Roland Barthes The Grain of The Voice Interviews 1962 1980
Roland Barthes The Grain of The Voice Interviews 1962 1980
BARTHES
The Grain
t
o f
theVoice
^Interviews 1962-1980
TRANSLATED BY LINDA COVERDALE
8090-5088-9
1284/2445
Image-M usic-Text
A Lover's Discourse
Mythologies
New Critical Essays
On Racine
The Pleasure of the Text
The Responsibility of Forms
Roland Barthes
S adelFourierlLoyola
SIZ
Writing Degree Zero
Roland Barthes
New York
Contents
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Contents
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La
Le
Do Things Mean
Something?
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On Film
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On Film
13
but the being, the existence of the cinema is not in its technique,
while the contrary is true of literature: can you imagine a litter
ature-verite, analogous to the cinema-verite? With language, this
would be impossible, truth is impossible with language.
And yet we refer constantly to the idea of a "cinemato
graphic language, " as if the existence and definition of
this language were universally admitted, whether you
take the word "language" in a purely rhetorical sense (for
example, the stylistic conventions attributed to the dolly
shot or the low-angle shot), or in a very general sense,
as the relation between a signifier and a signified.
For myself, it's probably because I have not succeeded in inte
grating the cinema within the sphere of language that I consume
it in a purely projective manner, and not as an analyst.
Isn't it, if not impossible, at the vel)' least diflicult for
the cinema to gain entrance to that sphere of language?
We can try to be more precise about that difficulty. It seems, at
present, that the model for all languages is speech, articulated
language. Now, this articulated language is a code, it uses a system
of signs which are not analogical (and which consequently can
be, and are, discontinuous); the opposite holds true for the cin
ema, which presents itself at first sight as an analogical expression
of reality (and, moreover, continuous); and we don't know how
to tackle a continuous and analogical expression in order to in
troduce, to initiate an analysis along linguistic lines; for example,
how do you divide (semantically), how do you vary the meaning
of a film, of a film fragment? Thus, if a critic wanted to treat the
cinema as a language, abandoning that metaphorical inflation of
the term, he would first have to discern whether there are elements
in the cinematic continuity which are not analogical, or which
partake of a deformed, or transposed, or codified analogy, ele
ments systematized in such a way that they can be treated as
fragments of language. Now those are problems of concrete re
search, which have not yet been approached and which could be
14
On Film
l5
16
respond to the reading units of the film; that is every critic's dream,
to be able to define an art by its technique.
But the procedures are all ambiguous; for example, the
standard rhetoric says that the overhead shot signifies
crushing, oppression; well, you can see two hundred
cases (at least) where that shot simply doesn't have that
meamng.
This ambiguity is normal and is not what complicates our prob
lem. The signifiers are always ambiguous; the number of signifieds
always exceeds the number of signifiers: otherwise, there would
be neither literature nor art nor history nor anything of what
makes the world go round. The strength of a signifier does not
come from its clarity but from the fact that it is perceived as a
signifier-I would say: whatever the resultant meaning may be,
it is not things but the place of things which matters. The bond
between the signifier and the signified is of much less importance
than the organization of the signifiers among themselves; the
overhead shot [/a plongee] may have signified crushing, but we
know that this rhetoric is outmoded precisely because we feel it
is based on an analogical relation between "to plunge" [plonger]
and "to crush," which seems naive to us, above all today when
a psychology of "denial" has taught us that there could be a valid
relation between a content and the form which seems to be most
"naturally" its contrary. In this awakening of meaning provoked
by the overhead shot, what is important is the awakening, not
the meaning.
Exactly-after an initial "analogical" period, isn't the
cinema already emerging from this second period of the
"anti-analogy" through a more supple, uncodified use of
"figures of style"?
On Film
17
18
On Film
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20
On Film
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22
Angel .
Apropos of the "modern" cinema, have you seen L'Im
mortelle?
Yes . . . My (abstract) relations with Robbe-Crillet complicate
things for me a bit. I'm not pleased; I wouldn't have advised him
to make movies . . . Well, there, in L'Immortelle, there you have
metaphor . . . In fact, Robbe-Crillet doesn't kill meaning at all,
he scrambles it; he thinks it's enough to mix up a meaning for it
to die. It takes more than that to kill meaning.
On Film
23
24
I Don't Believe
in Influences
For more than ten years now the criticism of Roland Barthes
has fascinated, even enthralled the best young writers of today.
Ever since Writing Degree Zero appeared in 1953, Barthes has
been reinventing a morality of exactingness and difficulty, apply
ing to literature his passion for understanding and his thirst for
truth, relentlessly tracking down man and history, subiecting them
to the test of his insistent thoroughness. Some people find this
difficult to put up with-no writer is safe anymore. And now we
have his latest book, Critical Essays: can revenge be far off? Barthes
is no longer the young author we must treat gently to safeguard
the future, or a novice made harmless by awkwardness. He has
become the man to overthrow, the irritating witness who must
disappear if we are ever to return to the little games we used to
play, the elegance and outbursts of feeling, the unself-conscious
ness, the grand style, the dainty tum of phrase.
And yet Roland Barthes still defies us bravely. The essays he is
publishing now are magazine pieces, prefaces, answers to ques
tionnaires, or unpublished remarks: he writes of Brecht, Robbe
Grillet, Butor; but also of La Bruyere, Voltaire, even Tacitus; and
theatrical costume and structuralism and criticism-Barthes's work
seems quite varied, and sometimes quite contradictory. What is
he driving at? Now it is his tum to answer our questions.
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Il- _
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That raises another question. On the one hand, one can try to
establish a rhetoric of film, i. e. , an inventory of discontinuous
signs, the connotators. That is what linguists call the paradigmatic
plane: the reconstruction of lexicons. But another approach to
the problem entails reconstituting the structure of narratives, what
Souriau calls "diegesis. " Apropos, here are Propp's work on Rus
sian folktales and Levi-Strauss's research on myth. And these two
types of analysis, even though they belong to the same complex,
are quite distinct. Functional analysis is perhaps more important,
richer, and more pressing than rhetorical analysis. With the func
tional approach one understands more or less how a film is made,
from the operational point of view: it's a kind of "dispatching,"
a distributional network of situations and actions where a given
situation engenders a number of possibilities, only one of which
is selected, and so on. That is what Propp studied in Russian
folktales. There is thus a large structural network of narrative
situations and actions, but since this network is sustained by
characters, whom Propp calls dramatis personae, each character
is defined by attributes, by a certain number of signs which are
within the scope of semiology. In the case of That Man from
Rio, for example, at a certain point the situation requires the
appearance of individual X, who fills a certain position, and all
this is still on the structural level; but once you define this in
dividual as a Brazilian architect, a colorful con artist and adven
turer, etc. , you are introducing semiological elements. The in
dividual's attributes are not his essence, he is first defined by his
place in the narrative network. It is only afterward, so to speak,
that the individual is grammatically "declined," that a paradigm
is established. In the case of secondary characters, this is perhaps
a bit complicated, but it's easy to see a possible typology of main
characters. In the case of roles played by Belmondo, the paradigm
varies very little, and it's at the level of the network that changes
appear.
Still following Propp's line, one could doubtless imagine
that films could be evaluated separately in categories which
aren't uniquely cinematographic, such as tales, comIC
strips, television shows, and so on.
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-'Ii' .
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Yes. This last choice, which was costly on the level of the work's
universality since the study was thus limited to an apparently
small territory, reinforced my profound conviction that semiology
is fundamentally dependent upon language, that there is language
in all languages. I would go so far as to say that fashion in its
complex form, which alone interests us, exists only through dis
course on fashion, without which fashion can be reduced to a
very rudimentary syntax no richer than the highway code. There
aren't many miniskirts around; in real life, they're only another
...
45
46
You could put it that way, at least if the image, even a utopian
one, that remains after the end of alienation didn't in the last
instance destroy the very antinomy of signified and signifier.
In the conclusion of your book, a kind of final invocation,
you insist on the position of the author, the semiologist,
before or rather in (as you clearly specify) the systematic
universe which is the object of his inquiry. Then again,
it seems that the very possibility of "reading" peculiar to
a work of this order is linked to an architecture that tends
to dissolve "the analyst within the system" and yet is also
the surest sign of his presence.
,4.
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1 --'AI
.......
.
...._.. 1,. t .ll.
...
____
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_______
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Though we have always known that these "obj ects" have very
different and precise functions, now we are convinced that they
are also methods of communication, instruments of meaning. It
was Saussure who first postulated the existence of a general science
of signs; he thought that linguistics would be only a part of that
science . This postulate has regained currency through the de
velopment of linguistics, the science of human language; lin
guistics is very well established now and serves as a model for
structuralism. Linguistic concepts and descriptive rules are ap
plied to collections of obj ects outside articulated language; we
analyze these collections j ust as we do a language when we want
to discover its grammar.
R egarding fashion, you have volun tarily limited your
analysis to articles on women 's clothing from fashion
magazines; i. e., to the written description of fashion.
Now, I speak here for the thousands offashion-magazine
readers when I say that nothing is more expressive, more
con vincing to women than the image; if there is a text
or caption, it's nothing more than an in vita tion to admire
a picture. My proofis that no woman buys a dress without
trying it on; in other words, without going beyond purely
verbal persuasion.
I do not deny the extraordinary richness of clothing which is
actually worn . If I limited myself to its written description, it's
for methodological and sociological reasons. Reasons of method:
in fact, fashion does put several systems of expression into play
material, photography, language; and it was impossible for me to
analyze rigorously a very heterogeneous subj ect matter, I could
not do work of any precision while passing casually from pictures
to written descriptions, and then to observations which I might
make of actual clothing. Given that the semiological approach
consists in dividing an obj ect into elements to be distributed
among formal general classes, it was in my interest to select the
purest, most homogeneous subject matter possible. My choice
was also j ustified by the fact that today fashion magazines have
a truly enormous circulation; they are part of mass culture. All
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Conversation on a
Scientific Poem
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On S/Z and
Empire of Signs
69
Etudes and the book that followed it-was perhaps the happiest
and busiest of my working life. I had the exalting impression that
I was tackling something really new, in the exact sense of the
word: something which had never been done before. I had wanted
for a long time to devote myself to a microanalysis, a patient and
gradual analysis, in order to further structural analysis of the
narrative. This analysis could not be exhaustive, of course, be
cause it's impossible to catalogue every scrap of meaning in a
perpetual analysis, like some sort of perpetual calendar. I was
profoundly happy to find myself perfectly at ease entering a kind
of textual and critical substance different from the usual experi
ence of commentary, even when this criticism is quite original.
The experience of S/Z represents for me, before anything else,
the biissful pleasure of work, and of writing.
I suppose that this pleasure comes fro m the decisive fact
that you were able, for the first time, to breach the es-
70
and there's
no
reason to feel
uncomfortable
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able t o "speak" the text, without ever feeling the need t o outline
it. Thus, there is really no other structure to this work than my
reading, the advance of a reading as structuration. In a word, I
radically abandoned so-called critical discourse to enter a dis
course of reading, a writing-reading [une ecriture-lecture].
Which you sum up in this declaration: "What is im
portant is not to reveal a structure but (as much as pos
sible) to produce a structuration. "
I'm not the only one to distinguish between structure and struc
turation. That opposition is inscribed in the historical process of
literary semiology. In fact, one must go beyond the statics of the
first semiology, which tried precisely to discover structures, struc
ture-products, object-spaces in a text, in order to discover what
Julia Kristeva calls a productivity-i . e. , a worki ng of the text, a
j u nction, a coupling into the shifting infinity of language. An
exact evaluation of a text's degree of closure should be made. The
classical text is closed, but only partially, and I wanted to find
out, through a method appropriate to this hypothesis, how the
text connects-even in a limited or alienated fashion-with the
infinite productivity of language.
However, I'm afraid that this operation may be perceived simply
as a necessary mode of contemporary discourse and that the pub
lic, in fact, may co-opt this movement, recuperating it under the
reassuring alibi of the usual explication de texte.
It's that infinite productivity you 're referring to, I suppose,
in the polemical formula "everything signifies, " implying
a paradoxical exactingness which often leads to redun
dancies between the text-analysis and your commentary.
It's a formula meant to deflect a kind of aporia, of impossibility:
that is-if everything does not sign ify, then there would be some
insignificance in a text. What would be the nature of this insig
nificance? Natural? Futile? These are not very scienti fic notions,
if I may say so, and that seems to me to pose a very grave the
oretical problem, perhaps an insoluble one.
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Yes, the risk is that the novel will be outli ned in large sections
to avoid fastidious recapitulations. Because on many pages the
codes, the signs, are repeated-as in any language; you can see
this in Sarrasine: the redundancy would quickly become boring.
To my eyes, this is not so much a theoretical problem as it is a
compositional one. H ow should this type of analysis be developed?
In any case, novel or novella , if these analyses are to be con
tinued, texts must be found which are neither one-dimensional
nor excessively unusual, and which thereby allow interpretation
of their resistance to the plural of writi ng. In Sarrasine I certainly
found a text extraordinarily suited to my pro ject.
