Abstract: We will start with the hypothesis that literary value is an aporia to all sorts of critical discourse: as soon as it claims to be legitimate, it excludes aesthetic judgement, obviously suspicious, from its functions, but it is also necessarily confronted to this unspeakable value, as soon as it interrogates the works and itself. We will test this hypothesis on Roland Barthes’s work, examining how he faces this aporia in the different critical stances he adopted: first as a representative and a symbol of the Nouvelle Critique, then as a lover discoursing and tempted by silence in front of the singularity of the object. Finally, we will try and see how his later texts show the start of a third form of criticism, which would face the aporia head-on to ponder and estimate the literary value.
