Barthes and the Pleasures of Alienation

Abstract

Barthes turned life into language and his alienation in Writing, Play and Pleasure. Barthes’ writings are repetitive: they unfold from the same key words and fundamental patterning structures. Like Yeats, Barthes has his own ex-centric vocabulary of interlocking terms and his own ex-centric mythology. But Barthes’ writings are also always different, always new: they change with the changes in Barthes’ intellectual environment and with the growing boldness of his mental, emotional and sexual striptease.¹ Because Barthes translated the languages and conventions of his culture, his readings, his thinking, his ‘art of life’, his habits, his loves, his ‘perversions’, his tenderness and even his own texts into Writing (Écriture), there remains, in his own words, ‘no person behind’ the plural surfaces of his texts. Indeed, one could conceive of writing about Barthes exclusively by putting together a patchwork of citations from Barthes. For instance:

It is my profound conviction (and it is linked to all my work during the past twenty years) that everything is language, that nothing escapes language, and that the whole of society is penetrated by language (GV, 145). Each of us speaks only one sentence which can be interrupted only by death (GV, 101).

‘Atopia. Fiché:I am pinned on a fiche, assigned to a place (intellectual), to residence within a caste (if not a class). Against which only one internal doctrine: that of atopia (a habitation adrift).’ RB by RB