Which you put into theory as follows: "There is no other
proof of a reading than the q uality and endurance of its
systematics, its functioning. " Doesn 't that suggest that
the operation of commentary aims to permit a kind of
rehierarchization of literary values insofar as the com
mentary constitutes in itself a literary experience, or, in
your words, a discourse of reading, a writing-reading?
Yes, and that's nothing to be afra id of. Mutatis mutandis, the
Middle Ages lived solely on rereading ancient texts, in Greek or
Lati n . Perhaps literature will now be precisely that: an obj ect
made of commentaries, a tutor of other languages, period . Who
knows?
To illustrate your views from a different angle, I would
like to talk to you now about a book published at the
same time as S/Z-Empire of Signs, where you deal in
an even more polemical and personal fashion with the
delicate question of the status of meaning.
In that book I chose to speak of Japan, of my Japan, a system of
signs I call Japan .
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and i ne\itable phase of the struggle toward "a new way of feeling,
a new way of thinking,
"
87
going well.
L 'Express,
May 3 1, 1970
L'Express
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With pleasure. The first part takes place in a Parisian salon during
the Restoration, and the explicit theme of the novella is a con
demnation of bourgeois soci ety. Balzac, whose views were mon
archisti c , criticizes wealth acqui red through speculation, the gold
of the nouveaux riches, and he places it within the symbolic field
of gold without origins, gold undignified by a landed past such
as the aristocracy could clai m .
In the second section, Sarrasine becomes the narrative o f cas
tration . Zambinella , the character at the heart of the enigma, is
a castrato . His name means "little leg" or "little doll , " and even,
in my opinion, "little phallus . " And the bastard gold of the nou
veaux riches, that almost alchemical gold sprung from a void,
corresponds precisely to Zambinella, who is a nothing, insofar
as he is a fake woman , a castrato .
I don't think it's farfetched to establ ish a close relation between
the emptiness of the castrato and the emptiness of the Parisian
new money.
Do ubtless, but Sa rrasine, who gi'es his name to the
nOidla, is a sculptor, and \I'e learn in the course of the
narrati'e that he has been assassina ted for ha'ing lO'ed
Zambinella. whom he be)je 'ed to be a woman. Your
in terpretation risks not corresponding to that of the a'
erage reader. who simply reads Balzac and "gets along. . .
But I assure you, I "get along" quite well when I read Balzac . In
any case, there are always at least two levels of reading. The
reader yOU mention is the nai\-e reader. who reads Balzac j ust
like that, spontaneously. and who enjoys read ing the story. finds
it in teresti ng, and reads on to the end , to learn how things turn
out.
Th is kind of reader consumes the anecdotal story line in its
temporal unfolding, page after page . month after month, yea r
after year. Indeed . he reads the text according to a millenary
logic. si nce this logic. for the Western world . goes back to the
Iliad and the Odvss)', and continues more or less up through
Hemi ngway.
:\nd then there is the reader attentive to the symbol ic, who
L'Express
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No, I don't think so, because I can only agree with Lacan: it is
not man who constitutes the symbolic, but the symbolic which
constitutes man. When man enters this world, he enters a sym
bolic order which is already in place.
And he cannot be "man" if he does not enter the symbolic
order.
You mean that from birth he is part of an upbringing,
an education, a social class, institutions that are already
established.
94
No, not at all. By the way, it's the psychosomaticians who propose
this method, not I .
A neurotic i s someone in whom a blockage has resulted from
various censorships which annihilate all his symbols. His silence
is a silence of censorship. The psychosomatic patient is in the
opposite position. He does not symbolize his body, which remains
matte, without echo . His silence is a silence of emptiness. His
cure progresses to the extent that the symbolic function is suc
cessfully reestablished in him, for it is precisely that function
which is hypertrophied in cases of neurosis.
You began writing about the importance of the symbolic
almost fifteen years ago, in Mythologies.
Yes, in part. Those pieces were the result of some very strong
feelings. I was annoyed , at the time, by a certain tone in the
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Well, the inscriptions, the gestures of daily life, the tiny rituals
of the city, the addresses, the food, their theater, which elaborates
signs and parades them as signs, while our theater is based. above
all, on expressiveness---everything Japanese seems to me to be
the fortuitous markings of a text. In Japan. I am constantly reading
signs.
But these signs are not written ones, properly speaking.
They are not written in books but traced on the silk of life. And
what fascinates me over there is that the sign systems, with their
extraordinary virtuosity. their subtlety, their strength and ele
gance, are, in the end , empty. They are empty because they do
not refer to an ultimate signified, as our signs do, hypostatized
in the name of Cod, science, reason, law, and so forth .
99
I'll give you a simple example, and you'll see my point easily. A
dictionary is composed of signifiers; i . e. , words printed in bold
type, each one of them furnished with a definition serving as its
signified. Now these signifieds, these dictionary definitions, are
themselves made up of other words, and so on forever. A dictionary
is a perfectly paradoxical object, both structured and indefinite,
which makes it a marvelous example, because it is an infinite
structure vertiginously off-center, since the alphabetical order of
its arrangement has no center.
In other words, what you like about Japan is that you
can read it in any order, as a dictionary is read.
Yes, but in the West there comes a point when the dictionary,
or, if you prefer, the inventory of everything in the world, comes
to a halt with God, who is the keystone of the arch, since God
can only be a signified, never a signifier: how could God ever
mean anything besides himself? While in Japan, as I read things,
there is no supreme signified to anchor the chain of signs, there
is no keystone, which permits signs to flourish with great subtlety
and freedom.
All civilizations in which monotheism plays a role are neces
sarily under the constraint of monism; they stop the play of signs
at some definite point. And that is the structural constraint of our
civilization. So you understand why I give such importance to
everything that tends to break away from Western monocentrism,
everything that opens onto a possible image of the plural .
It would be in teresting to go more deeply in to one of
100
Of course, but the parts of our meal aren't combined in the same
manner. The Western menu is very rigidly composed and ordered
In sequence.
Take restaurants: invariably they serve hors d'oeuvres, entrees,
roasts, cheeses, and desserts in an inexorable order. It's the logico
temporal order of the classical narrative, and it's inflexible, as
irreversible as it is in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in Les Liaisons
dangereuses or the latest popular novel.
While, in Japan, a meal is like a novel by Robbe-Grillet.
10 1
it, where the essential discussion takes place over dessert and
coffee. The course of the conversation follows the irreversible
order of the meal.
From the point of view of civilization, what do you de
duce from the fact that Japanese cuisine is at the antipodes
from ours?
Let's say that it's above all because a sign system which doesn't
include articulated language at some points is unimaginable.
Saussure, the principal founder of modern linguistics, thought
that linguistics was part of a larger science, the science of signs
an important part, doubtless, but j ust a part, the pioneering
achievements of which would be followed by the development
of other sectors into the larger discipline of semiology.
Today, however, I've come to the conclusion that even when
sign systems other than articulated language are considered, such
as food, or fashion, which we discussed earlier, it becomes ap
parent that these systems also are absolutely permeated by lan
guage.
What is semiology?
102
Because our language, like our menu, is very rigid, very centered,
to the extent to which it was codified in the seventeenth century
by a small social class .
What was called until the grammarian Rivarol "the genius of
the French language" masked the profound conviction that French
was the best language in the world, just because we put the subject
before the verb, and the verb before the complement. The clas
sical writers were convinced that such was the natural and logical
order of the mind. On that belief was founded French linguistic
nationalism.
103
104
105
It depends.
Well, are you an author or a writer?
lO6
The Grain
of the Voice
They don't put two antithetical words within the same sentence,
like Victor Hugo. Neither do they use metaphors, or if they do
slip one in, they treat it as something unclear which detracts from
the truth.
An author, on the other hand, works in the volume of language
we were just discussing, and is willing to renounce the guarantees
of transparent, instrumental writing.
You say that being an author isn't a question of style,
but neither is it the cultivation of obscinity.
107
have been the end of it, the whole narrative would have come
to a halt. Thus, there are two instances here, one symbolic, one
operative. The successful narrator is the one who knows how to
mix the two so that we cannot decide which one is the real reason.
An author's writing is essentially tied to a criterion of indeter
mmacy.
Aren't your two criteria restrictive?
I chose the title for its several possible meanings, and to this extent
it also represents one of the aims of the book, which is to show
the possibilities of a pluralistic criticism authorizing the interpre
tation of several meanings in a classical text. As for the oblique
bar opposing S and Z, it's a sign from linguistics indicating al
ternation between two terms of a paradigm. Strictly speaking, it
should be read S versus Z.
Yes, but why the opposition of those two letters?
108
Roland Barthes
on Criticism
1 10
First, let's make sure we agree on what a readerly text is. Some
history is useful here--cultural history, and the history of lan
guage instruction in France. Up until Flaubert's time, rhetoric
was taught, the art of writing. Since then, reading and writing
have been separated, and it is democratization that has caused
the loss of the art of writing while at the same time offering for
the reader's consumption cultural obj ects produced by the
bourgeoisie. Composition has survived, of course, but as an ex
ercise subject to professorial taste for correction, while the expli
cation de texte has assumed the major role. Learning to read, to
read well, has its positive side, but also a negative one, since the
gap has been widened between the small number of people who
write and the large number who read without transforming what
they're reading into writing. What separates the usual textual
analysis from structural analysis is that the latter, by seeking out
all the codes governing a text and its transformations, permits the
rewriting of texts.
The rewriting of the same text . . . Like translation
machines translating everything into the style ofDickens,
because the code for that kind of style has been discov
ered. But since pastiche isn't really literature, in order to
attain a new text, isn't it necessary to reintroduce the
subjective factor?
You know, the subjective has also been well defined these days.
Between one text and another, there are only differences of desire,
not of vocationr else a vocation is a phantasm that becomes
III
. . . texts that yield writing. But that literature doesn't exist yet,
or just barely. They are texts yet to come. There has been a break,
in this century and the last, and of course it is always the same
names that come up: Lautreamont, Artaud, sometimes Bataille,
liZ
whose texts seem readerly but which are often on the brink of
illegibility through the workings of a polyvalent logic.
But then who will read anymore? Who will read what,
and how?
Digressions
The Grain
114
of the Voice
carved wound.
Point number 1. The reading of a contradiction, which
should perhaps be accentuated rather than 'smoothed
out": this Japan presented immediately as an empire of
signs, and in the vel)' weave of the text as an "unheard
of symbolic system, entirely detached from our own," is
finally read as WRITING, the unfolding of a multiple prac
tice which exceeds the vel}' space of the sign (in its fun
damental hierarchy: signifier, signified, referent)-the
Space, if you like, of a hinge, where meaning ebbs and
flows, offers and refuses itself, in infinite interrogation
(e\'el)' signified already positioned as a signifier)-the
precise intenveaving of "codes" and the disappearance of
the hierarchy which founds the concept of "code." This
is marked in the text "A brightness so \'ivid, so subtle
that the sign vanishes before any particular signified has
had the time to 'take' "!"Empire of signs? Yes, if it is
understood that the signs are empty, and the ritual is
without a god."
Now comes the question of what is played out in your
text, let's say, between Saussure and Derrida, the end of
all 'formalistic" (positivistic, mechanistic) possibilities of
ll5
Digressions
1. FORMALISM
1 16
1 17
Digressions
2. EMPTINESS
1 18
the Father), while its neurotic form is repetition, and its social
form is stereotype (flourishing in so-called mass culture, in this
endoxal civilization of ours). In contrast, emptiness should no
longer be conceived (imagined) in the form of an absence (of
body, of things, feelings, words, etc. : nothing)-here we are the
victims of ancient physics; we have a somewhat chemical idea of
emptiness. Emptiness is closer to the new, the return of the new
(which is the contrary of repetition). I recently read in a scientific
encyclopedia (which marks the extent of my limited knowledge
on this point) the exposition of a theory in physics (the most
recent, I believe) which gave me some idea of this emptiness (I'm
becoming a believer in the metaphorical value of science); it is
Chew and Mandelstram's theory ( 196 1 ), called the "bootstrap"
theory (after the expression "to pull oneself up by one's own
bootstraps"); I quote: "The particles existent in the universe would
not be engendered from other, more elementary particles (thus
abolishing the ancestral specter of filiation, of determination), but
would represent the sum total of strong interactions at any given
moment (the world as an always provisional system of differences).
In other words, the set of particles would engender itself (self
consistence) . " The emptiness we are speaking of could be summed
up as the self-consistence of the world.
Point n umber 3. The symptom (in the sense of giving
oneself up, as Sollers says, to a cultural anamnesis) noted
here by your reading of haiku. Turning around the
impressionist or even surrealist interpreta tion of haiku
(consider Breton's use of haiku in his idealist defense of
the image-cf "signe ascendant" in La cle des champs),
you clearly indicate that "what is aimed at is the foun
dation of the sign, which is classification ''-underlining
at the same time the highly overdetermined character,
here, of all interpretation, whereas "this meaning does
not become internalized, does not spread or wander into
the infinity of metaphors, the spheres of the symboJ"
or again: "Nothing has been gained, the word-stone has
been cast for nothing: no waves, no ripples ofmeaning"
just what Basho points out:
1 19
Digressions
How admirable is he
Who does not think: "Life is fleeting"
When startled by lightning!
