There is no sense that is not shared [partagé]. But what is sharing, and what sense is revealed in it? Perhaps the two questions overlap: that is, one shares only that which is divided in this sharing, that which separates from itself, and a shareable sense is a sense separated from itself, freed of its completion in a final or central signification. A value of the end or of the center, in a general way, is a value of sense—in the sense that sense is understood as the concentration and crystallization of an absolute value. It is only in a value that has value in and for itself, that is not relative to anything else, that there can be an assuaging, a fulfillment, and a conclusion of the movement by which sense or value (whether these words, or this double name for the same concept, are taken on the level of language, of ethics, or of metaphysics) is referred to a horizon or a subject in which it is absorbed and in whose substance, in sum, it is “realized,” as we say of a financial value or capital. Of course, it is no accident that we thus touch upon the order of monetary value, and consequently that of general equivalency, which is the condition of a monetary economy—which in turn seems to regulate today the horizon of sense and its sharing.
Value or sense can be absolute in only two ways: either in the order of a supreme, ultimate value that measures everything else without itself being measured by anything, or in the system of a general equivalency, in which everything has worth by the same thing as everything else, while at the same time value consists in producing value and in reproducing that productivity. The first sense is deposited in the German word Würde, close to the word Wert, which means “value,” and with which Kant designates the absolute dignity that he places in the “human person.” The second sense is the word capital, which also designates, by metonymy, the process of an indefinite valorization of the production of exchangeable value.
It should also be said, to be more precise: the absolute value of the person, which also constitutes, when transposed into Marxist terminology, the human value of the productive act of production, and consequently the incalculable value added by man to the work [œuvre] (or as the work) is equally what capital converts into general equivalency.
And we are thus at the heart, today, of the tension that tears apart, before us and within us, history, politics, culture, even science, and the world—hence sense, or its truth. That is, the tension that distends within itself the equivalency of these absolute values that human beings are supposed to be.
Roland Barthes placed the entirety of his work beneath the sign of a preoccupation he called “morality of the sign,”1 characterizing it as a care of sense regulated by a double refusal: that of “solid sense” (acquired and fixed sense) and that of “zero sense” (that of the mystics of liberation, he says). To keep, to protect sense from being filled, as well as from being emptied—that is ethos.
It is worth pointing out that this “morality of the sign” bears some resemblance to the concern for “simple saying” in which Heidegger wishes to invest the requirement of what he designates as being the sense or originary value of an ethics. The connection I thus suggest (one that also involves Levinas) will disturb only those for whom the names Heidegger and Barthes are saturated in advance with some sense or value, whatever it may be. I do not say this in order to enter into a comparison, which obviously would soon encounter the issue of a very considerable difference in tone, and consequently of ethos as much as pathos, between them. I only bring it up to indicate that the concern with sense (and there are a good many other names I could mention among contemporary thinkers on this score) is not one concern among others, but defines for us (“we others,” as Nietzsche said, we latecomers, we the good Europeans …) the concern with thought itself, the concern with its morality (to retain this word); that is, the concern with a type of conduct and behavior that measures up to the requirements of a time for which sense, or the sense of sense, causes a problem, a concern, or an aporia.
This preoccupation proceeds from a self-understanding of our time as one of nihilism. “Nihilism” designates what might be called the lapse of sense. There is no need to belabor the point: history or destiny, subject or process, market or ethical value, this very word ethical as well as the word aesthetic—and to end this list that is in principle endless—sense as signifying, sense as in the five senses, and sense as direction, our condition of thought and therefore of morality, encounters, no matter what, assuming we reject vain restorative attempts and feigned incantations, a lapse of sense. And assuming we reject the tragic and cynical versions of nihilism (sublime heroism or ridiculous catastrophe) as well as negative theologies that reveal sense outside sense. In all respects, sense or senses are out of date. They are no longer valid, no longer have any true market value, unless it is only, miserably, an artificially controlled market intended to conceal actual poverty.
The self-understanding of a period no more expresses the whole truth than does that of an individual. But at least it indicates where the truth resides: that is, for us today, in the necessity of understanding sense, or the sense of sense, otherwise.
