One morning a few weeks ago I sat down and read Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure Of The Text. What a wonderful little book! Richard Miller’s translation of Barthes allows his words to be beautiful and flowing in English. I do not know how to speak French but Barthes’ prose in English reminds me of Walter Kaufman’s translation of Nietzsche in The Genealogy Of Morals, another favorite of mine. This is the book I would hand to the layman to help them deduce what is meant by the writerly text. It is straight forward, for Barthes at least, and offers keen insight throughout about literature, aesthetics, and a little bit of romance.

Anyhow, one quote from near the beginning of the book has stayed with me since I finished my reading. This quote sums up how I feel about a few different things:

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no “erogenous zones” (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. (10)

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