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PARTISAN REVIEW
the diverse accounts of playas given by Derrida, Sollers, and Bataille;
but in Barthes the crucial motive is the pleasure attendant upon the
exercise of power. The supreme form of power is represented as
sexual, writing being the Kamasutra of language, as he calls it in
The
PLeasure of the Text.
There and elsewhere, Barthes urges the reader to
entertain every logical or other contradiction, unabashed, for the sake
of pleasure; and to hold meaning not as an ultimate aim but as an
event at every moment revocable, reversible, and incomplete. In the
preface to Lucette Finas's
Le bruit d'iris
(1978), Barthes criticizes
structuralism for failing to include or allow for excess in its system.
He approves of Finas's determination to "exploit" the text of Mal–
larme, and he inlroduces into the experience of reading the terminol–
ogy of perversion, fetishism, and sadism. What he finds inadequate in
structuralism now is that it lacks the notions of force, intensity, £lux,
and excess: the boring aspect of structuralism, he suggests, is its
infatuation with the strict opposition of yes and no, A and B, there is
never recognition of more or less, of degrees of intensity or force. This
brings us round again to Derrida's use of both terms, play and force.
Play, to represent it briefly and inadequately, is that which the mind
'must conceive before the alternative of presence and absence. Play is
the term of terms within which the concept of being must be situated
and, indeed, rebuked: the force of mind is Nietzschean in its affirma–
tion, something like the tragic joy which Yeats attributed to
Nietzsche and invoked in "Lapis Lazuli."
It
is my understanding that the words "play" and "force" are
close kin in Derrida's mind. In the first chapter of
L'ecriture et La
difference
he addresses himself to Jean Rousset's book
Forme et
signification,
and he says that in the future, structuralism may be
interpreted "as a relaxation, if not a lapse, of the attention given to
force,
which is the tension of force itself."
"Form
fascinates," Derrida
said, "when one no longer has the force to understand force from
within force itself."
Criticism henceforth knows itself separated from force, occasionally
avenging itself on force by gravely and profoundly proving that
separation is the condition of the work, and not only of the
discourse on the work.
It
is this knowledge, according to Derrida, which accounts for the
note of melancholy and diminished ardor beneath the most subtle
essays in the structuralist analysis of texts. The reason is that the relief
and design of structures appear more clearly when content, "which is
