The essays, review-essays and brief reviews collected here were written over the last half-century and published in various leading publications of their moment. In relationship to Yeats, they trace the dance of contemporary theory-inflected criticism—its practices and personalities (including my own) over that period. For different reasons of space (both of this book and of each short individual piece) a few of them have been dropped. But their significances are either already evident in other longer pieces or are captured throughout in revision.

The major theme of the book is exemplified by Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” It is one of four poems he wrote on Major Robert Gregory, the only son of Lady Gregory, Irish poet, dramatist, folklorist and Yeats's long-time patron. The other three poems include “Shepherd and Goatherd;” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” an elegy aspiring to overtop Milton's “Lycidas;” and “Reprisals,” which was first published posthumously, as much about the seemingly endless troubles of Ireland due to British rule and its aftermath, as about a bitter remembrance of Gregory's loss. As it is in the public domain, here is “Irish Airman” entire:

What Yeats identifies in his later work of poetry and visionary imaginings on the tragic human condition (especially in modernity) as “death-in-life” and “life-in-death,” is herein dramatized. The sublime moment of singular, individualizing feeling—“A lonely impulse of delight”—is the dance of death, as Holbein, Strindberg and Freud might envision as represented in their works. All conditions—national, local, global, gender, sexual, medical or what-have-you—pale before what Yeats, as in most of his middle and later poems, puts front and center on the stage of this remarkable poem.

In the final two chapters of this book, we turn our attention to what might be called a ‘Politics of self’. The self becomes a key site of dialectical interplay between the apersonal and what Barthes calls the ‘for-me’ of Nietzscheanism. The apersonal is not, however, to be taken as a complete erasure of the subject (Lordon 2013). Rather than ‘dropping the subject’ (Goh 2015, 1–23), Barthes proceeds to radically relativize its position, using various strategies of decentring, re-ordering and exempting, in particular in the notion of the Neutral. This search for a non-determinism of self, a suspension of stereotypes of the person's image, is naturally dependent on the rising fame in the final decade of his life:

Furthermore, as we saw with the ‘double grasp’ in Michelet's writing of history and then its development in the writing on Japan into the ‘no wish-to-grasp (aucun vouloir-saisir)’, saisir, a synonym in French for both ‘understand’ and ‘record’, is slowly but surely decon-structed: it is the search for ‘peace’, away from the ‘images’ that the Other and society in general attach to the self, that leads Barthes to opacity.

No Wish to ‘Understand’ nor ‘Grasp’

Reminiscing, towards the end of his life, about his friendship with Barthes, the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khatibi (1997, 25) describes an intriguing, regular exchange: ‘Barthes would say to me privately, in response to a reproach frequently made to him: “When someone tells me to be clear, what they really mean is be like me”’. Revealing not so much a tetchy theorist of semiotics as an astute commentator on interpersonal relations, the retort from Barthes summarizes two decades of critical — and often complex — research on language.

‘History Cannot March Against History’

Barthes's speech in Bucharest in September 1949 finishes with these words. Not only does the tone resemble the ‘messianism’ in Walter Benjamin's theories on history we considered in Chapter Three, it suggests a voluntarist take on historical change. Furthermore, given that his initiation into the Marxism of his sanatorium friend Georges Fournié in 1946 occurs only one year before he becomes a French Lecturer in Bucharest, it is important to consider the young intellectual's attitude towards Stalinism during this pivotal period in world Communism which we will do in Chapter Seven. Before this we need to lay the basis for an analysis of the dialectical form of thinking that Barthes develops following this extraordinary injunction on history in Bucharest. To do this we will consider in Chapter Six his writings on Japan and China. But first, in this chapter we will consider, in the light of the ‘loss’ of self that we saw in Chapter Four, how Barthes deals with these two forms of determinism, the systematic and the classifying.

The System that is suppleness is not entirely original in Mythologies. Baudelaire's naiveté in his 1855 view that art criticism should be ‘free of a system’ (cited in Shawcross 1997, 51–52) is mirrored in Barthes's critique of the systematic that, as we shall see, is not at all systematic. Nevertheless, Barthes is certainly tempted by some form of system, especially in relation to History. For Michelet, Voltaire ‘dissipated history like dust in the wind, by consigning it to blind chance’ (1962, 244), and – despite his two-part history of the reign of Louis XIV – failed to understand history. As we shall see, the Barthes of the 1950s takes this blind chance view of Voltaire's and subjects it to a penetrating critique in 1958 precisely for its lack of system.

