The portrait (in the present text) is not a realistic representation, a related copy, an idea such as we might get from figurative painting; it is a scene made up by blocks of meaning, at once varied, repeated, and discontinuous (outlined); out of the arrangement of these blocks comes a diagram of the body, not its copy (in which the portrait remains totally subject to a linguistic structure, language recognizing only diagrammatical analogies: analogies in the etymological sense: proportions (Roland Barthes "S/Z," 61).