3. READABLE
120
it; that is more or less what classical texts have done (parsimo
niously), which makes them, whatever else they are, writing: a
new stage has begun, however, initiated here and there in the
nineteenth century, in which it is not meaning which is made
(liberally) plural within a single code (the one of "writing well")
but the entirety of language itself (as a "fluctuating hierarchy" of
codes, of logics) which is stirred up; this must still be done within
the appearance of communication, because the social and his
torical conditions for a liberation of language (in relation to sig
nifieds, to the property and propriety of discourse) have not yet
appeared anywhere. Thus, the present importance of the theo
retical (guiding) concepts of paragram, plagiarism, intertextuality,
false readability.
Point number 4. What is readable in the three preceding
points is of course the question of the materialist an
chorage ofthe writing designated by the word "japan"
an anchorage that can be determined from the articu
lations of a complex way of life (relatively autonomous
serial elements regulated, in their stratification, by re
lations of dominance and determination: in this case,
"cuisine" as well as "theater, " "wrestling " as well as "po
etry, " "manners" as well as "topology "), but also from
language -brutally confronting us with everything that
is ideological and unconscious in the way we live our
relation to language (a language which. as we know, is
not a superstructure-and which is also a "paternal lan
guage, " as you put it; i. e. , dominated by the instance of
the Name). Here it is a question of language. not only
as a "decentering " in relation to the obsession to com
municate. thus leaving room for a generalized writing of
traces and gestures. but also as a problematical site in
the dialectically arranged "scope " of recognized intellec
tual activities.
12 1
Digressions
4. LANGUAGE
122
that one can separate language from "literature , " that one can
teach French (as a foreign language) and repudiate French lit
erature (as "bourgeois"); unfortunately, language has no thresh
old, it cannot be stopped; one can at most close off and isolate
grammar (and thus teach it canonically), but not vocabulary, still
less the associative, connotative life of a language. A foreigner
learning French quickly finds himself (or at least he ought to, if
language instruction does its job) confronted by the same ideo
logical problems that face a Frenchman in his own language.
Literature is never anything but the deepening and extension of
language, and on that score it is the largest of ideological fields,
where the structural problem I mentioned a little while ago is
debated (I say all this drawing on my experiences in Morocco).
Language is infinite, and we must draw appropriate conclu
sions. Language begins before language; that is what I wanted to
say apropos of Japan, by my enthusiasm over the way I com
municated over there, outside a spoken language incomprehen
sible to me, but in the rustle, the emotive breath of that unknown
language. To live in a country where one doesn't know the lan
guage, and to live audaciously, outside tourist tracks, is the most
dangerous of adventures (in the naIve sense that word can have
in children's books). Such an adventure is more perilous (for the
"subject") than braving the j ungle, because one must exceed lan
guage, holding oneself within its supplementary margin, in its
depthless infinity. If I had to imagine a new Robinson Crusoe,
I would not place him on a desert island but in a city of twelve
million people where he could decipher neither speech nor writ
ing: that, I think, would be the modern form of Defoe's tale.
Point number 5. You write: "In the land I call Japan,
sexuality is in sex, not elsewhere "; but you also write:
"Over there, the body exists, unfolds, acts, gives itself,
without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to a
purely erotic project "; or this: "the great syntagm of bod
ies. " It 's as if we were confronted, upon abandoning
corporeal expression (i. e. , mindlbody dualism ) and any
space limited to fetishism or transference, by permuta
tions, and work (the transvestite, for example, does not
12 3
Digressions
5 . SEXUALITY
The delicacy of sexual play is a very important idea, and one that
is entirely unknown, it seems to me, in the West (a major in
centive to interest). The reason for this is simple. In the West,
sexuality lends itself only to a language of transgression, and that
but poorly; but to make of sexuality a field of transgression is still
to keep it imprisoned in a binary logic, a paradigm, a meaning.
To think of sexuality as a dark continent is still to submit it to
meaning (black/white). The alienation of sexuality is consubstan
tially linked to the alienation of meaning, by meaning. What is
difficult is not to liberate sexuality according to a more or less
libertarian plan but to disengage it from meaning, including
transgression as meaning. Look at the Arab countries again. There
certain rules of the "right" sexuality are easily transgressed by the
rather casual practice of homosexuality (on condition that ho
mosexuality never be named: but that is another problem, the
immense problem of the verbalization of the sexual, forbidden
in civilizations of "shame," while that same verbalization is cher
ished--confessions, pornographic representations-in civiliza
tions of "guilt"); but this transgression remains implacably subject
to a regime of strict meaning: homosexuality, a transgressive prac
tice, immediately reproduces in itself (by a kind of defensive
clogging-up, a reflex of fright) the purest paradigm imaginable:
active/passive, possessor/possessed, buggererlbuggeree, tapeur/tap(!
(these "pied-nair" words, of mixed French-Algerian ancestry, are
suited to the occasion: once again, the ideological value of lan
guage). Now, the paradigm is meaning; and so, in these countries,
any practice that goes beyond the alternative structure, confusing
or simply delaying it (what some people there refer to disdainfully
as making love), is at the same time interdicted and unintelligible.
Sexual "delicacy" is in contrast to the rough character of these
124
12 5
Digressions
6. SIGNIFIER
126
127
Digressions
7. WEAPONS
Interview: A Conversation
with Roland Barthes
129
130
131
132
133
134
1 35
me: for example, I like (and when I say "I like, " it simply means
"I can live with") a book that is rarely mentioned, Michelet,
whereas Writing Degree Zero, which I am less comfortable with,
is nevertheless more deeply imbedded in current histories of crit
icism and literature. If S/Z is an important book for me, it's
because I believe that I did indeed effect a change there; I brought
off a kind of mutation of my work. Where did this alteration
come from? Again, change is often brought about by others: it's
because I was surrounded by "formulators, " writers like Derrida,
Sollers, Kristeva (always the same names, of course), who taught
me things, persuaded me, opened my eyes. And I also think that
this change in theory, evidenced in S/Z, came as a response to
pressure, to determination from the critical operation itself. It's
because I began to operate on a text-and I almost feel like saying:
to operate a text-that was relatively short, giving myself, by a
stroke of good fortune, the right to spend months on thirty pages
and to really go over this text step by step, it's because of this that
the theoretical modification took place. If you like, it was my
luck (not in relation to the public, I repeat, but personally) to
have had the intuition, or the patience, or even the naIvete, to
think of a "step-by-step" approach to the text; I think that's what
determined the change in theory: I changed the level of perception
of the object, and thereby changed the object itself. It's well known
that on the order of perception, if the level of perception is changed,
so is the object; this is clear, if only from that plate of Diderot's
Encyclopedia that caused such a sensation at the time, showing
a flea seen under a contemporary microscope, magnified to several
square feet so that it became something quite other than a flea
(it's a surrealistic object). A change in the level of perception
multiplies objects like some kind of diabolical mirror. And so, in
going step by step over a text, I changed the object, and in that
way was led to a change in theory.
This change in perspective realized through the "step
by-step" method brings your reading of Sarrasine into
the world of connotation, and in fact, in the initial chap
ter of S/Z, you speak of connotation as the appropriate
instrument for approaching the classical readerly text.In
1 36
1 37
ing of connota tive language), but it's clear that S/Z must
itselfbe read as a text, that is, as you said about Semiotike,
a book in which theory and writing are rigorously ho
mogeneous. I find it difficult to formulate the question
I would like to ask here, but perhaps it could be expressed
if I ask you to situate S/Z in relation to the passage I
quoted from Semiotike.
The first question, as far as I can see, comes down to this: Can
semiology allow us, through the intermediary of the concept of
connotation, to return to a kind of sociology of literature? (We're
not discussing the epistemological problem of sociology, a science
which is presently much criticized from a political and ideological
point of view; I'm not considering this problem; whether it's called
sociology or something else is of no concern to me. ) I would say
that there is in fact a possibility of sociological exploitation in
S/Z through the identification of its textual codes, because at least
four of the five codes I identified are, or could be, answerable to
sociology: the proairetic code (actions), the semic code (psycho
logical semes), the cultural code (knowledge), and the herme
neutic code (the search for truth, for a solution to the mystery of
the text). For example, one could reread Balzac seeking out cul
tural intertextuality (the references to knowledge), a rather dense,
sometimes even nauseating, layer in the Balzacian text. This
would be a good problem to tackle, because then we could doubt
less see that these cultural codes have marked each author in a
different way. For example, Flaubert also came to grips with
cultural codes; he was truly bogged down in them, and he tried,
in complete contrast to Balzac, to free himself from them through
ambiguous attitudes, irony, plagiarism, simulation; as a result,
we have that vertiginous book, so amazingly modern, Bouvard
and Pecuchet. Thus, it would be possible to base a kind of cultural
sociology on literary semiotics, but once again, even there, it
would have to be a freshly conceived literary sociology, one which
could and should profit from what I would call the intertextual
sensibility, a sensitivity to the intertext. I think that such a sen
sitivity to intertextuality could lead to new horizons. The first
rule of this intertextual analysis would be to understand, for ex-
1 38
139
etrating manner. But, on the other hand, and this is the second
part of the ambiguity, S/Z is not entirely a representation, that
is to say an analytical commentary, because, as you said,
S/Z is written. I don't mean, as I have often explained before,
that it is well written; that's not where the problem lies, although
one should never be too quick to reject the requirement of style.
The fact that S/Z conforms to certain stylistic values in the tra
ditional sense of the word is important, because style is a begin
ning of writing, in that it is a rejection of ecrivance: to accept
style means that one refuses to consider language as a pure in
strument of transmission, and that is a beginning of writing. But
if S/Z belongs to the activity of writing, it's not only on the level
of the crafting of sentences, but above all because I labored over
what used to be called the composition, i.e . , the arrangement,
the organization of the lexias and their commentaries, the digres
sions. If I think back to when I wrote the book (I wrote and
rewrote, I took a great deal of trouble over it, with passionate
interest), I'd say that I don't remember at all those moments when
what are usually called ideas carne to me, but I have a vivid
memory of the time I spent struggling to piece the book together,
and that's why I consider it to be written. (That's also why the
book S/Z is an entirely different object from the seminar S/Z,
which I gave at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes before I
wrote the book, even though they both deal with the same con
ceptual material.) To the extent to which S/Z is written, it escapes
its own analytical commentary and belongs to textual productiv
ity. I might add that there were two types of reaction to S/Z (I
mean, forms of reaction): there was the traditional reaction, crit
ical articles and reviews in the press, which are absolutely nec
essary for the book to be able to play, as it must, the social game
and then there was the other reaction, the letters: I received letters
from readers, some of whom I didn't know, which linked up with
the reading of S/Z, multiplying the meanings I had found and
finding others; they would tell me, often in a very intelligent
and in any case, by definition, unchallengeable-manner, that
I could have found such and such a connotation for this lexia,
etc. I would say that, for me, the true justification of my work
was not in the reaction of the critics but in these letters, because
140
141
142
Let's say that the word "reactionary, " which I have used and
occasionally still use, perhaps through a lack of imagination, is
really too strong here, too monological ("theological"). I think
that literature, even classical literature, is never completely re
actionary, just as revolutionary and progressive literature is at
bottom, even when it's extremely conservative in its form and
contents, a literature that is in part paragrammatical, carnival
esque; it is contradictory by its very structure, which is both servile
143
Yes. It's a problem. I'm very interested these days in this problem
of innovative, mutant texts, a problem linked to stereotype and
repetition. For example, it's obvious that the writings of Marx
were a mutant text, but since then we've been repeating this
discourse-there hasn't been a new mutation. Lenin, Gramsci,
Mao-all very important, but their discourse is a repetition of
Marx.
Foucault speaks precisely of Marx and Freud as founders
of discursiveness: whereas someone like Galileo founds
a science that develops, extending itself beyond the space
of its discourse, Marx, as well as Freud, founds a scientific
discourse that is constantly returning toward its source,
questioning, analyzing, perpetually rereading it. Would
this be close to your conception of the problem of rep
etition?
144
145
146
To answer you, I'll play a bit on words. You ask: "How do you
conceive of the end of the book"; I'm not sure what to reply to
the verb itself. In fact, I don't foresee this end of the book, I mean
that I can't make it fit into a social or historical programming; at
the very most, I might be able to see it, insofar as t o see contrasts
147
148
149
you think are the main problems? What valid form could
the teaching of literature take at present?
