How to Live with Roland Barthes

Patrick ffrench

This is work in progress. The gesture that Barthes calls proleptic points to its object as a fragment of an uncompleted whole, indicates the opening fragment of a project that will in time attain completion. Barthes values the proleptic, or dilatory gesture over the completed whole; the statement Plus tard, moreover, works in secret as a denunciation of the monstre de la totalit (Roland Barthes, 175-6). The fragment may be the opening of an encyclopedic project, but the body of the project, the realized totality, falls silently away. The dilatory fragment is moreover, for Barthes, an object of jouissance, a source of pleasure and scandal. This gives us a key to the understanding of utopia in Barthess writing and in particular in the lecture course Comment vivre ensemble: simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens, given at the Collge de France from January to May 1977: it is made up of fragments of lives, a pleasurable accumulation of figures of living together that will inevitably disappoint those seeking a systematic and totalized socio-political theory. The fragmentary, dilatory and incomplete nature of this work is a key aspect of Barthess strategy. In the last session of the course of 14 lectures he comments on the method he has adopted in the course, which consisted of 31 figures of the discourse of le vivre ensemble. Each time, he says, it was a question of opening a dossier:
A tout instant jai dit Nous ouvrons seulement un dossier. Ouvrir un dossier, acte encyclopdique par excellence. Diderot a ouvert tous les dossiers de son poque. Mais en ce temps, acte effectif, car le savoir pouvait tre matris, sinon par un homme du moins par un quipe. Aujourdhui, plus dexhaustivit possible du savoir, entirement pluralis, diffract en langages incommunicants. Lacte encyclopdique nest plus possible, mais le geste encyclopdique a pour moi sa valeur de fiction, sa jouissance: son scandale. (Comment vivre ensemble, 182)

The gesture of opening a dossier in this context is equivalent to the agglomeration of archival fragments, which derive from a variety of sources: the history of monastic and pre-monastic life, several novels, psychoanalytic theory, and so on. In the first session Barthes addresses the approach he will adopt, which he seeks to distinguish from method. Method, he says, is a way of going toward an end in a straight line, equivalent to avoiding
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the places where you do not want to go. The term method itself refers to an opposition proposed by Nietzsche between method and culture. Culture supposes violence exerted on thought (dressage) which puts into play the unconscious of the thinker. Barthes eschews method in favor of this apparently passive and errant stumbling: tituber entre des bribes, des bornes, de savoirs, de saveurs (34). But he corrects this in the final session of the course: the approach he adopts is not opposed to method, it is a pre-method: Jai dit au debut: non-mthode. Comme toujours, le non est trop simple, il vaudrait mieux dire: pre-mthode (183). Again hesitation (la titubation) is dilatory: La mthode nest acceptable qu titre de mirage: elle est de lordre du plus tard (183). The fantasy of a life constructed here is plural, expansive and fragmentary-in other words, textual. It involves receptivity to the contingency of the archives fragments, and while it moves toward something that might be called utopia, it simultaneously demolishes the dogmatism of the closed concept of utopia--for example, in the gesture of putting it off until later; the utopianesque rather than the utopian. If this is a utopia, it is la fois contingent et anonyme (177), non-totalized and non-closed, even though it is not neurotically opposed to this totalization. Moreover, the figure of prolepsis, of the plus tard undoubtedly has a significance with regard to Barthess attitude toward the political. Putting it off until later not only suggests utopia (a never-to-be realized future social state); it is also congruent with Barthess mistrust of the hysteria of speech, of the demand inherent in face-to-face discourse. We can recall the insistence on the fascism of language in Leon: ...la langue, comme performance de tout langage, nest ni ractionnaire, ni progressiste; elle est tout simplement: fasciste; car le fascisme, ce nest pas empcher de dire, cest dobliger dire (14). Plus tard... affirms the inherent absence of the writer from the now, the affectivity of distance, which, as we will see, has a definite ethical and political resonance in Barthess work. It was Barthess intention to invite his audience to provide their own figures of a life together. The pedagogic space of the course would thus be the basis for the construction of a communal or at least plural discourse, characterized by dispersion and a relative anonymity. There is a mirroring effect between the space of the Collge (at least as Barthes imagined it or fantasized it), and the project itself, which echoes a notion that Barthes takes from Fourier: that the organization of social space be ordained not in terms of the resolution of conflict, but by the textual organization of conflicts or manias. Conflict would be neutralized through the expansion of difference into an organizational principle (Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1114). Barthes imagined that the pedagogic space of the Collge could be the mirror of a utopia (a heterotopia, in Foucaults sense), also non-

