Barthes on Love Author(s): Stephen Heath Source: SubStance, Vol. 11/12, Vol. 11, no. 4 - Vol. 12, no.

1, Issue 37-38: A Special Issue from the Center for Twentieth Century Studies (1982/1983), pp. 100-106 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684183 . Accessed: 30/08/2011 05:21
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Bartheson Love1
STEPHEN HEATH

was an immediate success, amoureux Published in 1977, Fragments discours d'un of a French bestseller. Magazines, fromElle to rapidly becoming something jostled forinterviews.A televisionprogram cordiallybroughttogether Playboy, Barthes and FranCoise Sagan to conferon love (the same television and the same Sagan who had served as witness in the book to "the most worn-outof "just last night,I heard it utteredin a play by Sagan: every other stereotypes": on TV, someone says: I love you").2 A theatrical adaptation by Pierre night, Leenhardt played in Paris at the Theatre Marie-Stuart. And the novelistMarie to littdraires provide Cardinal, misunderstandingan invitationby the Nouvelles a pen-portraitof Prime Minister Raymond Barre, wrote a piece instead on ... Roland Barthes, ending with the confessionthat what annoyed her most was that he, not she, had managed to produce such a fine account of love. in Fragments, other words, marks the great moment of the cultural resonance its a of Barthes'swriting, prestige,Barthesas almost novelist,whereasMythologies, had marked the moment of the force of his writingas twentyyears earlier, cultural analysis and criticism(analysis and criticismof, among otherthings, the very magazines --"the journal Elle, a real treasure-house of myth"-that now sought him fortheirpages). Between the two books runs a whole movement (that of semiology, of the study of signs and the systematicconditions of theirsignification, followedby increasing attentionto the termsof the production of meanings and of the relations of the individual as subject in that and production) in which Barthes can be seen as a constant initiatorof shifts displacements, his own work returningmore and more, the spiral of a return to differently,questions posed froma certain liking foraspects of an innerness of language and experience, frompoints of subjective response of intensity: pleasure (Le Plaisirdu texte1973]), the "I," the novel ofthe masks and personae [ and resistances of the ego (Roland Barthes Roland Barthes par [1977]), or, as in a Fragments, discourse of love. had Fragments one beginning in January, 1975 in Barthes's seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Justas previouslyhe had devoted two years of the seminar to the analysis of Sarrasine, shortnovel by Balzac, a
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an analysis subsequently writtenas S/Z (1970), so now it was to be given over to another text, another fiction, Goethe's Die Leiden desjungen Werther, the book of love, its suffering of passion. The similarity,however, supreme joy classistops there: object and method change. Text of the symbolic,Sarrasine, in orderedand at the same timereflexively excess ofthatorder,was copied cally out, commented on, fracturedand traced over in its process of meanings, its is possible plurality; text of the imaginary, Werther taken as a site of figures, a kind of book of moments, the possibilityof so many quotations of a subject in a discourseoflove. Even less thanS/Z, moreover,is Fragments simplya written "version" of the seminar. A number of the figurespicked up in the seminar are dropped fromthe book, those, precisely,that had no personal implication forBarthes, no directlysubjective relation. What is at stake in Fragments the is practice of a new writing,somethingof the creation of a new literarymode: neitheranalysis nor autobiography (which is not at all to exclude elements of analysis, elements of autobiography), it sets out the space of an imaginary, the reflections and recognitionsand crystallizations an "I," a lover, a consisof tence in discourse. In thiswriting,thismode, Werther, main accompanying the text, the "regular reading," is not an object of study but a reconstitutednearness Werther, ridiculous formodern tastes, is quarried, old-fashioned,a trifle simulates used, made available. Barthes's aim is one of simulation: Fragments the lover subject in discourse. The brief introductory phrase is explicit: "So it is a lover who speaks and who says. . . ." The book is thus the staging of an utterance, and its "method"(its strategy writing)is figurative;the lover, of presented dispersed in the spray of figuresin which he or she consists, comes togetherin love: a single being but a host of figures.On thiscloseness of simulation-no metalanguage, no second-order systemof explanation (only, and withthe lover, the action of a primarylanguage)- depends the effectof the book as a series of little scenes, tableaux, assembly of citations of love, the an fragments,exactly, of a discourse. Fragments, simulation of the lover as a subject in discourse: it is in these terms that can be grasped the theoreticalsituation of Barthes's book, his own previous work being itselfa decisive part of that current situation. What is in question is not a psychologicalbut a structuralaccount of the lover in place of discourse, the "place de parole" that the lover occupies as lover. The stress on discourse is the displacement of psychology:the "I" simulated is a function of the lover's speech within himr herself,"amorously confronting or the other loved object), who does not speak," like Wertherin his letters,locked into (the himselfin the image of Charlotte, she as his image - and psychoanalysistells us that it is one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego realized in the imaginary. The subject of thattheoreticalsituationis a subject removed fromany conception of unity,fromany coherence as "the same thinkingthing." No longer an assumption of origin, "the groundless ground of all other certainty," "I an am" of self-possession,the subject is a production, the historyof a construction in which possession of oneself as "same" or "ground" or "I am" is a pro-

