Roland Barthes gave desire a fuller meaning than his colleagues and more related to pleasure, avoiding on the one hand the negativity of Lacan, who will always link desire with death, and fleeing on the other hand from the existential vision of Sartre, who in
Nausea
describes sex as a gray and smelly dimension, which produces anguish due to its very necessity.
Barthes's truth is located at an intermediate point between desire as destruction and desire as an affirmation of oneself and the other.
What he is referring to is perceived throughout his entire work and is manifested in the joyful brilliance of his style and of course in the book we are going to discuss.
Although he appreciated the peaceful gifts of the countryside, especially those linked to the French Southwest or Basque Country, where he saw the first light, Barthes was above all a city animal in which he liked to get around on foot.
I lived on his same street for more than a year, and I can give an account of his walks, alone or accompanied, through the Latin quarter, through the Proustian neighborhood of Saint-Germain or around Montparnasse or the Opera, at a time when that Paris still had its story and its personality, before it became a theme park for the millions of tourists who visit it at all times of the year.
Quite often, when I was on my way to the Hotel Marigny (once a boys' brothel financed by Proust) to carry out my job as night porter, I would pass him somewhere along the way.
He probably came from Café de la Paix and was heading to Café La Coupole (he didn't like the Select, which was opposite, as it had been very frequented by Sartre).
All of which is to say that he was a capricious and selective
bon vivant
who sought “habitable” atmospheres and who appreciated the pleasures of friendship like no one else, because for Barthes his friends were his family and he considered Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva and Severo Sarduy his brothers, not to mention his children.
Of all the cafes that punctuated his walks, the most beloved and frequented was undoubtedly the Flore, where I saw him more than once having breakfast while reading the newspaper, and where they loved him like no other customer.
One of those mornings at the Flore I caught him in a reflective moment and with his gaze lost at an unknown point in the establishment.
Perhaps he was thinking about his lost steps: his days in the tuberculosis sanatorium, affected by the illness that prevented him from entering the Ecole Normale Supérieure, to which he was destined like Sartre, Althusser and Foucault, or his years as a French reader. in Bucharest and Alexandria, where he had more than one love, or his days at the École des Hautes Études, where he gave the seminar reproduced in The
Author's Lexicon
, or his later pedagogical experience at the Collège de France, whose courses I attended and where he entered in 1977, just three years before his death.
His entrance speech at the College was highly criticized in the intellectual cliques of Paris for some of its rather scandalous formulations, but it must be taken into account that Barthes resorted to sensationalism as a publicity tool sometimes, and other times out of the desire to
épater le bourgeois
.
These were pleasures that he could not deprive himself of and that nourished his narcissism,
tout à fait parisien
, and his histrionic and somewhat mocking spirit.
And histrionics and jokes usually result in an ironic attitude towards life and work.
Barthes wanted to place himself in that situation, although he did not always succeed.
The author's lexicon
, the last of his posthumous works and published in French and Spanish, has been prefaced by Éric Marty, author of
The Sex of the Moderns
and a great reader of Barthes, who knows his work inch by inch and who opens the doors of the journey with sharp nuances.
Those who have commented on the work report that the 1973-74 seminar, whose material is collected in the book, shows an experimental, exploratory, dubious, undulating and sometimes fruitfully contradictory work process.
I believe that this procedure was typical of the École des Hautes Études, which I knew very well as a student, and was practiced by all the professors, although Barthes took it to the ultimate extremes in derivation, in exploration, in detours, in successes, in the failures, in the communion with the students who cooperated in the work analyzing very specific concepts of the seminar and configuring among all of them a dialectic where enjoyment and desire had their presence, and where the process of constructing a text alternated with the destruction of the ideological layers of language.
The attendees formed an elite clique, with intellectuals such as Aron, Sarduy, Sollers, Bremond, Kristeva and a long etcetera.
Hegel said that “self-consciousness only achieves its satisfaction in another self-consciousness,” and that happened in the seminar of 73-74, where narcissisms were reciprocal and shared and where Barthes became aware of his own course in other consciousnesses that They accompanied him while he actually explored himself, since the seminar was the basis of an ironically autobiographical book.
Passed the halfway point of the work
We find unpublished texts about the trip to China that Barthes made with the members of the
Tel Quel
magazine in the middle of the '74 seminar, and that is precisely why he included it in it.
In the photographs taken of the trip, Barthes usually appeared apart from the
Tel Quel group,
which accentuated his difference: another clothing, another generation, another look, without forgetting that Barthes was very far from practicing the baroque and sophisticated Maoism of the magazine nor did he dedicate himself to exquisite demagoguery, as Philippe Sollers, captain of the group, used to do.
At that time, the left-wing elites of Paris still valued the cultural revolution very positively.
In the aforementioned pages, Barthes oscillates between mild criticism and aesthetic reflections, and happy and penetrating observations about an “unintelligible” country abound.
Nothing strange: Barthes' views on the East are often disconcerting, stimulating both reflection and curiosity, as well as opening unexpected avenues for semiological research.
As I went through
The Author's Lexicon
in all its nooks and crannies, I felt like I was witnessing the different phases of Barthes' work, the past, the present and the future, because there are moments that lead us to
The Zero Degree of Writing
, to
Criticism. and truth
, which remain far away in time, at the same time we see the reflection of the present implicit in the seminar and announcements of the future work in speculations that are very close to his
Fragments of a loving discourse
.
For all that has been said,
The Author's Lexicon
has great pedagogical interest because through its pages we see, in a way that is as protected as it is naked, the “live” construction of an essay in all its ups and downs and registers.
Look for it in your bookstore
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