shifted in emphasis but has not abandoned its earlier terrain. As with Macherey, this movement is largely ascribable to the events of May This can be seen clearly in -The Order of Discourse- where the organisation of discourse is related to the exercise of power, and where Foucault specifies the practices of control and restraint that mark discourse at every point.
Foucault began by wishing to articulate precisely that which reason excluded: madness, chance, discontinuity, difference. In 'The Order of Things' he describes the appearance of this sort of writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century at the very moment when language was becoming an object of knowledge.
This self-criticism can begin, for instance, by subjecting the notion of the author to the same process of interrogation as 'man' or discourse itself. A simple example of this would be the use of chronology to explain away radically dissimilar parts of a poem, or of different works.
A Foucaldian analysis would highlight and analyse these differences. It would also question the concept of literary history as a continuity, as a genealogy, even the concept of 'literature' itself: its constitution as an object, its limits and exclusions, its political functions and its investiture with power in the society and institutions which constitute it.
At all levels, the exercise of limitation and control are to be encountered, for, as Said puts, it we find that in our society 'the will to knowledge. The subject may inhabit language, but not the whole of his language like a secret and perfectly fluent god.
Next to himself, he discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and that he is unable to dominate, one that strives, fails, and falls silent and that he cannot manipulate, the language he spoke at one time and that has now separated itself from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly silent.
Foucault, Lacan and Derrida in their different ways have all produced a critique of the classical conception of the unitary subject, to which we now turn. The effect of this, however, was more than a negation or exclusion. This is the radical effect of Lacan's thesis that 'the unconscious is structured like a language'.
It could be said that it was only the decentring, indeed exclusion, of the subject in Saussure's own formulations that allowed the subject's reintroduction - not as a plenitude, a full imaginary unity, but as a serial movement, an effect of language. The subject's relegation to ex-centricity in Saussure has allowed the re-reading of the Freudian description of the division of the subject as a construction in language, with the subject 'always a fading thing that runs under the chain of signifiers'.
This description is formulated through a reading of the Freudian concept of castration; as Jeffrey Mehlman puts it, 'Lacan and those around him were distinguished by their willingness to take seriously Freud's remark that the castration complex was the "bedrock" beyond which one could not go'. Hence Lacan's aphorism, 'man's desire is the desire of the Other'. The following is perhaps his simplest exposition of this very difficult description: Where is the subject? It is necessary to find the subject as a lost object.
More precisely this lost object is the support of the subject The question of desire is that the fading subject yearns to find itself again by means of some sort of encounter with this miraculous thing defined by the phantasm. In its endeavour it is sustained by that which I call the lost object. But the relation between the subject and this objet petit a is the structure which is always found in the phantasm which supports desire, in as much as desire is only that which I have called the metonymy of signification.
The vulgar is anything which misses, or falls short of, the dimension of the symbolic, anything which rules out, or excludes, meaning as a loss and as a flight - anything which strives It is thus not rhetoric which disguises and hides sex; sexuality is rhetoric, since it essen- lally consists of ambiguity: it is the coexistence of dynamically antagonistic meanings.
The problem, also encountered in Jeffrey Mehlman's -Trimethyl- amin-, is precisely that interpretation and ambiguity make up an impossible contrary: it is impossible to interpret ambiguity in a text without reducing it in the process. The self-presence of meaning and consciousness is also the object of the philosophical critique of Jacques Derrida.
Like Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger before him, he is trying to remove all vestiges of idealism from thought. What he finds is that in doing so he has also, like Nietzsche, to remove 'philosophy', to be left only with language. For Derrida, structuralism is simply one episode in the whole of Western thought that remains grounded on metaphysical concepts. He produces a critique of Saussure's theory of the sign by pushing Saussure's formulation of difference to its limits.
Derrida denies the very possibility of literal meaning. This is because the literal assumes the absolute self-presence of meaning, whereas in fact, according to Saussure's own formulation, language is constituted by differance - it is 'form and not a substance'.
The sign, therefore, always differs and defers, a curious double movement that Derrida calls 'differance'. A perpetual play and instability occurs in the unending drift across the traverse. If Derrida thus shows that Saussure's theory of difference itself enables a powerful critique of 'logocentrism' or the metaphysics of presence, in other respects Saussure's theories remain clearly within the logocentric tradition.
