If it is true that only
great men deserve to have exhibitions devoted to them by posterity, I can hear Roland Barthes laughing from here. Not a hearty laugh à la Rabelais or a sardonic laugh à la Foucault, but a smooth laugh that excuses itself for passing the throat, after having troubled the lungs, halfway between the compassion that believers in greatness deserve, according to him, and the regret of “not being among them.” Because Roland was one of those rare cases, perhaps the only person I have known, who cultivated no faith, while also believing in the existence of what is at the basis of all cults, namely, love. That “the rose is without why” captivated him,
1 yet he still attempted to look objectively at its petals and delight in its fragrance without becoming intoxicated by it.
Of this human, too human, inversion of religion that is the romantic link between two people, he made an object of writing: not an altar of adoration to which literary ladies, whom he liked to make fun of, devoted their time, but a permanent inquiry into what, in love, had to do with discourse, and ended up being the higher side of dreaming. To take himself for one of “those men that other men call great” (a phrase of Colette’s, from whom he practically borrowed the title of his last book) would have seemed ridiculous to him.
2 In the sense that it is ridiculous to posit oneself as the lover as well as the beloved in the lover’s discourse: a ridiculousness that is lethal, but whose sentimental, erotic, and rhetorical components Roland Barthes enjoyed tracing, writing about, and analyzing. The inevitable pitfalls, inexorable vulgarities, and hyperboles that exalt and confound us—a lifetime or what we believe is essential about it. But what is essential? Here we are at the core of language and meaning once again, a semiological question if there ever was one. Let’s go ahead and celebrate another great man with an exhibition—that goes without saying—but in a way that is closer to his ironic lover’s discourse and his muted laugh.
He is what I remember most from what we called his “teaching”: a sarcastic complicity that respected and defied his topics at once so as to deflect them more effectively and digress in some innocent detour—neither austere scholar nor venerated writer, neither authority nor innocent, just inquiry, always open, formulated as perfectly as possible, into the music of meaning and its impossibility. From “semiology,” which he took out of the university, enraging the papers, to the Balzac of S/Z, from Sade to Loyola, from the reclusive French language of the provinces to the most aggressive utopian modernity, Roland Barthes sounded out everything he approached and made texts out of these things, restoring, then transforming their flavor—well before any “deconstruction” and in a completely different way—simply to approach them in his own modernity: in his modesty as a modern, making his way down paths leading nowhere, and in which we recognize our own, vaguely, inevitably, simply. Barthes, sophisticated, accessible.
That sort of teaching, if that’s what it was, honored the student and elevated him to the dignity of a copresence in the thinking of the teacher, who, as a result, ceased to be a master thinker or, on the contrary, went far beyond one. As I have already had occasion to note, Roland Barthes was—and still is, as far as I know—the only professor and writer who read his students and readers. Read: not to see how he was admired as a professor or writer, but to discover the student or reader in his/her irreducible strangeness. This was the very thing Roland Barthes prided himself on—and praised in others—and that he greeted as another, indispensable, threshold on his own path.
That was how his text “L’étrangère” seemed to me when I read it, on a plane that was taking me far away from everything, submerged in one of those solitary states that will either make you sick or make you dispassionate.
3 Roland Barthes’s writing opened the latter direction to me. No one has sketched a more accurate portrait of my work: Roland Barthes was able to point out my flaws and turn them into the promise of a merciless analysis of myself, language, and others (which he nicely termed “the French family”), fixed in an endogamous, irremediably closed passion. By detecting a fertile “strangeness” in my youthful alacrity, he gave me the gift of originality that I was not at all striving for. And, beyond that, he opened the jealously guarded Temple of French Letters and its signs to the sort of decompartmentalization that is only beginning, and whose good taste will always be disrupted by immigrants from Russia, India, or China, with the risk of conflict, but also with the chance of bringing the spirit of the Hexagon into the third millennium. I took this short text not as a love letter, as some have seen it, but as an encounter: in the sense of the impossibility that aureoles an idea when it inhabits you unconsciously and only reveals itself through the aptness of another word that recognizes you and then waits for you, ahead of you, at a distance from you. Ahead of me, ahead of Roland himself, and without him, to be constructed endlessly. My strangeness, in Roland Barthes’s sense, was certainly in me, but it was his writing that crystallized the idea of my exclusion, as well as the contentment to be had in the detached, remote, testimonial thinking I tried to put together in my dorm room.
For him, it was perhaps the chance for a lexical find: the terms stranger or strangeness, which he had not used much before, became a favorite way of referring to himself, as he would do indirectly in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and just as indirectly in The Pleasure of the Text (1973).
I am lingering over these personal memories, because they seem open to a constant of Barthes’s experience: his conviction that writing is strangeness, because it is jouissance, and jouissance insofar as it is strangeness.
Roland scandalized the guardians of Literature so much that they reproached him, as well as
Tel Quel, for destroying literature when he defined
writing not as
style (Sacrilege! What would be left of Man without Style?) but as a
testament of exclusion. It was not a matter of complaining that the person who writes is excluded from a milieu—the bitterness of this situation is always good for a laugh, at least since the Verdurin clan that so amused Marcel Proust, and today the Republic of Letters continues to cultivate that ancestral poison. Roland Barthes received attention, much more radically, for what he considered a “final alienation: that of his language… . He [R. B.] felt more than excluded:
detached, forever assigned the place of the
witness.”
