5RODQG%DUWKHV7KH'LVFRXUVHRI'HVLUHDQGWKH4XHVWLRQRI*HQGHU

$XWKRUV/DZUHQFH'.ULW]PDQ
6RXUFH0/19RO1R)UHQFK,VVXH6HSSS
3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
6WDEOH85/http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905020
$FFHVVHG

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
MLN.

http://www.jstor.org
 RolandBarthes:The Discourseof
Desire and the Questionof Gender

LawrenceD. Kritzman

In place of hermeneuticswe need an erotics

of art.
Susan Sontag,
Against Interpretation(1964)
Dans ce qu'il ecrit, chacun defend sa sexua-
lite.
Roland Barthes,
Roland Barthespar Roland Barthes (1975)1

Barthes' rhetoric of sexuality transcribes the text as a body imbued

with libidinal energy and capable of generating fantasies through a
figurative language that articulates theoretical fictions. In the pro-
cess of delineating these critical texts, writing aspires to the status
of matter. What Barthes terms the "grain of the voice"-la materi-
alite du corps parlant sa langue maternelle" (00, 238)-comes to
signify how the body speaks in writing through verbal choreo-
graphics which involve positions of passion, its drives, controls and

I I quote from the following texts: Le Degrg zero de l'9criture(Paris: Seuil-Collection

Points, 1972), [DZE]; SurRacine (Paris: Seuil, 1963) [SR]; Sade, Fourier,Loyola (Paris:
Seuil, 1971) [SFL]; SIZ (Paris: Seuil, 1970) [S/Z]; Le Plaisier du texte (Paris: Seuil,
1973) [PT]; Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975) [RB]; Fragments
d'un discours amoureux (Paris, Seuil, 1977) [FDA]; "Introduction a l'analyse struc-
turale du recit," in Poetique du recit (Paris: Seuil, 1977) [ASR]; La Lecon (Paris: Seuil,
1978) [L]; Sollers 9crivain (Paris: Seuil, 1979); La Chambreclaire (Paris: Gallimard
Seuil, 1980) [CC]; Le Grain de la voix (Paris: Seuil, 1981) [GV]; L'Obvieet l'obtus.Essais
critiquesIII (Paris: Seuil, 1982) [00]; Le Bruissementde la langue. Essais critiquesIV
(Paris: Seuil, 1984) [BL].
For a discussion of figuration see Steven Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professor of
Desire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). I wish to thank Gerald Prince
for his helpful comments during the writing of this essay.
 M L N 849

rhythms. "La figuration serait le mode d'apparition du corps ero-

tique ... dans le profil du texte" (PT, 88).
The Barthesian subject "essays" the languages of culture (art,
literature, music, photography and food), and through that pro-
cess it searches for the laws of its own desire. The writer's critical
discourse links the sensuous and the conceptual in a phenomenal
relation that ultimately becomes a form of self-knowledge: "Qu-est-
ce que la signifiance? C'est le sens en ce qu'il est produit sensuelle-
ment" (PT, 97). Subjectivity is indeed a rhetorical effect that is re-
lated to the body's gesture, a metaphoric bond between the
graphic and the corporeal, which transcribes figures of drive and
defense in the spectacle of writing. The text takes the form of an
erotic body with which the writing subject, who sees language and
is sensitive to its figurative choreographics, has a relationship that
reconciles semiotic analysis with the languages of love.2
For Barthes, the signifying process exemplifies the libidinal en-
ergy of phenomenal experience by means of psychic tropes
through which the aesthetic and the sexual coalesce and stage a
critical act transforming the abstract into the sensually concrete.
By ascribing value to theoretical fictions whose rhetoric constitutes
allegories of sexuality, Barthes transforms analytical narrative into
a reflection on desire ("un empourprement de plaisir" [RB, 107]),
that is accepted as an exemplary moral gesture.
The visual arts afford Barthes the opportunity to study women
as semiotic objects mediated by shaped or mastered languages. In
a preface to a collection of drawings by the fashion designer Erte
(Romain de Tirtoff ) Barthes examines the female figure as a mor-
phemic unit sketched out by the interplay between the graphic
qualities of the letter and the sensuous contours of the body. In
drawing upon the mythological stereotypes associated with the
image of the woman in Western culture, Barthes characterizes
Erte's conception of the female body as a fetishized textual object.
Each letter of his alphabet represents a synecdoche of femininity
inscribed within the silhouette of writing. Unlike the conventional
concept of the fetish as a fragment severed from the whole body, it
takes on new significance here, in the form of a cultural artifact
submitted to the mortifying gesture of a totalized harmonious
2 Francoise Gaillard describes what she terms "un 6rotisme de 1'intelligibilite" in
"Roland Barthes 'Semioclaste'?," L'Arc 56 (1974), 22-24. Upon completion of this
essay, I learned that Naomi Schor also discusses the notion of Barthes's "eroticiza-
tion of aesthetics" in her Reading in Detail (New York: Methuen, 1987), 96.
850 . LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN

figuration. "Femme entierement socialisee par sa parure, parure

obstinement corporeifiee par le contour de la Femme" (00, 103).
The silhouette becomes a fetish for Barthes because the cor-
poreal part object and vestimentary image merge as a composite
whole that links the ornamental and the bodily in an erotic, albeit
paradoxically desexualized, relationship. Upon closer inspection, it
seems that Barthes's gaze is drawn to Erte's gynecography by its
violence, through which the female body is dismembered and sub-
sequently integrated into a series of discrete units belonging to an
alphabetic order mediated by a graphic materiality.

