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

104Demonic Texts and Textual DemonsBarthes continues by stressing the anonymity of such a unifying reader:“the reader is without history, biography, personality” – yet such aspects ofthe reader have been very much in Barthes’s interests. The leisurely “stroll”of the reader among the heterogeneity of textual landscape may claim thatthis subject is “passably empty,” but he is nevertheless a certain kind of subject:one with an eye for the multiple possibilities of combination, for thesubversive beauties of reading differently. The reader implied by Barthes’stheory of the text is a subject with a particular aesthetics.This link between the text and the self is manifest in Barthes’s languageand in his metaphors. Barthes responds to a deeply personal dimension oflanguage, as well as to language as an abstract system, as a set of rules andlexical items, or as an alienating and ideological machinery. This has repeatedlycaptured the attention of commentators; Patricia Lombardo states thatthe “site” of Barthes always has been language, and that he was alreadyknown as the “fanatic of language” in 1947. 106 Michael Moriarty sees the personalmeaning of language as a threat to his theoretical purity; the extralinguisticarea is all the time creeping back into Barthes’s studies in textuality.107 Jonathan Culler refers to how Barthes himself has likened his life tohis writing (“I am the story which happens to me” 108 ) and summaries: “Forhimself, as for us, Barthes is a collection of writings […] ‘Barthes’ is itself aconstruction formed to order these [contrasting and contradicting] fragments.”109 The mutual intertwining of the text and the self into a peculiarsort of compound (a “textual self”) is underlined figuratively by the use of“network”; in an essay titled “The Plates of the Encyclopedia” (1964)Barthes analyses “the astonishing image of man reduced to his network ofveins.” 110 In discussion of the text, Barthes affirms that the “metaphor of theText is that of the network [réseau]”; 111 and, finally, the image from the Encyclopediais reproduced at the closing pages of Roland Barthes by RolandBarthes, emphasising the role of network as a metaphor of a textual self. Thismetaphor offers an alternative vision, or model: the solidity of an object isbeing replaced by a structure of relations. It is an illustration of internalcomplexity that has been extracted beyond the apparent unity; yet, thisnebulous network still maintains an inner logic and organisation. The illustrationeven retains the form of human body, even if this body has been disrobedof its reassuring familiarity and wholeness. In Roland Barthes by RolandBarthes the author 112 claims he has several bodies – le corps pluriel – “Ihave digestive body, I have a nauseated body […]. Further, I am captivated106 Lombardo 1989, 16.107 Moriarty 1991, 148 et passim.108 Barthes 1975/1977, 56.109Culler 1983, 114-15.110 Barthes 1983, 230.111 Barthes 1977, 161.112Barthes plays with the necessarily fictive quality of “autobiography” by deliveringhis fragments and narratives often in the third person: “All this must be considered as ifspoken by a character in a novel – or rather by several characters” (1975/1977, 119).