‘The Other Scene’: Barthes, his Contemporaries, and the Orient

Throughout Barthes's Cours at the Collège de France we see several profound themes that reveal the influence of Oriental thought as imported into the West largely by Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki. Barthes's sketching of the haiku as leading to an aesthetic experience which overcomes the sense of division between one's self and one's environment; his suggestions that we conceptualise space and time differently; his digressive, incomplete methods of exposition; and his espousal of ‘suspension’ because of his reluctance to be pinned to a specific subject-position, all stem in part from his fascination with Taoist thought and Japanese aesthetics. He frequently refers in the Cours to the peaceable, liberatory ideals he sees in the ‘Orient’, defined in opposition to an ‘Occident’ whose logomachy is characterised by conflict. There is a problem of conflation here, of course: Diana Knight has shown that ‘Barthes's key utopias are projected into the “Orient”’, and pointed out that the subsumption of such ‘totally distinct parts of the world’ as China and Japan under the label of ‘the Orient’ is problematic – or rather, ‘part of the problem to be discussed’. In the Cours, the ‘Orient’ includes Mount Athos in Greece, the Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka, and memories of Barthes's time spent in Morocco. However, the ‘Orient’ is mainly associated with Taoism, Zen, and the Japanese haiku. The largely Japanese slant of Barthes's Orient stems from Barthes's fascination with the country after visiting it in the late 1960s.

Barthes's writing about Japan in L'Empire des signes (1970) and about China in ‘Alors, la Chine?’ (1974) has been covered in depth by critics. Such criticism covers the important question of whether Barthes produces an exoticising Orientalist discourse.