La Femme de Erte n'est pas non plus un symbole, l'expression renou-

velee d'un corps qui preserveraitdans ses formes les mouvements fan-
tasmatiques de son createur ou de son lecteur (comme il arrive 'a la
femme romantique des peintres et des ecrivains):c'est seulement un
chiffre, un signe, renvoyant 'a une feminite conventionnelle (enjeu
d'un pacte social), parce qu'elle est pur objet de communication,infor-
mation claire, passage vers l'intelligibleet non pas expression du sen-
sible: ces femmes innombrablesne sont pas les portraitsd'une idWe,les
essais d'un fantasme, mais, tout 'al'oppose, le retour d'un morpheme
identique.
(00, 100-101)

In a very real sense, Barthes's analysis of Erte sees him as fitting

women into the coherent structure of an intelligible signifying
system. At the same time, he discovers her derivative function
within that system by submitting her body to the grammatical exi-
gencies of a highly aestheticized language in which women are sit-
uated at the locus of graphic abstraction: "Le lieu du depart signif-
iant, chez Erte, ce n'est pas la Femme (elle ne devient rien, sinon
sa propre coiffure, elle est le simple chiffre de la feminite my-
thique), c'est la Lettre" (00, 109). The semiotician therefore dis-
covers in the female body a decorative relic, a verbal icon, liberated
from the occult forces of the erotic by linguistic functions that le-
gitimize the obliteration of her libidinal power. The desexualiza-
tion of the female body is more than a turning away from femi-
ninity; it represents a sterilized object of play whose true value em-
anates from the u-topic space of a two-dimensional image.
A similar interest in fetishized textual objects draws Barthes to
the Physiologie du gout and to the amorous relation which Brillat-
Savarin maintained with a language that can literally be character-
ized as that of a gourmand. Gastronomist and semiotician alike de-
 M L N 851

sire words in their material presence and consequently establish a

fetishistic relationship with language, which represents the oral as-
pirations of the psychic body.3 "B.S. desire le mot, comme il desire
des truffes, une omelette au thon, une matelote; comme tout neo-
logue, il a un rapport fetichiste au mot seul, cerne par sa singula-
rite meme" (BL, 294). Orality is evoked here because it enables
Barthes to project via analogical metaphors the sexual onto the
verbal. As a result he transforms language into discrete physical
objects capable of enacting libidinal functions; orality is but an ex-
ercise of language that actualizes the pleasures of the body: "On
sait combien la modernite a mis d'insistance 'adevoiler la sexualite
qui est enfouie dans l'exercice du langage: parler, sous certains
censures ou certains alibis. .. est un acte erotique [le concept d'or-
alite] ... B.S. fournit ici ... une transition:celle du gout, oral
comme le langage, libidinal comme Eros" (BL, 294).
Barthes's discussion of Brillat-Savarin situates the erotic locus of
both food and language in the same bodily organ, the tongue,
without which there would be neither taste nor speech: "Manger,
parler, chanter (faut-il ajouter: embrasser?) sont des operations
qui ont pour origine le meme lieu du corps" (BL, 293). The
economy of desire adheres to the exigencies of a linguistic appetite
which produces a delight that is diffuse and yet totally permeates
the sensations of our internal body, through the very movements
of the tongue. Language is indeed an element of erotic nurtur-
ance, and food acts as the gustative metaphor of a narrative that
develops in time. "Un peu 'a la facon d'un recit, ou d'un langage:
temporalise, le gouft connailt des surprises et des subtilites; ce sont
les parfums et les fragrances, constitues 'a l'avance, si l'on peut
dire, comme des souvenirs: rien n'euft empeche la madeleine de
Proust d'etre analysee par B.S." (BL, 286). Like the field of dis-
course which is subject to the action of degrees, gustative sensa-
tions produce meaning subsequent to their first reception and
ironically evoke the pleasures of reference just when they appear
to trace their very absence. Here Barthes's analysis uncovers an
erotics of the table, the voluptuous effects of cenesthesia,which ex-
emplifies an idealized desire that is destined to produce euphoria