The Fatality of
Culture, the Limits of
Counterculture
Sade, Fourier, Loyola has iust been published, there has been
a special issue of Tel Que!, and appearances on television and in
the leftist press . . . Does this return of Roland Barthes to the
spotlight herald some new discovery, some new dramatic commit
ment? Roland Barthes has never really been away, and he con
tinues, within the problematics of culture, what he considers the
chief task of present-day subversion: the elucidation of writing
"which follows, step by step, the rending of bourgeois culture."
At a time when great confusion reigns in the field of subversive
action, when violence (the language of violence) exhausts itself in
often arbitrary and thoughtless sorties, his reflections on the limits
of counterculture are of great interest.
You hal!e been credited with this paradoxical self
definition: "I am in the rear guard of the avant
garde " ...
15 1
152
153
154
155
156
That is a problem, and I'm not the only one who has run into
it. Obviously, our work takes place within small groups. This
work has its esoteric aspects, and it is definitely not meant to
appeal to what are called the masses. This should be made very
clear, so that there are no misunderstandings on this point. But
I do feel that this relatively closeted work is necessary to the mise
en scene of a destruction of meaning. Our task, as intellectuals,
is not politicization but a critique of meanings, a critique of
meaning itself.
On the cultural level, French society is so dominated by petit
bourgeois cultural models that one would have to compromise
oneself (and one's actions) within these models in order to reach
the vast majority of people.
Having said that, one could certainly ask oneself, in the wake
of Brecht-and that is the role of creators (for example in the
theater, the cinema)--whether one couldn't attempt to build an
art which would have a great power of communication, in relation
to French society as it actually is, in its very alienation, an art
which would also comprise serious elements (I would even say
severe elements) of progressivism, subversion, or nihilism.
It's up to the creators to search and to discover. We might add
that even if these creators were to arrive at an effective result,
they would find a mass of difficulties on the level of the diffusion,
the dissemination of their work. There is incontestable censorship
on the level of cultural institutions (on the radio, the television,
perhaps even at school and at the universities) which would be
automatically reinforced. There has always been a barrage of
resistance as soon as an art form begins to seem subversive. But
it is not the most violent forms which are the most dangerous.
158
On the one hand, very strong and subtle codes are never natu
ralized (they show themselves off as sign systems), and on the
other hand, they never refer to ultimate signifieds, to stable, closed
signifieds . Perhaps this has to do with the Japanese past, with
160
16 1
162
163
It's true that the image of myself I receive from others presents
that ambiguity. Because I was one of the first semiologists, and
that carries with it an aura of scientificity. And yet, on the con-
164
165
That's where the bad faith begins. If you agree to play that role,
you're going to opt for a type of activity which is labeled scientific,
a type of scientific discourse I call ecrivance. And you're going
to miss the text, because you won't be in a transferential rela
tionship of self-analysis with the text. You simply won't be reading
the text. You'll treat it as a semiological or historical document,
for example; you'll be practicing an orthodox literary semiology,
you'll try to reconstruct narrative models, narrative syntaxes, or
poetics in the Jakobsonian sense. But you'll remain outside read
ing. You will not be part of an activity which displaces the reading
subject through contact with the text, and so you will not displace
the writing subject: you will be condemned to consider the subject
who wrote the text under study as an author in the traditional
sense of the word, a subjectivity which expressed itself in a work.
The only remedy against this would be to rewrite the work.
And now we come to the question of the subject. "If I
were a writer, and dead, how I would like my life to be
summed up, through the care of a friendly and unselE
conscious biographer, in a few details, a few tastes and
interests, a few reRections--call them 'biographemes.' "
This and other things you have written lead me to suppose
that you are delicately reintroducing, subtly or perhaps
inadvertently (please excuse the suggestion), the notion
of the subject-author taught to us by classical, humanistic
tradition .. .
166
167
168
You are the first to bring up that point, which I feel is an important
one. There are two quite obvious replies, the first of which is that
Sade frames the argument. And so the book is not a trilogy, a
simple parade of authors. A certain perspective is set up: Sade
before and after. The second reply is that "Sade I" was written
as an article, along a certain discursive line. "Sade II" is composed
of fragments. I had the feeling that I had not completely exhausted
my reading of Sade after having written "Sade I"; I felt that I had
written a rather ethnological description which neglected the in
triguing points of Sadean language. I reread Sade. I redid my
reading notes. Then I realized that Sade was an enigmatic ex
perience for me, an exaltation and a disappointment: in fact, I
saw that I thought the same way about Sade as when I was writing
"Sade I." And so, with "Sade II, " what is interesting is the decision
to write a fragmented Sade, a decision related to the Sadean text
itself. I'm very interested in these chopped-up repetitions.
In "Sade /" and "Sade II, " you talk about the Sadean
secret.Shouldn 't you explain what you mean by the word
"secret " in this case?
There's no need to make a fuss about the word "secret": this word
is a little dangerous because it suggests a certain hermeneutic
vision of the writer and the work, it implies the idea of deci
pherment. In fact, there are two Sadean secrets, the first of which
I considered in "Sade I," the second in "Sade II." The first secret
turns out to be the secret of Saint-Fonds: a libertine shuts himself
away for mysterious purposes he refuses to disclose to his closest
friends. We know what he does in this hideaway: he blasphemes,
he rails at God . The libertine's secret is thus to have a relationship
with God , which is inadmissible. The second secret is alleged in
those moments when Sade, after having described erotic practices
in such extreme detail that one can't imagine that there could be
anything further to say, says: "And then other extraordinary things
169
170
This text is not perfect . On the one hand, there are small recon
stitutive essays, purely taxonomic (scraps of Fourier's systems of
hieroglyphics, numbers, etc . ) : thus, they do not spring directly
from the hedonistic vein you mentioned, they are semiological.
But it is true that I have a real attachment to certain Fourierist
themes: sybaritic themes, voluptuous in the etymological sense
of the word. Food, for example: Fourier speaks of food with the
avidity of hunger; he adored French fruits, and so do I. There is
a linkage between his tastes and mine. I thoroughly enjoy his
descriptions of lemonade, pears, tiny pastries, melons.
Equally important to me is the phalanstery as an organized,
closed place where pleasure circulates. A sanatorium, for ex
ample, at least when I was in one, much resembled a phalanstery.
I was happy there. The organization of a lived-in space, a hab
itable place, a sociality which is both affectionate and "well
aired," at ease-this is an important theme in human life.
There is also the third great Fourierist pleasure: praise of neo
logisms.
So you're vel)' attentive to all the systematics of writers
or founders of languages: systematics that, although quite
structured, are not closed by God. I'm thinking, for ex
ample, of what you write about Fourier: "Fourierist con
struction posits the rights of a baroque semantics, i.e.,
open to the proliferation of the signifier: infinite and yet
structured."
17 1
Gulliver,
no.
5, March 1973
This interview with Roland Barthes took place before the pub
lication of The Pleasure of the Text, which was of course the major
subject of discussion. The idea behind the interview was not to
"explain" Barthes, or to summarize his new book-it is to be hoped,
rather, that those intrigued will read The Pleasure of the Text
and form their own opinions. Barthes's first formulations of the
idea of pleasure appear in the preface of Sade, Fourier, Loyola,
but his wonderful text on lapan, Empire of Signs, was already,
in the full sense of the term, a book of pleasure.
The question of aesthetic pleasure hardly seems original:
it was raised, for example, by the generation of Valery
Larbaud, Schlumberger, etc. But is it really the same
question? Or, to be more precise: what changes when
the terms are manipulated ever so slightly, replacing "lit
erary pleasure" with the "pleasure of the text "?
173
174
175
176
An Almost Obsessive
Relation to Writing
Instruments
178
179
It's not that simple. In my case, there are two stages in the creative
process. First comes the moment when desire is invested in a
graphic impulse, producing a calligraphical object. Then there
is the critical moment when this object is prepared for the anon
ymous and collective consumption of others through transfor
mation into a typographical object (at that moment, the object
is already beginning its commercialization). In other words-first
I write the text with a pen, then I type the whole thing on a
typewriter (with two fingers, because I don't know how to type).
Up until now, these two stages-handwriting, typewriting
were, in a way, sacred for me. But I should note that I am trying
to change my ritual.
I have just bought myself a present: an electric typewriter. Every
day I practice typing for a half an hour, in the fond hope of
acquiring a more "typewriterly" writing.
I was led to this decision by personal experience. Since I'm
often very busy, I have sometimes been obliged to have things
typed for me by others (I don't like to do this, but it has happened).
When I thought about this, it bothered me. Without going into
a big demagogical speech, I'll just say that to me this represented
an alienated social relationship: a person, the typist, is confined
by the master in an activity I would almost call an enslavement,
when writing is precisely a field of liberty and desire! In short, I
said to myself: "There's only one solution. I really must learn to
type. " Philippe Sollers, to whom I mentioned this resolution,
reassured me, moreover, that once you learn to type well enough,
writing directly at the typewriter creates a kind of unique spon
taneity which has its own beauty.
My conversion, I admit, is far from accomplished. I doubt that
I'll ever completely stop writing things out by hand, outmoded
and eccentric though that may be. In any case, that's my situation.
I'm making an honest effort to change with the times. And I've
gotten a little bit used to my new regime.
Do you attach equaJ importance to your workplace?
180
I simply cannot work in a hotel room. It's not the hotel itself that
bothers me. It's not a question of ambiance or decor, but of spatial
organization (it's not for nothing that I'm called a structuralist!).
To be able to function, I need to be able structurally to repro
duce my usual work space. In Paris, the place where I work (every
day from 9:30 a . m . to 1 p . m . ; this regular workaday schedule for
writing suits me better than an aleatory schedule, which supposes
a state of continual excitement) is in my bedroom. This space is
completed by a music area (I play the piano every day, at about
the same time: 2: 30 in the afternoon) and by a "painting" area
l say "painting" with lots of quotation marks (about once a week
I perform as a Sunday painter, so I need a place to splatter paint
around).
In my country house, I have faithfully reproduced those three
areas. It's not important that they're not in the same room. It
isn't the walls but the structures that count.
But that's not all. The working space itself must also be divided
into a certain number of functional microplaces. First there should
be a table. (I like it to be of wood. I might say that I'm on good
terms with wood. ) There has to be a place on the side, another
table where I can spread out the different things I'm working on.
And there has to be a place for the typewriter, and a desk for my
different memos, notes, "microplannings" for the next few days,
"macroplannings" for the trimester, etc. (I never look at them,
mind you. Their simple presence is enough. ) Finally, I have my
index-card system, and the slips have an equally strict format: one
quarter the size of my usual sheet of paper. At least that's how
they were until the day standards were readjusted within the
framework of European unification (in my opinion, one of the
cruelest blows of the Common Market). Luckily, I'm not com
pletely obsessive. Otherwise, I would have had to redo all my
cards from the time I first started writing, twenty-five years ago.
Since you 're an essayist rather than a novelist, what part
does documentation play in the preparation of your books?
18 1
182
184
That voice does indeed have a grain (at least to my ears); to describe
this grain, I find images of a milkweed acidity, of a nacreous
vibration, situated at the exquisite and dangerous limit of the
toneless. Her voice, moreover, had the only grain of the entire
evening.
And Callas?
I have said this before, Panzera's art (I think that I may now say,
quite simply: his voice) was of exemplary value to me, a value
that went far beyond simple aesthetic enjoyment: he initiated me,
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186
Opera is total spectacle, and perhaps for that very reason it is off
limits: to go to the opera is a complicated enterprise, you have
to reserve seats well in advance, the tickets are expensive, and so
you feel you must stay until the end of the performance. I would
like to see an opera as free and as popular as a movie theater or
a wrestling arena: you could go in and out according to your
mood, you'd spend part of your evening taking a "hit" of opera
but this opera did exist once, the aristocratic opera, the opera of
Balzac's novels. In short, I dream of a box at the opera, or of a
ticket costing only as much as a movie ticket.
Have you been to the Paris Opera recently?
1 87
social class, first of all because tickets are expensive, and also
because the enjoyment of opera requires certain cultural re
flexes-of background, ambiance, sophistication-which are still
class reflexes. And yet opera itself contains many progressive ele
ments: it's a total spectacle, mobilizing many of the senses, many
sensual pleasures, including the possibility for the public to enjoy
itself, in a way, and this all-encompassing, spectacular theatri
cality has been much sought after by our culture, from ancient
theater to rock concerts.
And opera is very well suited to avant-garde interpretations:
everything is possible, the stage is a blank canvas, the technical
means are there. Finally, the operatic performance can divide
into two spectacles in a curious but quite enjoyable fashion: I
recently saw Gluck's Orpheus, and aside from the wonderful mu
sic, it really was a silly thing to watch, an unconscious parody of
its own genre, but not only did this element of kitsch fail to upset
me, it positively entertained me: I enjoyed the double truth of
both the spectacle and its parody: laughter (or a smile) which is
not destructive-perhaps that is one form of the culture of the
future.
189
Text
The Pleasure
of
the
ten,
it was writ
1 90
191
neither the dominating nor the dominated class, but the thi rd
class, the ones who are neither producers nor proprietors nor their
accomplices: students, for example, and certain classes of young
people .