In particular, Derrida points to the way in which Saussure privileges speech over writing. In the 'Course', for instance, Saussure remarks: Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first. The linguistic object is not both the written and the spoken forms of words; the spoken forms alone constitute the object. But the spoken word is so intimately bound to its written image that the latter manages to usurp the main role.
People attach even more importance to the written image of a vocal sign than to the sign itself. A similar mistake would be in thinking that more can be learned about someone by looking at his photograph than by viewing him directly 'Course,', pp. For Saussure, as for Aristotle and Plato, speech is privileged because it seems closest to the self-presence of consciousness, to what is: It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice This effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many So too, for Descartes, the pure self-presence of the 'cogito' was the one moment of certitude, truth itself.
As a representation of the originary presence of consciousness, it is considered a perversion of it, a corrupting and alienating element. George Eliot makes the point nicely in 'Middle- march'; Dorothea suggests to Will Ladislaw that he might become a poet and Will replies; 'That depends.
One may have that condition bv fits only. Writing is condemned 'as destruction of presence and as disease of speech' p. Yet, in spite of this, Rousseau finds that speech never quite achieves the fulness of presence which it seems to promise. If speech is lacking it is necessary to supplement this lack by writing, the very medium which also seems to destroy presence.
Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute makes one forget the vicariousness of its own function and makes itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements.
For the concept of the supplement. The supplement is both a surplus, 'a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence', but also adds 'only to replace'. Derrida's analysis explores the strange logic involved here.
To deconstruct a text is to make such units subvert the text's own assumptions by tracing the paradoxical movements within its own language. Derrida has taken apart our presuppositions about the way in which language works, and shown us what he calls 'the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed' p.
This representation is of course a philosophical and a critical one: one of the effects of Derrida's work is to articulate the complicity between critical and philosophical positions. Against this, certain texts 'mark and. For literary critics the emphasis of de- construction tends perhaps to be slightly different: whereas for Derrida the interest of any text is that it subverts the categories of Western metaphysics, for literary criticism the interest tends to be in the properties of writing per se.
There are, as Derrida points out, no logocentric texts, only logocentric readings. To break through and from truth is not to substitute polysemy for unequivocal meanings. There is then a strategy for deconstruction, and that strategy occurs within institutions and institutional practices. A text for analysis can be strategically chosen, to show how, in Derrida's words, the text overruns all the limits assigned to it so far.
Its position is particularly powerful because it is clear that whether one likes it or not, approves of it or not, as a mode of textual analysis deconstruction certainly works.
The reader who wishes for more detailed information is referred to the works on structuralism in the bibliography. On the crucial importance of Saussure, however, cf. Lacan: 'the revolution of the sciences and a regrouping of them around [Saussurian linguistics] signals, as is usually the case, a revolution in knowledge' 'Ecrits, A Selection', trans. Alan Sheridan, London, , p. David B. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, , p.
Wade Baskin, London, Fontana, Geneva-to-Paris' trains that leave at twenty-four hours intervals. We feel that it is the same train each day, yet everything - the locomotive, coaches, personnel - is probably different. Wherever the same conditions are fulfilled, the same entities are obtained. Still, the entities are not abstract since we cannot conceive of a.
Derrida's substitution of 'grammatology' for 'semiology' in the same passage, in 'Of Grammatology', trans. Any statement of authority has no other guarantee than its very enunciation, and it is pointless for it to seek it in another signifier, which could not appear outside this locus anyway. And when the Legislator he who claims to lay down the Law presents himself to fill the gap, he does so as an impostor. Wing, Semiotics of Poetry, p. Volosinov's 'Marxism and the Philosophy of Language', trans.
Ladislav Matejka and I. Sheridan Smith, London, Tavistock, , p. It does not challenge the reality of 'experience', but asks what are its conditions, its forms and effects.
It is this very presence which makes both the subject and a stable, continuous body of experience possible. In humanist philosophies the subject is a unity as consciousness and as agent, it is capable of knowing itself through reflection on that unity and of being the source of its actions. Morot-Sir, W. Piersol, H.
Dreyfus, and B. Reid, in 'Philosophy and Phenomenological Research', 30, , pp. Richard Miller, London, Cape, It is this description which seems to suggest Foucault's alleged structuralism most clearly; cf.
