Barthes

While trying to decipher Barthes' pleasure of the text i found the quote, "the pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues it's own ideas, for my body does not have the same ideas i do" (111). this quote, appearing at the end of the text, helped the rest of the text finally click after reading and re-reading each sentence carefully. At the beginning of this reading i was confused about why Barthes was talking about erotic pleasure; i didn't know what that had to do with reading. I didn't understand this "intellectual pleasure" he was describing. I knew he was explaining how we skim ahead in order to reach and understanding that might be pleasurable but i didn't know what this had to do with erotic pleasure or the body. However, after differentiating pleasure and bliss, and reaching the end of the reading i understood that Barthes may mean that in order to gain pleasure from a text one must read with his or her whole body. Reading with only the mind would only create bliss, one must learn how to read with all the body of ideas. Barthes can explain it better than myself... "What body? we have several of them; the body of anatomists and physiologists, the one science sees or discusses: this is the text of grammarians, critics, commentators, phiologists" (111.) I think the idea of this text is to help the reader grasp how one is supposed to read, what will make him gain pleasure instead of just pure bliss. Barthes explains, "I must shift my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of this critical pleasure- a sure way to miss it- I can make myself its voyeur: I observe clandestinely the pleasure of others, I enter perversion; the commentary then becomes in my eyes a text, a fiction, a fissured envelope." (111).