[Faux titre no. 353] Pint, Kris_ Gemerchak, Christopher M._ Barthes, Roland - The perverse art of reading _ on the phantasmatic semiology in Roland Barthes' Cours au Collège de France (2010, Rodopi).pdf

The Perverse Art of Reading
On the phantasmatic semiology in

Roland Barthes’ Cours au Collège de France
FAUX TITRE
353
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,

Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
The Perverse Art of Reading
On the phantasmatic semiology in
Roland Barthes’ Cours au Collège de France
Kris Pint
Translator
Christopher M. Gemerchak
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2010

Cover painting: W.B. Tholen, De zusters Arntzenius (1895),
Collectie museumgoudA, Gouda.
Photography: Tom Haartsen.
Cover design: Pier Post.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3092-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3093-0
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction 9
The Fantasy: A Psychoanalytic Intertext 31
The Fantasy: A Nietzschean Intertext 69
A Reader Writes Oneself 133
A Reader at the Collège de France 163
Elements of an Active Semiology:

Space, Detail, Time and the Author 195
Lessons from an Amateur 257
Works Cited 277
Index 285
Acknowledgments
Writing is a lonely job, but there are a lot of people without whose
support—financially, intellectually, emotionally—this book would
have remained unwritten.
First of all, I would like to thank the colleagues, the students
and the staff of both the department of Dutch Literature and Literary
Theory at Ghent University and the Department of Arts and Architec-
ture at the PHL University College for creating just the kind of envi-
ronment which enabled me to read, to think aloud and to write.
Special thanks should go to Jürgen Pieters for the valuable, in-
spiring discussions which allowed me to create my own Barthesian
cartography, with its necessary detours and side-paths.
And thanks most of all to Nadia Sels, always my first reader,
who kept me company on this ongoing journey for quite some time
now.
I want to dedicate this book to her.
Kafka’s last diary entry, June 12, 1923:
Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits—thi s twist of the hand
is their characteristic gesture—becomes a spear tur ned against the
speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum. The
only consolation would be: it happens whether you l ike or not. And
what you like is of infinitesimally little help. Mo re than consolation is:
You too have weapons. (Kafka 1988, 423)
Introduction
A painting of girls, reading
While the birthday greetings on the back of the picture postcard were
not addressed to me, the painting portrayed on the front certainly
seemed to be: The Arntzenius Sisters, painted in 1895 by a Dutch
landscape artist whom I had never heard of, W.B. Tholen. The paint-
ing depicts two girls perched together on a chaise longue, each of
them engrossed in their reading. The one girl is sitting upright, her
eyes glancing downward at the book in her lap that she grips with one
hand, her other hand resting on the page. The other girl is reclining,
her knees tucked up under her skirt, resting her head on her hand. She
is poised to turn a page but forgets to do so, absorbed by what she is
reading. Light streams inside from an unseen window behind the girls,
noticeable only by the shine on the dark wood of the chair and the pale
glow of the paper where letters are suggested by little dark patches of
paint.
Although it was not my birthday, I had to have the postcard. I
would often return to it, just sit and stare at it without being able to
uncover the secret of its mysterious attraction. At best I could localise
my fascination in the dreamy, unflinching gaze of the second girl, lost
in a world evoked by words that would remain forever unreadable for
me. In other words, what my gaze latched onto was that which I can-
not see in her gaze: the image of what she is reading, an image that
gives her eyes that characteristic, impenetrable expression of someone
daydreaming, unaware of her surroundings or even the words in the
book she is holding. In her gaze I recognize the same intensity that
rivets me as a reader to the page, and imprisons me for hours in an
imaginary world.
The picture postcard lied on my desk, was sometimes used as
a bookmark, got lost and reappeared again, and the more I looked at
the print, the more I became convinced that she coalesced the essence
of our relation to the literary imagination; but at the same time I real-
10 The Perverse Art of Reading
ised that this imagination was not going to yield her secret straight
away. And then I recognized the same fascination for the strange rela-
tionship between the reader’s imagination and the text in the work of
‘late’ Barthes, and in particular the courses he gave as professor of lit-
erary semiology from 1977 to 1980 at the Collège de France.
What drew me to this period of Barthes’ work was a cryptic
sentence from the inaugural speech that Barthes gave on 7 January,
1977 at the Collège de France: “Je crois sincèrement qu’à l’origine
d’un enseignement comme celui-ci, il faut accepter de toujours placer
un fantasme, qui peut varier d’année en année.” (Barthes, Œuvres
complètes (hereafter OC) V, 445) [I sincerely believe that at the origin
of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can
vary from year to year. (Barthes 1982, 477)] It was primarily the no-
tion of the fantasy (or ‘phantasy’ or ‘phantasm’ as fantasme is some-
times translated) that intrigued me here, and I was also very curious
about the manner in which Barthes used these fantasies in his own
courses. And I was fortunate, for only recently was this final chapter
of Barthes’ work made available to a wider audience. The first two
courses—Comment vivre ensemble (How to live together) and Le
Neutre (The Neutral)—appeared in 2002, thanks respectively to
Claude Coste and Thomas Clerc, and in 2003 the final two lecture se-
ries were published together under the title La Préparation du roman I
et II (The Preparation of the Novel I & II), thanks to Nathalie Léger.
For more than twenty years, scholars had to avail themselves of brief
summaries in the annuaire du Collège de France, references in a few
interviews and a couple of lectures or articles that revisited some ele-
ments from the lecture series. It was therefore logical that the Cours
played a marginal role in the reception of Barthes’ oeuvre, which is
why at the start of my research I found myself on terra incognita.
What frustrated me the most was that Barthes himself, in his own les-
sons, never really made clear what the notion of the fantasy—which
was so important to his literary theory—actually meant. Nevertheless,
I remained convinced that Barthes’ notion of fantasy was particularly
suitable to conceive the intensity of the reading experience, an inten-
sity such as the one incarnated for me in the painting of the Arntzenius
sisters. At the same time I quickly came to understand that I would
first have to make a detour around a series of thinkers who could help
me clarify Barthes’ idiosyncratic interpretation of the fantasy.
Introduction 11
The reader will then forgive me this: in my search for an ex-

planation for the mysterious and even somewhat disturbing character
of Tholen’s reading girls, Barthes himself will only make a late en-
trance on the stage. Of all places I discovered a first step on the way to
an answer articulated in the work of someone whose thought is often
depicted as the antipode to the (post-)structuralist philosophy to which
Barthes’ thought belongs: Jean-Paul Sartre.
A project of consciousness, reading
In Sartre’s monumental L’être et le néant (1943) (Being and Nothing-

ness), he describes an alienating encounter with a man reading in the
park, an encounter that bears a very close resemblance to the experi-
ence I underwent while looking at Tholen’s painting:
Simplement la qualité même ‘homme-lisant’, comme rapport de

l’homme au livre, est une petite lézarde particulière de mon univers;
au sein de cette forme solide et visible, il se fait un vidage particulier,
elle n’est massive qu’en apparence, son sens propre est d’être, au mi-
lieu de mon univers, à dix pas de moi, au sein de cette massivité, une
fuite rigoureusement colmatée et localisée. (Sartre 2006, 295)
[The quality “man-reading” as the relation of the man to the book is

simply a little particular crack in my universe. At the heart of this
solid, visible form he makes himself a particular emptying. The form
is massive only in appearance; its peculiar meaning is to be—in the
midst of my universe, at ten paces from me, at the heart of that mas-
sivity—a closely consolidated and localized flight. (Sartre 1992, 344)]
This passage forms a good illustration of the well-known distinction

Sartre makes in L’être et le néant between the en-soi (in-itself) and the
pour-soi (for-itself), a distinction that is also clearly present in the
painting by Tholen: with the en-soi an object falls together with itself,
is always what it is in a tautological sense: the chaise longue is noth-
ing other than the material out of which it is made—the red velvet up-
holstery, the metal buttons, the dark wood of the armrest—just like the
girls’ dresses or the paper from the books. But a person can never be
an en-soi because one cannot fall together with oneself; one always
remains a pour-soi that cannot be reduced to a concrete, material pres-
ence. Sartre’s explanation of the human being as a pour-soi found here
is a continuation from his earlier publication, L’imaginaire: Psycholo-
gie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940) (The Imaginary. A
phenomenological psychology of the imagination). In this study of the

imagination Sartre describes the imaginary as the capacity human
consciousness possesses to present things to itself that are not there, to
supply the concrete reality in which consciousness finds itself with an
emptiness, a ‘nothing’.
An example by way of clarification: I am looking for a certain
book that I know I have, but cannot find. I imagine the colour of the
cover, its size, thickness . . . in other words I see the book ‘right in
front of me’, and in this way I get the feeling that something is miss-
ing from my study. Of course, the ‘not-being-there-of-the-book’ only
appears in the light of my imagination, which can form an image of
where the book should (must) be: someone else entering my room
would take no notice of this absence, precisely because the things in
my study would appear just as they are. In L’être et le néant, Sartre
applies this power of imagination not only to the consciousness of ex-
ternal objects or persons, but also to self-consciousness: as a pour-soi
I always appear as enveloped by a ‘nothing’ that haunts me. In the
same way that my imagination can ‘destroy’ (néantiser) the concrete
room and replace it with an imaginary room in which the book is in-
deed present, via my imagination I can take leave of my present self,
and as a pour-soi continually conjure up choices and possibilities quite
different from the situation in which I find myself.
It is also the ‘destructive’ power of consciousness that strikes
us when we encounter another consciousness, such as Sartre with the
man reading in the park, or me with Tholen’s painting. The expression
on the girl’s face as she is reading made me realise that she is not en-
tirely herself in the way that the chaise longue or the book are; that
she does not entirely fall together with herself as she seems to when
portrayed on the canvas. I see that she does not see; that all the things
that I see have, for her, disappeared; that all she is concerned about is
the intimate, imaginary universe evoked by her reading into which I,
as a spectator, almost literally sink into nothingness. The concrete re-
ality as depicted by the painter—the sunlight, the chaise longue, even
the body of her reading sister—seem deprived of their natural tangibil-
ity by that single fixated, reading gaze. But what is disturbing is, of
course, that the imagination which seems to dispossess these things of
their tangibility is itself intangible, inexistent. To say simply that her
thoughts are somewhere else would be misleading because the process
of imagination as described by Sartre consists precisely in the fact that
Introduction 13
the apparently absent gaze knows of no ‘elsewhere’; it cannot be any-

where else than there, in that moment. The girl’s reading does not ex-
pose another world; it only reveals an emptiness in this world that
cannot assume any positive, material content. The expression in her
eyes as she reads confronts me as spectator with a ‘nothing’ evoked by
her reading consciousness; and it is precisely from this point of non-
existence that all existence around her is destroyed. It is in this way
that the ‘nothing’ of imagination is capable of overcoming the enor-
mity of ‘being’, and manifesting itself as possibility.
In the pour-soi appears the notion of freedom so essential for
Sartre. While the chaise longue as en-soi has no other choice than to
be what it is in the location it was placed, this is not so for the two
girls. They have the choice to be something else. While reading, they
could imagine that they would set their books aside, tell the painter
that they were tired of posing and, for example, go take a walk. At that
moment they ignore their current situation as reading girls and project
themselves into the future as strolling girls, after which they may de-
cide to close their books and stand up, thereby actually ceasing to be
what they were. The freedom exercised in this example is hardly spec-
tacular, but is nevertheless fundamental for the pour-soi, which in fact
has no other choice than to choose and to take responsibility for the
choices it makes. Freedom is frightening precisely because it is so
radical: the nothing of consciousness, capable of opening a space for
different possibilities within the bulwark of being, is never based on
anything but negativity. But it is exactly because these possibilities do
not actually exist that they can receive no external legitimation, which
entails that the choices a subject must make continuously can also be a
source of anxiety. Confronted with an infinite, unfounded freedom,
every choice I make seems arbitrary. This is why I sometimes feel
compelled to escape my freedom via what Sartre calls mauvaise foi
(bad faith), through which I try to shift responsibility for the choices I
have made onto someone else. I choose to act in such or such a way
because others in my situation have done the same thing, or because
others seem to expect this sort of behaviour from me, or because I be-
lieve myself to be determined by socio-economic factors or a genetic
blueprint to behave in this way. This is not to say that all of these fac-
tors do not play an important role: this can be seen in Tholen’s por-
trayal of the Arntzenius sisters, influenced undoubtedly by nineteenth-
century bourgeois culture, an important aspect of which was intimate
reading; but at the same time, the social context can never fully de-
termine their actions. Irregardless of other factors, Sartre would say,
the Arntzenius sisters have indeed chosen to pose before the easel
while reading. It is a choice that, nolens volens, singularises them be-
cause it is their choice, their possibility that no one can realise in their
stead.
By emphasising the concrete, unique and solitary individual,
existentialist philosophy confronts the human being with a continuous
appeal: it is my duty to realise the freedom that I possess, a freedom
that makes me appear to myself as a unique task within the given
situation in which I, by chance, find myself. My freedom thereby loses
its non-committal character: the choices I make determine the direc-
tion of my life and form part of the unique project I become for my-
self, because of the fact that I can project myself as possibility into the
future. The singular character of that project becomes clear against the
horizon of the ultimate possibility that I can imagine, the only possi-
bility whose realisation is entirely certain, namely, the possibility of
my death. This is a perspective that I can in no way pass off onto an-
other; at that fatal moment when I die, no other consciousness can as-
sume for me my disappearance. It is this anxiety-provoking awareness
that is announced with the Heideggerian notion of Sein zum Tode (be-
ing-toward-death): my life is finite, my time is limited, and it is pre-
cisely this that gives meaning to my choices because they—seen retro-
spectively from that one unavoidable end of my possibilities—will de-
termine whom I have been.
Perhaps it is just this awareness of being-toward-death that so
struck me while looking at The Arntzenius Sisters: the portrayal of the
two girls shows me the freedom they had as pour-soi, but in a rigid,
fixed form; as painted figures, their concrete freedom is, of course,
denied. So long as the painting exists, the girl’s hand will not turn the
page, nor will her eyelids blink. Apart from the context of the paint-
ing, the expression on her face could just as well be that of a dead
girl—and in a certain sense she is just that, for the girl who posed for a
painter in 1895 has in the meantime become old (but how old?) and
died. It is with a shock that I realise that the only concrete freedom in
the painting, the nothing that haunts it, is not hidden in the painted
face of the girl, but in my act of gazing at the painting: it is my imagi-
nation that ‘destroys’ this two-dimensional collection of lines and col-
ours, ink and glossy paper of the postcard reproduction, and brings the
Introduction 15
girls to life as a riddle that confuses me and ultimately throws me back

upon myself, making me conscious of my freedom—and of the fini-
tude in which I am free. Again I recognise myself in Sartre, this time
in a passage from Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948) (What is Litera-
ture?), where Sartre defines aesthetic experience as an appeal to hu-
man freedom:
[C’] est ce que je nommerai modification esthétique du projet humain,

car à l’ordinaire le monde apparaît comme l’horizon de notre situa-
tion, comme la distance infinie qui nous sépare de nous-mêmes,
comme la totalité synthétique du donné, comme l’ensemble indiffé-
rencié des obstacles et des ustensiles – mais jamais comme une exi-
gence qui s’adresse à notre liberté. Ainsi la joie esthétique pro-vient-
elle à ce niveau de la conscience que je prends de récupérer et
d’intérioriser ce qui est le non-moi par excellence, puisque je trans-
forme le donné en impératif et le fait en valeur: le monde est ma tâche
(Sartre 1965, 75, italics in original).
[I shall call this the aesthetic modification of the human project, for, as
usual, the world appears as the horizon of our situation, as the infinite
distance which separates us from ourselves, as the synthetic totality of
the given, as the undifferentiated whole of obstacles and imple-
ments—but never as a demand addressed to our freedom. Thus, aes-
thetic joy proceeds to this level of the consciousness which I take of
recovering and internalizing that which is non-ego par excellence,
since I transform the given into an imperative and the fact into a value.
The world is my task (Sartre 2001, 44, italics in original)].
In the event that I would meet a girl similar to Tholen’s in the reading
room of a library, for instance, there would be a good chance that I
would not even notice her, let alone that a glimpse of her face while
reading would affect me like that of the girl in the painting. At that
moment I would probably be searching for a book myself, and in that
context she might at most appear as an obstacle—she is reading the
book that I wanted to borrow—or as an instrument—perhaps she can
help me find the shelf containing the book I am looking for. But in the
closed environment of my study, face to face with that one picture
postcard that is always somewhere on my desk, the act of reading
loses its obviousness. Because of this, the aesthetic dimension of the
scene receives an ethical appeal: this image, to which I can only relate
as a spectator, forces me to pause over the value of the act of reading.
It is thus not unusual that I am so struck by the portrayal of a girl
reading. I could just as well undergo the experience of being-toward-
death and the fundamental freedom of the human being through a

painting that depicts some other human activity, were it not that read-
ing is an activity occupying a central place in my universe, so central
that I hardly give it a moment’s thought. And it is precisely that which
turns Tholen’s painting into a challenge to my own bad faith as a
reader.
The temptation still remains, especially after an education in
literary theory, to reduce this painting to a revealing snapshot in the
history of reading, to an exemplary product of a bourgeois culture for
which this theme is all too familiar. The preference for this theme re-
sults in a series of paintings of reading women in which one finds ex-
pressed the same strange mixture of intimacy and sentimentality, but
also idleness. I can turn the same, objectivising gaze onto myself as
reader: within the context of an academic mandate I am supposed to
conduct research within the field of literary and cultural theory, and
the lion’s share of my reading is framed within this assignment. I read
books in order to be able to write about them, and I can present myself
with various reasons why I do this: a noble one; namely, to assist oth-
ers to broaden their knowledge: an ambitious one; namely, to expand
my economic and symbolic capital: and perhaps even a self-pitiable
one; namely, out of a vague anxiety that I am good for nothing else.
But from Sartre’s standpoint, this type of honesty concerning my mo-
tives is deceptive, because in this way I present myself as someone de-
termined by these motives. When I read and want to write about what
I have read, this is in the first place because I read and write for the
sake of myself, because over the course of years reading has become
an important part of the project I have, in all freedom, chosen, just
as—within the limits of my concrete situation—I am free to choose
something else. The reading girl confronts me with this personal truth:
I am not a random viewer of this intimately painted scenario; to a cer-
tain extent I am this scenario. The glance that the girl throws at her
book is of the same order as the one I throw at the picture postcard;
she reveals my freedom to me, my project in its absence, my ‘nothing’
in the face of the massive, mute being of things. It is precisely through
the ‘nothing’ in my gaze that this painting comes to life, and the act of
reading portrayed here appears to me as a task that I have chosen for
myself.
Introduction 17
The fantasy of the reading body
And yet . . . I examine once again the representation of the reading

girls and notice that Sartre’s explanation is not entirely sufficient to
elucidate my fascination. What disturbs me in Tholen’s painting is in-
deed more than absence itself, the ‘nothing’ of consciousness that re-
mains visibly invisible in the gaze of the reading girl, and in my gaze
as spectator. Her intense facial expression shows me not only the
nothing of her consciousness, but also the enduring presence of a
body, a presence that does not fall together with the en-soi because it
is manifest via the conscious act of reading; but at the same time, it
does not belong entirely to the pour-soi either. In the face of the girl I
rediscover, albeit less emphatically, the same trace of bodily ecstasy
found in the face of Teresa of Avila in Bernini’s famous sculpture
from the Roman church, Santa Maria della Vittoria. It is for this bod-
ily involvement with the ‘nothing’ of the imagination that Sartre’s dis-
tinction between the pour-soi and the en-soi cannot find the correct
formulation, precisely because of his rejection of every form of de-
terminism in the project of human freedom.
I began to recognise that in the reading experience, the ‘aes-
thetic joy’ Sartre interprets as the becoming-conscious of one’s free-
dom perhaps expresses just the opposite; namely, that my reading runs
off with my freedom. The girl has undoubtedly chosen to read, but in
the process of reading it nevertheless seems that she is overwhelmed
by what she is reading, by something from which she cannot extract
herself, and which reveals itself in the presence of her reading body.
The same goes for the enjoyment I experience when viewing the
painting: it attracts me in a way that cannot be understood purely as a
cerebral prise de conscience of my existential project. For while that
which I encounter in this painting is indeed the image of my own
situation as reader, my affective reaction and my repeated return to the
postcard without knowing why, show that the Sartrean interpretation
of the project does not entirely agree with my experience. Something
in my relation to the painting transcends the intentionality of my con-
sciousness; and the enjoyment adhering to my act of looking is not a
result of a free choice.
I thus came to the conclusion that existentialist philosophy
alone was insufficient to provide a proper understanding both of my
visual experience of Tholen’s painting, and above all of the—for me
essential—experience of reading it portrays. I needed a theory con-

cerned specifically with that border area between body and conscious-
ness, between the pour-soi and the en-soi; a theory which also is a first
important intertext for Barthes’ use of the fantasy in literary theory:
psychoanalysis. In the following chapter, I will concentrate primarily
on the psychoanalytic approach to the fantasy as the expression of a
relation between the subject as a ‘speaking being’ and its body. This
signifies, particularly from the Lacanian reinterpretation of Freud, a
radical break with the Sartrean notion of freedom. The fantasy indeed
establishes a distance to the pure materiality of the body as en-soi, by
which the existence of the subject becomes possible. At the same
time, the subject remains forever attached to this bodily presence,
which remains an unknowable Thing that the subject can neither tran-
scend nor ‘negate’. With Lacan, this conception results in an ethics
that is also inspired by Heideggerian being-toward-death, but in con-
trast to Sartrean existentialism, is radically anti-humanistic. The
awareness of one’s own mortality does not lead, in Lacanian psycho-
analysis, to the insight that the ‘nothing’ of the pour-soi implies a
radical freedom that turns me into a task or project for myself to com-
plete. With Lacan the issue is more one of abandoning such illusions
of self-determination and realising that my subjectivity is defined by a
fantasy that escapes my conscious grasp. In light of my death, what
remains for me is an attempt to traverse the fantasy that I am, and to
reach the point where I realise that the ‘nothing’ of my desires—
which hides in the fantasy behind the illusion of a mythical object of
desire—is but the other side of the presence of an inaccessible, uncon-
trollable, enjoying body. Exploring Julia Kristeva’s work, however,
we will find that psychoanalytic theory can nonetheless leave room for
a more positive view on the fantasy. In a way more closely connected
to Sartre, she considers the fantasy as a structure that provides the sub-
ject with a psychical space which enables imagination and even self-
transformation.
In the second chapter, I would like to complement this psy-
choanalytic view on the fantasy with the Nietzschean-inspired critique
of Deleuze and Foucault, which forms the second most important in-
tertext of Barthes’ literary theory. Both thinkers were known as fer-
vent opponents of psychoanalysis, a reputation gained by the former
primarily due to L’anti-Œdipe (1972) (Anti-Oedipus), the first book
that Deleuze wrote together with Félix Guattari, a former student of
Introduction 19
Lacan’s; and gained by the latter thanks to La volonté de savoir (1976)

(The Will to Knowledge), the first part of Foucault’s Histoire de la
sexualité (History of Sexuality). And yet both Foucault and Deleuze
began their research using psychoanalytic paradigms which would
never disappear entirely from their work. In my opinion it is therefore
more correct to speak of a radical reorientation of psychoanalytic the-
ory in their work than a radical break with it. As my reading will
show, this reorientation concerns primarily the status of the body:
from a Nietzschean perspective it is not some inaccessible Thing but a
collection of affects and powers that can be used in a ‘perverse’ way
to make possible new forms of thinking and feeling. In this sense,
Deleuze reformulates the fantasy as a program, a unique coupling of
bodily intensities in a continual process of becoming.
Despite the important differences between them, both Lacan
and Deleuze continue to be associated with the same anti-humanistic
philosophical current that, mainly since the sixties, had fired shots
across the bow of Sartre, the last great French defendant of humanism.
As my work progressed however, I came to the conclusion that the
central ethical implication of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy—
namely, that one is a task for oneself to accomplish—was not in the
least stripped of its relevance by its opponents. On the contrary, this
ethical dimension echoed in their thought like some stubborn remnant,
even if it received little exposure in the numerous introductions to, and
discussions of their theoretical work. Taking paths that Sartre never
could have anticipated, both Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Nietz-
schean-inspired philosophy of Deleuze confront their readers with a
call to change their lives and, in a certain way, to overcome their cur-
rent self. But as we will see, it is above all in the later Foucault that
the affects of this existentialist undercurrent would again come to the
surface. The fantasy appeared in Foucault as a demon, an uncanny
double urging us to care for the self by imposing self-discipline on the
body, and in this manner—in light of the irrevocable being-toward-
death—to turn the self into a work of art.
I will elaborate extensively on the important role that aesthetic
experience, and in particular literary experience, plays as the pre-
eminent meeting place between reader and fantasy. Both for psycho-
analysis and for Deleuze and Foucault’s Nietzschean philosophy, lit-
erature was always a privileged interlocutor, and it is precisely this
dialogue that makes their conceptualisation of the fantasy so crucial
for a proper understanding of Barthes’ literary theory. More than just

as a source of inspiration, Barthes would take their theoretical insights
as a point of departure, translating them into a specific approach to lit-
erary texts.
The reader of Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was born in 1915, losing his father not even a year
later when, as a marine officer, he died in a naval battle during the
First World War. His childhood years were spent together with his
mother in Bayonne, in southwest France. In 1924 the little family
moved to Paris, where Barthes developed into a promising student
who, like many of his friends, seemed destined for an academic ca-
reer. In 1934, a bout of coughing up blood put an end to his rosy fu-
ture: Barthes was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which would result in
him spending a great deal of time in sanatoria. Although he was fi-
nally pronounced cured in 1946—after an earlier relapse in 1941—his
health remained weak and he felt that his academic ambitions had
been ruined because the illness had prevented him from studying at
the École Normale Supérieure, thereby thwarting his expectations for
a career in literary studies.
But during his stay in the sanatoria, where he spent the greater
part of the Second World War, Barthes read voraciously. Along with
literary texts (primarily by Proust) and more or less the entire col-
lected works of the historian Jules Michelet—about whom he would
publish a small book in 1954 in the Écrivains de toujours series—
Barthes read about two philosophical systems that would thoroughly
influence post-war French thought: Marxism and, more importantly
for Barthes, Sartre’s existentialism. Thus when he returned to Paris in
1946, it was from that dual ideological perspective that he would en-
gage in a critique of bourgeois society. Barthes did this initially via
cultural pieces that were published in Combat, a former resistance
newspaper that was held in high regard after the war. Barthes’ biggest
enemy was the apparent obviousness with which historically deter-
mined and class-inspired convictions were presented as natural and
universal. This is what Barthes would later call doxa, a concept
closely associated with Sartre’s notion of bad faith: by basing certain
conceptions on a supposedly unchangeable nature that determines us,
Introduction 21
doxa in fact strips people of the notion of freedom, of the possibility

of changing themselves and society.
It was this critique of doxa that brought Barthes in the mid-
1950’s to write a series of articles for Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which
he scrutinised a variety of apparently meaningless details from 1950’s
French life—from the love for catch and bifteak frites to the Citroën
DS and astrological columns in women’s magazines—each time ex-
posing the bourgeois ideology on which they were based. These arti-
cles were collected in 1957 under the title Mythologies, which is still
one of Barthes’ most well-known books. While Barthes’ critical en-
gagement was in line with Sartre’s, his approach was different indeed.
Barthes’ analyses placed a much stronger emphasis than Sartre’s on
the instrument that made doxa so powerful and omnipresent: lan-
guage. During a stay in Egypt, where Barthes was a reader at the Uni-
versity of Alexandria from 1949 to 1950, he came into contact with
Algirdas Greimas who advised him to read the work of Saussure and
Jakobson. In this way Barthes discovered structural linguistics, which
offered him a suitable method for his critical work, much more so than
did Sartrean existentialism.
But despite the enthusiasm with which Barthes analysed many
popular socio-cultural phenomena, his greatest passion remained the
literary discourse. He wrote a few articles for Combat that formed the
basis of the book with which he debuted in 1953: Le Degré zéro de
l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero). The book was clearly influenced by
Sartre’s Qu’est-ce la littérature which had appeared a few years prior.
Barthes makes explicit use of typical existential concepts such as ‘en-
gagement’ and ‘responsibility’, and implicitly assumes Sartre’s fun-
damental approach to literature: literary discourse was a means to es-
cape the power of doxa; it makes it possible to encounter a different
arrangement of reality and to open new paths of freedom.
And yet Le Degré zéro de l’écriture also demonstrates the ma-
jor distinction between Barthes’ and Sartre’s view on literature: in
Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, Sartre dismissed the literary form ex-
periment with the now-famous quip that “[l]a littérature moderne, en
beaucoup de cas, est un cancer des mots” (Sartre 1965, 341) [[i]n
many cases, modern literature is a cancer of words. (Sartre 2001,
219)], whereas Barthes’ emphasises that form, rightly conceived, is an
ally against doxa. Owing to its own artificial, constructed character as
an expression of language, this modern literature unearths the work-
ings of language, makes visible the mechanisms by which language

surreptitiously guides our thinking. In his plea for an engaged and no-
nonsense realism—“[l]a fonction d’un écrivain est d’appeler un chat
un chat” (Sartre 1965, 341) [ [t]he function of the writer is to call a
spade a spade (Sartre 2001, 218)]—Sartre forgets that realism is also
an ideologically loaded literary form. By calling a spade a spade, a
certain author subscribes to a certain genre code, shows himself to be
a ‘realistic writer’ with all the connotations that brings with it. Be-
cause of the continual danger of recuperation, which had less to do
with content than with form, Barthes preferred authors such as Alain
Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, and playwrights such as Bertolt
Brecht, who always paid attention to the form of their work, to lan-
guage as a system of signs, making an uncritical identification with
the content impossible. He would write a series of groundbreaking
texts about them, mainly in Critique and in Théâtre Populaire, a few
articles of which were collected in 1964 in his Essais critiques (Criti-
cal Essays), together with other texts written specifically for that book.
In the meantime Barthes was delving deeper into structuralism.
In the 1950’s Barthes twice failed to make good on a scholar-
ship from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS),
the first for a lexicographic study on the vocabulary used in debates
concerning the social question during the political squabbles of 1830;
the second for the development of a ‘socio-semiology’ of the fashion
discourse. In both cases Barthes would lose the scholarship before he
could present a completed whole, although his research into fashion
via strict structuralist principles would lead to the publication of
Système de la mode (The Fashion System) in 1967, at a moment that
structuralism was actually already past its peak.
After the double failure with the CNRS, Barthes had the good
fortune in 1960 to be offered a position at the École pratique des
hautes études where he, with the exception of a year as visiting pro-
fessor in Morocco, would teach until 1976. It is from this position that
Barthes would further elaborate structuralist analysis as a literary the-
ory offering an alternative to the critique universitaire which then
dominated literary studies. He rigorously questioned the obvious start-
ing points of this critique, such as the importance of the author’s in-
tention in interpretation or the supposed neutral position of the inter-
preting critic and the universality of his aesthetic judgments. Con-
fronted with harsh criticism from the academic world upon publica-
Introduction 23
tion of Sur Racine (1963) (On Racine), in which he rather provoca-

tively applied his new style of literary criticism to the work of one of
France’s most well-known playwrights, Barthes felt compelled to de-
fend the premises of this nouvelle critique. The short book from 1966
that Barthes had published in reaction to this polemic, Critique et
vérité (Criticism and Truth), serves in general as one of the most im-
portant programmatic texts of the type of literary theory that is bound
to the structuralist mast. But at the same time it can also be read as an
initial plea for the role that the (contemporary) reader plays in the at-
tribution of meanings to a text, a role whose importance Barthes
would emphasise more and more from that point forward.
Critique et vérité also forms the starting point of the second
aspect of my investigation, by which I intend to follow the evolution
of the figure of the reader that runs through Barthes’ thought. A first
milestone in Barthes’ approach to literary texts focusing on the reader
was S/Z, which appeared in 1971. With this book—a meticulous an-
alysis of one of Balzac’s short stories—Barthes shows that structures
of meaning are not inherently present in a text, but are constructed ar-
bitrarily via the different codes of interpretation at the reader’s dis-
posal. The book signified a break with structuralism, which is primar-
ily directed at the text, and already announced what we now know as
post-structuralism, which would grow to become the central paradigm
of modern literary theory in the decades that followed. Yet regardless
how often Barthes was named in one breath with other famous French
post-structuralists such as Lacan and Deleuze, he never wanted to
compare himself to his illustrious colleagues, displaying a strange
mixture of coquettish dilettantism and an inferiority complex dis-
guised as modesty. As he admitted in a 1978 interview, he never con-
sidered himself a ‘thinker’:
Je n’ai pas fait de philosophie. Je suis, du point de vue des études, un

littéraire pur. J’ai fait des lettres classiques et […] dans le champ intel-
lectuel d’aujourd’hui, tout au moins en France, les intellectuels vien-
nent très largement de la philosophie. Ils ont donc une autre concep-
tion de la pensée et du langage ou une autre pratique que moi. (OC V,
537)
[I never studied philosophy. I am, from the point of view of my stud-

ies, purely a literary man. I studied classical literature and […] in to-
day’s intellectual landscape, at least in France, the intellectuals come
mostly from philosophy. They thus have a very different conception

of thought and language or a different practical approach than I do.]
Nevertheless, Barthes was always well aware of the latest develop-

ments in philosophy and psychoanalysis in France, and in the course
of his career he made full use of the most recent trends of thought
which he immediately implemented—albeit in an eclectic and ex-
tremely selective manner—as theoretical intertexts for his own analy-
ses. Due to the eagerness with which Barthes incorporated the con-
cepts of others and put them into his own words, it is often difficult to
determine what exactly his own contribution was. Still, as Vincent
Jouve remarks in his La littérature selon Barthes (1986), it is just this
theoretical eclecticism that makes Barthes’ work so interesting: “le
génie de Barthes, nous semble-t-il, a justement consisté à articuler en
un système dynamique et toujours susceptible d’évolution les diverses
pensées critiques jusque-là farouchement opposées.” (Jouve 1986,
105) [Barthes’ genius, it seems to us, consists precisely in taking what
had up to then been fiercely opposed critical theories and articulating
them into a dynamic system always capable of evolution.] This is in-
deed valid for the manner in which Barthes, in the 1950’s, linked Sar-
trean engagement to structuralist analysis; but it is also, and above all
valid for how Barthes, in his search for a literary theory in the early
1970’s, made use of both the psychoanalytic and Nietzschean intertext
right at the moment that both lines of thought—especially after the po-
lemic surrounding L’anti-Œdipe—seemed to be diametrically op-
posed. Under the influence of both theoretical frameworks, Barthes
would eventually take into greater account the bodily aspect of read-
ing: “lire, c’est faire travailler notre corps” (OC III, 604) [to read is to
make our body work (Barthes 1989, 31)].
With this citation from a 1970 text, Barthes summarises at one fell
swoop the essence of the literary theory that he would try to develop
in his work during the coming ten years. In this he relied heavily on
psychoanalytic and Nietzschean premises, often without specifying
these intertexts in his argument.
The first theoretical part of this book will therefore prove in-
dispensable to follow accurately Barthes’ intellectual path and to un-
derstand how he used both intertexts in the formulation of a concrete
literary theory starting from the body of the reader. For the sake of
clarity, it should be noted that it is certainly not my intention to pre-
sent a sociological or biographical reconstruction of the milieus in
Introduction 25
which an intellectual such as Barthes found himself, and which en-

abled him to be influenced both by psychoanalysis and Nietzsche. My
only criterion is that the work of Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Fou-
cault provide me with the theoretical basis with which I can better
comprehend Barthes’ work. This also explains my anachronistic use
of Foucault’s later texts, which in fact were only published after
Barthes’ death, but are nevertheless indispensable to clarify the ethical
stakes of Barthes’ phantasmatic literary theory.
Le Plaisir du texte (1973) (The Pleasure of the Text) is the
first important text in the extension of Barthes’ literary theory. The
pleasure from the title refers in the first place to the reader’s pleasure,
which surfaces every time one bumps into what Barthes calls the bê-
tise (stupidity): a stubborn enjoyment that unconsciously guides the
reading process and transports the reader away from that other bêtise,
which for Barthes has a much more negative connotation, namely, the
disembodied bêtise of doxa. The reader has various strategies avail-
able in order to be involved with the bodily bêtise while reading. As
we will see, Barthes will clearly give preference to a perverse reading
strategy. But in contrast to Deleuze, who couples his appreciation of
perversion with a radical rejection of the ‘I’ as an imaginary construc-
tion, Barthes will use a perverse reading strategy as a means to con-
struct an imaginary ‘I’ around the bodily bêtise via the literary dis-
course.
Through his growing interest for the imaginary aspect of read-
ing, Le Plaisir du texte also marked Barthes’ return to classic texts
that—once freed from the doxa of the critique universitaire and ap-
proached from a perverse, unusual reading strategy—can stimulate the
reader’s imaginary and allow one to imagine oneself as a character in
a novel. Reading thus becomes for Barthes an essential component in
a program of self-becoming that we can best understand in light of
Foucault’s later conceptions about the self as an (ethical-aesthetic)
oeuvre. In his later texts, Barthes brings this imaginary ‘I’ more to the
forefront: despite his still structuralist-tinted vocabulary, his tone be-
comes much more personal and his style more literary than previ-
ously. In 1975, the highly personal Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) appeared in the same se-
ries for which he had written Michelet, namely, Écrivains de toujours.
In this book, Barthes experiments with the autobiographical genre,
here performing himself as character in a novel.
Following this deliberate staging of his own imaginary came Frag-

ments d’un discours amoureux (1977) (A Lover’s Discourse: Frag-
ments), which as the title suggests gives the floor over to the imagi-
nary of the lover (in this case Barthes himself) who is no longer taken
seriously by the doxa. Imagination also plays a central role in his final
book, La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida), published in 1980. This
short book not only pays homage to photography and the memory of
his deceased mother, but also explicitly to Sartre’s L’imaginaire.
In the meantime Barthes had been appointed professor of lit-
erary semiology in 1977 at the Collège de France. As we have seen,
in his inaugural speech he pushed the fantasy to the fore as core con-
cept of his research. The notion of the fantasy made it possible for him
to bind together the imaginary, the body and the act of reading. While
Barthes initially borrowed this notion from psychoanalysis, it would
soon become apparent that the Nietzschean intertext is just as essential
for a proper understanding of the manner in which Barthes employs
the fantasy as an epistemological aid in his Cours. In this way, the two
most important intertexts of Barthes’ literary theory come together in
this notion. It allowed him to translate the perverse reading strategy he
had been exploring since Le Plaisir du texte into a concrete method
for the analysis of literary texts, a method that he described in his in-
augural speech as “une sémiologie active” (OC V, 443). [an active
semiology (Barthes 1982, 474)]
It is this active semiology that will occupy the central position
in the final part of our investigation. After having delved into Barthes’
most important intertexts and in the evolution of his thought from Cri-
tique et vérité onward, we will also be in a better position to place the
Cours, as well as the entirety of Barthes’ oeuvre, within both the
Nietzschean and psychoanalytic frame of reference.
In terms of content, this lecture series certainly does not house
the most interesting elements of Barthes’ work. Because these lecture
notes were not intended for publication, they often lack the intensity
of, for instance, books such as S/Z or Fragments d’un discours
amoureux, that were also based on lectures Barthes’ gave at the École
pratique, but which he had thoroughly reworked prior to publication.
The fact that he did not write his lectures for the Collège with publica-
tion in mind had much to do with doubts concerning the nature of his
teaching position. The closed, intimate and somewhat marginal char-
acter of the seminars at the École pratique was exchanged for the of-
Introduction 27
ten overcrowded, impersonal auditorium in France’s most prestigious

academic institution. It was clear that the transition intimidated
Barthes, particularly insofar as it happened at the same time as the ill-
ness and subsequent death of his mother, with whom he had lived to-
gether his entire life. Traces of his mourning and his doubts can be
found in the notes that sometimes seem rather flat and uninspired, es-
pecially in comparison with the rest of Barthes’ work. And yet the
four years in which Barthes taught at the Collège de France are still
worthy of attention, and for three reasons:
First, because they show how the respective fantasies that
Barthes chose each year as starting point for his lectures can be traced
retroactively to Barthes’ earlier work, shining a new light on that ear-
lier work. This is also nicely illustrates Barthes’ own proposition that
every bit of reading, regardless how objective it seems to be, is deter-
mined by unconscious fantasies.
Second, because the lectures also amend the image presented
by many critics of the later Barthes as a hedonist who could not be in-
convenienced by theoretical consistency, and for whom the only thing
that mattered was the pleasure of reading, without any further obliga-
tion. The lecture notes make clear that, behind the apparent hedonism,
there indeed lurked a consistent argument. Literary studies were, ac-
cording to the later Barthes, a way to care for the self, and this is why
he viewed his lecture series at the Collège de France above all as an
ethical experiment, as he emphasised in an interview from 1979:
Dans mon cours, au Collège, vous avez pu voir que je ne travaille pas
une œuvre, je lis des œuvres, et puis je fais passer des morceaux de
ces œuvres dans une pensée qui est située ailleurs que dans la critique
et qui est plutôt une sorte de recherche éthique: comment se conduire
dans la vie, comment vivre. (OC V, 740)
[In my course at the Collège, you may have noticed that I am not
studying an oeuvre. I read oeuvres, and then try to make pieces of
these oeuvres flow through a thinking which is situated elsewhere than
in criticism, and which is more a kind of ethical research: how to be-
have in life, how to live.]
With this approach he in fact anticipated what would come to be

known as the ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies, which until now has not
given Barthes’ literary theory the attention that, in light of the Cours,
it rightly deserves.
Third, because we can determine the way in which Barthes’