4Yet this later observation applies to his body of work from the start. Mythologies was nothing other than the fruit of this witnessing by a “detached” person, who sees France, for example, with its steak-frites and abbé Pierre from a “distance”: observing it with tenderness and ultimately and very gently devaluing it, its national prejudices raised by analysis to the level of this ridiculous noblesse, which the author, in this case, calls an ideology, myths unbeknownst to themselves. The semiological adventure itself was just the invention of another language to create this distance from the jinx of the proper, beginning with the amorous fascination inflicted on us by the mother tongue, the national rhetoric learned at home and at school, and the official literature itself, once academic, today media friendly.
This Frenchman from the Southwest who practiced no other language—with the exception of the music he played on the piano and the painting he tried his hand at—asked himself, in his sedentary retirement, the question of Ulysses the navigator: how can one not be an autochton? Is it possible not to be one? Appropriating the code of semiology others practiced as established scholars, he used it to extract his own invention, his inimitable, semiological idiolect, which a few narrow-minded epigones tried unsuccessfully to reduce to dogma for several decades. As for Roland Barthes, he sought to “estrange himself,” as Berthold Brecht said, something our impromptu semiologist was more than familiar with: to witness, with detachment, the adventures of meaning as they unfold, unbeknownst to us, in the French language and in everyday myths.
Was this witnessing a martyrdom? Not necessarily. A discipline, to be sure, with a good deal of inventiveness and detail, which is to say, finesse, and irony regarding the target (French, this text, this myth) as well as the tools (semiology itself, with its parataxis, intertext, and signifiers). Because he knew in the remotest depths of the French provinces from which he came, and which all of France now reluctantly understands, seized as it is by the challenge of the globalization underway, that
writing—as he saw it, reading those who had risked everything (Sade, Fourier, Loyola)—was the only worthwhile upheaval, and he generously associated me with it. Because there is a
ménage, which is the “stubborn refusal of another language,” where the need to be native is rooted, and that some, he and I (“cavalier,” “rickety,” “offensive”), do not share. Because, unlike the natives, we had to invent writing as “another language”: a “theory,” in appearance; in truth a language, quite simply, “that speaks of a politically and ideologically inhabitable place.”
5 However unacceptable it might appear to some, for Roland Barthes, theoretical thought that changes the familiar point of view and the most audacious intimate writing are joined precisely in this place where he situated himself. Some, to this day, continue to disdain him as apolitical. Whereas, on the contrary, he suggests a radicality of the inhabitable that is demanding in other ways: is it ethical? Spiritual? Sexual? Nameless? Inhabitable.
This sort of witnessing, written in an other language, is not a martyrdom, because it is a jouissance. To write for one’s own pleasure would just be masturbatory. On the other hand, an other language consists of creating a mobile space where the reader, the other, is not seduced in a trivial way (Roland Barthes writes: “cruised”) but invited to take part in the possibility of improvisation: he enters the game, plays his own game, the game exists for several people.
“If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer’s complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee—guaranteeme, the writer—my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must ‘cruise’ him)
without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader’s ‘person’ that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game.”
6Roland Barthes was in some ways the Winnicott of French criticism: he invented critical discourse as a “transitional object,” that is, as a space of indecision—a creation between author, critic, and reader. Who is the father, who is the mother, who is the child in this space of open possibilities? There is no answer, the lack of an answer is part of the game; check your identities (including your sexual identity) at the door and go see for yourself.
Have I been too quick to say that intellectual, theoretical work is a jouissance? You don’t believe me, I can feel it. “Public opinion does not like the language of intellectuals. Hence he has often been dismissed by an accusation of intellectualist jargon. And hence he felt himself to be the object of a kind of racism: they excluded his language, i.e., his body… . A petit-bourgeois view which construes the intellectual,
on account of his language, as a desexualized, i.e., devirilized, being: anti-intellectualism reveals itself as a protest of virility.”
7Parenthetically: how is anti-intellectualism of this type revealed, when attacking the language of a female intellectual in this racial manner? As an exhortation to pathetic confession? Romantic hysteria? Bovaryian sentimentality? Let’s close this parenthesis.
Abstraction, when you are in the midst of it and have made another language of it, is “in no way contrary to sensuality.” Barthes feels a “flush of pleasure” in it; “he always associated intellectual activity with delight: the panorama, for example—what one sees from the Eiffel Tower—is an object at once intellective and rapturous: it liberates the body even as it gives the illusion of ‘comprehending’ the field of vision.”
8You are there: before a landscape that expands as far as the eye can see—what one sees from the Eiffel Tower. You find the “concept,” which is a new idea conveyed by an unknown word. It’s a panorama, you say. You are seized by this foreign word, in the sign of another language. Panorama then becomes “an object at once intellective and rapturous.” Why? Because it “liberates the body even as it gives the illusion of ‘comprehending.’”
Comprehending is no doubt an illusion, like the lover’s discourse itself. Yet comprehending is formulating something in another language that detaches you from your sensible immersion, without separating you from it—simply giving meaning to your pleasure or euphoria, a temporary, modest meaning, but one that is more intense than the sensible vibrations to which the other language still adheres and from which it is nevertheless detached.
The joy of Barthes is in the modesty of this temporariness that does not leave the field of vision but, by protecting us from dazzle, gives us the gift of seeing in total lucidity. Perhaps in these somber times of ours this apparent minimalism of the pleasure of thinking is the only enlightened visibility (at the antipodes of spectacular hallucinations) and the most serene jouissance (in counterpoint to raucous transgressions) left for us to share.