ABSTRACT
The writerly reader figured in S /Z and eroticised in The Pleasure of the Text reads in the way dem anded by the avant-garde text, the text that
makes no sense when read from the point of view of the received beliefs about the border relations am ong the concepts of language,
literature, and life permitted by the classic text. The writerly reader subverts the assignm ents o f value m ade by the culture, subsets of whose predicates comprise her particular identity ju st as its concep-
tion of what the human being is makes her the kind of thing she is. In so doing she subverts the claims to truth or to any kind of felicity made
by the fam iliar conceptions of the self by which she can identify
herself, specific ‘her’ and generic ‘se lf’ alike. Does she thereby read
through eyes other than her culture’s, adopt the points o f view of
cultures other than her own? Yes and no. Yes, for the reader might make the assignments of meaning that
one from a different culture would naturally make: she would make them only to unmake them, however; she would try them out, would not insist on their rightly or truly yielding up the meaning of what is read. The writerly reader would not read the Xwexwe mask-in-thecontext-of-Kwakiutl-ritual in which it is used as really being what takes the place o f noxious prehistoric monsters o f which the Xwexwe is the last avatar, nor would she read the mask-in-the-Primitivism-
show as telling the truth about the mask as really being the product of the impulse to form shared by tribal and modern master. For the writerly reader plays the text she reads, follows the signifying chains, the paths out o f the text, makes substitutions and combinations only to see the more that can be made. To express a text is to take its signs out of their fam iliar contexts, contextualise them anew, and recontextualise them yet again along the lines sighted from the first new context. Another culture is ju st one kind of new context, one new
universe of discourse; a second kind is the framework specified by
another theory and a third is simply another syntagm, a different string
of signs from the string in which the sign appears in the text being read. Any proper part of what is being read may be put into the context of another culture (another theory, another syntagm ): it does
not take up residence there but only passes through it as part of the
intertext, part of what is most available when the keeper of culture, the censor, sleeps. Writerly reading begins with the reader’s doing
what is parallel to the psychoanalytic patient’s
noticing and reporting whatever comes into his head and not being
misled, for instance, into suppressing an idea because it strikes him as unim portant or irrelevant or because it seems to him meaning-
less. He must adopt a completely im partial attitude to what occurs to him, since it is precisely his critical attitude which is responsible for his being unable, in the ordinary course of things, to achieve the
desired unravelling of his dream or obsessional idea or whatever it
may b e .1
