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PARTISAN REVIEW
fact which serves adherents to rally around him, and detractors to
mystify and/ or dismiss him. Barthes has taken over many of Lacan's
dicta, without, however, spelling them out, or linking them to Freud's
writing. And they both are eager to create and/ or discover new meta–
languages, to discover new meaning. Hence some of the free–
associations which in
Barthes
by
Barthes,
or in
Image Music Text,
appear to be only playful, or outrageous, do have more theoretical
validity within the French context. Even the use of "divagations," of a
"fragmented" style, take place within the French literary tradition,
particularly in the constant concern with Michelet, Racine, and
Mallarme. Along with the emphasis on aphorisms, on metaphors, on
transparent signs that are
to
be "released from bondage.. ' as Donoghue
so well stated, the possibility of fragmented readings is to help us relate
to Barthes's " texts. "
It
is the French ambiance, I believe, that makes for
the success of a new type of reading, of reinventions, and. Which
promises to involve readers actively rather than passively. For reading
as a playful activity also parallels the Lacanian relation between the
self and the
Other,
that is, the psychoanalytic session. And the popular–
ity of Lacan, who from early on publicly attacked the inequality
inherent in the interchange between the knowing analyst and the
uninitiated patient, not only helped
to
establish the usefulness of
linguistic categories but also to emphasize the egalitarian notions of
structuralism. Lacan, it will be recalled, insisted that a patient is ready
to
be an analyst when he
feels
ready, and this led to his final break with
the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953. But had he
succeeded in training others as well as himself, we would hear the
names of Lacanian analysts as frequently as Lacan's, whereas, in fact,
Lacan is the charismatic figure who has only acolytes or enemies.
Clearly, the fusion between psychoanalysis,' literary criticism, and
philosophy, which was meant to serve as mutual enlightenment and to
explain the origins of culture and thought, had to become muddled
when the unconscious structures no longer promised to surface. (The
underlying ideology, that the emerging structures would also demon–
strate human equality, however, could not be abandoned along with
the original structuralist methodology.) Instead, structuralists concen–
trated on linguistics, which requires a wide-ranging intellectual back–
ground that fewer and fewer people possess, even though structuralists
and poststructuralists claimed to speak for the
reader,
that is for the
consumer of the texts. I am fairly well read, in a wide range of areas,
but I have much trouble with Derrida. And so far, I have had few
students, even at the graduate level, who can understand Levi-Strauss,
