"... rait": Sign of Utopia

There would be [". . . rait"] three reasons for this title, formed according to the inflection of the conditional mood. ¹

The first is that this inflection itself serves as the title of a text or narrative of Henri Michaux. This short text, hardly three pages in length, constitutes one of the twelve sections of his anthology "Facing the Bolts" (1954), just like the much longer sections "Slices of Knowledge" or "The Space in the Shadows." The first fragment reads: "An island of waves would turn in the midst of the land, a stream of water would patrol the suburbs. A ball of flames flying low, would traverse the city without burning it and one would encounter once again imaginary giants in the countryside." Underlining thus the pure conditional of virtuality as a category of sensation and thought, Michaux seems to echo the immoderate usage of the conditional inflection, a chiaroscuro sign of utopia found in so many of Barthes's texts and books.

The second reason is that if throughout his entire work, Barthes hardly cites Michaux (four times, and quickly), and if Barthes's name never appears in Michaux's work, it is a worthy project to situate how much both were obsessed by forms of utopia of which the utopia of the sign, the vanishing point shared by both text and image, is the crucial marker. In Michaux, the inventory of the signs practically defines the work (singular in its strict doubleness). But, the same is true, though in a completely different way, for Barthes, as the catalog of the exposition "Text and Image," the homage paid to him in 1986, suggests. ²

Finally, the reason that might be pushing me to pause here at this "would"--in this narcissistic age--would be that my first name is sometimes abbreviated in this way while already I hear in my initials those of Roland Barthes.

You can count--I have counted--108 conditional forms in Fragments: A Lover's Discourse and 130 in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (subject to errors made in advance, nothing is more treacherous than this type of exercise). But this is of little importance: what counts is the cumulative effect of these conditional verbs. The idea of looking closely at these forms came to me out of the kind of music which remained in the ear after a reading of Barthes, a reading in which the "would," as soon as one thinks about it, establishes itself as a recognized sign.

And why have I chosen these two books, the critical self-portrait and the structural portrait of the lover? Out of a pure desire to reread them, as opposed to Camera Lucida for example, which I flipped through recently but without this idée fixe. But if we must confirm that in Barthes's work this is nothing exceptional, let us note that an identical count yields 74 conditional forms in The Pleasure of the Text, a work of hardly 100 short pages, and 12 conditionals in an article like "The Third Meaning."

A brief inventory of The Pleasure of the Text easily allows us to identify, in an obvious and random fashion, the features or figures relative to this use of the conditional (which I do not know, moreover, whether Barthes himself would have analyzed--in others' or in his own writing--there are no obvious clues in his self-analysis in Roland Barthes). In any case, the following lines, devious as can be, would try to correct his perhaps too self-satisfied avowal of his "resistance" to "the saturation of the cinema":

(No sooner have I written this than it strikes me as an avowal of the imaginary; I should have uttered it as a dreamy speech which seeks to know why I resist or I desire; unfortunately I am condemned to assertion; we lack in French [and perhaps in every language] a grammatical mode which would...