For Macherey, see the interview in 'Red Letters', 5, , p. See n. For Deleuze's work, see his 'Proust and Signs', trans. Roland Barthes's 'Lecture', trans. Richard Howard, is printed in 'October', 8, Spring , pp. Alan Sheridan, London, Hogarth Press, throughout. For an example of the possibilities for this sort of criticism, see Maud Ellmann's Disremembering Dedalus, Chapter 9, below.
Pos E II, 'the concept of castration is in fact inseparable. Page references in the text hereafter will be to 'Of Grammatology'. John P. Leavey, Hassocks, Harvester Press, , pp. Still the best introduction to Lacan. Power is everywhere Michel Foucault. Published in the same year as 'The Pleasure of the Text' , -Theory of the Text- elaborates the new object of post-structuralist criticism - except that it is not, strictly, an 'object', or even a 'concept'.
The theory of the text was developed by those associated with the journal 'Tel Quel' in the late s and early s Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva and Sollers. But they are not, strictly, in opposition to each other, for to compare the two is to compare an object with a practice. Text functions as a transgressive activity which disperses the author as the centre, limit, and guarantor of truth, voice and pre-given meaning.
Instead, it produces a performative writing, which fissures the sign and 'ceaselessly posits meaning endlessly to evaporate it'. The theory of the text, it is also claimed, enunciates a signifying practice that can be rearticulated with the social practices in which it participates. Just as text is not a stable object, so the word 'text' does not reify into a metalanguage. Part of the theory of the text involves the destruction of metalanguage, and its replacement by a 'criticism' conceived as a practice of writing also.
The word and the 'concept' text refuse to rest at any level of arrested meaning, performing instead a play, a trembling and overflowing of the signifiers, a stereographic shifting of signification.
Two French terms are retained in this translation. The term with which it is identified, 'jouissance', seems by now sufficiently well known in its French usage to allow its retrieval from the OED's 'obsolete' classification. It is commonly agreed that neither 'bliss' nor 'pleasure' are adequate translations. It is the phenomenal surface of the literary work; it is the fabric of the words which make up the work and which are arranged in such a way as to impose a meaning which is stable and as far as possible unique.
In spite of the partial and modest character of the notion it is, after all, only an object, perceptible to the visual sense , the text partakes of the spiritual glory of the work, of which it is the prosaic but necessary servant.
The notion of the text is historically linked to a whole world of institutions: the law, the Church, literature, education. The text is a moral object: it is the written in so far as the written participates in the social contract. We are beginning to understand now that the sign is a historical concept, an analytic and even ideological artefact. We know that there is a civilisation of the sign, namely our own Western civilisation from the Stoics to the middle of the twentieth century.
The classical sign is a sealed unit, whose closure arrests meaning, prevents it from trembling or becoming double, or wandering. The same goes for the classical text: it closes the work, chains it to its letter, rivets it to its signified. As the repository of the very materiality of the signifier the order and exactitude of the letters , the text demands to be rediscovered, 'restored', if it should come to be lost or changed for some historical reason.
It is then taken in hand by a science, philology, and by a technique, textual criticism. In the classical universe, a law of the signified is deduced from the law of the signifier, and vice versa. The text then becomes the very object of all hermeneutics. It is that scientific 'instrument' which defines in an authoritarian way the rules of an eternal reading. This conception of the text the classical, institutional, and current conception is obviously linked to a metaphysics, that of truth.
For centuries, how many battles for truth, and also, concurrently, how many battles in the name of one meaning against another, how many attacks of anguish at the uncertainty of signs, how many rules as an attempt to make them firm! But also, one and the same crisis, which started last century in the metaphysics of truth Nietzsche , is being opened up again today in the theory of language and literature, by the ideological critique of the sign and by the substitution of a new text for the old one, that of the philologists.
This crisis was initiated by linguistics itself. In an ambiguous or dialectical manner, structural linguistics scientifically consecrated the concept of sign articulated into signifier and signified ; this may be regarded as the triumphant culmination of a metaphysics of meaning. At the apogee of structural linguistics around certain new researchers, who in many cases had emerged from linguistics itself, began to enunciate a critique of the sign and a new theory of the text formerly known as 'literary'.
Finally, semiology, a new discipline postulated by Saussure at the beginning of the century but which began to develop only around , applied itself, at least in France, principally to the analysis of literary discourse.
