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.

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.

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’.

Radical [Hi]story

With these words, we mark in this chapter the extraordinary and life-long fascination that Barthes has with the nineteenth century (Sun 2014), even imagining Marx, Mallarmé, Nietzsche and Freud meeting in 1876 (2013, 6). Indeed the quotation above from Jean Jaurès – from the introduction to his huge ‘socialist history’ of the Great French Revolution – seems to go to the heart of Barthes's political ideas at least at the start of his career, up to and including what Stedman Jones (1983, 48) calls the early Lukács's ‘marriage between romantic anti-scientific lebensphilosophie and historical materialism’. First, because Jaurès was assassinated in 1914, whilst trying to argue against a war that was going to turn into a blood-bath, and in which Barthes lost his father he never knew (Stafford 2015a, 15–17). Second, the strong influence of Jaurès's socialism, well attested in Barthes's early correspondence in 1932 with his life-long friend Philippe Rebeyrol (Barthes 2018, 2, 4–5) points to the consistency of Barthes's left-wing beliefs. But, perhaps the most important for the purposes of this chapter, is that Jaurès was a historian (and not the first) that we now call ‘from below’, who used a historiographical writing that went directly against official History. This ‘History from below’, typified by the works of its recent practitioner, Raphael Samuel – younger member of the group of mainly British Communists who, by turn, were influenced by the French historians Georges Lefebvre, Lucien Febvre and Albert Mathiez – is what characterized the interest that Barthes had developed in the historiography of Jules Michelet.

The play on words ‘history/story’ in the title of this section above refers, at the same time, to Barthes's extensive work of 1968–69 on the curious story by the nineteenth-century writer (and contemporary of Michelet) Honoré de Balzac called Sarrasine, the ‘re-writing’ of which by Barthes and his postgraduate students in Paris became his 1970 essay S/Z.

Backwards Barthes?

This book operates with the premise that not only should we avoid creating a hierarchy of different moments in Barthes's career (usually the late over the early, often forgetting the middle), but also, by the same token, no text or Barthesian maxim should be taken as the final word: we should not take, for example, Camera Lucida ‘as Barthes's final or absolute word on the image’ (Oxman 2010, 85). Barthes's writings are then a set of texts to be shuffled around, while we remain all the time mindful of their historical and contextual progression, albeit in the fits and starts of a spiral.

Indeed, there are even a number of good reasons to consider a ‘backwards’ reading of Barthes's work. Even in publishing terms there has been a marked backwards feel to Barthesiana; for example, Hervé Algalarrondo's ‘Final Days’ was followed, more recently, by the ‘First Days’ of Barthes (Gury 2012). The former suggests that the last three years of Barthes's life, after his mother's death in 1977, are deeply unhappy ones; the latter that being separated from his Normandy roots in exchange for his Basque/Gascogne upbringing had particular consequences in his work. But more seriously, one major reason for entertaining the idea of ‘backwards’ biography in relation to Barthes is that there is, in his oeuvre, a double looking-back.

Since 2002 there has been a raft of posthumous publications of Barthes's lecture and seminar notes and diaries, which have been released (surely for good reason) backwards too – the 1976–77 and 1977–78 lectures in 2002 (2013; 2005), the 1979–80 lectures in 2003 (2011b), the 1974–76 seminars in 2007 (2007a), the China diaries and the Mourning diaries (written in 1974 and 1977–79, respectively) in 2009 (2012 and 2010b), and the 1968-69 seminars in 2011 (2011b).

Barthes, Aesthete?

It was once remarked to me that taking the work of Roland Barthes as ‘political’ was absurd given how much of an aesthete he clearly was. What would it mean therefore to present a ‘political’ Barthes (Zhuo 2011)? That is the challenge of this book, to affirm and investigate the politicized charge of an essayist, theorist and writer. In doing so, the analysis acknowledges but looks away from the four biographies of Barthes that have been written since his death in 1980. Calvet (1994), Stafford (1998), Gil (2012) and Samoyault (2017) all underline, to lesser or greater extent, the general dislike evident in his life and work of ‘official’ politics, including left-wing militancy and the associated hysteria it generated. There is no equivalent in Barthes's activities of a Michel Foucault leading the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP) in its direct support for prisoners in French gaols.

And yet, writing was a deeply political act, from the start of Barthes's oeuvre during World War II, right up until the final lectures at the Collège de France four decades later. Forty years then of radical thought, critical theory and innovative essay-writing are to be considered as a form of political activity. In doing so, this book aims to address, if only obliquely, the perceived dichotomy between politics and aesthetics that seems to beset the ways in which critics have read Barthes's writing, to the extent that there would seem to be two very different ‘Roland Barthes’: a politicized, Marxist intellectual and a disengaged, literary aesthete. In the latter, Susan Sontag (1982, 427, 432) casts Barthes in the Oscar Wilde tradition of the aphorist, interested in the dandy and ‘camp’, a modern aesthete and excellent commentator on Fashion and fashions more generally, investigating the social and literary mask. Yet we forget Wilde's powerful arguments in favour of socialism at our peril: in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1960 [1890]), Wilde drew on Ruskin, Shaw and Morris, in an essay as utopian as it is essayistic, to expose social alienation, in ways that a Barthes, inspired by Michelet, Fourier and Jaurès, will do too.

It was C. L. R. James who famously claimed, in a letter to John O’Neill, that he had managed to understand the dialectic in action: ‘I take the liberty of sending you a work of my own … a study of the dialectic of Hegel, not explanations of the dialectic but directly the dialectic itself … I regret to say that it is the only direct study of the dialectic that I know’ (cited in Dunayevskaya 1972, n1). It is precisely the writing of the dialectic that we trace in Barthes's accounts of his trips to Japan and then China.

Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Barthes is looking for a dialectical way of writing. In three separate essays – ‘Authors and Writers’ in 1960, in a 1965 article on Edgar Morin's ‘dialectical writing’, and ‘Writers, Teachers, Intellectuals’ in 1971 – he comes to the same conclusion. It is worth quoting in full the footnote in ‘Authors and Writers’, to show the view of the non-dialectical nature of language:

Despite the injunction for the responsible intellectual ‘we must be dialectical’, language itself is incapable of being dialectical because, he argued, it is ‘monodic and linear’: it can speak of more than one phenomenon not at once but only in series. ‘La dialectique parlée’ – in a sentence which is, inexplicably, left out of the English translation – ‘est un voeu pieux’ [the spoken dialectic is wishful thinking] (2002, II, 405n2).

The danger is that we consider this turning away from the world to the self as one of antipathy to politics. Indeed, the ‘new dialectic’ that Barthes finds in Japan should not be seen, however, as a harbinger of so-called ‘postmodernity’.