3"[Barthes] uses Nietzsche's methods-the genealogy and the gay science-to

overcome the death drive encountered in his fetishism, thus transforming a per-
version into a technique of critical production"; Gregory L. Ulmer, "Fetishism in
Roland Barthes' Nietzschean Phase," Papers on Language and Literature 14 (1978),
334-55.
852 LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN

and yet remain incomplete. This unsatisfied wish perhaps ac-

counts for the paradoxical nature of unelaborated desire. Like a
dream, it is built on felicitious memories that evoke an intense
pleasure devoid of any real sensuality, yet that remain on the
threshold of joyful expectations: "Lorsque j'ai l'appetit d'une
nourriture, est-ce que je ne m'imagine pas la mangeant? Est-ce
que, dans cette imagination predictive, il n'y a pas tout le souvenir
de nos plaisirs anterieurs? Je suis le sujet constitue d'une scene a
venir, dontje suis le seul acteur" (BL, 300).
If ideality is an issue in Barthes's critical fictions, his essays on
romantic song, and Schumann's lieder in particular, recall a world
in which desire and its object were once continuous. In these texts,
musicality becomes a mode of figurative language for a subject
who seeks asylum in the narcissistic pleasure of internalized bliss.
Emphasizing the delight of the original dyad, Barthes glorifies the
desire to preserve the unravished purity of illusion whereby the
subject is engaged in the undifferentiated unity of symbiotic de-
pendency. To sing in the romantic voice is indeed an act that is
self-consuming and capable of producing a mode of orgasmic
pleasure which enables the ideal and the real to coalesce in the
body of desire; romantic song is a performative act that assigns to
the psychic body the function of mediator of dreams: "Toute la
musique romantique, qu'elle soit vocale ou instrumentale, dit ce
chant du corps naturel: c'est une musique qui n'a de sens que si je
puis toujours la chanter en moi-meme avec mon corps ... Car
chanter, au sens romantique, c'est cela: jouir fantasmatiquement de
mon corps unifie"' (00, 255). While the love song presupposes an
imaginary interlocution, it indeed emanates from a loss that is the
result of an absent other. The subject is forced to seek refuge in a
musical form that is "continu'ment refugiee dans l'ombre lumi-
neuse de la Mere" (00, 263) and that consequently disengages the
self from the constraints of Oedipalization. The phantasmatic
rhythms of romantic song produce the illusion of a narcissistic ful-
fillment through an art that is appearance without reality: "Fanta-
sieren: 'ala fois imaginer et improviser: bref, fantasmer, c'est-a'-dire
produire du romanesque sans construire un roman" (00, 257). In
renouncing the semblance of referentiality, the love song fantasy
engages the singer in a mode of figurative expression that marks a
certain sensitivity to the institution of the novel.4 It also affirms

4 "Car s'il est chez lui [Barthes] une continuity, c'est bien celle d'une intelligencedu
romanesquesi aigud, si seduisante qu'elle ne cesse d'6clipser lutopie' plus secrete
 M L N 853

that art can reshape matter through form, reality through the
openness of music as a nostalgic quest that is "une errance pure,
un devenir sans finalite"' (00, 257). The singing subject drama-
tizes the relation with the other in as much as it becomes the osten-
sible catalyst of his very own sense of loss: "Je lutte avec une image,
qui est 'a la fois l'image de l'autre, desiree, perdue, et ma propre
image, desirante, abandonee" (00, 256).
What is remarkable about Barthes' essay on romantic song is its
exemplary allegorization of a discourse of desire which refuses the
demands of the symbolic order and opts instead for pre-Oedipal
bliss. Barthes's encomiumof the lieder is catalyzed by the will to tran-
scend the Oedipalized typology of the opera lyric and the need to
(re)discover the dream of omnipotence in a romance of union,
represented as a conflict-free relation liberated from the laws of
gender overdetermination.
Dans notre societ6 occidentale, 'atraversles quatre registres vocaux de
l'opera, c'est l'Oedipe qui triomphe ... ces quatre voix familialesque le
leid romantique, en quelque sorte, oublie:il ne tient pas compte des
marquessexuellesde la voix, car un meme liedpeut etre indifferemment
chante par un homme ou une femme; pas de "famille"vocale, rien
qu'un sujet humain, unisexepourrait-ondire, dans la mesure meme ouiil
est amoureux: car l'amour ... ne fait acception ni de sexes ni de r6les
sociaux.5
(00, 254)
The passionate romantic love to which Barthes alludes is one that

d'un autre reve d'&criture qui, depuis les annees d'apprentissage, habite les pages
ecrites comme le songe d'un songe"; Philippe Roger, Roland Barthes, roman (Paris:
Grasset, 1986), 31.
5 Even during the pseudo-scientific positivism of the 1960's, Barthes advanced

the hypothesis that the birth of narrative is contemporaneous with the story of
Oedipus. The loss of the Oedipal master narrative would be the end of storytelling
and writing in the figurative sense. It would ostensibly signify the absence of the
anxious desire for the disappearance of the father in all its multifarious manifesta-
tions. "La mort du Pere enlkvera a la litterature beaucoup de ses plaisirs. S'il n'y a
plus de pere, a quoi bon raconter des histoires? Tout recit ne se ramene-t-il pas a
l'Oedipe? Raconter, n'est-ce pas toujours chercher son origine, dire ses demes
avec la Loi, entrer dans la dialectique de l'attendrissement et de la haine?" (PT,
75-76). For a more complete analysis of Barthes' anti-Oedipal discourse see my
essay "Barthesian Freeplay," Yale French Studies 66 (1984), 189-210. The study of
narrative from a post-Lacanian Oedipal perspective has been undertaken in The
Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 1981) and Juliet Flower MacCannell, "Oedipus
Wrecks," MLN 98 (1983), 910-40.
854 LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN

has not encountered the trials and tribulations of difference. It

reflects the desire for a primary relationship of narcissistic whole-
ness, in which the other and the one are the same without at-
tributes recognizable as either specifically masculine of feminine:
"En somme, l'interlocuteur du lied, c'est le Double-mon Double,
c'est Narcisse: double altere, pris dans la scene affreuse du miroir
fendu . . ." (00, 257). This narcissistic overestimation in the case
a
of object-choice reveals not only regression to the realm of the
Imaginary, but also the apparent need to invent a gender-neutral
world in which the body is, nevertheless, bound up with the
rhythms of the semiotic.
Perhaps the most revealing of Barthes's critical fictions is the
notion of the text, which is described as a fetishistic object of
pleasure in which the "devirilized" son loses himself in the web of
the maternal body.6 The writer-child engages in an erotic activity
in which the joyful pleasure derived from playing with the
mother's body is but a colonization and merging with that body.
The distance between mother and son has been reduced to cata-
strophically narrow proportions whereby the latter is fatally drawn
into the vertiginous path of Arachne's labyrinth:7 "Nous accen-
tuons maintenant, dans le tissu, l'idee generative que le texte se
fait, se travaille 'a travers un entrelacs perpetuel; perdu dans ce
tissu-cette texture-le sujet s'y defait, telle une araignee qui se
dissoudrait elle-meme dans les secretions constructives de sa toile"
(PT, 101). For Barthes, then, the writing subject develops the
ability to become that "beautiful land" through the loss of its
opacity, symbolized by the mother's body, and thus merge with the
vanished corpus of childhood bliss.
However, the body in question here represents not the mother's
invention, but rather the child's drama of artistic creation.
Barthes's text transcribes the mother as object of scriptural pro-
duction and not as its dynamic subject: "L'ecrivain est quelqu'un

6 See The (M)other Tongue: Essaysin FeministPsychoanalyticInterpretation,ed. Shirley

Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1985). Domna Stanton, in "The Mater of the Text: Barthesian Displace-
ment and Its Limits" [L'Espritcrgateur25 (1985), 57-72], has coined the term "de-
virilized son."
7 "The discourse of the male weavers rhetorically stages 'woman' without in any

way addressing women"; Nancy K. Miller, "Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text,
and the Critic," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. N. K. Miller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), 271.
 M L N 855

qui joue avec le corps de sa mere ... pour le glorifier, l'embellir ou

pour le depecer, le porter 'ala limite de ce qui, du corps, peut etre
reconnu" (PT, 60). In passing from passive to active persona, the
Barthesian subject-in actualizing a Kleinian intertext-reappro-
priates the maternal body which was destroyed in fantasy.8 He ac-
tively remodels it through a creative act-"la main . .. pour ras-
sembler et entremeler les fils inertes" (S/Z, 166)-which is but a
sublimated version of the urge for reparation. To be sure, the im-
pulse to satisfy the mother is inextricably linked to the symbolic
recreation of the maternal body by a male writer who paradoxi-
cally feminizes himself through the symbolic representation of the
fetishistic female braid, which the text emblematizes in its very ma-
teriality. Thus, in characterizing the maternal body as "ce qui peut
etre tresse"' (00, 103-104), the Barthesian subject ascribes to the
scriptural act the masturbatory pleasures associated with narcis-
sistic drives. The writing of the text embodies the transgression of
the forbidden satisfaction derived from the maternal. Yet it exer-
cises an obsessional attraction for a self which, paradoxically, be-
comes a substitute object of nurturance that sustains the order of
the imaginary.
In order for the text to keep the fiction-making machine alive,
its most fundamental law within Barthes's critical fantasy must be
to render the satisfaction of desire incomplete. The fictional must
outwit the death drive of the pleasure principle. The enactment of
narrative produces a discourse of desire which represents tempo-
rality as the deferral of meaning. The writing of the text trans-
forms a reflection on desire into a kind of resonance of language
that erases the object of its articulation. Barthes's concept of the
text openly thematizes the inability to repress castration and, with
it, the refusal to incarnate the Law. Accordingly, the braiding of
the pubic hair, as it is evoked by the Barthesian subject, enacts the
fable of his demands. It is a mere metaphor for the symbolic posi-
tioning of desire and the denial of castration. Like the child who
arrives at the fetishistic solution as the only means to defeat the
castration threat, the theorist opts for the cacophony of mutually
interfering sign systems as a way to perpetuate the exigencies of

