For the Liberation of a Pluralist Thinking: An Interview with Roland Barthes

Translator’s Introduction

November 12, 2015, marks the centenary of the birth—at 107, rue de la Bucaille, in Cherbourg—of Roland Gérard Barthes, one of the major cultural theorists of the twentieth century. The interview we publish below, conducted by the eminent Japanese academic Shigehiko Hasumi, took place in 1972 and first appeared in Japanese in the journal Umi, which is a stablemate of Chuokoron, one of Tokyo’s most distinguished literary magazines. Hasumi, the translator of, among others, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, was instrumental in introducing French poststructuralist theory into Japan.¹ Part of this interview was printed in Libération on November 16, 1990, the first full French-language version having appeared earlier that year in the spring issue of the Tokyo-based journal Représentation. With the kind permission of Les Éditions du Seuil, the present translation is copublished with Seagull Press of Kolkata.

Barthes’s relationship with Japan was an important and complex one. He became deeply fascinated with the country after a first visit in May and June of 1966. Indeed, so unsettled was he by that visit—his recent biographer Tiphaine Samoyault describes the experience as one that “radically displace[d] him”²—that he asked Maurice Pinguet, the head of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo, who had been his host in that city, to try to find him a university post there for two or three years (Samoyault 2015: 415–17). Though nothing came of that, he quickly made two further trips to Japan, from March 4 to April 5, 1967, and from December 17, 1967, to January 10, 1968.

Visiting Pinguet in Tokyo, Barthes encountered a culture whose meanings were denied to him by the complete impenetrability of the language and yet, at the same time, gained access, through a seasoned Western observer (Pinguet had lived in Japan since 1958), to expert interpretation of his alien surroundings.³ For Barthes, the erstwhile champion of Bertolt Brecht, this particular Verfremdungseffekt must have had its own special charm. And, as with the Tel Quel group’s visit to China in the 1970s (in which Barthes participated with no great enthusiasm), the nature of the experience was clearly inflected by preoccupations—particularly around the question of meaning—that lay in his own European past (and present). While much was lost in translation for Barthes in Japan, a great deal more seems to have been found in the almost visceral experience of an abrupt and total loss of access to meaning.

When he transposed this Japanese experience into the theoretical fiction published as L’Empire des signes (Empire of Signs) in 1970, Barthes seemed to find a kind of liberation in the encounter with a seductive surface of signifiers that appeared to have no transcendental underpinning. As Edmund White put it, Japan, for Barthes, had been “a test, a challenge to think the unthinkable, a place where meaning is finally banished. Paradise, in deed, for the great student of signs.” As the American writer saw it, Barthes’s notional (“fictive”) Japan provided a cure for the author’s “repulsion for the ‘overfed’ meanings or the ‘diseased’ signs of our petit-bourgeois culture with its advertising, glossy theatrical spectacles, agony columns and child prodigies” (White 1982).

At the time of the interview with Hasumi, Barthes had already written the enigmatic little book Le Plaisir du texte (1973) and was, as he says, hesitating over its publication. The Pleasure of the Text is a work that readers themselves have hesitated and puzzled over down the years, not least because it is organized around a central opposition between two categories, the texte de plaisir and the texte de jouissance, which are not always clearly distinct from each other, nor even very clearly defined. Barthes speaks of the book here as not necessarily possessing a theoretical coherence: there is emphasis on its fragmentary—and even its intertextual—nature, though whether these are necessary consequences of this turn toward the study of “literary erotics” is not addressed.

However, two aspects of Barthes’s clearly stated...