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totalized, non-closed, dispersed and contingent. Ultimately, this dream fails because of the limitations (according to Barthes) of public discourse. Speaking in front of an audience is an exposure, it is necessarily hysterical, and any pedagogic situation is inevitably hysterical and infused with power. Only the text, only writing can afford the affectivity demanded by the subject (see later). Barthes proposes the course of lectures, which, he says, is a recherche rather than a course properly speaking, as un enseignement fantasmatique (Comment vivre ensemble, 34). As I have noted above, this pedagogy rests on a Nietzschean distinction (drawn from Deleuzes book Nietzsche et la philosophie) between method and culture or what Nietzsche calls paideia (33). Paideia (literally the education of children) implies a certain violence in the receptivity of the subject to force or to forces (a typically Deleuzian motif, very evident in the much later book on Francis Bacon). The method involves a receptivity to force, to differences, coute de forces, de diffrences (34).1 The first force he encounters as a subject will be the force of desire, the force of the fantasy, even through the lure of the imaginary, he adds, mme travers le leurre de limaginaire (34). He does not intend fantasy here in a strictly psychoanalytic sense, but as follows:
Un fantasme (ce que du moins jappelle ainsi): un retour de dsirs, dimages, qui se rdent, se cherchent en vous, parfois toute une vie, et souvent ne se cristallisent qu travers un mot. (36-7)

The fantasy is the persistence of internal desires or images of which one may be unaware, and to which one should (it is implied) be attentive. Qui se cherchent resonates with recherche, linking the exploration of) subjective or personal fantasies to the process of intellectual enquiry and to the pedagogy that Barthes is charged with undertaking. The course is thus given a libidinal inflection. This search, which has an unmistakably Proustian dimension, is oriented toward an attentiveness to the desire and imagination that is in me (he adds later, to his audience que vous ntes pas oblig videmment de partager). This erratic, experimental exploration, as Barthes says, can sometimes take a lifetime (parfois toute une vie). The space and time of a life are thought here as those of a libidinal insistence, an attentiveness to this insistence, and its potential crystallization as a fantasy, should its specific signifier be fortuitously encountered. Comment vivre ensemble charts the search or exploration of the fantasy whose signifier Barthes says he encountered, or felt (senti) through the reading of a book by Jacques Lacarrire, Lt grec. Une Grce quotidienne de 4000 ans, published by Plon in 1976. It is in this book that he came across the word idiorrythmie, designating chacun y a sa rythme propre (37). The specific subject of the book is the pre-monastic

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practice of living apart, but in a small, dispersed community, pertaining to the historical moment between the dominance of the figure of the hermit (lrmitisme) and the institution of the monastery (le cnobitisme), in the early part of the fourth century CE. The scene or scenario of the fantasy is an illuminated space between two others left in darkness: life alone (le vivre seul) and its corollary, the couple (le vivre deux), and the commune or regulated community (39-40). As such the Comment vivre ensemble course, Barthes insists, should not be assumed to be the logical or temporal continuation of the previous years seminar at the cole pratique des hautes tudes on the lovers discourse (see Fragments dun discours amoureux). The fantasy is not of a conjugal life with the lover proceeding from the moment of love; moreover, the seminar on the lovers discourse did not proceed from a fantasy. The fantasy has its signifier, idiorrythmie, and its scenario, which Barthes describes:
Mditerrane, terrasse, montagne []. Je me vois l, au bord dune terrasse, la mer au loin [le crpi blanc], disposant de deux chambres pour moi et autant pour quelques amis, non loin; plus peut-tre une occasion de runion [de synaxe] comme une bibliothque. (37)

