## Roland Barthes, Richard Miller (2009). *The Pleasure of the Text*. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Author(s): [[Authors/Roland Barthes, Richard Miller]] Zotero Link: [The Pleasure of the Text](zotero://select/items/@barthes_pleasure_2009) Index: ### Related ### Summary: ### Notes: >“Figuration is the way in which the erotic body appears (to whatever degree and in whatever form that may be) in the profile of the text. For example: the author may appear in his text (Genet, Proust), but not in the guise of direct biography (which would exceed the body, give a meaning to life, forge a destiny). Or again: one can feel desire for a character in a novel (in fleeting impulses). Or finally: the text itself, a ==diagrammatic== and not an imitative structure, can reveal itself in the form of a body, split into fetish objects, into erotic sites. All these movements attest to a figure of the text, necessary to the bliss of reading. Similarly, and even more than the text, the film will always be figurative (which is why films are still worth making) — even if it represents nothing. ^3c4116 >“Representation, on the other hand, is ==embarrassed figuration==, encumbered with other meanings than that of desire: a space of alibis (reality, morality, likelihood, readability, truth, etc.). . . . Of course, it very often happens that representation takes desire itself as an object of imitation; but then, such desire never ==leaves the frame==, the picture; it circulates among the characters; if it has a recipient, that recipient remains interior to the fiction (consequently, we can say that any semiotics that keeps desire within the configuration of those upon whom it acts, however new it may be, is a semiotics of representation. That is what representation is: ==when nothing emerges, when nothing leaps out of the frame==: of the picture, the book, the screen).” ([[@barthes_pleasure_2009]], 55-7) ^18ad3f