A Guide to Reading Difficult Theory: Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and the Problem of Meaning
Introduction Why can a familiar word become difficult when it enters a theoretical framework? A reader encountering Derrida for the first time may understand text as a written document and writing as the production of marks on a page. In Lacan, signifier may initially seem to refer to one component of the linguistic sign, paired with the signified. Barthes's myth , meanwhile, may evoke a traditional story, a legend, or a widely held but false belief. Yet none of these familiar meanings is sufficient to determine what the terms are doing in the theories in which they appear. The difficulty, then, may not lie simply in the complexity of the argument. It may begin earlier, at the level of vocabulary. A theoretical text can take a word that already has a history of uses and place it within a new system of relations. The word remains recognizable, but its conceptual function changes. What makes the experience disorienting is precisely that the reader recognizes the word without y...