However, in his 1971 essay on Fourier (1989, 109), Barthes uses a quotation from Marx/Engels's The German Ideology (1974) to underline the paradoxes of systems whereby orthodox followers of system end up as the ‘exact antipodes’ of that system (hence Marx's famous dictum: ‘I am not a Marxist’); and makes an important distinction.

It would be facile to claim, as my title may appear to do, that the momentous transformation in literary studies that Frank Kermode's Romantic Image and Jean-Michael Rabaté's The Future of Theory permit us to reflect critically upon comes down to a mere shift in point of view. More must be involved than a change from a focus on the individual author suffering in isolation to produce his or her radiant work of beauty with an uncanny life all its own, to an investigation of the sublime spectacle of all the minute processes, however identified and analyzed, by which any subject is formed (and deformed) as it deposits its traces in the real or virtual archives of the present moment. Nonetheless, for purposes of initial clarification at least, I think it is accurate to say that a general shift of this sort, from placing the critical perspective on the dancer (so to speak) to placing it on the dance (a shift from aesthetic product to social process), has indeed occurred in the 45 years between the original publication of Frank Kermode's Romantic Image in 1957 and Jean-Michel Rabaté's The Future of Theory in 2002. Ironically or not, the imagery of dancer and dance, so central to Kermode's study (even more so than that of the tree, the obvious symbol of Romantic organicism), does reappear in Rabaté's book, as we shall see, at a crucial moment in its argument.

But before opening my own argument, I want to present the most famous passage celebrating the vision of dancer and dance in modernist literature, the concluding stanza of W. B. Yeats's magisterial meditation on the complex interchanges between life and art, “Among School Children”:

Now is not the occasion to do a complete reading of this visionary scene of dancer and dance, although some interesting unanswered questions about it could be raised: Where do dancer and tree suddenly come from, their having made no earlier appearance in the poem at all?

Politics of Biography

In Chapter One, we considered the merits and appropriateness of looking at Barthes's thought and writing in a backwards, and anti-teleological, fashion. This was part of a concern to present his work in an equalized if not non-hierarchical manner that tried to disallow any privileging of the later ideas in ways that downplayed the political Barthes in favour of the aesthete. In this final chapter, we pursue the de-hierarchization of the aesthetic over the political by considering the political import of inverting History through a consideration of what we might call Barthesian dialectics: or, the ‘undialectical’.

In his biography of himself (1994, 68–69), Barthes uses the figure of the spiral to account for the way in which he sees his thought returning in different forms and in different places along his career. Indeed, the spiral goes to the heart of the Barthesian conception of the dialectic, in all its guises:

How then does the spiral – alongside the doubles, circles, returns that we have identified in Barthes's work – fit with the ‘undialectical’?

Though Barthes's ‘undialectical’ appeared to be used in some sense negatively in relation to Sartre and Marx's inability to use language dialectically (and thereby get beyond paradox), this turns around in Camera Lucida. Following his mother's death, his own death suddenly appears to him ‘undialectical’; for, since he has no offspring, ‘the only biography is of an unproductive life’, that of a ‘being pour rien’ (1994, 5, 21). In line with the Hegelian dialectic, his own death to come will produce nothing (1984, 71–72). Except that Barthes reverses chronology in the light of this non-dialectical (or anti-dialectical) situation, by considering his recently deceased mother as his daughter, as a product of his own life, and then proceeding to immortalize her by inscribing her into his essay on photography.

The second volume of R. F. Foster's biography, W.B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (the first volume was the award-winning The Apprentice Mage) clearly completes a major achievement in literary biography every bit as masterful and illuminating as Richard Ellmann's life of James Joyce. Despite this obvious achievement, however, I come away from finishing my reading of it disturbed. What disturbs me is not the usual kind of complaint about literary biography, that the biographer has poured so many facts into his text the writer's work has been overwhelmed by the contexts of history and personal life.

