Although Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (Zero Degree of Writing) is presented by its author, Roland Barthes, as a working hypothesis, it has a dogmatic tone. (p. 185)
According to Roland Barthes, "writing is in no way a means of communication." As the opposite of spoken language, it is by nature a counter-communication. Its particular ambiguity is in that it is at the same time language and coercion. Since all paradoxes, however laden with truth they may be, are capable of being turned around, one could say just as correctly that it is speech that aims to remove adherence by intimidating means, and one attribute to writing the opposite character of a balanced, delicately shaded, essentially honest act. To the extent to which "it improperly combines the reality of acts to the ideality of ends" political writing is, however, by all evidence, coercive. Roland Barthes devotes a chapter to it which is all the more convincing in that his arguments appear to be political. Literary writing also fulfills the author's definition if we agree with him that since it is an instrument placed in the service of a class ideology it imposes its myths more than it proposes them. One can obviously play upon the word communication. But whether or not, in either case, it is a one-way transmission, changes nothing in the fundamental purpose of language, which is to make oneself understood. This elementary truth Roland Barthes knows as well as anyone else. He is right in not being satisfied with it, but wrong in forgetting it on the way. (pp. 186-87)
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