Ben 9/12

This past week, we read passages by Ferdinand De Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Macherey. These passages talked about different theories and ideas regarding semiotics. The most notable one that stuck out to me was the passage by Roland Barthes talking about tmesis, the act of splitting a word into two, and adding another world in the middle. This was an interesting concept to me. It is something that seems as though it would not work, but it is a concept that, if used properly, can be a very powerful tool in language. The idea of this led into a conversation about the pleasure of words. Barthes states, “is it not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?” (Barthes, 108). Meaning, suggesting certain things without completely showing somethings add pleasure, sometimes referred to as “jouissance.” Which is French for “bliss,” but also carries the meaning “orgasm.” One example we talked about regarding this was noir films. The way that the shots are framed, and the story is told relies much on the idea of suggesting certain things with the types of shots they shoot. The filmmaker doesn’t make it obvious to the viewer what is going on, this would be boring. The filmmaker suggests certain things and challenges the viewer to figure it out through their own interpretations. It is an art that can transferred over to language as well. Suggesting certain things is your language is intriguing to the listener and will keep them entertained and attentive. Barthes thinks that challenging the reader makes reading more pleasurable and provides bliss. He refers to these texts as “writerly text.” Where “readerly texts,” as text that do not challenge the reader’s position. A text is either one or the other, and he believes that writerly texts are much more important. These ideas about language opened up a whole different world for me in terms of how I see language. Language is something that makes everything that we have done as humanity up to this point possible. It is something that I believe humanity takes for granted, and provides us with more bliss then we realize.