You 're often rather enigmatic o n the subject o f avant
garde literature. You say that it can be effective even
without being read! One gets the impression that you
find the pleasure of the text in writers hostile to formal
research in itself even though, in their own way, they
may have advanced its boundaries in their works-for
example, Michelet, Brecht, or Zola.
In my opinion, we can find what we call text, writing, and there
fore avant-gardism, in writers of the past such as Proust, Michelet,
Brecht; it's not a question of "form" (still less of "formalism") but
of impulse: whenever it's the body which writes, and not ideology,
there's a chance the text will join us in our modernity.
If it's rather difficult to talk about the current avant-garde, it's
because there has been a change of obj ects over the years . Today
the avant-garde object is essentially theoretical: the double pres
sure of politics and intellectuals ensures that it is now theoretical
positions (and their exposition) which are avant-garde, and not
necessarily creative works themselves.
Not that there is any lack of these works (more unpublished
than published, though), but as it is difficult to j udge them by
that antiquated criterion of "taste , " one ends up j udging them
less according to their textual effect (besides, why shouldn't there
be a great deal of attrition and loss in the avant-garde, as there
is elsewhere?) than by the theoretical intelligence they display.
And we must remember that "theory, " which is the decisive
practice of the avant-garde, does not have a progressive role in
itself; its active role is to reveal as past what we still believe to be
present: theory morti fies, and that is what makes it avant-garde.
Envisaging the future of literature, you announced that
it is heading for disaster. What do you mean by that?
1 92
I can only say (and I'm not alone in saying this) that literature
has been historically defined by a certain type of society. When
society changes, i nescapably, either in a revolutionary or a cap
italistic direction (because the death of cultural objects does not
determine the direction of political change), then so does liter
ature (in the institutional, ideological, and aesthetic sense that
this word had not long ago) : it can either disappear completely
(a society without l iterature is perfectly conceivable) or so change
its conditions of production, consumption, and writing, in short
its value, that it will have to change its name as well. After all,
what is left of the fonns of the old literature?
A few modes of discourse, publishing houses faced with growing
economic diffi culties, a fragile and unfaithful public weakened
by mass culture, which is not literary . . . The great mainstays
of literature are passing: when Aragon and l\1alraux have gone,
there will be no more "great writers. " The Nobel ideology is
forced to take refuge in authors who live in the past, and even
those must be supported by a political trend.
You have written a magnificent book on three logothetes,
three founders of a linguistic style: Sade, Fourier, Loyola.
Louis-Jean Calvet, in the edition of L'Arc which was
devoted to you and your work, refers to you as a logothete
in your own right.
In a general manner, I am unable to say who I am--or that I
am th is, that, or whatever, because in saying it. I would only be
adding one more text to the others I have written, without any
guarantee that this text would be "truer" than any other. We are
all, especially when we write, interpretable bei ngs, but it is the
other, and never ourselves, who possesses the power of interpre
tation. As a subject, I cannot apply any pred icate, any adjective
to myselfxcept by d isregard ing my unconscious, which is un
knowable bv me. And not onlv are we unable to conceive of
:
ourselves th rough adjectives. \\ e cannot even authenticate the
adjectives applied to us by others: they leave us mute; for us, they
are critical fictions.
What I can say here is that a logothete is not only and not even
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195
Le
Monde, November
15, 1974
197
Les
13, 1975
1 99
200
20 1
202
That was the structuralist phase: the goal was to understand what
understanding is. So that proposition wasn't a paradox, it was
even epistemologically well-founded.A writer never becomes aware
of the i ncreasing obscurity of his language with a light heart;
language is not an infinite translation system. There is a complete
register of ideas, of clause-sentences, which can be produced only
in a certain obscurity . We have to accept this, to trust history,
even the sidelights of history, which will get things moving again
sooner or later. Besides, obscurity itself can be a theatrical tool
of writing, one needn't necessarily give it up . . . even if one
catches the classicist virus and begins envying a kind of formu
lation that has the appearance, in any case, of clarity.
You're the leader of a school of criticism. What does this
mean to you?
For a writer, nothing is more difficult than obtaining a precise
idea of his own role and image: your image comes to you only
in fragments, and it's al most impossible to know precisely what
happens to the work you do. Besides, I haven't the vocation to
be a chef d'ecole.
When one ofyour innovations starts showing up all over,
like some kind of nervous tic, how do you feel about it?
I'm very philosophical and tolerant about that. It's inevitable, and
it doesn't bother me.
Are you a "repressed " novelist? ] almost said a novelist
manque ...
20 3
204
Do
mu
Life
of Rance, that the cat as vellow ... and it's alreadv a novel.
.
Le
206
207
assurance that they are also texts of pleasure . These are texts that
may displease you, provoke you, but which, at least temporarily,
in the flash of an i nstant, change and transmute you, effecting
that expenditure of the self in loss .
This theme of bliss skirts other themes, for example, not drugs
in the proper sense, but "addiction , " or certain forms of per
version.
Without getting involved in a distribution of prizes, if
you had to offer examples of texts of bliss, which ones
would you mention?
Let's say, texts of the avant-garde, texts that don't tend toward
the probable and the realistic . As soon as a text submits to a
code of verisimilitude, no matter how i ncendiary it may be
. . . I'm thinking of Sade, for example: it's tempting to put Sade
with the texts of bliss, and he belongs there on many counts, not
because he speaks of bliss, but by the manner in which he does
so; but despite all this, the Sadean text, because it is subject to a
code of verisimil itude through the constraint of its period, remains
aligned with texts of pleasure . The text of bliss should be on the
side of a certain illegibility. It should unsettle us, not only on
the level of our imagination, but on the level of language itself.
Then the work of Severo Sarduy, for example, would be
closer to jouissance.
Completely. And Sollers's writings. But this is difficult to explain
because the criteria for judging texts of bliss are still obscure,
whereas those for judging texts of pleasure are readily imaginable.
Especially since time has a tendency to turn texts of bliss
into texts of pleasure.
Of course . Culture recuperates . Recuperation is the great law of
history.
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209
210
21 1
212
The three
arrogances
21 3
214
21 5
216
The amateur
Another word I picked out is "amateur, " a word often
used by Roger Vailland. What does "amateur " mean to
you?
This theme interests me. I can
empirical fashion: when I have
in the completely assumed role
mous benefit of the amateur's
21 7
imago.
What is your relation to music? You say that you play
music as an amateur, but playing the piano involves
regular practice, a continuous effort.
I studied piano when I was a child. My father's sister, who lived
in Bayonne, was a piano teacher. And so I lived in an atmosphere
of music. But I haven't studied since, I have no technique, no
speed. I did learn to read music at an early age, and my fingers
follow as best they can. So I can sight-read music, but I don't
really know how to play. Which is fine for amateur playing.
Despite lagging tempi and false notes, I still manage to attain the
materiality of the musical text, because it passes into my fingers.
The sensuality of music is not purely auditory, it is also muscular.
The amateur is not a consumer. Contact between the amateur's
body and his art is very close, imbued with presence. That's what
is beautifu l about it, and that's where the future lies. But here
things open onto a problem of civilization. Technical develop
ment and the evolution of mass culture reinforce the division
between producers and consumers to a frightening extent. We
are a consumer society, and not at all a society of amateurs .
History has its repercussions, its mishaps, that famous bell curve
familiar to statisticians. There have been periods of alienation
(monarchical or even feudal societies) where there was a real
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219
220
Reading
One thing strikes me: you 're one of the few critics who
says: HI love to read. "
I wouldn't wa nt to deprive you of an illusion , all the more so in
that I do love to read . But I am not a great reader, I'm a casual
reader, casual in the sense that I very qu ickly take the measure
of my own pleasure. If a book bores me, I have the courage, or
cowardice, to drop it. I'm freeing myself more and more from
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222
The novelistic
] was struck by that sentence where you say "] think of
myself not as a critic but as a novelist-not of the nOld
but of the novelistic. ] love the novelistic, but ] know
that the novel is dead. "
The novelistic is a mode of discourse unstructured by a story; a
mode of notation, investment, interest in daily reality, in people,
in everything that happens in life. The transformation of this
novelistic material into a novel seems very difficult to me because
I can't imagine myself elaborating a na rrative object where there
would be a story, which to me means essentially verbs in the
imperfect and past historic, characters who are psychologically
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224
mean that one can't be i nnocent of it, that would be bad faith,
but one can't be innocent of it simply.
We've known this since Flaubert, whose attitude toward stu
pidity is quite complex-apparently critical, but falsely so, that's
obvious. An attitude of uneasiness.
In any case, stupidity's mode of being is triumph. One can do
nothing against stupidity. One can only internalize it, take a small
homeopathic dose of it-but not too much .
Whereas Mythologies was completely directed against
stupidity.
225
Yes, Brecht: I've always loved his theater, and his intellectual
work perhaps even more. His last essays constitute an admirable
book, Writings on Politics and Society, translated four or five
years ago . A book both just and violent. A text I constantly want
to quote . While writing Roland Barthes, I wasn't sure at one point
that I'd have enough to say, and I considered-if only as a fan
tasy-inserting passages from Brecht.
I discovered Brecht in 19 54, when the Berliner Ensemble came
to present Mother Courage at the invitation of the Theatre des
Nations, and I remember very well being up in the balcony of
the Sarah Bernhardt Theater with Bernard Dort, where I was
literally inflamed with enthusiasm for that production, but, let
me add right away, inflamed also by the twenty or so lines of
Brecht printed in the theater program. I had never read a language
like that on theater and art.
What did you discover?
It's a discovery that has evolved . Fi rst of all, I was captivated by
the alliance of extremely vigilant, informed, and firm Marxist
thought with a sense of pleasure, of forms, colors, lighting, ma
terials, all that artistic materiality so extraordinarily thought out.
I understood that the product of these two constraints was the
very thing to do, the object to be desired . Then I read more
Brecht, and discovered in him that ethic of both pleasure and
intellectual vigilance, responsibility, an ethic wasting no time
with pathos, with humanist or free-will sentimentality.
There is also a sly side to Brecht, and if I may say so-the
word also has the connotation of excessive subtlety-a certai n
Chinese aspect.
You don 't reduce Brecht to his theater, as many others
do?
No. He is a great writer of ideas . In Writings on Politics and
Society the essay takes on a thousand forms. Not just dissertations,
but bits of dialogue, projects, announcements, notes, schemes:
everything that makes things lively.
226
Gide
In Roland Barthes, you speak of Gide as your "Ur-suppe, "
your primordial literary broth.
We no longer talk enough about Gide. He was important to me
when I was young. Doubtless, this masked other things: I didn't
have any literary contacts with Surrealism, whereas I had nu
merous contacts with Gide.And I've always felt greatly drawn to
Gide. He wrote at least one great book, a great modern book:
Paludes, which should be reevaluated today, without a doubt.
And the Tournai, which I always particularly liked , in connection
with the themes that interest me: that authenticity which out
maneuvers itself, twisting, until it is no longer authenticity. The
thematics of the Tournai is very close to that of the fragments of
Roland Barthes.
Criticism
Let me put things in the proper context: you had written
a series of prefaces to the plays of Racine, which were
coJ/ected and published, with an introduction, as On
Racine. Then a Sorbonne professor. himself the writer
of a thesis on Racine. wrote a pamphlet entitled New
Criticism or New Imposture, a pamphlet directed against
several writers. you in particular. To which you re
sponded with your text Critique et Verite. Aside from
the fact that Picard had written a huge historical thesis
on Racine that few peopJe had read, whereas everyone
227
228
Japan
You say that, of all your books, Empire of Signs is "the
most happily written. "
I allowed myself to say that. Why? Why shouldn't one say what
one thi nks about one's own books? Especially since those very
subtle affective bonds one has with them do not necessarily co
incide with the evaluation of critics, of friends and colleagues.
Thus, I haven't any close, personal, corporeal ties to a well-known
book like Writing Degree Zero, or even Mythologies, whereas I
feel very close to a lesser-known book of mine, Michelet.
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230
It's the beginning of the u ncoupl ing that became more evident
in The Pleasure of the Text.
Under the circumstances, it was also the pleasure of the
site.
I've always enjoyed my trips to Japan; each time I lived the life
of an ethnologist, as it were, but without the bad faith of the
Western ethnologist who goes to examine foreign customs. In
Japan I even behaved contrary to my character, with impulsive
energy that I wouldn't have at home: nocturnal wanderings, in
a huge city, the largest in the world, a city completely unfamiliar
to me, and I don't speak a word of Japanese. But I always felt
entirely at ease. At four i n the morning, lost i n out-of-the-way
neighborhoods, I was always very happy. Whereas, if I were to
go wandering here, at the same late hour, in Bagnolet-I could
certainly go, but it would never have the same fascination for
me.
As for what i nterested me in Japan-that's why I speak of being
an ethnologist-I was constantly on the alert for all the tips I
might receive, and I investigated all of them. If I was told about
a place I might like, even in rather vague terms, I didn't give up
until I'd found it. That's the ethnologist's attitude: exploration
lured by desire.