‘active semiology’ can be applied concretely to the reading of literary
texts by discussing the methodological reflections that Barthes intro-
duces into his lecture notes at different moments. The Cours thus of-
fers us further theoretical refinement of the perverse strategy of read-
ing that Barthes developed, and in which the reader approaches the
text from out of a fantasy in an exploration of new possibilities for liv-
ing.
The type of reader Barthes envisions—which is also the kind
of reader he himself tried to become—uses literature as an immense
fictional encyclopaedia whose epistemological value can no longer be
tested on an external, objective truth, but rather on reading pleasure,
the reader’s bodily bêtise to which one relates via the fantasy. The
knowledge the reader obtains about oneself via the intervention of the
fantasy ultimately makes possible the image of a future self-as-oeuvre,
a program that Barthes, with a gesture toward Dante, called the vita
nuova. For the compilation of such an encyclopaedia, during his lec-
tures at the Collège Barthes did use, although not explicitly, some
classic concepts of literary theory, such as the literary space, the detail
in literary description, time—both internal to the text (narratology)
and external to the text (history of literature)—and finally (and sur-
prisingly), the author. I will devote a chapter to each of these notions,
addressing briefly the (often privileged) position they occupy in
Barthes’ earlier work and how he, in his Cours, redefined them. In this
way I would like to use Barthes’ own trajectory as a case study in or-
der to investigate how these notions might be integrated in a reading
strategy directed toward the creation of that so-called vita nuova, as
well as examine the problems Barthes encountered on his path.
At the end of my discussion of Barthes’ active semiology, in
the final chapter I will address another important question which the
status of the Cours as lecture notes almost automatically evokes: to
what extent can the perverse reading strategy Barthes promotes also
form the basis of a perverse teaching strategy? Or, stated more gener-
ally, how can a phantasmatic reading form the basis for a dialogue
with other readers?
The ethical question concerning how to live, which Barthes
asks to literature, automatically evokes the question of how to live to-
gether. The design of this last chapter thus finally reminds me of the
fact that, in the painting of Tholen’s two girls, two reading bodies are
Introduction 29
pictured. For while the girls are clearly entranced by their own imagi-
nation and the intimacy of each girl’s reading experience remains in-
accessible to the other, bound as it is to their singular bodies, they are
still portrayed together, on the same chaise longue. Unintentionally,
their reading thus does have something in common: however lonely
the intimate reading experience might be, one never reads alone. I will
therefore finish my exploration of the Cours with a reflection on the
implications of the intersubjective dimension of the perverse art of
reading.
The Fantasy: A Psychoanalytic Intertext
A woman, walking
When Freud published his famous Traumdeutung (The Interpretation

of Dreams) in 1900 it was not only his intention to unravel the secret
of the dream: at the same time, his work aspired to be a comprehen-
sive analysis of the subjectivity of the dreamer. According to Freud,
the subject is driven by unconscious desires that consciousness cannot
or will not accept, but which are expressed in the dream via ingenious
dream rebuses when conscious censorship is weakened. The ‘talking
cure’ that is psychoanalysis attempts to decode these rebuses, on the
one hand through the analyst’s unprejudiced manner of listening, and
on the other hand by the rule of free association that obliges the analy-
sand to say whatever comes to mind, however banal or embarrassing.
In this way desires, which are frustrated and repressed in reality and
thus seek satisfaction via the dream, are exposed. The most paradoxi-
cal and revolutionary aspect of Freud’s theory was that the subject is
not conscious of these desires, and yet the unconscious still, in one
way or another, finds a way to express them. The Enlightenment ideal
in which the human subject could know itself completely through its
own consciousness by means of rational self-examination no longer
seemed attainable. Mediation by an Other is required in order to come
to self-knowledge. In the first place, this Other is the andere Schau-
platz (the other scene)—the unconscious—where that desire is staged
via dream images and symptoms. In addition however, it is also the
analyst who, thanks to the transference that takes place in the analysis,
is presumed to know the meaning of the dream images and symptoms
that remain incomprehensible to the analysand. This supposed knowl-
edge of the Other is the illusion required to encourage the subject to
question itself intensely during analysis, and thereby to discover what
motivates it.
If we start from the premise that it is only via the Other that
we are able to arrive at knowledge of our unconscious desires, the ob-
vious question that arises is to which Other Freud could address him-
self in order to explain his own dreams, those dreams which would
form the beginning of psychoanalytic theory. At that moment he was
both analyst and analysand simultaneously, and was thus in flagrant
contradiction of his own assertion that the subject cannot know itself.
In this case, which authority is supposed to know what Freud’s dreams
signified? Considering the fact that it dismissed all knowledge of the
dream as superstitious nonsense, the scientific, neurological discourse
of his medical education would not suffice. It was at this point that
Freud turned, out of sheer necessity, to literature, and in particular to
canonical authors as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and modern au-
thors such as Hoffmann and Jensen.
That literature functioned for Freud as the Other-supposed-to-
know is also apparent from the introduction to his first full-fledged
analysis of a literary work, ‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens
Gradiva’ (1907) (Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva): “In
their knowledge of the mind they [i.e. writers, kp] are far in advance
of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not
yet opened up for science.” (Freud 1959, 8) According to Freud, writ-
ers are able to crystallise into a creative work the elusive products of
these unconscious desires—namely, (day)dreams and fantasies—
thereby exposing the mechanisms of the unconscious.
Yet Freud was not entirely satisfied with the purely literary
description of psychical processes. And just as the analysand some-
times becomes frustrated by the analyst’s silence during the analytic
treatment, Freud as well complains, in the same introduction, about
the limited scientific interest shown by people of letters: “If only this
support given by writers in favour of dreams having a meaning were
less ambiguous!” (8) Confronted with the unbearable silence of litera-
ture, Freud turned the tables: literature was no longer a discourse re-
vealing the meaningfulness of the dream; it was now psychoanalysis
that was going to expose the origin and functioning of literature start-
ing from the psyche of the writer. The writer went from being an in-
voluntary analyst to an unwitting analysand, for while the writer may
have penetrated deeper into the mysteries of the spiritual life of ordi-
nary human beings, ultimately there remained something unexplained
about which the writer could not speak—whether because unable or
because of repression. It was Freud who would map out systematically
that to which literature could at best only allude, and to try to establish
a consistent theory for it. Freud’s interpretation of Gradiva is in any

event a good point of departure from which to look more closely at the
intriguing interplay between literature and psychoanalysis.
The protagonist in Jensen’s novel is the bachelor Norbert Ha-
nold, a young archaeologist who has little interest in anything other
than his profession: “Marble and bronze alone were truly alive for
him; they alone expressed the purpose and value of human life.” (14)
Yet one day Hanold becomes inexplicably fascinated by an ancient
bas-relief of a beguiling woman with her dress raised slightly so that
one could see her elegant feet. He names her ‘Gradiva’, Latin for
‘someone who steps along brilliantly’. The scientific value of the bas-
relief is minimal, and yet “he [Hanold] found something ‘of to-day’
about it.” (11) The relief intrigues him to that point that he goes fer-
vently in search of women’s and girls’ feet in the same position as
those in the relief.
After having awoken from a nightmare in which he had
dreamt that Gradiva was buried under a rain of ash from the eruption
of Vesuvius in Pompeii, Hanold believes that he sees from out of his
window the real Gradiva passing by on the street. He hurries outside,
but it seems she has already disappeared. He hears a canary warbling
from a cage in the open window of the house opposite, and this brings
him to the shocking realisation that he too, as an armchair scholar, is
imprisoned in a cage. Determined to fly from his cage, Hanold re-
solves quickly “to make a spring-time journey to Italy. A scientific
excuse for it soon presented itself . . .” (13-14) Still, the journey brings
him no solace, at least initially: a strange restlessness urges him on-
ward, disconsolate “because he lacked something, though it was not
clear to him what.” (Jensen, quoted in Freud 1959, 16) Finally, his
aimless adventure through Italy brings him to the ruins at Pompeii,
where to his surprise he encounters a woman at the midday hour who
is the spitting image of his mythical Gradiva, and who is named
Zoe—Greek for ‘life’. He proceeds in the illusion that she is the wo-
man from his nightmare, a victim of the volcanic eruption who has re-
turned from ancient Pompeii just to meet him.
It soon becomes clear—at least for the reader—that this Gra-
diva is actually no ghost, but a woman of flesh and blood who at first
plays along with Hanold’s delusion for reasons unclear. Zoe-Gradiva
steers their conversations in such a way that Hanold slowly begins to
realise that he has fallen prey to a hallucination, a delusion from
which she gradually liberates him. Her true identity is finally revealed:
it appears that she was a childhood friend of his, Zoe Bertgang, who is
travelling through Italy with her father. Blinded by his obsession with
Gradiva, he had not recognised her at that midday hour in Pompeii—
and this for the second time, for she was also the woman that he had
earlier seen pass by his window after he had awoken from his night-
mare about Pompeii. Unbeknownst to him, Zoe had in fact been his
neighbour for years.
In his interpretation of the novel, Freud uses the relationship
of the two protagonists as a typical example of the analytic situation.
Norbert Hanold is the neurotic subject in flight from his unconscious
desire after it has risen to the surface because of an unexpected con-
frontation with the Other (the relief, the nightmare). Hanold wanders
aimlessly through Italy, driven by a dissatisfied, restless mood that he
cannot comprehend, and ultimately meets Zoe in Pompeii. She be-
comes the Other who discovers quickly what Hanold is hiding from
himself. Through her tactful approach, she frees him from the delusion
with which he tries to protect himself, as much as possible, from his
desire for her. Zoe here plays the role of the analyst, and Freud shows
great appreciation for her character, which he calls, “the embodiment
of cleverness and clarity.” (33) It is she who finally provides Hanold’s
journey with a logical meaning and both literally and figuratively situ-
ates all the elements of his delusion. In the end, the Italian ruins are
but an exotic backdrop against which a very recognisable, domestic
love relationship is established: after having admitted their feelings for
one another, they return as a happy couple to the German university
town from whence they both came.
It is interesting to see how the trip to Italy itself, which is so
central to the plot of Jensen’s story, is relegated to a relatively insig-
nificant role in Freud’s analysis of the novel. In Freud’s interpretation,
Hanold’s journey to Italy is nothing more than a flight from the desire
that arouse after he had unconsciously recognised his forgotten child-
hood sweetheart and neighbour Zoe in the woman he saw walking
down the street after his nightmare.
For Freud, the trip in Gradiva is subordinate to the (for him)
much more important field of metaphorical imagery, namely that of
archaeology. Hanold’s profession as an archaeologist, just like his
dream about the volcanic eruption in Pompeii, fits perfectly into
Freud’s vertical topography of the subject which he conceives as a
sort of archaeological site: “There is, in fact, no better analogy for re-
pression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible
and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim
and from which it could emerge once more through the work of
spades.” (40)
The subject can only expose the infantile origins of its desires
by pausing over, and descending into, its own past in that meticulous
work of excavation known as the analytic treatment. According to
Freud, Hanold’s inordinate obsession for the relief of Gradiva is also a
result of his memory of his former playmate Zoe, which had been bur-
ied under the ash of repression. “Even in her childhood,” Freud writes,
“the girl showed the same peculiarity of a graceful gait […] and it was
because it represented that same gait that an ancient marble relief ac-
quired such great importance for Norbert Hanold.” (46) It is therefore
not by chance that it is in Pompeii, the pre-eminent archaeological
site, that Hanold is able to discover the truth underneath his delusion
and find his own object of desire, Zoe.
While Jensen’s novel may have the classic ‘happy ending’
where the hero and heroine finally rediscover one another and go on to
live happily ever after, the psychoanalytic story digs a bit deeper,
thereby unearthing a more ancient layer of truth—one which does not
permit rosy conclusions. According to psychoanalysis, behind every
childhood sweetheart lurks another, more original object that can
never be rediscovered because it is lost forever: the mother. It is this
first love object that every subject must give up by means of an inter-
vention from a third, forbidding party: the father who demands the
mother for himself and forces the child to look for other love objects
in which it can hopefully recapture certain satisfying aspects of the
mother’s body—that first, mythical object of desire. The paternal in-
cest prohibition in this way sets in motion the infinite metonymy of
desire through which the subject is forced to go in search of a series of
surrogate love objects, each of which turns out to be an imperfect
copy of that one object forever lost, and can therefore never be fully
satisfying. This frustration forms the core of the Oedipus complex so
central to psychoanalytic theory.
However traumatic the break with the mother-object might be,
because this break makes possible our own identity it is at the same
time necessary to ensure the existence of the subject. What we are is
determined by the story of our desire, which is to say: by the way in
which we incorporate into our lives that fundamental, irremediable

lack. For while the author of the Gradiva novel can create the illusion
that the missing object can indeed ultimately appear in the form of a
charming young lady, in reality this lack is never filled. Regardless
which object we obtain, it will never coincide entirely with the mythi-
cal object we have had to give up.
Psychoanalysis cautions us not to confuse this superficial
roaming of desire from object to object with the hidden layers of its
origin. To understand the desire that drives us onward as subjects, we
must follow psychoanalysis in its archaeological search for the ves-
tiges of desire which are, simultaneously, the very ruins from whence
our subjectivity has arisen.
In the beginning was the Thing
Psychoanalytic research into the origin of the subject arrived initially

at the border marked by the Oedipus complex, the moment where the
first object of desire must be given up because of the incest prohibi-
tion. Freud’s now classic theory of the Oedipus complex was based on
the boy who entered into rivalry with the forbidding father because of
his attachment to his mother. Things were different for the girl, who
had to compete with her mother for the love of the father, but whose
first infantile desire was also, like the boy’s, directed toward the
mother. In her case, where was the love that must be forbidden in or-
der for the subject to come into existence? In his ‘Über die weibliche
Sexualität’ (Female Sexuality) from 1931, Freud once again uses an
archaeological metaphor: “Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus,
phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another
field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of
Greece.” (Freud 1961, 226)
It would be primarily female psychoanalysts such as Melanie
Klein who would elaborate on this pre-Oedipal terra incognita in their
research on the child’s earliest psychical developments. An important
factor in this was the fact that children enter the world in an immature
state and thus for a long time depend completely upon their environ-
ment for survival, in particular on the mother-nurse. Moreover, par-
ticularly in the first months after birth, the child is subjected to a bom-
bardment of stimuli and sensations without it being able to determine
clearly which stimuli are coming from the outside and which come
from within. Hunger is a good example of this. As an internal stimula-

tion, hunger is directed toward something that must come from the
outside; for instance, nourishing milk. But at the same time it is ex-
perienced internally as strange and even frightening, as if something
aggressive is besieging one from the inside.
In his seventh seminar, L’éthique de la psychanalyse (1986,
[1959-1960]) (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Jacques Lacan will de-
note this ‘foreign’ thing, which is difficult to distinguish from one’s
‘own’ self—as in, for instance, the interplay between the internal
stimulus of hunger that ‘invades’ the child from within and the
mother’s breast that ‘pervades’ it from without—with the term das
Ding. This ‘Thing’, described paradoxically by Lacan as “cette extéri-
orité intime, cette extimité” (Lacan 1986, 167) [the intimate exteri-
ority or ‘extimacy’ (Lacan 1992, 139)], is situated on the still-unstable
borders of the defenceless pre-subject and forms an emanation of the
pure libidinal being into what is literally a no man’s land. Just like the
Ding an sich from Kantian philosophy, the Thing is something that
falls outside the range of knowledge. It belongs to what Lacan calls
the order of the real, and withdraws entirely from the other two orders
that he differentiates in his thought; respectively, the imaginary order
(the Thing cannot be represented) and the symbolic order (the Thing
cannot be expressed in a signifying system). Therefore the ‘real’ is
also a somewhat misleading term, insofar as, for Lacan, it stands pre-
cisely for that which cannot be grasped in our categorisation of reality:
the real is that which continually escapes this categorisation as an un-
knowable surplus. The Thing looms on the horizon of our subjectivity
only in certain traumatic limit experiences in which the subject is un-
der threat of being flooded by its libidinal being. Lacan designates
such experiences with the term jouissance (libidinal enjoyment, bliss):
a compulsive, even unbearable enjoyment in which, paradoxically
enough, the subject, precisely because it is so overwhelmed, can no
longer enjoy.
It is here that the fantasy enters the scene as an attempt to get
a grip on the drives in their reaction to internal and external stimuli.
The fantasy forms a shield against the pure, unmediated enjoyment of
the libidinal being, and at the same time it is a construction intended to
recuperate something of that enjoyment. In what follows I will exam-
ine precisely how the fantasy intervenes in each of the three orders
that Lacan differentiates.
A rhythm given to the real
The first phantasmatic ‘arrangement’ of the Thing is primarily a ques-

tion of rhythm, in the broadest sense of the word. We can find this
rhythmicity in the processing of external sensory stimuli, such as vis-
ual impressions like certain alterations in colour tones and light inten-
sity, and auditory impressions, like sound variations in the voices the
child hears, including its own. We can consider these rhythmic fanta-
sies as initial interpretations of the entanglement of drives with which
the child is confronted in reaction to such stimuli. Of course, here we
should not understand ‘interpretation’ as an ‘explanation’ of these
drives, but rather as a ‘translation’: the child in fact can still not reflect
upon the drives that assail it; at most it can try to ‘process’ or ‘ar-
range’ them. Still, the child’s affective arrangement means that an ini-
tial dissociation has occurred between an emerging self-consciousness
and the libidinal being, which paves the way for the future individual.
Now, the term ‘individual’—at least in its etymological mean-
ing of in-dividuus (‘not’-‘divisible’)—is not entirely appropriate: in
that, precisely in order to become an ‘individual’, the child must be
split between unmediated bodily perception (the ‘Thing’) and its ar-
rangement via the affective interpretation of the fantasy. The primary,
libidinal involvement of the body with the external world now be-
comes an unattainable, ‘extimate’ kernel with which the child can no
longer coincide. Therefore, intervention by the fantasy also immedi-
ately implies the presence of a lack, a loss of the immediacy of the
‘pure’ experience of enjoyment or pain. This is one of the most in-
triguing aspects of the fantasy: it is able to shield an excess (the over-
whelming, immediate corporeal drive) from consciousness, but in the
process of doing so the excess is transformed into an unattainable, lost
good, a lack that awakens in the subject a desire to once again be uni-
fied with this mythical Thing. For Lacan, the relationship to the Thing,
as expressed in the fantasy, always has a tragic dimension insofar as
the subject desires something that, should it in fact be obtained, would
signify its own destruction. The subject only exists by means of dis-
tancing itself from that stranger within, to which it has no access; an
‘extimacy’ of which it will always be deprived, but can never do away
with.
We find a beautiful example of this paradoxical character of
the fantasy in Du côte de chez Swann (1913) (Swann’s Way), the first
part of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. We read

how, at a certain moment, the fashionable dandy Swann becomes fas-
cinated by a phrase from a composition for piano that he heard some-
where inadvertently. This particular, harmonious combination of
sounds seems the perfect way to bring Swann’s enjoying body to ex-
pression:
Elle lui avait proposé aussitôt des voluptés particulières, dont il
n’avait jamais eu l’idée avant de l’entendre, dont il sentait que rien au-
tre qu’elle ne pourrait les lui faire connaître, et il avait éprouvé pour
elle comme un amour inconnu. (Proust 1994, 223)
[It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate

pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never
dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate
him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange
desire. (Proust 1970, 160)]
We can call the feeling aroused by a certain aesthetic object—in

Swann’s case a musical phrase—a sublime experience in the sense
that Lacan speaks of sublimation: “elle élève un objet […] à la dignité
de la Chose.” (Lacan 1986, 133) [it raises an object […] to the dignity
of the Thing. (Lacan 1992, 112)]. In this manner, the phrase has an
absolute quality for Swann because the combination of notes and
rhythms seems to encapsulate in an almost magical way his phantas-
matic relationship to the Thing.
In his description of Swann’s ecstatic reaction, Proust’s bril-
liant powers of observation in fact already indicate the different barri-
ers with which the fantasy confronts the subject, and which see to it
that sublimation never really succeeds entirely. We have already iden-
tified the first barrier: the exceptional delight that the phrase makes
Swann envision never does actually occur.
However unique and intimate Swann’s reaction to the music
composition may be, the second barrier is that the phrase ultimately
comes from an Other. And however much he tries to make this phrase
his own, to turn it into a personal expression of his singular affects, in
the end the composition remains something foreign, possessing some-
thing impersonal that goes beyond the listener:
souffrant de songer, au moment où elle passait si proche et pourtant à
l’infini, que tandis qu’elle s’adressait à eux, elle ne les connaissait pas,
il regrettait presque qu’elle eût une signification, une beauté intrinsè-
que et fixe, étrangère à eux, comme des bijoux donnés, ou même en

des lettres écrites par une femme aimée, nous en voulons à l’eau de la
gemme, et aux mots du langage, de ne pas être faits uniquement de
l’essence d’une liaison passagère et d’un être particulier. (Proust 1994,
232)
[agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so

near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their
ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning
of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves,
just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a
woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the ‘water’ of a
stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned
exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a ‘lass un-
parallel’d’ (Proust 1970, 167)]
Swann is incapable of making the phrase entirely his own, of finding a

language in which to express his fascination for the musical composi-
tion. Therefore, and this is the third barrier, the fantasy separates the
subject not only from the Thing—by which it changes into an object
of desire—but also from other subjects who cannot share this particu-
lar relationship to an object of desire.
The particular phrase, which had such an overwhelming im-
pact on Swann, is for others at most but a beautiful piece of music;
and so his search for confirmation of his fantasy goes for naught. Mu-
sical performances serve primarily—and most definitely in the salons
where Swann hung around—as instigation to informal chit-chat and
the utterance of witticisms. This is why the extremely personal re-
marks than Swann makes about his favourite musical theme so irri-
tates Mme. Verdurin, the hostess of the salon Swann often visited be-
cause of his mistress Odette: “Tiens, c’est amusant, je n’avais jamais
fait attention; […] on ne perd pas son temps à couper les cheveux en
quatre ici, ce n’est pas le genre de la maison.” (226) [D’you know,
that’s a funny thing; I had never noticed it; […] we don’t waste time
splitting hairs in this house; why not? well, it’s not a habit of ours,
that’s all. (163)]
A blind spot in the imaginary
The distance established by the fantasy with respect to the personal

libidinal being increases with the further psychical development of the
child. The primary factor here is the progressive improvement of the
child’s visual capacities. The moment where the child recognises itself
in the mirror is an important developmental phase. The collection of
heterogeneous drives that the child experiences now seem to belong
together in one corporeal totality for which the mirror image is the
guarantee, and with which the child can identify. The mirror gives the
child a fixed location among other things, which can now be consid-
ered as distinct objects, enabling the child to position itself in space.
Lacan calls this the imaginary order. But just like the real, this term is
also somewhat misleading because we usually equate the imaginary
with the purely illusory and unreal, similar to what Sartre does in
L’imaginaire. Imagination, the creation of something that does not ex-
ist in reality, is of course an important aspect of the child’s imaginary.
Now that the child has learned to recognise that the mother is an inde-
pendent, separate being, the child also realises that the mother can
leave it. The child therefore evokes the mental image of the desired
mother object in order to avert the anxiety that comes with this realisa-
tion. In this way, the image ‘pacifies’ the absence by making it present
in a visual fantasy. The child attempts, via the imaginary, to visualise
its desire. Here the psychoanalytic interpretation of the fantasy comes
closest to its etymological meaning. Fantasy comes primarily from the
Greek φαντασµα, which can be translated as ‘phantom’ or ‘spectre’,
but also as ‘vision’ or ‘dream’. The verb φανταζω means ‘to make
visible’, ‘display an object’, ‘imagine’ (see the relevant lemmas in
Liddell & Scott 1961 [1843]).
But whatever enjoyment this visual fantasy might arouse, just
like Swann’s musical phrase it remains circling a void and promises a
satisfaction it cannot deliver. It is impossible to make the ‘real’ object
of desire present via the imagination. This lack forms the essence of
imagination for Sartre as well. In his study, Sartre differentiates be-
tween imagined and concretely perceived objects precisely on the ba-
sis that, in the imagination, the object is missing: “Cette absence de
principe, ce néant essentiel de l’objet imagé suffit à le différencier des
objets de la perception.” (Sartre 1975, 346) [This fundamental ab-
sence, this essential nothingness of the imagined object, suffices to
differentiate it from the objects of perception. (Sartre 2004, 180)]
On this point Lacan goes a step further and questions this dis-
tinction between perception and imagination: according to him, the
world of perception is based upon a ‘fundamental absence’ and is
structured around an irreducible lack—namely, the irrepresentable
Thing—every bit as much as is the imagination. When the child bor-

rows its self-image from its mirrored body, this mirror image obvi-
ously cannot show its libidinal involvement with its surroundings: the
mirror establishes the contours both of its own body and that of the
other, but the Thing which continually exceeds these boundaries re-
ceives no definitive place in that image. It is as if something remains
hidden in the visible; something of the real that travels along with the
wandering eye of the child like a strange stain. Lacan calls this surplus
in perception le regard (the gaze), a term that he borrowed from Sar-
tre’s L’être et le néant. Sartre specifies the gaze as the moment when I
feel myself changing into an object while being watched by someone.
Sartre uses the example of a voyeur who stares through a keyhole and
is completely engrossed in his act of spying until the sudden realisa-
tion occurs that someone else in turn is watching him. (Sartre
2006/1992, 298/347) First a spying subject, the voyeur changes into
an object spied upon, and is overcome by a feeling of shame. That the
gaze is dissociated from the concrete eyes is here made evident. I do
not need to see the eyes of the Other in order to know that he is look-
ing at me. Sometimes there need not even be an Other for the gaze to
arise; walking at night down a dark and threatening alley, a shadow
appearing suddenly behind a window or in a doorway can create the
impression that I am being watched. The supposed gaze directed to-
ward me is in fact nothing more than an externalisation of my own
anxiety, thereby revealing my affective involvement in the situation.
The gaze appears as something that cannot actually be seen, precisely
because anxiety, as pure drive, cannot be represented.
In contrast to Sartre, Lacan does not necessarily limit the gaze
to a human agency. In his eleventh seminar, Les quatres concepts fon-
damentaux de la psychanalyse (1973, [1964]) (The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis), Lacan illustrates his interpretation of the
gaze with the classic visual story of a competition between to re-
nowned painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios. (Lacan 1990/1998, 118/103)
Zeuxis is able to depict grapes in such a realistic manner that birds are
deceived and fly down to the painted cluster in order to feed. Con-
vinced of his abilities by this demonstration, and full of confidence, he
goes to Parrhasios who, it appears, is hiding his painting behind a cur-
tain; Zeuxis asks to see the painting. We then discover that the curtain
in fact is Parrhasios’ painting. He wins the contest because he has not
only managed to deceive birds, but people as well. According to La-
can, Parrhasios plays adeptly with the principle of the gaze. Birds re-
act instinctively to a visual stimulus; they see something that creates
the illusion that it can satisfy their hunger. Human beings, however,
always go in search of the Thing behind things, of that which seems to
be hidden by the veil of reality, the eternal truth behind the curtain of
temporary, vacillating phenomena. According to psychoanalysis, there
is no true world waiting for us behind the Platonic world of shadows:
one who turns around toward the exit of the cave runs up against a li-
bidinal being that escapes all representation; the gaze that seems to
stare at one from behind things is ultimately nothing more than an ex-
ternalisation of one’s own scopic drive.
In Gradiva we find an example of how the scopic drive struc-
tures our field of vision unconsciously. Hanold is attracted irresistibly
to the Roman bas-relief not because of the artefact as such—the scien-
tific value of which is rather limited—but rather because of a particu-
lar aspect of the relief, namely, the gracious positioning of a young
girl’s elegant feet. Hanold’s fascination is not found in the material
object itself—the plaster reproduction of a marble sculpture of a wo-
man’s foot—but in something that remains invisible in the foot. Just
like Zeuxis, he is convinced that something is hidden in the relief, a
secret that he, somewhat naïvely, tries to discover by examining
charming feet on the street. What Hanold does not understand is that
his fascination is not contained in the object itself, but is only evoked
by his own gaze. In terms of Lacan’s formula for sublimation, the foot
of the Gradiva is thus a perfectly ordinary object which Hanold raises
to the dignity of the Thing.
From a Lacanian perspective, in his analysis of the novel
Freud makes the same mistake as Sartre when he proposes that Ha-
nold’s imaginary object (the Pompeiian woman on the relief) is ulti-
mately exchanged for an object that actually exists (his childhood
sweetheart Zoe), and thus that the imaginary scene which Hanold has
constructed in his delusion makes room for reality. In fact, for Hanold,
Zoe is equally an image invested with phantasmatic enjoyment, a re-
assuring interpretation of an irrepresentable drive. This becomes clear
when, at the close of the story, Zoe and Hanold leave the ruins of
Pompeii. Hanold suddenly asks Zoe to walk in front of him briefly so
that he can admire her from a distance. Zoe granted his request and
crosses the street with the same gait as Gradiva. Frued offers an ex-
ceptionally lenient comment on this request: “With the triumph of
love, what was beautiful and precious in the delusion found recogni-
tion as well.” (Freud 1959, 40) In Freud’s interpretation, it is as if Ha-
nold’s request is nothing but a final, innocent whim, a playful, self-
conscious allusion to something that had earlier haunted him as a
pathological delusion, but now—with his newly-found health and
clear consciousness—can be put back into proportion, namely: the
beauty of the elegant gait of his girlfriend, valuable in itself, which no
longer exercises the same compulsive power of attraction as the Gra-
diva-relief. Yet it is equally possible (and perhaps even more correct)
to read this scene as proof that Hanold is still very much in the grip of
his fantasy and remains obsessed with the image of an elegant foot in
motion, a fascination that goes beyond the actual bas-relief, but also
beyond the real Zoe. The foot raised to the dignity of the Thing is still
the irresistible object that rouses Hanold’s desire, even though he tries
to master it, to reduce it to the simple aesthetic pleasure of watching
Zoe walk.
For Lacan the imaginary is always the order of mis-
recognition. He links this misrecognition to the supposedly auto-
nomous, independent ‘I’ (the ego), the self-image that is borrowed
from our mirror image and does not want to know about its libidinal
involvement with the body, which directs its perception of the world.
The ego cannot accept that it is only a constructed effect of its mirror
image rather than its origin. Because we identify ourselves entirely
with our mirror image, we alienate ourselves from our libidinal being,
this extimate Thing that escapes all imaginary self-determination. This
is why Lacan has such a fierce resistance against the interpretation of
psychoanalysis in so-called Anglo-Saxon ego-psychology. This
movement places the emphasis of analytic practice on the fortification
of the ego and the development of a stable, controlled personality
modelled on the example of the analyst, and which should enable the
subject to find the right balance between the blind, corporeal drive and
the demands of reality. Only from such a point of view, Hanold’s
therapy could be called a success: at the end of the story he is both
aware of reality (he knows that Gradiva does not really exist) and of
his desire, which he no longer represses (he loves Zoe, who does
really exist).
For Lacan, the ego is anything but a dam against neurotic pa-
thologies. Even more, in his first seminar, Les écrits techniques de
Freud (1975, [1953-54]) (Freud’s Papers on Technique), he does not
hesitate even to call the ego “le symptôme humain par excellence, […]
la maladie mentale de l’homme.” (Lacan 1975, 22) [the human symp-
tom par excellence, the mental illness of mankind. (Lacan 1991b, 16)]
This is why, according to Lacan, the impact of the imaginary as the
pre-eminent order of the ego must be reduced as much as possible in
psychoanalysis. Language takes precedence in Lacan: the subject can
only realise through the symbolic order that its imaginary identifica-
tion is a linguistic construction and its ego is nothing more than a
symptom. And as Lacan remarks in ‘Fonction et champ de la parole et
du langage’ (Function and Field of Speech and Language), a reading
from 1953 that was later included in his Écrits (1966): “le symptôme
se résout tout entier dans une analyse de langage, parce qu’il est lui-
même structuré comme un langage, qu’il est langage dont la parole
doit être délivrée.” (Lacan 1970, 147) [symptoms can be entirely re-
solved in an analysis of language, because a symptom is itself struc-
tured like a language: a symptom is language from which speech must
be delivered. (Lacan 2002, 223)] This quote makes clear that Lacan’s
view always starts from the primacy of language, from the symbolic
as a manner of overcoming the misrecognitions of the imaginary. But
as we will see in what follows, the fantasy is also active on the level of
the symbolic.
An anchor in the symbolic
The impetus for the entry into the symbolic order is that the child
comes to realise that the pool of sounds, the rhythmic repetition of
vowels and consonants that continually besiege it consists of signifiers
that are often addressed to it: the mother, for instance, gives the child
pet names or makes comments about its body or behaviour. Ulti-
mately, the child does not only want to be the one addressed by all
those signifiers with which it is continually haunted: at a certain mo-
ment the child assumes the word for itself, and through the process of
language acquisition gains entry into the treasure-store of signifiers
and grammatical structures with which it can express itself. This proc-
ess necessarily cuts through the other two orders. Speech, in which a
specific vocal sound is joined to a certain referent, can thus only arise
via a gradual ‘discliplining’ of the real vocal drives: little shrieks and
crying, which are almost direct discharges of drive, acquire rhythm,
are modulated and repeated until the child can finally form compre-
hensible words and phrases. These vocal sounds are identified with a
certain mental object via the imaginary. In this way the child learns to
connect the name given to it by its parents with its mirror image. This
often goes together with tremendous pleasure: the child loves to point
at things and name them, and in this manner give them a place in its
continually expanding life-world. As its linguistic ability increases,
the child will finally notice the arbitrary character of the imaginary
equivalence between verbal signs and the object: the child comes to
realise that its parents could have just as well given it a different name,
or that there are other children running around with the same name.
The child thus comes to the frustrating realisation that the sig-
nifiers it has at its disposal in order to determine itself always have the
potential to slide. Who we are always depends on the context in which
we find ourselves and which structural positions we assume in the
symbolic universe of a particular family, a particular community, a
particular society. The subject does not have the impression that it is
signified completely by any of the alternating symbolic positions:
something always escapes linguistic identification; the real body al-
ways seems, at certain points, to resist the signifiers that attempt to
express it. This might be because the signifiers are partially taboo, and
therefore cannot be pronounced by the subject or by society, and thus
remain repressed. The classic example is, of course, frustrated sexual-
ity, which landed many a young woman on Freud’s couch with nerv-
ous disorders in the prudish bourgeois milieus of Vienna, with its ar-
ranged and often unhappy marriages.
For Lacan as well, the unconscious was originally but a mere
consequence of censorship, as seen in the definition he gave of the un-
conscious in ‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage’:
“L’inconscient est ce chapitre de mon histoire qui est marqué par un
blanc ou occupé par un mensonge: c’est le chapitre censuré.” (Lacan
1970, 136) [The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is
marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter.
(Lacan 2002, 259)] In the event that the analysand is able to fill the
empty, open places in its story with the right signifiers, the analysis
can ultimately lead to a conscious acceptance of the repressed and its
formulation in truthful speech. Lacan would eventually realise that
this was too optimistic: unconscious processes did not translate per-
fectly into signifiers; there would always be a remainder, an open
space in the subject that cannot be filled. The open place means that
the subject can never fulfil its desire to coincide with itself in a ‘full
speech’. There will always be a yawning chasm between the symbolic
and the real of the body.
The fantasy in the symbolic surfaces precisely here: more spe-
cifically, as a way to bridge the gap with the real and thus to establish
a relationship between the libidinal being and the speaking being. And
like the fantasy is expressed in the imaginary via a libidinal involve-
ment with a certain image, at the symbolic level it appears as a sen-
tence. The prototype of such a phantasmatic sentence is the famous ‘a
child is being beaten’ that Freud discusses in an article of the same
name from 1919 (‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’). It was a mysterious
sentence that kept returning stubbornly and causing much agitation to
several different analysands, without them being able to find an ex-
planation for it. What is intriguing is above all Freud’s observation
that the subject itself never seems to be present physically in all the
different variations on the root sentence: “The figure of the child who
is producing the beating-phantasy no longer itself appears in it. In re-
ply to pressing enquiries the patients only declare: ‘I am probably
looking on’.” (Freud 1955, 185-6) The formulation in which the ana-
lysand makes itself the subject of the sentence—‘I am being beaten by
my father’, which is for Freud moreover the most important variation
of the phantasmatic sentence—can only be formulated through a
“construction of analysis” (185): that is, through an intervention by
Freud himself.
The reason why the subject itself remains absent from the sen-
tence and is replaced with the vague substitute, ‘a child’, is because
the subject exists precisely in the distance maintained from the phan-
tasmatic scene symbolised via the sentence. In the entire scene, the
subject is only present in the gaze—‘I am probably looking on’—that
establishes its libidinal involvement as a non-localisable surplus of
perception. This physical absence at the place where it all happens not
only signals the distance between the subject and its real libidinal be-
ing in the symbolic; it also makes clear that the subject only exists in
this distance, or even more, it is this distance.
In order to avoid confrontation with this fundamental empti-
ness, the ‘I’ that is absent from the grammatical structure of the fun-
damental fantasy returns with all the more insistence in the imaginary
fantasies constructed around the fundamental fantasy. We again illus-
trate this with Jensen’s Gradiva: we could formulate Hanold’s funda-
mental fantasy as ‘A young woman strolls by, her dress raised

