ROLAND BARTHESUniversity of California Pres Berkley and Los Angeles, California Fit California Paperback Printing 1988 Prblised by Agreement wth Farr, Sts and Gioes, le Teo copie © 196 y Fars Sins nd Gia. Onin pb in ech Le rasvement del langue ‘Copyright © 1984 by Bdions du Seu Agi ered Primed in the Und Sues of America Designed by ak Haron 45678910 "To Wie: An Inaniive Veh fet pbished in English] in The Languages of (Criciom and th Selences of Man: The Sruchallt Courover, edited by Rear ka © 7 yb His Uae Pr Tae Lage” fie pblsbed in Vrs ue exhigue ss enave,© 1915 by UGE. "Rhsorel ‘Analy fa pbb a Linear a Soci © 1967 by Loa de sciogi Universi ibe de Braxlls. “The Division of Languages” Gn pubshed Une Chilsation nowwle? Hommage & George Friedman, © 1973 Galina ‘Trnaition of: Le brisement de ange Philology. 2 Discoure snag, 3 Seite, 1 Tie, Poms 1999 « ISBN 0520-06694 (ak. pape) a1 s23579 “The pape sed inthis publication rect be minimum requirement of American ‘Netto Standard for foformation Sseaes Permanence of Perfor Pte’ Libary Materials, ANSI 23948-1984, ©Contents 1_L FROM SCIENCE TO LITERATURE From Science to Literature _3 ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb? 1 Reflections on a Manual_22 Writing Reading 29 On Reading 33 Freedom to Write 44 2_/ FROM WORK TO TEXT ‘The Death of the Author _49 From Work to Text _56 Mythology Today 65 Research: The Young 69 ‘The Rustle of Language 76 g / LANGUAGES AND STYLE Rhetorical Analysis 83 Style and Its Image _ 0 Pax Culturalis 100 ‘The War of Languages 106 ‘The Division of Languages 111Contents 4 / FROM HISTORY TO REALITY The Discourse of History 127 ‘The Reality Effect 143 Writing the Event 149 5 / THE LOVER OF SIGNS Revelation 157 ‘A Magnificent Gift_159 Why I Love Benveniste 162 isteva's S 68 ‘The Rewrn of the Poetician 172 To Learn and to Teach 176 6 / READINGS ox, Cayrol and Erasure 181 Bloy 191 Michelet, Today 195, Michelet’s Modernity _208 Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity 212 wo EB. 223 The Baroque Side 233 What Becomes of the Signifier_236 Outcomes of the Text_238 Reading Brillat-Savarin 250 ‘An Idea of Research 271Contents Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne hewre... 977 Preface to Renaud Camus's Tricks 291 ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves 206 ENVIRONS OF THE IMAGE Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers 309 To the Seminar 332 The Indicument Periodically Lodged... 343 Leaving the Movie Theater 345 ‘The Image 350 Deliberation 3591 FROM SCIENCE TO LITERATUREFrom Science to Literature fan cannot speck his thought without thinking his speech” —BONALD French university faculties possess an official list of the social and human sciences which constitute the object of a recognized instruction, thereby necessarily limiting the specialty of the diplomas they confer: you can be a doctor of aesthetics, of psychology, of sociology—not of heraldry, of semantics, of vietimology. Thereby the institution directly determines the nature of human knowledge, imposing its modes of division and of classification, just asa language, by its “obi (and not only by its exclusions), compels us to think in a certain way. In other words, what defines science (the word will hence forth be used, in this text, to refer to all the social and human sciences) is neither its content (which is often ill defined and labile) nor its method (which varies from one science to the next: what do the science of history and that of experimental psychology have in common?), nor its morality (neither serious- ness nor rigor is the property of science), nor its mode of communication (science is printed in books, like everything else), but only its status, Le. its social determination: the object of science is any material society deems worthy of being transmit- ted. In a word, science is what is taught. Literature has all the secondary characteristics of science, ie. all the attributes which do not define it. Its contents are precisely those of science: there is certainly not a single scientific matter which has not at some moment been treated by universal literature: the world of the work is a total world, in which all (Gocial, psychological, historical) knowledge takes place, so that for us literature has that grand cosmogonic unity which so 34 From Science to Literature delighted the ancient Greeks but which the compartmentalized state of our sciences denies us today. Further, like science, literature is methodical: it has its programs of research, which vary according to schools and periods (like those of science, moreover), its rules of investigation, sometimes even its exper- imental pretensions. Like science, literature has its morality, a certain way of extracting its rules of procedure from the image it assumes of its being, and consequently of submitting its enterprises to a certain absolute spirit. ‘One last feature unites science and literature, but this feature is also the one which divides them more certainly than any other difference: both are discourses (which was well expressed by the idea of the ancient logos), but science and literature do not assume—do not profess—the language which constitutes them in the same way. For science, language is merely an instrument, which it chooses to make as transparent, as neutral as possible, subjugated (o scientific matters (operations, hypotheses, results), which are said to exist outside it and to precede it: on one side and first of al, the contents of the scientific message, which are everything; and on the other and afterwards, the verbal form entrusted with expressing these contents, which is nothing. Itis no coincidence if, since the sixteenth century, the combined rise of empiricism, of rationalism, and of religious evidence (with the Reformation), ie., of the scientific spirit (in the very broad sense of the term), has been accompanied by a regression of the automy of language, henceforth relegated to the status of “instrument” or of “fine style,” whereas in the Middle Ages human culture, as interpreted by the Sepfenium, shared almost ‘equally the secrets of language and those of nature. For literature, on the contrary—at least for that literature which has issued from classicism and from humanism—language ‘can no longer be the convenient instrument or the sumptuous decor of a social, emotional, or poetic “reality” which preexists itand which itis responsible, in a subsidiary way, for expressing, provided it abides by a few rules of style: no, language is the being of literature, its very world: all literature is contained inFrom Science to Literature 5 the act of writing, and no longer in that of “thinking,” of “painting,” of “recounting,” of “feeling.” Technically, according to Roman Jakobson's definition, the “poetic” (i.e., the literary) designates that type of message which takes for object its own form, and not its contents. Ethicaly, itis solely by its passage through language that literature pursues the disturbance of the essential concepts of our culture, “reality” chief among them. Politically, itis by professing (and illustrating) that no language is innocent, itis by employing what might be called an “integral language” that literature is revolutionary. Literature thus is alone today in bearing the entire responsibility for language: for though science needs language, it is not, like literature, vwidhin language: science is taught, i. it makes itself known; literature fulfills more than it transmits itself (only its history is taught). Science speaks itself; literature writes itself; science is led by the voice, literature follows the hand; it is not the same body, and hence the same desire, which is behind the one and the other, Bearing essentially on a certain way of taking language—in the former case dodged and in the latter assumed—the oppo- sition between science and literature is of particular importance to structuralism, Of course this word, generally imposed from outside, actually overlaps very diverse, sometimes divergent, sometimes even hostile enterprises, and no one can claim the privilege of speaking in its name; the author of these lines makes no such claim; he merely retains the most particular and consequently the most pertinent version of contemporary struc- turalism, meaning by that name a certain mode of analysis of cultural works, insofar as this mode is inspired by the methods of contemporary linguistics. Thus, itself resulting from a lin- guistic model, structuralism finds in literature, the work of language, an object much more than affinitary: homogeneous to itself. This coincidence does not exclude a certain embar- assment, even a certain laceration, depending on whether structuralism means to keep the distance of a science in relation to its object, or whether, on the contrary, it is willing to