Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Unravelling the Demonic Text 103take action on every occasion against Power, but our true battle is elsewhere,it is against powers in the plural, and this is no easy combat.” 101 The Text (inthe sense utilised by Barthes in the early 1970s) is an “antidisciplinary object,”that shatters disciplinary boundaries, and operates therefore as a “critiqueof disciplinary reason.” 102 The demonic ambivalence marks with itsplurality both the effects of power, and the attempts to produce an alternativeto the hegemony of the author and his work. The connection betweenthe author and the work is “legal,” and it becomes, according to Barthes, anobligation for a textual reader to liberate the signification from itsmonological, legal state, and to pluralise it. 103 As the traditional conceptionsof Power and work are “monist” (singular, reducible to a unified system),the textual reader is reading specifically those aspects that are rejected by thetraditional system. In other words, he is reading Evil.The “demoniacal texture” and plurality of the text are realised in the actof reading, and Barthes’s conception of the text as demonic implies also aparticular view on the reading/writing self. In “The Death of the Author”Barthes advocates the “removal” of the author, and connects this to the wideinterpretation of the intertextual:We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensionalspace in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend andclash. 104After this affirmation of anonymity and loss of any integrating subjectivityin the text, Barthes makes a reference to Jean-Pierre Vernant’s studiesof ambiguity and tension in Greek tragedy. Barthes focuses on the nature oftragedy, stating thatits texts [are] woven from words with double meanings that each characterunderstands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the‘tragic’); there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicityand who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the charactersspeaking in front of him – this someone being precisely the reader (orhere, the listener). […] The reader is the space on which all the quotationsthat make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; atext’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. 105101 Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture” (1977); Barthes 1983, 459.102 Mowitt 1992, 13, 23 et passim. Mowitt operates in his study with the multiple meaningsof discipline as ‘branch of learning,’ and ‘set of rules,’ or ‘control of behaviour.’ Hesees pharmakos (scapegoat) mechanism as a part of the “violence of reason” operating inthe academia; the text is blurring the boundaries and thereby resisting the (aggressive)expulsion of the other (ibid., 38).103“Texte (théorie du)”; Barthes 1973b, 998).104 “The Death of the Author” (1968); Barthes 1977, 146.105Ibid., 148.