A term used by Roland Barthes and especially Jacques Derrida to suggest the essential openness and productivity of the text.
According to such literary semiotics as Barthes and Derrida, the function of the text is not representative but productive; it is not a mirror held in front of nature, history, the soul, or anything else, but rather a mechanism that produces meaning.
The text is not a finished product, but an open process in which the reader has the obligation to accept the role of co-author.
By accepting this role, he is in fact obliged to rewrite the text, and rewriting it would consist “only in scattering it, scattering it in the field of infinite differences” (Barthes, 1974, 5).