slightly, so that her feet are visible’. The ‘I’ is indeed absent from this
fundamental fantasy: Hanold’s involvement in the scene depicted is
only shown by his gaze, staring passively at the relief. Hanold’s ‘I’
plays a more important and more active role via the imaginary ‘super-
structure’: he imagines that Gradiva is a prominent woman from an-
cient Pompeii who has returned from the dead to meet him; he ad-
dresses her, follows her, tries to find out who she is, discovers the real
situation and thinks that he is finally ‘himself’ again. . . . But all of
these actions in effect only disguise the extent to which Hanold is de-
termined by the symbolic structure of his fantasy: he does not choose
the phantasmatic scenario that suits him best; the scenario chooses
him. And so, at the ground of Hanold’s subjectivity lies an arbitrary
encounter with a signifier, namely, the surname of the girl next door,
Zoe Bertgang, “which means something like ‘someone who steps
along brilliantly or splendidly’.” (Freud 1959, 51) Hanold develops a
fantasy from the one signifier that he picked up by chance as a child,
and which in turn brought into existence the desire from which Ha-
nold appeared as a subject.
While the fantasy may well be an arbitrary linguistic construc-
tion that recalls an object of desire to which the subject is inordinately
attached, at the same time it also offers the subject a necessary anchor-
ing in the symbolic. Our subjectivity, through the open space in the
symbolic, is continually subordinated to the infinite sliding of the sig-
nifier, a little like the missing piece of a slide puzzle makes it possible
to continually move the other pieces of the puzzle around. But the
subject does not disappear entirely in the chain of signifiers with
which it is designated precisely because it detects a surplus in its rela-
tion to the symbolic, a phantasmatic attachment to an object that can-
not be symbolised. The sight of the foot in the relief is thus the cause
of Hanold’s desire, a desire that singularises him and gives him his
‘dignity’ as a unique, irreplaceable individual. The fantasy protects the
subject in this way, and in a double sense: on the one hand it estab-
lishes a necessary distance with respect to the extimate Thing that can
appear via the fantasy as the subject’s (unattainable) object of desire,
without the subject being destroyed by a terrifying jouissance; on the
other hand, the fantasy also ensures that the subject does not lose itself
in the symbolic, disappearing entirely in the continual sliding of the
signifiers.
On account of the fact that the ultimate object, the Thing, is

kept at a safe distance in the fantasy, it becomes possible, via sublima-
tion, to place all kinds of different objects in that empty place in the
symbolic: some of the ‘sublimatable’ objects are already present in re-
ality, others are the result of human creativity, attempts to materialise
the desired object in a work of art. The creative influence of the fan-
tasy has received a good deal of attention primarily from the English
psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott. In the section that follows I will dis-
cuss briefly his insights, viewing them as a supplement to Lacan’s
theory that should enable us to better understand the specific function
of the fantasy in literary experience.
The literary text as transitional object
D.W. Winnicott is known primarily for his notion of the transitional

object that, in his view, plays an essential role in child development.
This object, as he writes in Playing and Reality (1971), appears at the
moment that the child realises that its mother cannot always be there.
The child becomes attached to a certain object—such as, for example,
a particular cuddly toy or a particular song it wants to hear before go-
ing to sleep—that must replace the lost body of the mother in order to
avert the anxiety for this absence. (cf. Winnicott 1971, 4) With this,
the child at the same time creates what Winnicott calls a potential
space, a space in which it can play with this transitional object:
This area of playing is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the indi-
vidual, but it is not the external world. […] Into this play area the
child gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses
these in the service of some sample derived from inner or personal re-
ality. Without hallucinating the child puts out a sample of dream po-
tential and lives with this sample in a chosen setting of fragments from
external reality. (Winnicott 1971, 51)
What is most striking about this play with the transitional object is that
the child does in fact remain aware of the inanimate character of the
things with which it plays, but at the same time is willing to suspend
this knowledge for the duration of the play so that the things in the
play area take on a magical aura, are subject to internal projections
and are used in the staging of phantasmatic scenarios. Winnicott ar-
gues that we, even as adults, never lose this ability for ‘serious play’:
“I am assuming that cultural experiences are in direct continuity with
play, the play of those who have not yet heard of games.” (Winnicott
1971, 100) In this sense, we can also understand the relief from Gra-
diva, just like Swann’s musical phrase, as an ‘adult’ variant of the
child’s transitional object—they open this potential space that allows
the subject to sublimate its phantasmatic relationship to the Thing.
Potential space, as a space between the internal world of im-
agination and external reality, is the most suitable way to describe the
literary experience, an experience that is only evoked when an exter-
nal reality (letters on a white sheet of paper) intermingle with the im-
agination of the individual reader. The author of the book, it is true,
provides the characters, the plot and the descriptions, but the book
only comes to life in interaction with me as a reader: this is the mo-
ment where I ‘forget’ that I am reading words printed on a page and I
project myself into that literary space which I know is not real, but
which I nevertheless enter. The importance of imagination becomes
clear when I watch a film adaptation of a book: it is only then that I
realise how much I as reader have contributed to the construction of
the literary space, the characters and the circumstances in which they
are placed. We also often have the tendency to identify with characters
from a book, mainly with the ‘agent’, the hero around whose desire
the story unravels. The most famous literary examples of readers who
become so involved in their identification with heroic fictional charac-
ters that they mistake the fiction for reality are assuredly Cervantes’
Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. This identification does
not necessarily stop with the protagonist: for instance, I can also rec-
ognise myself in characters that one would not initially think of as the
‘agent’, but who are the victim of the hero, even if not explicitly; a
reader can recognise one’s own hysterical tendencies in Emma
Bovary, but at the same time can sympathise with her unfortunate
husband and re-examine the story from his point of view. This is, for
example, what Freud does in his interpretation of Gradiva as he iden-
tifies with Zoe Bertgang and not with the protagonist, Hanold:
The procedure which the author makes his Zoe adopt for curing her
childhood friend’s delusion shows a far-reaching similarity—no, a
complete agreement in its essence—with a therapeutic method which
was introduced into medical practice in 1895 by Dr Josef Breuer and
myself, and to the perfecting of which I have since then devoted my-
self. (Freud 1959, 88-9)
Oddly enough, in his interpretation of Gradiva, Freud does not call his
own identification with Zoe into question, let alone examine what this
identification reveals concerning his own phantasmatic relationship to
the novel.
While Freud does, in his interpretation, keep open the possi-
bility that he has produced “a complete caricature of an interpreta-
tion”, thereby showing “how easy it is to find what one is looking for
and what is occupying one’s own mind—a possibility of which the
strangest examples are to be found in the history of literature” (91), he
seems to have included this consideration primarily as a gesture of
false modesty. A bit further in the text he defends his method by say-
ing that “we have not discovered anything in [Jensen’s] work that is
not already in it.” (92) With respect to Jensen’s text, Freud clearly
considers himself as the analyst and not the analysand. He positions
himself outside the text and believes he can thereby assume the stand-
point of neutral interpreter. Still, the imaginary plays a role here as
well (albeit less prominent) because the fundamental identification
with the Other remains: Freud not only sees in a concrete character his
mirror image, but is of the opinion that—from this imaginary mis-
recognition—he can completely merge with the seemingly objective
perspective from which he interprets the novel.
Like Freud in his discussion of Gradiva, as reader I usually
take no notice of the phantasmatic relationship to my singular libidinal
being which, while I am reading, betrays itself in the gaze. While I can
look through the eyes of a focaliser-character or from the perspective
of a certain theory, it is still my particular desire that guides my read-
ing. I project a lack into the text that cannot be filled at any level and
which appeals to my object of desire. In this way, the object is that
which can never appear concretely in the text and becomes, during my
reading, the counterpart of that which can never disappear outside of
the book, namely, the libidinal involvement of my reading body. The
reader, who believes to be capable of grasping one or another hidden
truth ‘behind’ the work, is often another Zeuxis who, misled by the
workings of the gaze, tries to pull aside the curtain of text.
In the sense of minimal interpretation of the subjective in-
volvement with what is shown (or read), it is the same presence of the
gaze that Freud’s analysands were unable to localise when he asked
them about their fantasy of ‘a child is being beaten’. This makes it
clear that they were not capable of determining their position with re-
spect to the phantasmatic scene: at most they could say that they
probably stood to the side and watched; in other words, they identify,
apparently, with the role of the spectator. This, however, is but one of
the many roles that the analysand can play in one’s imaginary assimi-
lation of the fantasy. The analysand can identify with the one who
beats, the one whom is beaten or the one looking on. The subject,
however, does not find itself in one of these three positions, but rather
in that impossible, ‘empty’ point from which it sees itself being
beaten, sees itself doing the beating, and finally also sees itself watch-
ing. Thus, the subject does not appear in the phantasmatic scene, but it
is its unconscious support.
We can clarify this with the famous statement attributed to
Flaubert: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’. At first sight we are inclined
to interpret this as the writer’s imaginary identification with his female
protagonist. This interpretation, however, is difficult to reconcile with
Flaubert’s famous impassibilité, his aloof absence as writer from the
fictional universe he has created. If we assume that he is referring to
the book Madame Bovary in its entirety rather than to the character
Madam Bovary, Flaubert’s statement becomes less paradoxical:
“L’auteur dans son œuvre doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers,
présent partout et visible nulle part.” (Flaubert 1980, 204) [The author
in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and
nowhere visible.] The definition Flaubert gives here of the author is
also valid for the reading subject: invisible, but nevertheless present, it
guides the direction of the reading. The reader’s conscious ‘I’, as an
imaginary construction, can never coincide entirely with the subject:
there is always a remainder, a phantasmatic involvement that remains
unconscious. Phantasmatic enjoyment thus appears in that which is
read, but at the same time, I know that what I read does not exist; it is
fiction. This is a necessary precondition, according to Lacan, for the
subject to ‘survive’ a confrontation with this phantasmatic enjoyment:
the fantasy can only be staged if it is clear that it is but a game, that
the transitional object (in this instance the story read) is not the real
thing; otherwise, the subject would be under threat of losing the coor-
dinates of its desire—and thus of its identity—as Lacan declares in Le
transfert ([1960-61], 1991) (Transference): “il faut dans l’exécution
un trait qui fasse pas vrai, parce que autrement, peut-être, si cela de-
venait tout à fait vrai, on ne saurait plus où on en est. Il n’y aurait
peut-être plus pour le sujet aucune chance d’y survivre.” (Lacan 2001,
458-9 – italics in original) [in the execution it is necessary that a mark

makes it unreal, because otherwise, perhaps, if it should all become
true, one would no longer know where one is in it. Perhaps there
would no longer be any chance for the subject to survive.]
Therefore, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, we would do
better to invert Coleridge’s famous claim from his Biographica Liter-
aria (1817) about “[t]hat willing suspension of disbelief for the mo-
ment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 1985, 314) into a
“willing suspension of belief”: an artistic creation only remains toler-
able as long as we—as spectator or listener—do not believe that the
real work of art could in fact fully incarnate and make present the
phantasmatic object of desire. As soon as one no longer creates a dis-
tance between the text as a fictional construction and that which it
evokes in the reader, such that the necessary ‘disbelief’ is suspended,
the text acquires such a stranglehold on the reading subject that the
words lose their symbolic arbitrariness and become a direct, unmedi-
ated expression of intolerable jouissance that normally is shielded by
the fantasy. I keep this enjoyment at a safe distance so long as I, as the
reader who sees my fantasies performed in the text I am reading, con-
tinue to believe that what I read is ‘not real’.
And yet the creation of a potential space during the act of
reading literature is more than an escapist activity in which I can en-
joy—away from the view of others—an innocent staging of those fan-
tasies that I cannot actualise in ‘real life’. From a Lacanian perspec-
tive, it is in fact an imaginary misrecognition to think that, in this way,
I can completely control my reading enjoyment. In other words, as
reader, I may not cherish the same illusion as Hanold who, once he
has realised that Zoe is ‘not really’ the Gradiva, thinks that he is liber-
ated from his phantasmatic obsession for the gait of a woman. Psy-
choanalysis makes clear that the fantasies that become visible in fic-
tive constructions (from my conscious act of reading to Hanold’s de-
lusions) also determine my relationship to reality.
The question now is which position I as reader should try to
assume with respect to the fantasies that I detect during my reading.
With this in mind I will discuss two divergent standpoints: first that of
Lacan, who sees the fantasy as an obstacle to desire, as something that
the subject must learn to ‘traverse’; and then that of Julia Kristeva,
who pays much more attention in her work than Lacan does to the lit-
erary experience, and therefore develops a more positive view on the

role of the fantasy and the imaginary activated by it.
Jacques Lacan: traversing the fantasy
Freud’s interpretation of Gradiva does not suffice if we want to ap-

proach the phantasmatic reading experience from the perspective of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. In order to illustrate the reader’s journey
through the literary universe, we thus turn to another travel story, Mi-
lan Kundera’s ‘The Hitchhiking Game’, a short story included in his
Laughable Loves (1969). The ‘hitchhiker’ from the title is an attrac-
tive young woman who is underway to a vacation spot in the Tetra
Mountains with her somewhat older boyfriend. In her eyes he is a man
of the world who has had numerous fleeting relationships, and she
imagines that he, while on a business trip, has perhaps cheated on her
with the sort of frivolous woman that she can never be for him. She
sees herself as a prudish and shy person who does not feel very com-
fortable with her own body. Her fantasy is that she could also become
such a loose woman, freed of all of her complexes: “She often longed
to feel free and easy about her body, the way most of the women
around her did.” (Kundera 1974, 5)
Her boyfriend teases her frequently about her exaggerated
shame for her body, and he does so also when she, along the way,
needs to relieve herself at the side of the road while he fuels the car at
a petrol station. When she returns to the car she acts as if she does not
recognise her boyfriend and is looking for a ride. Just as Zoe in Gra-
diva, her boyfriend initially goes along with the game: a seduction
scene develops between “the driver and the hitchhiker who did not
know each other.” (Kundera 1974, 12) But for the ‘hitchhiker’ the
game quickly takes on a strange, serious character: “The girl slipped
into this silly, romantic part with an ease that astonished her and held
her spellbound.” (Kundera 1974, 10) The difference with Zoe is that
here, the man gets carried away in the game as well. He deliberately
takes another route with a determination that surprises him: “Fiction
was suddenly making an assault on real life. The young man was
moving away from himself and from the implacable straight road,
from which he had never strayed until now.” (Kundera 1974, 12) They
arrive in an unfamiliar town where the man reserves a hotel room.
During a vodka-saturated dinner, the man begins to feel increasingly
uneasy about the ‘role’ that his girlfriend is playing with so much
conviction: “Perhaps the girl supposed that by means of the game she
was disowning herself, but wasn’t it the other way around? Wasn’t she
becoming herself only through the game?” (Kundera 1974, 16, italics
in original) Her provocative body language and the frequent glances
cast by the other male guests give her “a new sensation, one she didn’t
recognize: indecent joy caused by her body.” (Kundera 1974, 17-8,
italics in original) The role-play nears its climax when the man escorts
her roughly to their room and rudely forces her to undress. She per-
forms a striptease, something she never thought herself capable of do-
ing, but as soon as she is naked the game is over for her: she now
wants to go back to their normal relationship. But the man refuses to
abandon the game, and at the same time he has greater and greater dif-
ficulty disguising his disgust for her: he humiliates her like a common
whore until finally, against her will, he has sex with her. For her, the
game has now taken on an unbearable intensity, and her initial pleas-
ure turns into excessive enjoyment:
She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she pro-
ceeded across it without objections and as a full participant—only
somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel hor-
ror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so
much pleasure as at this moment—beyond that boundary. (Kundera
1974, 25)
Her boyfriend’s brutal reaction to her behaviour forces her to realise

that it was no longer a game for her, that her behaviour no longer had
anything playful or unreal about it: for a moment she actually ap-
peared to be the woman that she had always wanted to become,
thereby destroying her desire at the same time: she was now com-
pelled to look behind the confines of her fantasy where she found
nothing but an exorbitant, terrifying enjoyment that threatened her
symbolic identity. She no longer knows who she is: the prudish girl
seemed but a façade, but even less could she really be the frivolous
hitchhiker. . . . After the love making, in the darkness of the hotel
room:
a pleading, sobbing voice broke the silence, calling him by his name
and saying, “I am me, I am me…” The young man was silent, he
didn’t move, and he was aware of the sad emptiness of the girl’s asser-
tion, in which the unknown was defined in terms of the same un-
known quantity. (Kundera 1974, 25)
Her unexpected hitchhiking adventure thus did not come to the same
satisfactory conclusion as Hanold’s escape to Italy: while Hanold rec-
onciled with his desire, and his conscious ‘I’ once again got a grip on
reality, she seemed to be losing this grip entirely. She discovers that
her self-image is founded on a void, namely, the distance that she as a
subject maintained with respect to the intolerable presence of her en-
joying libidinal being. Lacan, at the close of his seminar on Les quatre
concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, proposes that the ultimate
goal of a psychoanalytic process is just this disconcerting experience
in which the fantasy is traversed and nothing remains but the confron-
tation with the libidinal being: “l’expérience du fantasme fondamental
devient la pulsion.” (Lacan 1990, 304) [the experience of the funda-
mental phantasy becomes the drive. (Lacan 1998, 273)]
The goal of psychoanalysis is thus not what Lacan had origi-
nally described, namely, to help the analysand to formulate the cen-
sored chapter concerning one’s own desire. The ethic of the later La-
can is much more pessimistic: it implies that the analysand must reach
the point where he realises that the only truth of his desire is that there
is nothing hiding behind the fantasy, that there is no ‘true’ identity that
must be freed from taboos or inhibitions.
This means—when we focus this ethic upon the reading sub-
ject—that as a reader, I must come to the insight that I do not have,
but rather that I am the desire that the text evokes in me. Not only
imaginary fantasies, but also the fundamental symbolic fantasy on
which they rest are in effect nothing more than the final obstacles I
must traverse.
The paradox here is that this ‘real’ desire lies beyond the fan-
tasy that desire itself constructs—a desire, thus, on the other side of
every object, which only aims at nothingness, an empty place in the
symbolic. The experience of reading at this point reveals to me my
fundamental loneliness as a reader because I realise that there is liter-
ally nothing to say about the essence of my reading; a ‘nothing’ that I
cannot share with anyone, neither with the writer nor with other read-
ers of the same text. This ‘nothing’ is not, as in Sartre, an appeal to my
freedom, a confrontation with my unique existence, the ‘nothing’ of
the singular project that I both am and still must realise in the time that
remains before my death. Freedom for Lacan is an imaginary con-
struction that gives me the illusion that I can escape the stranglehold
of desire. I do not choose this desire myself; it chooses me and will

accompany me until my death without ever providing the satisfaction
it seems to promise.
That the appeal from this ‘nothingness’ nevertheless maintains
its claim on the subject is a peculiar aspect of Lacanian ethics. The
subject has the obligation to assume this particular desire stripped of
all imaginary illusions, or as Lacan formulates in L’éthique de la psy-
chanalyse, “Je propose que la seule chose dont on puisse être coupa-
ble, au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est d’avoir cédé sur
son désir.” (Lacan 1986, 368) [I propose then that, from an analytical
point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having
given ground relative to one’s desire. (Lacan 1992, 319)]
As a reader, this is thus the task I must assign myself from a
Lacanian perspective: in traversing the text, I must also traverse my
own fantasy that travels along with my reading gaze, and dare to con-
sider that this mythical object of desire—the promise of which the re-
ceding horizon of the text still seems to contain—can ultimately never
be found, not even in the terminal point of desire, namely, my own
singular death. Thus, what remains for me beyond the traversed fan-
tasy is the experience of the compelling presence of my libidinal being
that confronts me with a real body to which I have no direct access.
And at the same time, according to the same imperative that addresses
us in the poem of the same title by Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle
into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Tho-
mas 2003, 148), I cannot take any distance from the desire with which
I am burdened.
As we will see in the section to follow, Kristeva denounces
such a view on the bodily real as an inaccessible, uncontrollable li-
bidinal being. In her opinion, this radical standpoint passes over too
quickly the possibilities opened for the reader by a confrontation with
the fantasy.
Julia Kristeva: revaluating the imaginary
Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris at the end of 1965 as a young Bulgarian

linguist with a grant. She immediately made a strong impression on
her professors and was received quickly into the avant-garde milieu of
the Tel Quel journal. In ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ (1966)
(Word, Dialogue, and Novel), her article about the Russian literary
theoretician Bakhtin who until that time was still relatively unknown
in the West, she introduced the concept of intertextuality—which is
still one of the central ideas in contemporary literary theory (cf.
Kristeva 1978/1980, 82-112/64-91). In 1973 she defended her doc-
torat d’état—which was published in 1974 under the title La révolu-
tion du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language)—at the
University of Vincennes. Under the influence of Lacanian psycho-
analysis, the body came to play an important role in her analysis of lit-
erature, but at the same time she also distanced herself from Lacan on
this point. According to her, he placed too much emphasis on the gap
between the symbolic of the speaking being and the real of the libidi-
nal being which can only appear in the symbolic as a lack. In La révo-
lution du langage poétique, Kristeva takes as her starting point that
there is an inextricable link between language and body. To this end,
Kristeva introduces the chora (χώρα), a concept borrowed from
Plato’s Timaeus and which refers in her work to the pre-oedipal body
that is still closely bound to the mother’s body. The chora constitutes
the libidinal breeding-ground from which the process of signification,
and thus symbolic identity, ultimately arise. (cf. Kristeva 1985/1984,
22 ff./25 ff.) According to Kristeva, this system of signs can still only
appear in a concrete, corporeal realisation, loaded with affects and
drives, even though the libidinal being’s direct, pre-symbolic expres-
sion of enjoyment or pain remain fundamentally heterogeneous to the
arbitrary, abstract sign system of language. Kristeva therefore intro-
duces a new term alongside the symbolic: the semiotic. The semiotic
is that which is active in the symbolic, and is an immediate expression
of the chora.
The introduction of the corporeal in textual analysis has im-
portant implications: it means that we not only have to take into ac-
count the different codes that direct one’s reading, but also the manner
in which these codes are changed and transformed under pressure
from the semiotic. In La révolution du langage poétique, Kristeva ex-
amines the working of the semiotic in such avant-garde writers as
Mallarmé and Lautréamont. Through their style of writing, the avant-
garde shows its readers that which transgresses the symbolic—from
the laws of genre and grammar to the social conventions that regulate
a society—and brings language into contact with the libidinal being
that is continually kept at bay by the symbolic.
For Kristeva, the destructiveness of the avant-garde clears a

space for new symbolisations, for a new sort of writing. The signifi-
cance of the avant-garde is that they confront the readers with what
Kristeva calls, in an article of the same title from 1973, le sujet en
procès (the subject in process), a subject whose identity is continually
altered by the incessant slippage of the symbolic under the influence
of corporeal drives and unconscious processes. (cf. Kristeva 1977, 55
ff.)
Classic psychoanalytic interpretation as a rule misjudges, ac-
cording to Kristeva, this transformative, revolutionary activity of the
semiotic. At the same time, Kristeva admits that the enjoyment evoked
by semiotic processes must be kept in check by a symbolic frame-
work. In ‘L’expérience et la pratique’ (1973), an article on the work of
Georges Bataille, Kristeva makes clear that the rejuvenating action of
avant-garde discourse only remains fruitful if it takes sufficient ac-
count of what she calls the ‘thetic phase’ of the signifying process.
This is the moment in which the continually-in-motion semiotic ‘co-
agulates’ into a set series of signifiers, thereby making possible for the
subject new identifications and meanings (cf. Kristeva 1977, 107).
Bataille’s work is distinguished from other avant-garde artists, accord-
ing to Kristeva, exactly because of the attention he gave to the neces-
sary thetic phases. Bataille understood that the transgressive experi-
ence that confronts the subject with its own heterogeneity, with that
which cannot be inscribed in the symbolic, can only put this subject in
process so long as the subject does not disappear entirely, but to a cer-
tain extent remains anchored in language. In her view, Bataille was
able, through a fictional discourse, to confront the subject with exces-
sive enjoyment without it being destroyed by this enjoyment; in this
way a certain form of knowledge about the relationship to this enjoy-
ment finally became possible. Kristeva would later extrapolate her
remarks about Bataille’s writing to every form of fiction that confronts
the reader with semiotic processes, and which can thereby put the
symbolic identity of the reader into process.
While Kristeva certainly does not deny the importance of the
oedipal phase, she believes that the genesis of the subject goes through
an important earlier phase that is neglected by classic psychoanalysis:
the phase in which the child becomes conscious of the presence of
what Kristeva in Histoires d’amour (1983) (Tales of Love) calls the
‘loving Other’ who appears as a ‘third’ in the relationship between the
child and the (mother’s) body. (cf. Kristeva 1999/1987, 31 ff./21 ff.)
This ‘third’ is at first a sort of ‘grid’ that includes both the mother and
the child and consists of certain, pre-linguistic patterns that offer the
child a first structuring for its initial identification. In other words, it
provides the child with the first primitive fantasies through which it
can relate to its libidinal being. This Other is not experienced as a pro-
hibitive paternal authority that confronts the subject with a fundamen-
tal lack, but as a loving third that does not deprive the child of some-
thing (namely, a mythical, ‘direct’ relationship to the libidinal being),
but rather gives something to it; namely, a schema and later a lan-
guage with which the child learns to relate to its libidinal being. We
are reminded here of Swann’s musical phrase that functions as a gift
that comes to him from the Other, and in this way becomes a minimal,
if indefinable expression of his own relation to his libidinal being.
For Kristeva, imaginary identification with this ‘loving Third’
is anything but a moment of misrecognition: it is rather the essential
precondition for the subject to be able to develop its own potential
space. The child learns to represent its drives and to project its uncon-
scious process onto the transitional object within the imaginary play-
room made possible by the loving Other. For Kristeva, the imaginary
thus does not belong exclusively to the order of misrecognition. On
the contrary: Kristeva proposes, in her Pouvoirs et limites de la psy-
chanalyse II. La révolte intime (1997) (Intimate revolt: The Powers
and Limits of Psychoanalysis II), that it is the imaginary that can bring
the subject into contact with the intimate world of its unconscious de-
sires and drives. (Kristeva 1997/2002, 100/63)
It is not surprising that Kristeva, in La révolte intime, makes a
detailed examination of Sartre’s book about the imaginary in the
course of her own revaluation of the imaginary. As we have already
seen, Sartre indicated that the imagination is always based on a ‘fun-
damental absence’, the ‘essential nothingness’ of the imagined object.
According to Lacan, this absence is not only valid for the imagination,
but for every perception insofar as it can never represent the Thing as
being present. Unique to the Sartrean imaginary is in effect that it re-
produces this absence as absence: at the moment that I imagine some-
thing consciously—in a daydream for instance—I know that I am
imagining something that is not there in reality. This is why Kristeva
believes it is important to maintain Sartre’s distinction between im-
agination and perception, however problematic it may be. The imagi-
nary can only have a liberating effect on the subject if this subject re-
mains conscious of its fictitious, ‘unreal’ nature. Kristeva also distin-
guishes this form of the imaginary from the imaginary of the adver-
tisement, of the ‘looks’, of the image I want to radiate and that others
have of me; an imaginary that indeed holds a false mirror before the
subject, and with which it desperately tries to coincide, but in vain:
la gestion commerciale de cet ‘imaginaire’-spectacle omniprésent,
ainsi que la diminution ou l’affaiblissement de la culture verbale qui
l’accompagne conduisent à effacer le vecteur ‘néantisant’ au profit de
l’‘illusion’: je me saoule de l’image, je ne la perçois plus comme im-
age néantisante fatalement libératrice, j’adhère au contraire à sa pré-
tendue réalité, j’y crois. Plus d’imaginaire: l’imaginaire s’est réalisé.
Ou plutôt: si tout est imaginaire, l’imaginaire est mort. Et ma marge
de liberté aussi. (Kristeva 1997, 197)
[ [the] commercial control of this omnipresent imaginary-spectacle

and its attendant diminishing or weakening of verbal culture end up
erasing the annihilating vector in favor of illusion: I get drunk on the
image; I no longer perceive it as a fatally liberating, annihilating im-
age; I cling instead to its so-called reality; I believe in it. More than
imaginary: the imaginary is realized. Or rather: if everything is imagi-
nary, the imaginary is dead, along with my margin of freedom.
(Kristeva 2002, 128)]
Kristeva argues that the subject, precisely from the intimate of its im-
agination, is capable of dealing creatively and actively with the lack
around which its subjectivity is constructed. Somewhat provocatively,
she also suggests that psychoanalysis has the task of activating the
imaginary: “la psychanalyse ouvre la voie à une valorisation de
l’activité imaginaire comme sol d’élection pour la constitution de
l’appareil psychique.” (278, italics in original) [psychoanalysis opens
the path to a valorization of imaginary activity as favored terrain for
the constitution of the psychical apparatus. (179)]
With this, Kristeva has also set aside an important function for
the fantasy, which she calls the nucleus of the imaginary (cf. 278/179).
According to her, imaginary fantasies are essential for the construction
of the intimate playroom that the subject needs for its psychic sur-
vival. Kristeva hereby reserves an exceptionally important place for
the literary discourse which confronts the subject with the imaginary,
but at the same time clearly remains a fictitious construction, thereby
preventing the subject from mistaking the imaginary for reality. Toge-
ther with psychoanalytic practice, literature hereby becomes:
un des rares lieux où le fantasme avoue sa réalité de serf du désir, par

quoi il s’affirme comme indispensable et, en ce sens, réel; et où, dans
le même temps, il pose sa propre nécessité de se dissoudre comme
fantasme pour apparaître dans son essence d’irréalité néantisante libé-
ratrice. (279)
[one of the rare places where fantasy admits its reality as a servant of
desire, thereby asserting itself as indispensable and in this sense real;
and where, at the same time, it poses its own necessity to dissolve like
fantasy in order to appear in its essence of nihilating, liberating unreal-
ity. (180)]
As we have seen, Kristeva does not share Lacan’s negative assessment

of the fantasy, and in contrast to Freud she is also not afraid to re-
cognise the fictitious, imaginary aspects of the psychoanalytic prac-
tice. According to her, it is precisely this imaginary character of psy-
choanalysis that makes it the ideal ally of the subject insofar as it en-
ables the subject to obtain a better picture of the way its imaginary
fantasies have arisen and can possibly be developed. But despite her
revaluation of the imaginary, ultimately the formulation of the fantasy
in literature and art still remain, for Kristeva, subordinate to their psy-
choanalytic interpretation: “l’art et la littérature sont les alliés de la
psychanalyse; ils ouvrent la voie verbale à la construction des fantas-
mes et préparent le terrain à l’interprétation psychanalytique.” (109)
[art and literature are the allies of psychoanalysis; they open the verbal
path to the construction of fantasies and prepare the terrain for psy-
choanalytical interpretation. (68)]
However important the fictive constructions may be for the
subject, Kristeva still starts from the assumption of a truth beyond
imaginary appearance, a truth that can be unearthed by psychoanaly-
sis. While perhaps less focused than Lacan on the lack, and definitely
much more tolerant with respect to the imaginary, Kristeva also as-
sumes an unsatisfiable desire that continues to drive the subject for the
rest of its life, from a place before and beyond language: the place of
the mythic body of the mother around which all fantasies circle, in-
cluding the fantasy of psychoanalysis itself. Kristeva in this way holds
fast to the fundamental point of departure in psychoanalysis, namely,
that there is always a transcendent Thing beyond things and that there
is a truth to be found beyond the fantasy: a starting point that shows
the extent to which the psychoanalytic universe is influenced by
Plato’s world view. To conclude this chapter about psychoanalysis I
would like to demonstrate that this theory of the fantasy betrays un-
mistakably a Platonic influence. It is also this influence that consti-
tutes the most important difference with the Nietzschean view on the
fantasy, which is the topic of the next chapter.
The Platonic inheritance of the fantasy
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the fantasies that the subject formu-

lates during the treatment or encounters in its reading constitute a mis-
recognition of the fundamental indetermination of ‘real’ desire. In this
perspective, psychoanalysis has the task of liberating the subject from
the omnipotence of the fantasy. It is as if enjoyment is the chain that
keeps the subject imprisoned in its Platonic cave, fascinated by the
shadow play of its imaginary fantasies on the stone wall, and ignorant
of the true dimension of its desire outside the dark cave.
Lacan always resisted vehemently such an interpretation of
psychoanalysis, even though he admitted that psychoanalytic theory
can lead in the direction of Platonic idealism. In Les quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, he emphasises that psychoanalytic
practice “ne nous permet en rien de nous résoudre à un aphorisme
comme la vie est un songe. Aucune praxis plus que l’analyse n’est
orientée vers ce qui, au cœur de l’expérience, est le noyau du réel.”
(Lacan 1990, 63, italics in original) [in no way allows us to accept
some such aphorism as life is a dream. No praxis is more orientated
towards that which, at the heart of experience, is the kernel of the real
than psycho-analysis. (Lacan 1998, 53, italics in original)] Nev-
ertheless, Lacan always remained an heir—albeit recalcitrant—of the
idealism he meant to combat. For both Plato’s idealism and Lacanian
psychoanalysis ascribe a central position to desire caused by the ex-
perience of a lack. Zeuxis, the duped painter who believed that there
was something hidden behind the painted curtain, is thus not merely
an allegory for Platonic philosophy, which tries to discover the ‘real’
world by looking behind the painting of sensibly perceptible reality,
but is equally an allegory for the psychoanalyst who attempts to look
beyond the fantasy and goes in search of what Lacan designates as “la
rencontre première, le réel, que nous pouvons affirmer derrière le fan-
tasme”. (Lacan 1990, 64) [the first encounter, the real, that lies behind
the phantasy (Lacan 1998, 54)] This Thing—the brute, traumatising
presence of the real body—may well differ radically from Plato’s
Sovereign Good with respect to content, yet both assume a sort of

doubling of the world with an inaccessible space on the other side of,
respectively, the symbolic and sensible world.
While the lack for Lacan only applies to the symbolic level—
in the order of the real strictly speaking, no objects are missing—the
subject still only has access to reality via the symbolic, and so its view
on reality is marked by that fundamental lack. Lacan’s view in this
sense can hardly be seen as constituting a break with idealism; it is
rather an exceptional reinterpretation of the Platonic inheritance of
Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud, in his introduction to the fourth edi-
tion of ‘Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie’ (1905, fourth ed. 1920)
(Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), called explicitly on Plato
to defend his theory against criticism: “[A]nyone who looks down
with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage-point
should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanaly-
sis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato.” (Freud 1953, 134) His
reference to Plato is more than a rhetorical attempt by Freud to make
his theory credible and respectable. Earlier we saw how Freud, in his
investigation into the meaning of the dream, found no support in the
scientific discourse of his day. He therefore went in search of another
discourse, one that could serve for him as the necessary Other in that
auto-analysis which would lead to the discovery of psychoanalysis:
the discourse of literature.
Psychoanalysis soon became ensnared in the paradoxical
situation of thinking it held the key to the explanation of the cultural
discourse from which it arose. Freud’s genesis of the subject, which
he primarily explained via the Oedipus myth, thus became a retrospec-
tive clarification of that very myth, and by extension of every other
philosophical and literary narrative in which loss and insatiable desire
played a prominent role, as in Plato.
As we have already noted, in his interpretation of Gradiva,
Freud was surprised about the remarkable similarities this novel dis-
played to his psychoanalytic theory: “We probably draw from the
same source, and work upon the same object, each of us by another
method. And the agreement of our results seems to guarantee that we
have both worked correctly.” (Freud 1959, 92) With this Freud as-
sumes, implicitly of course, that this common ‘source’ was the oedipal
history at the origin of the subject which he himself had exposed via
his archaeological excavation of the human spirit. But this common
source could very well be the ancient cult of desire from which have
arisen not only Platonic philosophy, but literature and psychoanalysis
as well. We can thus see that psychoanalytic theory is no exception to
its own principle that identity always originates in the discourse of the
Other. But it is just this influence that Freud did not recognise. This
accounts for his surprise when he notices that what he—a Viennese
doctor at the end of the nineteenth century—discovers in himself is
already there to read in the ancient tragedies, and when reading them
it is as if he is looking at himself through a mirror, darkly. We can use
Freud’s later terminology of the unheimliche (uncanny) to designate
the unexpected encounter with a doppelgänger, a double in literature
and philosophy. In ‘Das ‘Unheimliche’’ (1919) (The Uncanny), Freud
describes just such an encounter:
[I]t is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with some-
one else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the
extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, divid-
ing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant re-
currence of the same thing. (Freud 1955, 234)
It is this ‘extraneous self’ that Freud recognises in Zoe, a fic-

tional character from a story written by an author who knew nothing
of psychoanalysis, and yet nevertheless seemed to apply Freud’s own,
unique method. And when Freud always found the same pattern ap-
pearing in mythical and literary figures such as Oedipus and Hamlet,
when he continually saw the same story repeated, these were undoubt-
edly examples of the ‘constant recurrence of the same thing’ by which
myth and fiction once again seem to articulate accurately the psychic
reality of the subject: “[A]n uncanny effect is often and easily pro-
duced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced,
as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary ap-
pears before us in reality.” (244) But the reverse is also true: some-
times the uncanny also appears when something regarded as reality
turns out to be mere fantasy. Freud’s disconcerted reaction to his dis-
covery, at the very beginning of his psychoanalytic practice, of a curi-
ous hysterical phenomenon serves to prove this. Namely, he found
that the sexual assaults about which some patients spoke, and which
he considered as the real basis of their traumas, were in fact only
phantasmatic constructions that had never actually occurred. This led
Freud to the fundamental insight that fantasies play a central role in
the construction of reality. In the end, however, Freud balked at ap-

