The bliss of text is a type of text identified by Roland Barthes as opposed to the text of pleasure (plaisir). The text of pleasure is the one that “contains, causes euphoria, the text that comes from culture and does not interfere with it, is associated with the pleasurable practices of reading.” In contrast, the text of bliss is the one that “causes a state of loss that causes discomfort (perhaps the point of a certain boredom), puts the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological predispositions in an uncertainty, questions his tastes, values, memories, leads to a crisis of his relationship with language“(1973 [1975], 14).
The texts of pleasure are objects for consumption, while those of bliss are like someone with whom you make love. Bart’s aspiration in making this distinction is to suggest that when the text is approached correctly, both eroticism and a politics of reading might emerge. Reading includes something analogous to seduction, preparatory play, and even orgasm; jouissance is a term that Bart uses, among other things, because it means the bliss that a person experiences during orgasm.
Reading also contains disturbance, rebellion, and resistance. In the spirit of the riots of the late 1960s and 1970s, Bart proclaimed that “the text is (or should be) this unencumbered man appearing behind the Political Father” (1973 [1975], 53).
The eroticism of reading requires that the unique “fabric” of the text be tested for its own pleasure, an activity that pushes the reader to bliss, but at the same time exposes him to all the risks inherent in Eros.
Reading policy, on the other hand, requires the courage to make one or another obscene gesture to the institutionalized authorities who control meanings and messages.