Foster has already demonstrated brilliantly in the first volume, and he continues the demonstration here, that he can marshal all the facts and place the work in context and still do justice to its large formal structures and major themes. Although close textual analysis of a specialized kind is apparently not Foster's forte, for purposes of literary biography it is not really necessary, and in fact would just get in the way, stopping the onward dynamic thrust of the story he has to tell.

Basically, that story is how the 52-year-old W. B. Yeats (to whom Foster consistently refers as WBY, for short), on marrying the 24-year-old Georgie Hyde Lees in October 1917 finds not only an erotic and domestic partner, willing to bear him children and run his everyday life more efficiently and sympathetically than anyone else ever could. But he also finds, for the first decade of their marriage at least, an occult muse whose automatic writing, dream-visions and oracular medium-like trances give him, as the spiritual Instructors later claims, “metaphors for poetry,” not to mention the most sustained and successful sexual relationship in his life. Indeed, she gives him, as Foster shows, metaphors for the experience of poetic inspiration and visionary eroticism so powerful and original, whatever their traditional sources, that it could rightly be said that if any person (other than Yeats himself) remakes this once minor figure into the major poet to write English in the last century, it is certainly she.

But it is not, of course, Foster's magisterial rehearsal of this familiar story that disturbs me. Nor it is that Foster writes dismissively of Yeats's occult beliefs, for he does not.

Two images or scenes of reading in Yeats’ work haunt me. The first occurs at the conclusion of Ego Dominus Tuus, the poem that Yeats attached to the end of his meditation upon visionary creativity, Per Amica Silentia Luna (1918). Basically, for Yeats, visionary creativity happens to the poet, to him, when an occult experience arises, and he becomes the medium of a long-dead person or of a daimon or daemon—a sort of demi-god, located in ancient hierarchy of beings between the human and the fully divine. The torturous self-divisions of life produce a crisis, which the coming of the ghost or daemon (to simplify things), whose wisdom, if properly evoked by the poet will not so much finally resolve the divisions but instead create a bulwark, what Yeats terms the Mask, a symbolic representation of provisional, ritually evoked unity of being. At the end of this poem, we find the following:

Insofar as a student of Yeats, his scholar–critic–teacher, reads him, he or she fulfills this prayer/prophecy, for Yeats, as he sees it.

The other scene of reading, twenty years later, concludes the poem Lapis Lazuli (1938):

The question of identity is never a purely academic matter. As we see every day, in America's War Against Terrorism, civilizations clash over identity, with great violence. This is especially true in the modern world, in which technology has fostered the power to lay waste to combatants and civilians alike on a massive scale without precedent in human history. How identities are formed, what shapes they take, how they defend themselves once formed and how they change, if they really do, are all questions embedded within a larger philosophical question of identity, particularly with the global advent of modernity, which early in the last century struck the minds of leading Western intellectuals with considerable force. This larger question, traditionally phrased, is: “What is man?” By which, I mean here, what does it mean to say that a person, a culture, a world or a historical period, has an identity? The question of identity is really the question of possessing an essence.

However, that may be in general, W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud conceive of human identity as being substantially dependent, for its essence (whatever that may be), upon the operation of a comprehensive and coherent system of symbols whose cultural power they call, respectively, myth or illusion. Although Yeats thinks that all myth is true in some fundamental sense, and Freud thinks that all myths are illusory and so false if pandemic, both agree that the system of interlocking symbols constituting the cultural machinery of a society works by means of great coordinating mythologies, or the manifold illusion to produce and enforce identity. What is striking to both of them about modern society, especially after the First World War, is the absence of any master symbol to stitch together the symbolic strands or to forge, into a significant whole, the chain of elements now making up cultural identity. Not only God, but also every other candidate for the position of master symbol appears outmoded, disposable, if not already disposed. Despite their considerable differences, Yeats the occult intellectual and Freud the Enlightenment enthusiast view this unparalleled situation in human history—in which the totality of a culture's resources to create and sustain identity appears to function without any authoritative central symbol—as apocalyptically dire and potentially destructive of the entire species.

