SOURCE: Kritzman, Lawrence D. “The Discourse of Desire and the Question of Gender.” In Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty McGraw, pp. 99-118. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989.

In the following essay, first published in 1988, Kritzman examines the relationship between language and desire in Barthes's theory, and traces an evolution in his thinking about the subject, culminating in Camera Lucida.

In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

—Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1964)

In what he writes, each protects his own sexuality.

—Barthes, Roland Barthes (1975)

Barthes's rhetoric of sexuality transcribes the text as a body imbued with libidinal energy and capable of generating fantasies through a figurative language that articulates theoretical fictions. As it delineates these critical texts, writing aspires to the status of matter. What Barthes terms the “grain of the voice”—the “materiality of the body speaking its...