Pleasure of the Text: Mind and Body

“Arab Scholars, when speaking of the text, use this admirable expression: the certain body. 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, philologists (the pheno-text). But we also have a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations, utterly distinct from the first body: it is another contour, another nomination; thus with the text: it is no more than the open list of the fires of language… The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need.” (Roland Barthes 111)

This passage particularly grabbed my attention because how often does one think of the human body in so many different forms? In all fairness how often was one associate text with the human body? Before reading this the thought had never crossed my mind. I don’t think of the body in so many ways; usually it’s just the physical body. Yet I think there is another way to look at this that is not so easily seeable in the text. Psychologist often struggle with separating the mind and body in humans and the idea that the mind may be disconnected from the brain; that is may be a completely separate entity by itself. I think the easiest way to describe this is that the mind may be almost like a spirit within our physical form. It seems to me that Barthes is getting at this with his idea of the “erotic body,” the “body of bliss”.

I believe what Barthes is saying in this last line here, is that the pleasure of the text, the joy and sensations one gets from reading, cannot be detached from than the basic needs of the human body. He believes the text to be an anagram of our erotic body.