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duced instance, not some initial and exhaustive determination: a subject is a process, multiple and unfinished.The condition of this process, this producthe the tion, is language, the signifier, symbolic, lattera termused by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Every one findshim or herselfin language, the movementof the signifier, and thatfindingis the constitutive divistructuring sion of the individual as subject. The individual, that is, is a subject in and fromlanguage which is not the expression of my foundingconsciousness but an order that the individual enters as speaking being and that poses him or her as "I," causes me in meaning; subjectivityis thus understood as this process across individual, interminably the divided as subject fromany single idenelementsin which any "identity" tity,subject tolanguage, the play of signifying is desired and made. Psychoanalysis proposes an understandingof and intervention in the historyof the individual as subject and further that such underof standing and interventionallow for what are grasped as effects coherence, of unity. As the symbolic the term forconstitutivedivision, so the imaginary is is the term for these effects subject identity,for the very props of subjecof tivityin our everyday sense of the word, the images, figures,identifications in which the individual subject seeks reflection totality, as makes up coherence, coalesces as unity of ego for our sense of self-identity. Love in Barthes'spresentationis a quite spectacularcatchingup ofthe symbolic in the imaginary (Lacan too speaks of love as of "a veritable subduction of the symbolic"): the lover does not let on to the play of the signifier,cuts offfromthe Other (the locus of the symbolicas cause, of the distribution-circulation of signifiers which the individual is constituted, in representedas subject) in a capturing appropriation of the loved object (precisely) within a relation forwhich Barthes's referenceis the imaginary relation self-mirroring that par excellence, of infantto mother(the imaginaryis a dual relationof I and the my other,the otherI put as my image forme: intrasubjectively, narcissistic relation of subject to ego, the formationof an idealego; intersubjectively, the of the relationwiththe mother,the fullnessof the onerelationwhich repetition the symbolic as thirdterm, as Other, interrupts.3 The proverbial madness of love indeed is thisveryconsistence,the subject as subject, totallystickingto the of its place as lover; or better, gettingitselftogetheragain and again figures in thesefigures, speakingits"amorouswounds." The lover'ssoliloquy,thelover's refusal "to submit to adult language" (to permit the third term), caresses, enwraps, "a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being." In this discourse, there can be no outcome, the idea ofwhich is part ofthe system, just anotherfigure.Hence, in a way, the paradox of Barthes's book: simulation of a lover's discourse but also writing, inevitable distance ofthe symbolic,writing to always "dense, violent,indifferent the infantile ego which solicits it": "what writingdemands, and what any lover cannot grantit withoutlaceration, is to sacrificea littleof his or her Imaginary. .. ." Hence too its originality:the attemptat a writingof the imaginary,something like an intelligent closeness. Hence too its finallyambiguous stance with regard to psychoanalysis:the lattertaken up, presentin the book (in so many instances almost of"wild analysis") which simultaneouslyseparates fromit, wants to rest

