Work and Text in the Later Writings of Roland Barthes

Abstract

Summary This paper investigates the use to which the categories of “work” and “Text” are put in the later writings of Roland Barthes. The paper proceeds to argue that despite Barthes's vehement repudiation of the foreclosing effects of a theoretical oeuvre, his later publications, including, inter alia, S/Z (1970), Empire of Signs (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and a number of anthologised essays, are linked by their overriding preoccupation with the central distinction between “work” and “Text”. The paper then turns to an analysis of the metaphors selfconsciously employed by Barthes as a means of undermining the metaphysical imperatives of language in his elaboration of the Theory of the Text. Having outlined this extensive rhetorical system, however, the paper employs a close reading of Derrida's “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (1982) in order to demonstrate the complex dynamic in which Barthes's use of metaphor in the Theory of the Text is implicated: far from functioning simply as a means of circumventing the imperatives of metaphysical discourse, Barthes's use of metaphor involves both the entrenchment and subversion of logocentric meaning; in Barthes's own terms, the features of the so‐called Barthesian work return even in the self‐proclaimed site of Textuality. The Barthesian rhetorics of metaphor thus straddles the discursive possibilities of both meaning and nonmeaning, work and Text alike. The paper then proceeds to argue that this aporia is fundamental to the shift from work to Text advocated and indeed “performed” across Barthes's later writings; through demonstrating how the epistemological slide from the former to the latter is frequently executed through Barthes's playful collapse of the work/Text distinction itself; here again, work returns to the site of Textuality even as the play of Textuality disrupts the monologism of the Barthesian work. In this way, the argument differs substantially from Barbara Johnson's deconstruction of Barthes's S/Z in “The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac” (1980), arguing that the collapse of the work/Text divide does not function as a point of departure for a deconstructive critique of Barthes so much as a self‐conscious and skilfully employed strategy for the enactment of the Barthesian transition from work to Text.