propriating this insight into his own theory, which he invariably con-
sidered to be based on objective scientific knowledge—the potential
distortion of which by his own fantasies he found unacceptable. This
difficultly, stemming precisely from its Platonic bias, became one of
the most important theoretical problems for psychoanalysis: if every
subject creates a psychic reality with the help of its fantasies, then this
is true of the scientist as well. The scientist cannot place oneself at a
remove from the enjoyment of one’s own libidinal being, a enjoyment
that announces itself in what Lacan calls, in his seventeenth seminar,
L’envers de la psychanalyse (1991a, [1969-1970]) (The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis) “la pulsion épistémologique” (Lacan 1991a, 122) [the
epistemological drive]. In other words, the scientist’s fantasy, the ob-
sessive search for the truth is equally a variant of the phantasmatic
quest for the object of desire. Thus when Freud remarks, in ‘Der Dich-
ter und das Phantasieren’ (1908) (Creative Writers and Day-
Dreaming) that “our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work pro-
ceeds from a liberation of tensions in our own minds,” and that “not a
little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to
enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame” (Freud
1959, 153), this might also apply to his own reading of Gradiva. This
reading is just as well guided by a fantasy; more precisely, the ar-
chaeological fantasy that Freud recognised in Jensen’s novel. This
recognition only took on an uncanny complexion at the moment when
Freud, while reading, meets his phantasmatic enjoyment in the figure
of Zoe and in the metaphor of Pompeii. But as a scientist, he cannot
admit of this enjoyment: “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or
alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind
and which has become alienated from it only through the process of
repression.” (Freud 1955, 241)
In connection with this, we can summarise Freud’s archaeo-
logical fantasy, a desire to continually dig under the surface in search
of the underlying motives of a given reality, as a variation of the so-
called Urphantasien (original fantasies) identified by Laplance and
Pontalis. In their Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origins, origine
du fantasme (1964), they describe them as the foundational fantasies
with which the subject attempts to answer essential questions that con-
front it, such as the question of sexual difference and the question of
its origin; questions that earlier were answered with collective creation
myths. (cf. Laplanche & Pontalis 2002, 159) These religious myths of
creation have been replaced in secular western society by the natural
sciences that, to a certain extent, assume the phantasmatic function of
myths and continue to offer the subject meaningful coordinates. Seen
from this perspective, psychoanalytic theory in general is also a proto-
type of such an Urphantasie, is an explanation offered to the subject,
and which makes it possible to cast an impossible glance on the how
and why of its own existence—just like physics does with the Big
Bang theory or biology with the theory of evolution. But the psycho-
analytic fantasy, just like all other fantasies, also confronts the subject
in extremis with an enjoyment that in no way whatsoever can be ap-
propriated by a symbolic order that provides it with meaning: “Le sa-
voir est un fantasme qui n’est fait que pour la jouissance”. (Lacan
1991a, 14) [Knowledge is a fantasy that is only made for enjoyment.]
Ultimately, the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasy in this way
seems to be sawing off the branch on which it is perched, because it,
as a theory, is also driven by a fantasy.
This is why, in order not to have to take distance from this
claim, psychoanalysis advances the theory of a truth that can be
reached ‘on the other side of the fantasy’, so that the subject can come
to confront the truth of its desire without phantasmatic deformation or
misrecognition. But psychoanalysis hereby remains imprisoned in
universe of Plato. This dualistic interpretation of reality has neverthe-
less incited much opposition. And one of the most important and in-
fluential opponents was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche, who would
finally reject the Platonic doubling of the world and would postulate
the phantasmatic world of appearances as the only reality.
In the second section of this first theoretical part I would like
to examine Nietzsche’s philosophy which both breaks with the
Platonic inheritance and was decisive for the later reorientation of
psychoanalysis by Deleuze and Foucault.
The Fantasy: A Nietzschean Intertext
Friedrich Nietzsche and the pathos of distance
Nietzsche’s philosophy can be summarised as a radical rejection of the

idealistic belief in an essence of things hidden behind their appear-
ance. When Nietzsche uses the notion of fantasy in his work, it too is
deprived of every form of transcendence. For Nietzsche, fantasies are
handy, even indispensable schemas with which the human being in-
terprets reality; or, more accurately, they are schemas in which reality
as such can appear to the human being. As Nietzsche emphasised in
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1886), (Human, All-Too-Human),
the fact that these fantasies cannot be legitimated in any way by an ex-
ternal, objectively determinable truth has no harmful effect on their
epistemological value:
That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors
and fantasies, which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with
one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being,
and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire
past – as treasure: for the value of our humanity depends on it. (Nietz-
sche 1986, 20)
Just as psychoanalysis would later do, Nietzsche conceived fantasy as

an interpretation of the libidinal being. But while for psychoanalysis
the libidinal being is a radically unknowable, inaccessible kernel kept
at a safe distance by fantasies, for Nietzsche the libidinal being is ex-
pressed immediately in fantasies, and with which it therefore coin-
cides. If one supposes that reality can only be experienced through
fantasies, then the classic opposition between the apparent world of
fantasies and the truth beyond appearance disappears. Nietzsche ar-
ticulates this as follows in a famous passage from Götzen-Dämmerung
(1888) (Twilight of the Idols): “The real world—we have done away
with it: what world was left? The apparent one, perhaps?... But no!
with the real world we have also done away with the apparent
.” one
(Nietzsche 1998, 20, italics in original)
A second departure from psychoanalysis is that Nietzsche
does not theorise this libidinal being as a monolithic Thing, but rather
as a heterogeneous collection of various fluctuating drives that con-
tinually affect one another, establish connections and thereby either
weaken or reinforce each other. Fantasies are valuable because they
structure not only the interplay between internal and external stimuli,
but also the drives and affects generated by these stimuli, and they do
so in such a way that the organism strengthens its grip on itself and its
environment.
The task of the philosopher, according to Nietzsche, is to ex-
amine fantasies: which ones are circulating in a given culture; what
functions do they serve; what are the existential possibilities that these
fantasies open up or foreclose; which forces do they stimulate and
which ones are curtailed, or even destroyed. When it becomes appar-
ent that certain of these fantasies are unproductive and condemn hu-
manity to an existence of ignoble, life-denying slavery, the task of the
philosopher is to ‘philosophise with a hammer’: that is to say, to strike
them so that people can hear the hollow sound they make, and in this
way to free humanity from their grip. It is tempting to see Nietzsche as
a precursor to the psychoanalyst on this point, insofar as the analyst
tries to disengage analysands from the nefarious influence of their fan-
tasies. The big difference is that the diagnosis Nietzsche gives does
not aim toward a truth beyond the fantasy. The critique of existing
fantasies that together shape the morality, culture and religion of a
particular society is but the first phase; it must be followed by the
creation of new fantasies which are the expression of different combi-
nations of stimuli, drives and affects, and through which a new way of
living becomes conceivable. It is of no matter to Nietzsche that these
new fantasies are, strictly speaking, every bit as fictional as the older
ones: “Why could the world which is of any concern to us—not be a
fiction?” (Nietzsche 1973, 47, italics in original) as he remarks in Jen-
seits von Gut und Böse (1886) (Beyond Good and Evil).
Considering the fact that this interpretation of fantasies is it-
self a fantasy, Nietzsche’s stated aim of creating and evaluating new
fantasies immediately raises the question of exactly whom or what
would determine the perspective from whence they should be judged.
There can be no talk of an external standpoint, a sort of ideal, ‘natural’
condition toward which the ‘good’ forces strive. For this would
amount to yet another doubling between the ‘real’ and ‘apparent’
world. When one considers that Nietzsche rejects this division insofar
as the drives, in his view, only function within the perspective in
which they are expressed, there can thus be no question of a deeper,
more true nature to which different fantasies point like the needle of a
compass.
Even less is there a purified subject that can oversee the situa-
tion and get a clear view on its fantasies in order to select the best
ones. For Nietzsche, the subject is not the result of a distance estab-
lished from the libidinal being, but is itself the expression of one spe-
cific drive among others. The subject thus cannot consider itself an
objective interpreter of its situation: on the contrary, it is itself already
an interpretation of the situation. Nietzsche argues that we must get
out of the habit of looking for some underlying agent (the subject, na-
ture) behind the process of interpretation, an agent that evaluates these
fantasies and guides their interpretation. There is only a ‘will to
power’ of the affects, which cannot be reduced here to a simple thirst
for power, the inclination to control. In its most ideal form, Nietz-
sche’s ‘will to power’ is precisely the expression of a favourably dis-
posed profusion of energy, an active, creative power that increases the
possibilities of the organism through the integration of more and
manifold forces. Thus, the ‘will to power’ does not strive for the con-
struction of a reductionist, generalised system; rather, in the process of
interpretation it aims at the unclassifiable detail, the little nuance
through which appear subtle powers that slip through the threads of
language.
This ‘will to power’ is, more specifically, the power that ex-
presses the chaotic complexity of the libidinal being in all its different
intensities and nuances. It is power that confronts the subject with the
collection of drives and affects from which it is constructed, thereby
enabling it to explore and use for its own development the unknown
forces that traverse its body. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls
this ‘will to power’ by another name, the ‘pathos of distance’; that is
to say, the ability to take distance—not only from others but also from
oneself—as a means to expand the limited horizon of experience, to
open up new and unknown territories, with as the ultimate goal:
an ever-increasing widening of distance within the soul itself, the for-
mation of ever higher, rarer, more remote, tenser, more comprehen-
sive states, in short precisely the elevation of the type ‘man’, the con-
tinual ‘self-overcoming of man’, to take a moral formula in a supra-
moral sense. (Nietzsche 1973, 173)
We can read Nietzsche’s definition here as a foreshadowing of what

Julia Kristeva would later call the subject in process: a subject whose
symbolic identity is broken open, transformed and ‘overcome’ by
what Kristeva calls the semiotic: the action of subtle libidinal proc-
esses that cannot be signified in language, yet which exert a translin-
guistic influence.
Like Kristeva, Nietzsche already valued art as the ideal place
for the formulation of these processes, the foremost place where the
‘pathos of distance’ can develop and where new fantasies can be ex-
pressed. But for Kristeva, art ultimately can only serve as a step on the
way to more penetrating psychoanalytic interpretation. Seen from a
Nietzschean standpoint, she does not go far enough in her ‘fictionali-
sation’ of the psychoanalytic discourse because she does not follow it
through to the Thing itself that forms the basis of these psychoanalytic
fictions. For her, the Thing is a pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic experience
to which the subject always desires to return, even in psychoanalytic
interpretation itself. Beside the fiction there still remains the pure de-
sire for the Thing, even if that desire can only be formulated in fic-
tional constructions. Nietzsche is more radical in this regard: for him,
nothing exists beyond the fiction, and thus beyond the fantasy. In the
introduction to Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) (The Gay Science),
Nietzsche pleas for a return to the pre-Platonic universe of the ancient
Greeks, who did not believe in a hidden truth behind appearance, but
rather were seduced by the creative power of their fantasies:
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is
to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appear-
ance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of ap-
pearance. Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity. And is
not this precisely what we are again coming back to…? And are we
not in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And
therefore – artists? (Nietzsche 1974, 38, italics in original)
From the 1960’s onward, Nietzsche’s plea to become ‘adorers of

forms, of tones, of words’ would certainly reverberate throughout
French literature and philosophy, aided by the 1962 publication of
Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie (Nietzsche and Philo-
sophy). This monograph not only made a significant impact on the
orientation of the post-structuralist reception of Nietzsche in France,

but was also crucial for the later development of Deleuze’s own philo-
sophy.
In what follows I will examine how Deleuze tried to rethink
the psychoanalytic fantasy within a Nietzschean context, and how he
then—under the influence of Félix Guattari—would go on to replace it
with the notion of the program. Having illustrated the difference be-
tween these two concepts by means of Gradiva, I would ultimately
like to investigate the role this program might play in the reading of
literature, and to do this from the perspective of Deleuze’s reinterpre-
tation of perversion in view of a few of his literary analyses.
Gilles Deleuze: from lack to problem
Gilles Deleuze initially wrote primarily about philosophers and au-

thors: his 1953 debut was a classic introduction to Hume’s empiri-
cism, and alongside his study on Nietzsche, in the1960’s he also pub-
lished books about Kant (1963), Proust (1964), Bergson (1966), Sa-
cher-Masoch (1967) and Spinoza (1968). He eventually began to de-
velop his own philosophy with Différence et répétition (1968) (Differ-
ence and Repetition) and Logique du sens (1969) (The Logic of
Sense), which was in line with Nietzsche’s anti-Platonic revaluation of
the phantasmatic appearance as the only reality. He summarises his
philosophical project in Différence et repetition as follows: “Renver-
ser le platonisme signifie ceci: dénier le primat d’un orginal sur la co-
pie, d’un modèle sur l’image”. (Deleuze 1968a, 92) [Overturning Pla-
tonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of
model over image (Deleuze 2004a, 80)]
Starting from this Nietzschean perspective, Deleuze equally
resists the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasmatic object of
desire as a copy of the lost, mythical body of the mother, the unattain-
able ‘original’ on the other side of the fantasy. For Deleuze, this object
of desire is, in the first place, a virtual object that can indeed enter into
relationships with figures from the surroundings, like the mother, but
at no point can it be reduced to their substitute: “Bref, il n’y a pas de
terme ultime, nos amours ne renvoient pas à la mère; simplement la
mère occupe dans la série constitutive de notre présent une certaine
place par rapport à l’objet virtuel”. (Deleuze 1968a, 139) [In short,
there is no ultimate term - our loves do not refer back to the mother; it
is simply that the mother occupies a certain place in relation to the vir-
tual object in the series which constitutes our present. (Deleuze 2004a,
130)] The difference between Deleuze and psychoanalysis becomes
clear when we compare this virtual object with Winnicott’s transi-
tional object.
When the child gets caught up in its game and turns different,
inanimate things (cuddly toys, a toy car, a melody) into transitional
objects, Winnicott interprets them as objects that are intended to re-
store, via a phantasmatic staging, the broken bond with the (mother’s)
body. This can in fact only happen on a fictitious level insofar as a
real restoration would lead to an annihilation of subjectivity. As Lacan
remarked, the staging of the fantasy therefore must maintain some-
thing ‘unreal’ about it.
In contrast, Deleuze did not believe whatsoever that the
child’s game aimed at restoring a lost unity from the past: the desire
expressed in this game is primarily a desire to construct something
new. Deleuze also does not view the unreal, ‘virtual’ character of this
object as protection against the destructive proximity of the real thing
which is the libidinal being: its virtual character is precisely inherent
to an experimental process that tries to bring about a new approach, an
unprecedented arrangement of reality.
What goes for the child’s play also goes for adult fantasies.
Deleuze gives, in Abécédaire—an extensive television interview with
Claire Parnet from 1988—the simple example of a woman who wants
to buy a dress to illustrate desire. (cf. ‘D as in Desire’, Deleuze & Par-
net 2004a) It is foolish, in Deleuze’s opinion, to see the dress itself as
the desired object: the dress becomes worthy of being desired when
the woman can imagine a context in which the dress is associated with
certain people, with a certain situation, a certain atmosphere or, in
short, to the effect she hopes to create with the dress. In contrast to
psychoanalysis, with Deleuze the fantasy takes on a much more active
function: from the primitive hunter who envisions a future weapon in
the branch lying on the ground, to the scientist who finds in various
chemical formulas a virtual image of the medicine he is hoping to dis-
cover, a possible future in a virtual environment is always evoked via
a fantasy. By forming an association between the virtual impression
and the dead branch, between the pangs of hunger and thought of his
prey, the chance is created for the primitive hunter to expand his hold
on the environment by transforming the branch into a spear. The fact
that, once actualised, the virtual object in the end does not turn out to
be the ultimate, totally satisfactory object, has not so much to do with
the fact that it cannot incarnate the Thing as with the fact that reality
continually makes new virtualities possible, thereby bringing about
new challenges. The branch may well turn out to be a suitable spear,
but this object leads directly to yet another new, virtual object: a spear
that can be thrown faster and over a longer distance—it is this fantasy
that will eventually be actualised in the invention of the bow-and-
arrow.
Deleuze does not belong in the camp of those who believe that
desire results in an ineradicable lack. He views desire as leading to the
formulation of a concrete problem:
[E]n même temps que le désir trouve le principe de sa différence avec
le besoin dans l’objet virtuel, il apparaît non pas comme une puissance
de négation, ni comme l’élément d’une opposition, mais bien plutôt
comme une force de recherche, questionnante et problématisante qui
se développe dans un autre champ que celui du besoin et de la satis-
faction. (Deleuze 1968a, 140-1)
[However, just as desire finds the principle of its difference from need
in the virtual object, so it appears neither as a power of negation nor as
an element of an opposition, but rather as a questioning, problematis-
ing and searching force which operates in a different domain than that
of desire and satisfaction. (Deleuze 2004a, 131)]
Desire appears at the moment that internal and external stimuli and
unconscious processes interact in such a way that they combine to
form a problem that compels the organism to what Deleuze calls an
individuation: the result of a particular combination of varying forces
and intensities that work upon an organism, and by which it evolves
and develops new methods of interacting with the changing context.
In her introduction to Deleuze from 2002, Claire Colebrook illustrates
this with the simple example of the reaction to light: “the problem of
‘light’ is posed, creatively, by different forms of life in different ways:
photosynthesis for plants, the eye for animal organisms, colour for the
artist. A problem is life’s way of responding to or questioning what is
not itself.” (Colebrook 2003, 21)
This individuation is not a consciously planned transformation
of the organism. The plant has not chosen consciously to perform pho-
tosynthesis, but individualises itself at a certain moment in this direc-
tion through the interplay of chemical and physical processes. At a
higher level, a fantasy is also a result of this kind of individuation: just

like the spontaneous evolution of an organism, it appears as what
Deleuze describes, in Logique du sens, as “un pur événement”
(Deleuze 2002a, 245) [a pure event (Deleuze 2001, 241)], an anony-
mous occurrence, the unexpected result of different stimuli, drives and
affects reacting upon one another. According to Deleuze we should
view the fantasy as an indeterminate happening, an infinitive-
occurrence without a concrete agent: “Le phantasme est inséparable
du verbe infinitif, et témoigne par là de l’événement pur.” (250) [The
phantasm is inseparable from the infinitive mode of the verb and bears
witness thereby to the pure event. (245)]
At first glance, this interpretation of the fantasy comes close
to the Lacanian interpretation of the symbolic fantasy as an ‘agent-
less’ occurrence in which a few signifiers coincidentally become at-
tached to the jouissance of the libidinal being. Thus, for psychoanaly-
sis as well, the symbolic fantasy is an infinitive verb: considering the
fact that it is the unconscious support of the phantasmatic scene, the
subject cannot be posited as present in the fantasy. It is only by means
of an imaginary approach to the fantasy that the subject finally ap-
pears on stage as the supposed agent of the desire that is being per-
formed.
According to Lacan, confrontation with the fundamental fan-
tasy also unmasks the illusion of an autonomously acting and deciding
ego, an illusion that, ideally, disappears as a disturbing symptom in
the analysis. But the subject ‘survives’ both the destruction of its im-
aginary fantasies as well as the traversal of the symbolic fantasy. It is
this subject that, at the end of the analysis, is considered capable of
recognising the emptiness on which it is founded and to accept the
impossibility of its desire. In contrast to Lacan, Deleuze nevertheless
rejects such a distinction between the imaginary ego and a symbolic
subject that transcends this ego. For Deleuze, beyond the ego there is
nothing but the chaotic, anonymous tangle of intensities that the fan-
tasy brings to expression:
Ce qui apparaît dans le phantasme, c’est le mouvement par lequel le
moi s’ouvre à la surface et libère les singularités acosmiques, imper-
sonnelles et pré-individuelles qu’il emprisonnait. A la lettre, il les lâ-
che comme des spores, et éclate dans ce délestage. (249)
[What appears in the phantasm is the movement by which the ego

opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and
pre-individual singularities which it has imprisoned. It literally re-

leases them like spores and bursts as it gets unburdened. (244)]
This also implies that there is no underlying, fundamental fantasy to

discover behind the numerous imaginary fantasies. Deleuze argues
that psychoanalysis, by placing too much emphasis on the ever-
returning fundamental fantasy, neglects the fact that every manifesta-
tion of the fantasy is a new ‘event’, and is the result of a specific link-
ing of ‘singularities’ that continually creates new, unique individuali-
ties in a continuously fluctuating context.
If we follow Deleuze’s line of thinking, it makes no sense
whatsoever to go in search of this fundamental fantasy, let alone to try
to traverse it in order to finally be able to accept the fundamental lack
of our being-toward-death as the only truth. The desire to go beyond
the fantasy can only lead to a resentful refusal of life.
While Deleuze, in Différence et répétition and Logique du
sens, often made use of the psychoanalytic conceptual arsenal, these
points of disagreement with Lacan make clear that his Nietzschean in-
spiration is ultimately difficult to reconcile with psychoanalytic the-
ory. And yet his definitive rejection of psychoanalysis only took place
through his friendship with Félix Guattari, whom he met during the
turbulent student protest at the end of the sixties. Guattari was one of
Lacan’s students who increasingly turned away from the ideological
dominance of psychoanalytic schemes of thought. It was he who con-
vinced Deleuze to abandon his half-hearted relationship with psycho-
analysis and together with him to formulate a radical alternative. In an
interview from 1988, included in Pourparlers (1990) (Negotiations),
Deleuze described this evolution as follows:
[C]e n’est pas moi qui ai sorti Félix de la psychanalyse, c’est lui qui
m’en a sorti. Dans mon étude sur Masoch, puis dans Logique du sens,
je croyais avoir des résultats […] qui n’étaient pas conformes à la psy-
chanalyse, mais qui pouvaient se concilier avec elle. Au contraire, Fé-
lix était et restait psychanalyste, élève de Lacan, mais à la manière
d’un ‘fils’ qui sait déjà qu’il n’y a pas de conciliation possible.
(Deleuze 1990, 197)
[Oddly enough, it wasn’t me who rescued Félix from psychoanalysis;

he rescued me. In my study on Masoch, and then in The Logic of
Sense, I thought I’d discovered things […] that contradicted psycho-
analysis but could be reconciled with it. Félix, on the other hand, had
been and was still a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacan’s but like a
‘son’ who already knew that reconciliation was impossible. (Deleuze

1995, 144)]
From fantasy to program
The first and now famous result of the collaboration between Deleuze
and Guattari would appear in 1972: L’Anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et
schizophrénie. The book signified a full frontal attack on the privi-
leged position occupied by psychoanalysis in Parisian philosophy.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis always again re-
duced desire to an oedipal pre-history which saddled the subject with
a fundamental lack that the analysand, through an endless process of
analysis, must learn to accept. In their view, psychoanalysis in this
way completely missed the creative role played by desire in the devel-
opment of virtual constructions, the production of new links between
stimuli, drives and affects, and the creation of unexpected possibilities
for the future: “Dis que c’est Œdipe, sinon t’auras une gifle. Voilà que
le psychanalyste ne demande même plus: ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est, tes
machines désirantes à toi?’ mais s’écrie: ‘Réponds papa-maman quand
je te parle!’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1995, 54) [Say that it’s Oedipus, or
you’ll get a slap in the face. The psychoanalyst no longer says to the
patient: ‘Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won’t you?’
Instead he screams: ‘Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to
you!’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004a, 49)]
With L’Anti-Œdipe, Deleuze and Guattari not only distanced
themselves from psychoanalytic theory, but also from its specific ver-
nacular. This included that the concept of fantasy that Deleuze, in his
Différence et répétition and Logique du sens, had still interpreted posi-
tively, from this point forward would only be understood according to
its strict psychoanalytic meaning; namely, as yet another expression of
the reactive, pessimistic psychoanalytic view on desire:
le désir apparaît comme ce qui produit le fantasme et se produit lui-

même en se détachant de l’objet, mais aussi bien en redoublant le
manque, en le portant à l’absolu, en en faisant une ‘incurable insuf-
fisance d’être’, un ‘manque-à-être qu’est la vie’. (33)
[desire is regarded as what produces the fantasy and produces itself by

detaching itself from the object, though at the same time it intensifies
the lack by making it absolute: an ‘incurable insufficiency of being,’
an ‘inability-to-be that is life itself’. (27)]
Contrary to psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the neurotic subject,

the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari takes as its starting point
the impersonal delirium of the schizophrenic. They find in this delir-
ium the expression of all those different forces, affects and intensities
that are manifested in the body and which cannot be reduced to one
single fundamental fantasy.
One of the examples they discuss is Nietzsche’s delirium as
documented in the final series of letters that he wrote from Turin at
the beginning of January, 1899, just before his total collapse. In these
letters, Nietzsche crawls into the skin of multiple personalities, from
Julius Caesar to Vittorio Emanuele, from Dionysius to the Crucified.
Commenting on this in a letter to Jacob Burckhardt, he writes: “The
unpleasant thing, and the one that nags at my modesty, is that at root
every name in history is I” (Nietzsche, quoted in Deleuze & Guattari
2004a, 95, italics in original).
Seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, a delirium such as
this is, in the first place, a last-ditch attempt at self-preservation. Psy-
chosis is distinguished by a ‘rejection’ of the master signifier that the
subject attaches to its symbolic identity. In its most concrete form this
is the surname of the father which, in a patriarchal society, is given to
the child—this is why Lacan calls this signifier the Nom-du-Pére (The
Name-of-the-Father). In the structure of psychosis, the connection to
the symbolic via this master signifier is missing. When this lack ap-
pears in the psychotic patient, the patient loses its grip on reality and is
handed over, defenceless, to the libidinal being. Nietzsche’s imaginary
identifications with historical figures and gods can thus be interpreted
as a final, desperate attempt to find a substitute for the rejected
‘Name-of-the-Father’. But according to Deleuze and Guattari, in
Nietzsche’s case these multiple pseudonyms have nothing to do with a
frenetic search for a stable identity, but are rather a condensed rendi-
tion of those forces that are traversing his body, making any stable
identification impossible:
La théorie des noms propres ne doit pas se concevoir en termes de re-
présentation, mais renvoie à la classe des ‘effets’: ceux-ci ne sont pas
une simple dépendance de causes, mais le remplissement d’un do-
maine, l’effectuation d’un système de signes. On le voit bien en phy-
sique, où les noms propres désignent de tels effets dans des champs de
potentiels (effet Joule, effet Seebeck, effet Kelvin). Il en est en histoire
comme en phsyique: un effet Jeanne d’Arc, un effet Héliogabale –
tous les noms de l’histoire, en non pas le nom du père… (103, italics
in original)
[The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of

representation; it refers instead to the class of ‘effects’: effects that are
not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and
the operation of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics,
where proper names designate such effects within fields of potentials:
the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like
physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect – all the names of
history, and not the name of the father. (95, italics in original)]
And yet the schizoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to de-
velop from these psychotic deliria is anything but an idealisation of
schizophrenia as a clinical syndrome. Schizophrenia is only valuable
to the extent that it makes visible the multiplicity of anonymous forces
from which the individual has arisen and that schizoanalysis then tries
to explore in search for new connections between these forces. The
goal pursued by schizoanalysis thus has little to do with transgressive
excess, self-destruction or the loss of self in madness or drug addic-
tion. The schizophrenic clinical syndrome, for Deleuze and Guattari,
primarily points to the failures of these kinds of self-experimentation.
Considering that psychoanalysis and psychiatry are confronted solely
with these failures, they create a distorted picture of schizophrenia as
purely negative, destructive experience.
Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie II (A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II), the follow-up to L’Anti-
Œdipe which appeared in 1980, continued in the same ‘experimental’
vein. In this book, Deleuze and Guattari bring the notion of the ‘pro-
gram’ to the fore as an alternative to the psychoanalytic ‘fantasy’.
Nevertheless, this does not discount the fact that the ‘program’ is
closely linked to the ‘fantasy’ described by Deleuze in La logique du
sens as a means by which ‘a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual
singularities’ can be liberated from the reactive envelope of the ego.
The experimental program in A Thousand Plateaus is also aimed at
stimulating new virtual constructions and establishing new links be-
tween forces both internal to the body and forces passing between
bodies. The combination of all these lines of force results in an im-
mense ‘cartography’, a map with which the body provides coordinates
for itself and its environment, thereby transforming chaos into a dif-
ferentiated world. This often leads Deleuze and Guattari back to the
example of a tick which, with an absolute minimum of affects—

climbing up a stem to the light, dropping toward the scent of a passing
mammal, penetrating at the spot where its prey is least protected by
fur—can create for itself a territory.
The human being, in contrast to the tick, is not only a being in
possession of infinitely more affects, but additionally is always devel-
oping new programs with which it can forge new links, thereby en-
larging its horizon of experience. In this way, the body is diverted
from the lines that it had formed to this point; its territory expands and
what Deleuze and Guattari designate as a ligne de fuite (line of flight)
comes into existence; a ‘deterritorialising’ line of becoming that
points the body toward a virtual object that drags this body along with
it, away from its familiar environs. Deleuze and Guattari call this pro-
cess of transformation a devenir (becoming).
A similar example of a line of flight is a ‘becoming-animal’,
in which a certain animal becomes the virtual object of a specific pro-
gram. Deleuze and Guattari stress that this becoming-animal does not
have to do with imitating an animal, with mimicking its behaviour or
with sacralising it into a sort of totem or symbol: in becoming, the
animal is at no moment whatsoever a metaphor for something else;
even less is it the intention to effectively be this animal. There is also
no clear goal for the line of flight because the virtual object toward
which one escapes is itself caught up in that process of becoming, and
in this process is itself subject to change. A simple but indeed illumi-
nating illustration can help clarify this ‘becoming-animal’: the age-old
dream of man to be capable of flying, the dream of becoming a bird.
We should not interpret this desire in the abstract, but rather as
a collection of concrete, desirable affects (floating on the wind, the
panoramic perspective, speed . . .) that seem fundamentally incom-
patible with the structure of the human body. It was this virtual con-
struction of a ‘becoming-bird’ that captured the imagination of many
inventors and artists, the most famous of which was undoubtedly Leo-
nardo da Vinci. Numerous sketches and models of flying machines
bear witness to his attempts to realise this program. The failure of
these plans comes from the fact that he wanted to imitate the bird too
precisely: the flapping of one’s wings, propulsion by muscular exer-
tion, etc. ‘Becoming-bird’ could only come to fruition through con-
struction of an apparatus that in many ways did not resemble a bird,
that worked according to other principles, with different parts (like the
combustion engine) to which Leonardo had no access in his day. The

Wright brothers’ solution to the problem also signified, however, the
end of this ‘becoming-bird’ as line of flight, the seductiveness of
which effectively derived from its virtual character. Flying became an
experience that was part of the ‘territory’ of modern humanity, a cou-
pling of body and machine which quickly became self-evident. This
perhaps explains the fascination for the work of an artist such as
Panamarenko. His fantastic machines, which will never get off the
ground, serve as virtual objects that once again bring the program of
flight to the foreground, thereby keeping open the line of flight of be-
coming-bird.
A difference in approach becomes apparent if we compare our
Deleuzean-inspired analysis with the way Freud interprets da Vinci’s
flight plans in ‘Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci’
(1910) (Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood). For
Freud, da Vinci’s desire to fly is primarily a distorted ‘copy’ of his
‘true’, hidden desire for sexual intercourse: “But why do so many
people dream of being able to fly? The answer that psycho-analysis
gives is that to fly or to be a bird is only a disguise for another wish,”
namely, “a longing to be capable of sexual performance.” (Freud
1957, 125-6) This leads to Freud’s conclusion: “Thus aviation, too,
which in our day is at last achieving its aim, has its infantile erotic
roots.” (Freud 1957, 126)
While for modern readers this passage from Freud is certainly
a rather caricatural example of a reductionist reading, it nevertheless
illustrates all the more clearly the inherent drive of psychoanalysis to
penetrate deeper into the layers of repression by means of careful ex-
cavation in order to finally unearth a different, unconscious desire. In
his Dialogues with Claire Parnet from 1977, Deleuze pits the horizon-
tally-oriented, geographic research of schizoanalysis against this verti-
cal image of the unconscious as an archaeological site:
L’analyse de l’inconscient devrait être une géographie plutôt qu’une
histoire. Quelles lignes se trouvent bloquées, calcifiées, murées, en
impasse, tombant dans un trou noir, ou taries, quelles autres sont acti-
ves ou vivantes par quoi quelque chose s’échappe et nous entraîne?
(Deleuze & Parnet 2004b, 122)
[The analysis of the unconscious should be a geography rather than a

history. Which lines appear blocked, moribund, closed in, dead-ended,
falling into a black hole or exhausted, which others are active or
lively, which allow something to escape and draw us along? (Deleuze