8
Melanie Klein, "The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of
the Ego," in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, vol. 1 of The Writings of
Melanie Klein, ed. R. E. Money-Kyrle (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1975). See also "Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of
Art and in the Creative Impulse," Writings, I, 210-18.
856 LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN

desire: "On connailt le symbolisme de la tresse: Freud, pensant 'a

l'origine du tissage, y voyait le travail de la femme tressant ses poils
pubiens pour fabriquer le penis qui lui manque. Le texte est en
somme un fetiche; et le reduire 'a l'unite du sens, par une lecture
abusivement univoque, c'est couper la tresse, c'est esquisser le geste
castrateur" (S/Z, 166). To cut the braid is thus tantamount to
halting the drive and the kinetic energy that is the source moti-
vating desire. The suspension of meaning activates the euphoria
derived from an eroticized language which resists the quiescence
of a castrative hermeneutics: "Chez lui, le desir du mot l'emporte,
mais de ce plaisir fait partie une sorte de vibration doctrinale" (RB,
78).
In effect, Barthes's notion of the text represents the desire to
escape the fate of monumentalization and to transcend the limits
of interpretation as well as the problems of classification. The no-
tion of organic totality must be fractured in order to produce a
feeling of ecstasy emanating from the site of a loss. A seam, a cut,
or a discontinuity in the textual fabric stimulates the erotic energy
of the reader, whose affective sensibilities are attuned to the rhet-
oric of fragmentation. As Barthes claims, a naked body is infinitely
less erotic than the spot where the garment gaps. The fragmented
corpuswhich constitutes an ideal representational mode entices the
reader and transports him into the realm of the senses: "Quand
j'essaie de produire cette ecriture courte, par fragments, je me
mets dans la situation d'un auteur que le lecteur va draguer. C'est
le bonheur du hasard, mais d'un hasard tres voulu, tres pense,
epie, en quelque sorte" (GV, 218). Barthes's corpus morceleenacts
the fantasy of his own body in bits and pieces, a corporeal pose
that implies a certain loss of self and seduces because of this very
absence.
The Roland Barthespar Roland Barthes puts forth an unquestion-
ably idealistic view of sexuality that attempts to transcend the psy-
chic mythology of the binary prison through a process of self-ne-
gation: "Il songe 'a un monde qui serait exempt de sens" (RB, 90).
The concept of the neuter becomes a scriptural metaphor in the
quest to transcend the integrity of meaning in language and the
threat of reification due to taxonomies. Barthes therefore proble-
matizes the possibility of essentialized gender identities and sug-
gests that the very idea of a "happy sexuality" can only become
possible when sexual difference is disavowed. In essence, Barthes
seemingly refuses those identities of man and woman as fictions of
 M L N 857

oppression imposing closure. Within this context, sexuality is char-

acterized as more than merely the biological. In fact, it is portrayed
as a textual phenomenon that is plural and disengaged from the
contingencies of a priori roles.
Des lors que I'alternative est refusee (des lors que le paradigme est
brouillk) l'utopie commence: le sens et le sexe deviennent l'objet d'un
jeu libre, au sein duquel les formes (polysemiques)et les pratiques(sen-
suelles), liberees de la prison binaire, vont se mettre en 6tat d'expansion
infini. Ainsi peuvent naitre un texte gongorien et une sexualite heu-
reuse.
(RB, 134)
To be sure, the utopia of sexuality evokes a pleasure that refuses to
name itself and is situated at the locus of its root-meaning, no place.
The free-play in question here is integral to the quest for an amor-
phous sexuality; it suggests that it can only have felicitous conse-
quences through an excess of meaning.
By equating utopia with the neuter, Barthes opts for a higher
form of sexuality that reaches beyond social constructions in the
name of the transgressive imperatives of desire: "Le neutre .. . est
une notion purement qualitative, structurale; il est ce qui deroutele
sens, la norme, la normalite. Avoir le gou't du neutre, c'est force-
ment se degouiter du moyen"(SFL, 113). In a sense, then, the cou-
pling of the erotic and the semiotic in the figure of the neuter
produces a radical signifying practice that challenges closure both
in gender (i.e. the institution of heterosexuality) and in language.
To go beyond the constraints of normality is, in fact, an attempt to
reject the fictional signs of plenitude associated with the quantita-
tive equilibrium of the so-called mythological mean. The abnormal
therefore becomes the signifier of the neuter, with pleasure de-
fining itself as a form of perversity: "Le plaisir est un neutre (la
forme la plus perverse du demoniaque)" (PT, 102). Perversion be-
comes an issue because it generates a blissful surplus of meaning, a
libidinal flow which frees sexuality from a totalizing homogeneity
and allows it to transgress the obstacles of social censure through
the active quest for the neuter. "Le pouvoir de jouissance d'une
perversion (en l'occurrence celle des deux H: homosexualite et
haschisch) est toujours sous-estime. La Loi, la Doxa, la Science ne
veulent pas comprendre que la perversion, tout simplement, rend
heureux;ou pour preciser davantage, elle produit un plus et
. O

dans ce plus vient se loger la difference . . ." (RB, 68).