This is the fantasy scene, in which, were one to analyze it further, one would want to attend to the geography and to the importance of friends and friendship. But, as Barthes notes, a fantasy does not tell us anything, is not dialectical, and can only give rise to an affirmative repetition. The course itself will consist of the investigation of the difficulties that the living of the fantasy would encounter. The fantasy is transformed into a field of knowledge through an attention to the difficulties raised within it comme des fantmes (38). Although the course itself will primarily address the difficulties, these are measured against the affirmation of the fantasy, and are to some extent at least programmed by pleasure; in the interstices of the reading of the figures of the course the affirmation of the fantasy is palpable. Le vivre ensemble, as Barthes assembles it here, is to a certain extent ordained by the pleasure and the jouissance of the fragment, which involves elements of separation, distance, and a distinctive relation to the whole. The final figure of the course is utopia. These reflect Barthesian emphases of the early 1970s on utopia and pleasure. Here, as before, Barthes reconfigures utopia as domestic rather than political; the utopian is in this instance only political if this term is revised. The object is not the theoretical construction of a social space, but la recherche du Souverain Bien (177), the pleasure or happiness of the individual. What is stake is the right distance from others, the distance that affords the subject the most happiness and the least conflict and neurosis. The social space Barthes constructs will be idiorrhythmic, its figures will be concerned not with

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the organization of the social body as such, but with the distance of my body from the group, where the group itself positions itself at a distance from society. The life fantasized here is a life in proximity to others, but distinct from the couple. Neither is the fantasy one of solitude, because the unitary individual proposed as independent from the social exists necessarily in a hysterical, conflictual, identificatory relation to it. It is a question of a relative solitude that maintains a proximity to others, according to a principle of dlicatesse (179); this affective relation is not crushed by identificatory dynamics, by imaging a relation to the other, or striking a pose. As Diana Knight observes in her essential Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing, utopia in Barthes refers to domestic rather than social space. It pertains essentially to the details of everyday life and, as I suggest here, to a certain mode of corporeal and spatial being with others--a precise calibration of spatial, corporeal and affective factors. Barthess inflection of utopia away from the optimum organization of social space, and toward la Recherche du Souverain Bien personalizes and individualizes the question: Or le souverain Bien, sa figuration, mobilise toute lextension et la profondeur du sujet, dans son individuation, cest--dire dans son histoire personelle au complet (Comment vivre ensemble, 178). Despite the focus on questions that might be described as political questions relating to community Barthess focus is affective, distinct from the social and ideological concerns that characterize Mythologies, for example. One might presume to think of it as an ethics of personal happiness rather than a politics of social space. However, what I want to propose or to test in what follows is the hypothesis that Barthess inquiry into le vivre ensemble, in its very insistence on affective and proxemic2 questions, carries an understated discourse on the political--or at least intends a form of response to the political. More specifically, the suggestion is that here and in other texts, Barthes responds to the demand for some kind of political expression that emerged in the wake of the events of May 1968. Much of Barthess work of the 1970s can be read as a counter-strategy to the intense politicization of the decade, deflecting the demand for politics toward a subtle and delicate ethics of affective and corporeal relations. Ultimately, then, the dimensions of the political and the ethical in Barthes cannot be so easily demarcated. Rather than being ignored, repressed or displaced, political questions are thought in terms of the affectivities that they mobilize; the socio-political bond is affective, rather than being a relation of law or right. Living (together) with others is dealt with not in terms of democratic consensus, but in terms of relations of proximity--the closeness or distance of the bond with the other and with others.3

