The most abstract instruments of modern semiology serve to provide the reader with an immediate sensual pleasure from the text. This enjoyment arises from the intellectual and moral lack of principles of the reader, who finds nothing foreign in the moment of reading and is open to all suggestions. How this unfolds in detail - particularly in the case of Roland Barthes, the most important representative of structuralist literary analysis - is illustrated through seemingly casual yet highly artistic aphorisms and digressions.