The Pleasure of The Text

The Pleasure of the Text is a short book published in 1973 by Roland Barthes. It was written in French and later translated into English. Barthes sets out some of his ideas about literary theory.

In the book, Barthes divides the effects of texts into two: plaisir (translated as "pleasure") and jouissance. Jouissance is translated as "bliss", but the French word also carries the meaning of "orgasm".

The distinction corresponds to a further distinction Barthes makes between texte lisible and texte scriptible, translated respectively as "readerly" and "writerly" texts (a more literal translation would be "readable" and "writable" texts). Scriptible is a neologism in French. The pleasure of the text corresponds to the readerly text, which does not challenge the reader's position as a subject. The writerly text provides bliss, which explodes literary codes and allows the reader to break out of his or her subject position.

The "readerly" and the "writerly" texts were identified and explained in Barthes's S/Z. Barthes argues that "writerly" texts are more important than "readerly" ones because he sees the text's unity as forever being re-established by its composition, the codes that form and constantly slide around within the text. The reader of a readerly text is largely passive, whereas the person who engages with a writerly text has to make an active effort, and even to re-enact the actions of the writer himself. The different codes (hermeneutic, action, symbolic, semic, and historical), that Barthes defines in S/Z inform and reinforce one another, making for an open text that is indeterminant precisely because it can always be written anew.

As such, although one may experience pleasure in the readerly text, it is when one sees the text from the writerly point of view that the experience is blissful.