& Parnet 2007, 102)]
It goes without saying that an interpretation of the unconscious as di-

vergent from Freud’s as this one necessarily implies a very different
analysis of literary texts as well. Before dealing with Deleuze’s ap-
proach to literature, I would first like to return again to Jensen’s Gra-
diva, a novel that can help us to elucidate the difference between ar-
chaeological psychoanalysis and geographic schizoanalysis.
Gradiva revisited
As we saw in the first chapter, Hanold’s journey was, for Freud, little
more than a neurotic flight, a way of avoiding confrontation with his
unconscious desires. The desire that is initially sublimated into his
fascination for the Gradiva-relief ultimately is drawn to the surface by
Zoe, his childhood sweetheart, through her intelligent approach.
From a Deleuzean perspective, the trip to Italy symbolises
anything but a way to dodge desire. On the contrary, the journey itself
is the expression of Hanold’s desire to escape from his sterile study
and his boring life as an office archaeologist. His ‘Pompeii fantasy’ is
therefore not a delusion repressing a true desire, but rather an entire
program that enables Hanold to follow those lines of flight that can
transport him beyond his limited academic ‘territory’, and by which
he can map out a cartography of unknown affects, intensities, sensa-
tions of speed, colour, movement. The importance of these new sensa-
tions is also clear to see in Jensen’s description of Hanold’s journey
through Italy:
He had a feeling that a Nature unknown to him was surrounding the
railway tracks, as if he must have passed through these places before
in continual twilight, or during a grey rainfall, and was now seeing
them for the first time in their golden abundance of color. A few times
he surprised himself in a desire, formerly unknown to him, to alight
and seek afoot the way to this or that place because it looked to him as
if it might be concealing something peculiar or mysterious. (Jensen
1993, 23-4)
Freud passes over these impressions of Italy in his interpretation be-

cause he, as a consummate Platonist, always wants to part the curtains
of these sensual impressions, to exchange the superficial appearance
of things for that of which they are, in his eyes, but a reflection, an
imperfect copy. For Deleuze, on the contrary, the spectator never sees
an object or a landscape as a metaphor, as a substitute for something
else: it is a compilation of a series of stimuli, affects and drives that
are transformed immediately into a virtual object. The same goes for
the foot in the relief that aroused Hanold’s desire. For Freud, this ob-
ject was a substitute for Zoe’s foot as Hanold had perceived it many
years earlier when they were playing together, or perhaps it was even
just an imaginary construction on the basis of a signifier—her family
name, Bertgang. But as Deleuze puts it in ‘Ce que les enfants disent’
(1983) (What Children Say), included in Critique et clinique (1983)
(Essays critical and clinical), the unconscious has not so much to do
with “des personnes et des objets, mais à des trajets et des devenirs; ce
n’est plus un inconscient de commémoration, mais de mobilisation”
(Deleuze 2002b, 84) [persons and objects, but with trajectories and
becomings; it is no longer an unconscious of commemoration but one
of mobilization (Deleuze 1997, 63)]
Sylvére Lotringer, in his article, ‘The Fiction of Analysis’
(1977), offers an interesting reinterpretation of the Gradiva novel
which is heavily influenced by Deleuze. He suggests that Hanold’s
desire is not directed toward a person (Zoe) or to a fetish object (a
woman’s foot), but to the trajectory, the becoming that virtually ex-
presses the foot as it strides along. According to Lotringer, Freud is
mistaken when he shifts the accent of his analysis from “the walking
woman” to “the walking woman.” (Lotringer 1977, 183, italics in ori-
ginal) Freud is therefore incapable of understanding Hanold’s desire, a
desire that forms part of a program that compels him into the street in
search of women’s feet, “which starts the scientist moving, which
throws him into the streets like an ankle-high dog.” (Lotringer 1977,
178)
Lotringer’s analysis, in which the meeting with the Gradiva
figure is the absolute beginning of Hanold’s history, is in sharp dis-
tinction from the one given by Freud, where the fixation on the foot
with which the story begins is the result of a lengthy process of re-
pression preceding the fixation, and which is only later revealed. First
came the sincere love for a girl from his youth, and then came the es-
cape into asexual science; thereafter, his desire for her threatens to
erupt once again as he looks at the Gradiva relief, which prompts a re-
newed attempt at escape, this time to Italy. When Hanold is finally
able to recognise the truth of his original desire, the entire, hidden his-
tory is brought to light and the story ends with the promise of a happy
marriage.
On the other hand, if we follow the apparently naïve sequence
of Jensen’s exposition, there was first the relief that presented itself as
a virtual object, but which did not refer to any other object than itself.
The figure of the Gradiva is only associated with Zoe once Zoe Ber-
trang happens to appear at the same location where Hanold’s becom-
ing-Gradiva has led him. The program is coupled in this way to a mass
of childhood memories, a connection that eventually causes the line of
flight to change direction and return to its starting point: by directing
itself towards Zoe’s foot, Hanold’s program of becoming-Gradiva
changes into a reactive construction that leads to a reterritorialisation.
It is thus only when this point is reached that Hanold is in flight from
his unconscious desires: he departs from the path which Gradiva’s gait
had opened to him and returns with Zoe to the bourgeois life that he
had earlier tried to escape. Nothing of the active program that had sent
Hanold on his explorations remains except for passively watching as
Zoe, at his request, walks elegantly ahead of him.
From reading these two different interpretations of Jensen’s
novel we should already have a preliminary idea of the way in which
Deleuze presents, in a radically different light, the relationship be-
tween body, literature and reader.
Literature as line of flight
Glancing through the work of Deleuze, we notice that, as with Freud,

literature often occupies the place of the privileged Other, an ideal in-
terlocutor that both legitimates as well as illustrates his theory. The
major difference is that for Freud, literary expression ultimately must
be accompanied by an external analytic interpretation. For the psycho-
analyst, an author is often no more than an analysand who has the gift
of being able to write about fantasies and symptoms in an ex-
ceptionally precise fashion. Deleuze wanted to reverse that standpoint:
for Deleuze, the work of Sacher-Masoch is much more than a case
study of the sexual behaviour named after him and included by psy-
choanalysis among the ranks of the perversions. The pervert is some-
one who cannot tolerate that the symbolic Other imposes signifiers
upon him, signifiers that determine the relationship with the libidinal
being and deny the subject direct access to its enjoyment. The pervert
is in no way prepared to sacrifice this enjoyment in exchange for the

unsatisfiable desire offered by the symbolic. And yet the pervert does
not reject the lack in the symbolic order, as does the psychotic, be-
cause he realises that the subject only continues to exist on account of
language, which establishes a distance with respect to the libidinal be-
ing. The lack is thus not rejected, as in psychosis, but is denied, dis-
avowed: every symbolic representative of the law is challenged and
made ridiculous, and at the same time is forced to look on powerlessly
as the pervert replaces the law with a contract that gives him excessive
enjoyment.
At first glance, no one seems further from the pervert than the
masochist, who submits willingly to the law of the Other in the form
of a merciless master(ess) who demands total obedience and adminis-
ters severe punishment for supposed infractions on entirely arbitrary
grounds. The masochist thereby becomes the passive instrument of the
other’s enjoyment and effaces himself entirely from the scenario. And
yet the masochist is the one who has everything under control insofar
as it is he who determines the subjection by means of a contract, and
who can suspend the performance of the masochistic fantasy with a
contractually arranged password. Thus the masochist controls and can
manipulate the Other’s enjoyment, and enjoys this position of power.
This is in sharp contrast to the passive neurotic subject who is indeed
at the mercy of: (1) a phantasmatic enjoyment outside its control, and
(2) the whims of the Other that prescribes an arbitrary identity on the
subject until its death—without providing the password with which
the subject could stop the game.
By means of the contract, the pervert raises to the dignity of
the Thing a certain fetish, a concrete object that excites him im-
measurably, and yet he knows very well that this object is, all the
same, an unreal attribute in a fictitious world. The latter is continually
emphasised by the exaggeratedly kitschy complexion of many fetish
objects and the theatrical staging of S&M practices. The pervert can
participate in the game with complete abandon, and enjoy it immeas-
urably, precisely because one knows that it is just a game.
The neurotic subject can only dream of the enjoyment to
which the pervert seems to have such free access because the neurotic
does not dare to defy the judgmental Other and finds perverse activi-
ties either too immoral, too risky or too shameful to participate in
them. Psychoanalysis, however, makes clear that this is a much too
rosy picture of the perverse structure. For, while the pervert indeed
does not submit to the law, he is all the more compulsorily bound to
the contract that replaces the law. The perverse relation to enjoyment
is exceptionally rigid insofar as it can only be attained by carrying out
a specific contract. Furthermore, concerning the law, which the per-
vert wants to reveal and confirm precisely through his transgressive
behaviour: even if this law is but a powerless authority that must be
continually challenged, the pervert has no means to escape it.
As with its view on schizophrenia, this psychoanalytic ap-
proach to perversion is still determined too unilaterally by those pa-
tients whose behaviour lands them either in psychiatric clinics or
prison. Furthermore, the component of sexual deviation is focused
upon too exclusively. From a Deleuzean perspective, we could also
expand the field of perversion to every form of ‘deviant’; ‘improper’
use of an object or situation. In this way, perversion appears as an in-
genious program in which an element loses its original function, is de-
territorialised and incorporated into a virtual construction. One should
also note here that the notion of the program itself already involves
numerous aspects that could be interpreted as masochistic: it strives
for the destruction of the reactive ego through total submission to the
will of an Other—in this case, the Nietzschean ‘will to power’—and
turns one’s own body into a subordinate instrument in an impersonal
experimental process that erases or ‘overcomes’ one’s current identity.
At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari recognise no external author-
ity that can pass judgment on this process of becoming, an authority
like psychoanalysis, for instance.
In his Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: le froid et le cruel
(1967) (Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty), Deleuze suggests that it
makes no sense to go looking in Sacher-Masoch for a primordial
erotic scene that would serve as an explanation of his masochism be-
cause the perverse experiment goes far beyond the boundaries of
strictly sexual enjoyment. Sacher-Masoch’s ‘poetics’ starts from a
personal experience that he even calls “la figure vivante” (Sacher-
Masoch, quoted in Deleuze 2004b, 251) [the living figure (Deleuze
1991, 273)], which he then intends to reformulate as a problem con-
cerning one’s world-view. Rather than using his writing as an intimate
scene in which he, as a passive spectator, can endlessly enter into his
perverse contract with the reader as the third party who merely ob-
serves, powerlessly, Sacher-Masoch uses his writing as an active

search for:
une structure théorique, idéologique, qui lui donne la valeur d’une

conception générale de la nature humaine et du monde. Définissant
l’art du roman, Masoch disait qu’il fallait aller de la ‘figure’ au ‘pro-
blème’: partir du phantasme obsédant pour s’élever jusqu’au pro-
blème, jusqu’à la structure théorique où le problème se pose. (47-8)
[a theoretical and ideological structure which transforms it into a gen-

eral conception of human nature and of the world. Talking about the
art of the novel, Masoch remarked that we must proceed from the
‘schema’ to the ‘problem’; from our starting point in the obsessive
fantasy we must progress to the theoretical framework where the prob-
lem arises. (53)]
For Deleuze, the pervert becomes a Nietzschean philosopher-artist

who tries by means of his program to develop new customs that seem
inconceivable in current society. In this regard, the work of Sacher-
Masoch is much more than a pertinent case study about deviant sexual
behaviour. Deleuze believes that he is an artist “à la manière de ceux
qui savent extraire de nouvelles formes, et créer de nouvelles manières
de sentir et de penser, tout un nouveau langage.” (Deleuze 2004b, 16)
[in that [he] discovered new forms of expression, new ways of think-
ing and feeling and an entirely original language. (Deleuze 1991, 16)]
It should be clear that this form of perversion has little to do
with perversion as diagnosed in psychiatric patients or delinquents. In
their case, the perverse program is indeed stagnant: an possibly ex-
perimental, creative strategy has become fixed within an inflexible,
perverse structure. This ultimately leads to a dead end, and the only
recourse left to the subject is the continual repetition of a sterile sce-
nario and an ostentatious challenge to the law which, after all, cannot
change the (oedipal) societal structures.
This also explains Deleuze’s annoyed response to Michel
Cressole in ‘Lettre à un critique severe’ (1973) (Letter to a Harsh
Critic). Cressole had accused the author of L’Anti-Œdipe of hypocrisy
because he occupied a position in the university, was married and had
a daughter whom he, God forbid, allowed to play with dolls . . . how
scandalously conformist! Deleuze pointed out that it was naïve to be-
lieve that self-experimentation is only possible within the context of
an unconventional life: “tu devrais savoir qu’il ne suffit pas d’être cé-
libataire, sans enfants, pédé, membre de groupes, pour éviter Œdipe”

(Deleuze 1990, 21) [you should know that it’s not enough just to be
unmarried, not to have kids, to be gay, or belong to this or that group,
in order to get round the Oedipus complex (Deleuze 1995, 10)]. On
the contrary, one only gives the norm greater power and turns trans-
gression into an oedipal structure by so openly flirting with margins
and taboos. The real process of becoming perverse occurs in a clan-
destine and almost invisible manner, is a question of subtle manoeu-
vres and recombinations that are anything but limited to the classic
form of perversion:
Aucune raison que j’aille dans vos ghettos, puisque j’ai les miens. Le
problème n’a jamais consisté dans la nature de tel ou tel groupe exclu-
sif, mais dans des relations transversales où les effets produits par telle
ou telle chose (homosexualité, drogue, etc.) peuvent toujours être pro-
duits par d’autres moyens. (22, italics in original)
I don’t need to join you in your ghettos, because I’ve got my own. The
question’s nothing to do with the character of this or that exclusive
group, it’s to do with the transversal relations that ensure that any ef-
fects produced in some particular way (through homosexuality, drugs,
and so on) can always be produced by other means. (11, italics in ori-
ginal)
It is therefore absurd to either reject or celebrate a certain lifestyle in

absolute terms, and to associate it automatically with perversion. As
Deleuze and Guattari emphasise in their final joint book, Qu’est-ce
que la philosophie (1991) (What is Philosophy?), the perverse pro-
gram can only be judged from within its own context and according to
its own results:
Un mode d’existence est bon ou mauvais, noble ou vulgaire, plein ou
vide, indépendamment du Bien et du Mal, et de toute valeur transcen-
dante: il n’y a jamais d’autre critère que la teneur d’existence,
l’intensification de la vie. (Deleuze & Guattari 1991, 72)
[A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or

empty, independently of Good and Evil or any transcendent value:
there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the inten-
sification of life. (Deleuze & Guattari 1994a, 74)]
In their short study that appeared in 1975, Kafka – Pour une littéra-
ture mineure (Kafka: toward a minor literature), Deleuze and Guattari
once again prove that a perverse program does not need to be con-
spicuous to be successful. With this book they challenge the prevail-

ing view on Kafka’s work as a grotesque enlargement of his neurotic
fantasies and the cultivation of his oedipal complexes.
Not subscribing to the standard view that posits the primacy of
the Oedipus complex in the constitution of desire, Deleuze and Guat-
tari refuse to read Kafka’s work as one long staging of this complex
and the fundamental lack with which it burdens the subject. They be-
lieve, on the contrary, that the Oedipus complex is only a secondary
construction issuing from a desire to subject oneself to the law: “Bref,
ce n’est pas Œdipe qui produit la névrose, c’est la névrose, c’est-à-
dire le désir déjà soumis et cherchant à communique r sa propre sou-
mission, qui produit Œdipe.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975, 19, italics in
original) [In short, it’s not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neuro-
sis – that is, a desire that is already submissive and se arching to
communicate its own submission – that produces Oedipus. (Deleuze &
Guattari 1986, 10)]. While Deleuze and Guattari do add that there are
indeed traces of such a ‘subjected’ desire to be found in Kafka’s life
and work, they emphasise that Kafka’s writing program does primar-
ily aim to overcome and pervert the power of Oedipus. Psychoanalysis
remains blind to Kafka’s specific program, which cannot be explained
from the supposed Oedipus complex: “C’est pourquoi il est si fâ-
cheux, si grotesque, d’opposer la vie et l’écriture chez Kafka, de sup-
poser qu’il se réfugie dans la littérature par manque, faiblesse, impuis-
sance devant la vie. […] Une ligne de fuite, oui, mais pas du tout un
refuge.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975, 74) [That’s why it is so awful, so
grotesque, to oppose life and writing in Kafka, to suppose that he took
refuge in writing out of some sort of lack, weakness, impotence, in
front of life. […] A line of escape, yes – but not a refuge. (Deleuze &
Guattari 1986, 41)]
It annoys Deleuze immensely that psychoanalytic interpretive
schemes not only influence the literary critics, but the authors them-
selves as well. In Dialogues, he criticises the modern French novel for
just this, as he believes they are often written with a psychoanalytic
interpretation in the back of the author’s mind. It has thereby become
a literature of confession, “l’éloge le plus éhonté de la névrose”
(Deleuze & Parnet 2004b, 61) [the most shameless eulogy of neurosis
(Deleuze & Parnet 1997, 49)], the continual interpretation and rehash-
ing of personal experiences and traumas based on the psychoanalytic
notion of fantasy: “On ne dira pas assez le mal que le fantasme a fait à
l’écriture” (59) [It is impossible to overemphasize the harm that the

phantasm has done to writing (47)].
This rejection can somewhat astonish us, not only because
French thinkers as a rule are rather chauvinistic about French litera-
ture, but above all because Deleuze himself, with his Marcel Proust et
les signes (Proust and Signs) from 1964, had written a book about a
body of work that can be read as a precursor to the modern, narcissis-
tic confessional literature that he had dismissed in Dialogues. Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu is, in effect, a meticulously detailed,
and for the most part autobiographical roman à clef about the Parisian
lifestyle at the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as he
would later do with Kafka, Deleuze refused to reduce Proust’s work to
a personal fantasy, to surreptitious erotic frustration. He has no incli-
nation, as he has written, to view Swann’s jealous love for the coquet-
tish Odette as a repetition of the storyteller’s possessive love for his
mother, and is even less inclined to see the jealous relationship be-
tween Albertine and Marcel as a reflection of Proust’s own relation-
ship with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli. The love object in Recher-
che is a virtual object that is not desired in the context of a continually
returning, triangular oedipal relationship, but which rather forms part
of a program that tries to gain access to the unknown worlds evoked
by the beloved through an intimate coupling with the loved one:
“Dans la mesure où l’être aimé contient des mondes possibles […], il
s’agit d’expliquer, de déplier tous ces mondes.” (Deleuze 2003a, 167)
[Insofar as the beloved contains possible worlds, it is a matter of ex-
plicating, of unfolding all these worlds. (Deleuze 2000, 138)] Deleuze
takes a similar approach to the active role played by unconscious
memories in this series of novels. The autobiographical musings at the
basis of the novel are in no way a form of free association allowing
Proust to unearth repressed memories which—once remembered and
written down—would provide a more precise, more ‘real’ portrait of
his personality. It is rather that, in his accounts of ‘involuntary mem-
ory’, the author is transported beyond the limits of the distinct indi-
vidual:
Il ne s’agit plus de dire: créer, c’est se ressouvenir – mais se ressouve-
nir, c’est créer, c’est aller jusqu’à ce point où la chaîne associative se
rompt, saute hors de l’individu constitué, se trouve transférée à la
naissance d’un monde individuant. (134, italics in orginal)
[It is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to remember – but ra-

ther, to think is to create, not to remember is to create, is to reach that
point where the associative chain breaks, leaps ove r the constituted
individual, is transferred to the birth of an indiv iduating world
. (111,
italics in original)]
Deleuze contrasts Proust’s impersonal form of ‘remembrances’ with

Swann’s phantasmatic fascination for a musical phrase: Swann can
only interpret that which always seems to elude him while listening to
the phrase as the forbidden, inaccessible Thing, and not as an invita-
tion to go beyond his ‘I’, to ‘overcome’ himself and enter into a world
of unknown sensations and affects. This is why it also disturbs Swann
that the most intimate relationship to his libidinal being is only possi-
ble via a fantasy that comes from the Other, and thus always has
something alien about it. If we follow Deleuze’s reasoning, it is neces-
sary that Swann’s favorite phrase appears as something heterogeneous
and strange, as an unconscious, impersonal interconnection of affects
and sensations: the phrase, through its radical alterity, incites Swann
to get carried away in the line of flight that it outlines as it floats by,
‘so near and yet so infinitely remote’…
Proust the author succeeds at the moment that Swann the
character fails: when joined with other sensations, the phrase which
turns up again and again in Recherche exceeds Swann’s personal as-
sociations and becomes an expression of the ‘individuating world’ that
Proust creates in his work. It is this experience that is occluded when a
work of literature is reduced to the author’s prior personal history. In
contrast to “l’infini compte rendu des interprétations toujours un peu
sales” (Deleuze & Parnet 2004b, 59) [the infinite account of interpre-
tations which are always slightly disgusting (Deleuze & Parnet 2007,
48)] to which—in his view—a psychoanalytic reading gives rise, in
Dialogues Deleuze advocates that literature only be seen as “des
procès finis d’expérimentation, des protocoles d’expérience” (59) [fin-
ished processes of experimentation, protocols of experience (48)], as
“des programmes de vie” (59) [programs for life (48)] that may be
used as “des moyens de repérage pour conduire une expériment ation
qui déborde nos capacités de prévoir.” (60, italics in original) [means
of providing reference points for an experiment whi ch exceeds our ca-
pacities to foresee. (48, italics in orginal)]
It is for this reason that Deleuze prefers Anglo-Saxon litera-
ture which, in his opinion, pays more attention to the experimental
process that characters go through in the course of a book, and he ex-

amines how they develop a unique program along a line of flight that
carries them beyond themselves, beyond their familiar world. On this
point Deleuze invokes D. H. Lawrence who, in a discussion of the
American author Melville, describes the highest aim of literature as
“[t]o leave, to leave, to escape . . . to cross the horizon, enter into an-
other life . . .” (Lawrence, quoted in Deleuze & Parnet 2007, 36)
Deleuze distinguishes two literary traditions in Dialogues.
This distinction directly implies two different methods of reading,
which of course is very interesting for our inquiry into the relation be-
tween the literary text and the reader. In his ‘Lettre à un critique
sévère,’ Deleuze places both methods of reading right next to one an-
other:
C’est qu’il y a deux manières de lire un livre: ou bien on le considère
comme une boîte qui renvoie à un dedans, et alors on va chercher ses
signifiés […] Et l’on commentera, l’on interprétera, on demandera des
explications, on écrira le livre du livre, à l’infini. Ou bien l’autre ma-
nière: on considère un livre comme une petite machine a-signifiante;
le seul problème est ‘est-ce que ça fonctionne, et comment ça fonc-
tionne?’ Comment ça fonctionne pour vous? (Deleuze 1990, 17)
There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a
box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies […]
And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about
the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book
as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is ‘Does it
work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? (Deleuze
1995, 7-8)
It is clear that Deleuze prefers the second way of reading in which the
reader neither goes in search of hidden meanings—such as the au-
thor’s unconscious fantasies—nor tries to interpret those fantasies
evoked by one’s own reading. The reader should thus not ask why one
is so fascinated by a certain passage, by one particular character, but
rather how this fascination works and how it can lead to the construc-
tion of one’s own ‘program of life’ that enables one—in the words of
D.H. Lawrence—to enter into another life. The text hereby becomes a
virtual object which puts me on the trail of an unexpected line of
flight.
In this way, reading a text becomes a process of interpretation
driven by the ‘will to power’. This method of reading proves to be
diametrically opposed to the style of reading that imposes upon the

text a scheme of interpretation that has been chosen in advance, that
effectively ‘conquers’ a text by planting the flag of a particular theory.
That is to say, it is rather a matter of the reader, in combination with
the text, going through a unique process of individuation and expand-
ing the cartography of one’s body to those ‘ever higher, rarer, more
remote, tenser, more comprehensive states’ about which Nietzsche
wrote in his description of the pathos of distance. We can illustrate
this briefly by looking to Freud’s interpretations of literary texts, such
as the tragedy of Oedipus, which laid the foundation for the archaeo-
logical program of psychoanalysis. Freud’s interaction with these texts
gave rise to a program in which the unconscious is formulated as
problem, and in the course of which Freud himself got caught up in
the character of Oedipus as a virtual object, getting swept along in a
deterritorialising line of flight toward that inaccessible, unknown land
of the dream.
Freud’s program of reading, however, quickly became associ-
ated with reactive forces, foremost among which was the longing for
affirmation, as is often seen in his interpretation of Gradiva: it is no
longer a matter here of Freud becoming Oedipus, but of Zoe becoming
Freud. The unconscious’ line of flight becomes a centripetal line spi-
ralling toward one sterile endpoint: that selfsame oedipal scenario that
always turns up behind every utterance, behind every creation. Every
variation of desire could be traced back to an insatiable desire for that
one object, forever lost.
In his Nietzsche et la philosophie, Deleuze had already indi-
cated the amount of force required to protect thought from slumbering
reactive forces such as these, which bring a program to a halt and stag-
nate thought:
Il faut qu’une violence s’exerce sur elle en tant que pensée, il faut
qu’une puissance la force à penser, la jette dans un devenir-actif. Une
telle contrainte, un tel dressage, est ce que Nietzsche appelle ‘Cul-
ture’. (Deleuze 2003b, 123, italics in original)
[Violence must be done to it as thought, a power, the force of thinking,

must throw it into a becoming-active. A constraint, a training of this
kind is what Nietzsche calls ‘Culture’. (Deleuze 2006a, 101, italics in
original)]
Nietzsche based this idea on the paideia of the ancient Greeks, a pe-
dagogical program that was directed toward the constraining of these
reactive forces: “ils savaient que la pensée ne pense pas à partir d’une
bonne volonté, mais en vertu de forces qui s’excercent sur elle pour la
contraindre à penser.” (124) [they knew that thought does not think on
the basis of a good will, but by virtue of the forces that are exercised
on it in order to constrain it to think. (101)]
When we apply the necessity of ‘training’ to the act of read-
ing, this means then that the Deleuzean theory is anything but a li-
cense for a ‘wild’ reading: an active, affirmative reading can in fact
only come about when the reader is compelled to distance oneself
from every form of narcissistic identification and instead to go in
search of that which—in the reading material—makes one differ from
oneself and opens lines of flight.
This narcissistic return to oneself is nevertheless but one risk
associated with the exploration of lines of flight in the reading proc-
ess. Another, much graver danger is that these lines of flight ulti-
mately change into “lignes d’abolition, de destruction, des autres et de
soi-même.” (Deleuze & Parnet 2004b, 168) [lines of abolition, of de-
struction, of others and of oneself (Deleuze & Parnet 2007, 140)].
Kundera’s story about the hitchhiker offers a good example of how a
line of flight could come to a bad end: the main character develops a
program during her journey, a becoming-whore that allows her to en-
ter into another life and expand the cartography of her body with new
affects. This line of flight, in the end, carries her too far; she becomes
so lost to herself that she can no longer return to the person she was,
but neither can she move forward. This stalemate strips her of all fu-
ture perspective and leaves her behind in a cheap hotel room, desper-
ate and lonesome. The same destructive process also arises in Nietz-
sche’s madness. To be sure, Deleuze and Guattari refused to interpret
the many identities that Nietzsche assumed in his final letters as a
search for the Nom-du-Père, but they also could not deny that the
great philosopher did indeed have a total collapse shortly thereafter.
Nietzsche would die a complete catatonic after several unproductive
years in which he was entirely dependent on his doctors and his
mother and sister, both of whom he despised. Therefore, Deleuze and
Guattari also emphasise, in Mille Plateaux, how cautiously one must
proceed with such experimental programs so that the ‘self-
overcoming’ at which one aims does not end up becoming a process
of pure self-destruction: “Ne faudra-t-il pas garder un minimum de

strates, un minimum de formes et de fonctions, un mininum de sujet
pour en extraire matériaux, affects, agencements?” (Deleuze & Guat-
tari 1994b, 331) [Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a
minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to ex-
tract materials, affects, and assemblages? (Deleuze & Guattari 2004b,
298)]
In a similar way, Julia Kristeva also emphasised the impor-
tance of the ‘thetic phase’ as a necessary interlude for the ‘subject in
process’, a ‘reterritorialisation’ that allocates the subject a place in the
symbolic universe and assures it of at least a minimal identity—an
identity that later, under the influence of the semiotic, can transform
itself once again, thus making new subject positions possible. But ul-
timately, starting from her psychoanalytic framework, Kristeva as-
sumes the existence of the kind of subject that allows it to be ‘reterri-
torialised’ in this process, whereas Deleuze and Guattari reject this
very subject as a transcendental illusion. For them, the program is a
process without a subject, which destroys the reactive ego, splintering
it into a series of ‘pre-individual singularities’. And yet they still as-
sume the necessity of a ‘minimal subject’ which survives this destruc-
tion and prevents the lines of flight from becoming lines of annihila-
tion, although they neglect to clarify how exactly we are to conceive
such a ‘minimal subject’.
From a Deleuzean perspective we also cannot explain ade-
quately why it is that a reader can in fact change or ‘overcome’ one-
self through the process of reading, and yet at the same time, in one
way or another, is still able to recognise oneself through all these
transformations. If we assume, along with Deleuze, that there is no
fundamental fantasy hiding behind all these different reading pro-
grams, there nevertheless must still be something which survives to
support the subjectivity of the reader. In what follows I will call upon
Michel Foucault to help us find a solution to this problem. Starting
from the same Nietzschean intertext as Deleuze, Foucault, in his later
work, seems to search for a way to provide a concrete interpretation of
this ‘minimal subject’.
Michel Foucault: the search for the limit
Picking up the thread where Nietzsche left off, Michel Foucault also
assumes a reality that only arises within the perspective of a series of
collective fantasies. Together these fantasies form a complex system
of knowledge in which reality appears meaningful and comprehensi-
ble to the subject. And in his historiography, Foucault, as Nietzsche
did before him, rejects the notion of a guiding agent that produces this
knowledge through a determined process. The system of knowledge
that produces a specific social form at a particular moment is sup-
ported by a certain exercise of power; power that in turn is legitimated
by the very knowledge it supports. Foucault stresses that that the exer-
cise of this power is not exclusively repressive, but also constructive:
a society arises from, and is held together by, the interaction of an en-
tire series of power relations working at different levels. It would
therefore be naïve to want to localise power in one central place—the
state apparatus, for example—that wields power over its subjects from
the top down in a hierarchical structure: for Foucault, power is every-
where and nowhere, and is often so ingrained that we do not even no-
tice it. From the architectural arrangement of classrooms and other
public spaces to our personal family ties and individual viewpoints,
the exercise of power makes us the subjects that we are.
This proposal forms the nucleus of Foucault’s theoretical anti-
humanism: it is not the autonomous subject that conceives of increas-
ingly better institutions through a process of rational reflection, rather
it are the institutions themselves that ultimately have generated the
modern subject through a process of discipline and normalisation.
Foucault is therefore interested in those points where the dominant
paradigm runs up against its self-imposed limits and is confronted
with a different perspective that it is unable to integrate. In his work,
Foucault searches for the kinds of limit experiences that simultane-
ously provoke fascination and anxiety and which give rise to various
discourses by which society attempts to control these experiences, for
instance by exclusion. Here as well, Foucault does not abandon his
Nietzschean point of departure: these experiences only exist to the ex-
tent that they, from the perspective of discourse itself, appear as the
impossible, the unutterable and the unknowable. Therefore, the trans-
gressive experience is never the discovery of an essence still hidden
beyond discourse. The limit experience emerges only through the dis-
course that delineates the boundary, and can therefore change or even
disappear together with that discourse.
One of those limit experiences, the experience of madness,
was the subject of Foucault’s doctorat d’état, which appeared in 1961
under the title Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge cla ssique
(Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Rea-
son). In this extensive study he investigated the different strategies
that were used to form the image of madness, from the idea of the
‘ship of fools’ in the Middle Ages, up to and including twentieth-
century psychoanalysis. Foucault’s historical overview rejects the
teleological approach to history in which every development in the
discourse of madness is seen automatically as a progression with re-
spect to earlier ways of thinking. Thus, Foucault does not view the ac-
tions of the enlightened director Pinel—who famously ‘liberated’ the
lunatics from Bicêtre where they had been chained like animals—as
quite the historical schism that the history of psychiatry has usually
considered it to be; at most it was a shift internal to the very system
which attempts to exclude madness. The mentally ill started to be
gathered into institutions as a separate group, their physical chains re-
placed by mental coercion administered by the doctor, the representa-
tive of morality and reason.
Thus Foucault does not believe there is any guiding force un-
derlying the march of history that would make humanity ever more
‘humane’; it is therefore also a mistake to look at the past from our
current perspective and to see it as a process of increasing liberation
from the yoke of ignorance, a progressive evolution toward a more
reasonable, more humane and tolerant society. The criteria by which
we now judge the past have come about precisely by means of a his-
torical process, and thus they cannot be used to pass judgment retroac-
tively on the past from which they have arisen. At that time there were
other systems of knowledge at work, which made the experience we
are concerned with appear radically different.
This goes as well for the other limit experiences that Foucault
investigated in later studies about, respectively, criminality (Surveiller
et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975) (Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison)), and sexuality (the three volumes of his Histoire
de la sexualité (1976-1984) (The History of Sexuality)). From a con-
temporary point of view, the manner in which people used to treat
‘borderline cases’ is seen as intolerable and inhumane: the gruesome
treatment of the mentally ill, the torture of prisoners or the stigmatis-

ing of every form of deviant sexual behaviour. The fact that we now
view such practices in a different way is a result of an anonymous, ar-
bitrary progression of historical events, impasses and conflicts from
which our current way of thinking has arisen.
This Nietzschean point of departure has significant implica-
tions indeed for historical research itself, which, according to Foucault
in his programmatic ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’ (1971)
(Nietzsche, Genealogy, History), must confront the modern subject
with the various anonymous and heterogeneous processes from which
it has emerged over the course of time:
l’analyse de la provenance permet de dissocier le Moi et de faire pul-
luler, aux lieux et places de sa synthèse vide, mille événements main-
tenant perdus. La provenance permet aussi de retrouver sous l’aspect
unique d’un caractère, ou d’un concept, la prolifération des événe-
ments à travers lesquels (grâce auquels, contre lesquels) ils se sont
formés. (Foucault 2001a, 1009)
[The analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the Me, its recog-
nition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profu-
sion of lost events. An examination of descent also permits the dis-
covery, under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept, of the myriad
events through which – thanks to which, against which – they were
formed. (Foucault 1998a, 375)]
In this way the historical knowledge we gain also stimulates the ‘pa-
thos of distance’, becoming a Nietzschean call to ‘self-overcoming’: if
the ego is split apart into the different forces that have formed it, it
may become possible to envision new combinations, new subject posi-
tions that enable resistance to, and alteration of, the existing social or-
der: “le savoir appelle aujourd’hui à faire des expériences sur nous-
mêmes, au sacrifice du sujet de connaissance.” (1023) [knowledge
now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of
the subject of knowledge. (388)]
Because of their common Nietzschean intertext, Foucault’s
historical analysis and exploration of the miscellaneous forces and in-
tensities active in history is closely related to Deleuze’s work, for
which Foucault initially showed great sympathy and interest. In his
‘Theatrum philosophicum’ (1970), an extensive discussion of Diffé-
rence and répétition and Logique du sens, Foucault even predicted
that “un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien.” (Foucault 2001a,
944) [perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzean.

(Foucault 1998a, 343)] Still, despite his admiration and friendship,
over the course of time Foucault would increasingly take distance
from Deleuze, who—in an interview from 1986—interpreted Fou-
cault’s prediction as a misunderstood joke: “Je ne sais pas ce que vou-
lait dire Foucault, je ne lui ai jamais demandé. Il avait un humour dia-
bolique. Peut-être voulait-il dire ceci: que j’étais le plus naïf parmi les
philosophes de notre génération.” (Deleuze 1990, 122) [I don’t know
what Foucault meant. He was a terrible joker. He may perhaps have
meant that I was the most naïve philosopher of our generation.
(Deleuze 1995, 88)]
It was indeed this naïveté, as Deleuze called it, that ultimately
gave Foucault grounds for concern, not in the least because it was
largely his own naïveté too. With their glorification of the anonymous
processes and forces that made any identity impossible, were he and
Deleuze perhaps not themselves also the prisoners of a specific system
of knowledge? Was their way of thinking not part of a discourse that,
like every other discourse, established boundaries and thus provoked
new limit experiences? And just like madness in the discourse of rea-
son, did not the experience of the self continue to surface at the limits
of their anti-humanistic stance? Did not their banishment of the ego as
an imaginary construction result precisely in the relationship to the
self announcing itself as a problematic limit experience?
This question would be central to Foucault’s later work. His
changing view on sexuality would eventually lead to a radical revalua-
tion of the notion of pleasure and a growing interest for that which, in
classic antiquity, was known as ‘care of the self’. Foucault attempted
to translate into a modern context this ‘care of the self’, as well as the
duty to speak openly and honestly (the so-called parrhesia) that goes
along with it. Of course, the problem with this was that for Foucault,
there existed no transcendent truth that could legitimate a contempo-
rary, ‘parrhesiastic’ care of the self. From Foucault’s Nietzschean per-
spective, the only legitimacy that remains is thus perverse self-
creation: the self as a work of art, an oeuvre.
By going back to Foucault’s earlier texts about the imaginary,
I want to examine how this creation can occur through a process of
imagining the self, such as is found in dreams and above all in litera-
ture. In particular it seems that the notion of the demon will come in
handy for our purposes. The demon, as the numinous double of the
subject, not only helps us to conceive the experience of the self from
within Foucault’s anti-humanist framework; it also functions as a pos-
sible compromise in the theoretical conflict between the passive repe-
tition of the psychoanalytic fantasy and the active process of becom-
ing found in Nietzschean philosophy. To conclude, I want to examine
how this notion of the demon also plays a crucial role in the experi-
ence of reading.
The discovery of the self
The evolution of Foucault’s later thought was influenced greatly by

changes in his own life. As he remarked in an interview from 1984,
his personal experiences always played a large role in determining the
content of his work. (cf. Foucault 2001b, 1486)
In his biography of Foucault from 1989, Didier Eribon focused pri-
marily on the impact that Foucault’s sexual disposition had during his
adolescence. In those days, homosexuality was not only considered
scandalous, but moreover was a criminal act and thus could only be
carried out in clandestine fashion. Shortly after the Second World
War, Foucault was admitted into the elite boarding school, the École
normale supérieure, after having taken a public exam. He struck the
other students as someone unstable, as someone who was always
struggling with madness and could behave very destructively, both
toward himself and his fellow students. His bottled-up aggression
eventually even led to several suicide attempts. (see Eribon
1989/1992, 41-60/24-40)
Foucault would later try, through his work, to come to terms
precisely with these personal experiences of sexuality, madness and
violence. In a particularly elucidating intellectual biography, The Pas-
sion of Michel Foucault (1993), James Miller summarises this effort
with a question taken from one of Nietzsche’s early texts from 1874,
‘Schopenhauer als Erzieher’ (Schopenhauer as Educator), which was
included in Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1876) (Untimely Medita-
tions): “How did I become what I am and why do I suffer from being
what I am?” (Nietzsche, quoted in Miller 2000, 72) Foucault would
gradually come to realise that this question was, in fact, too one-sided.
In his text on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had also posed still another,
more important question which was directed toward the future rather
than the past, a question that runs like a guiding thread through his
work and which is encapsulated in the subtitle to the autobiographical

Ecce Homo (1889): “How one becomes what one is.” This does not
mean that Nietzsche assumes the existence of a higher, immutable self
that one could reach by continual self-overcoming. ‘Become who you
are’ means rather that you are only who you become—in other words,
the ‘self’ coincides with the process of self-becoming from which it
arises. The ‘self’ toward whom one tries to direct one’s life must
therefore not be discovered, but rather invented.
It was this Nietzschean call to self-becoming that Foucault, in
his later work, would endeavour to translate into a contemporary con-
text. This would lead him to shift his focus somewhat, such that he
would no longer analyse exclusively those anonymous processes and
power structures that had turned the subject into what it was, and
would focus more on the way this subject itself tried to actively influ-
ence and apply these processes in order to ‘become oneself’.
Both Eribon and Miller suggest that the decisive turning point
for Foucault were his visits to the United States in the seventies (cf.
Eribon 1989/1992, 329 ff./309 ff.; Miller 2000, 245 ff.). In the big cit-
ies, such as New York and primarily San Francisco, he came into con-
tact with a well-established homosexual subculture that thrived in a
relatively tolerant atmosphere where—much less than in France—it
was not as burdened with social stigmatisation. Furthermore, what
was particularly revealing for Foucault was that in the S&M clubs he
frequented in San Francisco, the sadomasochistic experiences which
had caused him so much anxiety and shame during his student years
were actually seen in a radically different light. There he discovered a
creative approach to this ‘perversion’ that did not fit with the way this
disorder was interpreted by classical psychoanalysis. The image that
Foucault gives of perversion is closely related to Deleuze’s version:
the sadomasochistic homosexuality with which Foucault became ac-
quainted in San Francisco consists in an exploration of the body’s
possibilities, an exploration that is not limited exclusively to sexual
practices, as he stresses in an interview from 1982:
Nous devons comprendre qu’avec nos désirs, à travers eux,
s’instaurent de nouvelles formes de rapports, de nouvelles formes
d’amour et de nouvelles formes de création. Le sexe n’est pas une fa-
talité: il est une possibilité d’accéder à une vie créatice. (Foucault
2001b, 1554)
[We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go
new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation.
Sex is not a fatality: it’s a possibility for creative life. (Foucault 1997,
163)]
It was in this subculture that Foucault saw Nietzsche’s idea of

the individual who creates his own values being put into practice.
Rather than focusing on resistance to the psycho-social, clinical per-
spective, which claims that their ‘inclination’ is assimilated and de-
fined by various power structures in the discourse, Foucault argued
that they experimented with sadomasochistic sexuality in order to cre-
ate an entirely personal lifestyle.
The American experience was so pivotal that Foucault felt
compelled, upon his return to France, to set aside the enormous collec-
tion of notes that formed the material for his Histoire de la sexualité
(cf. Miller 2000, 251), which was almost completed. Instead, he first
began on a methodological work, La volonté de savoir (The Will to
Knowledge) which appeared in 1976. With this work he attempted to
define the theoretical playing field for the research that would follow.
The revaluation of the art of living
Foucault’s primary aim in La volonté de savoir was to question the so-

called oppression hypothesis which would have us believe that our
sexuality—from the seventeenth century onward and culminating in
the infamous Victorian priggishness—has gradually become the ob-
ject of taboos and shame. Above all it is a hypothesis which proposes
that after centuries of oppression, a laborious process has finally made
sex ‘open for discussion’ again, and offers each and everyone the op-
portunity to choose one’s own sexual identity freely. What Foucault
brings to light, however, is that in earlier times sexuality was anything
but kept under wraps, and that as far back as the days of spiritual care
in Christianity, a system of knowledge with sensual desire as its point
of departure was already being developed. For Foucault, the pertina-
cious attention of the clergy for sinful thoughts—which had to be
enumerated meticulously by the parishioners during confession—was
no different than the tendency of nineteenth-century sexologists to
turn sex into a medical affair or the contemporary ‘compulsion’ to
come ‘out’ sexually. They are all merely phases of the same historical
process; a process that turned the Western subject into “une bête
d’aveu” (Foucault 1986a, 80) [a confessing animal (Foucault 1998b,

