ABSTRACT
The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease”. Origen’s use of the word logos carries this relation between word and life. In the Commentary on the Song of Songs and elsewhere, the traditional sense of the Christological title, logos theou, is expanded such that it signifies the linguisticality of experience. Origen was, of course, a figurative thinker, and never was he more insistently figurative than in his Commentary on the Song of Songs. The phrase “the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance” is a concise statement of Barthes’s perspective on language that, like the Oracle at Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals, but signifies. Barthes remarks about the text of bliss that it is “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language”.
