Text/Textuality

When in 1972 Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov published The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, it was the text as thing, the text of textual criticism, that oriented the first of their two entries on "the text," which focused on the way the text fills a gap in linguistics, rhetoric, and stylistics by providing them with a concept of the autonomous and closed unit that arises through the individuated use of a language system. In effect, "the text" answers the question: what thing is produced when a linguistic code is used to generate a message? In this it substitutes for either discourse or speech act. Significantly, though the Encyclopedic Dictionary contains a second entry on the text, it appears in an appendix, the very sort of supplementary material typically distinguished from the text of textual criticism. This text is dubbed "semiological" by the authors, a characterization meant to note the rather different way this second text engages the traditions and practices of humanistic scholarship.

In his contribution to the Encyclopaedia Universalis of the following year, Roland Barthes repeats this division of the concept of the text, suggesting that—despite the centrality of his contribution to the theorization of the semiological text—he found the division, if not compelling, then certainly useful. Framing his discussion in terms of the "crisis of the sign," Barthes reminds us that the second text has a rather different genealogy than the text of textual criticism. For one thing, its emergence is considerably more recent. Although many of the writers who mattered to the theorists of the semiological text—Stéphane Mallarmé, Honoré de Balzac, Edgar Allan Poe, the Comte de Lautréamont, and others—wrote during the nineteenth century, the theorization of the text their work enabled unfolded during the postwar period in France. Nineteen-sixty is the date typically given for the emergence of the second text, and this is because it was in 1960 that the first issue of the influential journal Tel Quel appeared. While it is certainly the case that the text and Tel Quel are intimately related, the intellectual insights that converged in the concept of the text are discernible already in the 1940s. This becomes evident if one compares Maurice Blanchot's 1948 essay "Literature and the Right to Death" with his "Reflections on Nihilism" from part two of The Infinite Conversation (1969). In "Reflections" Blanchot makes explicit how his earlier meditation on literature, the book, the work, and death—framed largely in terms of the Hegelian principle of negativity—converts almost effortlessly into the properly textual concerns of Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Indeed, Blanchot appears to trace here precisely the movement from work to text that was to be thematized so fruitfully by Barthes in 1971. Perhaps because Derrida has made his debt to Blanchot explicit, it is difficult not to read in the title of the opening section of Of Grammatology (1966), "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," the palimpsestic presence of Blanchot's conception of the disappearance of literature and the absence of the book. While it is true that Blanchot holds the very term "text" in abeyance (systematically preferring "work"), it is clear that his profoundly philosophical engagement with the literary object opened what Barthes was later to call the "methodological field" of the semiological text.