59)], and which still forces us “à nous faire passer presque tout entier
– nous, notre corps, notre âme, notre individualité, notre histoire –
sous le signe d’une logique de la concupiscence et du désir. Dès qu’il
s’agit de savoir qui nous sommes, c’est elle qui nous sert désormais de
clef universelle.” (103) [to bring us almost entirely—our bodies, our
minds, our individuality, our history—under the sway of a logic of
concupiscence and desire. Whenever it is a question of knowing who
we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key. (78)]
In La volonté de savoir, Foucault points out that alongside the
Western encapsulation of sex within a theoretical, scientific frame-
work—which he specifies with the term scientia sexualis—there is
still another way for a culture to produce ‘the truth about sex’, namely
via an ars erotica (77/59). In contrast to the scientia sexualis, this ars
erotica does not try to unveil the hidden desire that functions as an
underlying truth for sexual experience, but strives for the acquisition
and transfer of knowledge, through which the pleasure of sexual ac-
tivities becomes richer and more intense.
In an extensive interview from 1983 with his Californian col-
leagues, Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault mocked the current, exclu-
sive focus on desire in which the concrete pleasure of the sexual act
itself remained underexposed: “Je dirais que la ‘formule’ moderne est
le désir – qui est souligné théoriquement et accepté dans la pratique
puisque vous devez libérer votre désir; les actes ne sont pas très im-
portants, quant au plaisir, personne ne sait ce que c’est!” (Foucault
2001b, 1219) [And I could say that the modern ‘formula’ is desire,
which is theoretically underlined and practically accepted, since you
have to liberate your own desire. Acts are not very important, and
pleasure —nobody knows what it is! (Foucault 1997, 269)]
But however much the scientia sexualis neglects pleasure, ac-
cording to Foucault it has nevertheless unwittingly discovered a new
pleasure, namely, the “plaisir spécifique au discours vrai sur le
plaisir.” (Foucault 1986a, 95) [specific pleasure of the true discourse
on pleasure (Foucault 1998b, 71)]. Under the guise of a search for our
ultimate truth, this kind of pleasure is cultivated to the extreme:
Les livres savants, écrits et lus, les consultations et les examens,
l’angoisse à répondre aux questions et les délices à se sentir interprété,
tant de récits faits à soi et aux autres, tant de curiosité, de si nombreu-
ses confidences dont le devoir de vérité soutient, non sans trembler un
peu, le scandale, le foisonnement de fantaisies secrètes qu’on paye si

cher le droit de chuchoter à qui sait les entendre, d’un mot le formida-
ble ‘plaisir à l’analyse’. (95-6)
[The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and exami-
nations; the anguish of answering questions and the delights of having
one’s words interpreted; all the stories told to oneself and to others, so
much curiosity, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal,
sustained –but not without trembling a little– by the obligation of
truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to
whisper them to whoever is able to hear them, in short, the formidable
‘pleasure of analysis’. (71)]
In this passage as well Foucault offers a barely-disguised critique of

psychoanalytic practice. Freud’s teaching brings this urge for confes-
sion to a head in its search for repressed desire which is revealed to be
the ultimate truth of the subject, a truth lodged in the subterranean
world of sexual drives. It is a critique that takes up where L’anti-
Œdipe left off: psychoanalysis cultivates the pleasure of confession, of
acknowledging the underlying fantasy that the analyst brings to the
surface through a patient overcoming of resistance which attempts to
conceal the truth of desire.
With his revaluation of pleasure, however, Foucault not only
distances himself from psychoanalysis, but also from the standpoints
of Deleuze and Guattari. According to Foucault, despite their rejection
of psychoanalytic theory they also assume the primacy of desire. Fou-
cault had shown in his study on sexuality that such a standpoint is in-
cluded in a paradigm that has developed historically, and this makes it
difficult for him to tolerate its obvious dominance in the intellectual
discourse of his time. We can discern this from his discussion with
Dreyfus and Rabinow:
tout le monde – le philosophe comme le psychanalyste – explique que
ce qui est important c’est le désir et que le plaisir n’est rien, alors on
peut se demander si cette séparation n’a pas été un événement histori-
que qui n’était pas du tout nécessaire et n’était lié ni à la nature hu-
maine ni à une quelconque nécessité anthropologique. (Foucault
2001b, 1208-9)
[everybody – the philosopher or the psychoanalyst – explains that

what is important is desire, and pleasure is nothing at all, we can won-
der whether this disconnection wasn’t a historical event, one that was
not at all necessary, not linked to human nature, or to any anthropo-
logical necessity. (Foucault 1997, 259)]
This implicit critique of his work did not escape Deleuze. It became
clear through a series of notes that Deleuze had given to Foucault in
1977, and which was published in 1994 in Deux régimes de fous (Two
Regimes of Madness) under the title of ‘Désir et plaisir’ (Desire and
Pleasure), that their most significant difference of opinion was indeed
reducible to their antipodal appreciation of the notion of ‘pleasure’.
For Deleuze, pleasure was a reactive force that disrupted the stream of
desire, a “reterritorialisation” (Deleuze 2003c, 120), while Foucault
distinctly chose pleasure over desire:
La dernière fois que nous nous sommes vus, Michel me dit, avec
beaucoup de gentillesse et affection, à peu près: je ne peux pas sup-
porter le mot désir; même si vous l’employez autrement, je ne peux
pas m’empêcher de penser ou de vivre que désir = manque, ou que dé-
sir se dit réprimé. Michel ajoute: alors moi, ce que j’appelle ‘plaisir’,
c’est peut-être ce que vous appelez ‘désir’; mais, de toute façon, j’ai
besoin d’un autre mot que désir. (Deleuze 2003c, 118-9)
[The last time we saw each other, Michel kindly and affectionately
told me something like the following: I can’t stand the word desire;
even if you use it differently, I can’t stop myself from thinking or ex-
periencing the fact that desire = lack, or that desire is repressed. Mi-
chel added: So, what I call ‘pleasure’ is maybe what you call ‘desire,’
but in any case, I need a word other than desire. (Deleuze 2006b, 130)
This discussion would, together with a few differences of opinion

concerning politics, eventually seal the fate of their friendship for
Foucault (see Miller 2000, 297). Together with his self-imposed isola-
tion, the sudden end of his alliance with Deleuze, which had lasted for
many years, is telling for the intellectual crisis in which Foucault
found himself: “Detours led to dead ends; lost and discouraged, he
kept starting over again; at times, as one friend later recalled, he
seemed ‘struck with boredom, or some awful doubt’.” (Miller 2000,
288) Foucault had no idea whatsoever where the research he had be-
gun for La volonté de savoir would lead him, or how his revaluation
of pleasure could lead to a viable alternative for the dominant philoso-
phy of desire. There is no doubt that Foucault could not have antici-
pated, with the publication of La volonté de savoir, just how difficult
it would be to develop a broader theoretical framework for that which
he had discovered concerning the experience of pleasure while he was
in America. In the two volumes that followed La volonté de savoir,
respectively L’Usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure) and Le souci

de soi (The Care of the Self), he produced a study of sexuality in clas-
sical antiquity. The two books were only finished in 1984, when Fou-
cault was already considerably weakened by the then still rare and
largely unknown disease of AIDS, of which he would die that same
year.
Foucault’s impasse was also discernable in the lectures he
gave during the 1977-78 academic year at the Collège de France
where he had occupied the chair of Histoire des systèmes de pensée
since 1970. In the lecture series that year, Sécurité, territoire, popula-
tion (Security, Territory, and Population), Foucault introduced unex-
pectedly a new theme which would dominate his later work: the no-
tion of ‘governmentality’. If his earlier emphasis had primarily been
on the nineteenth century, with this concept Foucault went back to the
treatises concerning proper government from the sixteenth and seven-
teenth century, which had been influenced by the Judeo-Christian tra-
dition as well as by Greek-Roman philosophy. In his conversation
with Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault argued that under the growing
influence of Christianity, the care of the self which was so central to
classical antiquity had become subordinate to the pastoral care of the
other. According to Foucault, this evolution led to an increasing aver-
sion to one’s own ‘self’ as vain self-deception which obscures one’s
true nature:
Ce nouveau moi chrétien devait être examiné constamment parce que
ce moi abritait la concupiscence et les désirs de la chair. À partir de ce
moment, le moi n’était plus quelque chose qu’il fallait construire, mais
quelque chose auquel il fallait renoncer et qu’il fallait se mettre à dé-
chiffrer. (Foucault 2001b, 1225)
[This new Christian self had to be constantly examined because in this

self were lodged concupiscence and desires of the flesh. From that
moment on, the self was no longer something to be made but some-
thing to be renounced and deciphered. (Foucault 1997, 274)]
This negative view on the ‘self’ also left its traces behind in post-
structuralist thought: for Lacan also the ego was but a symptom that
must be deciphered and ‘dissolved’ via analysis, and Foucault had
even earlier summarised historiography as a process by which the
‘self’ splits apart into the different forces from which it was con-
structed. Foucault eventually realised that the destruction of the ‘self’
was perhaps less than desirable, and that this ‘self’—as it appeared in
classic literature as something that persons must construct and care
for—just might be something that could help him out of his theoretical
impasse. In ‘Sexualité et solitude’ (1981) (Sexuality and Solitude),
Foucault even admitted that, in his earlier work, he had perhaps paid
too little attention to this relationship to the self:
Ce dont je me suis rendu compte peu à peu, c’est qu’il existe dans tou-
tes les sociétés un autre type de techniques: celles qui permettent à des
individus d’effectuer, par eux-mêmes, un certain nombre d’opérations
sur leur corps, leur âme, leurs pensées, leurs conduites, et ce de ma-
nière à produire en eux une transformation, une modification, et à at-
teindre un certain état de perfection, de bonheur, de pureté, de pouvoir
surnaturel. Appelons ces techniques les techniques de soi […] J’ai
peut-être trop insisté, lorsque j’étudiais les asiles, les prisons, etc., sur
les techniques de domination. (Foucault 2001b, 990)
[I became more and more aware that in all societies there is another
type of technique: techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their
own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their
own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a man-
ner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a
certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power. Let
us call these techniques ‘technologies of the self.’ […] When I was
studying asylums, prisons, and so on, I perhaps insisted too much on
the techniques of domination. (Foucault 1997, 177)]
With these ‘technologies of the self’ as Foucault had found them pre-
scribed in texts from classical antiquity, he had discovered a concrete
example of an ars erotica: an exercise that was based on pleasure
rather than desire, and in which the ‘self’ was used as an active force
that could help the individual to recreate oneself. In antiquity, this ars
erotica was at once an ars vivendi, an art of living that had to do with
both good government as well as the experience of sexuality. This is
certainly not to suggest that Foucault found in this period a utopian
ideal that could offer a ready-made alternative for the Western scientia
sexualis: “on ne trouve pas la solution d’un problème dans la solution
d’un autre problème posé à une autre époque par des gens différents.”
(Foucault 2001b, 1205) [you can’t find the solution of a problem in
the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other
people. (Foucault 1997, 256)] In fact, Foucault could not summon
much appreciation for the concrete moral principles which gave shape
to the care of the self in antiquity: “[l]a morale grecque du plaisir est
liée à une société virile, à l’idée de dissymétrie, à l’exclusion de

l’autre, à l’obsession de la pénétration, à cette menace d’être privé de
son énergie… Tout cela est franchement répugnant.” (Foucault 2001b,
1207) [[t]he Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to a virile society, to
dissymmetry, exclusion of the other, an obsession with penetration,
and a kind of threat of being dispossessed of your energy, and so on.
All that is quite disgusting! (Foucault 1997, 258)]
For Foucault, what is more important than the concrete con-
tent is above all the fact that the individual is encouraged to be con-
cerned about oneself, an instigation that may be seen as the opposite
of the much more notorious ancient imperative: the Oracle of Delphi’s
‘know yourself’ which would later be the core principle of Platonic
philosophy as well as the essential point of departure for our view on
subjectivity. And yet the duty to know and speak the truth also played
an important role in the ‘care of the self’. The difference with the
Western scientia sexualis is that the obligation to ‘speak the truth’
does not here take the form of a plea of guilty, a confession of the re-
pressed ‘secret’ of sexuality. With the ‘care of the self’ this obligation
implies rather that the individual attempts to bring one’s life into
agreement with the logos, with the truth as prescribed by the concrete
philosophical tradition against which the individual can measure the
improvement or deterioration of this process of self-becoming.
‘Speaking the truth’ also constitutes the central theme of a lec-
ture series Foucault gave at the University of California, Berkeley in
the fall of 1983, entitled Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of
Parrhesia, the lecture notes from which were published in 2001 under
the title, Fearless Speech. The Greek concept of parrhesia refers to a
form of ‘truth-telling’ in which the individual vouches for his words
with his own life. At first, when parrhesia was still considered to be
of political significance in the Greek city-state, the former statement
was to be taken literally: a parrhesiast was someone who spoke the
truth regardless of whether he would be sentenced to death by the ty-
rant for doing so. Later, under the influence of Plato, parrhesia came
to be not so much a political as an ethical concept, and in this case as
well it carried the implication that the speaker guaranteed the truth of
what he has said, thereby putting his reputation and standing on the
line. The life of the speaker, where the truth is put into practice, thus
served as evidence:
[T]he truth that the parrhesiastic discourse discloses is the truth of

someone’s life, i.e., the kind of relation someone has to the truth: how
he constitutes himself as someone who has to know the truth through
mathesis, and how this relation to truth is ontologically and ethically
manifest in his own life. (Foucault 2001c, 102)
Socrates is here portrayed as an outstanding example of a parrhesiast:

he enters into dialogue with an interlocutor in such a way that he plays
the part of a friend who, by means of a thorough interrogation, in-
spires the other to take care of himself.
Of course, one can question as to which authority has con-
ferred this role on Socrates, why it is precisely he who can determine
the best way to get at the truth concerning the care of the self. The
first, most recognised guarantee for truth is transcendent: there exists a
truth of the soul that the one who is being questioned can discover
through critical introspection, a labour in which Socrates serves as the
‘midwife’ whose questions enable the person with whom he is con-
versing to reveal what he in fact already knew.
In his discussion of one of Plato’s lesser-known dialogues—
Laches, or Courage—Foucault refers to still another form of legiti-
macy based on a harmonious relationship between Socrates’ words
and deeds. Socrates can fulfil an exemplary function precisely because
he has achieved an agreement between what he says and how he lives.
His method of interrogation also consists in asking those to whom he
is speaking about their balance between word and deed, between bios
and logos; this is in no way an interrogation that aims at a biographi-
cal confession. In Laches, Socrates is not present as a midwife who
helps to deliver the truth, but rather as basanos, the touchstone “which
tests the degree of accord between a person’s life and its principle of
intelligibility or logos.” (Foucault 2001c, 97, italics in orginal)
With this in mind, we should not lose sight of the fact that the
manner in which Socrates, as an individual, formed his own life was
determined entirely by a particular discourse that was founded on the
Greek ideal of universal reason. As Foucault emphasised in an inter-
view from 1984, the experience of self never exists in a vacuum but
rather is continually evaluated, interpreted and directed by means of a
historically determined network of texts and prescriptions:
je dirais que si, maintenant, je m’intéresse en effet à la manière dont le
sujet se constitue d’une façon active, par les pratiques de soi, ces pra-
tiques ne sont pas néanmoins quelque chose que l’individu invente lui-
même. Ce sont des schémas qu’il trouve dans sa culture et qui lui sont
proposés, suggérés, imposés par sa culture, sa société et son groupe
social. (Foucault 2001b, 1538)
[I would say that if I am now interested in how the subject constitutes

itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices
are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself.
They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, sug-
gested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social
group. (Foucault 1997, 291)]
Foucault also wondered which contemporary discourse could establish

the horizon against which a modern interpretation of the care of the
self could be delineated. At first glance, nothing seems further from
the Foucault of Folie et déraison and Surveiller et punir than the Pla-
tonic view of a rational justification of one’s own life, with faith in
universal reason as the universal standard.
And yet Foucault did not break entirely with that rational
ideal, such as it reappeared in a modern form in Kant’s philosophy. In
his ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’ (What is Enlightenment?) from
1984, which appeared precisely two centuries after the publication of
an article of the same title by Kant, Foucault attempted to define his
position with respect to the Enlightenment. In this article he resists
implicitly the accusation that anti-humanist philosophy, such as prac-
ticed by himself and others, would be a threat to the goals of the En-
lightenment. Foucault makes clear that he indeed counts his thought as
part of modernity. Kant’s imperative, sapere aude—dare to think—
may also be seen as an extension of Socratic parrhesia: it gives hu-
manity the task of freeing itself from the immaturity and dependence
upon a given system of thought through the use of its own critical rea-
son. It is this task that Foucault had made his own:
Je caractériserai donc l’êthos philosophique propre à l’ontologie criti-
que de nous-mêmes comme une épreuve historico-pratique des li-
mites que nous pouvons franchir, et donc comme travail de nous-
mêmes sur nous-mêmes en tant qu’êtres libres. (Foucault 2001b,
1394)
[I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the

critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits
we may go beyond, and thus as a work carried out by ourselves upon
ourselves as free beings. (Foucault 1997, 316)]
In modernity, the present is no longer enclosed within an eter-

nal, unalterable and metaphysically-based world order. Contemporary
humanity now realises that it has the freedom to change the world as
such through our way of thinking and acting. According to Foucault,
the ‘historical-critical’ project of modernity is also distinguished by
“une attitude expérimentale” (1393). From this one can also ascertain
Foucault’s own version on Kant’s sapere aude: “il faut être aux fron-
tiers.” (1393) [we have to be at the frontiers (315)]
The point on which Foucault does in fact take distance from
the Kantian tradition lies in the demand that this emancipation be
based solely on rationality as a universally valid starting point. Bear-
ing in mind that in his own work he always went in search of those
limits that reason tries to specify as unsurpassable, Foucault saw this
demand as a form of blackmail to which he refused to capitulate. At
the limits of reason are found the border areas where, in his opinion,
thought must stop and where one could experiment with new forms of
(co)existence. In Foucault’s interpretation, the sapere aude is more an
extension of the imperative of the poet René Char, whom he quoted in
the preface to Folie et déraison: “Un mystère nouveau chante dans
vos os. Développez votre étrangeté légitime.” (Char, quoted in Fou-
cault 2001a, 195) [A new mystery sings in your bones. Develop your
legitimate strangeness.]
Nevertheless, Foucault realised that this ‘legitimate strange-
ness’ of every limit experience was ultimately only productive if the
individual who underwent the experience could in one way or another
continue to play a directing role. By means of a detour through ancient
philosophy, and with Kant as improbable ally, Foucault sought a man-
ner in which the ‘self’, via specific ‘technologies of the self’, could
exercise influence on one’s body and behaviour. According to Fou-
cault, in this way the subject could learn to develop what was still for-
eign in oneself and—more importantly—to then also legitimise this
strangeness with parrhesiastic expression. Foucault’s ideal, as he
thought he had found in the San Francisco subculture, was thus an un-
expected combination of the self-discipline of ancient philosophy with
the limit experience of perverse sexuality.
This contemporary realisation of the ‘care of the self’ was
never the exclusive privilege of a particular homosexual lifestyle. In
‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’, Foucault indicates that this possibility
was also inherent to the project of modernity which, in his view, cul-
minated in the figure of the nineteenth century dandy:
qui fait de son corps, de son comportement, de ses sentiments et pas-
sions, de son existence, une œuvre d’art. L’homme moderne, pour
Baudelaire, n’est pas celui qui part à la découverte de lui-même, de
ses secrets et de sa vérité cachée; il est celui qui cherche à s’inventer
lui-même. Cette modernité ne libère pas l’homme en son être propre;
elle l’astreint à la tâche de s’élaborer lui-même. (1390)
[who makes of his body, his behaviour, his feelings and passions, his
very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the
man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth;
he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not
‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of
producing himself. (312)]
In his conversation with Rabinow and Dreyfus, Foucault also regretted

the contemporary lack of interest for this kind of ‘aesthetic of life’:
Ce qui m’étonne, c’est le fait que dans notre société l’art est devenu
quelque chose qui n’est en rapport qu’avec les objets et non pas avec
les individus ou avec la vie. […] Mais la vie de tout individu ne pour-
rait-elle pas être une œuvre d’art? Pourquoi une lampe ou une maison
sont-ils des objets d’art et non pas notre vie? (Foucault 2001b, 1211)
[What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become some-
thing that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life.
[…] But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should
the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? (Foucault 1997,
261)]
And yet from a Nietzschean perspective, this self-styling can obvi-

ously never be the result of an agent acting autonomously with a spe-
cific end in mind. The ‘I’ that works on its self is itself transformed by
a multiplicity of forces outside of its control. Nevertheless, Foucault
assumes that this ‘I’, through a concerted effort, is capable of entering
into a relation with these forces and, to a certain extent, of using them
to change oneself.
Of course, the central question remains how we should repre-
sent this relationship between the ‘I’ and the play of forces from
which it arose. As we saw earlier, in psychoanalysis this relationship
is determined by the fantasy, while Deleuze and Guattari referred to a
program. In what follows I want to approach this relationship via
Foucault by using of the notion of the demon. We come across this

figure by following a different trajectory in Foucault’s work, one
which lives in the shadow of his more well-known books: it is a tra-
jectory that will lead us from his very first text to a series of articles
about literature that he published in the sixties, and which will eventu-
ally, after a detour through classic antiquity, lead us to the figure of
the reader.
The demon and the oeuvre
In June of 1953, Foucault paid a visit to the Swiss psychoanalyst

Ludwig Binswanger, who was not only a friend of both Freud and
Jung, but was also influenced heavily by the philosophy of Heidegger.
The extent of Foucault’s fascination for Binswanger’s existential psy-
choanalysis is evident from the introduction that he was asked to write
for the French translation of Binswanger’s ‘Traum und Existenz’
(1930) (Dream and Existence) in the spring of 1954: the introduction
ended up being twice as long as the original article (cf. Miller 2000,
77). What most attracted Foucault to Binswanger’s approach was his
original interpretation of the dream experience, which diverged from
orthodox psychoanalysis. Freud’s pioneering work had pointed to the
importance of the dream as a mysterious staging of unconscious de-
sires, but at the same time Freud’s dream analyses paid little attention
to the concrete experiences undergone by the dreamer during the
dream. For Freud, the dream was above all an ingenious rebus, a rep-
resentation of words with images, or as Foucault formulates it: “le
langage du rêve n’est analysé que dans sa fonction sémantique […].
La dimension proprement imaginaire de l’expression significative est
entièrement omise.” (Foucault 2001a, 98) [the language of the dream
is analyzed only in its semantic function. […] The peculiarly imagina-
tive dimension of the meaningful expression is completely omitted.
(Foucault 1993, 35)]
It is primarily on this last point that Binswanger supplemented
Freudian theory by paying much more attention than Freud to the fig-
ure of the dreamer in the dream scenario. For Binswanger, this
‘dreamed’ self plays a much more important role because it confronts
the dreamer with the conditions of one’s existence. The dream-world
is thus not a staging of censured desire, but is rather the direct expres-
sion of the way in which the subject exists in the world. This entails,
in effect, that the dream is not in need of external clarification: the

dream experience divulges the intimate universe of the dreamer like a
rebus that is its own solution.
By extension, we can also read Binswanger’s critique of
Freud, as described by Foucault, as an implicit critique of Lacan’s
theory. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the waking ‘I’ is nothing more
than a ‘dream character’ that is used like a sort of unsuspecting mario-
nette to enact phantasmatic desire in an imaginary transformation of
reality. For Lacan, this imaginary ‘self’ is but a ‘becoming’ in the
same way that the child identifies with its own reflection in the mirror
stage: the ego comes to exist retroactively only through identification
with its reflection in the mirror, insofar as the child tries to become
what it seems to be in the mirror, namely, an independent entity. For
Lacan, this ‘self-becoming’ is coextensive with alienation because the
mirror image, just like every other image with which the subject will
later identify, is incapable of representing the real of the libidinal be-
ing, the presence of which cannot be ascertained on the imaginary
level.
In his discussion of Binswanger, Foucault makes clear that
this ‘alienation’ is not inherent to the imaginary, but only comes into
existence if the image is seen apart from the act of imagination itself.
According to Foucault, when psychoanalysis tries to liberate the ana-
lysand from rigid identification with a nefarious self-image, this does
not mean that the imaginary must be destroyed. Rather, the point is
precisely that the imaginary, by means of the treatment, is emanci-
pated from the congealed image in which it is trapped, a process
which allows the dreamer to once again become conscious of one’s
existential possibilities: “c’est à la libération de l’imaginaire enclos
dans l’image que devra tendre la psychothérapie.” (Foucault 2001a,
144) [[t]he aim of psychotherapy should be to free the imaginary that
is trapped in the image. (Foucault 1993, 72)]
This association of the imaginary with freedom can indeed be
seen to have strong Sartrean connotations: it is precisely the imaginary
nature of the dream that helps the dreamer to ‘annihilate’ present real-
ity, allowing one to disentangle oneself from the fixed self-image, and
thereby presenting the chance to develop other possibilities.
Nevertheless, Biswanger’s theory—much more than that of
Sartre—takes the most important implication of psychoanalysis into
account, namely, that the construction of our identity via the imagi-
nary always takes place through the Other, and thus always retains
something alien. For Binswanger, the dream ultimately confronts the
subject with the same paradox as the Lacanian fantasy: while the fan-
tasy comes to the subject from the Other, and thus always has some-
thing fundamentally impersonal about it, the subject still comes to ex-
ist only by means of this fantasy, which makes it simultaneously the
most intimate, authentic formulation of one’s existence. In Foucault’s
view, this opposition between freedom and necessity is most clearly
expressed in dreams of death. The representation of one’s own death
not only conveys that the present ‘I’ must die in order to make the
process of transformation possible; it also makes it evident that the
end of all transformation is ultimately physical death. Thus the dream
experience becomes a confrontation with one’s being-toward-death,
the realisation of one’s mortality that incites the subject to conceive of
its life as a unique task:
Au plus profond de son rêve, ce que l’homme rencontre, c’est sa mort

– mort qui dans sa forme la plus inauthentique n’est que l’interruption
brutale et sanglante de la vie, mais dans sa forme authentique
l’accomplissement de son existence. (Foucault 2001a, 122)
[In the depth of his dream, what man encounters is his death, a death
which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody inter-
ruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is his very existence being ac-
complished. (Foucault 1993, 54)]
In this way, the inevitability of my death becomes simultane-

ously the symbol of my ultimate freedom. Foucault illustrates this in
view of a case study of Ellen West, a schizophrenic patient of Bin-
swanger’s who was consumed with an intense desire for death. In the
end, Binswanger could do nothing other than come to the conclusion,
together with her, that the fulfilment of her tragic fate apparently lay
in her free, conscious choice to commit suicide. As Miller remarks,
Foucault was immensely captivated by this particular case study be-
cause he recognised in it his own, obsessive fascination for disappear-
ing, a fascination that would resurface at different points in his life
and work: from his suicide attempts to his interest in the loss of self in
madness and his description of death, in a later interview, as “a limit-
less pleasure whose patient preparation, with neither rest nor prede-
termination, will illuminate the entirety of your life.” (Foucault,
quoted in Miller 2000, 55)
But this recognition shows precisely that the imaginary not

only comes to expression via the dream, but also through the media-
tion of a text, such as the case study of Ellen West which seemed to
reveal to Foucault his own fate with the numinous power of a dream
experience. It is for this reason that Foucault later would cease looking
for this imaginary in the dream, and would turn to the library. As he
described it lyrically in an afterword (1967) to a German translation of
Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint-Antoine, for modern humanity the li-
brary had become the best place to have a waking experience of the
dream:
Ce lieu nouveau des fantasmes, ce n’est plus la nuit, le sommeil de la
raison, le vide incertain ouvert devant le désir: c’est au contraire la
veille, l’attention inlassable, le zèle érudit, l’attention aux aguets. […]
L’imaginaire se loge entre le livre et la lampe. […] Pour rêver, il ne
faut pas fermer les yeux, il faut lire. (Foucault 2001a, 325)
[The domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason,

or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but, on the contrary,
wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition, and constant vigi-
lance. […] The imaginary now resides between the book and the
lamp. […] Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in
reading. (Foucault 1998a, 106)]
During the sixties, Foucault devoted several intriguing articles to

modern literature for journals such as Critique, La Nouvelle Revue
française and Tel Quel, among others, central to which were the same
themes as in his introduction to ‘Traum und Existenz.’ There was, for
instance, a discussion of Blanchot’s work, ‘Le langage à l’infini’
(1963) (Language to Infinity) in which Foucault proposed that, like
Binswanger’s dream experience, the literary experience ultimately
came down to a confrontation with one’s own death. In another essay
on Blanchot, ‘La pensée du dehors’ (1966) (The Thought of the Out-
side), he revisits this paradoxical nature of literature with a discussion
of a passage from the Odyssey; the fragment about the irresistible song
of the Sirens:
Offert comme en creux, le chant n’est que l’attirance du chant, mais il
ne promet rien d’autre au héros que le double de ce qu’il a vécu,
connu, souffert, rien d’autre que ce qu’il est lui-même. Promesse à la
fois fallacieuse et véridique. Elle ment, puisque tous ceux qui se lais-
seront séduire et pointeront leurs navires vers les plages ne rencontre-
ront que la mort. Mais elle dit vrai, puisque c’est à travers la mort que
le chant pourra s’élever et raconter à l’infini l’aventure des héros.

(Foucault 2001a, 560)
[Presented as though in negative outline, the song is but the attraction

of song; yet what it promises the hero is nothing other than a duplicate
of what he has lived through; known, and suffered, precisely what he
himself is. A promise at one deceptive and truthful. It lies because all
those who surrender to seduction and steer their ships toward the
beach will only meet death. But it speaks the truth in that it is death
that enables the song to sound and endlessly recount the heroes’ ad-
venture. (Foucault 1998a, 161)]
This deadly doubling that the Sirens promise the hero in their song is
closely related to what Freud remarked in ‘Das ‘Unheimliche’’: “For
the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the
ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and
probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body.”
(Freud 1955, 235)
It is a disconcerting experience that we can compare to the
moment where Foucault was confronted with himself in the figure of
Ellen West, or when Freud recognised himself in the figure of Zoe:
just like Ulysses, they meet an Other who seems to be speaking about
them, telling them who they are, but in doing so this Other threatens to
assume their place. This explains Freud’s ardent attempts to repair the
primacy of his psychoanalysis and to explain away Jensen’s text by
placing his scientific authority above literature. Jensen’s text thus be-
comes a mere object of study and is no longer an uncanny double of
his own theory.
In an attempt to explain away the striking similarities between
psychoanalytic practice and the way in which Zoe, in the Gradiva,
frees Hanold from his delusion, Freud sought to find a common source
from which both he and Jensen had drawn. In contrast to Freud’s
method, the post-structuralist critique would employ the notion of the
text—a fabric of citations and phrases without an unambiguous origin
that gives its language to the concrete author—only in order to erase
this author as a particular individual, dissipating him into an endless,
anonymous network of signifiers. Just as the Siren’s song only be-
came possible through the death of the hero, a text is also only possi-
ble through the disappearance of the author. Language is no longer a
transparent representation of an external reality: modern writing pre-
sents itself, falls together with itself, thereby destroying any notion of
origin(ality). This also implies that a concept such as ‘authenticity’,

which Foucault, in his text on Binswanger, treated as being self-
evident, now becomes problematic. The uncanny character of the
double consists precisely in the fact that one cannot determine which
one is the copy and which is the original. The imaginary with which
the literary text confronts us is no longer a reflection of our deepest
self, but an image without origin that runs off with the identity of the
writer.
In this way, the transgressive literary experience quickly leads
to the same aporia that Foucault’s own thought would land in during
the mid-seventies: if the writing and reading subject is ultimately
nothing more than a disappearing figure in a text proliferating out of
control, where are we to locate the point from which the subject can
utilise the (literary) limit experience to offer some resistance, to
change oneself? The modernistic poetics of authors such as Blanchot
and Bataille, like the philosophy of Deleuze, would ultimately turn out
to be too ‘naïve’ an ally. As Jacques Neefs remarked in ‘Michel Fou-
cault et l’espace littéraire’ (1995), it is striking that after the 1960’s—
when Foucault’s work continually referred to literary texts and when
he, in 1963, even published a book about the author Raymond Rous-
sel—the references to literature in Foucault’s texts all but disappeared.
(cf. Neefs 1995, 166)
This evolution is most clearly discernable in the reading Fou-
cault gave in 1969 for the Société française de philosophie, ‘Qu’est
qu’un auteur?’ (What is an Author?). Foucault proposes—just as
Barthes had done a year before in his ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1968)
(The Death of the Author)—that in modern literature there is some
talk of “l’ouverture d’un espace où le sujet écrivant ne cesse de dis-
paraître.” (Foucault 2001a, 821) [creating a space into which the writ-
ing subject constantly disappears. (Foucault 1998a, 206)]. But despite
this common starting point Foucault simultaneously formulates an
only lightly veiled critique of Mallarméan-style poetics, or the very
style that he had propagated in his earlier discussions of literature:
Enfin, penser l’écriture comme absence, est-ce que ce n’est pas tout
simplement répéter en termes transcendantaux le principe religieux de
la tradition à la fois inaltérable et jamais remplie, et le principe esthé-
tique de la survie de l’œuvre, de son maintien par-delà la mort, et de
son excès énigmatique par rapport à l’auteur? (823)
[To image writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in tran-

scendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet
never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work’s sur-
vival, its perpetuation beyond the author’s death, and its enigmatic ex-
cess in relation to him. (208)]
Gone is the sacred splendour that the oeuvre had enjoyed in earlier
texts: Foucault now describes it as nothing more than a collection of
texts collated by the ‘author function’, a function that, in modernity,
has only become more important for literary texts.
Foucault had originally resisted the traditional theory of the oeuvre as
a monument created by the author and intended to endure after his
death. He pointed out that the oeuvre had the same paradoxical status
as the double, which transformed from a guarantee against death into
the herald of it. But ultimately, for Foucault, the transgressive, inti-
mate experience in writing where the oeuvre serves the author notice
of his own death like a fascinating double loses its appeal. He began to
approach literary texts at more of a distance and began viewing them
as less absolute, interpreting them rather as parts of a wider discursive
field. In spite of his waning interest in literature, Foucault would nev-
ertheless revisit, within the context of the ‘technologies of the self’,
the notion of the oeuvre that was so central to many of his observa-
tions on literature in the sixties. In an interview from 1983 that was
included as an afterword in the English translation of his book on
Roussel, Foucault offered a new definition of the relationship between
subject and oeuvre:
il vaux mieux essayer de concevoir que, au fond, quelqu’un qui est
écrivain ne fait pas simplement son œuvre dans ses livres, dans ce
qu’il publie, et que son œuvre principale, c’est finalement lui-même
écrivant ses livres. Et c’est ce rapport de lui à ses livres, de sa vie à ses
livres, qui est le point central, le foyer de son activité et de son œuvre.
La vie privée d’un individu, ses choix sexuels et son œuvre sont liés
entre eux, non pas parce que l’œuvre traduit la vie sexuelle, mais
parce qu’elle comprend la vie aussi bien que le texte. L’œuvre est plus
que l’œuvre: le sujet qui écrit fait partie de l’œuvre. (Foucault 2001b,
1426)
[I believe that it is better to try to understand that someone who is a

writer is not simply doing his work in his books, in what he publishes,
but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing
his books. The private life of an individual, his sexual preference, and
his work are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual
life, but because the work includes the whole life as well as the text.
The work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of
the work. (Foucault 1986b, 184)]
The oeuvre appears here again as a double, but a double that is no

longer purely destructive. On the contrary: the ‘principal work’ is pre-
cisely this very subject that attempts to turn itself into a work of art via
the imaginary of literary texts. The imaginary figure thereby created is
an exceptional version of the uncanny double: Foucault calls it the
figure of the demon. In his essay on Klossowski, ‘La prose d’Actéon’
(The Prose of Actaeon) from 1964, Foucault describes this demon as
follows: “le Démon, ce n’est pas l’Autre […] mais plutôt quelque
chose d’étrange, de déroutant qui laisse coi et sur place: le Même,
l’exactement Ressemblant.” (Foucault 2001a, 354) [the Demon is not
the Other […] but something strange, bewildering, which leaves one
speechless and immobile – the Same, the exact Likeness. (Foucault
1997, 123)]
While Foucault’s demon certainly does not have the same
conceptual function as Deleuze and Guattari’s program or Lacan’s
fantasy, the demon is nevertheless an extremely useful notion for un-
derstanding his later conception of the self. In The Passion of Michel
Foucault, Miller also emphasises the importance of this concept,
choosing the demon as the central theme in his biographical approach
to Foucault’s work (cf. Miller 2000, 70).
The confrontation with the demon is comparable to the en-
counter with the imaginary ‘self’ in the dream as described by Bin-
swanger, where the dream experience ultimately expresses nothing
other than the dreamer: this ‘self’ is a perfect likeness and it is pre-
cisely in this resemblance that one finds the doubling of the dreamer.
The demon, as Miller summarises it, is “the very image of our being,
if only we would recognize it.” (Miller 2000, 2)
This also turns the figure of the demon into something contra-
dictory: in the case that we, in one way or another, would be unfamil-
iar with what the demon conjures up before us, we would fail to rec-
ognise it as a double; but at the same time it can only continue to exist
as our double if we misrecognise ourselves in it, such that it seems not
to coincide with us. Freud had exposed the same paradox with his no-
tion of the uncanny: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening
which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” (Freud
1955, 220) The demon simultaneously reflects an image of that which
we have always been, and yet have still not become: the encounter
with the demon is a confrontation with our own fate, an appeal that
challenges us and urges us to reflect upon who we are and, above all,
who we want to be.
Foucault, in his discussion of Klossowski, refers explicitly to
Nietzsche’s demon of the eternal recurrence, which he describes in a
famous passage from The Gay Science:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your
loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and
have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy
and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great
in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and
sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and
even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is
turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse
the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremen-
dous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god
and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained
possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush
you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once
more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as
the greatest weight. (Nietzsche 1974, 273-4)
According to Nietzsche, we can only endure an encounter with this

demon through amor fati. This entails not only that we affirm whole-
heartedly everything that has happened to us and all that we have
done, but also that we approach everything that still awaits us in such
a way that we could accept that these experiences would be repeated
endlessly, in precisely the same way—even stronger: that we would
actively thirst for their recurrence. The difference in which the figure
of the demon can appear arises precisely when, in the ‘loneliest lone-
liness’, one imagines that the same thing is going to be repeated for-
ever: by multiplying our life in an imaginary way the possibility of
recognising oneself in repetition emerges. That is to say, what we
want to have repeated innumerable times in the repetition is the self
that we want to become. Here again we find the Nietzschean para-
dox—become what you are: we can only become that which we al-
ready are (virtually) in the figure of the demon.
The Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the same is not to be
confused with Freud’s uncanny return of the repressed: since no pri-
mal repression can be specified, no hidden truth brought to light by
the demon, the only thing that is repeated is the repetition itself, and in
this repetition arises identification: it is the moment when, in a dream
or in a text, a demon suddenly jumps up on your shoulder and says,
“This is you.” In the demonic demand— “you will have to live once
more and innumerable times more”—is found the touchstone, the
basanos available to the subject, and which enables it to pass judg-
ment on the progress and failures of its process of becoming.
The demon that would keep recurring in different guises
throughout Foucault’s life and work is illustrated nicely by Miller,
who describes it as “a characteristic dream of making himself disap-
pear.” (Miller 2000, 373) There is no point in trying to hunt down the
origin of this demon. Foucault shared his fascination for the disap-
pearance of the ‘self’ with an entire series of post-war French, ‘anti-
humanist’ thinkers and writers. Thus we can see that this fascination
was on the one hand the result of an anonymous and impersonal ‘spirit
of the time’, but on the other hand it was inspired by highly personal
biographical experiences. Consequently, Foucault’s demon was the
spawn of an incidental, but not therefore less significant combination
of intimate and collective factors playing off each other, ‘a profusion
of lost events’ that interacted with one another without there being one
‘primal scene’ that could be specified as the determining factor.
Rather than trying to discover how precisely this demon came
to exist, it would be more interesting to ask how this demon can be
used as an active force in the process of self-becoming. Once he was
finally able to recognise himself in his demon, Foucault then suc-
ceeded in manipulating the inevitable repetition on different levels in
his life and work in such a way that he could change himself along
with them; he was able to use it to give his life a certain style, a cer-
tain direction. In this way Foucault was finally able to translate the
terrifying strangeness of the sadomasochistic fantasies into the par-
ticular program of ‘becoming-gay’ with which he became familiar in
the clubs of San Francisco. Similarly, he was able to apply his desire
to disappear in such a way that he could continually put himself in
question and take leave of himself.
The encounter with the demon makes it clear that the subject is
not entirely free to choose itself insofar as the choice always appears
within an apparently ineluctable constellation of factors that cannot be
outstripped by even the most experimental line of flight nor changed
by the most rigorous paideia. It is what Nietzsche defined in Beyond

