We Always Fail: Barthes' Last Writings Author(s): Paul Smith Source: SubStance, Vol. 11, No.

3, Issue 36 (1982), pp. 34-40 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684312 . Accessed: 19/08/2013 15:29
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LastWritings Barthes'
PAUL SMITH

We Always Fail-

"On &choue toujours ta parler de ce qu'on aime": we always fail . ... Such an apparently self-critical resignation, the title given to Roland Barthes' last published article,1might, in fact, by no means be an admission of regretor unqualified failure. Through a not too fancifulflightinto French etymology it is possible to suggestthat the phrase "on 6choue . . ." mightforBarthes take on an opposite, duplicitous as it were.2 "Echouer:toucher au fond," implication--"amphibologiquement," to reach the bottom or, in an older mode, reach the essential.And always by accident,says Littre;by language, thatMallarmean hazardousness, Barthes mightsay. The word "echouer"is furthermore (according to one etymological dictionaryI consulted) influencedby the old French to "eschec," in its sense of "butin," booty or spoils; so would it not be etumos or such a failure is our reward for a life our realizathat our lot, lived, say partly tion of something that can be carried offafterbattle? The idea that an "&chec" could be somewhat triumphant,and would be forever("toujours"), and yet ultimate (the essential), should effectively scuttle the whole notionof achievement:achievements,in our history, are always teleological and always comportsome more or less overtsense of a mastery.Barthes was never a master,would never have wanted to be one, and it is thus salutary to note that in "eschec" is also implicitlyinscribed the whole social game of chess in which the king is destined to die-"eschec et mat." In his project of decomposing the certainties and fixitiesof a kingly structure,our culture,3 Barthesacts almost as thatmost trifling value in the game, the pawn who makes relentless forays against the space of the king-classical, doxical, scientific, masculine space as that is in our inheritedculture. And to the extentthat this is a specifically disruptivegambit it concerns us all. As Jean Louis Scheferhas Barthes has probably taken the measure of something in all his suggested, readers--what is the stature, then, of your peonage?4 So, I think it would in one way be un-Barthesian to talk of the mastery of achievement in the work of this single man: rather,perhaps, we should talk
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Barthes' Last Writings

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about his end, his "achevement,"or about the utterancesthat death put (puts) an end to. Perhaps, in Barthes' case, that end was not imposed too soon. In 5 Barthes complains about that destinywhich his finalbook, La Chambre claire, held him in the betweenhis own death and thatofhis mother: him, space caught the space, we mightsay, of his disinheritancefromthe real. Afterhis mother's death, "ma propre mort est inscrite; entre les deux plus rien qu'attendre; je ' n'ai d'autre ressourceque cetteironie: parler du 'rien dire.' "6 Is not thissuffering exactly the condition of the writer, foregroundedin our "modernism"but which Barthes has seen everywhere;is it not the disinheritancefromsome part of our lived bodies, from"I'Intraitable dont je suis fait,"7the Imponderable which might, now, appear to some as the symptom of a sort of essentialist romanticism? There, exactly, is the problem of reading Barthes' last writings- reading our modernism against his retracingof our history,or against his project of reinstating what we have, in the name ofhistory,too oftenwithdrawn from the scene and adjectivized as something aged and enfeebled. But forBarthes the decomposition of the structures of a modernistregime was as importantas the decomposition of any other sort of structure:"Tout d'un coup, il m'estdevenu indiff6rent de ne pas etre moderne."8 Joiningin with the modern regime is for Barthes simply another effort towards a discourse of masteryor ofvictory, a subsumptionofthe past into a supposedlynew orthoFor him, any political action or militancywould necessarilyassume the doxy. same discourses and modes of operation as the previous victorsand achievers had imposed. Which is to say that such revolutionary action would be circular- returningalong the lines of the same geometryto the same political locus. And it is here, of course, that Barthes' import can be located; if there is a place, another scene, where the imaginary identifications of the civic can be revised and reviewed (and it's not by accident that Barthes ultimatelyand almost grudginglywrites about photography,that apparatus which gives us things to see, but not to re-see) it is for him the scene of writing. Language itselfoffers us somethingin excess of both the personal and the political. Not that Barthes would have imagined that, politically,purelylinguisticrebellions are sufficient or complete, but they have preciselythis decomposing effect on the doxas we inhabit-whereas the assuming of the mantle of the inherited is always a consolidation, not, obviously, of the modes of politics, but certainly of its epistemology. So what the last years of Barthes' life bring him to (bring to him) is the action: "c'est la subversion de toute ideologie qui est necessity of a different en cause."9That action is undertaken by a singleman, a man writing. Inhabiting such a space is to suffer the agonies of the continual effort of making one's subjectivity heard within the networks of the symbolic codes we traditionally inhabit- within,thatis, the terrifying ofthelaw's prohibitive efficacy rationality. but the fragAgainst those fixed modes must be posited, not another fixity, Those terms,in that function, mentarycrossing of the symbolic by the semiotic. derive fromJulia Kristeva who talks, too, of the female's negative entryinto the symbolicby thismeans; Barthes,forall his disregardofthe politico-sexual,10