Linguistics stops at the sentence and certainly defines the units which compose it syntagms, monemes, phonemes ; but beyond the sentence? What are the structural units of discourse if we give up the normative divisions of classical rhetoric? Literary semiotics here needed the notion of text, a discursive unit higher than or interior to the sentence, yet still structurally different from it.
The text may coincide with a phrase or with an entire book; The dialectical- materialist reference Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and the Freudian reference Freud, Lacan enable us to identify with certainty the adherents of the new theory of the text.
For there to be a new science it is not enough, in effect, for the old science to become deeper or wider which is what happens when one passes from the linguistics of the sentence to the semiotics of the work ; there has to be a meeting of different epistemes, indeed ones that normally know nothing of each other as is the case with Freudianism, Marxism, and structuralism , and this meeting has to produce a new object it is no longer a question of a new approach to an old object : in the event, it is this new object that we call text.
The text is a fragment of language, itself placed in a perspective of languages. What is a signifying practice? It is first of all a differentiated signifying system, dependent on a typology of significations and not on a universal matrix of the sign.
The notion of signifying practice restores to language its active energy; but the act which it implies is not an act of understanding already described by the Stoics and by Cartesian philosophy , and therein lies the epistemological mutation: the subject no longer has the fine unity of the Cartesian 'cogito'; it is a plural subject, which so far only psychoanalysis has been able to approach.
No one can claim to reduce communication to the simplicity of the classical schema postulated by linguistics: sender, channel, receiver, except by relying implicitly on a metaphysics of the classical subject or on an empiricism whose sometimes aggressive 'naivety' is just as metaphysical. Productivity The text is a productivity. This does not mean that it is the product of a labour such as could be required by a technique of narration and the mastery of style , but the very theatre of a production where the producer and reader of the text meet: the text 'works', at each moment and from whatever side one takes it.
Roland Barthes 37 Even when written fixed , it does not stop working, maintaining a process of production. The text works what? As soon as the text is conceived as a polysemic space where the paths of several possible meanings intersect, it is necessary to cast off the monological, legal status of signification, and to pluralise it.
It was for this liberation that the concept of connotation was used: the volume of secondary or derived, associated senses, the semantic 'vibrations' grafted on to the denoted message. Phenotext and genotext It is also to Julia Kristeva that we owe the distinction between phenotext and genotext. The phenotext can, then, come under a theory of the sign and of communication, without any incoherence: it is the privileged object of semiology. One of the paths of this deconstruction-reconstruction is to permute texts, scraps of texts that have existed or exist around and finally within the text being considered: any text is an intertext; other texts are present in it, at varying levels, in more or less recognisable forms: the texts of the previous and surrounding culture.
Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of codes, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. A lover of neologisms might therefore define the theory of the text as a 'hyphology' 'hyphos' is the fabric, the veil, and the spider's web.
A work is a finished object, something computable, which can occupy a physical space take its place, for example, on the shelves of a library ; the text is a methodological field. One cannot, therefore, count up texts, at least not in any regular way: all one can say is that in such- and-such a work, there is, or there isn't, some text. In other words, 'the text can be felt only in a work, a production': that of 'signifiance' ,12 'Signifiance' invokes the idea of an infinite labour of the signifier upon itself : the text can therefore no longer coincide exactly nor by right with the linguistic or rhetorical units hitherto recognised by the sciences of language, the singling- out of which always implied the idea of a finished structure.
The text does not necessarily contradict these units, but it overflows them, or, to be more precise, it does not have to fit itself to them. We know that this spectrum is traditionally divided into two distinct and heterogeneous regions: any manifestation of language whose dimensions are less than or equal to the sentence belongs by right to linguistics; everything beyond the sentence belongs to 'discourse', the object of an ancient normative science, rhetoric.
The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books in a library for example , the Text is a methodological field. It follows that the Text cannot stop for example on a library shelf ; its constitutive movement is that of cutting across in particular, it can cut across the work, several works.
In the same way, the Text does not stop at good Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary or precisely , its subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single text.
Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.
Similarly, the infinity of the signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable the unnameable signified but to that of a playing; the generation of the perpetual signifier after the fashion of a perpetual calender in the field of the text better, of which the text is the field is realized not according to an organic progress of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations.
The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible and not merely an acceptable plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.
The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stenographic plurality of its weave of signifiers etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference.
The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy we know that there are opposing examples of these ; for such a philosophy, plural is the Evil. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: a determination of the work by the world by race, then by History , a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author.
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