Good and Evil as the ‘spiritual fate’, the ‘great stupidity’:
But at the bottom of us, ‘right down deep’, there is, to be sure, some-
thing unteachable, a granite stratum of spiritual fate, of predetermined
decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. In the case
of every cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable ‘this is I’ […]
One sometimes comes up certain solutions to problems which inspire
belief in us; perhaps one thenceforth calls them one’s ‘convictions’.
Later—one sees them only as footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts
to the problem which we are—more correctly, to the great stupidity
which we are, to our spiritual fate, to what is unteachable ‘right down
deep’. (Nietzsche 1973,143-4, italics in original)
By way of clarification we refer once again to Gradiva: Lotringer, in

his Deleuzean analysis of the novel, refuses to interpret the continual
variations of Hanold’s foot obsession as copies of a lost original, in
casu the foot of his childhood sweetheart, Zoe. Every manifestation of
that desire has still another implication: the active program of the
Gradiva relief that sends Hanold on his journey is not the same as the
program that is eventually bound up with Zoe’s foot and which acti-
vates the very opposite desire, ‘reterretorialises’ Hanold, and finally
carries him back to his German Heimat. Yet still, it is only thanks to
the fact that there is something that travels along with Hanold’s line of
flight, the ‘great stupidity’, the demon of his foot obsession that keeps
recurring, that a ‘becoming-Gradiva’ is possible for Hanold at all: had
he not become obsessed with the foot of the Gradiva, he would never
have arrived at the idea of travelling to Italy.
I am also of the opinion that the notion of the demon provides
an unmistakable supplement to Deleuze’s theory. As we saw in the
previous chapter, Deleuze rejects the psychoanalytic interpretation in
which patterns that recur in the life of the analysand are interpreted as
the insistent repetition of a fundamental fantasy, a symbolic structure
that links the enjoyment of the libidinal being to a fixed series of sig-
nifiers. For Deleuze, on the contrary, fantasies were singular events,
expressions of a particular constellation of forces that could not be re-
duced to a single underlying structure. This means, however, that
Deleuze’s theory cannot provide a final explanation for the fact that
some fantasies nevertheless seem to be repeated. From a potentially
infinite number of lines of flight a body ultimately chooses a particu-
lar direction.
In Foucault, the book that Deleuze published in 1986 in hon-

our of his former friend, he would try reformulate in his own termi-
nology Foucault’s later view on the subject that cares for itself. In an
interview given on the occasion of this book, Deleuze compares this
‘self-becoming’ with the plaiting of different forces into creative lines
of flight. And while Deleuze did not in so many words admit it, the
suggestion is that Foucault might indeed have found the solution to
the theoretical stalemate in which schizonalysis threatened to get
caught; namely, the impossible choice between the reactive ‘self’ and
self-destruction in the psychotic delusion. As Deleuze argued in an in-
terview from 1986, the process of individuation is safeguarded from
the risk of total self-loss precisely by the imposition of a ‘care of the
self’ as a specific form of paideia:
Les Grecs inventent le mode d’existence esthétique. C’est cela, la sub-
jectivation: donner une courbure à la ligne, faire qu’elle revienne sur
soi, ou que la force s’affecte elle-même. Alors nous aurons les moyens
de vivre ce qui serait invivable autrement. Ce que dit Foucault, c’est
que nous ne pouvons éviter la mort et la folie que si nous faisons de
l’existence un ‘mode’, un ‘art’. (Deleuze 1990, 154)
The Greeks invent an aesthetic way of existing. That’s what subjecti-

fication is about: bringing a curve into the line, making it turn back on
itself, or making force impinge on itself. So we get ways of living
with what would otherwise be unendurable. What Foucault says is that
we can only avoid death and madness if we make existing into a
‘way’, an ‘art.’ (Deleuze 1995, 113)
This citation makes clear that, at least for Deleuze, Foucault’s later
view on subjectivity is easy to reconcile with his own theoretical in-
sights. But with respect to psychoanalysis the possibility of reconcilia-
tion seems much less likely. As Freud suggests in ‘Das Unheimliche’,
the eternal recurrence of the same is only an externalisation of the
“dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ pro-
ceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the
very nature of the instincts” (Freud 1955, 238), and not at all a Nietz-
schean invocation to make one’s life into a work of art, to ‘become
what one is.’
According to psychoanalysis, the continual repetition of the
fantasy protects the subject from too-direct exposure to the enjoyment
that would destroy it, but at the same time this fantasy also compels
the subject, like a donkey in a treadmill, to continually turn circles
around the unattainable object of desire. It is for this reason that Žižek,
in Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992), reproaches Foucault in that his view
on the self as an oeuvre to be created, fails to take into account the li-
bidinal being’s excessive, destructive enjoyment that can in no way be
mastered or harmonised, and which can only appear in the symbolic as
lack. (cf. Žižek 2001, 179 ff.)
And yet Žižek’s remarks are not entirely correct: in his later
work as well Foucault does indeed take into account the fact that the
body is traversed by destructive forces that threaten to erase the sub-
ject either in madness or death. Foucault does not conceive the sub-
ject-as-oeuvre as self-consciousness in perfect harmony whatsoever,
but rather as a process that attempts to manipulate the different forces
exerted on it in such a way that they transform the subject. Foucault
therefore does not at all assume that this process can be completed: the
self as a completed work of art, toward which the subject strives in its
asceticism, is a goal which—as he emphasised in an interview from
1981—“heureusement on n’atteint jamais.” (Foucault 2001b, 984)
[happily, one never attains (Foucault 1998a, 137)] Happily, Foucault
adds, for he realised, just like Lacan, that the subject can only exist in-
sofar as it can never coincide with itself; in other words, the double
will always differ from the subject.
For Foucault, recognition of the insurmountable distance be-
tween the subject and that which it wants to be does not necessarily
mean that one should dismiss this imaginary transformation as mis-
recognition. Already in his text on Binswanger, Foucault saw the
awareness of our being-toward-death as a chance to examine our life
retrospectively as an incomplete work, spread out across memories,
actions and writings. It is only in light of one’s own, inevitable death
that the notion of a work acquires meaning; only in this way can one
interpret oneself as a task, precisely because one does not have an
eternity to realise this work.
Reflection upon one’s own mortality was already an important
exercise in classical Stoic philosophy and received thorough treatment
by Foucault in one of his final lecture series at the Collège de France,
L’herméneutique du sujet (1981-1982) (The Hermeneutics of the Sub-
ject). In the abstract for the Annuaire du Collège de France, he de-
scribes this meletê thanatou (exercise, contemplation of death) as:
la possibilité de jeter, pour ainsi dire par anticipation, un regard ré-
trospectif sur sa vie. En se considérant soi-même comme sur le point
de mourir, on peut juger de chacune des actions, qu’on est en train de

commettre dans sa valeur propre. La mort, disait Epictète, saisit le la-
boureur dans son labour, le matelot dans sa navigation: ‘Et toi, dans
quelle occupation veux-tu être saisi?’ (Foucault 2001b, 1184)
[the possibility of looking back, in advance as it were, on one’s life.

By thinking of oneself as being about to die, one can judge each action
that one is performing in terms of its own value. Death, said Epictetus,
takes hold of the labourer in the midst of his labor, the sailor in the
midst of his sailing: ‘And you, in the midst of what occupation do you
want to be taken?’ (Foucault 1998a, 105)]
The encouragement of Epictetus makes clear that the emphasis of this

‘exercise’ does not lay on completing a task, but in simply assuming
the task, implementing a program that makes life worthwhile and
meaningful for the subject both from an ethical and aesthetic perspec-
tive. Not even two years later, Foucault himself would be confronted
with the prospect of his impending death. He insisted on letting his
bios end along the same lines as the logos by which he had lived. De-
spite increasingly weakening health, he would continue, with stoic de-
termination and as long as he was able physically, to teach at the
Collège and continue writing L’Usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi.
That was the specific task from which he wished to be torn away.
At first glance this Foucauldian ethics appears far removed
from a Lacanican ethics that, with death in mind, urges the subject to
relinquish its imaginary identifications and to dissolve the ‘self’ as a
symptom. Yet at the end of his teaching, Lacan would have to adjust
this radical rejection of the ‘self’ because his original interpretation of
the symptom as something that could be explained and eliminated via
analysis was not substantiated in practice. As Žižek formulated it in
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989):
how do we account for patients who have, beyond any doubt, gone
through their fantasy, who have obtained distance from the fantasy-
framework of their reality, but whose key symptom still persists? How
do we explain this fact? What do we do with a symptom, with this
pathological formation which persists not only beyond its interpreta-
tion but even beyond fantasy? (Žižek 1995, 74-5)
Lacan eventually came to realise that the enjoyment lodged in the

symptom could never be removed entirely through verbal analysis: the
symptom was thus no longer an unconscious message to be deci-
phered, but the expression of an enjoyment that escaped the symbolic
order and could not be explained away. It is this re-interpretation of

the symptom that Lacan would later refer to as the sinthome (referring
to the old French spelling of ‘symptom’). In The Sublime Object of
Ideology Žižek in turn defined this sinthome as “a terrifying bodily
mark which is merely a mute attestation bearing witness to a disgust-
ing enjoyment, without representing anything or anyone. (Žižek 1995,
76) Anyone who consults Lacan’s 23rd seminar, which is dedicated en-
tirely to the sinthome, will notice straightaway that Žižek’s interpreta-
tion is much too harsh. Lacan in fact expands the notion of the sin-
thome to include what he earlier had called the paradigmatic symp-
tom, namely, the ego: once reformulated as the sinthome, the ego in
Lacan now appears as a sort of artificial construction brought about by
writing. To illustrate, Lacan turns to the work of James Joyce, which
he held in great esteem (and, in view of Lacan’s fondness of bizarre
word games, often imitated as well). According to Lacan, in Joyce the
sinthome functioned via an “artifice d’ecriture” (artifice of writing)
(Lacan 2005, 152) which made the required connection in Joyce’s
psyche between the orders of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic,
thereby protecting him from psychosis. Through his retour à Joyce,
the ego, which in the early Lacan could only be an imaginary mis-
recognition, eventually returns to psychoanalytic theory. As Rabaté
remarks in Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Li tera-
ture (2001), Joyce came to serve for Lacan as a “literary Doppel-
gänger who allows him to make sense of his own opaque and baroque
style, while permitting the return of the repressed ‘ego’.” (Rabaté
2001, 174)
The ego here is no longer the imaginary construction of a
Narcissus who becomes enamoured with his own mirror image so that
he would not have to recognise his own desire, but a sinthome, an arti-
ficial construction born from writing itself, or as Rabaté calls it in the
words of Ezra Pound, an ego scriptor (cf. Rabaté 2001, 172). Does
this not also mean that we can see Lacan’s eventual reformulation of
the analytic project—namely, where the analysand is enabled to iden-
tify with his own sinthome—as a call for us to identify with this artifi-
cial ego? This interpretation of the sinthome is perhaps less loaded
than it seems at first glance: in fact, it is already incorporated in the
double entente of the signifier ‘sinthome’ itself, a fertile ambiguity
that Lacan, given his fondness for portmanteau words, could not re-
sist—the sinthome becomes a “synth-homme”, an “artificial self-

creation” (Thurston, quoted in Evans 2001, 190).
At least based on this interpretation, the ultimate goal of the
psychoanalytic cure no longer seems to be the Platonic traversal of the
fundamental fantasy and a confrontation with the pure libidinal being
beyond that fantasy, but the Nietzschean creation of a synth-homme by
which the fantasy and the libidinal being in fact coincide in an artifi-
cial self-construction. This Lacanian ‘synthetic man’ becomes a re-
formulation of Nietzsche’s artistic ideal as rediscovered by Deleuze in
Sacher-Masoch’s perversion. Joyce’s artificial ego also becomes for
Lacan the ultimate example of a new form of perversion with positive
connotations, which psychoanalytic practice had heretofore neglected.
This is at least what Lacan suggests at the conclusion of his seminar
on the sinthome:
Vous m’avez entendu très souvent énoncer ceci, que la psychanalyse
n’a même pas été foutue d’inventer une nouvelle perversion. C’est tri-
ste. Si la perversion, c’est l’essence de l’homme, quelle infécondité
dans cette pratique. Eh bien, je pense que, grâce à Joyce, nous tou-
chons quelque chose à quoi je n’avais pas songé. (Lacan 2005, 153)
[You have very often heard me say that psychoanalysis was not even
able to invent a new perversion. This is sad. If perversion is the es-
sence of man, how infertile this practice is! Ah well, I think that,
thanks to Joyce, we touch upon something of which I haven’t
thought.]
This pronunciation shows that despite their divergent theoretical as-

sumptions, Lacanian psychoanalysis and a Nietzschean-inspired phi-
losophy may ultimately be less irreconcilable than is often contended.
From Foucault’s perspective we can interpret both as variations of
contemporary ‘technologies of the self’, tricks that are used to bring
about a new relation of the subject to itself, an attempt to develop ‘une
nouvelle perversion’ by which the subject, through an encounter with
its artificial double, creates the ‘self’ that it wishes to become.
As can be discerned from Rabaté’s comment about the impor-
tant role that Joyce played for Lacan, it once again seems that the de-
mon can also appear as a literary double. While Foucault scarcely de-
voted attention to literary texts in his later work, there is still one text,
‘L’écriture de soi’ (Self Writing) from 1983 that enables us to ex-
trapolate Foucault’s later insights into a study of literature, and above
all to the active role that the reader fulfils in it as one goes in search of
one’s demon in the literary text.
The hypomnemata
In ‘L’écriture de soi’ Foucault discusses a certain aspect of the ‘care

of the self’, namely the retention of so-called hypomnemata. In antiq-
uity this was a sort of journal in which people would jot down their
observations, thereby creating a heterogeneous collection of text
fragments which together formed a logos bioéthikos, a sort of guide
for conduct. Indeed, the authority of the source was not unimportant
when making a selection of the citations, but the real use of the cita-
tion was based primarily on the singular situation in which the reader
found oneself and to which the philosophical wisdom could be ap-
plied. It was therefore also essential that the one who compiled the
book did not remain merely a reader: by giving consideration to the
relevant passages and copying them down, he was able to author the
truth he had discovered there, making it available for his own use. In
this way all of the different, disparate fragments were unified into a
personal synthesis. With this in mind, Foucault cites a remark from
Seneca that compares this practice with an intelligent bee that returns
regularly to the hive in order to place in safe storage the nectar she had
collected on her journey from flower to flower. But despite the impor-
tance assigned here to the role of one’s personal approach to the writ-
ing material, Foucault utters words of caution—in his conversation
with Dreyfus and Rabinow—against confusing the hypomnemata with
the type of autobiographical journals that were later kept, primarily
under the influence of Christianity:
Il ne faut pas prendre les hupomnêmata, si personnels qu’ils aient pu
être, pour des journaux intimes ou pour ces récits d’expériences spi-
rituelles […] que l’on peut trouver ultérieurement dans la literature
chrétienne. Ils ne constituent pas un ‘récit de soi’; leur objectif n’est
pas de mettre en lumière les arcanes de la conscience dont la confes-
sion – qu’elle soit orale ou écrite – a une valeur purificatrice. Le mou-
vement qu’ils cherchent à effectuer est l’inverse de ce dernier: il ne
s’agit pas de traquer l’indéchiffrable, de révéler ce qui est caché, de
dire le non-dit, mais au contraire de rassembler le déjà-dit: de rassem-
bler ce que l’on pouvait entendre ou lire, et cela dans un dessein qui
n’est pas autre chose que la constitution de soi-même. (Foucault
2001b, 1444)
[As personal as they were, the hupomnemata must nevertheless not be

taken for intimate diaries or for those accounts of spiritual experience
[…] which can be found in later Christian literature. They do not con-
stitute an ‘account of oneself’; their objective is not to bring the ar-
cane conscientiae to light, the confession of which – be it oral or writ-
ten – has a purifying value. The movement that they seek to effect is
the inverse of this last one: the point is not to pursue the indescribable,
not to reveal the hidden, not to say the nonsaid, but, on the contrary, to
collect the already-said, to reassemble that which one could hear or
read, and this to an end which is nothing less than the constitution of
oneself. (Foucault 1997, 273)]
The classic reader-writer of this hypomnemata thus views one’s ‘self’

not as something that must be discovered, but as something that needs
to be carefully constructed and instructed so that it could inch ever
closer to the ethical and aesthetic ideal of the self-as-oeuvre. In this
way the practice of hypomnemata was a sort of training program ena-
bling the individual to work on oneself.
The practice of hypomnemata was ultimately associated strictly with
the specific context of Stoic philosophy, and can thus not be projected
randomly onto another period. Yet I believe that numerous aspects of
this particular ‘technology of the self’ can still find a place in the con-
temporary practice of reading where the reader’s discoveries are con-
tinually referred back to his or her own life. By bringing together all
of these different, divergent fragments an imaginary double is eventu-
ally created, a demon that addresses the individual and in which one
recognises oneself. The artificial ‘self’ that the reader hereby develops
through interaction with the text is not in the least a self-confirming
mirror image, but a collection of heterogeneous fragments that interact
with one another and with the reader in a continual process of trans-
formation, such that the reader can never coincide completely with
this textual double. The demon does not confront the reading subject
with what it is, but with what it will be; in such a process, the reader
repeatedly runs up against a lack that arouses one’s desire. What is
lacking here is not the mythical, lost love object as proposed by psy-
choanalysis, but rather the future ‘self’, the self-as-oeuvre that looms
on the horizon of the reading experience.
The encounter with the demon thus does not signify some fu-
tile circling of an extimate kernel, but a spiralling movement in which
the demon functions as the virtual object that, however subtly, trans-
forms the reader during the reading process, driving one forward on
this ultimate line of flight—becoming-oneself—without ever reaching

the goal.
With this figure of the demon we can now reconsider the no-
tion of fantasy in a way that takes into account not only the unavoid-
able compulsion to repeat as found in the psychoanalytic fantasy with
its constitutional inability to be fulfilled, but also the experimental es-
cape routes that the fantasy, redefined as program, makes possible ac-
cording to Deleuze and Guattari. The notion of the demon also be-
comes an excellent tool for understanding how Barthes could bring
together both the Nietzschean as well as the psychoanalytic intertext
in his lecture series at the Collège de France, and how he in this way
developed a method of reading that, as we will see, resumes the prac-
tice of classical hypomnemata in a contemporary context. But before
we examine Barthes’ lecture series at the Collège I would like to first
indicate how, under the influence of both intertexts, Barthes’ approach
to the reader would evolve thoroughly during the course of the sixties
and seventies.
A Reader Writes Oneself
The return of the intimate
On the 19th of October, 1978, Roland Barthes delivered a lecture on

Proust to the Collège de France: or more accurately, he spoke about
Proust and himself.
‘[m]oi’ doit s’entendre ici lourdement: ce n’est pas le substitut asepti-
sé d’un lecteur général (toute substitution est une asepsie); ce n’est
personne d’autre que celui à qui nul ne peut se substituer, pour le
meilleur et pour le pire. C’est l’intime qui veut parler en moi, faire en-
tendre son cri, face à la généralité, à la science. (OC V, 465, italics in
original)
[“Myself” is to be understood here in the full sense: not the asepti-

cized substitute of a general reader (any substitution is an asepsis); I
shall be speaking of the one for whom no one else can be substituted,
for better and for worse. It is the intimate which seeks utterance in me,
seeks to make its cry heard, confronting generality, confronting sci-
ence. (Barthes 1989, 284, italics in original)]
A bit further Barthes describes how his ‘reading body’ reacted in an

excessively emotional way to certain passages from Proust’s Recher-
che which he experienced as “moments de vérité” (moments of truth)
(cf. 468/287) because they reminded him of a recent personal loss—
namely, the death of his mother—a year earlier.
Barthes certainly must have surprised many of his listeners
with statements such as these. Was Barthes not known as the prophet
of the text, that anonymous tissue of signs that makes every illusion of
intimacy impossible insofar as—according to this theory—even our
most personal thoughts and feelings are always determined by the
Other? Does it not seem that he is falling back upon the very point of
departure that he had personally fought against during the glory days
of structuralism, namely, the belief in an autonomous, inalienable ‘I’
that evaluates texts from out of its own, intimate biographical experi-
ences, and can therefore determine their ‘truth’?
Anyone who has studied Barthes’ collected works will realise
quickly that this focus on the singular reader is not so much an unex-
pected return to outdated literary-critical theories as a logical conclu-
sion to the evolution in his way of thinking. Already during the sixties
and seventies Barthes had started to warm up to the idea of the fun-
damental role that the body of the reader, and more specifically its
pleasure, played in the process of interpretation.
Barthes links this pleasure to the reader’s imaginary; that is to
say, to the relationship the reader maintains with oneself while read-
ing. In Le Plaisir du texte, we will see that for Barthes, the ideal read-
ing method seems to be a perverse strategy which enables the reader
to imagine oneself as a ‘fictional character’, and through this creative
imaginary to liberate oneself from earlier identifications, to experi-
ment with other possibilities with which to fashion oneself.
Before we sketch this evolution with reference to a few of
Barthes’ crucial texts and passages on this problematic of the reader, it
would be helpful to make a brief but nonetheless important remark
concerning Barthes’ relation with the psychoanalytic and Nietzschean
intertexts which explicitly (and more often implicitly) form the theo-
retical infrastructure for his thinking. As Brown remarked in Roland
Barthes: The Figures of Writing (1992), the major difficulty with this
is that Barthes was anything but consistent when it came to intertex-
tual references:
Barthes invites us to go to other places, other texts, for a full explana-
tion of what his terms signify, but by the time we return, we find that
what we have learnt may be curiously irrelevant. Barthes insists that
he has deformed the terms he appropriates, but the degree of deforma-
tion is difficult to determine. (Brown 1992, 95)
Nevertheless, in contrast to Brown, I do not believe that the original

intertext would become irrelevant for understanding Barthes simply
because of this terminological deformation; on the contrary, one could
indeed advance the claim that it is just this kind of ‘background in-
formation’ that is essential to safeguard Barthes’ reading theory from
the accusation of being nothing more than some sort of ad hoc sorcery
with fashionable words. At worst, one could even reverse Brown’s po-
sition and claim that it may well be that his incoherent and often even
illogical terminology could end up turning Barthes himself into some-

thing ‘curiously irrelevant’.
It is for this reason that, in the sections that follow, I would
like to approach—in light of these two intertexts—the terms that
Barthes borrowed, in extremely idiosyncratic fashion, from both inter-
texts (terms such as the fantasy, the imaginary, the pathos of distance).
But in a certain sense I would also like to turn the tables and apply
Barthes’ singular view on intertextuality to his own texts by integrat-
ing into my analysis the terms we have discussed in the first, theoreti-
cal part (such as the demon, the program, the hypomnemata), even if
Barthes himself did not use them. I believe that these terms could
prove to be ‘curiously relevant’ for our reading of Barthes because
they help to clarify in concise fashion a number of central conver-
gence points in his theory of reading. I am aware that in so doing I am
ultimately distorting Barthes’ texts to a certain extent, but paradoxi-
cally enough I believe this approach is necessary if we are to give
Barthes theory of reading its due. Barthes’ distortion (and in conse-
quence, mine also) is inherent to the perverse reading strategy he de-
veloped specifically from these intertexts. The idea that this interpreta-
tion changes nothing of the fact that Barthes can be considered a less
important theoretician than say, Lacan or Foucault, might in turn be-
come irrelevant. The virtue of his work and its value for literary the-
ory lies precisely in the way in which he, much more than his sources
of theoretical inspiration, tried to reconsider the subject, and more
specifically the reading subject, from the perspective of literature it-
self.
The birth of the reader
The polemical Critique et Vérité from 1966 would be a useful starting

point for our survey. Barthes wrote this text in reaction against the
Sorbonne professor and renowned Racine scholar Raymond Picard,
who a year earlier had used him as whipping boy in his Nouvelle Cri-
tique ou Nouvelle Imposture. Picard’s rancour was aroused primarily
by Barthes’ Sur Racine (1963), which he wanted to expose for its am-
biguous, opaque jargon and its many inconsistencies.
What makes Critique et Vérité so interesting for us is primar-
ily the fact that Barthes felt compelled to defend his method of reading
in Sur Racine by making explicit many of his assumptions which had
heretofore remained implicit. Barthes assailed Picard’s strict histori-

cal-philological method of interpretation, and more specifically the
assumption that this method could provide a sort of zero-degree of
criticism, one that is entirely objective, neutral and independent of any
specific temporal or theoretical modality. The text can never be re-
duced to an unequivocal meaning, but generates a multiplicity of po-
tential meanings, some of which are concretised in a particular reading
situation: “[E]n ajoutant ma situation à la lecture que je fais d’une œu-
vre, je puis réduire son ambiguïté […] mais cette situation,
changeante, compose l’œuvre, elle ne la retrouve pas.” (OC II, 786-7,
italics in original) [It is true that by adding my situation to my reading
of a work I can reduce its ambiguity […]; but this situation, as it
changes, composes the work and does not rediscover it (Barthes 1987,
71-2, italics in original)]. The ‘situation’ here is not yet the intimate,
personal experience of the reader as Barthes would later describe in
his lecture on Proust: it is rather determined entirely by the anony-
mous effect of language itself, which speaks both through the author
and the reader.
It is this notion that Barthes develops further in one of his
most influential essays, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in which he opposes the
dominant position occupied by the author in literary studies and liter-
ary criticism. Opposite the author Barthes places the figure of the
reader, in whom—once freed from the obligation to search the text for
the supposed intention of the author—all the different meanings that a
text generates can coalesce. In the final, now famous sentence of his
article, Barthes also claims that “la naissance du lecteur doit se payer
de la mort de l’Auteur”. (OC III, 45) [the birth of the reader must be
requited by the death of the Author. (Barthes 1989, 55)] Just like the
author, this newborn reader nevertheless appears here as an abstract
construction, stripped of its singular existence outside the text: “le lec-
teur est un homme sans histoire, sans biographie, sans psychologie; il
est seulement ce quelqu’un qui tient rassemblées dans un même
champ toutes les traces dont est constitué l’écrit.” (45, italics in origi-
nal) [the reader is a man without history, without biography, without
psychology; he is only that someone who holds collected into one and
the same field all of the traces from which writing is constituted. (54,
italics in original)]
Around the same time that ‘La mort de l’auteur’ appeared,
Barthes was working on an analysis of Sarrasine, a novel by Balzac,
together with his seminar students in the École pratique des hautes
études. This seminar, spread over two academic years (1967-1969) re-
sulted in an extensive commentary published in 1970 under the enig-
matic title, S/Z.
In his programmatic introduction, Barthes not only rejects an
interpretation focused on the author, but he simultaneously distances
himself from rigid structuralism, which still assumed the presence of
objectively defined structures in the text which determine its meaning
independent of the context in which it is read. According to Barthes,
these structures are not inherent to the text, but are imputed by the
reader on the basis of a series of textual and cultural codes (cf. OC III,
133/Barthes 1974, 18), and in that sense constitute an equally arbitrary
collection of signifiers like so many stars grouped in a constellation.
In his reading of Balzac, Barthes viewed himself as a sort of
modern augur:
Le texte […] est comparable à un ciel, plat et profond à la fois, lisse,
sans bords et sans répères; tel l’augure y découpant du bout de son bâ-
ton un rectangle fictif pour y interroger selon certains principes le vol
des oiseaux, le commentateur trace le long du texte des zones de lec-
ture, afin d’y observer la migration des sens, l’affleurement des codes,
le passage des citations.(129)
[The text […] is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep,
without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on
it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult,
according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator
traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe
therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the pas-
sage of citations. (14)]
This metaphor makes clear the extent to which Barthes thinks the
reader actively intervenes during the reading process. For him, the
ideal reading is in the first place also an act of writing, as it appears in
the well known distinction he made in S/Z between “le scriptible” (the
writerly) and “le lisible” (the readerly) (cf. 122/4). Scriptible are those
texts that no longer force the reader into the position of a passive con-
sumer of readily available meaning, but treat the reader as a producer
who creates meaning. Lisible, on the contrary, are texts which are so
strongly anchored in a particular system of meaning that the reader en-
joys little freedom to experiment with alternative interpretations or
codes. Instead, during the reading process, the reader is invariably led
back to classic interpretation schemes, as in the case of Balzac’s

novel.
Barthes’ distinction between ‘scriptible’ and ‘lisible’ is also an
implicit reaction against the accusation of being ‘illisible’ (unread-
able), often voiced against avant-garde writers and theoreticians—
Barthes included. In fact, Barthes turned the tables: the kind of texts
that he defended must remain unreadable so they could be made writ-
erly by the reader: from this perspective, classic, ‘readerly’ texts may
be reproached because they are ‘unwriterly’.
In ‘Écrire la lecture’ (Writing Reading), a short article about
S/Z that he wrote in 1970 for Le Figaro littéraire, Barthes emphasised
once again the impersonal, ‘trans-individual’ character of the reading
code he advanced in S/Z: “Je n’ai pas reconstitué un lecteur (fût-ce
vous ou moi), mais la lecture.” (OC III, 603) [I have not reconstitued a
reader (you or myself) but reading (Barthes 1989, 31)]. And yet in this
article the anonymous reader-without-biography is indeed explicitly
ascribed a body, through which reading becomes more than a purely
textual operation:
lire, c’est faire travailler notre corps (on sait depuis la psychanalyse
que ce corps excède de beaucoup notre mémoire et notre conscience)
à l’appel des signes du texte, de tous les langages qui le traversent et
qui forment comme la profondeur moirée des phrases. (604)
[to read is to make our body work (psychoanalysis has taught us that
this body greatly exceeds our memory and our consciousness) at the
invitation of the text’s signs, of all the languages which traverse it and
form something like the shimmering depth of the sentence (31)]
While the ‘body’ was already a recurring theme in Barthes’ early

work, the notion faded into the background during his structuralist pe-
riod in the sixties (cf. Moriarty 1991, 186 ff.). With S/Z the ‘body’
made a prominent return and came to play an important role in
Barthes’ approach to the reader. This evolution was influenced heavily
by Barthes’ friendship with Julia Kristeva: without notions such as
productivity and intertextuality that she had developed, inspired pri-
marily by the work of Bakhtin, Barthes notion of the ‘writerly’ would
have been inconceivable. Barthes also followed his favourite student’s
lead when she, in the years that followed, exchanged her Bakhtinian
vocabulary for the Lacanian vernacular and began to pay attention to
corporeality in language—not as a lack, but as a breeding ground, as

chora.
The major difference between Barthes and Kristeva was that
she—like many of her colleagues at Tel Quel—worked out her in-
sights about the body and the text, the semiotic and the symbolic,
within a pronouncedly revolutionary political program. The avant-
garde’s literary revolution became, in Kristeva, the foreshadowing of
an imminent cultural and political upheaval. During that period,
Barthes was much more reserved when it came to politics. In contrast
to many of his younger friends at Tel Quel, May ’68 left him quite dis-
illusioned, as Calvet points out in his biography of Barthes (cf. Calvet
1990/1994, 202 ff./163 ff.). Barthes did not share Kristeva’s ideologi-
cal aspirations, but rather—based on her psychoanalytically-inspired
research—developed a more personal, hedonistic approach to the
body in its interaction with language.
The reading body
Relieved to have the opportunity to escape a turbulent Paris and the

hysteria of the student protest for a while, in September 1969 Barthes
accepted a post as visiting lecturer at the University of Rabat in Mo-
rocco. There he not only prepared the publication of S/Z, which would
appear in 1970, but also worked for the art publisher Skira on a short
book devoted to Japan, which he visited three times during 1966 and
1967. This book appeared under the title L’Empire des signes (Empire
of Signs). As with S/Z, here as well Barthes declares in the introduc-
tion that it is the reader who provides an otherwise meaningless col-
lection of signifiers with a structure. But whereas in S/Z he started out
from the assumption of a fixed, more or less objective series of inter-
pretation codes, he now chose as his selection principle for his ‘read-
ing’ of Japan to be guided simply by the pleasure that certain aspects
of this country evoked in him.
While Barthes, after only one year, ended prematurely his stay
in Rabat, for him this sabbatical year spent far away from the political
struggles in Paris working on a book about a much more distant coun-
try signified for him a change of course with respect to his earlier
work. While Tel Quel, like many of the leftist intellectuals in France
in the early seventies, had taken a pronounced Maoist stance, Barthes
would devote himself undisturbed to the intimate revolution of pleas-
ure. He proclaimed this credo expressly in the preface to Sade, Fou-

rier, Loyola (1971), a collection of texts that were published primarily
in Tel Quel and Critique: “Rien de plus déprimant que d’imaginer le
Texte comme un objet intellectuel (de réflexion, d’analyse, de compa-
raison, de reflet, etc.). Le texte est un objet de plaisir.” (OC III, 704)
[Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the Text as an intellec-
tual object (for reflection, analysis, comparison, mirroring, etc.). The
text is an object of pleasure. (Barthes 1997, 7)] In addition, a bit fur-
ther Barthes suggests, somewhat provocatively, that “[l]e plaisir d’une
lecture garantit sa vérité.” (706) [ [t]he pleasure of a reading guaran-
tees its truth. (9)] Thus, the only criterion Barthes retained was the
pleasure that the text provided to the reader’s body. And while the no-
tion of the ‘body’ in Barthes to that point was still primarily a theo-
retical and thus, paradoxically enough, also a rather abstract term, he
now realised that the experience of pleasure as such was still con-
nected to the concrete body of a singular reader: in casu, himself.
Thus Sade, Fourier, Loyola also signalled the return of biography, not
only that of the author—Barthes added a list of short anecdotes at the
back of the book, biographèmes as he called them (706/9)—but also
(and above all) that of the reader:
le plaisir du Texte s’accomplit d’une façon plus profonde […]: lorsque
le texte ‘littéraire’ (le Livre) transmigre dans notre vie, lorsqu’une au-
tre écriture (l’écriture de l’Autre) parvient à écrire des fragments de
notre propre quotidienneté, bref quand il se produit une co-existence.
(704, italics in original)
[the pleasure of the Text is achieved more deeply […]: whenever the
‘literary’ Text (the Book) transmigrates into our life, whenever an-
other writing (the Other’s writing) succeeds in writing fragments of
our own daily lives, in short, whenever a co-existence occurs. (7, ital-
ics in original)]
This ‘co-existence’ means that the writerly is no longer an anonymous

operation of language in a textual field, but an extra-textual confronta-
tion with the singular body in its everyday context, a context that is
thereby altered, gaining new perspectives.
The bêtise
In Le Plaisir du texte, written in 1973, Barthes would continue his re-

search into the relation between text, subject and body. Still, this slim
little book is somewhat disappointing for those who had expected a
more thoroughly developed theory of reading drawing upon the rather
vague notion of ‘pleasure’ that Barthes, in his preface to Sade, Fou-
rier, Loyola, had taken as the touchstone of a given text’s truth.
Le Plaisir du texte is a collection of loose fragments without
any clear connection, full of quotations for which Barthes declined to
provide the source (cf. A. K. Mortimer’s attempt to identify the differ-
ent (often hidden) intertextual references in her The Gentlest Law: Ro-
land Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1989)). Furthermore, the dis-
tinction between the two central concepts examined by Barthes,
namely, plaisir and jouissance, is very shaky. Yet hidden behind this
terminological vacillation was a more profound uncertainty in
Barthes’ thinking. As J.-M. Rabaté suggests in his lemma about
Barthes in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Crit icism
,
with this conceptual pair—plaisir/jouissance—Barthes once again
takes up the distinction he made earlier between lisible and scriptible
in S/Z (cf. Rabaté 2005, 98). Reformulated in psychoanalytic terms,
this is to say that with the texte de plaisir, the reader can pleasurably
project one’s imaginary fantasies onto that which one reads. The texte
de jouissance makes this identification impossible and profoundly de-
stabilizes the reader’s identity.
And yet, with all due respect to Rabaté, the purpose of Le
Plaisir du texte is not just the reformulation of the contrast between
‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ in psychoanalytic terms: while it is clear that
Barthes, in S/Z, still sided with the ‘writerly text’, his value judgment
is now pronounced with less conviction. As was apparent from the
preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, he ascribed an important role to
pleasure in the evaluation of a text. Furthermore, as he now claims,
the texte de jouissance can even be thoroughly irritating: in other
words, the choice between ‘classic’ and avant-garde texts is much less
evident than it used to be. Barthes’ vascillating terminology seems pri-
marily to be an expression of his own hesitation between his love for
the old and his fascination for new forms of literature. For Barthes, the
pleasure of identification which occurs with classic texts, and the en-
joyment of ‘writerly’ texts which destroys every form of identifica-
tion, mutually exclude one another in advance. For this reason he can-
not view his own conflicting literary preferences as anything other
than a contradiction which turns him into a reader who “jouit à la fois,
à travers le texte, de la consistance de son moi et de sa chute.” (OC IV,
230, italics in original) [simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the
consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall. (Barthes 1975,
21)]
The conceptual confusion becomes even greater when Barthes
claims that pleasure (thus the pleasant reading of textes lisibles) is also
capable of breaking through the imaginary consistency of the ‘self’.
Thus, like jouissance, it can be an active force that compels the sub-
ject to reconsider its relation to the body during the process of reading.
It is this moment that Barthes, in Le Plaisir du texte, designates as the
dérive (drift), a notion that refers to the moment where the reader is
captured imaginarily by a certain passage and begins to drift away
from the original text, and yet is simultaneously confronted with that
which does not get carried away in this drift:
La dérive advient chaque fois que je ne respecte pas le tout, et qu’ à
force de paraître emporté ici et là au gré des illusions, séductions et in-
timidations de langage, tel un bouchon sur la vague, je reste immobile,
pivotant sur la jouissance intraitable qui me lie au texte (au monde).
(229, italics in original)
[Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever,