You also say that you 're an ethnologist in Racine, In
Sade, or Proust.
In that fragment I explain what I like about ethnology. Not the
ethnology of primitive peoples, which has run out of territory and
dried up, but the ethnology of modernity, of the big city, or the
ethnol ogy of France, introduced by Michelet. And Proust, Sade,
Racine, they are entire populations, societies.
Cruising
I would like YOU to define this fabulous word, which
appears sever;l times in Roland Barthes: "cruising. "
23 1
Perversion
This sentence of yours: "Perversion, quite simply, makes
one happy. "
Quite simply.
Aside from the opposition perversion/simply, what does
that mean, "perversion ?
"
232
Pratiques,
no.
5 , February 1975
Literature / Teaching
You have written that you don 't like the spoken interview
which is tape-recorded and then transcribed: "The in
terview is a discount article, " as much for the "thought"/
"form" disjunction it implies as for the repetition it sanc
tions, since the interviewee must talk about what he has
already "written. "
So we have chosen the format of a questionnaire in
the hope that your answers will help bridge the gap be
tween our position (the teaching profession) and yours
(to be defined?). We would like to draw out your image
repertoire on a subject that, though covered by many
discourses, is as yet largely unexplored: the teaching of
literature.
1. Can "literature " be taught? If we provisionally de
fine the teaching function as the transmission of a col
lected body of knowledge, we can ask ourselves:
-If this knowledge exists, as a collected body of in
formation
-If it does exist, of what type is it
-If it does exist, is it useful to students, and in what
way
2. The pleasure of the text. What could be the pleas
ure of the text in a relation involving the teacher and his
knowledge (?), the student and his knowledge (?), con
fronted by a text as the object of work to be done ?
3. The teaching relationship. Pleasure/knowledge/
234
Literature / Teaching
23 5
236
Literature / Teaching
237
semblable.
At present, things are changing. "Literature , " the text, can no
longer coincide with this function of mathesis for three reasons:
l . Today our world is a global village. It's a profuse world ,
and what we learn about it is made known immediately, but we
are bombarded by fragmentary, controlled bits of information.
Since knowledge of the world is no longer filtered, this world
would not fit easily into a literary mathesis.
2. The world is too surprising, its unexpectedness is so exces
sive that it goes beyond the codes of popular wisdom. Thus, Brecht
noted correctly that no literature could deal with what happened
in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Excess and astonishment make literary expression impossible.
Literature, as mathesis, was the closure of a homogeneous body
of knowledge.
3. It's banal to say that knowledge has a relation to science,
but science is plural today: there is not one science but many
sciences, the old dream of the ni neteenth century has collapsed .
238
Literature / Teaching
239
240
24 1
Literature / Teaching
psychology. This reader who cannot write proj ects his image
repertoire (the narcissistic zone of the psyche) very far from his
muscular, carnal body, the body of jouissance. He is drawn into
the trap of the image-repertoire.
Is it still possible to learn how to read? Yes, if the function of
institutional codes is clearly identified . To begin with , the ac
complishments of liberal secular schooling must be maintained,
but redirected toward the exercise of ['esprit critique, the deci
pherment of codes, supported by semiological studies.
Reading, in fact, m ust be considered as a critical ap
prenticeship of codes, as the detection of the organized
behind the natural on all levels of reading (novels, com
ics, films . . . ); we m ust establish what you call a new
"regime of readerliness. "
Yes, a reader must learn to demystify appearances, to flush out
the transcendental, idealist signified . There ought to be an ethics
of semiology, which would explain how semiology can sharpen
the critical spirit. As for psychoanalysis, it can teach us to read
meaning where we never looked before. We read while noticing
the unforeseen, what we didn't expect to notice. Psychoanalysis
teaches us to read elsewhere.
"The (collective) edification of a theory that liberates the
signifier. "
.
The "theory that liberates the signifier" must help liberate the
text-all texts-from theologies of the transcendental signified.
Today I would speak of signifiance rather than of a "signifier":
the text sends us from signifier to signifier without ever closing
itself off.
Litera ture/school/society.
What is the specific role of school? It's to develop that critical
spirit I mentioned before . But we must also know whether we
should teach someth ing on the order of doubt or truth . And how
242
Le
The Surrealists
Overlooked the Body
Do you consider surrealist texts to be "texts of pleasure"
or "texts of bliss"? Is there a Kamasutra of surrealist writ
ing?
Textual pleasure and/or bliss are not attributes to be attached
obj ectively to this or that type of text; it's impossible to set up
some sort of definitive prize list of such texts: these affects don't
determine what label should be assigned to a work. Nothing
prevents the Surrealist text from being a text of pleasure or bliss,
but nothi ng obliges it to be one or the other.
It would seem that the Surrealists were not vel)' con
cerned with "deconstructing" language. But why
weren 't they?
I suppose that if the "Surrealists" (but shouldn't we first "decon
struct" this label?) didn't deconstruct language, or only very little,
it was because at bottom they had a normative idea of the body
of sexuality, to be blunt. The "corset" imposed on syntax (an
enormously complicated garment, in Breton's case) and sexual
constraint come down to the same thing. The "dream" they
conceived of offered no access to bodily madness (except in Ar
taud's case, but I presume you put him in a category all his own),
but rather entrance to a kind of cultural vulgate , to "oneirism , "
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245
I.e
In a way, isn 't Fla ubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet the same
undertaking-but in verted-as Mallarme's Le Livre a
venir? Fla ubert wan ts no one to dare write anymore after
Bouvard and Pecuchet, while Mallarme hopes to create
the book that would contain all possible books.
The encyclopedias of the eighteenth , nineteenth, and even the
twentieth centuries are encyclopedias of knowledge , or bodies of
knowledge . Now, in the midst of this history, there is a Flaubert
moment, a Bouvard and Pecuchet moment, which is the farce
moment. The encyclopedia is then treated with derision, as a
farce. But this farce carries with it, behind the scenes, something
very serious: encycloped ias of knowledge are replaced by an en
cyclopedia of la nguages . What Flaubert is recording and iden
tifying in B and P are languages .
Obviously, insofar as the relation to knowledge is a farcical
one, and where the problem of language is dissim ulated , the
book's tone and ethos are very uncertain: one never knows whether
to take the book seriously or not.
Fla ubert says in one of his Jetters, moreover, that the
reader will nel'er know whether he 's being made fun of
or not.
And that's the unani mous opinion on B and P:
take the book seriously, it doesn't work. If you choose not to take
247
the book seriously-it still doesn't work. Simply because the lan
guage is neither on the side of truth nor on the side of error. It's
on both sides at once, so you can't tell whether it's serious or
not. Which explains why no one has been able to pin down the
Flaubert of B and P, a book that seems to me the very essence
of Flaubert. He appears there in an "enunciatory role" both per
fectly distinct and perfectly uncertain.
Isn 't it tbis same mixture tbat Fla ubert calls stupidity?
It refers to stupidity, but we mustn't let ourselves become hyp
notized by this word . I was myself fascinated while studying stu
pidity in Flaubert's works, and then I realized that the important
things were perhaps elsewhere. In B and P, but also in Madame
Bovary , and even more in SalammbO, Flaubert seems to be a
man who literally stuffs himself with languages . But of all these
languages, finally, there is not one that prevails, there is no master
language . I would therefore say that Flaubert's favorite book was
not the novel but the dictionary. And what is important in his
Dictionary of Received Ideas is not "received ideas" but "dictionary . "
That's why the theme o f stupidity is a b i t o f a trap. The great
book implicit in Flaubert is the phraseological dictionary, the
phrase book, like one fi nds, for example, in the entries in Littre.
And the dictionary is linked to tbe tbeme of copying,
wbicb opens and closes B and P. Because wba t else is a
dictionary except copying the sentences of otbers?
Of course. The theme of copying is an important theme, by the
way . There have been some very interesti ng copy dictionaries,
such as Bayle's Critical Dictionary at the end of the seventeenth
century. But in Flaubert, copying is an empty act, purely reflex
ive . When Bouvard and Pecuchet go back to copying at the end
of the book, there's nothing left but the gestural activity . They'll
copy anything at all, as long as the manual gesture is preserved .
This is a historic moment in the crisis of truth , which is equally
manifest in Nietzsche, for example, even though there is no
relation between Flaubert and Nietzsche. It's the moment when
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250
251
Le
Great Rhetorician of
Erotic Figures
25 3
254
255
256
257
Le
Of What Use Is an
Intellectual?
Of What
Use Is an Intellectual?
259
260
Mountain.
261
No, I never knew him. I saw him once, from a distance, at the
restaurant Lutetia: he was eating a pear and reading a book. So
I never knew him; but there were a thousand things about him
that interested me, along with many other adolescents of the time
as wel l .
For example?
He was a Protestant. He played the piano . He talked about desire.
He wrote .
Wha t does being a Protestan t mean to you?
It's difficult to say. Because when faith is gone, only the imprint,
the image, is left. And the image belongs to other people . It's up
to them to say whether I "seem" Protestant.
What I meant was, what did your religious appren ticeship
instill in you?
I might say, very cautiously, that a Protestant adolescence can
provide a certai n taste for or a certain perversion of inwardness,
the inner language, the subj ect's constant dialogue with himself.
And then, don't forget that to be a Protestant means not to have
the slightest idea what a priest is, or prayer-by-formula . . . But
these thi ngs should be left to the sociologists of mentalities, if
French Protestantism still interests them.
You 're said above all to be a "hedonist. " Is this a mis
understanding?
Hedonism is considered "bad. " Not nice. Poorly understood . It's
unbelievable how pejorative this word can get! No one, no one
at all, no philosophy, no doctrine, dares to take up hedonism .
It's an "obscene" word .
But you, do you cha pion it?
262
Of What
Use Is an Intellectual?
263
264
I used to, quite a bit, but not so much these days . There was a
ti me when I would take off at the drop of a hat, to different
countries that appealed to me at various times. I enj oyed Holland,
then Italy, afterward Morocco. Recently, Japan . . .
Your enjoyment varied, I suppose, according to what
you found there . . .
Of course. But I never cared very much for monuments, cul
tural landmarks and such, except for Dutch pa inting. When
I travel, what interests me the most are those wisps of the art
of living I can seize in passing. The feeling of plunging into
a world that is both easy and opaque (everything is easy, for
the tourist) . Not a vulgar dip into slumming, but a volup
tuous immersion into a language that I perceive only as sounds,
for example . It's a very restful th ing, not to understand a lan
guage . All vulgarity is eliminated , all stupidity, all aggres
sIOn .
In the end, you think of traveling as a form of relaxed
and inspired ethnography . . .
It's something like that. A city like Tokyo, for example, is in itself
an amazing mass of ethnographic material. I went there with all
the enthusiasm of an ethnologist.
I suppose that this attitude carries over into human re
lations.
I'll give you a direct answer: traveling is also an adventure for
me, a series of possible adventures of great intensity. Traveling
is obviously li nked to a kind of amorous awareness, one is always
on the alert . . .
There's one trip you don 't talk about, however, a quite
recen t trip ...
265
Yes, I know, Chi na. I spent three weeks there . The trip was
tightly organized, of course, along the classic format. Even though
we did receive some special attentions.
When you got back, you wrote hardly anything about
this trip. Why?
I wrote very little, but I saw and listened to everything with close
attention and interest. Writing demands something else, however,
some kind of piquancy in addition to what is seen and heard,
something that I didn't find in China.
And yet China is certainly full of signs!
That's true, of course. But you have a point: signs are important
to me only if they seduce or irritate me. Signs in themselves are
never enough for me, I must have the desire to read them . I'm
not a hermeneutist.
And this time you could bring back from Peking nothing
except an article on the "neuter" . . .
In China, I found absolutely no possibility of erotic, sensual, or
amorous i nterest or investment. For contingent reasons, I agree .
And perhaps structural ones as well: I mean in particular the
moralism of the regime there .
You speak of "wisps of the art of living": the art of living
is also the way people eat, food as an aspect of culture.
As a cultural object, food means at least three things to me. First,
the aura of the maternal model , nourishment as it is considered
and prepared by the mother: that is the food I like . Second, from
that home base, I enjoy excursions, digressions toward the new
and unusual: I can never resist the temptation of a dish endowed
with the prestige of novelty. And finally, I'm particularly sensitive
to conviviality, to the companionship of eating together, but only
if this conviviality is on a small scale: when the company becomes
266
267
268
A rejection of power?
Of What
Use Is an Intellectual?
269
270
apprOl'e
of this
lun
I know. There are, even on the left, people who substitute facile
indignation for difficult analysis: it was shocki ng, incorrect; it's
just not done to chat with the enemy, to eat with h i m . One m ust
rema in pure . It's all part of the left's "good manners . "
Ha l'e you nel'er been tempted fo return to your Ith
ologies of twen ty years ago. adding more ",ark in a leftist
direction. toward the ne"' m.lthologies of the left?
