Barthes: "From Science to Literature"

"From Science to Literature" is the first entry in The Rustle of Language -- thanks to gH for leaving your copy in our Cina office. The piece first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement in 1967.

...[T]here is certainly not a single scientific matter which has not at some moment been treated by universal literature: the world of the work is a total world, in which all (social, psychological, historical) knowledge takes place, so that for us literature has that grand cosmogonic unity which so delighted the ancient Greeks but which the compartmentalized state of our sciences denies us today....science will become literature, insofar as literature -- subject, moreover, to a growing collapse of traditional genres (poem, narrative, criticism, essay) -- is already, has always been, science; for what the human sciences are discovering today, in whatever realm: sociological, psychological, psychiatric, linguistic, etc., literature has always known; the only difference is that literature has not said what it knows, it has written it. >