Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion

In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes outlines and advocates an anti-normative, anti-institutional erotics that celebrates the reader’s perversity. While it is well known that Barthes understands readerly pleasure according to the model of sexual perversion, I discover that Barthes advocates not just perversion but sexual dysfunction, which he calls “amatory maladjustment.” I linger on this surprising discovery, which includes Barthes’s championing of premature ejaculation as the mode of the radical text. Barthes’s celebration of amatory maladjustment appears in a chapter titled “Emotion,” suggesting a connection between sexual dysfunction and emotion, as he aims to reclaim both from their place of shame.