“Ex-” in Text: An Excursus in Barthesian Text Theory

Abstract

The “Ex” of my title leads to a question: can we say that the theory of the text is “history,” or is it still operative, generating methods and protocols that can be reactivated? I survey the evolution of Barthes’s theory of the text, from the seminal essays of Writing Degree Zero and the Tel Quel period to the later essays on Textual Pleasure and Textual Bliss. We will grasp why the theory of the Text ended up undermining itself by its very insistence on the infinite productivity of texts. Text could not be reduced to its signified even though it was crucial to analyze these signifieds, since they were needed to understand the various codes underpinning them. Yet, fundamentally, “Text” brought to the fore a “significance” that both produced it and kept it open. In a last part, I compare Barthes’s trajectory with the more recent analyses of Jacques Rancière in Mute Speech , a book which never mentions the concept of “text.” Rancière resists the allegorical nature of the Barthesian Text. By historicizing texts as much as he can, Rancière follows the periodic and local metamorphoses of these cultural productions without having to hypostasize a “Text.” However, Barthes had paved the way by providing a productive allegory. His concept of an infinite Text contained a Benjaminian allegory: it presented an opaque object that condenses the riddles of history and enhanced the material side of its production.