In his play‐texts, Barthes punctures the critical methods he uses even as he is using them. He hovers between meaning and silence, between coherent argument and absurdity, between conformity to bourgeois critical and ideological stereotypes and evasion of all conformity. “Jacob's Struggle with the Angel” andS/Zare adduced to show how the game works on the level of the Barthian text.For Barthes, the play‐text was a subversion of bourgeois criticism and culture; a supposedly 'neutral third term' which enabled him to speak without 'borrowing from the bourgeoisie,' and without giving the bourgeoisie any idea or form with which to subvert his subversion; an expression and resolution of the problem of post‐ Marxist intellectuals who could unmask bourgeois culture, yet find no alternative to it within bourgeois society.But the play‐text was also a re‐creation which enabled the critic to overcome his alienation from himself, from others and from 'dead' cultural materials. Fabricated by the writer out of extant cultural forms, the play‐text invites the reader to fabricate a meaning out of its discrete entities. Fabrication is not only apraxiswhich reappropriates cuItura1 forms; it was also an expression of what Barthes conceived to be man's anthropological essence: his ability to