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*** Life in its various forms is a privileged signifier in Barthess work, whether as biography (Michelet, himself), biographeme (Sade, Fourier, Loyola), or as concern with everyday life (Mythologies). The impetus for the Comment vivre ensemble lectures was, as we have seen, the imagining or fantasy of a life. The concept or figure of life, of a life, if we are to consider it through the lens of Lacans tripartite schema of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, belongs within the field of the Imaginary. Even while it evidently has its corollaries in the domains of the Real (as dchet or rebut) and the Symbolic (as that which is castrated, economized and regulated by the effects of the signifier) (Le Sminaire II, 317), life, in the sense of a life is associated with the image, with narcissistic projection. Up to a certain point, in Mythologies, everyday life is seen as the exclusive prey of ideology, of mythic or discursive capture--in the same vein as Foucaults later conceptualization of life in La volont de savoir as that which is manufactured and managed by biopolitical power. The imaginary has also had bad press, consistent with the Lacanian and Althusserian insistence on ideology as an imaginary mis-recognition of ones relation to others, to the Symbolic, to oneself, and as lure or bait (see Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, chapter 3). After 1968, however, the notions of life and of the imaginary, and related figures such as the imagination and fantasy begin to be valorized in Barthess writing and thinking. In a 1968 article on advertising published originally in Italian, Barthes comments that advertising claims to constitute an imaginary, and that the imagination, viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, serves the ends of misrecognition and abuse of knowledge. This resonates with the critique of imaginary relations as masking the real conditions of production, to use an Althusserian vocabulary. However, later in the text Barthes writes of the kind of advertisement that appears on walls (of streets and metros). He valorizes this by associating it with the anthropological importance of the gesture of mural inscription:
Dans son introduction au beau livre de Franco Vaccari sur les graffiti muraux, Le Tracce (Sampietro, ed. 1967), Adriano Spatola a trs bien exprim la porte anthropologique du geste humain qui inscrit quelque chose sur un mur; le mur appelle irrsistiblement la trace des songes profonds, des agressions ou des caresses intimes; le mur, mme (et peuttre surtout) dans son apparence la plus prosaque, la plus dshrite, cest dj la pierre de lart prhistorique, le bas-relief du sculpteur, le vitrail du verrier, la toile du peintre, la feuille de lcrivain, lcran du cinaste et comme la paroi interne de notre crne, o se tracent nos rves; comme support de linscription, le mur, le panneau contiennent le geste mme qui incise, divise, met dans la matire pleine un creux signifiant. (Oeuvres compltes II, 509)

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Barthes re-imagines mural inscription as archaic, as pertaining to the prehistory both of man and of the subject, to an affective dimension of the subject co-incident with the first inscription, the deepest level of dreams, and the corporal register of intimacy; there is an inevitably maternal resonance to these qualifications. In an interview with Pierre Daix in the Communist journal Lettres franaises in July 1968 Barthes picks up this question again, valorizing the wall, and the writing on the wall, as in some sense archaic, wild:
Pour en rester au niveau des problmes universitaires, il me semble quil y a eu, dans la contestation tudiante, des aspects bien diffrents, parfois contradictoires. Jy ai vu, quant moi, trois aspects, qui sont peut-tre trois moments. Dabord une forme que jappelerai sauvage, qui est celle qui ma touch le plus; cela sest traduit, au tout dbut, par ces inscriptions murales quon a vues un peu partout, surtout la Sorbonne, et qui exprimaient par lcriture (ceci me parat important) une sorte dexplosion de la subjectivit sauvage, du besoin dimagination, du plaisir du langage, un refus perdu des rgles, des institutions, des codes. (524-25)

Mural inscription is the expression of a wild subjectivity, the element of May 1968 that Barthes says touched him most. He distinguishes this from the missionary, technocratic and coercive aspects of the students discourse. Barthes pursues a form of response to 1968 via writing, and through an exploration of the kind of archaic and passional subjectivity that is put into play by the figure of mural inscription. In the same interview Barthes mentions that he intends to start a new project:
Mais je voudrais aussi commencer quelque chose de nouveau, qui rponde peut-tre plus directement certaines questions, certaines imaginations. Je veux reprendre une ide que javais eue depuis assez longtemps: lanalyse de ce quon pourrait appeler le texte de la vie . En imaginant la vie quotidienne, la vie dite prive , certains acteurs ont trac, inscrit dans lhistoire venir, des formes de vie qui sont en quelque sorte lenvers, et par consquent la libration de notre vie relle, aline. Je voudrais dcrire (cest dire dfalquer dune criture) certaines de ces utopies domestiques, certains de ces arts de vivre imaginaires. [] Je pense que lanalyse de lutopie permettra une fois de plus, non seulement de continuer une critique de notre culture, mais aussi de prciser une sorte dimagination du plaisir, qui me parat devoir tre prsente dans ce qui se cherche et se conquiert aujourdhui. (527)

This is a clear statement, I think, that the Sade, Fourier, Loyola project is a form of response to May 1968, that the emphasis on the imagination of a life ordained by pleasure is also intended as a liberatory gesture. The analysis of des arts de vivre imaginaires, or lutopie domestique is thus a form of cultural critique. In this light, some further remarks Barthes made to Jean Ristat in a 1972 interview are illuminating, and problematize

