ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that of a famous essay by Roland Barthes, ‘De l’oeuvre au texte’, ‘From Work to Text’. In the context of work as a topos, while the English language has the same word, ‘work’, to represent both process and product, in other languages the connection is etymological, whether more directly or less so. The passage from Marx quoted by Michel Henry is notable for the contrast which it sets in operation between the masses and the individual, a contrast made more notable by Marx’s comparison of the mass of workers, living or dead, to the souls in Hell who clamour for the attention of Odysseus. A very striking but ambiguous passage in Dante’s Purgatorio offers a meditative reflection on the trope of self-constitution through work. Barthes argued that the work ‘is a fragment of substance’ and that ‘the work can be held in the hand’ while ‘the text is held in language.’
