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So I've decided to (try to) read #Barthes more quickly now, not stopping to try to make sense or ramification of every paragraph.
If I were someone who writes (wrote?) in books, I might be scrawling on the pages here: "what?", "no!", "what can this mean?", "obviously false, but poetic", "intriguing in its wrongness".
Is pleasure vs bliss a property of a text, or a property of how a particular reader experiences a text? I think he sees no reason, has no desire or intention, to be consistent on that. Okay!
Being #Barthes , he casually drops in the word #doxa as though it had some clear meaning. (This is still The Pleasure of the Text.)
I suppose he means it in the mild sense of "opinion", of something believed but falling short of knowledge, as he says
«le temps de la doxa, de l'opinion, et celui de la paradoxa, de la contestation. Un troisième terme manque, autre que le plaisir et sa censure».
and here he's being cute with "doxa" vs "paradoxa", comfortable opinion vs disturbing paradox, calm pleasure vs chaotic bliss.
But still one can't entirely ignore the way translators of the bible translated the Hebrew word kavod (כבוד) for God's Glory into the Greek doxa (δόξα) for reasons probably lost to time.
So in referring to the comforting pleasure of opinion, is he reminding us that even the Glory of God is from many angles (angels?) just another part of the Opiate of the Masses?