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6 Barthes and Beckett: The Punctum, the Pensum, and the Dream of Love
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6 Barthes and Beckett The Punctum, the Pensum, and the Dream of Love Pathos has had a bad name in the history of the modern; sentimentality worse. Until the last books of Roland Barthes, they seemed like insipid residues of humanism in the era of the End of Man. An honorable exception was always Beckett-the congenital last holdout of humanism-who couldn't shake the pathos for all its running sores, the laughter of mutilations , and whose cruelty never prevented you from having a good cry, right up the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh. If the writing of Barthes-dry, obtuse, matte, fatal, as he describes it-seems to come from "a gentle hemorrhage" I in the discourse of desire, the grotesque comedy of Beckett seems to leak from a defective bypass in the braininess of a bleeding heart. "Nature!" exclaims Hamm, rapturously for a moment (pause), forgetting his painkiller. "There's something dripping in my head. (Pause.) A heart, a heart in my head."2 Barthes, too, has a heart in his head, as he suggests in his quasi-autobiography , Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, in the pensee entitled "L'amour d'une idee"-Love of an idea. Love and Idea: we might almost say, before loving the idea, a fatal coupling! For at a time when all our thought, and certainly theory, seems infatuated with the sexual, love seems obscene, as Barthes observes in A Lover's Discourse, because it prefers the sentimental (175). He prefers it himself with a certain exuberance. "I take for myself the scorn," he writes, "lavished on any kind of pathos: ... like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything in the field of my love" (166-67). If sentimentality is still to be thought of as an emotion disproportionate to its motive and somewhat immune to considered judgment, Barthes seems to indulge himself to the point of infatuation, and not only about the idea of love: "For a certain time," he writes in "Love of an idea," "he went into raptures over binarism; binarism became for him a kind of erotic object. This idea seemed to him inexhaustible, he could never exploit it enough. 94 Barthes and Beckett / 95 That one might say everything with only one difference produced a kind of joy in him, a continuous astonishment. Since intellectual things resemble erotic ones, in binarism what delighted him was a figure"3-as it does in the figurations of love in A Lover's Discourse, the goings and comings of love, the ubiquitous plottings, the strivings and contrivings, the measures taken, what keeps the lover's mind racing through all the contingencies, cantillations , and vicissitudes of love. Speaking, however, of Exuberance, the Blakean figure by which the amorous subject negotiates the place of love in an economy of pure expenditure and utter loss, Barthes warns in a parenthesis that, "if we would glimpse the transgressive force of love-as-passion ," we must remember "the assumption of sentimentality as an alien strength" (Lover's Discourse 84). This strength is what we see in Camera Lucida, not only in his refusal to reduce himself-as-subject before the photographs he studies, but in the memorial to his mother in that somewhat Proustian book. He does not weep, he says, in another parenthesis, expecting that Time will simply dissipate the emotion of loss. Meanwhile, he does not refrain from summoning up in bereavement the language of sensibility and irreducible affect. He wants to mourn his mother in the untenable words of the ego's old dispensation : as being, soul, essence, a quality of life; in a world suspicious of love and substance, the substance of the beloved, rather than a reflection of structuralist activity or an illusory Figure of Speech; not the Mother, but his mother, the only mother he can mourn. Since the classical phenomenology in which he'd matured had never, so far as he remembers, spoken of desire or mourning, he has to look elsewhere for a way to cross the hysterical division of History-which is hysteria, marked and affirmed by Death-in order to recover an Image of his mother that would be immediately steeped in the particularity, the singularity, of his pain, what would preserve for him the"radiant, irreducible core. "4 Against his Protestant instincts, which refused the Image, and his demythologizing past, which exposed it, he would give himself up to the solitude of the Imaginary, the Image-repertoire , in order to...