BiegieGo, 9/6

Roland Barthes analyzes the reasons for people feeling the need to skim when looking at a text. “we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote.” He compares reading to a striptease. We resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs on to stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing: but in the same order, that is on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual.” What Barthes is trying to relay to his readers is that they are rushing the readings and not taking the time to sit down and read every word but rather to skim the text and look for the important parts or the most interesting parts to make the story move along more quickly.
Text of pleasure: the text that contents fills grants, euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. These two text, the text of pleasure and the text of bliss tell us the different kinds of text and what effects they have on their readers. The text of pleasure implies a state of comfort and the text of bliss pushes that state of comfort into a state of discomfort and test the language of the readers.