In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Perverse Art of Reading: On the Phantasmatic Semiology in Roland Barthes’ ‘Cours au Collège de France’
  • Patrick Ffrench
The Perverse Art of Reading: On the Phantasmatic Semiology in Roland Barthes’ ‘Cours au Collège de France’. By Kris Pint. (Faux titre, 353). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 293 pp. Pb €59.00; $89.00.

As Kris Pint points out in the Introduction to this perceptive and informative book, for a long time after his death readers of Barthes were frustrated by the relative inaccessibility of the lecture courses at the Collège de France. These have now been published as three books devoted to each year’s course, given between 1977 and 1980: Comment vivre ensemble, Le Neutre, and La Préparation du roman (Paris: Seuil, 2002–03). The lecture notes on each of these topics are very rich terrain indeed, and reveal an extensive and promising field for research, particularly on what Barthes himself referred to as an ‘ethics’. They are crucial reading for those interested in the later developments of French thought of the twentieth century. It should, however, be underlined that, although the text of Barthes’s inaugural lecture was published during his lifetime (as Leçon, 1978), the lectures as published do not constitute a written text, presented as they are in the form of lecture notes. They should thus be read with the caveat, ironic in view of Barthes’s emphasis on the responsibility of form, that they do not constitute a text as such. One might therefore expect the distinctive qualities of Barthes’s style to be lacking, but the lecture notes do retain a recognizably Barthesian quality, suggesting that there is something like a Barthesian style of thought. This may [End Page 111] perhaps be characterized as a consistent position cutting across the doxa, which, with Barthes’s characteristic attentiveness to the idiosyncrasies of etymology, we could call ‘para-doxical’. Otherwise, it may be described as perverse. It is to Barthes subtle perversity that Pint attends in this finely written (and translated) study, which takes as its starting point Barthes’s initial proposition that his teaching, each year, would be generated by a fantasy. Pint focuses extensively, in the first two chapters, on the intertexts that inform Barthes’s notion of fantasy: psychoanalysis and Nietzsche. In each chapter, through careful and clear exegesis, Pint engages finely with the readers of Freud and of Nietzsche who were Barthes’s contemporaries: Lacan and Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze. The care with which Pint establishes this context explains why he comes to Barthes’s lectures only in the fourth chapter, following in the third a useful trajectory across Barthes’s work up to his inauguration. The chapters on the lecture courses themselves bring to light a series of crucial questions that resonate in and beyond Barthes’s œuvre and life: if one seeks to outwit (déjouer) the ‘fascism of language’, as Barthes put it, through recourse to the reasons of the body, what prevents such a perverse strategy from appearing as hysterical theatricality, particularly in so far as the subject in question is a position of the teacher? How, and to what end, can or should one teach from one’s pleasure? To what extent can such a teaching, based as it is in the subject’s specific relation to their own pleasure, justify a collective? Pint concludes the book with some subtle and intriguing propositions concerning a ‘perverse teaching strategy’ in which, through the exhibiting of the bêtise (the jouissance) of one’s investment in what one teaches, the position of the master may be fruitfully avoided.

Patrick Ffrench
King’s College London
...

pdf

Share