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

Unravelling the Demonic Text 105“The Vascular System” (from the Encyclopédie; Barthes 1974, endplate).to the point of fascination by the socialized body, the mythological body,the artificial body […].” 113 The textual movement that renounces the idea ofunified subjectivity, can, therefore, simultaneously signify a return to theplurality and otherness of body.The textual network as a site of contradiction and dynamic identity canalready be located in the very first writings of Roland Barthes. In his firstpublished article, “On Gide and His Journal” (1942), Barthes pays attentionto how André Gide’s journal consists of “details” without a single great organisingprinciple – the “Journal is not an explanatory, an external work; it isnot a chronicle (though actuality is often caught in its web [trame:weft]).” 114 This becomes a model for Barthes’s criticism of Gide, as well:Reluctant to enclose Gide in a system I knew would never content me, Iwas vainly trying to find some connection among these notes. Finally Idecided it would be better to offer them as such – notes – and not try todisguise their lack of continuity. Incoherence seems to me preferable to adistorting order. 115113Barthes 1975/1977, 60-61.114 Barthes 1983, 4.115Ibid., 3.