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 將自己借給幾種語言：精神分析、存在、悲劇、心理（其他語言可以發明，其他人將被髮明）;沒有人是無辜的。但是，承認這種沒有能力說出關於拉辛的真相，恰恰是為了最終承認文學的特殊地位。它存在於一個悖論中：文學是對象、規則、技術和作品的一體，其作用正是在我們社會一般經濟中，正是將主體性制度化。要追隨這個運動，批評家必須自己變得自相矛盾，必須下致命賭注，用一種方式而不是用另一種方式談論拉辛：他也屬於文學。
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’.
在這篇文章中，巴特斯準備在文章《歷史還是文學？》的結尾，為最終具體說明他前幾頁所關注的兩種文學方法之間的區別做準備：文學史，關注文學作為一種制度，而批評，關注文學作為一種創造。關於前者，巴特斯認為，文學史，適當的構思和執行，應該關注文學功能——生產、傳播、消費——及其決定的制度條件。換句話說，正如他所說，"文學史只有在社會學上才有可能，如果它與活動和機構有關，而不是與個人有關。當這樣提出時——從歷史、制度、功能上——文學存在的問題發生了根本轉變。對於歷史本體文學，巴特斯認為，解散它的對象。他寫道，現在文學非常活躍，當回到歷史時，就不再是一種存在。它的位置被一系列分散和歷史上可變的函數所佔據，這些函數超越了任何和所有文學概念的指南針，成為充滿其自身不變存在永恆。從這些關注的角度來看，文學研究變成了"對技術、規則、儀式和集體心理的研究"。
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，如果一個人在文學中佔據批評家的地位——如果像巴特斯所說，'一個人想把自己安放在拉辛裡面......說，即使只有一個詞，關於拉西尼亞的自我'-那麼人們必須期望看到"最謹慎的批評家暴露自己是一個完全主觀的，完全的歷史存在"。對於擔任這一職位的批評家來說，沒有文學的真理可說，而只是在主體性制度化的制度中以不同的方式談論文學，而主體性是主體性的組成部分。文學有兩種途徑：一種是在文學空間中佔據一席之地，與它一起作為與主觀性形成有關的實踐的地形;二是採用文學以外的立場，將文學的歷史寫成功能、規則、技術和制度的歷史——簡而言之，是一部像任何其他歷史一樣的表面歷史，一種沒有任何隱藏深度或秘密內部的歷史。然而，也許這兩種方法的劃定並不像巴特斯所假裝的那樣清晰，尤其是因為它有一個令人不快的熟悉環。因為巴特斯的提法與批評與文學社會學之間關係的相互容忍的分工有著驚人的相似之處。後者往往自由地被賦予對批評通常被解釋為文學生產的社會學五分五週（文學市場組織、文學職業結構等等）的主權。然而，這通常以被要求承認這樣的考慮只與文學的"真實的東西"相相得住，因此，批評保持了無可爭議的壟斷地位。然而，更引人注目的困難是，任何與文學有關的內外極性構造都能輕易的被解構。
我們又看到了結構和解構。這一主題反覆下當下提起，不論是文學還是電影或者其他藝術形式。包括人生的建構和解構，一樣成為後現代主義的主題。人們開始總是試圖建立和解釋，用建立的理論解析這個世界，然後有用另一套理論解析相反的現象，結構和解構不是相反的過程，而是試圖從內而外和從外而內的剖析系統，系統的外在表現，內在結構，邊界，聯繫等關係。
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