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But if there is no reality behind the illusion, then to "penetrate the
object," is, as Barthes puts it, not simply to liberate, but to destroy it.
Demystification for Barthes shows signs of wear, because necessary as it
may be, it cannot satisfy the appetite for wholeness, for substantiality,
for presence as it did for Marx. "We constantly drift between the object
and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness," Barthes
declares almost poignantly at the end of a book apparently devoted to
demystification.
Unlike Marx, Barthes does not possess a vision of reality alterna–
tive to the myths that he demystifies and consequently from which he
excludes himself. His "impatience at the sight of the 'naturalness' with
which newspapers, art, and common-sense dress up reality," does not
presuppose an authentic nature which the contemporary world be–
trays. Nature has several meanings and antimeanings, and they all
figure in Barthes's rejection of the possibility of the natural world: the
real as opposed to the illusory, the normal opposed
to
the abnormal,
the innocent to the corrupt, the artless to the artificial. In
Roland
Barthes
(1975), Barthes, reflecting on a theme that has preoccupied him
from the beginning of his career, opposes history
to
nature, claiming
for history the power of relativizing nature and making it possible "to
believe in meaning in time." In contrast, nature oppressively makes all
things motionless, eternal: "like milk spoiled in the disintegrated space
of phraseology." This, of course, recalls a Marxian distinction, but the
distinction does not provide Barthes with the experience of an alterna–
tive plenitude to the empty abstractions of bourgeois Nature. For Marx,
history was a natural force comparable to the evolutionary system
described by Darwin. All that remains of the natural in Barthes is the
honesty of acknowledging that innocence is no longer possible, a
purely negative condition, immensely difficult to sustain.
In a remarkable essay on
La
Rochefoucauld, Barthes examines a
particular method of demystification . Through a series of maxims,
La
Rochefoucauld reduces heroism to ambition, ambition to jealousy,
and finally jealousy to "the grandest of all passions
(amour propre)."
Barthes presses beyond
amour propre.
"When the ultimate passion has
been discovered it too evaporates into indolence, inertia, nothingness."
According to Barthes, La Rochefoucauld has immobilized the process
in the maxim, which can be demystified in grammatical terms as a
reduction engendered by
ne que. (L'heroisme n'est que l'ambition.
Heroism is nothing but ambition.)
As
Barthes wittily remarks,
"la
pessimisme de La Rochejoucauld's n'est qu'un rationalisme incom–
plet."
Beyond or underneath the classical "clarity" of La Rochefou–
cauld's pessimism is the modern
neant.
One wonders, however,
