exemption from meaning

is the dream not of meaninglessness but of forms with empty meaning, a strategy which among other things, encourages a poetics that seeks to understand forms rather than a hermeneutics that seeks meaning.

Barthes's writings increasingly promote what seems a powerful myth, the myth of 'exemption from meaning'. In Barthes par Barthes he writes, 'Obviously he dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning (as one is exempt from military service). This began with Writing Degree Zero, which imagines 'the absence of every sign'... subsequently, a thousand affirmations incidental to this dream (apropos of the avant-garde text, of Japan, of music, of the alexandrine, etc.)' (p. 90/87). Always there is the dream not of meaninglessness but of forms with empty meaning. As a critical notion, this has a crucial strategic role among other things, it encourages a poetics that seeks to understand forms rather than a hermeneutics that seeks meaning but in Barthes's later works he begins to present as a transgression what could easily be taken as a reaffirmation of quite regressive, pre-semiological notions. (Culler 2002: 105-6)

exemption from meaning, n.All

exemption from meaning