Practising with Roland Barthes

This article considers a distinction that Barthes makes (in his last lecture course) between two kinds of readers: those for whom the pleasure of reading is satisfied by the reading experience, and those for whom the pleasure of reading extant writing is made restless by the desire to add oneself actively to the work one loves . It then describes some of the forms that this active adding or appending might take: for Barthes, playing a Bach movement himself, on his own piano, but too slowly, or drawing from a Cy Twombly monograph; for the author, teaching from the writing instructions she hears in The Preparation of the Novel , giving concrete form to Barthes’s notion of a pathetic literary criticism, and translation.