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 yet grasping the system in which it is now operating.

This is where Roland Barthes's account of myth offers a particularly useful point of entry. In “Myth Today,” Barthes describes a second-order semiological system in which a sign already constituted at one level becomes the signifying element of another. The first sign does not simply disappear; its previous meaning remains recognizable, but it is taken up into another signifying operation. Barthes describes this as a movement from meaning to form.

This model also provides a way of thinking about theoretical vocabulary itself. Myth in Barthes, signifier in Lacan, and text and writing in Derrida are not merely words with dictionary definitions that happen to be slightly modified by their authors. They are terms whose force depends upon the systems in which they participate. To understand them, therefore, we need to ask not only what they mean but what relations give them their meaning and what function they perform within those relations.

The question is therefore not simply, “What does this word mean?” It is: “What is this word doing here?”

This distinction matters because theoretical language is rarely invented from nothing. Philosophers and theorists inherit words, concepts, metaphors, and distinctions from earlier systems and put them to work elsewhere. A term can carry its previous history into a new conceptual setting without remaining identical in function. Reading difficult theory consequently requires attention to the movement of vocabulary: where a term comes from, what relations it enters, and what becomes possible when it is made to signify within a different system.

When a Sign Becomes a Form

Barthes's Mythologies offers a precise model for understanding what happens when a sign from one semiological system becomes the signifying element of another. In “Myth Today,” he begins with the structure of the linguistic sign inherited from Saussure: a signifier and a signified are correlated to produce a sign. Barthes then asks what happens when this already constituted sign is taken up by a second-order system. His answer is that the first-level sign becomes the signifier of the second system. At this level, Barthes gives the components new names: what functions as the signifier of the second system is called form, its signified is concept, and their correlation produces signification.

The structure can therefore be represented schematically:

First system

signifier₁ + signified₁ → sign₁

Second system

sign₁ → form₂ + concept₂ → signification₂

The arrow between the two systems is the important part. The first-level sign is not simply given an additional meaning, as though a dictionary entry had acquired another definition. It is taken up as the signifying element of another system. Barthes describes this as a movement from meaning to form. The first-level meaning remains recognizable, but it is partially emptied of its autonomous signifying force so that it can function within the second system.

Barthes's example of quia ego nominor leo makes the mechanism especially clear. The sentence, taken linguistically, means “because my name is lion.” Yet Barthes is a schoolboy reading it in a Latin grammar book, and he realizes that the sentence is not there primarily to tell him something about lions. It functions as an example of a grammatical rule, specifically the agreement of the predicate. The sentence therefore has a first-level meaning, but that meaning has itself become the material for a second signifying operation. The linguistic sign becomes the form through which the concept of the grammatical rule is communicated.

This example is important because the first meaning does not have to vanish before the second can operate. The sentence still means “because my name is lion.” But, within the grammar book, that meaning is no longer the endpoint of the signifying process. It becomes the material through which something else is signified. Barthes's point is therefore not simply that one thing can have two meanings. It is that a sign already constituted at one level can become the signifier of another system.

Barthes then extends the same structure to myth proper. A photograph, a sentence, an advertisement, an object, or an image can already constitute a meaningful sign before myth takes hold of it. Once incorporated into mythical speech, however, the sign is treated as the form of another signification. The second-order concept gives that form its direction: it makes a particular image, object, or statement signify something beyond its first-level meaning. In Barthes's analysis of modern myth, this operation has an ideological dimension. Myth presents what is historical and produced as though it were natural and self-evident. It transforms particular arrangements into apparently universal ones, making contingency appear as necessity.

This is more than a theory of additional meanings. It is a theory of refunctioning. What already signifies can be taken out of one semiological role and made to perform another. Once this possibility is visible, Barthes's model becomes useful beyond the analysis of myth. It offers a way of thinking about what happens when a familiar term enters a different conceptual system.

We can therefore reformulate the question with which we began. Instead of asking only, “What does this word mean?” we can ask: “What system is making this word signify here?”

Derrida: Text and Writing

Consider Derrida's famous statement, il n'y a pas de hors-texte—usually translated as “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida, 1976, p. 158). Read through the ordinary meaning of text, the proposition can sound almost nonsensical. If a text means a book, a written document, or a sequence of words on a page, the statement might seem to claim that nothing exists outside books. That, however, is precisely the kind of reading that can obscure what Derrida is doing with the term. The phrase has often been misunderstood as a claim that reality itself is reducible to language.