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enjoins exactly this mode of negative entry. In Kristeva that mobile semiotic is given the name signifiance, which Bartheshas contraversalof symbolicfixity flated with his own use of the wordjouissanceas it crosses the rigid legality of in plaisir.11 signification From Le Plaisirdu Texte onwards, thattraversalis what Barthesundertakes. of a writing"a d6couvert,"12 His project is devoted to the exhausting process to the not without shadowed cover, skies, open by any system, but writing a over to of quite boldly given possibility discovery.(Perhaps therewe can incia seemof man's fascinationwith Proust, who offers locate the part dentally with of flow and sentence the endless of end, ingly phrase exactly, disclosing or uncovering somethingprofoundlysituated.) Barthes' abhorrence of system led him to repudiate especially those whollymodern systemswhich he himself - structuralism, and had helped explore in the sixties marxism,psychoanalysis, of its maniso on- and to returnto the intransitive with itself, a-system writing fold relations to the subject on the one hand and to the cultured world on the clairereflects(upon) such a dichotomy, other: in its very passage La Chambre a reading of photography'srestingplace in the firstpart of the book offering the symbolic, while the second part tells us what photography means to his own subjectivity. Withinthatdivision- a divisionwhichhas haunted philosophy - Barthes chooses (a-philosophically, as it were) to valorize the effects forever of subjectivity. This finalbook, then, is a travellingtowards the valorization of the pawn, of the individual subject as he is set against the king. And yet it is inscribed within the very irony that he tells us of: the speaking about the inabilityto speak, the knowledge that in destroyingthe king the pawn in fact ends the game, ends his own life. So there is a sort of devolved nihilism inscribed in Barthes' whole project; perhaps it is the same sensation as that which resides in the heart of romanticism (secretly)or of existentialism (overtly).It is, finally, the positingof a sortof despair, but one which we can (and must) continually traverseand enjoy, and fromwhichwe can thentake somethingaway as booty. In "On 6choue toujours . . . ," giving himselfover to the "failure"which is the celebratorytriumphof the subject'sjouissance, Barthes discovers,through Stendhal, a jubilatory possibilityof the subject's powerlessness or impotence. When Stendhal talks about what he loves (his whole fantasyof Italy in Rome, or La Chartreuse deParme),he fallsinto the platitudeof an unsysNaples,Florence, tematic unity of effects which, if respected by the writer,always gives him to a certainaphasia, or the end pointof"style."'3 In and throughStendhal, Barthes valorizes the profound emptiness of style which spins the novelist into the idolatry that language can only speak deictically. Stendhal "dit simplement: and his language is thus reduced to the functionof pointing 1lail y a un effet"'" out that some loved object is "beau/belle"; and this is performedin that most simple of tropes, the superlative. Stendhal reminds Barthes of the aphasic struggleof the child, caught between the sensation of an overwhelminglove and the difficulty of expression. Barthes sees here (and writes more about in La Chambre between the infinite the metonymic extensibility, claire)the conflict