That is why I have found, on this occasion, on which I am to speak at the Roland Barthes Center, a kairos that leads me to reemploy an expression he used in order to try to blaze a trail toward a different understanding or a different way of hearing sense—namely “an exempting from sense.”
I will be asked (I have already been asked) whether it is not preferable simply to give up on “sense,” not in favor of the nonsensical (as if to exacerbate nihilism), but in favor of a stoic bearing in the ascesis of a truth devoid of any sense, or in favor of an infinite dissemination of sense itself. Such a question proposes drying out sense or scattering it in all directions, or in any case giving up on its weighty concept, the most weighty of all. To this there must be added the Freudian warning that to wonder about the sense of existence is already to be neurotic. It would seem that it is not possible, these days, to ignore sense, or to keep it at a distance, or to be cured of it—not to mention those who would rehabilitate it. In a certain way, I have the definite intention of taking into account all these retreats or refusals and of making them into so many a priori conditions—but conditions for opening up, and obstinately so, the sense of sense. So, rather than somehow confirming the lapsing of sense, I would like to consider an exemption from sense. That is the expression Barthes gives us, and it must hold our attention all the more due to the circumstance that he himself did not furnish us with a real analysis of it but left its sense in limbo, attached only to a few occurrences, elusive at best.
“The Exemption from Sense” is the title of a chapter in The Empire of Signs.2 Without any inspection of the selected term, the chapter is devoted to characterizing the relationship to sense in Zen and haiku as one of detachment: neither excavation nor the “mise en abyme” of a sense whose negativity or sublimation keeps on reiterating, always a little further on, the promise of a final signified, albeit a silent, yawning, pallid one, like death and God conjoined (which would represent the deep movement of all Western thought), but the detachment and abandonment of sense itself. The “exemption” in that chapter is clearly the opposite of the “effraction of sense” that, in the preceding chapter, designates the imperious, indiscreet, and eager seizure of sense that would interpret the simple words of a haiku. What “exemption from sense” must involve is withdrawal from that signifying will, a retreat from a wanting-to-say that can step aside to give pride of place to saying. Barthes writes: “The haiku does not want to say anything.”
Wanting-to-say, which Derrida introduced at the same time—’68 is both the number and the sense—in the guise of a translation of Husserl’s Bedeutung, indicates, within sense, the prevalence of willing over saying. Willing is subjectivity making itself into its own work [œuvre]: it is the projection of an assumed interiority into the reality of an exteriority. (Kant defines the will [le vouloir] as the faculty of “being by its representations the cause of the reality of these same representations.”3) Sense qua will (i.e., sense in the absolute sense, as we understand it at the very beginning, “we others”) always comes down to that self-instituting projection of the will. To take the example of the most famous and publicly scrutinized of senses, recently fallen into desuetude, a sense of history comes down to the accomplishment, by history, of a will already given: this sense thus proceeds to the strict annulment (in all senses of the word) of historicity itself. Similarly, a sense of life bridles life with the will for its completion. In this sense, all sense is death-bearing, or morbid, as Freud suggested.
We could, then, stop here and bid sense farewell. That is not what Barthes does. The expression “exemption from sense” is not taken up again in its proper sense. It is fleetingly, in the chapter, made analogous to “a lapsing of sense,” in order to designate the result of the Zen operation of suspension, arrest, or destitution of sense.4 Generally, the word gives way to “suspension,” and when it is taken up again further on (in the chapter “Tel”), the same substitution of “suspension” takes place without any further examination. Five years later, in the text titled The Rustle of Language, the word exemption reappears when Barthes speaks of a use of the language that would allow us to “hear an exempting from sense.” From one occurrence to the other, there has been a displacement of form and content. A displacement of form, because from the wording “the exemption from the sense” [l’exemption du sens] we have moved to “an exempting from sense” [une exemption de sens]. A displacement of content, for, in 1975, Barthes specifies that it is not a question of “foreclosing” sense, and that the latter remains on the “horizon,” that is, on the horizon of what he calls “the utopia” of the “rustling of language,” of a kind of purely sonorous effusion of the pleasure of language, from which sense would nevertheless not be excluded, but on the contrary be “the vanishing point of intense pleasure.”