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the suggestion that Barthess later work moves away from the political. Barthes insists on the equal emphasis given to revolutionary truth and to pleasure by Brecht, a key influence on his early publications: il y a toute une dimension hdoniste quil faut un peu rtablir dans le champ progressiste (1482). Indeed, pleasure is the guarantee of truth, Barthes remarks in Sade, Fourier, Loyola: le plaisir dune lecture garantit sa verit (1045). This is an explicit displacement of politics into the domain of pleasure and affectivity. The insistence on the euphoric, on imagination, is political only through a reformulation of what this word means, through a de-hystericization of politics as a field of conflictual discourses. In the essay on Fourier, Barthes distinguishes his enterprise, and that of Fourier, from politics properly speaking:
Le champ du Besoin, cest le Politique; le champ du Dsir, cest ce que Fourier appelle le Domestique. Fourier a choisi le Domestique contre le Politique, il a difi une utopie domestique (mais une utopie peut-elle tre autre chose? Une utopie peut-elle tre jamais politique? La politique nest-elle pas: tous les langages moins un, celui du Dsir. En mai 68, on proposa lun des groupes qui se constituaient spontanment la Sorbonne, dtudier lUtopie domestique on pensait videmment Fourier; quoi il fut rpondu que lexpression tait trop recherche, donc bourgeoise; le politique est ce qui forclt le dsir, sauf y rentrer sous forme de nvrose: la nvrose politique, ou plus exactement: la nvrose de politicisation). (1102)

One might imagine (as does Louis-Jean Calvet) that the respondent in question was Barthes himself, that the anecdote is real. Whether or not this was the case, it is certain that the subjects in question would have found themselves excluded from a social body, and excluded precisely by virtue of a refusal to respond to a political demand, or more profoundly, to a demand for politics, to a demand as politics. Barthes or his imaginary avatar is excluded from a community already itself distant from the socius-exactly the situation explored in Comment vivre ensemble. Lidiorrythmie, in the 1977 course names the ambivalence of separation: there is a desire on the one hand not to be subsumed completely under the social body; the fantasy of a life is necessarily apart, at a distance from the socius. On the one hand, therefore, the fantasy involves departure and exile (named by the figure of anachoresis, lanachorse, which is acte ou tat de sparation davec le monde) (Comment vivre ensemble, 57). On the other hand, in order not to fall into the status of exclusion, and thus of hysterical demand (for love), the life fantasized needs an affective connection. The departure from the world named by the figure of anachoresis is, Barthes insists, remonte vers un lointain profond, intime, secret (57). The fantasy of a life thus generates figures of positive affect, of contentement, suffisance, plenitude affective.

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At one moment Barthes puts this in Lacanian terms; the objective is to maintain a distance from le grand Autre, but also to maintain certaines points de capiton (59). Distance is valued: anachoresis and Xenithea (expatriation) are connoted positively. But this life apart needs the affective support of others; thus the ideal of the idiorrhythmic community, apart from the world, where the distance between bodies is maintained, but contact and proximity are possible. The community is characterized by an aporia, however; Barthes suspects that there is a tendency toward power and law in any grouping of this sort. Having sought initially to separate rgle (in the sense of custom or guideline) from rglement, written law, he speculates that there is a drive to law, comme une pulsion de loi, in every custom (164). Furthermore, as far as desire is concerned, the path of anachoresis is paradoxical. Barthes expresses this aporia as a series of 4 stages: 1) I am troubled by the bodies of others, by desire and the concomitant experience of lack; 2) I fantasise the absence of desire; 3) I enter a state in which desire for others is impossible by distancing myself from them; 4) if I can no longer touch the other, I lose the will to live. Two solutions to this problem can be drawn out of Comment vivre ensemble, I believe, both of which characterize the idiorrhythmic life in different ways: ambivalence and oscillation. With ambivalence, the issue is to maintain distance, but to retain the possibility of affective and erotic contact, of touch. In a situation in which a distance from other bodies has been regulated or self-imposed in order to ward off the neurosis associated with desire and lack, erotic contact can be entertained, Barthes hints, under the guise of functional proximity, washing together, eating together, and so on. The idiorrhythmic community, living together but apart, is entirely eroticized; eroticism spreads across it in a diffuse manner. It is by this token desexualised, and this dynamic bears a certain similarity to Foucaults emphasis in La volont de savoir on les corps-plaisirs rather than le sexe-dsir. As concerns oscillation, as I have called it, Barthes draws from the monastic practice of evening prayer the notion of an alternation between a state of internal exile (Stenochria) during the day and the necessity of an affective proximity to others in the face of the coming night; one prays together in the evening in order to face the night together.
La communaut sarme de courage pour affronter la nuit (penser une campagne trs retire, sans lumire, o la tombe de la nuit est vraiment le menace de lobscur). Vivre ensemble: seulement peut-tre pour affronter ensemble la tristesse du soir. Etre des trangers, cst invitable, ncessaire, dsirable, sauf quand le soir tombe. (177)

There are parallels here with Barthess account of his own nocturnal life, in the posthumously published Soires de Paris. Diurnal life is characterized by separation and exile, while the night offers the possibility of affective, erotic contact.
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Taken together, the 31 figures of communal life of Comment vivre semble present a predominantly negative picture, which contrasts with the promise of the fantasy Barthes postulates at the outset of the course. Rather than a delineation of the fantasy of a life amongst friends, what dominates is the picture of the inevitable turn of any anachoretic community toward power or toward the law of desire. It ends up mirroring the society from which it separates, and Barthes suggests this particularly of the communities established in the wake of 1968 in France. As for the community that is already set apart, the fantasy of a life becomes aligned with individual expatriation, which must not take on the form of an image, the pose of exile. In the end, the imaginary is degraded again, but since there can be no zero degree of the image, it becomes a question of adopting a false counter-image: the exile makes a pretense of sociability. The affective tie is maintained nevertheless. The fantasy of a life is a life apart from others, distant from the social imaginary and from conflict, with the maintenance of an erotic affective relation to other bodies. This affectivity and this erotics privilege the maternal. The kind of libidinal relation at stake in the strategy I called ambivalence may be called anaclitic, or of an attachment type, following Freuds description of a libidinal instinct that has become attached to the instinct for self-preservation (Freud, On Narcissism, 81). It relates to the early relation to the mother as nurse and privileges epidermal contact rather than penetration. Furthermore, Barthess fantasy implies the absence of the father. He insists that the fantasy of le vivre-ensemble is incompatible with the event and that the fantasy vomits the event in its attachment to the quotidian: Thus, in Defoes novel, Barthes values Crusoes life on the island before the arrival of Friday. The event is paternal, the paradigmatic event is the murder of the father; without the father and his murder, no event, and vice-versa:
Lvnement fait de moi un autre sujet. Je deviens sujet du suspense, du meurtre du Pre et non plus sujet du nid, de la Mre: lvnement comme Pre (lOedipe et le protocole de lvnement, tout vnement est oedipien). (123) Fantasmer le Vivre-Ensemble comme quotidiennet: refuser, rejeter, vomir lvnement. Lvnement est lennemi du Vivre-Ensemble. (123)

The fantasy thus carves out a space outside or before castration and repression. It privileges maternal attachment and is resolutely non-phallic. It features a happy sexuality. Ultimately, then, the fantasy of a life eschews the utopian; the enunciator of the question implied in the title comment vivre ensemble is not a collective nous but an individualized je: how can I live with others? The answer seems to be in living apart, but retaining an affective proxSubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

