From Work to Text

1. “The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed”

“the work is a fragment of substance . . . the Text is a methodological field”

“the work can be seen . . . the text is a process of demonstration”

“the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language”

“the Text is experienced only in an activity of production” (116).

1. “the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation” (116).

“the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa [(from ancient Greek δόξα from δοκεῖν dokein, “to expect”, “to seem” ) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion].”

“the Text is always paradoxical” (117).

1. “The Text . . . practices the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory”

“The Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text” (117).

1. “The Text is plural.”

“The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an over crossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination” (117).

“the Text: it can be it only in its difference” (118).

1. “The work is caught up in a process of filiation . . . determination of the work by the world . . . consecution of works amongst themselves . . . conformity of the work to the author”

“The work . . . refers to the image of the organism which grows by vital expansion, by “development””

“the metaphor of the Text  is that of the network; if the Text extends itself it is as a result of a combinatory systematic”

“the Author . . . in the Text, in his text . . . [is] a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” (118).

1. “The work is normally the object of a consumption”

“The Text . . . decants the work . . . from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice” (119).

1. “But this pleasure [in reading], no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part . . . a pleasure of consumption”

“As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation”

“the Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate” (120).

“The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing” (120).