First published in Revue d'esthétique, 3 (1971). Collected in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (1986).

Featuring Marx, Freud, Einstein, Lacan, Bataille, Albert Thibaudet, Chateaubriand, Proust, Genet, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Balzac, Dumas.

‘The Text is a little like a score of this new kind: it solicits from the reader a practical collaboration. A great novation this, for who executes the work? (Mallarmé raised this question: he wanted the audience to produce the book.) Today only the critic executes the work (pun intended). The reduction of reading to consumption is obviously responsible for the “boredom” many feel in the presence of the modern (“unreadable”) text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means one cannot produce the text, play it, release it, make it go.’

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