So far we have considered the dialectical interventionist, and especially earlier, Barthes, by looking at the twin inheritance from Michelet and Marx, whilst asserting the competing epistemologies of early Nietzsche. Across theatre (both ancient Greek and modern Brechtian epic), contemporary myth and the historiality of criticism, Barthes's use of a ‘double grasp’ has signalled the political nature of his writing as it confronts a responsibility of forms within a determined defence of left-wing critique. Now the analysis moves onto a more creative and mobile form of critical praxis.

Macé (2006, 232) locates both Empire of Signs and S/Z on the cusp ‘between a met-alinguistic and a fictional moment’. The ‘double grasp’, as we shall see, involves the pleasure of reading, but also then writing. However, the pleasure of the ‘double grasp’ is also in its very deconstruction. In what Barthes calls a ‘new dialectic’, the very notion and practice of the ‘double grasp’ will be shown to undergo a ‘mutation’; and it is in his 1970 essay Empire of Signs that we will trace its trajectory in Chapter Seven, before showing the limits of this ‘new dialectic’ in the diaries Barthes kept during his 1974 visit to China. Before this, we need to consider two major elements in the ‘mutation’ that takes place in Barthesian thought and critical praxis across the 1960s. In Chapter Six we will consider the critique of systems and classifications, but first we need, for the philosophy of politics we are aiming to define, to track what it means to start ‘losing ground’ (Brown 1992, 13–63). However, the metaphor of ‘drifter’ that Brown attributes to Barthes will be replaced by a much more active, even voluntarist, metaphor, that of perte.

Turning the Tables: Creative Criticism and the Loss of Self: From Historiality to Apersonalism

Weakly (and pessimistically) translated as ‘loss’ in English, Barthesian perte – as distinct from the version in Georges Bataille's thought – is the politicized corroding of the notion of self, a relentless but not aggressive critique of personal identity, of national, linguistic and cultural tropisms that underpin selfhood.

The ‘subversive complicity’ (Brown 1992, 32) that we have seen in Mythologies, using a range of dialectical innovations, will become in this chapter an intervention by Barthes into theatre. If the theatre is a more performative genre than the essay, the ‘commentary par excellence’ can take on new actions and new possibilities. In this chapter, a consideration of the chorus, the collective commentary, will be the key figure under which Barthes performs a political voice.

In a 1951 article (2015b, 8–11), Barthes likens the ‘many dissident’ Marxists who reject Muscovite dogmatism to the ancient Greek chorus, trying ‘to retain, like the classical chorus, an awareness of misfortune, a sense of hope, and a will to understand’ (10); this is, in 1951, in sharp contrast, to his imagining in 1975 a fiction of ‘choosing’ one's ‘brand’ of Marxism like a clothing item (1994, 156). Two years later, in 1953, describing ancient Greek tragedy as ‘essentially the theatre of a political history that created itself’ – the King in Aeschylus's play The Suppliants meditating on war and peace is his example – Barthes likens this ‘pure human deliberation’ to the Greek chorus (2002, I, 266). Between the three levels on the stage – the people, the kings and the Gods – it is the ‘people chorus’ which holds the ultimate human power: language. However, this chorus is not, as is traditionally thought, a lyrical echo of the actions on stage; rather the chorus is the ‘all-powerful speech that explains and resolves the ambiguity of appearances, bringing the actors movements into a causality that can be understood’ (266–67). Indeed, as the ‘Commentary par excellence’, it is the chorus which supplies the tragic dimension of the play, whilst, as Véron notes (2019, 10), it makes sure that the hero is never alone. Barthes regrets that it is precisely this that is missing in modern and contemporary theatre (not to mention sport, daily life) which has promoted human psychology over political commentary, the actor's humanity over that of the spectator who is silent.

In Chapter One, we used a dog-leg structure in the analysis to suggest that Barthes's conception of love is remarkably consistent, from one end of his career to the other, in its use of dialectics. In this chapter, we concentrate on a shorter period of his career, 1954–57, to consider an ‘amorous dialectic’ that is politicised in a different way.

