296
RICHARD KLEIN
Barthes's dilemma is not unique, only more
readable
t.han
that of
most critics - to his immense credit. And tJhere is no easy way out. It has
become a commonplace of modern criticism to reject as a false dichotomy
the opposition between form and content and, in the gesture of rejecting
and transcending its terms, falling squarely back into one side or the
other. Leo Bersani's book reveals just that tendency. For the opposition
of form and content is not just anyone; it is fundamentally implicated
in a whole chain of metaphors which constitutes the very ground of
Western thought: outside/inside; surface/depth; circumference/center;
body/mind; appearance/truth. And as Jacques Derrida has shown, all
those oppositions can ultimately be derived from the notion of
sign,
which implicitly and unavoidably distinguishes between signifier and
signified. It
is
that notion that Baruhes, following Saussure, unwaveringly
adopts as the indispensable instrument of his critical enterprise. How–
ever much the critic may aspire to get beyond those dichotomies, they
inform all his concepts, any language he might use to transcend them.
But Barthes's work
assumes
them, none more vigorously and rigorously
than his - wittingly and unwittingly. For if at times his theory is more
alert than his practice (
Mythologies),
at others his practice subverts and
exceeds his theory
(Critical Essays).
Barthes is regularly accused of
being contradictory, protean, of changing positions and formulations
from essay to essay, often from paragraph to paragraph. The charge
within certain limits is doubtless true. But if that is a weakness, it is also
his greatest strength. For the strength of his work lies in its subtle
rhetorical strategy, its unwillingness to settle for a falsely secure theoreti–
cal position, and, conversely, its self-concious refusal to take refuge
m
an unexamined critical practice. It weaves an intricate textual structure
that exploits the freedom of its essayistic form, that moves with uncom–
mon elegance and economy between the poles of the inescapable dilemma
it poses.
It
is the movement of that rhetorical play, its back and forth,
or more exactly, to borrow Barthes's own metaphor, its turnstile spin–
ning, that opens and closes the metaphysical space of its own categories.
The metaphor is emblematic of his most persuasive mode of critical
discourse, one that renounces its scientific pretentions to purely formal
description, that acknowledges the Nietzschean imperative of a world of
signs without truth that offers itself constantly to interpretation–
critical discourse that is itself both "language object" and "meta–
language," writing and science, content and form, like the subtle, "con–
tradictory" essay that spins around
I'Le
dernier point sur Robbe–
Grillet?" - a spiraling, interrogative movement - a question mark–
like Mallarme's dancer, "Crayonne au theatre:"
