EUGENE GOODHEART
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inviolate. Barthes's value terms are
difference
and
pluriel.
He pro–
tests against the tyranny that one language tries
to
impose on another.
Difference "dispenses with triumphs." The increasing inwardness of
his work
(Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes and
A Lover's Discourse)
has led Barthes to confessions of insecurity. His liberalism is not
simply a concession to otherness.
It
proceeds from an unwillingness,
based on insecurity, to over-value his own
imaginaire de la solitude
(the image-system of solitude). His Nietzschean perception of the will
to power inherent in all languages leads him in an un-Nietzschean
direction to the condition of resisting its murderous innocence.
It
is the
other Nietzsche, who has transcended the contentions of power, who
provides an analogous image to Barthes's dream of happiness.
Nietzsche's utopia is an anticommunity of artists, each creating his
own world of beauty and power, which he governs with absolute
authority. Nietzsche remarks somewhere: "Hundreds of profound
lonelinesses together form the city of Venice: this is its charm, a picture
for the men of the future." Barthes proposes an anarchist utopia, which
bypasses the necessity of making a revolution.
In
Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes one is struck by a persistent
suggestion , indeed an offering of, a psychogenic basis for his thought
as he himself had earlier offered a psychoanalytic understanding of the
work of Michelet and Racine. Referring to the intimidating authority
of the
natural,
Barthes speaks ironically of "how natural it is, in
France, to be Catholic, married, and properly accredited with the right
degrees."
It
is difficult to see how Barthes has suffered from being a
Protestant or from his failure (resulting from illness)
to
have received
an aggregation and a doctorate. (After all, he has recently acceded to a
chair in the G.>llege de France.) But Barthes's homosexual preference is
unquestionably a continuous source of anxiety as it was for Proust (his
favorite writer), Gide, and is for Genet. It is, I would suspect, the origin
of his persistent need to assert the sacrosanctness of his own
imaginaire
de La solitude.
Barthes goes beyond the usual apologetics for homosex–
uality by deuniversalizing it, insisting on the plural term, homosexual–
ities. What Barthes can be said to achieve is a kind of imaginative
onanism in which one need not defer to, indeed one need scarcely
acknowledge the other. I am not so much proposing a psychoanalytic
reduction or shou ld I say demystification, as I am a correlative to what
is "finally" a linguistic phenomenon.
Barthes's complicity with contemporary myths, his indiscriminate
pleasure in the verbal systems of Sade, Loyola, Fourier (so different
from one another in their content, yet so alike in their
ecritures,
the
bodies of their endless desire) seems perverse and puzzling only if we
