Exemption Of Meaning - Roland Barthes
Translation by Richard Howard

The whole of Zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning. We know that Buddhism baffles the fatal course of any assertion ( or of any negation) by recommending that one never be caught up in the four following propositions: this is A-this is not A-this is both A and not A- this is neither A nor not·A. Now this quadruple possibility corresponds to the perfect paradigm as our structural linguistics h as framed it (A-not-A-neither A nor not A [zero degree]-A and not- A [complex degree]); in other words, the Buddhist way is precisely that of the obstructed meaning: the very arcanum of signification, that is, the paradigm, is rendered impossible. When the Sixth Patriarch gives his instructions concerning the mondo, a question.and answer exercise, he recommends, in order to confuse the paradigmatic functioning more is posited, to shift toward its adverse term ("if, questioning you, someone interrogates you about non-being} answer with being. If you are questioned about the ordinary man., answer by speaking about the master} etc."), so as to make the mockery of the paradigm and the mechanical character of meaning all the more apparent. What is aimed at (by a mental technique whose precision, patience, refinement, and learning attest to how difficult Oriental thought regards the peremption of meaning), what is aimed at is the establishment of th e sign, i.e., classification (maya); constrained to the classification par excellence, that of language , the haiku functions at l east with a view to obtaining a flat language which nothing grounds (as is infallible in our poetry ) on superimposed layers of meaning, what we might call the "lamination" of symbols. When we are told that it was the noise of the frog which waken ed Basho to the truth of Zen, we can understand ( thought this is still too Western a way of speaking) that Basho discovered in this noise , not of course the motif of an "illumination" of a symbolic hyperesthesia, but rather an end of language there is a moment when language ceases (a moment obtained by dint of many exercises), and it is this echoless breach which institutes at once the truth of Zen and the form - brief and empty - of the haiku. The denial of "development" is radical here, for it is not a question of halting language on a heavy, full, profound, mystical silence, or even on an emptiness of the soul which would be open to divine communication (Zen knows no God); what is posited must develop neither in discourse nor in the end of discourse: what is posited is matte, and all that one can do with it is to scrutinize it; this is what is recommended to the apprentice who is working on a koan (or anecdote proposed to him by his master): not to solve it, as if it had a meaning, nor even to perceive its absurdity (which is still a meaning), but to ruminate it "until the tooth falls our." All of Zen, of which the haiku is merely the literary branch, thus appears as an enormous praxis destined to halt language, to jam that kind of internal radlophony continually sending in us, even in our sleep (perhaps this is the reason the apprentices are sometimes kept from falling asleep), to empty out, to stupefy, to dry up the soul 's incoercible babble; and perhaps what Zen calls satori, which Westerner can translate only by certain vaguely Christian words (illumination) revelation .. intuition), is no more than a panic suspension of language, the blank which erases in us the reign of the Codes, the breach of that internal recitation which constitutes our person; and if this state of a-language is a liberation, It is because, for the Buddhist experiment, the proliferation of secondary thoughts (the thought of thought), or what might be called the infinite supplement of supernumerary signified-a circle of which language itself is the depository and the model - appears as a jamming: it is on the contrary the abolition of secondary thought which breaks the vicious infinity of language. In all these experiments, apparently, it is not a matter of crushing language beneath the mystic silence of the ineffable, but of measuring it, of halting that verbal top which sweeps into its gyration the obsessional play of symbolic substitutions. In short, it is the symbol as semantic operation which is attacked.
In the haiku, the limitation of language is the object of a concern which is inconceivable to us, for it is not a question of being concise (i.e., shortening the signifIer without diminishing the density of the signified) but on the contrary of acting on the very root of meaning, so that this meaning will not melt, run, internalize, become implicit, disconnect, divagate into the infinity of metaphors, into the spheres of the symbol. The brevity of the haiku is not formal; the haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately find s its proper form. The measurement of language is what the Westerner is most unfit for: not that his utterance is too long or too short, but all his rhetoric obliges him to make signifier and signified disproportionate, either by " diluting" the latter beneath the garrulous waves of the former, or by "deepening" form toward the implicit regions of content. The haiku's accuracy (which is not at all an exact depiction of reality, but an adequation of signifier and signified, a suppression of margins, smudges, and interstices which usually exceed or perforate the semantic relation), this accuracy obviously have something musical about it (a music of meanings and not necessarily of sounds ) : the haiku has the purity, the sphericality, and the very emptiness of a note of music; perhaps that is why it is spoken twice, in echo; to speak this exquisite language only once would be to attach a meaning to surprise, to effect, to the suddenness of perfection; to speak it many times would postulate that meaning is to be discovered in it, would simulate profundity; between the two, neither singular nor profound , the echo merely draws a line under the nullity of meaning.

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