ix--Macherey's unifying theory

Upon looking at our (dis)ordered reading assignment--De Saussure on pages 3-11, Barthes on 108-111, back to pages 15-23 for Macherey--i fleetingly wondered if there was any reason to such seemingly disparate jumping around. I mean, i'm already on page 11, it is simply far more easy for me to go to page 15 than flip all the way to page 108--only to accidentally pass it, of course, and have to flip back a few pages. Fortunately, i did not give way to temptation and did not believe the hype that says a straight line is the easiest way to anyplace, physical or mental. So in a way, you can say, the form of our reading assignment was deconstructed by Rog. And just as when you deconstruct any text, very difficult but sometimes achievable, new insights arise. After reading the assigned texts in their assigned order i begin to see the "why" of the aforementioned arrangement. Pierre Macherey synthesized, or so it seems to me, the concepts of De Saussure and Barthes and used them to go further and come up with his own thesis of the "two questions."

Two statements Macherey made immediately reminded me of what De Saussure was talking about, and having already read Saussure prior to this reading, understood it through him (Saussure). When Macherey asked "are there books which say what they mean, without being critical books, that is to say, without depending directly on other books?"i instantly, and resoundingly answered "No." because my thoughts went back to De Saussure and his assertion that text has no inherent value, that "[i]ts content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it." To me this made perfect sense, the book is merely a macro-extension of the text and though containing many units of text, the book itself is a singular Text, and only when viewed as "part of a system,"is it then, according to De Saussure,"endowed not only with signification but also and especially with a value."
The second statement, "to reach utterance, all speech envelops itself in the unspoken," has significant De Sauserre tones. Though i did not thoroughly dissect this Macherey statement, i could not help but see the parallel with De Saussure's argument that "[w]ithout language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula."
Barthes' influence on Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production is also quite evident, especially on the subject of tmesis, or what is not read. This idea that meaning, Barthes describes it as pleasure, can be found in the gap(e)s, is not unlike Macherey's "the spoken and the unspoken" where he asserts that "the speech of the book comes from a certain silence...a certain abscence, without which it would not exist.
Having priorly read both authors, De Saussure and Barthes, did not only help illuminate Macherey's text for me but also reciprocally helped me understand the former authors' text in a clearer light.