Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism

2. ROLAND BARTHES: From Ideology to Event

Chapter T w o ROLAND BARTHES From Ideology to Event I A case in point To persist [S’entêter] means to affirm the Irreducible in literature, that which, in literature, resists and survives the typecast languages [discours typés] surrounding it: philosophy, science, psychology; to act as though it were incomparable and immortal. A writer—by which I mean not someone who fulfils a function, or is the servant of an art, but the subject of a practice—needs the persistence [l’entêtement] of the lookout standing at the crossroads where all other languages meet, in a trivial [triviale] position compared to the purity of those doctrines (trivialis, according to etymology, is the epithet that characterises the prostitute waiting at the three-way fork in the road). All in all, to persist [s’entêter] means to maintain in spite of everything the force of drift and expectation [d’une dérive et d’une attente]. And it is precisely because it persists that writing is given to constant displacement [entraînée à se déplacer]. Roland Barthes, Leçon1 Few critics displayed with the economy or intensity of Roland Barthes the contradictions and impasses, revisions and hesitations, shifts and detours that mark the history of literary theory and criticism during the second half of the twentieth century. From the early 1950s till his 71 72 Radical Indecision untimely death in 1980, Barthes came to embody, one after the other, sometimes even simultaneously, a multiplicity of divergent and seemingly irreconcilable approaches to texts, literary and non-literary alike, ranging from a phenomenologically or existentially inspired thematicism to a proto-Marxian, at times explicitly Marxist commitment to ideological demystification, a protracted engagement with the concepts and methodology of Saussurean linguistics, an eclectic dalliance with sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the affirmation of textual plurality as a criterion of value, a rehabilitation of textual pleasure as an object of inquiry—all of which coexisted throughout with a deep-seated suspicion of ideological and other stereotypes, a restless distrust of political , interpretative, metalinguistic, even theoretical authority, a willingness at timely as well as untimely moments to defend the literary and artistic avant-garde, outweighed only by an equally uncompromising devotion to a favoured body of both established and neglected classics , and an acute sensitivity to textual forms in general, whose boundaries Barthes in his own writing was constantly exploring, deploying a mobile repertoire of styles and idioms that went from polemical intervention to theoretical excursus, from critical diagnosis to expressions of appreciation, from aphoristic fragment to oblique autobiographical exposure.2 Over a thirty-year period Barthes not only brought to literary and cultural criticism a fresh language of understanding, analysis, and commentary , he also supplied it with a new set of objects, spanning both popular culture and high art, from photography to fashion, food to film, myth to music, classical rhetoric to contemporary journalism. In the process, he placed at the centre of critical debate, in France and elsewhere , a distinctive set of theoretical and other concerns, each of which received from Barthes a characteristically decisive formulation: writing, écriture, as that which, irreducible to the opposition between form and content, reconciled the autonomy of the one with the historicity of the other; the social stereotype or myth, by which petty-bourgeois ideology infiltrated itself as incontrovertible self-evidence into the language of everyday life; the idea of a science of literary (and other) signs, which, by explaining the process of signification itself and the diversity of interpretation to which a text gave rise, might disqualify the dogmatism, obscurantism, and impressionism of traditional literary criticism; the Roland Barthes 73 practice of reading and writing as productive activities upon which it might be possible to base an affirmative politics or ethics; the multiplicity of the body as that which, exceeding signification, was inscribed within writing as resistance, recalcitrance, and risk; textuality itself as a paradoxical domain in which what prevailed was the signifier without the signified, structuration without structure, the novelistic without the novel, and where meaning itself was perpetually disappointed, interrupted , suspended, and returned to that which, in his first book in 1953 and one of the last lecture series he held at the Collège de France in 1977, thus framing the history of his dealings with the literary, Barthes addressed as the zero degree of writing or the neutrality...