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imity to other bodies in a mode that is either desexualized, or necessary only under cover of darkness. Are we to conclude that Barthes fantasy of a life, after all, diverts from the critique of culture, from the countercultural line promised in his comments in 1968? One way of not answering this positively is to emphasize, again, Barthes resistance to taking up a position that might be called counter-cultural, to taking up a position tout court, perhaps. He understands the inevitably Oedipal dynamics of such an oppositional stance in a way that echoes Lacans retort to the revolting students of Vincennes: Ce quoi vous aspirez comme rvolutionnaires, cest un matre. Vous laurez. (Le Sminaire Livre XVII, 239). Oedipal revolt and filial remonstrance are frustrated and disabled here, and the imagination of a different life takes the route of the absence of the father, Barthess biography inflecting his thought. The fantasy is thus of spaces of life together in uneventful regularity (without regulation), and an affective, desexualized eroticism. This maternal space, I would propose, is promulgated earlier in the affirmation of the anthropological, archaic, mural inscription. Indeed the subjectivit sauvage that Barthes links to the graffiti of 1968 cannot not recall the figure of the cave and perhaps specifically Lascaux, a phantasmatic space for more than one writer of an archaic wild subjectivity, connoted maternally.4 Writing is suggested here as a mode of living in affective proximity to the body of the mother, or at least in a non-neurotic relation to others characterized predominantly by physical closeness. It is in writing, then, that the fantasy of a life together will find its ideal affectivity and scansion. Recall that Barthes had said that at the end of the course, only a writing could realize the histoire personelle of the subject in which the fantasy of Le Souverain Bien would be rooted. Seule lcriture peut receullier lextrme subjectivit, car dans lcriture il y a accord entre lindirect de lexpression et la verit du sujet--accord impossible au plan de la parole (donc du cours) qui est toujours, quoi quon veuille, la fois direct et thtrale (178). The book Fragments dun discours amoureux is thus, he says, more true than the seminar (at the EPHE) from which it derived. Extreme subjectivity, linked by Barthes to the wild subjectivity of 1968s graffiti, as well as to maternal space and its erotics, finds its utopia in writing. *** This implicates Barthess reader, and especially those who risk extending this status to the act of critical writing, in the fantasy of le vivre ensemble that his work articulates, and the affectivity it expresses. The other politics hinted at in Barthess meditations on living together arises from affective bonds--the friendships implied in reading and writing.5 To live with Roland Barthes is perhaps necessarily to join with him in
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Patrick ffrench

a community formed by the subjectivities of reading and writing. This community is always non-hysterical (without the demands, conflicts, or other fascisms of language) insofar as it is a community premised on the proleptic gesture of plus tard. My writing will always be read later; his texts and mine are not contemporary, or rather, inhabit the strange temporality of the literary where everything is at once contemporary and archaic. The virtual or at least non-actual nature of this community does not, however, dilute the affective force of living with, precisely because this takes place affectively and imaginatively, in the dimension of the Imaginary. Perhaps the living with implied by the activity of critical reading and writing solicits the subjectivit sauvage of which Barthes speaks--the truth of the subject, insofar as the indirectness (another form of prolepsis?) of the literary relation defuses the hysteria of living in close proximity to the other. To live with Roland Barthes (or with other writers) is to this extent both a desirable utopia and a flight from the demands of the real. Kings College, London
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957 [in Oeuvres compltes I (Paris: Seuil, 1993)]. -----. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris: Seuil, 1971 [in Oeuvres compltes II (Paris: Seuil, 1994)]. -----. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975 [in Oeuvres compltes III (Paris: Seuil, 1995)]. -----. Leon. Paris: Seuil, 1978. -----. Soires de Paris in Incidents. Paris: Seuil, 1987 [in Oeuvres compltes III]. -----. Comment vivre ensemble: Cours et sminaires au Collge de France. Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: PUF, 1962. -----. Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002) Calvet, Louis-Jean. Roland Barthe. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualit vol. I: La volont de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. -----. Des espaces autres in Dits et crits vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism in The Penguin Freud Library: On Metapsychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Knight, Diana. Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. Le Sminaire Livre II: Le moi dans la thorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1972. -----. Le Sminaire Livre XVII : Lenvers de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1987.

Works Cited

1. On this topic, see coute in LObvie et lobtus: Essais critiques III (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 217-30. 2. As Barthes notes (Comment vivre ensemble, 155), proxemics is lensemble des observations et thories concernant lusage que lhomme fait de lespace en tant que produit cultural spcifique. 3. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Substance for the comments that have informed these points. 4. See, for example, Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de lart (Paris: Skira, 1995). 5. Cf. Patrick ffrench, Friendship, Asymmetry, Sacrifice: Bataille and Blanchot in Parrhesia 3, 2007, pp. 32 42. (http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia03/parrhesia03_ffrench. pdf)

Notes

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009