A different approach is to ask what text is doing within Derrida's conceptual system. The word arrives with its familiar history, but it is surrounded by terms and arguments that alter its conceptual range: trace, supplement, différance, spacing, and the critique of presence. The result is not simply a new dictionary definition of text. The term has been displaced from the conceptual environment in which its meaning seemed secure.

Something similar happens with writing. In ordinary usage, writing refers to graphic marks, inscriptions, or the activity of putting language onto a page. Within Derrida's argument, however, writing becomes a term through which the assumed priority of speech over writing is challenged. What appears at first as an inversion—writing before speech, or writing as a condition of possibility for speech—becomes less paradoxical once writing is no longer restricted to its everyday sense.

The point is not that Derrida secretly means something completely different by these words. Nor is it that their ordinary meanings are irrelevant. On the contrary, the tension between the familiar meaning and the new conceptual function is part of what makes the argument difficult. The reader carries the familiar sense into the new system and initially experiences a contradiction. The difficulty begins to change when the surrounding constellation becomes visible.

This is where Barthes's model becomes pedagogically useful. A sign can enter another system without becoming meaningless. Its earlier function remains part of its history, but its role within the new system changes. Derrida's text remains recognizably related to what we ordinarily call a text; writing retains its historical connection with inscription. But neither term can be understood adequately if we isolate it from the network in which Derrida places it.

Myth and Signifier

The same logic applies to Barthes himself. The word myth does not begin its theoretical life with Mythologies. In everyday language, it may refer to a traditional story, a tale about gods or heroes, or simply a widely held but false belief. Barthes does not simply give this familiar word a more precise definition. He takes a word with an established history of meanings and makes it name a specific operation within his semiological system.

As we have seen, Barthes's myth is a second-order signifying system. A sign that has already been constituted at the first level becomes the starting point for another signification. The photograph, sentence, advertisement, or image does not cease to have its first-level meaning. But that meaning is no longer simply the endpoint of the signifying process. It becomes the material through which another meaning is produced. Myth takes something historically produced and makes it appear natural; it presents the contingent as necessary, the particular as universal, the cultural as though it were simply the way things are.

This distinction matters for the reading of theory itself. When Barthes writes about myth, the reader may initially approach the word through its ordinary associations: ancient stories, legends, false beliefs. But none of these meanings, by themselves, tells us what the term is doing in Mythologies. Its conceptual force emerges from its position within Barthes's semiological system. The question is therefore not simply, “What does myth mean?” but “What does myth designate within this system?”

Something similar happens with Lacan's use of the word signifier. A reader familiar with Saussure may recognize the term immediately. In Saussure's linguistics, the signifier is one side of the linguistic sign, correlated with the signified. It belongs to a structure in which the two terms are defined relationally and together constitute the sign. When Lacan formulates the proposition that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, however, the term is operating within a different conceptual arrangement.

The word has been inherited, but its function has changed. In Lacan, the signifier is not simply one component of a sign paired with a signified. It is situated in a chain of signifiers, and its relation to the subject and the unconscious becomes central. The Saussurean concept has therefore not simply been carried over unchanged or given a slightly different definition. It has been displaced into another theoretical system, where its relations to other concepts alter what it can do.

This does not mean that Lacan simply abandons Saussure. On the contrary, the force of the term depends partly on the history it carries with it. The reader recognizes signifier as a Saussurean term, and that recognition is precisely what makes the transition potentially confusing. The word seems familiar, but the network in which it now functions is different. To understand Lacan, we therefore cannot simply import the Saussurean definition unchanged; we have to follow what happens to the concept when it enters Lacan's system.

The same principle applies more broadly to theoretical language. A theorist does not necessarily invent an entirely new vocabulary. Often the more consequential operation is to take words or concepts that already carry a history of uses and place them in new relations. Their earlier meanings do not simply disappear, but neither do they determine their new conceptual function. A term can remain recognizable while its role within the system changes.

This is why reading theory through isolated definitions can be misleading. To know what myth means in ordinary language does not tell us what Barthes is doing with the term. To know how Saussure defines the signifier does not tell us automatically what the term does in Lacan. And to know that text ordinarily refers to a written document does not settle what Derrida means by text.

