A Lecture on Barthes
Francophone readers may find interesting (bearing generously with my much out-of-practice French, a language I’ve had sadly little occasion to use in recent years) a presentation I gave recently at the Universite de Montreal on a notion I find in the work of the late Roland Barthes, and in that of his students Julia Kristeva and Jean-Louis Bouttes, by which the problem of how to get along with others in a liberal society without succumbing to nihilism, tolerating differences in ‘values’ or ‘worldview’ without losing moral ‘seriousness’ (I problem I discuss elsewhere in relation to Bergson, and also to Strauss and Schmitt), is akin to the problem of how to conduct oneself in a one-sided romantic passion. It connects with my previous two essays on Barthes, and on Kristeva—whom I also discussed with Dan Oppenheimer recently), and with my writing here on Substack about the (unfortunately rather unknown) Bouttes, a couple of passages from whom I’ve translated:
The crux of all this material is something like how to care about something but not be insane about it, how to remain open to the calls that might beckon from beautiful people or vital projects or other ‘gods’ but not become a tyrant, psycho, asshole, etc—a problem that runs through a lot of my work (eg, these essays on Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz’ treatment of the same issue) because, of course, it’s a real problem for me!
Most of my problems are not universal, or of any possible interest to other people, but I take it that this one is at least—as my writing about all these other modern writers’ grappling with their own version of it tries to show—is one I share with many intellectuals who for vocational reasons have perhaps a particularly hard time making sense of how to be at both committed (to specific political, spiritual, aesthetic, etc, values/projects) and chill, especially if one rules out such strategies for appearing chill as ‘irony’.
A good deal of my writing—such as the recent essays on Judith Butler and Marilynne Robinson, and earlier ones on Allan Bloom and BAP, or on Eve Sedgwick—suggests that some kind of ‘ironic’ position is necessary to square the difference between maintaining a proper intensity to the holding of one’s own values and sense of self, and one’s certainty of the ways the world will necessarily disappoint one’s existential quest. This irony can be imagined variously as a defensive but masterful stance by which a frustrated spiritual elite protects itself from the uncomprehending multitude and from reality, or as a playful Stevensian kind of humor about one’s philosophical over-reach and inevitably unsuccessful attempts to know/speak the whole and oneself within it.
But I’m not at all sure that I ‘believe in’ or really advocate either of these kinds of ‘comedy’, or even think that to advocate them is to promote a socially useful ‘noble lie’ (by which we would keep people with big ambitious projects safely operating in the private sphere of the imagination, or at least somewhat counterbalance their potential danger to the rest of us by encouraging them to have second thoughts)—which is part of the appeal to me of Bouttes, perhaps the most brilliant of Barthes’ students in the 70s, whose fragmentary, polemical and baroque style seems to enact both the clash among rival values as well as the clash between rival perspectives on how to live out that clash (by containing it, neutralizing it, or rather heightening it)—and which is surely why I keep turning this theme over and over again in essays!