Une parole inquiète: Barthes et Foucault au Collège de France par Guillaume Bellon (review)

As the Introduction to Guillaume Bellon’s superb study reminds us, Barthes and Foucault share a fundamental mistrust of ‘l’autorité de l’assertion’ (p. 7). ‘Le seul fait de parler’, as Foucault remarked, ‘est en lui-même une force’ (p. 218). The examination of both thinkers’ teaching material — spoken word now become texts — is thus particularly interesting. Foucault lectured at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1984, and Barthes from 1977 to 1980. Bellon’s title alludes to their highly nuanced awareness of the status of their lectures at this prestigious institution, and their constant attempts to evade the violence of language, in an ‘échappée relative d’un ordre du discours jamais totalement aboli’ (p. 244). In doing so, each produces a ‘discours inquiet’ (p. 245). Bellon’s account is informed by a sustained attention to the many implications of this inquiétude. His central concern is with the ways in which the problematic status of the Collège de France texts, in foregrounding the nature of discourse itself, can enrich our understanding of the two authors’ work. The first section, ‘Vers le livre’, concerns the materialization of the publications: Bellon analyses the strategies used by the transcribers when transforming recordings of Foucault’s lectures and transcriptions of Barthes’s lecture notes into published texts, the priorities that these strategies reveal, and their effects on our reading. The second section, ‘Au miroir de l’œuvre’, is by far the longest. Making skilful use of genetic analysis, Bellon produces a fascinating dialogue between the lectures and the authors’ contemporary published work, scrupulously avoiding any simplistic account of this relationship. In both authors’ cases, he argues, ‘la pensée développée dans le cadre du Collège reste [. . .] “flottante”, sans reprise au cœur du dispositif plus systématique offert par le livre’ (p. 108). Nonetheless, Bellon’s close readings of thematic and methodological concerns bear witness to fruitful migrations between lecture and text. Of particular interest in this section is his account of how Barthes’s lecturing methodology, promoting an ideal of the ‘incodé’, finds its elaboration in the punctum of La Chambre claire. On Foucault, Bellon analyses the balance between the methodologies of archaeology and genealogy in the lectures, and there is a very interesting discussion of ‘la fiction comme modèle heuristique’. Bellon’s final section, ‘Un atelier de pensée’, convincingly demonstrates that the lecture as discursive space permitted both Barthes and Foucault to articulate specific discourses and modes not available to them elsewhere. From the outset to its moving conclusion, this book makes a compelling case for the value of its source material. Barthes’s and Foucault’s ‘attention anxieuse à la parole’ (p. 11) finds its subtle and persuasive echo in Bellon’s work. Enriched by meticulous archival research as well as a wide variety of secondary materials, this is a timely and important work, of interest not only to specialists of Barthes and Foucault but to anyone wishing to orient their understanding of the intertwined roles of teacher and public intellectual, as exemplified by so many figures in post-war French theory.