The History of My Pleasure in Le Plaisir du texte

Abstract

The author traces her reading of Barthes’s 1973 book, Le Plaisir du texte, over the last five decades. Examining her published writings on the book, she traces how it meshes with her critical attachments to psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory. Claiming it as a text that gives her definite pleasure, she finds it also always embroils her in contradiction. She works to understand that contradiction via the articulations of contradiction in Barthes’s text.