The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes

” Pleasure/Bliss: terminologically, there is always a vacillation- I stumble, I err. (I will read them with my coffee Saturday am 🙂 ) All responses are due by Friday at Midnight. Please post your response as a comment to this post. However, I expect you to write something thoughtful and engage with the texts. This is informal and meant to be a brainstorming activity for you. Tell me how the binary is being questioned.and what this means for the meaning of the text as a whole. Please choose one of the texts and write 250 words or more (but don’t get too crazy!) about a binary that is being questioned.

I want you to think of literature as an experimental space where we can think about the blurring of lines and the breakdown of two distinct types of thought that aim to dismiss anything that doesn’t categorically fit. This week for your first blog post, I would like you to very informally discuss what you think happens when these binaries break down (as they do in the case of every text we have read thus far). Good/Evil Feminine/Masculine Strong/Weak Naive/Experienced Pessimism/Optimism Religious beliefs/ Secular beliefs (there are many more). One of the results of this kind of Universal Reason (or even of the Mind/Body split) is the creation of many binaries. We also looked at those who have critiqued this reason (Moliere, Akinari, Voltaire) and have tried to offer us a type of irrationality that seems inherent to our very nature. This gave us a lot of pros and cons to think about ( think about the double edged sword of Enlightenment). We looked at Kant and Descartes who created a very specific philosophical vision of Universal Reason meant to fuel the Enlightenment. In our short time together we have really focused on the theme of Reason and more specifically how very complicated it can be to define what Reason is in any given context.

The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes