This week’s readings brought me to the other equally complex and contested side of the spectrum: the reader and the meanings created from a text. Barthes’ call for the birth of the reader at expenses of the death of the author (p.148) and Foucault’s reflection on how the society insists on perpetuating the ideological construction of the author despite the efforts of modern criticism and philosophy, reminded me a discussion about Jorge Luis Borges, short story Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote where the main character re-writes this work and the text is seen as a completely different text. This to say, echoing Barthes again, that the text is eternally written here and now, or Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality when stating that a text is a mosaic of quotations, or the transformation of other texts. Borges uses a narrator that praises Menard’s innovative style of the “rudimentary art of the work (of art)”, hinting that a new reading of a text is, in fact, like re-writing the text.

This only generates more questions as writer and reader are two sides of the same coin, the text. Who is the reader? An abstract concept as Barthes implied: “someone without history, biography, psychology” (p.148) as a recipient that brings text to life through their interpretation? or the product of embodied social structures that cannot see beyond these systems of classifications where they are located and in which they locate/undersdant texts? Is the author’s own structures being reflected on his work and being used to reproduce social order? How can we break this trap? Can we break it?