GUÍA 1

Main ideas writers (indeed, all human beings) function within a language or textual system (there is nothing outside of the text); texts must be received and understood as being part of a textual system and NOT as a direct conduit to, or expression of, the person who writes them; the role of the reader is as important as that of the writer (Barthes provocatively ‘kills’ the author and ‘births’ the reader).

Barthes: lines 7-13 (“The image of literature … ‘confiding’ in us”); These lines lead on logically from the preceding ones (a summary, according to Barthes, of the historical evolution of the figure of the author): the author in ordinary culture is the focalizer through which works of literature are read and explained.

lines (“a text is not … so on indefinitely”); …a more comprehensible version of Derrida’s there is nothing outside of the text. Barthes argues that when we sit down to write we are drawing on textual resources that are always already there. It’s like dipping into a limitless pre-existing dictionary from which we extract our own words, “only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.”

lines (“the scriptor no longer bears within him … this immense dictionary from which he draws”). Barthes proposes an alternative term to Author (with its connotations of authority and authoritarianism): scriptor (with its emphasis on writing and text). The scriptor draws on language (“this immense dictionary”) and avoids connecting with anything unrelated to language or centred on the figure of the Author (“passions, humours, feelings, impressions”).

Derrida line 13 (“reading must not be content with doubling the text”) For Derrida, “doubling the text” is equivalent to trying somehow to get inside the writer’s head in order to reproduce “the conscious, voluntary,intentionalrelationship that [he] institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to […] language”, (ll ). Among other things, this would involve, presumably, accepting that the writer has some control over the text he produces through his “exchanges” with “history” and “language;” that he ultimately produces a stable, water-tight text in which there are no fissures or fault lines through which meaning escapes authorial control. Derrida challenges this notion that an author is in command of what he writes.

lines (“[I]t seems to us in principle impossible to separate, through interpretation or commentary, the signified from the signifier”); Following l. 13, Derrida cautions us that if reading cannot simply ‘double the text’, it cannot look to an extra-textual referent either (“a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.”). Here he is repeating Barthes’ injunction to avoid interpreting a text through the personality of its author. In other words, Derrida is saying that we cannot seek a referent (e.g. the author) outside text because there is nothing outside of the text. Consequently, our interpretation cannot separate signified and signifier because it is not possible to place the signified in a place where the signifier is not: both signifier and signified are situated within text. Alternatively put, text comprises both signifier and signified. the split sign – signifier (sound or written/graphic mark) and signified (referent or concept referred to).

lines (“[L]iterary writing … such a reading is blind”). Derrida compares literary writing to the philosophical text which, according to him, emphasizes the signified (meaning, concepts referred to) at the expense of the signifier (in this case, text). Derrida claims that literary writing traditionally “has lent itself to this transcendent reading,” that is, a reading or interpretation in which the signified is held to transcend text. Derrida repeats that he is not trying to “annul” the signified (thus challenging accusations of nihilism) but simply seeks to “understand” (or re-situate) it within a system (i.e. text), a practice to which transcendent reading is “blind.”