This time, then, it would seem to be a question of exempting without lapsing, and within a context that no longer plays on a contrast between East and West but rather attempts a maneuver that disorients the Occidental way of signifying, so to speak. In keeping with this, it is no longer a question of “the exemption from sense,” a general, categorical formulation, but of “an exempting from sense,” a formulation indicating a circumscribed, circumstantial operation, the formulation suggesting an opportunity to be seized in language, in the interstice between the wanting and the saying phases of sense [vouloir-dire], and something like a murmur of saying at the level of the grain of the voice.5
How is this to be understood? How are we to understand a disorientation that would be tantamount neither to a pure aberration (of the nihilistic sort) nor to a reorientation (such as “salvation through zen,” another nihilistic motto)? And how are we to understand an exemption that would remain somehow regulated by what it exempts? As I have indicated, I do not want to do a commentary on Barthes himself. I am taking up at my own risk a clue that he, willingly or otherwise, left in suspense and that he exempted himself from explicating.
What is the sense of “exemption”? We know perfectly well. To exempt is to relieve of an obligation, to free, to exonerate from a duty or debt. In order to conceive of an exempting from sense, first sense must have been posited at the level of an obligation, an injunction of some sort. To make sense, to produce or recognize its instance and form—would be for us first and foremost an imperative. (It can be shown to be the essence of the Kantian imperative.) Indeed, referral to a reason or purpose, an origin or destination, a reference point or value, seems indispensable to us for the constitution of a being, or of being itself. That being is for some purpose, even if it is for the very purpose of being, is one of the strongest motivating forces behind our thinking—“we others, thirsting after reason.”6 There, in a certain way, is the pure and simple schema of our late thought. Thus it is that being is always reduced to what should be, what can be, and what we desire there to be—to what always also includes the dimension of a production and an effectuation, a realization of value. We have to make sense and produce sense, or else produce ourselves as sense. In that way, sense is always constituted inevitably as end-oriented sense, and end-oriented sense itself tends, at least asymptotically, to conduct itself and to develop as unique sense.7
An exempting from sense would be, then, a lifting of that imperative. It would not be a denial on principle but only a single and exceptional dispensation. Whether we imagine it as temporary, spasmodic, or rhythmic, or represent it as invested solely in certain individuals among others (these are other questions), it is undeniably a question of a privilege. But this is no slight privilege. Once the general law authorizes exceptions, it exposes and is exposed to a beyond-the-law that will no longer be reassimilated. Now, the law of sense seems to authorize exception in two ways. On the one hand, it always ends up postponing ultimate sense, placing it outside language, in the ineffable. The unsayable unnameable realizes the apogee of sense. On the other hand, conversely, this apogee of sense must be given up in order for us to go on speaking. Between the unsayable of the ineffable and the too-much-said of a last word (I allude, of course, to Blanchot), saying itself thus requires an exempting from sense.
Hence the formally sublime dignity of the “person” and anonymous monetary circulation present the double face of the economy of unsayable sense. The unsayable or the supra-sayable produces the rage—indeed, the sickness—for the imposition of sense. In order to keep language, in both senses of the word keep, one must except oneself from its goal-oriented regimen. That which withdraws from the injunction of sense reopens the possibility of speaking.
Along the same lines, the privilege that confers exemption lifts the teleological obligation, and paradoxically in that same gesture does not excuse us from speaking but on the contrary calls us to a renewed, refined, and ever more finely honed word [parole], in its concept as well as its image: the word of the writer, the lover, or the philosopher; poetry, prayer, or conversation—but thus a word always closer to its birth than its closure, always more governed by its saying than by its said, by its reserve more than by its last word, by its truth more than by its sense.
The wanting-to-say commanded by sense always consists, in sum, in a wanting-to-have-said (“I have said” is the word of the master). An exempting from sense, by contrast, designates a wanting-to-say in which the wanting melts into the saying and gives up wanting, so that sense is absent and makes sense beyond sense. The beyond is no longer ineffable; it is in a surplus of speech, and consequently it is no longer beyond. Instead of pronouncing the end of History—in both senses of the word end—we, the speaking subject, “we others …” open another history, a new narrative—a recitation even. Rather than completing signification, it recites its own signifying, and it is in that signifying that it finds its extreme pleasure [jouissance], the sense of which becomes its “vanishing point.”
