The Pleasure of the Text

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.

Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.

I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.

Cinema captures the sound of speech close up and makes us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under the cover of an "art de vivre" shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.

Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.

The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents -- this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.

Forma bastardă a culturii de masă este repetarea ruşinoasă:se repetă conţinuturile,schemele ideologice,ştergerea contradicţiilor,dar se variează formele superficiale:mereu alte cărţi,emisiuni,filme noi,fapte diverse,dar întodeauna acelaşi sens

El texto que usted escribe debe demostrarme que me desea. Esa prueba existe: es la escritura. La escritura es esto: la ciencia de los gozos del lenguaje, su kamasutra (de esta ciencia no hay más que un tratado: la escritura misma).

No entanto, a narrativa mais clássica (um romance de Zola, de Balzac, de Dickens, de Tolstoi) traz em si mesma uma espécie de mimese enfraquecida: não lemos tudo com a mesma intensidade de leitura; um ritmo se estabelece, desenvolto, pouco respeitoso em relação à integridade do texto; a própria avidez do conhecimento nos leva a sobrevoar ou a passar por cima de certas passagens (pressentidas como “aborrecidas”) para encontrarmos o mais depressa possível os pontos picantes da anedota (que são sempre suas articulações – o que faz avançar a revelação do enigma ou do destino): saltamos impunemente (ninguém nos vê) as descrições, as explicações, as considerações, as conversações; tornamo-nos então semelhantes a um espectador de cabaré que subisse ao palco e apressasse o strip-tease da bailarina, tirando-lhe rapidamente as roupas, mas dentro da ordem, isto é: respeitando, de um lado, e precipitando, de outro, os episódios do rito (qual um padre que engolisse a sua missa). A mimese, fonte ou figura do prazer, põe aqui em confronto duas margens prosaicas; ela opõe o que é útil ao conhecimento do segredo e o que lhe é inútil; é uma fenda. surgida de um simples princípio de funcionalidade; ela não se produz diretamente a estrutura das linguagens, mas apenas no momento de seu consumo; o autor não pode prevê-la: ele não pode querer escrever o que não se lerá. No entanto, é o próprio ritmo daquilo que se lê e do que não se lê que produz o prazer dos grandes relatos: ter-se-á alguma vez lido Proust, Balzac, Guerra e Paz, palavra por palavra? (Felicidade de Proust: de uma leitura a outra, não saltamos nunca as mesmas passagens).