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of in a certain utopia of the imaginary,the affirmation a value there,a certain in love. pleasure In his introductory pages, "How this book is constructed,"Barthes gives The lover subject is put details concerning the composition of Fragments. from an intertextthat includes the regular reading of together, assembled, insistentreadings, fromPlato's Symposium psychoanalysis, Zen to to Werther, German lieder, occasional readings,conversations withfriends, and, lastly,"what comes frommy own life."The intertext bits and pieces forthe develprovides is or opment of the figuresand the Fragments written,much like Werther like of Schubert's Winterreise, a repertoire the discursivefiguresin which thelover as is placed. The lover's discourse comes and goes in figures,which are as his or her gestures,the lover "at work,""ideograms of passion" (this last a phrase fromBarthes'sseminar). Far frompsychology, describes,like a circle, Fragments a topicof love, with the figuresthe places - "absence," "anxiety,""annulment" and so on - in that topic. Which is to say (the image of the circle has its rightness) thatthe book, as simulation, can know no order of progressor resolution itselfthe end can only come with the passage from"I" to "Editor," (in Werther with narrative the flow of the letters"). The lover's discourse is "interrupting neithera dialectic nor a novel: "figuresoccur to the lover without any order, foron each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident." The timeofthisdiscourseis a staticagitation:thereis a beginning,the initialmoment of ravishment(but which is perhaps only a retrospectiveconstruction,something the lover recounts to him or herself; whereas Barthes's seminar began withthe figure ravishment, of Fragments simplypresentsit like any otherfigure), and then the spray of figures,with no ending, no outcome (unless as fantasy, as itselfa figurein the discursive systemof love). Thus Fragments, composiits The storyis on the side of tion, its writing,refusesthe novel, the love story. the world, not of the "I," the storyis a mode of social reconciliation,a distance fromthis discourse, this imaginary for me: in short, an understanding (and is not understanding "to divide the image, to undo the I"?). is Refusing the novel, Fragments neverthelessfull of the novelistic, of elements of the novel, a multitude of investmentin and notations of the everyday, people, the incidents of life. Discourse and figuresare given in terms of the creation of effects recognition; the episodes of language that constitute of the lover's subjectivityare produced in littlescenes offered the projections, for the identifications the reader ("That'sso true! recognize scene language. of I that of "), a almost a novel, approaching novel, but withoutnarrative or characters (only "the lover" as a figmentof discourse), without any firmorder of fictionand name. Each figureis set out fromits "argument,"a summary outline, into so many littlereflections, intelligibleimages, so many "touches"thatcompose the of a lover in discourse. In this composition, the "I" adopted, the "I" portrait of the writing,can move different ways, fromthe "I" of the unfoldingof the of a figure(in engulfment, mask my mourningby an evasion; I dilute "I "logic" myself,I swoon in order to escape that density, that clogging which makes me into a responsible subject: I come out: it is ecstasy") to an "I" that picks up instantsof autobiography, particularcrystallizations experience ("here I am of

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in the buffetof the Lausanne railway station,""of everyone I had known, X was certainlythe most impenetrable") in a play that includes too the cited "I" of Wertheror Freud or simplya friendand the "he" of a cited incident(seeing someone offat the station at the beginning of the figure,"At fault"). An "I" of writingbut built up of fragments, identitiesin one, the one pieces, different of the lover; a myriad intensities,the shimmerof a life, the detail of a culture a (the cafe, the comedian Coluche, a hotel room, last week's PetitRapporteur, silk shirtand thin summer socks, the memoryof the childhood wait at a Paris bus stop. ..). The gestureof Barthes's writingis always one of displacement, the operationof a paradox, a shift from received,the accepted,the insertion another the of As he puts it in Le Plaisir du texte: day comes when one feels the "a question. need to loosen the theory a little, to displace the discourse, the idiolect that is being repeated, solidifying,to shake it with a question." The question of Fragments that of love.4 Love is today everywhereand is nowhere accredited: it is the stuff popular magazines, of films and songs of and T.V. programs (the litany of "I love you," the storiesof romance fictions) but at the same time not contemporary, aside or disparaged by the actuality left of theoreticalsystems;it is the object of no political demand, no militantsupport (while Marxism has had little to say about it, psychoanalysis describes love but wants to come to its cure, invites the lover to accept the death of his or her imaginary). The lover is a solitude, modestly marginal. Barthes will affirm,take up that solitude- its discourse, its imaginary- as value. Subtle he provocation:when everyoneis talkingof sexuality, will talkoflove, the realm of modern obscenity("love is obscene preciselybecause it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual"). Which love? Romantic love, historically one of the two or threegreatWestern systemsof conventionallove (along withamour courtois Petrarchanlove) and and the one in whichwe stillmove, findour echoes, howeverdegraded or maris ginalized (Werther far distant but near to us, Barthes can produce recognitions fromit). Not the love ofpropertyand possession, ofjealous intrigue,constant suspicion (that love which is given its major literaryaccount in the narrator'srelationto Albertinein Proust'sA la recherche temps du perdu)but the lovepassion, the effusionof the subject in the image of the loved object as desire fortotal fulfillment, paradisical unity. It is not by chance that presentin Fragments the lieder-cycles Schubert, nor that in the same year as this book are of was published Barthes should also publish an essay on Le Chantromantique. The subtle provocation is also a difficult provocation, always coming up against itslimits,on the edge of a certaincomplicity ("theOrder feedson Love," noted Barthes in 1Mythologies On the otherside of the lover, the writing [1957]). of the imaginary, is indeed its social story,its situation, its implications. The problem of the writingis that of the development of an affirmation without that development merelyreturningthe stereotype,the convention, the values given. The discourse of the lover permitsa distanciationof sexualityor, rather,

