I mean by literature neither a body nor a series of works, nor
even a branch of commerce or of teaching, but the complex
graph of the traces of a practice, the practice of writing.
Hence, it is essentially the text with which I am concerned --
the fabric of signifiers which constitute the work. For the text
is the very outcropping of speech, and it is within speech that
speech must be fought, led astray -- not by the message of
which it is the instrument, but by the play of words of which it
is the theater. Thus I can say without differentiation: litera-
ture, writing, or text. The forces of freedom which are in lit-
erature depend not on the writer's civil person, nor on his po-
litical commitment -- for he is, after all, only a man among
others -- nor do they even depend on the doctrinal content of
his work, but rather on the labor of displacement he brings to
bear upon the language.... Because it stages language in-
stead of simply using it, literature feeds knowledge into the
machine of infinite reflexivity. Through writing, knowledge
ceaselessly reflects on knowledge, in terms of a discourse
which is no longer epistemological, but dramatic.... Writ-
ing makes knowledge festive.

-- Roland Barthes, Inaugural Lecture,

Collège de France ( 1977)

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