858 D. KRITZMAN
LAWRENCE

But this idealized sexuality that Barthes puts fojth is suspended

somewhere between the satiety of pleasure and its ostensible ab-
sence. In a 1979 preface to Renaud Camus' novel Tricks, Barthes
portrays a utopian erotic rapport as a fiction in which no one
player would have a position of dominance over the other. It is,
like the imaginary contract of prostitution, an encounter which
takes place only once and engages its players in a drama which
passes without regret. A trick is indeed more than simply an act of
cruising, but it is often infinitely much less than love. It is a meta-
phor of many clandestine adventures that can potentially engage
the amorous subject in a theatrical event, in which the ludic strate-
gies of the players reduce libidinal intensity into surfaces and sexu-
ality into a form of haiku that permits asceticism and hedonism to
coalesce. In its very essence, then, a trick is a pseudo-affective
mode. It induces a tropistic interaction through a seductive cho-
reographics that absorbs the self into the facticity of illusion. The
trick thus enables the passage from the sexual to the discursive and
thereby becomes a metaphor of mystical experience. "Le trick
quitte ... la pornographie (avant d'y avoir aborde) et rejoint le
roman ... le trick ... c'est un amour virtuel, stoppe volontaire-
ment de part et d'autre, par contrat, soumission au code culturel
qui assimile la drague au donjuanisme" (BL, 329-30). The drama-
turgy of the desiring subject transmits an intensity that is kept in
check. Barthes is ostensibly drawn to Camus's narrative by its
ability to represent homosexual encounters without ever directly
speaking about them. The narrative allows him to reflect the es-
sence of the neuter, which is unquestionably an entity without es-
sence beyond the plenitude of being.
It is, however, in the Fragmentsd'un discoursamoureux(1977) that
Barthes reconceptualizes the discourse of love as separate from
sexuality, therefore problematizing once again the issue of gender.
Out of the lover's discourse emerges a persona who is described as
being sexually indifferent and inscribed in a constellation of
figures that simulate the amorous subject as a feminized being, one
who is gender-marked and who experiences a devastating sense of
passivity as the object of desire. Difference is, in fact, not deter-
mined by sexual identity, but rather by the shifting loci of object
relations that define a redistribution of power: "Tout amoureux
qui recoit un coup de foudre a quelque chose d'une Sabine ...
l'amoureux-celui qui a ete ravi-est toujours implicitement f6-
minise" (FDA, 223).
 M L N 859

Femininity undoubtedly leaves itself open to libidinal coloniza-

tion; the function of this feminized subject is to be possessed
through a form of domination. The production of a lover's dis-
course depends to an unsuspected degree on the binding of the
energy of an amorous subject who is trapped within the entropy of
a male-centered cultural division of gender roles. But if Barthes
enables the masculine to become feminine, it is in order to explore
and put into question the association of sexual inversion with femi-
nization; gender identity is conditioned by the language of love,
which transforms the amorous subject into a transvestite of sorts
whose subversion is realized by the enunciative reversibility of
masculine and feminine: ". . . dans tout homme qui parle l'absence
de l'autre, du fbminin se declare: cet homme qui attend et qui en
souffre, est miraculeusement f6minise. Un homme n'est pas f&-
minise parce qu'il est inverti, mais parce qu'il est amoureux" (FDA,
20). Falling in love makes the male figure genuinely a man-woman
and inscribes him in the phallocentric plot of female subjection:
"C'est leur situation dans le rapport de force qui verse les uns dans
la virilite et les autres dans la f6minite, sans egard 'aleur sexe bio-
logique" (SR, 25). By distancing himself from the anatomy of the
gender-marked body, Barthes sets it free, in order to reify the
myth of the eternal feminine which takes the masculine as its point
of origin. Ironically, the subject in quest of the neuter finds him-
self imprisoned within the parameters of the binary law: "Je suis
oblige de toujours choisir entre le masculin et le f6minin, le neutre
ou le complexe me sont interdits" (L, 13).
Barthes evokes the passivity of the lover only in order to priori-
tize the primal relationship between the subject and the imaginary
(m)other who engenders the birth of desire. In the lover's dis-
course, the maternal imago not only becomes the center of the
subject's identity, but remains an internalized principle of sensu-
ality and corporeal experience whose absence constitutes a sym-
bolic castration-"se voir abandonne de la Mere" (FDA, 59)-that
is indeed the very symptom of this tragically terminal disease. The
absent mother therefore symbolizes a lost harmony and emblema-
tizes the pain of separation associated with all love relationships. In
a sense, the desired return for the maternal figure offers the
amorous subject renewed hope for symbiotic bliss, while at the
same time serving to imprison him in the femininity within him-
self: "Ce quej'attends de la presence promise, c'est une sommation
inouie de plaisirs, un festin; je jubile. comme l'enfant qui rit de voir
860 LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