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course of the "Souverain Bien" that he idolizes, and the anythingbut innocent power of language. Insofar as the symbolic is, here, seen as overbearing (Barthes spoke in his inaugural lecture for the College de France of the inherentfascism of coded language)"5 its power must be negated, brought to a check-mate. The pawn thus tries to speak his own subjectivity(disinheritedfromthe real), in order to reduce the symbolic, decompose our culture. In dealing specificallywith photography, Barthes sees himselffaced with precisely an apparatus for the legalistic authorizing of the real. The photograph is in a certain way undeniwith it, not allowing us to deny the past existable, since it carries its referent ence of that referent.To most photos we apply what Barthes calls a studium, a type of reading which cannot but be an endorsement of our place in the rationalworld thatis ideologicallygiven to us. But otherphotos,Barthesclaims, can cut across that fixityand demand another kind of reading: "face a cerTo such images we apply taines photos,je me voulais sauvage, sans culture."16 the transgressivereading of the punctum, a deictic remarkingof somethingin the photo which exceeds the functionary The punctum here power ofthestudium. to what Barthes has elsewhere "la cialite mon called de corresponds sp d6sir"'7 reads offforus is the sense (to, perhaps, Catullus' micasalis). What thepunctum of our subjectivityin opposition to, or arising out of the cultural knowledge of the viewer. In other words, the studium photo is readable througha code, the punctum one is not. And, of course, codes never allow us to speak our desire- they are intrinsically totalitarianin this respect, taking our place and the elides such a presumption of the subject. us; speakingfor punctum schema this that Barthes to Clearly, simple adopts get at the essence of is an extension of his notions of photography plaisirandjouissance:studium gives on an only pleasure, relying interpretable position forthe subject; thepunctum, on the other hand, is orgasmic and seminal. It is never more than a detail, a fragment which speaks tous. In relation to the legal and "pleasurable" unity of the self, it bespeaks a bodily loss. 18A photo which acts in this way is, for in the etymological sense that the individual subject is Barthes, interesting - interesseinscribed there in the infinitive of being, between one death and between the and the real. It in this infinitive is that the subject, another, past as an effectof the image, sees his desire thrownbeyond the legalism of the image itself. The space that is being described here is, simply, that ofjouissance.Here, forBarthes,Nietzsche'snotionof"l'antiquesouverainetedu moi"19 is celebrated, but hardlyin the sense of a will to power. Nietzsche'sphrase mustbe understood here as part of his nurturingof an idea of selfwhich will deny the efficacy of or traditional self-reflective of which will that moment, philosophy's "thought" the law, philosophyitself) withthe "content" rejoin "structure" (culture, history, of the individual subject. Barthes' importance for modern thought can be sketched out fromhere: his project, respecting Nietzsche's immoralism and realizing the "caractbre asociale de la jouissance"20 is to live in and celebrate (calibrate) preciselythat division which philosophyis concerned to cover over

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within the subject himself. Emblematic of such a philosophical desire within is Lukics' attackon Nietzsche'simmoralism.Lukics, founding modernismitself an argument upon the politically charged notion of the necessity to dialectically historicize the subject, wants to establish a bridge, a unity to lie wholly between structure and content:thiswill be thehistoricizedsubjecthimself.Such a desire clearly implies the appropriation of the means of power of bourgeois philosophy which has always sought the theoreticalelaboration of the subject as preciselythatunifiedlinkbetweencultureand individual. Of course, Lukics' is indefeasibly partofwhat the Tel Quelgroupwas concernedto deconstratagem it seems to that it has been leftlargely to Barthes to offer the and me struct, demonstration of the new subject actually livingthat division. In thisconnection, a remarkable aspect of Barthes' offering in the last book of a-philosophy is itsimplicitdebt to phenomenology and existentialism. Indeed, the book is dedicated (ambiguously, it should be said) in homage to Sartre. an embracingofthatdespair of Sartre'sWhat I thinkis at stake here is firstly the cul-de-sac in which his social theorizingended up when faced withthe narcissism a deuxof reader and writer. But Barthes' work adds to that sense of an impasse a celebratoryassumption of precisely the underlyingsexual load of Sartre's crisis. Arising, bodily as it were, out of that re-reading of Sartre isjouissanceitself;and if Husserl, too, presentsthe same crisis of being unable to "epochize" the subject into the role demanded by philosophy, Barthes has taken the hint. Marxism and phenomenology as systems show themselves properlyincapable of rationalizing desire. Rather than attemptingto impose such an image of the subject Barthes recognizesthatphilosophy'sfailureshould be invertedto become, no longer a crisis or a dead-end, but an inevitable condition of thought,bespeaking the subject's fundamentalalienation. The crisis, then, must be seen as a carnival, or a fiasco (the fiasco, exactly, that induces Stendhal's platitude of expression in Italy).21What such an inversioninvolves is the decompositionof bourgeois thoughtand the concomitantrecognition that our failure is triumphant,even our essential condition. So this is, finally,Barthes' carryingaway of the spoils fromthe battlefield. The theatreof war in which the giant systematizers have foughtit out (political animals thattheyare, siblingsfighting forcontrolof the father's sacred objects) is leftopen to the scavenger collecting scraps and trifles to carry back home. claire Home, of course, is the locus of the mother, about whom La Chambre is written in the end. At his seminarsat the College de France Barthesdescribed his discourse as exactly those "comings and goings of a child playing beside his mother,leaving her, returningto bring her a pebble, a piece of string,and In thisjubilatherebytracing a whole locus of play around a calm center."22 the narcissistic littleboy runs the riskofbeing called torycollectingoffragments names by the older boys (essentialist,un-political, individualist,romanticist), but such an embracingof powerlessness has the rewardsoftouchingthe bottom, the as he exist outside of ideology and culture. To subject might glimpsing fail the demands of regal structures and paternal law is to necessarilyestablish a voluptuous and subversive relationship with the mother.