In twenty years the situation has obviously changed . There was
\lay 1 968. which liberated . opened up language on the left, at
the price of i mparti ng a certain arrogance at the same ti me. Above
all, in a country where 49 percent of the people voted on the
left. it would be surprising if there hadn't been a shifting, a
27 1
272
Of What
Use Is an Intellectual?
273
274
connected with this first type of reading that is fluid and hap
hazard, but it functions all the same: para-acoustical information.
My second way of reading appl ies to my work: a course to prepare,
an article, a book-well, here I read books, from beginning to
end, taking notes, but I read them only in terms of my work,
they go into my work. And the third type of reading is my bedside
reading, usually the classics . . .
You didn 't answer my question .
My "contemporaries"? I put almost all of them in the first cat
egory: I "take a look at" them. Why? It's hard to say . Probably
because I'm afra id of being seduced by material too close to me,
so close that I wouldn't be able to transform it. I don't see myself
reworki ng Foucault, Deleuze, or Sollers . . . It's too close. It
arrives in a language that is too contemporary, absolutely con
temporary.
Are there any exceptions?
A few . Once in a while a book impresses me very much and
filters into my work, but it's always somewhat by accident. More
over, whenever I seriously read a contemporary book , it's always
long after its publication, never while it's popular. When everyone
is talking about it, there's too much noise, I don't feel like reading
it. I read Deleuze's Nietzsche, for example, and L'Anti-Oedipe,
but always some ti me after they first came out.
And then there 's Lacan, to whom you often refer, after
all.
I don't know about "often . " Mostly, in fact, when I was worki ng
on A Lover's Discourse. Because I needed a "psychology, " and
only psychoa nalysis can provide one. And it was there, at that
prec ise po int, that I often came across Lacan.
Lacanianism or the Lacanian "text"?
275
276
277
278
I'm looking for a writing that doesn't paralyze the other, the
reader. And that won't be too familiar, either. That's the difficulty:
I would like to arrive at a writing that would be neither paralyzing
nor overly "friendly . "
You used to say that you were looking for "grids " through
which to apprehend and appropriate reality . . .
I don't think I ever talked about grids . I n any case, if I have one,
it can only be literature. A grid that I carry around with me j ust
about everywhere . But I th ink that it's quite possible to drive
reality from cover, as a friend of mine puts it, without a "grid" !
A n d that is the whole problem o f semiology: in the begi nning i t
was a grid, a n d I myself tried t o make it into o n e . B u t when it
had become a grid, it didn't turn up anything else at all . So I
had to go elsewhere, without repudiating semiology, of course .
In speaking of your books, people who don 't like
you talk about a superstition, a sanctification of
writing . . .
I'm not agai nst sanctification . Lacan said not long ago that true
atheists are very rare . The sacred is always somewhere . . .
So let's j ust say that for me it turned out to be writing. Let
me repeat: it is very difficult not to sanctify anything. Sollers is
the only one I know of who has brought it off. Perhaps. He may
have a secret somewhere, like the blasphemy of Saint-Fond was
for Sade. In any case, as for me, I definitely sanctify the bliss of
writi ng.
Language is also spoken language-theatrical language,
for example.
My relations to the theater are rather complicated . As a meta
phorical energy, it's sti ll very important to me: I see theater every-
279
280
A Lover' s Discourse
282
A Lover's Discourse
283
thus, there are tastes, values, behavior, "writings" o f the past that
may return, but in a very modern place. The second argument
is l inked to my work on the amorous subj ect. This subj ect develops
mainly in a register that, since Lacan, is called l'imaginaire, the
image-repertoi re-and I recognize myself as a subj ect of the im
age-repertoire: I have a vital relation to past literature precisely
because this literature provides me with images, with a good
relation to images . For example, the narrative, the novel , forms
a di mension of the image-repertoire that existed in "readerly"
literature. In admitting my fondness for this l iterature, I claim
the rights of the subj ect of the image-repertoire insofar as this
subj ect is in a way disinherited, crushed between those two great
psychic structures that have claimed most of modernity's atten
tion: neurosis and psychosis. The subj ect of the image-repertoire
is a poor relation of those structures, because he is never either
completely psychotic or completely neuroti c . You see that, while
militating discreetly for this subj ect of the image-repertoire, I can
give myself the alibi of work that is actually quite far along,
something like one form of tomorrow's avant-garde, with a touch
of humor, of course.
When modernity becomes the discourse of hegemony,
of stereotypes, don 't you decide, in your own way, to
keep your distance? Isn 't it somewhat provocative to talk
about "love" today, just as it was yesterday, in the midst
of structuralism, to defend "the pleasure of the text"?
Doubtless, but I don't experience this as tactical behavior. It's
j ust that I find it very difficult, as you remarked , to put up with
stereotypy, the elaboration of small collective languages, a phe
nomenon quite familiar to me through my work in teaching, in
the student milieu. I'm exposed on all sides to these stereotyped
languages of marginality, the stereotypy of nonstereotypy. I can
hear them being invented . At first they can be enjoyable, but in
time they become a burden. For a while, I don't dare make my
escape , but finally, often because of some chance occurrence in
my personal life, I find the courage to break with these languages.
284
The archetype of love-as-passion
A Lover's Discourse
285
286
A Lover's Discourse
287
288
Writing
as
a morality
A Lover's Discourse
289
291
Is love old-fashioned?
Yes, no doubt. Love is out of date in intellectual milieux. From
the point of view of the intelligentsia, the intellectual milieu that
nourishes me, in which I live, and that I love . . . I had the
feeling of writing something rather old-fashioned.
292
293
one loves.
But doesn 't "object" also contrast with "subject"?
Yes. The beloved is inevitably an object, is not experienced at
all as a subject. "Object" is the right word, because it indicates
the depersonalization of the beloved.
294
One might well ask. But I would say no, after all. Because the
ravishing image is alive, in action.
And there we have your "ravished " lover . . . Tha t's what
a poll taken last year called "true love. " And an impressive
majority of the French public said they "believed in it, "
and though t it lasted throughout life. What does your
lover think of that?
He would answer "yes," of course, on the question of "true love. "
But a "lifelong" love? I don't know. That implies an optimism
that doesn't belong in the lover as I presented him. To him, the
expression "lifelong " has no meaning. He is within a kind of
temporal absolute. He doesn't parcel out time along the entire
estimated length of his life . ..
29 5
Yes, I think so. Or rather, I would say that the feeling of love is
defined precisely like that: because suffering is inevitable. But
one can always imagine that the feeling will change .
Is everyone jealous?
I would say-and here I'll trot out some big words-that it's a
phenomenon of anthropological breadth. There is no being in
the world who hasn't experienced waves of jealousy. And I don't
think it's possible to be in love, even in the lax and relaxed manner
296
Failing that, if I may say so, can one love several people
at the same time?
I think that one can, for a while, anyway. One can . . . and I
even think that it's a delicious feeling, to use a classical word.
Yes, it's a delicious sentiment, to bathe in an atmosphere of
love, of generalized flirtation-giving "flirtation " a certain
strength . . .
297
That's the
about . . .
tyrannical
relation
you
were
talking
298
And of desire?
There is desire in the feeling of love. But this desire is diverted
toward a diffuse sexuality, toward a kind of generalized sensuality.
In your book,
"cruiser" . . .
you
con trast
the
lover
with
the
299
Yes, those two types of "discourse, " in the larger sense, should
be contrasted with each other. The practices of cruising don't
coincide at all with the quite ascetic practices of the lover, who
doesn't scatter himself through the world, remaining instead im
prisoned with his image.
Aside from lovers and cruisers, there are the ones who
have settled down, the sistemati .
.
Yes. I was talking one day with a friend who told me that the
Italian for "settled down, " in the sense of "married, " was siste
mato. I thought it was interesting that instead of saying "So-and
so has settled down, " "So-and-so is married, " one could imagine
him "systemized, " caught in a system ...
But to say that people have "settled down, " isn 't this
cruiser talk?
300
At the other end of the scale, there are those referred to,
depending on one's vocabulary, as "deviants" or "per_
verts. " They, like the married couple, are absent from
your book. Your lover sometimes seems to be speaking
in their place.
No. The lover does not speak by proxy for other deviants, for an
essential reason: he is a deviant in relation to deviants. In the
sense that he is less demanding, less contentious . . . and less
glorious. In relation to the problems of homosexuality, there is
an important consequence: if one is talking about a homosexual
(male or female) in love, the important term isn't "homosexual"
but "in love." I refused to proffer a homosexual discourse. Not
because I refuse to recognize homosexuality, not through censure,
or prudence, but because a lover's discourse is not any more
related to homosexuality than it is to heterosexuality.
301
Venus for the desirants, and lovers on the moon: Tha t's
wha t gives them that silly look, perhaps. As you wrote:
"What is more silly than a lover?" . . . What makes him
silly?
It's because he is situated in what I call "dis-reality." Everything
that the world calls "reality, " he experiences as illusion. Every
thing that amuses others, their conversations, their passions, their
indignations, none of that seems real to him. His personal "real
ity" is his relation to the beloved, and the thousand incidents that
affect it--exactly what the world considers to be his "madness."
Because of this very reversal, he feels himself imprisoned by a
bitter maladjustment. And he does in fact behave in many ways
that seem idiotic in the eyes of common sense.
302
But you say this yourself: every other night, on the tele
vision, someone's saying "I love you. " There is thus a
"promotion " of love by the media. How could mass cul
ture be pushing "love" if it's asocial and dangerous?
That's a more difficult question. Why does mass culture focus so
much on the problems of the amorous subject? What are really
being staged in these cases are narratives of episodes, not the
sentiment of love itself.The distinction is perhaps a subtle one,
but I insist on it. This means that if you put the lover in a "love
story," you thereby reconcile him with society. Why? Because
telling stories is one of the activities coded by society, one of the
great social constraints. Society tames the lover through the love
story.
303
Why?
Because he doesn't know where or how to make signs stop. He
deciphers perfectly, but he's unable to arrive at a definite inter
pretation, and he's swept away by a perpetual circus, where he'll
never find peace.
304
305
And a moral?
Yes, there is a moral.
307
word that would truly define what happens within me, and not
. within my writings, it would be the word "philosopher," hich
does not refer to a degree of competence, because I have had no
philosophical training. What I do within myself is philosophize,
reflect on my experience. This reflection is a joy and a benefit
to me, and when I'm unable to pursue this activity, I become
unhappy, because I am deprived of something important to me.
Philosophizing? It belongs perhaps more to the ethical order than
to the metaphysical one . . .
A good look at this word reveals that it is completely irregular,
an unusual word that creates a kind of panic of responses in us.
It's a word that is understood differently by many different
people, and it covers very different things: one may think violence
means something quite specific, but the more one thinks about
it, the more it means. That is a first difficulty, on an intellectual
and analytical order; this word lends itself to dissertation, because
it is already firmly embedded in the vast paperwork of the judicial
system. Mass culture itself has provided us with all sorts of ways
of looking at this word.
The second difficulty is of an existential nature. Violence
threatens our bodies: therefore, we usually react to it with rejec
tion, refusal, but there are perhaps beings who accept and assume
violence, even finding a kind of exaltation in it. Violence is not
a simple thing.
The third difficulty: it's a word that poses problems of conduct
on the level of states, organizations, groups, individuals. And
here we feel quite at a loss. It's a problem as old as the world
itself: how do we control violence, except with more violence?
This kind of impasse finally develops a religious dimension.
The difficulties are immense, and we must accept the fact that
we are, in a way, impotent before this word. It is an insoluble
word.
308
309
310
term, and against which there will be no other rampart than that
of insurrection." If one wishes to separate oneself from vio
lence, one must accept the thought of nonpower, in current social
terms, a way of thinking of the absolute margin. If one is against
violence, one must manage to have an ethic, strong in itself,
outside power, and one must not put oneself in a situation where
one will participate in power.
Finally, I ask myself this question: Can one be against violence
only in part, that is, under certain conditions, allowing for ex
ceptions? Can one hedge with nonviolence? I ask this question,
and I ask it of myself. I sense that you want to offer certain
objections or qualifications, which are also mine. But I answer
you with a question: Can one begin to evaluate the contents of
violence, and its justifications?
In fact, there are two ethical attitudes: either one gives oneself
the right to judge the contents of violence, to retain certain con
tents and condemn others, which is generally what the world
does; or else violence is perceived by the body as intolerable, from
which moment one refuses all alibis and makes no compromises
over nonviolence, but this is an excessive attitude, assumed only
within the limit zones of personal morality.
311
A Few Words to
Let in Doubt
Admired-{)r vilified-by intellectuals, which is to say by a
minority, Roland Barthes might very well have continued his suc
cessful academic career outside the glare of publicity if he hadn't
published, last year, a book that has been enjoying considerable
popularity: A Lover's Discourse.