The problem, then, is not that theorists arbitrarily redefine familiar words. Their concepts acquire their force through the relations in which they participate. Reading difficult theory requires attention not only to vocabulary but to the movement of vocabulary: where a term comes from, what conceptual relations it enters, what it leaves behind or transforms, and what becomes possible when it enters another system.

Joining the Dots

Something interesting happens once we begin to read theoretical vocabulary in this way. The difficulty of the text does not simply disappear when a familiar word acquires a new conceptual function. Instead, the reader has to reconstruct the relations that make the new function intelligible.

A reader confronted with text, writing, trace, and supplement, for example, begins to ask how these terms belong together. Why does text appear beside writing? What relation connects trace to presence? Why does supplement matter to the argument? One relation suggests another, and a new connection can change the meaning we had initially assigned to a term. Reading becomes an activity of reconstruction: we are not solely collecting definitions but tracing the lines that connect them.

The same thing happens with myth and signifier. Once we understand that Barthes's myth names a second-order operation, the term begins to illuminate the relation between signification and ideology. Once we see how Lacan places the signifier within a chain of signifiers, the term can no longer be read through the Saussurean sign alone. In each case, understanding one term changes the position of another. Meaning is produced across the network.

This may be one reason why difficult theoretical texts can be frustrating and compelling at the same time. They resist the immediate satisfaction of recognition while provoking the desire to establish connections. The reader recognizes the words but does not yet know how they belong together. The work of reading consists partly in discovering those relations.

Barthes's distinction in The Pleasure of the Text between plaisir and jouissance offers an illuminating analogy here. Barthes associates the text of pleasure with cultural familiarity and continuity, whereas the text of jouissance unsettles the reader's established cultural and linguistic assumptions (Barthes, 1975). Difficult theory can produce a related tension. It withholds the comfort of immediate recognition while generating the desire to find a new coherence.

The point is not to romanticize obscurity. A text can be unnecessarily difficult, and difficulty by itself is no guarantee of intellectual value. Nor should every obscure expression be treated as evidence of profound conceptual depth. But neither should difficulty be confused with meaninglessness. Sometimes the reader's first task is to recognize that the problem lies not in the absence of meaning but in the fact that the terms are participating in relations that have not yet become visible.

This is where joining the dots becomes more than a metaphor. To read difficult theory is to reconstruct a conceptual network: to notice which terms recur, which distinctions organize the argument, which concepts modify one another, and how a word changes when its relations change. The reader gradually moves from isolated words to a system.

And once that system begins to emerge, the difficulty of the text changes. What first appeared as a collection of obscure formulations can become a set of problems whose connections can be followed. The words have not necessarily become easier. We have begun to see why they are there.

An Entry Point

The pedagogical task, then, is not necessarily to make difficult texts simple. It is to give readers a way of entering them. Barthes's account of myth provides one such entry point because it makes visible a process that is easily overlooked: something that already signifies can be taken up into another system and made to function differently.

Once this mechanism is recognized, it becomes possible to approach theoretical vocabulary differently. Myth in Barthes, signifier in Lacan, and text and writing in Derrida are not terms whose meanings can be recovered in isolation. Their conceptual force emerges from the relations in which they participate. The reader's task is therefore not simply to locate a definition but to reconstruct the system that makes the term intelligible.

This changes the way a difficult sentence can be read. Instead of asking, “What does text really mean?” we might ask: “What is text doing here? What other terms surround it? What distinctions does it enter into? What changes when it is placed in this particular system?” The same questions can be asked of myth, signifier, writing, or any other term that seems familiar until it encounters a theory.

Perhaps this is what a guide to difficult theory should offer: not a translation that removes the difficulty, and not a final interpretation that closes the text down, but an entry point from which the reader can begin to work. The aim is not to eliminate the strangeness of theoretical language but to understand where that strangeness comes from. The words have not necessarily become meaningless. They have entered into relations we have not yet learned to see.

Reading begins when we start to see those relations. And once we do, the difficulty of the text can change from an obstacle into a problem to be worked through: not simply to understand what the words say, but to discover what they are made to do.

References

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)

Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text (R. Miller, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1973)

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966)

Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in General Linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). Duckworth. (Original work published 1916)