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Barthes' Last Writings

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seems on the one hand to be a literalmemorialto Barthes' If La Chambre claire mother, it must also be seen in this light: as a deliberate rejection of mastery. of Italy designated This is what Barthes saw laid open in Stendhal whose fantasy the opposition between Italy as matria, and France as patria. In Italy Stendhal could findhimself"voluptueusementretirede la responsabilit6du citoyen."23 If the valorizing of that position with all its fragmentation,its sense of loss, its insecurityand jouissance,leads to the platitudes so disregarded by cultured civilization, it has nonetheless an immense strategic and ontological importance. And in the essay on Stendhal, Barthes is unafraid to court the risksthat such platitude runs: he compares Stendhal to the childrenanalyzed by Winnicott,24 playing with "transitional objects" in the fantastic space between themselves as infans (deprived of adult language) and the mother'simage. If, as Winnicott suggests,that space is worked-outin these children's"squiggles" (a non-adult, non-tendentiouslanguage), the writer,in order to decompose the great structures under which we live in thrall,may have to learn to speak to sensationsofjouissance, valorize the subchildishly, prolong the fragmentary it is here that Barthes' lesson can be irremediable division. ject's Perhaps learned - in the endless measuring of our relation to the patriarchal space on the one hand, and to the text on the other which "met en 6tat de perte, celui . . faitvacillerles assises historiques,culturelles, qui d6conforte psychologiques du lecteur, la consistance de ses goits, de ses valeurs et de ses souvenirs, met en crise son rapport au langage."25

NOTES
2. Roland Barthes par lui-mime,Paris, 1975, pp. 76-77.

1. Tel Quel,no. 85, pp. 32-38.

3. Ibid., p. 67.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

6. Ibid., p. 145. 7. Ibid., p. 153. 8. "D6lib6ration," Tel Quel,no. 82, p. 14.

Le Plaisir du Texte,Paris, 1973, p. 54. Roland Barthes,p. 120. Plaisir du Texte,p. 63. Roland Barthes,p. 106. "On ichoue . . ." p. 35.

4. "Barthes," Cahiersdu Cinema. 5. La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie, Paris, 1980.

14. Idem. 15. Publishedas Legon, Paris, 1978.

18. The first few McGraw's and Barthes' Visual article, "Semiotics, pagesofBetty Erotographics, no. 26, exploreverycarefully whatthismight mean forBarthes. Concerns," Sub-Stance,
19. Chambre Claire, p. 21. 20. Plaisir du Texte,p. 63.

16. Chambre Claire, p. 20. 17. Fragments d'un discours amoureux, Paris, 1977, p. 26.

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du Pri, where,on his worknotes textLa Fabrique hereof Ponge'sbeautiful 21. I'm reminded est une perfection." that"la platitude for22 and 23 February1963, he remarks no. 12, p. 128. Michelsonin October, 22. Quoted by Annette
23. "On 6choue .. ." p. 34.

24. Ibid., p. 37. du Texte, 25. Plaisir pp. 25-26.

under and DalhousieUniversity, oftheKillamFoundation thegenerosity The author acknowledges whose auspicesthisworkwas carriedout.

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