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the reappropriatesthe latterfromits reductionto genitality, povertyof the currentand commercial economy of sex, the marketof the phallus, into a diffuseness of desire, a kind of generalized sensuality, another economy. Yet it may equally serve to accomplish the idea of a unitythat repairs, smooths over real contradictions.The subject of Fragments, its discourse of love, is unisex, an of "a lover" (the scenes permutate "he" and "she," hetero and indifference, only homosexual love, marking as little as possible the differences sexes). The of of Romantic love "makes no distinctionof sexes or social roles" (Le imaginary Chantromantique), on the spiral which comes back round to that love today but other questions insistand the question of thatlove is now elsewhere, engaging complex issues and assumptions. Writingin an imaginary of sexual indifference can produce effects that slip into a storyand a historythat are perfectly for contemporary,ideologically attuned and powerful:the effect, example, of this indifference in fact a support fora certain mythof the "feminine"(the as lover as "feminized":"in any man who uttersthe other'sabsence something femito the nineis declared," "convertingbeing-in-love loving lover is like "the woman, she who does not make forany objectbut onlyfor. . giving," etc.). To envisage a futurethatwill belong "to the subjects in whom thereis somethingfeminine" mightbe heard on the one hand as the projection of a new order, beyond the is for the phallic (and Fragments effectively love against narrativedestinyof genitality,the phallus as the term of sexuality formen and women), on the other as a derivationfromthe existingorder, a repetitionof its image and essentialization and alibi, its perspective, of "Woman." To simulate, today, a subject outside of sexual differenceis to shiftthe domination of the definitionfrom the male, a shiftwhich produces the feminineas its point of reference,which feminineis again fromthe male, itsthesis(can the notion of"subjects in whom there is somethingfeminine"be anythingother than a masculine conception?). Sexual difference too directlypolitical a problem now to admit of an imagiis nary abstraction. In a real sense, the risk of Barthes's book is a final romanticismof "the subject,"the possible creationof a confirming ideologyof the single individual. was Published in 1977, Fragments both marginal and in place in the Paris of the Nouveaux and of . . . the "New Romanticism."5 The point, of Philosophes course, is not at all that Barthes writeswith any closeness to the latterbut that could be taken into a certain situation there; its moral of aspects of Fragments "oser aimer" affirmation, wager of displacement, ("dare to love"), is the difficult a returnto the new in a social and cultural context in which it is continually broughtdown to the old commonplaces. Perhaps thisis what we should remember as we read and tryto draw out the forceof,to displace again, the pleasurewhich is immense- of Barthes's book.

NOTES 1. This piece, writtenin 1979 just afterthe publication of the English translation of Fragments and while reading again notes taken during the corresponding seminar at the Ecole Pratique, was

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detailsoftheother booksby Barthes I which mention, ofEnglish and translaBibliographical are trans. Lavers(New York: tions, as follows: Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957),Mythologies, Annette Hill and Wang, 1972); SiZ (Paris: Seuil, 1970), S/Z,trans.RichardMiller(New York:Hill and du trans.RichardMiller Wang, 1974); Le Plaisir texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), ThePleasure the of Text, Barthes Roland trans.RichardHoward(New (New York:Hill and Wang,1975); Roland Barthes, by York:Hill and Wang, 1977); Le Chant in Gramma,1977), reprinted romantique (Pont-sur-Yonne: L'Obvie l'obtus et (Paris: Seuil, 1982). 3. It might notedherethatWerther ravished be is exactly the imageof Charlotte by mother, bread forheradoringbrothers sisters, and Kindern"- as she says cutting "mychildren"-"meinen herself. 4. Discussionoflove by Lacan can be foundparticularly Le Siminaire I (Paris: Seuil, in Livre of coincided with beginning Barthes's the of seminar which and itself 1975),thepublication which containsseveralreferences Werther pp. 162, 311). to (see 5. The Nouveaux is of that Philosophesa vague "movement" Parisianmedia-inflated posturing in before electoral the defeat theright; leader, intolerable of its the appeared thelasttwoorthree years a cousinof Giscardd'Estaing. married, Gonzague Saint-Bris, romantically, seventeen-year-old

loses this- major - stress.

as of intended a brief on in presentation Barthes's writing love. It served, fact,as a kindofbackFix groundtextformybook TheSexual (London: Macmillan,1982). A 2. Roland Barthes, Lover's Discourse: trans. Fragments, RichardHoward(New York:Hill and to Wang, 1978). Page references the textomitted. It shouldbe notedthatquotations from differ Howard'stranslation at least in Fragments from one important WhileHowardhas usedtheterm for respect. "image-repertoire"Barthes's imaginaire, I have preferred term the translation imaginaire of "imaginary": becausethisis thestandard 1) (cf. of use Englishtranslations Lacan whoseworkis crucialto Barthes's oftheterm);2) becausewhile theimaginary indeedengagedin images,it is also notreducible a setofimages:itis a strucis to turalinstance theconstitution thesubject described psychoanalysis; in of as by "image-repertoire"