celle dont la seule presence annonce et signifie une plenitude le

satisfaction" (FDA, 139).
Barthes thus stages the lover's discourse as a catastrophic theat-
rical event characterized by the nostalgia for a lost maternal pleni-
tude that is manifested as the projection of nothingness. The
feeling of abandonment evokes a subject divided between the po-
tential loss of what can never be recovered and the memory of
what can never be forgotten: "L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quel-
quefois, meurt par exces, fatigue et tension de memoire ... Enfant
je n'oubliais pas: journees interminables, journees abandonnees,
oi la Mere travaillait loin, j'allais, le soir, attendre son retour ...
les autobus passaient plusieurs fois de suite, elle n'6tait dans
aucun" (FDA, 20-21).9 Like the abandoned child, the lover finds
himself in a state of solitude, the consequences of which reveal the
inability to complete separation because of a past that cannot be
extricated from the present: "J'invoque sa protection, son retour:
que l'autre apparaisse, qu'il me retire telle une mere qui vient
chercher son enfant" (FDA, 23). Desire, then, takes the form of a
demand addressed to the (m)other, who, in essence, becomes a
personification of that very need. Barthes' vocatives are choreo-
graphed as a series of fantasies of persecution by a maternal agent
of evil who replaces the identical agent of good. The mother is
split into contrasting opposites, with the menacing object being
nothing more than the result of the excessive idealization of the
perfect object: "Le fading de l'objet aime, c'est le retour terrifiant
de la mauvaise Mere, le retrait inexplicable d'amour, le delaisse-
ment bien connu des Mystiques ... Je ne suis pas detruit, mais
laisse la, comme un dechet" (FDA, 130).
But if the bad mother is characterized as one who withdraws her
love, the good son refuses to abandon his mother. From the per-
spective of the amorous subject springs forth the impulse to sus-
tain nurturance and the need to reenact the infant's original
pleasure. Quoting the Tao Te Ching, the lover evokes the singu-
larity of his quest to cathect onto the figure of the mother: "Moi
seul je differe des autres hommes, parce que je tiens 'a teter ma
Mere" (FDA, 252). Nurturance is consecrated as an activity by
virtue of the Kleinian definition of culture as an effort to repair

9 Steven Ungar very interestingly analyzes the symbolic value of the Sevres-Baby-
lone bus stop in the Barthesian mythology by focusing on the root meaning of the
word "sever": to wean, not yet detached from the mother (120).
 M L N 861

the damaged world of the imaginary, through the symbolic redis-

covery of the mother's body.'0 And it is through the correlation
between writing and femininity that the amorous subject is able to
compensate for this loss. The scriptural act constitutes itself as a
gynotextual activity that elaborates the fiction of absence at the
level of the logos, and thereby provides the amorous subject with a
locus for the projection of the missing object; the wounds of love
can be transcended by a discursive performance that bears that
mark of the female voice: "Historiquement, le discours de l'ab-
sence est tenu par le Femme ... C'est la femme qui donne forme 'a
l'absence en elabore la fiction, car elle en a le temps; elle tisse et
elle chante; les Fileuses, les Chansons de toile disent 'a la fois l'im-
mobilite . . . et l'absence" (FDA, 20).
At the core of the discourse of desire is the rhetoric of the de-
tail." This phenomenon is inextricably linked to the loss of the
mother; it functions as a synecdoche that transcends what Barthes
terms, in the context of photography, the realm of the studiumor a
culturally coded discourse. Barthes delineates the notion of the
punctum in La Chambreclaire as the aspect of the photograph that
designates what punctures the studium and figuratively injures the
spectator, even though he cannot articulate precisely why: "Un
mot existe en latin [punctum] pour designer cette blessure, cette
piqufre, cette marque faite par un instrument pointu" (CC, 49). In
essence the punctum is that subliminal detail, that "objet partiel"
(CC, 73) which touches the viewer and unchains a desire reaching
a level of orgasmic pleasure, and produces a readerly response "'a
la fois courte et active, ramassee comme un fauve" (CC, 81). This
piercing detail, described as both certain and unlocatable, is a ves-
tigial trace of something that is secretly familiar but which has un-
dergone repression and exerted a symbolic exercise of force on the
desiring subject: "Ce que je peux nommer ne peut reellement me
poindre. L'impuissance 'a nommer est un bon sympt6me de
trouble" (CC, 84). Thus the power of the detail catalyzes a pathetic
struggle to keep memories alive and forestall the death of desire.
"Peut-etre l'imagination du detail est-elle ce qui definit specifique-
ment l'Utopie ... le detail est fantasmatique et accomplit 'ace titre
le plaisir meme du desir" (SFL, 110). In effect, the punctum is a
tactic of delay that sustains the jubilant reading of a photographic

10Klein, "Symbol-Formation," 220, 232.

1 See Naomi Schor, "Le detail chez Freud," Litterature37 (1980), 3-14.
862 LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN

