Student Question
What does Barthes mean by "a text is a tissue of quotations," and how does it differ from Derrida's "a book itself is only a tissue of signs?"
Quick answer:
What Barthes means when he calls a text "a tissue of quotations" is that it is always engaging with, intentionally or not, with other texts, and so is not a solitary, original creation of the author. Derrida, on the other hand, questions the whole Western conception of language and truth in his seminal work Of Grammatology. Derrida uses the phrase "a tissue of signs," but in his deconsructionist view of language, there is nothing fixed (or signified) behind the signs.
This is an enormously complicated question, one that is key to the understanding of twentieth-century literary theory. As such, it demands a complicated answer, something that is not possible in this limited space. I would highly recommend looking at the links below, as well as individual works by Barthes and Derrida.
A brief summary of their ideas, both of which deal with the nature of texts and textuality, can be found in a quotation from Barthes. Both Barthes and Derrida were French theorists, whose ideas had an enormous impact on literary criticism/theory, especially in the academy. Barthes wrote in a more informal, essay style and was very much interested in signs; one of his most famous works is titled The Empire of Signs . In his widely quoted essay "The Death of the Author," he writes, "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text,...
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to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." What Barthes means is that whatever the writer's intentions or motives when writing the book, every reader approaches the book differently, so that there is no "fixed" meaning. It's what Umberto Eco, who was also very much interested in signs (or semiology), called the open work. To say, as Barthes, does that a work is a "tissue of quotations" calls into question, in a radical way, the assumptions most readers have of both the personality of the author and the originality of the author. A work is always made up of fragments of other works and, as such, cannot be considered an original work in the usual sense.
The Algerian-born Jacques Derrida pushes this even further in his theory of deconstruction. Derrida is not only questioning the nature of literature and the idea of the author, but the fundamental truth and stability of language itself and, by extension, the basis of Western thought and philosophy itself, as started by the Greeks. A work of literature, for Derrida, has infinite meanings and, therefore, one might say, no meaning. For the Platonist or the Christian, language refers to some immutable or transcendent truth, but Derrida challenges this notion. There is no meaning outside of the text. There isn't space to discuss the notion of the signifier and the sign, but that is another important concept.
You may also want to look at Stanley Fish's book Is There a Text in This Class? and Francois Cusset's French Theory.