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marked by the excessive fear of failing to communicate meaning (its basis) ;
whence, in reaction, in our latest-or ' new '-novels , the practice of the third
system: to state the event without accompanying it with its signification."
"Excessive" is presumably a technical term , but what about" excessive fear"?
Is there an unexcessive fear? "If one prefers" -and if one doesn't? "A kind
of" -categorical subdivision or mere vagueness? "Archaic-or infantile"–
are they really the same or is this gratuitous insult (or worse, exhibitionistic
erudition , here an allusion to Foucault and Freud, with a slippery and
slipshod equating of the two)? "Communicate meaning (or its basis),' -well ,
which , meaning or basis? "In reaction"-is it really, or is the "historical "
development here merely a pseudo-development determined by the dis–
course's presumptions that its alternatives are exhaustive and that they stand
in a relation of "reaction" to each other, that no other "causes" need be
sought? The strange technical vocabulary (never defined or fully established)
combines with a shifty syntax and rhetoric to produce a hallucinatory trance ;
in the reader's bedazzled confusion , the flat assertion of the final clause
emerges with the force of a brilliant discovery, instead ofa banality spruced up
by a glossy discourse. As Susan Sontag remarks, Barthes is an " elegant " critic.
Though she means to praise, the only deadlier insult, by Barthes's own lights,
would be the accusation of clarity (no one is likely to make it). Barthes never
justifies his language or its presuppositions ; it becomes a whirling vortex that
sucks the reader in and under.
This smooth style covers some very eclectic tracks. The language is a
pastiche of-among others-Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan , Jacques
Derrida, and thtough them of Freud and Nietzsche . Barthes's way of talking
is in fact commonplace among up-to-the-minute French intellectuals. It
constitutes an as yet nameless movement , the festive fun at structuralism's
wake . To draw on other thinkers is unobjectionable-what else does anyone
ever do? But in Barthes , the new terms function like that reference code which
he finds" nauseating" : they are not explored, tested, established, but merely
put into play, treated as a received wisdom, an accumulated intellectual
capital.
It
is the critical equivalent of sentimentalism: an appeal in bad faith
to formulaic notions (as sentimentalism appeals to formulaic feelings) with–
out the thought (or experience)that would authorize them . By cutting off
the problematic and polemic origins of its terms, the style flattens them out. Is
Derrida at pains to show that Saussure' s thought is internally contradictory?
Do he and Lacan disagree utterly on fundamental issues? No matter. Saus–
sure ,Jakobson , Bataille, Derrida, Lacan-here comes everybody to sit down
to tea and a polite if rather shallow
causen·e.
So debilitating is this elegance
that Barthes can never quite get at his own central terms. Are some texts
"readerly" and others" writerly"? Is the distinction categorical or historical
