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PARTISAN REVIEW
stances. A favorite practice has been to search in a text or theory for
one of the currently disapproved philosophical isms-logocentrism,
empiricism , positivism, essentialism, panopticism. Since it's
assumed a priori that the
ism
in question is crucial to the legitimation
of "bourgeois society," the reactionary nature of the text or theory
that harbors it hardly even needs to be argued.
This mode of political critique can be found in most of the brief
essays in Roland Barthes's much admired
Mythologies
(including the
second volume, translated as
The Eif.fel Tower and Other Mythologies).
Applying with great literalness his stated premise that "the disease
of thinking in essences is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology
of man," Barthes proceeds to find this disease in everything from
the striptease to detergent soaps. Since Barthes has determined in
advance that essentialism is the epistemological glue of the bourgeois
order, he need engage in no real social analysis, but has only to
produce instances of essentialism in the phenomena he studies.
Since "essences" exist at a very high level of abstraction, it isn't too
difficult for Barthes to find them wherever he looks. One might even
accuse Barthes of propounding essences when he implies there is a
"bottom" to bourgeois mythologies of man.
It's not that Barthes couldn't have found considerable justifica–
tion for linking the bourgeoisie with essentialist thought-doubtless
he could have. The trouble is one can just as readily associate bour–
geois culture with
antiessentialist
thought.
If
certain passages in
Marx can be believed, essentialism was more characteristic
ofjeudal
than of bourgeois society, which has ruthlessly unsettled all that ' s
holy and traditional. Barthes would seem to have taken one ten–
dency which has, in
some
times and places, systematically functioned
to legitimate established social order and inflated it into
the
defining
establishment trait, with the dubious implication that attacking that
trait in any of its forms would then be a radical move .
Barthes's critique of essentialism derives not from analysis of
society but from the avant-garde myth of the bourgeoisie, as a class
always in need of "reassurance." This avant-garde myth brings into
playa kind of Intellectual Discomfort Index, which measures the
value of any idea according to the degree of discomfort it presum–
ably inflicts on the bourgeois mind. For Barthes, essentialism is
always acting to "reassure," "shelter," "recuperate," or provoke
"euphoria" by satisfying the bourgeois need for "airtight order "
and closure. What Barthes fails to consider seriously enough is the
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