All of Barthes' writing project seems to besummed up in this performance, which walks the rhetorical tightrope. The question: how to keep a fanatical and absurd exercise from falling apart (the departure of the reader). He does it, with considerable help from Balzac. It is here, I think, that Barthes began to see his way clear to "come out of the closet" -- as an old-fashioned, literature-loving aesthete. Before: semiology, system, degree-zero. After: amorous discourse, pleasure of the text. A pure subjectivity.