Roland Barthes's vast culture, his tireless desire to explore the
word as sign and the sentence as structure, to shift them, to probe
until they finally reveal what speaking means, coupled with the
exacting writing of this amateur pianist and painter who selects
from his word palette precisely what is needed to convey the right
color, the correct note-all these qualities distinguish this great
writer, who two years ago was offered the Chair of Literary Se
miology at the College de France, in recognition of his innovative
textual and linguistic criticism.
Semiology is the science of signs, and for Barthes, signs are
everywhere. Everything is language. The problem is that all lan
guage ends by entrapping thought and intelligence. Words become
snares engendering mental stereotypes. Denouncing this danger,
Barthes calls on intelligence to reverse a certain disenchantment
in our society, which now more than ever needs to revise its received
ideas.
You say that we must alll'ays be on the lookout today for
signs that are the forerunners of tomorrow. Can we not
313
314
31 5
You say that the French are proud ofha ving had Racine
but don 't regret not ha ving had Shakespeare. Would love,
316
317
And the art of living. That was what won you over in
Japan. Do you think there is a national art of living that
comes before any indiyidual art of liying?
An art of living may be social. For example, the bourgeois art of
living, which is not unpleasant, in France. Or an art of living
may be national. I have often dreamed about setting up on paper,
in the form of descriptions, a kind of synthetic art of living that
would bring together all the best features of ['art de vivre from
extremely different civilizations.
318
An Extremely Brutal
Context
I am an essayist. I have written neither novels nor plays: I have
never created fictional characters. In certain essays, of course, I
have approached the fictive, but only as a category. I admit to
being tempted these days to write something that could be related
to the novel, but this temptation does not extend to plays for the
theater. The professional world of the theater is a very difficult,
very irregular world; everything there is played out in an extremely
brutal context, and in record time.
On the level of a text's survival, this idea of time is quite
disturbing. The brutality of theatrical creation is doubtless partly
responsible for its sensual pleasure and worth. It must be very
exciting to see one's text pass into the body of the actor, into his
gestures, in that kind of immediate realization. But the French
theatrical machine is based on a very harsh economic system:
there is a struggle with, or against, money. Perhaps someday I'll
come up against the temptation of writing dialogues. But then I
would find it difficult to create the remainder, the body of a story
or an intrigue, even if today's theater can get along without such
things. It has happened that portions of a written text like A Lover's
Discourse have been brought to the stage. As an author, I found
this very interesting. It showed me what happens to a "silent " text
when it passes into the actor's voice and breathing, it showed me
what becomes of punctuation once it enters the actor's body,
where commas become pauses, or gestures. At that moment, I
320
Roland Barthes on
Roland Barthes
The works of Roland Barthes-fifteen books or so, some of them
quite well known: Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies, and re
cently, A Lover's Discourse-are distinguished first of all by their
diversity: they include critical studies of Michelet and Racine as
well as a methodical analysis of fashion language, or even an
astonishing piece on Japan, Empire of Signs. This polyvalence
goes deeper than mere appearance. Instead of seeking to construct
a system of thought, Roland Barthes has always made his way
across different fields of knowiedge, moving serenely from one theory
to another, taking an idea from Marx, for example, in order to
put it to the test in linguistics or vice versa. And if, when the
opportunity arose, he stopped long enough to construct an ana
lyzing apparatus, "semiology, " he started to leave it behind the
day it threatened to become too rigid and exclusive a framework
of interpretation.
Roland Barthes's itinerary, despite its detours, driftings, and
side trips, presents one constant element: a particular attention
to language. On the one hand, he denounces linguistic oppression,
the {razen expressions of common sense, the "it goes without saying, "
o r stereotypes (and where there are stereotypes, o r even better,
stupidity, Roland Barthes arrives on the run) . But, on the other
hand, he celebrates the extraordinary possibilities of jubilation and
the explosion of meaning provided by a centuries-old activity:
literature. And it is this Roland Barthes, the lover of literature,
322
323
324
So you don 't use a tape recorder. What about the type
writer?
325
326
It's obvious that this is still a very important subjective theme for
me.I've always had a strong desire to belong to the university, a
desire originating in my adolescence at a time when the university
was very different. I was not able to join the university through
the normal channels, if only for the reason that I was ill with
tuberculosis each time I was due to go on to the next stage.The
first time I was ill I was unable to prepare for the E cole Normale
Superieure, as I would have liked to do, and then I had a relapse
when it was time to prepare for the agregation exam. My career
proves that I always held on to the idea of belonging to the
university, but I belonged to it-which was lucky for me--through
marginal institutions that were able to accept me without the
diplomas usually required: the Centre National de Recherche
Scientifique, the E cole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and now the
College de France. These institutions are marginal for reasons of
style, but also for an objective reason that was not well understood
when I spoke of it in my inaugural address: the College de France
and, in large part, the E cole Pratique des Hautes E tudes do not
grant diplomas. Thus, one is not enmeshed in a power system,
and that creates an objective marginality.
327
328
sider to be great books. After that, I read less Sartre, I fell off a
bit.
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
This is not the first time tha t the work ofRoland Barthes has been
the subject of a broadside denouncing his language and style of
expression . In 1963, when he was a standard-bearer of new crit
icism, which championed an analysis of the internal structure of
texts instead of a reliance on vague psychology, Roland Barthes
published a work on one of our grea t classics: On Racine. A few
mon ths la ter, Raymond Picard, a professor at the Sorbonne and
a Racine specialist, published a pamphlet entitled Nouvelle Cri-
337
in 1966
possible
similarities between Picard's pamphlet and Bumier-Rambaud's
pastiche, Roland Barthes made it clear that he thought the pastiche
was indeed "a Picard operation more than ten years later, with
the difference that the theater of operations has changed: because
I am better known, they have moved from the arena of the uni
versity to that of the media. But in the end the problem remains
the same, a problem tied to language."
At the Cerisy conference, you mentioned that you were
surprised that interviewers never ask you about your book
on Michelet, which you called "the least talked-about of
my books, and yet the one I like the best. I should like
to end this interview by asking you why you like this
book . . .
"
That's quite a trap you've set for me! But it's true, I admit that I
find the thematics of this book rather well done. And then, M ich
elet remains somewhat of an innovator, because he's a historian
who really introduced the human body into history. Of course,
he can be faulted on all sorts of scientific points , he committed
many historical errors . But the entire Annales school of history,
and the "living h istory" school of Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le
Roy Ladurie, and Jacques Le Goff, recognizes what history owes
to Michelet, who reexami ned and rethought the body within
history, with its suffering, its humors, blood, physiologies, and
foods. And it was M ichelet who founded the ethnology of France
by moving away from chronology in order to look at French
society the way ethnologists study other societies.
And somewhat in the manner ofMichelet rethinking the
body in history, you also are becoming more and more
attentive to the savor of knowledge and things.
Somewhat, yes. For that, I take the detour of subj ectivity. Let's
say that I'm taking more responsibility for myself as a subject.
Dare to Be Lazy
Dare to Be Lazy
339
340
Dare to Be Lazy
341
342
Dare to Be Lazy
343
to do nothing was best, since one should not answer evil with
more evil.
Needless to say, thi s morality is now completely discredited.
And if we were to carry things even further, idleness might appear
as an important philosophical solution to the problem of evil. To
not answer. But once again, modern society does not get along
very well with neutral attitudes, and it finds laziness intolerable,
as if it were itself, in the end, the chief evil.
What is terrible about idleness is that it can be the most banal,
stereotyped thing in the world, the most thoughtless behavior,
j ust as it can be the most thoughtful.
It can be a natural aptitude, but also a conquest.
This thoughtful idleness, wouldn't that be what Proust
calls Ie Temps perdu?
Proust's attitude toward a writer's work is something quite partic
ular. His masterpiece is constructed, if not on, at least in the
company of, a theory of involuntary memory, of the rising to the
surface of memories and sensations. This free-flowing remem
brance obviously involves a kind of idleness. To be idle, within
that particular perspective, is-to use the Proustian metaphor
to be like the madeleine that slowly dissolves in the mouth, which,
at that moment, is idle. The subj ect allows himself to disintegrate
through memory, and he is idle. If he were not idle, he would
find himself once more in the domain of voluntary memory.
We might turn to another Proustian image: the Japanese paper
flowers, tightly folded, that blossom and develop in water. That
would be idleness: a moment of writing, a moment of the work.
And yet, even for Proust, writing was not a lazy activity. Proust
uses another metaphor to designate the writer, a metaphor of
labor. He says that he writes a work as a dressmaker sews a dress.
That implies an incessant, meticulous, plundering, constructive,
tacking-on activity, like Proust's. Because, after all, he was per
haps idle for the first half of his life (if then!), but afterward, when
he shut himself away to write Remembrance, he was not idle, he
worked constantly.
In the end, there would be two periods in writing. At first,
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Dare to Be Lazy
345
For a Chateaubriand
of Paper
Well, what does Chateaubriand mean to you?
In my life, in my cultural memories, Chateaubria nd-as he is
for everyone-was first of all the author of selected excerpts, those
descriptions of moonlit scenes, or American wilderness land
scapes . These official pages are not without beauty, but I don't
th ink that we can find much pleasure in them . . . These are
generally the pages used to fill out a certa in mythology of the
Romantic hero, but they are not really representative of an oeuvre
that goes far beyond them. In this respect, I th ink that Chateau
briand has become an exemplary victim of our teaching system,
because as a result of the scholastic impoverishment to which he
was subjected-and the withdrawal of sympathy that has en
sued-he is now little read in France .
You had already read enough of his work to want to write
a preface for the Life of Rance . . .
Indeed, I had to di scover this sumptuous and austere book to
understand that Chateaubriand was not merely the dil igent cham
pion described in schoolbooks . In the Life of Rance I found a
profound , grave , and powerful man, and it was perhaps in think
ing of that Chateaubriand that I began to really read the Memoires
d'outre-tombe a few months ago. And I was astounded . . .
347
348
349
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352
On
Photography
Barthes is one of the men who will leave his mark on our time.
From Mythologies to A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes's anal
yses of different elements and aspects of society are talked about,
imitated, sometimes mocked, but never ignored. His influence on
the intellectual life of France is undeniable.
Here are some of his thoughts on photography and the role it
plays in modern society.
ANGELO SCHWARZ: Photography is now commonly de
3 54
On Photography
355
3 56
On Photography
357
'1
358
not necessarily the shock of the subj ect depicted . There are trau
matic news photos in newspapers and magazines that perhaps
command high prices because they are traumatic, but they don't
affect me at all. On the other hand, there are some rather anodyne
reportage photos that can suddenly strike a chord in me, affect
me. That is what I tried to analyze. Then I noticed that, by being
guided by my pleasure, I was certa inly getting results, but I was
not able to define what it was that radically opposed photography
to all other types of images . Because that was my intention. And
so at that point . . .
. . . But I don't want to go into detail because my book involves
a bit of intellectual suspense, and I don't want to ruin the effect.
In any case, at this stage I decided to consider a private photo
graph, in relation to a recent personal loss, the death of my
mother, and it was in reflecti ng on a photograph of her that I
was able to formulate a certain philosophy of photography, which
puts into relation photography and death . This is something that
everyone feels intu itively, even though we live in a world of living
photographs, lively images. That is the philosophy I tried to ex
plore and formulate. I won't say any more about it, it's all in the
text. Obviously, I concentrated on photographs of people rather
than la ndscapes, and I don't deny that I postulated a certain
"promotion" of private photography. I think that in contrast to
painting, the ideal future of photography lies in private photog
raphy, images that represent a loving relationship with someone
and possess all their power only if there was a bond of love, even
a virtual one, with the person in the photo. This is all played out
around love and death. It's very Romantic.
What does the book look like? What photographs did
you select?
The photographs I chose have an essentially argumentative value.
They are the ones I used in the text to make certa in points. The
book is, thus, not an anthology. I wanted to show not the best
picture, or even my favorite picture, from each photographer's
work, but simply the photo I needed to illustrate my argument.
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On Photography
But I did of course try to use pictures that are beautiful in them
selves.
What was the corpus from which you made your selec
tions?
It was very narrow, a few albums and magazines . I used the Nouvel
360
The game isn't over yet. I would say rather that every
photograph is answerable to art, except (paradoxically) art pho
tographs.
Socially, in any case, photography is well on the way to
being recognized as art. Nevertheless, it has a very spe
cial, very close relation to reality. Would you agree that
photography is a bridge between art and non-art?
Yes, that's quite true. I don't know if it's a bridge, but it's certainly
an i ntermediate zone. Photography displaces, shifts the notion of
art, and that is why it takes part in a certain progress in the world.
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Biography
November 1 2 , 1 9 1 5
October 26, 1 9 1 6
1 9 1 6--24
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Lycee Montaigne
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1937
1938
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tique
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Biography
Convalescence at the Post-Cure on rue Quatrefages,
Paris. Last of the license examinations (grammar and
philology)
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1 94 3 - 4 5
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October 1 94 5
1 946-47
Convalescence in Paris
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1950-52
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teaching division
cherche Scientifique (lexicology)
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1 962
November 1 978
February 2 5 , 1 980