The vanishing point is the inverted figure of the last word. Intense pleasure derives from the circumstance that it does not have a last word, and that its words or its silences are not those of conclusion but of opening and calling out. Not “I have said” but “tell me,” or “allow me to say.” One does not say (as in Sade) “I’m coming” [je jouis] or “you’re coming” in order to express a sense, but one says it to feel the saying resonate with the coming.
Just as orgasm is a pleasure that is neither terminal nor preliminary, but pleasure that is exempted from having to begin and end, similarly orgasmic sense is sense that ends neither in signification nor in the unsignifiable. “Jouis-sens,”8 as Lacan says, but it must be understood that orgasm is always about sense in all senses. To have an orgasm is always to feel, and since to feel is always also to feel oneself feeling, thus presupposing an alteration and an alterity, to have an orgasm is to feel oneself through the other and in the other.
As for sense, you have to feel it go by, and doubtless we must even assert: sense is precisely that: the fact of feeling it go by, and of its feeling itself going from one to the other (from one person to the other as well as from one sense to another).
This might well be called “consenting”: neither a consensus, nor submission, but consent to feeling the other and being felt by him or her, consent to the other person’s feeling him or herself, and thus infinitely fleeing the very flight of orgasm, whose breaking away is at the same time identically the consent to orgasm. Sex, from this point of view, is the sense of the senses. Not that it constitutes the only paradigm for this, but that it offers the syntax for it. That is relationship—by which sense regains sense. It is nothing other than relationship, the back and forth from one to the other. Sense depends on nothing but a receptivity, an affectability, a passibility: what there is of sense is what comes to me, strikes me, disturbs me, moves me. Its truth is the instantaneous touch; its sense is the movement to and fro.
There is no sense for just one, Bataille said. What makes sense is what does not cease circulating and being exchanged, like coins in fact, but coins whose currency is incommensurable with any possible equivalent. Sense is shared, or it does not exist. The contrasting couple of the exclusive ineffable and the general equivalent, or, if you prefer, of negative theology and monetary ontology, is the result of the disintegration of sharing itself, in which each of two senses falls to a single side. Unique sense, in sum, is always unilateral, and no longer has any sense for that very reason. Nor is it a question of juxtaposing multiple senses. Here’s the point: What makes sense is one person speaking to another, just as what makes love is someone making love to someone else. And one being the other by turns or simultaneously, without there being an end to these comings and goings. The goal—if we must speak of a goal—is not to be done with sense. It is not even mutual understanding: it is to speak anew.
We know this already, and yet when we find ourselves standing on the edge of a vacuum of sense—whether in the domain of history, art, matters of state, sexuality, technology, or biology—we stand nonplussed. Yet it is precisely there, in the place of our relinquishment, that the truth becomes available, not within easy reach or within shouting range, but within the range of language.
The lesson is very simple, as always, but the task is awesome. We, we others, have no lesser task than that of understanding and practicing the sharing of sense—of the sense of the world, no less. That doesn’t mean dialogue and communication, which drag themselves listlessly along like saturated significations and the latest conventional chit-chat, but it wants to say—or no longer even wants but simply says—something other, for which the proud and solitary word [parole] is worth as much as mutual conversation: that the truth of sense is properly nothing but its being shared, that is, at once its passage between us (we who are always other than ourselves) and its internal and sovereign dehiscence, by means of which its law justifies its exception, by means of which sense is exempted from itself in order to be what it is, and by which its jouissance is not its sensed result but the exercise of its very sense, its sensitivity, its sensuality, and its feeling. Again it is Barthes who spoke of a “love of the language”: that love is every bit as worthy— the expression is particularly apt—as the love of one’s neighbor, and might even be said to make up all the latter’s value and sense. And there we have, if I still dare use this word, an ethics for our time—and more than an ethics.
Translated by Bettina Bergo