Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

(Pleasure/Bliss: terminologically, there is always a vacillation -- I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete)

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it the destruction which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss.

But if I believe on the contrary that pleasure and bliss are parallel forces, that they cannot meet, and that between them there is more than a struggle: an incommunication, then I must believe that history, our history, is not peaceable and perhaps not even intelligent, that the text of bliss always rises out of it like a scandal

"...Whoever speaks, by speaking denies bliss, or correlatively, whoever experiences bliss causes the letter -- and all possible speech -- to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating" [Barthes quoting Leclaire]



  --  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text