1 OUTSIDE ‘LITERATURE’
Racine lends himself to several languages: psychoanalytic, existential, tragic, psychological (others can be invented, others will be invented); none is innocent. But to acknowledge this incapacity to tell the truth about Racine is precisely to acknowledge, at last, the special status of literature. It lies in a paradox: literature is that ensemble of objects and rules, techniques and works, whose function in the general economy of our society is precisely to institutionalise subjectivity. To follow this movement, the critic must himself become paradoxical, must lay the fatal bet and talk about Racine in one way and not in another: he too belongs to literature.
拉辛 将自己借给几种语言：精神分析、存在、悲剧、心理（其他语言可以发明，其他人将被发明）;没有人是无辜的。但是，承认这种没有能力说出关于拉辛的真相，恰恰是为了最终承认文学的特殊地位。它存在于一个悖论中：文学是对象、规则、技术和作品的一体，其作用正是在我们社会一般经济中，正是将主体性制度化。要追随这个运动，批评家必须自己变得自相矛盾，必须下致命赌注，用一种方式而不是用另一种方式谈论拉辛：他也属于文学。
In this passage, which occurs toward the end of his essay ‘History or literature?’, Barthes prepares the ground for finally specifying the distinction between two approaches to literature which it had been his concern, in the preceding pages, to disentangle: the history of literature, concerned with literature as an institution, and criticism, concerned with literature as a creation. With regard to the former, Barthes argues that literary history, properly conceived and executed, should concern itself with the examination of literary functions—of production, communication, consumption—and their determining institutional conditions. ‘In other words,’ as he puts it, ‘literary history is possible only if it becomes sociological, if it is concerned with activities and institutions, not with individuals.’ When posed in this way— historically, institutionally, functionally—the question of literature’s being is radically transformed. For a historical ontology literature, Barthes contends, dissolves its object. ‘Now literature very being,’ he writes, ‘when restored to history, is no longer a being.’ Its place is occupied by a series of dispersed and historically variable functions which exceed the compass of any and all conceptions of literature as an eternity imbued with an unchanging being of its own. From the point of view of these concerns, the study of literature becomes ‘the study of techniques, rules, rites and collective mentalities’.
在这篇文章中，巴特斯准备在文章《历史还是文学？》的结尾，为最终具体说明他前几页所关注的两种文学方法之间的区别做准备：文学史，关注文学作为一种制度，而批评，关注文学作为一种创造。关于前者，巴特斯认为，文学史，适当的构思和执行，应该关注文学功能——生产、传播、消费——及其决定的制度条件。换句话说，正如他所说，"文学史只有在社会学上才有可能，如果它与活动和机构有关，而不是与个人有关。当这样提出时——从历史、制度、功能上——文学存在的问题发生了根本转变。对于历史本体文学，巴特斯认为，解散它的对象。他写道，现在文学非常活跃，当回到历史时，就不再是一种存在。它的位置被一系列分散和历史上可变的函数所占据，这些函数超越了任何和所有文学概念的指南针，成为充满其自身不变存在永恒。从这些关注的角度来看，文学研究变成了"对技术、规则、仪式和集体心理的研究"。
If, however, one takes up the position of the critic inside literature—if, as Barthes puts it, ‘one wants to install oneself inside Racine…to speak, even if only a word, about the Racinian self’— then one must expect to see ‘the most prudent critic reveal himself as an utterly subjective, utterly historical being’. For the critic who takes up such a position, there is no truth of literature to be said but merely different ways of speaking about literature within the regimes for the institutionalisation of subjectivity of which criticism forms a part. Two approaches to literature, then: one which occupies a place within the space of the literary and which works with it as a terrain of practices implicated in the formation of subjectivities, and a second, adopting a position outside literature in order to write its history as a history of functions, rules, techniques and institutions—in short, a history like any other, a history of surfaces without any hidden depths or secreted interiors to fathom. Perhaps, however, the delineation of these two approaches is not —cannot be—quite so clear as Barthes pretends, and not least because it has a discomfortingly familiar ring about it. For Barthes’s formulation bears a striking resemblance to the mutually tolerable division of labour that is often proposed for the relations between criticism and the sociology of literature. The latter is often freely granted sovereignty over what criticism typically construes as the sociological penumbra of literary production (the organisation of literary markets, the structure of the literary profession, and so forth). Yet this is usually at the price of being called on to concede that such considerations bear only tangentially on the ‘real stuff’ of literature where, accordingly, criticism retains an undisputed monopoly. The more compelling difficulty, however, is that any construction of an inside/outside polarity in relation to literature can too easily be deconstructed.
然而，如果一个人在文学中占据批评家的地位——如果像巴特斯所说，'一个人想把自己安放在拉辛里面......说，即使只有一个词，关于拉西尼亚的自我'-那么人们必须期望看到"最谨慎的批评家暴露自己是一个完全主观的，完全的历史存在"。对于担任这一职位的批评家来说，没有文学的真理可说，而只是在主体性制度化的制度中以不同的方式谈论文学，而主体性是主体性的组成部分。文学有两种途径：一种是在文学空间中占据一席之地，与它一起作为与主观性形成有关的实践的地形;二是采用文学以外的立场，将文学的历史写成功能、规则、技术和制度的历史——简而言之，是一部像任何其他历史一样的表面历史，一种没有任何隐藏深度或秘密内部的历史。然而，也许这两种方法的划定并不像巴特斯所假装的那样清晰，尤其是因为它有一个令人不快的熟悉环。因为巴特斯的提法与批评与文学社会学之间关系的相互容忍的分工有着惊人的相似之处。后者往往自由地被赋予对批评通常被解释为文学生产的社会学五分五周（文学市场组织、文学职业结构等等）的主权。然而，这通常以被要求承认这样的考虑只与文学的"真实的东西"相相得住，因此，批评保持了无可争议的垄断地位。然而，更引人注目的困难是，任何与文学有关的内外极性构造都能轻易的被解构。
我们又看到了结构和解构。这一主题反复下当下提起，不论是文学还是电影或者其他艺术形式。包括人生的建构和解构，一样成为后现代主义的主题。人们开始总是试图建立和解释，用建立的理论解析这个世界，然后有用另一套理论解析相反的现象，结构和解构不是相反的过程，而是试图从内而外和从外而内的剖析系统，系统的外在表现，内在结构，边界，联系等关系。
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