image which surprises by the force of its very presence. "Le punctum
est alors une sorte de hors-champ subtil, comme si l'image lancait
le desir au-dela de ce qu'elle donne 'avoir ... Toujours, la Photo-
graphie m'etonne,d'un etonnement qui dure et se renouvelle, ine-
puisablement" (CC, 93, 129).
The rhetoric of the detail reaches its most poignant level in
Barthes's ruminations on images of the mother, in which the son
in mourning fetishizes the photographic detail as mediator of de-
sire for the mother, in an effort to master the trauma of her loss.
Under the guise of a quest for the essence of photography, the
analysis of the image in La Chambreclaire reveals not only the ab-
sent referent common to all photos, but, in addition, the ontolog-
ical anxiety derived from the Barthesian subject's nostalgia for
what has been. "Au gre de ces photos, parfois je reconnaissais une
region de son visage, tel rapport du nez et du front, le mouvement
de ses bras, de ses mains. Je ne la reconnaissais jamais que par
morceaux, c'est-a'-dire que je manquais son etre, et que donc je la
manquais toute" (CC, 103). Yet this equivocal remembrance en-
ables Barthes to repress even momentarily the pain of separation
and to compensate for the loss of a psychic illusion of unity; its
stake is undoubtedly in the quest to reconstitute the lost maternal
corpus from lacunary fragments and the agony and the ecstasy of
that pursuit: "Tendu vers l'essence de son identite [that of the
mother], je me debattais au milieu d'images partiellement vraies, et
donc totalement fausses" (CC, 103-104). Barthes's affective in-
vestment reveals itself through the hypertrophy of single details
that, at best, painfully approximate the image of the maternal
body. "Le presque:regime atroce de l'amour, mais aussi statut dece-
vant du reve . . ." (CC, 104). They function as a symptom of the
need to keep desire alive and resurrect a simulacrum of the absent
other, through a metonymic process which intermittently allows
the part to exceed the whole. "Je vois, je sens, doncje remarque, je
regarde etje pense" (CC, 42). The photo thus becomes an allegor-
ical image in which temporality is paradoxically represented as
both a triumph and a defeat; it makes a place for a body which,
although "hers," had no meaning before this possibility of re-
membering.
Fetishism is indeed an issue in La Chambreclaire, because Barthes
is caught in an imaginary relationship which nurtures an amorous
preference for the mother. This relationship is predicated on the
denegation of the maternal phallus, which serves as a means to
 M L N 863

avert the threat of his own castration and thereby remain in an

imaginary state of sexual indifference that maintains the Other as
the Same.'2 "Devant la photo du Jardin d'Hiver, je m'abandonnais
'a Image, a l'Imaginaire" (CC, 117).13 Thus for Barthes the fetish-
istic attraction to the photographic detail becomes "a model for
repudiating reality".'4 Accordingly, the maternal image carries
within it a monument to repression, a spectrum that enables the
orphaned spectator to avert the total renunciation of the object of
narcissistic desire: "ce mot [spectre] garde 'a travers sa racine un
rapport au 'spectacle' et y ajoute cette chose un peu terrible qu'il y
a dans toute photo: le retour du mort" (CC, 23). In this context,
Barthes's writing puts forth the desire to preserve the unravished
purity of illusion in which the filial subject opts for symbiotic de-
pendency with a singular maternal figure.
After his mother's death, the amorous son, while pondering
over a photo of her as a child in the Winter Garden scene, un-
covers a utopia, the "ombre claire" (CC, 169), where wishes are
fulfilled.'5 The photo becomes an object of intense affective in-
vestment that symbolically consecrates the union of mother and
son as the only Nature acceptable to the amorous subject. Yet the
moment Barthes sees his mother in the photo, he not only at-
tempts to ward off the death he sees inscribed in her girlish pic-
ture, but also intercalates it with the story of his own life and the
mortality that it implies. The future is imagined from the anticipa-
tory standpoint of its having already occurred, and from the con-
sciousness of impending death; unable to think the absence of

12 The fetishistic solution is the means to confront and defeat the castration

threat. According to Jean Baudrillard fetishism incorporates the notions of "con-

struction," "artifice," "fabrication," and "imitation by signs" ("Fetichisme et ideo-
logie: la reduction semiologique" in Objetsdu frtichisme, Nouvelle Revue de Psychana-
lyse 2 [1970], 213-26).
13 Barthes tells us that the imaginary may be found "a travers la Mere, presente a

c6t6 du miroir" (RB, 156).

'4 "The fetish becomes the first model of all repudiations of reality"; Octave
Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 12.
15 "L'impossible par chance parfois devient possible: comme utopie. C'est bien ce
qu'il disait avant sa mort, mais pour lui, de la Photographie du Jardin d'Hiver.
Au-delA des analogies 'elle accomplissait pour moi, utopiquement, la science impos-
sible de l'tre unique.' I1 le disait uniquement, tourne vers sa mere et non vers la Mre,
mais la singularite poignante ne contredit pas la generalite, elle ne lui interdit pas
de valoir comme la loi, elle la fklche seulement, et la signe"; Jacques Derrida, "Les
Morts de Roland Barthes," Poetique 47 (1981), 277. According to Julia Kristeva, "la
selection de Mere [in Barthes] ... resume tout, debut et fin condenses" ("La Voix de
Barthes," Communications36 [1982], 148-49).
864 LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN

thought, the Barthesian subject conceives of its mortality through

the death and separation from the (m)other. "Elle morte, je n'avais
plus aucune raison de m'accorder 'ala marche du Vivant superieur
(l'espece) ... Je ne pouvais plus qu'attendre ma mort totale, india-
lectique" (CC, 113). Just as the absence of the mother served as a
template for uninterrupted desire in Fragments d'un discours
amoureux, so the death of the mother evoked by the punctum of the
Winter Garden photography functions as an uncanny harbinger
of the death of desire. "Car ce que j'ai perdu, ce n'est pas une
Figure (la Mere), mais un etre; et pas un etre, mais une qualite (une
ame): non pas l'indispensable, mais l'irremplacable" (CC, 118).

Ohio State University