The situation of the text: erotic and pornographic in Barthes's Camera Lucida

In the present essay I argue the continued relevance of aesthetic evaluation by means of an analysis of Barthes's much discussed concept of punctum in Camera Lucida. Focusing especially on Barthes's seemingly offhand comments on the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, I suggest that what is truly original in Barthes is the way he figures his own interpretive pleasure into the text under study, to the effect that his own text becomes the reflection not only of this or that text, but of the very situation of interpretation. In highlighting this situation, I make a case for Barthes's analysis of the photograph as an unexpected Marxist version of the medieval quadriga, the fourfold interpretive scheme according to which a text holds a literal, an allegorical, a tropological, and an anagogical sense. Such a procedure makes evident the continued relevance not only of the much maligned distinction of the erotic and the pornographic, but of aesthetic evaluation as such.