In an early ‘monthly mythology’ called ‘Phenomenon or myth?’ (2002, V, 1022–23), not included in Mythologies, Barthes sets out the only strategy that he can see for analysing contemporary myths. Remarkably candid, and neither ironic nor playful, Barthes, here in 1954 at least, describes the political mission of his monthly column. Whenever he sees a new myth (that of Martians or Marlon Brando's wedding) he feels the need to counter the attempts to maintain ‘Order’ that myth enacts by denouncing and explaining. But here, he concedes, was the dilemma of this political act. Denunciation could only ever be an explanation whose inadequacy and limits he recognizes. Given the nature of human alienation, his explanations of myth must have a dialectical but ‘loving’ relationship with these myths, the mythologist must be ‘engaged with [their] historical moment’ in ‘a truly amorous dialectic [véritable dialectique d’amour]’:

Though there is no mention of the ‘amorous dialectic’ in Mythologies three years later, there is, at the end of ‘Myth Today’, an echo:

The difference is that, by 1957, the ‘amorous dialectic’ has become the ‘order of sar-casm’, indicative of the mythologist's exclusion from those ‘having nothing’, of the intellectual such as Barthes living only a ‘theoretical sociality’ (2009, 185).

It seems perhaps odd, in the light of what has gone before in this book, to conclude, to close down the discussion. Perhaps then a contradiction is needed. Barthes, probably not a Barthesian (Stafford 2015a, 156–59), is very possibly a materialist moralist; that is, deeply conscious of the lived realities of alienated modern human society, which are then turned into writerly, literary essayism. Furthermore, there is no ‘double’ Barthes divided between aesthetics on the one hand, and the political on the other hand. Indeed, it is against the spirit of Barthesian theory and writing to divide them. Though there are clearly different Barthesian constituencies, the political and the aesthetic are not separate, merely nuances, accents and emphasis. Perhaps it is the ultimate essayistic feature – moralism – that keeps them tightly tied, at least in Barthes's world and spirit. It is necessary then finally to make some tentative suggestions as to the nature of the ethics and politics of Barthesian essayism. This will be carried out by way of a triangulation with, first, an intellectual figure whom we have regularly discussed in this book, Lucien Goldmann, and second, an essayist heavily influenced in his early career by Goldmann and Barthes, the Palestinian post-colonial critic Edward Said.

Barthes, Said, Goldmann

Barthesian ethics in the 1970s have clear echoes in Edward Said's anti-imperialism, what in Orientalism is called the ‘nonrepressive’ and ‘non-manipulative’. Both Said and Barthes wrote, to lesser and greater extents – and this will be the nub of this comparison – as consummate essayists, who, both playful and acerbic in their commentaries, were ever keen to negotiate the dichotomies of writing and reading, of modernity and classicism (in music as much as in literature), of self and other in relation to an alienated political world. However, Higgins (1981) sees Barthes escaping the Saidian dichotomy of either not speaking, or denying subjectivity, by ‘writing without representing’.

Modern poetic autobiography originated with the Romantics’ desire to overcome that growing fragmentation of human existence that had its most immediate sources in the revolutionary scientific and historical critiques that so indiscriminately leveled every traditional structure and value of the culture. Just as people in ages of faith once turned to the confessional genre to discover the specific providential plan secretly at work in the lives, so, during the nineteenth century especially, poets and prose writers such as Wordsworth, Mill and Carlyle, who increasingly found this option denied to them, resorted to the autobiographical mode to determine if perhaps some imaginative pattern of ultimate meaning—or of personal continuity at least, however baleful—could be discovered beneath the apparently random and contradictory details of their experiences.

In this context the figure of the autobiographer and the image of his work clearly become of central importance. The former emerges in the course of the figure of a man who, suffering from an identity crisis, can be seen as in desperate quest of his very self. His work as a result appears to be the place where he seeks not only to trace but hopefully to prefigure the entire journey, as the symbolic history of his own imaginative survival in a bad time: from the imagination's wondrous if hazardous birth, through its eccentric development and self-conscious passion, to its intermittent pangs of a spiritual rebirth.

Thus, the work's completed narrative form describes a dialectical “progress,” which paradoxically is also a spiraling back from the present beginnings in the identity crisis, through the return to the original sources or first principles of imaginative being, to the point where the figurative repetition of the life's wayward movement begins: with the onset of the identity crisis.