by dint of seeming driven about by language’s illusions, seductions,
and intimidations, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, piv-
oting on the intractable bliss that binds me to the text (to the world).
(18, italics in original)]
This intraitable can be aligned with Nietzsche’s “something unteach-

able” which, in his description of the “spiritual fate”, he called the
“great stupidity” (Nietzsche 1973, 143-4): the concrete libidinal pres-
ence of our body. Barthes indeed concludes: “un autre nom de la dé-
rive, ce serait: l’Intraitable – ou peut-être encore: la Bêtise.” (229,
italics in original) [another name for drifting would be: the Intracta-
ble—or perhaps even: Stupidity. (18, italics in original)]
At first sight the term bêtise (‘stupidity’) here should astonish
a reader of Barthes because bêtise for him is usually negatively con-
noted with doxa, and stands for a stupid cliché, an obvious stereotype,
the unthinkingly accepted bourgeois prejudice that Flaubert ridiculed
in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues and about which Barthes resumed
the critique in his Mythologies (cf. Ette 2002, Gaillard 1978,
Herschberg-Pierrot 2002). The bêtise as it now appears in Le Plaisir
du texte no longer belongs to the collective doxa, but to the singular
body as it is bound to the text during the course of reading.
The various ways that the subject deals with its bêtise culmi-
nates in different approaches to the text. According to Barthes, it
should also be possible to generate a topology of the pleasures of read-
ing via the psychoanalytic diagnostic schemas of hysteria, obsessive
neurosis, paranoia and perversion (cf. 258/63). The exercise that
Barthes suggests here is very interesting, and yet he devotes barely
half a page to the various positions that the subject can take with re-
spect to the text. In what follows I intend to develop this Barthesian
classification further theoretically.
But first an important amendment must be made concerning
Barthes use of psychoanalytic terminology: he obviously did not use
them in the strict clinical sense, and therefore I choose to make a clear
distinction between, on the one hand, a certain fundamental psychic
structure—such as can be diagnosed in a patient—and on the other
hand, the strategy related to the structure, and with which a particular
reader approaches the text. This effectively means that a reader need
not have a psychotic structure to, for instance, employ a paranoid
reading strategy, and even less that a reader always has to choose for
the same strategy. As Barthes remarked about himself, in Roland Bar-
thes par Roland Barthes, (1975), “vous découvrez que vous êtes à la
fois (ou tour à tour) obsessionnel, hystérique, paranoïaque et de plus
pervers (sans parler des psychoses amoureuses)”. (OC IV, 717) [you
discover that you are at one and the same time (or alternately) obses-
sive, hysterical, paranoiac, and perverse to the last degree (not to men-
tion certain erotic psychoses). (Barthes 1994, 144)] Yet we will ulti-
mately see that a certain reading strategy would become Barthes’ pre-
ferred method, and would also serve as the paradigm for the theory of
reading that he attempted to develop starting with Le Plaisir du texte:
the strategy of the ‘perverse’ reader.
We begin our sequence with the hysterical reader. The hys-
terical position is typical of the way in which we usually relate to the
symbolic: while we know that language is arbitrary, as is the identity
that language gives to us, we nevertheless need this symbolic identity;
we expect that the Other can tell us who we really are and can liberate
us from the bêtise which makes it so that we cannot coincide with our-
selves. The hysterical reader, for which Flaubert’s Emma Bovary is
undoubtedly the prototype, carries this expectation to the extreme: this
reader goes desperately in search of the sort of texts in which one
finds reflected the person one wants to be, texts that can offer one a
fixed identity. The point is, of course, that the Other whom the hys-
terical reader takes as a model is, per definition, incomplete; it is al-
ways lacking the one signifier that can determine one completely, that
can fill the lack in the symbolic—which is precisely where one’s bê-
tise is located.
This ‘failure’ of the text does not have to be a problem; even
more, it can make the text more appealing to me because I get the im-
pression that my role is an essential support for the text because I,
through my enthusiasm, offer evidence that the text does in fact make
sense and is relevant. This reader is the missing piece of the puzzle
that fills the lack in the text with its own presence. Every form of tex-
tual exegesis, such as this book for example, has something irrevoca-
bly hysterical about it: such a form of interpretation assumes that a
certain corpus is lacking something, and so one starts from the im-
plicit belief that one can ‘help’ the writer by filling a gap in the origi-
nal text with the commentary one writes. The hysterical reader can
also react negatively to this lack: the text then loses its authority and
the faithful exegete suddenly becomes a fervent critic. This happens
when the reader discovers that also the text is written from out of a
surreptitious bêtise that one, in this way, tries to escape.
This hysterical reading strategy is an excellent tool to use for
any form of ideology critique: texts are examined for the unaccept-
able, obtuse and amoral enjoyment that they keep hidden, albeit not
consciously. This is, for example, what Barthes tried to do with his
Mythologies: he read French society in the fifties as a façade with
which the bourgeoisie tried to legitimise its bêtise by giving it the ap-
pearance of self-evidence and naturalness, at the expense of all those
who were abused for the secret enjoyment of the bourgeoisie. The
hysteric abhors this bêtise, disappointed because what one ultimately
encounters in all those cultural products is but a hypocritical masquer-
ade of blind, repulsive power, ridiculous prejudices and narrowmind-
edness: one is disgusted by this underhanded enjoyment that hides be-
hind a society’s master-texts. Yet the problem with this sort of cri-
tique, is that it often remains blind to its own bêtise, hence Barthes
reservations about this kind of ideology critique which—certainly af-

ter May ’68—was omnipresent in the human sciences.
From this perspective we can perhaps understand the decon-
structionist school within literary studies as an ultimate attempt to
elude the bêtise proper to ideology critique itself. With a careful read-
ing, the deconstructionist reader tries to expose the point at which an
author or another reader has been ensnared by one’s own blind spot,
one’s own bêtise. In contrast to, for instance, a Marxist critic, the de-
constructionist must then beware of formulating an alternative pre-
cisely because one is aware that the bêtise would once again reappear
immediately. By this sort of circumscriptive reading, the continual
suspension or deferral of meaning, abstaining chastely from any form
of identification, one’s own libidinal investment in a text—the
reader’s concrete sinthome—can be kept at bay. The deconstructionist
discourse, which stresses absence in a text, fits perfectly with the hys-
terical aversion to the presence of one’s own libidinal being in the
course of reading: by emphasising the fact that there exists no hors-
texte (outside of the text), this reader forgets that at the same time
there can also be no hors-corps (outside of the body). And it is pre-
cisely in this attempt to bracket corporeal enjoyment and exchange it
for a ‘pure’ desire for what always silently withdraws, for what re-
mains ‘to come’ in the text, that the hysterical reader, paradoxically
enough, discovers one’s own, ideal reading pleasure.
Starting from the same aversion to the bêtise, the obsessional
reader also obtains pleasure from the text by avoiding bodily jouis-
sance. This kind of reading strategy attempts to cover up the lack in
the text through the meticulous explanation and encapsulation of
every uncertain or ambiguous element. Barthes confronted such an
‘obsessional’ reading method—namely, the critique universitaire—in
his polemic with Raymond Picard. It is a type of reading which as-
sumes that the truth of a text can be reconstructed unequivocally via
dictionaries, historical reference books, genre- and period codes, biog-
raphies which clarify the author’s intentions, or if need be, secondary
literature from influential critics whose judgment or theoretical
framework establishes the only correct interpretation. Occasionally,
out of fear for one’s own bêtise, the obsessional reader abandons any
form of textual interpretation altogether. One then focuses on the for-
mal aspects of a text, searching for printing or other mistakes, catego-
rising, placing it in a particular time frame or carrying out statistical
research; in short, one tries everything so long as one is not forced to

realise—faced with the plurality of meanings in language—the extent
to which one’s own body gets caught up in the text, thereby confront-
ing one with one’s own bêtise.
A third type of reader Barthes distinguishes is the paranoid
reader. As an illness, paranoia belongs alongside psychosis, which is
characterised by a rejection of the symbolic; a rejection that leaves the
subject defenceless against its libidinal being. Precisely in order to
protect oneself temporarily against the deluge of the real, the paranoid
subject tries to maintain its identity by constructing a sort of surro-
gate-order, a carefully constructed delusional system that provides a
structure which enables the paranoid to master the real—at least for
the time being. The paranoid reader thus believes anything but the fact
that the figure of the author is dead: on the contrary, this author, like a
master manipulator, has complete control over the interpretation of the
text. This kind of reader is not only convinced that everything in a
book has been placed there by the author with a specific intention in
mind, but also that—if one reads between the lines—one can find all
kinds of hidden meanings that the author wanted to impart to his read-
ing public. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) by Eco is a fantastic parody
of this kind of paranoid reading of a text.
The paranoid reader sometimes even believes that the text in
question is solely and exclusively about him, that the author has writ-
ten secret messages that only he can decipher. Nabokov portrays mas-
terfully just such a reader in his Pale Fire (1962); namely, the charac-
ter of Charles Kinbote, professor of literature and neighbour of a fa-
mous poet whose final poem Kinbote publishes posthumously, and for
which he provides a commentary which is to make clear that the entire
poem is ultimately about none other than Kinbote himself.
Finally there is the perverse reader. As we saw earlier with our
discussion of Deleuze, the pervert is someone who denies the lack in
the symbolic and is thus unwilling to repress one’s enjoyment, as with
the obsessional, or to sublimate in one or another mythical object of
desire, as with the hysteric. The pervert exchanges the law for the con-
tract which protects one against a too-direct exposure to the libidinal
being, but at the same time allows one to raise a particular fetish to the
dignity of the Thing and to derive excessive enjoyment from it, all the
while the pervert realises all too well that it is a fictional construction.
According to Barthes, every reading in fact consists in a simi-

lar perverse contract by which “le lecteur peut dire sans cesse: je sais
bien que ce ne sont que des mots, mais tout de même… (je m’émeus
comme si ces mots énonçaient une réalité).” (OC IV, 248, italics in
original) [the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but
all the same… (I am moved as though these words were uttering a re-
ality). (Barthes 1975, 47, italics in original)] The reader knows very
well that the text is merely a fiction, but precisely by this suspension
of belief, as we have reformulated Coleridge’s famous expression, the
perverse reader can turn language itself into a fetish: “Le fétichiste
s’accorderait au texte découpé, au morcellement des citations, des
formules, des frappes, au plaisir du mot”. (258-9) [The fetishist would
be matched with the divided-up text, the singling out of quotations,
formulae, turns of phrase, with the pleasure of the word. (63)] It is not
difficult to recognise Barthes’ own working method in this definition:
his cutting of Balzac’s short story into pieces, his fragmentary and bi-
ased description of a fictionalised Japan, the way in which he brought
together, in Le Plaisir du texte, theoretical concepts and philosophical
quotations without clarifying their original context. . . . The perverse
reader is also not afraid of or embarrassed by one’s own bêtise, and
also does not recoil, like the hysterical reader, when one sees the bê-
tise of the Other suddenly crop up in the text.
Still, as we saw with Deleuze’s discussion of Sacher-Masoch,
perversion is more than a challenge to the law and the enjoyment of an
object forbidden by that law: it is the motor of an experimental proc-
ess in search of a different arrangement of reality, the construction of
one’s own worldview. Considering the fact that the pervert does not
accept the legitimacy of the symbolic order, he is indeed forced to de-
velop a life program of one’s own. The pervert denies the authority of
the Other and refuses to assume the identity ascribed to him. He tries
to exchange this predetermined position in the symbolic order for the
construction of the ultimate fetish: the self. The perverse reader will
then also adjust his reading to a continual process of self-styling: one
selects those elements from the text one is reading that can be used to
change oneself. Simultaneously—and here is where the perverse
reader differs from the hysterical reader who really believes one can
locate one’s own truth in the text—the perverse reader realises that
this ‘virtual self’ crystallised from the reading will always have some-
thing unreal about it, that it can never produce a complete image with
which one can coincide entirely. Thus the pervert is not misled by the
imaginary of the dérive, but uses it as a convenient instrument to write
a new identity for oneself. And where, in S/Z, it was still the anony-
mous, proliferating meanings of language that made the text ‘writerly’
for the reading subject, it is now the dérive which makes it possible
that the reading subject itself becomes ‘writerly’ through the text.
In the program of Le Plaisir du texte, the subject of the reader
must no longer be resisted as an illusion, but can return as a fiction:
“Un certain plaisir est tiré d’une façon de s’imaginer comme individu,
d’inventer une dernière fiction, des plus rares: le fictif de l’identité.”
(258, italics in original) [A certain pleasure is derived from a way of
imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the
fictive identity. (62, italics in original)] We should therefore not forget
that this fictive identity, this demon, much like the one which arises
through interaction with the text, is not a creatio ex nihilo but is con-
stantly being formed by an entire succession of irretrievable factors
which, taken together, determine the singular bêtise by which a reader
can bring oneself en dérive and then ‘rewrite’ oneself as a fiction:
car c’est au terme d’une combinatoire très fine d’éléments biographi-
ques, historiques, sociologiques, névrotiques (éducation, classe so-
ciale, configuration infantile, etc.) que je règle le jeu contradictoire du
plaisir (culturel) et de la jouissance (inculturelle), et que je m’écris
comme un sujet actuellement mal placé […] sujet anachronique, en
dérive. (258)
[for it is at the conclusion of a very complex process of biographical,

historical, sociological, neurotic elements (education, social class,
childhood configuration, etc.) that I control the contradictory interplay
of (cultural) pleasure and (non-cultural) bliss, and that I write myself
as a subject at present out of place […]: anachronic subject, adrift.
(62)]
While the perverse reading strategy in Le Plaisir du texte is clearly

Barthes’ preferred method, he still fails to divest his own reading posi-
tion from all of those hysterical aspects which prevent him from af-
firming without reservation the bêtise in his reading. The reader’s
dérive is such that one can only appeal to the lonesome pleasure felt
during one’s ‘drifting’: this reader cannot lay any claim to a theoreti-
cal system that gives legitimacy to his interpretation, and this still
made Barthes somewhat uneasy about his own work.
It was here that Barthes drew inspiration from Nietzsche for

his perverse reading strategy, Nietzsche who rejected the existence
(and along with it the necessity) of a truth to be determined externally
and who glorified appearance as the only reality. Nietzsche functions
primarily as an intertext that finally enables Barthes to escape the
dogmatic grip of his other intertexts, or formulated more precisely, to
go back and use them as serviceable fictions with which the reader can
reflect upon oneself, but which can lay no further claim to an external
truth. Barthes also reformulated his relationship to psychoanalysis in
Le Plaisir du texte from that Nietzschean perspective: “Le monument
psychanalytique doit être traversé – non contourné, comme les voies
admirables d’une très grande ville, voies à travers lesquelles on peut
jouer, rêver, etc.: c’est une fiction.” (255) [The monument of psycho-
analysis must be traversed—not bypassed—like the fine thoroughfares
of a very large city, across which we can play, dream, etc.: a fiction.
(58)]
Barthes was in this way able to reconsider the subject not only
as a fiction but also starting from fiction. This fiction need not be lim-
ited exclusively to texts that have already from the beginning been
viewed as belonging strictly to the belles-lettres: theoretical texts as
well—in Barthes case those of Nietzsche or Lacan—can stimulate the
reader’s imaginary, thereby providing elements with which one can
make one’s relation to oneself ‘writerly’. In Roland Barthes par Ro-
land Barthes, which appeared two years after Le Plaisir du texte,
Barthes would attempt to bring this perverse creation of a fictive iden-
tity into practice.
Writing the imaginary
Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes appeared in the same series in

which his Michelet had earlier been published: Écrivains de toujours.
The intention of this series was to introduce various known, primarily
French authors, with great attention paid to illustrations and including
copious citations from the work of the author. Hence the customary
title for each volume: “X . . . par lui-même”. The publisher Seuil sug-
gested to Barthes as a publicity stunt that he write a book that would
incorporate this title literally. But as Barthes stated in a 1975 inter-
view, for him this book quickly became much more than an ironic
pastiche: he saw it as the ideal occasion to explain in greater detail his

relationship to the imaginary (cf. OC IV, 876)
It is immediately made clear that the text is in fact a fictional
autobiography. Preceding the text is a short sentence in Barthes’
handwriting, printed in facsimile, which warns the reader: “Tout ceci
doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman.” (OC IV,
577) [It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.
(Barthes 1994, 1)] The books begins with a rather vague photo of
Barthes’ mother walking along the beach, without caption. His mother
also returns a few times after this: somewhat further the reader again
discovers a photo of her carrying the young Barthes in her arms
(583/5). It is a moving photo, primarily because her son is actually al-
ready a bit too grown-up to still be carried in this way: his long, spin-
dly legs are dangling next to her while he clings tightly to her, casting
an anxious, suspicious glance at the lens—as if the photographer has
just remarked that he is indeed too old to be carried by his mother like
that. “La demande d’amour” (583) [The demand for love (4)] reads
Barthes’ laconic commentary. A few pages later we find a photo of
Barthes, this time as an infant, as his mother shows him proudly to the
photographer. Barthes adds the caption, “Le stade du miroir: ‘tu es
cela’ ” (601) [The mirror stage: ‘That’s you’ (21)]. Yet despite this
clear reference to Lacanian terminology, Barthes would still approach
the imaginary in a very different way. This can already be ascertained
from the short introduction Barthes wrote to accompany the photo-
graphs and in which he remarked that photos such as these, which are
so characteristic of the (auto)biographical genre, are not always reas-
suring mirrors offering the subject imaginary recognition. In this way
Barthes implicitly adds nuance to Lacan’s view on the imaginary as a
unifying process that gathers heterogeneous drives into a whole, an
‘imagined’ body that I recognise as mine but which can never repre-
sent fully my libidinal involvement. In contrast, Barthes’ photos are
indeed capable of confronting the subject with its extimate kernel,
precisely because they reflect the viewing subject’s own body back to
him as something fundamentally strange (cf. 581/3).
These photos, which as Barthes indicates in the introduction
were purposefully kept out of the actual text, together with a few
sparse childhood memories included in the text and a summary biog-
raphy of relevant dates at the end of the book, comprise the only evi-
dence of what Barthes, in his introduction, calls his unproductive life,
namely, his life before he began to write (cf. 582/3). Mounir Laouyen,
in ‘L’imago maternelle dans Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes’
(2002) which was included in an issue on Barthes in the Revue des
sciences humaines, attributes this to Barthes’ aversion for the oedipal
‘story’ (cf. Laouyen 2002, 135-6). But while Barthes, as we will see
later, indeed had a problematic relation to the classic ‘story’, in my
opinion Layouen’s interpretation is in need of some nuance. One who
reads attentively Barthes’ apparently casual remarks accompanying
the photos, and compares them with what we know from the biogra-
phy by Calvet, will notice that these photos illustrate a carefully con-
structed oedipal narrative. For instance, note the commentary that fol-
lows two photos of Louis Barthes: “Le père, mort très tôt (à la guerre),
n’était pris dans aucun discours du souvenir ou du sacrifice. Par le re-
lais maternel, sa mémoire, jamais oppressive, ne faisant qu’effleurer
l’enfance, d’une gratification presque silencieuse.” (595) [The father,
dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial
discourse. By maternal intermediary his memory—never an oppres-
sive one—merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost si-
lent bounty. (15)]
The father figure here is almost literally presented as the lov-
ing Other as described by Kristeva: the mother’s discourse establishes
it as present imaginarily, not as a frustrating rival but as a nourishing
and cherished authority that helps the subject to disengage from the
(mother’s) body and allows it to develop its own psychical space. This
imaginary father figure makes it possible to assume a middle position
between, on the one hand, psychotic self-loss, and on the other, the
name-of-the-father which positions the subject in the symbolic,
marked by a lack. This middle position is also similar to the position
of the pervert, who knows all too well that he always needs a mini-
mum of structure and identity, but can only accept this identity if he
has first produced this self as a fictional construction, becoming, in
other words, his own procreator, his own father.
We should also not forget here that the absence of the oedipal,
prohibitive father figure and his glorification as a loving Other is also
a perverse strategy, a fictitious ‘contract’ that replaces the symbolic
law, together with its inherent oedipal conflict. With this in mind, the
anecdote that Barthes tells later on in his autobiography is revealing:
one of his teachers had the habit at the beginning of each year to sol-
emnly write on the blackboard the names of the student’s family
members who had died in the First World War: “le tableau effacé, il
ne restait rien de ce deuil proclamé […]: pas de père à tuer, pas de fa-
mille à haïr, pas de milieu à réprouver: grande frustration œdipéenne!”
(625) [once the blackboard was erased, nothing was left of this pro-
claimed mourning […] no father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to
reject: great Oedipal frustration! (45)]
Calvet’s biography shows that Barthes comments here are in-
deed a fictional rendition of the facts, for it is clear that his ‘no family
to hate’ does not accurately reflect Barthes’ actual youth. Barthes in-
deed had more than enough opportunities to hate his family: he had a
difficult relationship with his grandmother on his mother’s side be-
cause she offered little assistance when Henriëtte Barthes was deemed
persona non grata by her stepfamily and moved to Paris after the birth
of Barthes’ half brother Michel following an affair with a certain
André Salzedo (cf. Calvet 1990/1994, 36ff/17ff). Remarkably enough,
Barthes did not mention a word about this family history in his auto-
biography. If the name of his father was erased by a schoolteacher, the
name of the lover was skilfully deleted by Barthes himself. The only
indication of that part of his biography is a beach photo of Barthes
with his mother and half brother, but without André Salzedo; the sole
comment, although a very telling one, is this: “La famille sans le fa-
milialisme”. (OC IV, 607) [Family without familialism. (Barthes
1994, 27)]
With the collection of photos in Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes, Barthes not only situates himself outside the influence of an
oedipal father figure, he also extracts himself from the ancestral his-
tory of notaries from the Haute-Garonne. Alongside an old family
photo he reproduced a copy of a confession by his grandfather Léon
Barthes, to which he added:
L’écriture n’a-t-elle pas été pendant des siècles la reconnaissance
d’une dette, la garantie d’un échange, le seing d’une représentation?
Mais aujourd’hui, l’écriture s’en va doucement vers l’abandon des
dettes bourgeoises, vers la perversion, l’extrémité du sens, le texte…
(598)
[Has not writing been for centuries the acknowledgment of a debt, the
guarantee of an exchange, the sign of a representation? But today writ-
ing gradually drifts toward the cession of bourgeois debts, toward per-
version, the extremity of meaning, the text. . . (18)]
This commentary summarizes the entire story that Barthes scripted,

with himself as a ‘fictional character’ playing the lead: it signifies a
triumph over the law and the oedipal guilt of the past, which is re-
placed by the perverse contract with the text which—as Barthes al-
ready noted in ‘La mort de l’auteur’—permits that “le scripteur mod-
erne naît en même temps que son texte”. (OC III, 43) [the modern
scriptor is born at the same time as his text. (Barthes 1989, 52, italics
in original)] It is this ‘story’ that ultimately enables Barthes to replace
the Lacanian imaginary—where it is the Other who assigns the subject
a fixed place, the compulsory ‘that’s you’ of the mirror stage—with an
other imaginary, the imaginary of the text. The best comparison for
this imaginary would be the creative imaginary that Kristeva would
revive in her later work; or perhaps the notion of the imaginary as
used by Foucault in his text on Binswanger: an imaginary that liber-
ates the subject from its rigid identification with a certain self-image,
erases the hereditary debt of the past and enables the subject to be re-
born, in writing.
This also explains why Barthes chose to place all of the pho-
tos in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes before the actual text: the
photos testify to an imaginary identity that Barthes, as he claims, left
behind once he began to write: “Un autre imaginaire s’avancera alors:
celui de l’écriture.”(OC IV, 582) [Another imaginary will then be con-
stituted: that of writing. (Barthes 1994, 4, translation slightly modi-
fied)]
Thus the text does not destroy the subject’s imaginary (as the Barthes
of Critique et vérité still thought), but replaces it with the imaginary in
the text. Perverse self-creation becomes possible in this way; the con-
struction of an ego that no longer issues from a passive, imaginary
identification with the position prescribed for us by the symbolic or-
der.
This alter ego offered to us by the textual imaginary is not
created in a vacuum, but arises from a whole network of texts that
stimulate this imaginary. In other words, the imaginary of writing is
always the result of the imaginary of reading, that is, a reading of
‘writerly’ texts which are always susceptible to the dérive. The reas-
suring, unambiguous mirror image is hereby replaced by the arbitrary
constellations of signifiers from S/Z, which continually generate alter-
native identifications by always making possible new combinations
and different meanings. It is this imaginary of reading, which Barthes
would try to comprehend in the coming years up to and including his

lectures to the Collège de France. ‘Sur la lecture’ (1976) (On Read-
ing), a text based on a reading Barthes presented to the Writing Con-
ference of Luchon, where he explains in brief his theory of reading
based on the imaginary, gave the initial impetus to this attempt.
The reader as character in a novel
‘Sur la lecture’ opens with a captatio benevolentiae: Barthes points

out that he has no relevant pedagogical experience that would allow
him to speak with any authority on how to acquire a serviceable the-
ory of reading. For this reason he only wants to discuss his own per-
sonal reading practice. He then points out the major doctrinal confu-
sion in which the debate about reading theory was at that moment en-
tangled. It is a confusion that, Barthes immediately adds, may well be
inherent to the reading experience itself insofar as it is characterised
by a lack of pertinence. This lack can be located, on the one hand, in
the ‘object’ read, which need not per se be a written text—a city, an
image, a gesture can also be read—and on the other hand, it can be lo-
cated in the reader whose reading consists of different, almost indis-
tinguishable levels, going from pure denotation (a sign refers to a ref-
erent) to the various connotations that this sign can acquire in a chain
of other signs.
While Barthes keeps open the possibility that this lack of per-
tinence can perhaps be solved by some genius future theoretician who
figures out how to make a coherent analysis of reading in all its differ-
ent facets, he suspects that this impertinence is inextricably linked to
the perverse nature of reading itself: “La lecture, ce serait le geste du
corps (car bien entendu on lit avec son corps) qui d’un même mouve-
ment pose et pervertit son ordre. Un supplément intérieur de perver-
sion.” (OC IV, 929) [Reading is the gesture of the body (for of course
one reads with one’s body) which by one and the same movement
posits and perverts its order: an interior supplement of perversion.
(Barthes 1989, 36)] Barthes stresses that such a reading perversion is
not at all similar to a ‘wild’ reading that takes no notice of the mean-
ing structures of a text: to a certain extent, perversion needs these
structures, precisely in order to challenge or ‘deny’ them.
The same is true for laws imposed on the reader from outside
the text, and which not only determine how a text should be read, but
first of all establish which texts should be read. While the classic, uni-
versal canon has come increasingly under fire, Barthes believes it is an
illusion to believe that a ‘law of reading’ has disappeared entirely:
la loi de lecture ne vient plus d’une éternité de culture, mais d’une ins-
tance bizarre, ou du moins encore énigmatique, située à la frontière de
l’Histoire et de la Mode. Ce que je veux dire, c’est qu’il y a des lois de
groupe, des micro-lois, dont il faut avoir le droit de se libérer. (930)
[the law of reading no longer comes from an eternity of culture, but

from a bizarre, or at least enigmatic, instance located between History
and Fashion. What I mean is that there are group laws, micro-laws,
from which one must be entitled to liberate oneself. (37)]
Barthes also suggests then that a theory of reading must take into ac-
count the reader’s desire not to read something. According to Barthes,
the reader’s productivity, which can be encouraged by a texte scripti-
ble, can also be stimulated by disregarding a text: “Qui sait si certai-
nes choses ne se transforment pas, qui sait si certaines choses impor-
tantes n’arrivent pas (dans le travail, dans l’histoire du sujet histori-
que) non pas seulement par l’effet des lectures, mais par celui des ou-
blis de lecture.” (930) [Who knows if certain things are not trans-
formed, who knows if certain important things do not happen (in
work, in the history of the historical subject) not only by the effects of
reading but also by the effects of reading’s omissions (forgettings).
(37)]
Barthes believes that there is still another external law that
takes aim at the perverse reader’s freedom, namely, the library. On the
one hand, it might be that the book one wants to read is missing, hav-
ing been borrowed from the library, and thus forcing the reader to be
satisfied with a substitute; on the other hand, the infinitude of the li-
brary confronts the reader with one’s own lack, ‘hystericises’ the
reader by making one realise that one will never be able to read every
book, thereby creating the nagging fallacy that one might just neglect
to read that one incomparable book which would render the perfect
reading experience. In addition, there is also the fact that the book bor-
rowed still belongs to the Other, which makes it impossible for the
reader to turn the book into a fetish because he cannot appropriate the
book for himself entirely. For Barthes, the ideal place for the reader is
one’s own private library, where one can surround oneself with books
that can be the continuation of the intimate space of one’s own imagi-
nary. And while Barthes, in S/Z, denounced such an imaginary reading

as reactionary, he is now going to revaluate this reading precisely be-
cause, in the meantime, he has come to understand that the imaginary
no longer has to be a purely passive identification, but can also be-
come an active creation. Barthes now describes the figure of the
reader in almost the same terms he employed to present himself as a
fictional character in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. This figure
must be treated “comme un personnage, […] un des personnages
(même pas forcément privilégié) de la fiction et/ou du Texte.” (935,
italics in original) [as a character, […] one of the characters (not even
necessarily a privileged one) of the fiction and/or the Text. (41, italics
in original)]
In 1977 a book appeared that could serve as a case study for
the reading method he proposed in ‘Sur la lecture’: Fragments d’un
discours amoureux. Like S/Z, the book is the result of a seminar that
he gave at the École pratique des hautes études. Considering that in
‘Sur la lecture’ Barthes had compared the reader with someone in love
(cf. 932/39), it is not so surprising that he chose deliberately the dis-
course of the lover for his apology for the imaginary, because this type
of reader is the paradigm of one who reads from an imaginary per-
spective. Barthes does not want to analyse the amorous bêtise as a
neutral bystander, but to present himself as an apparently naïve reader
who continually seems to encounter himself, through the bêtise of be-
ing in love, as a fictional character in the texts he reads. Barthes defi-
nes these identifications as figures that—ordered alphabetically—
make up the different chapters in Fragments: “Une figure est fondée si
au moins quelqu’un peut dire: ‘Comme c’est vrai, ça! Je reconnais
cette scène de langage.’” (OC V, 30, italics in original) [A figure is
established if at least someone can say: ‘That’s so true! I recognize
that scene of language.’ (Barthes 1979, 4, italics in original)].
From a psychoanalytic intertext, one can compare this figure
with Kristeva’s loving Other: the imaginary schema of the figure
hands the reading body a structure with which to arrange the affects
that traverse it in the intimate psychic space of its imagination. It is
also not by chance that Winnicott is an important intertext in the
Fragments: the figure becomes a sort of transitional object that makes
it possible for a loving subject to deal with the severity of its fantasies
by channelling and expressing it via the figure. And yet this psycho-
analytic interpretation of the figure is not sufficient to completely un-
derstand its function in Barthes’ theory of reading. The figure is more

than a transitional object that comforts the lover for the absence of the
desired object by giving him a structure to help him deal with this
lack. From a Deleuzean perspective we could also interpret the figure
as part of a program, a program that we—seeing that Goethe’s The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) runs through the Fragments as a
guiding thread—could describe as Barthes’ becoming-Werther. Yet
the fact that a text from the Romantic period plays a central role in the
Fragments shows also an important difference from the Deleuzean
reading strategy. Goethe’s Werther is a paradigmatic example of a
classic novel, while Deleuze focused primarily on modernistic, ex-
perimental literature. Initially, Barthes also had a marked preference
for revolutionary texts which forced the reader to take distance from
the classic interpretation schemes. But as we have seen, from Le
Plaisir du texte on, Barthes began to doubt the validity of such a clear-
cut opposition: could not classic texts also become ‘writerly’, particu-
larly at a time when they were marginalised and even ridiculed and
where there was no prescription obligating one to read them? Out-
moded romantic discourse, as found in Goethe’s Werther, becomes
with Barthes just as revolutionary as an avant-garde text. It bestows an
exploration of a line of flight which has been denied to the modern,
conscientious reader, precisely because this reader views Werther’s
naïve sentimentality as being every bit as obscene as a sexual aberra-
tion: “Lorsque j’imagine gravement de me suicider pour un téléphone
qui ne vient pas, il se produit une obscénité aussi grande que lorsque
chez Sade, le pape sodomise un dindon.” (220) [When I seriously en-
visage committing suicide because of a telephone call that doesn’t
come, an obscenity occurs which is as great as when, in Sade, the
pope sodomizes a turkey. (178)]
Just like Deleuze, in his ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, made the
sneering remark that perversion cannot be reduced to flirting with an
‘anti-oedipal’ lifestyle, a perverse reading strategy need not always be
provocative or revolutionary. First and foremost it is about affirming
the difference, the nuance, the ‘pathos of distance’—a reading that
celebrates impertinence with respect to both current literary modes as
well as the classical, reverential approach to the work of a canon-
author such as Goethe. Another difference from Deleuze, which is
also apparent in Barthes’ preference for classic literature, is that much
attention is paid in the Fragments to the ‘self’ that encounters itself in

the figures, as Barthes admits in an interview from 1977:
je me reconnais, moi, comme sujet de l’imaginaire: j’ ai un rapport vi-
vant à la littérature passée, parce que, justement, cette littérature me
fournit des images, me fournit un bon rapport à l’image. Par exemple,
le récit, le roman, est une dimension de l’imaginaire qui existait dans
la littérature ‘lisible’; en reconnaissant mon attachement à cette littéra-
ture, je revendique en faveur du sujet imaginaire (OC V, 399).
[I recognise myself as a subject of the imaginary: I have a vital rela-

tion to past literature precisely because this literature provides me with
images, with a good relation to images. For example, the narrative, the
novel, forms a dimension of the imaginary that existed in ‘readerly’
literature. In admitting my fondness for this literature, I claim the
rights of the subject of the imaginary.]
For Deleuze, such a return to the ‘self’ can be nothing other than a
reterritorialisation, the disruption of a line of flight as happened with
Hanold at the end of Gradiva. The danger does indeed exist that the
dérive ultimately ends up making a circular movement, bringing the
reader back to its starting point time and again. Interpreted in this way,
Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux in the end is nothing
more than a narcissistic return to the personality of the critic, the si-
multaneous theatricalising and half-hearted concealment of the failed
love relation which lies at the basis of the Fragments—in short, the
umpteenth expression of a culture of confession in literature which
Deleuze so despised.
While Barthes, in contrast to Deleuze, does take into account
the personal, intimate biography of the reader, this ‘I’ which is con-
tinually speaking in the Fragments is still not a narcissistic mirror im-
age, but is the result of an intermittent identification with a series of
‘figures’ in which the reader recognises oneself briefly. This means
that the imaginary identifications themselves are continually en
dérive: one time the lover sees himself mirrored in the figure of some-
one waiting for a beloved who does not show up, another time in the
figure of jealousy, depending on the haphazard context in which he
finds himself. Therefore, the Fragments can no more be called an
autobiography in the strict sense of the word than could Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes: the book is not a report on a history of
love, but is a disparate corpus of various textual passages, the imperti-
nence of which already appears from the list of primary sources
Barthes provides at the beginning of the book, which extend from

Goethe to Plato to conversations with friends and personal experi-
ences. (cf. 33/8) This impertinence of reading also appears in the way
that Barthes, without much consideration for the original context, ‘re-
writes’ all sorts of heavyweight religious, philosophical or literary
texts into fragments useful for his own lover’s discourse. In doing so,
the denotation (such as God in mystical discourse) can easily be con-
verted into connotations that a certain passage invokes for the reader
through its interaction with one’s personal experiences. Just as with
the hypomnemata from classic antiquity, the consistency of the text
lies not with the corpus itself, but exclusively with the reader who at-
tempts to shape one’s own lover’s experience on the basis of this cor-
pus, and the program imposed on one’s reading body by the various
figures. The relation that the subject has with the fictional construction
created by his reading loses its arbitrary nature precisely because it is
based on the bêtise, the presence of the reading body. This is evident,
for example, from Barthes’ consternation as a result of the conde-
scending remark about Goethes’ Werther that Gide wrote in his diary,
claiming that he found Werther’s drawn out death agony immensely
irritating, and that he could hardly wait for him to finally draw his last
breath:
Gide ne sait pas que, dans le roman d’amour, le héros est réel (parce
qu’il est fait d’une substance absolument projective en quoi se re-
ceuille tout sujet amoureux), et que ce qu’il souhaite là, c’est la mort
d’un homme, c’est ma mort. (270, italics in original)
[Gide doesn’t realize that in the novel of love, the hero is real (be-
cause he is created out of an absolutely projective substance in which
every amorous subject collects himself), and that what he is looking
for here is a man’s death—is my death. (219, italics in original)]
By not treating Werther’s pathetic behaviour as ridiculous, as did

Gide, but rather by recognising through him his own lover’s bêtise,
Barthes turns Werther into his demon: a figure that makes clear that
his love is not original, that his intimate experiences had already been
written centuries before; but at the same time summons him, as a
modern reader, to continue to subscribe to it in its repetition. In this
way, Werther becomes an uncanny double for Barthes, one with
which he can never coincide, neither in the past nor the future, but
which he can only become.
That is the paradox of the imaginary which Barthes had al-

ready ascribed a central place in his autobiography. According to La-
can, the mirror stage illustrated that—to use a known verse from Rim-
baud—in the order of the imaginary, I am always an other, and thus
always grounded on misrecognition, alienation. For Barthes, on the
contrary, it is precisely in this misrecognition, the ‘delusion’ of the
lover in which he takes himself for another (in casu Werther), that the
pure experience of self inevitably announces itself:
Depuis cent ans, la folie (littéraire) est réputée consister en ceci: ‘Je
est un autre’: la folie est une expérience de dépersonnalisation. Pour
moi, sujet amoureux, c’est tout le contraire: c’est de devenir un sujet,
de ne pouvoir m’empêcher de l’être, qui me rend fou. Je ne suis pas
un autre: c’est ce que je constate avec effroi. (156, italics in original)
[For a hundred years, (literary) madness has been thought to consist in

Rimbaud’s ‘Je est un autre’: madness is an experience of depersonal-
ization. For me as an amorous subject, it is quite the contrary: it is be-
coming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which
drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realize with hor-
ror. (121, italics in original)]
For Barthes, it is only in this imaginary misrecognition, in the lover’s

delusion, that truth can be experienced. Thus, the subject’s truth is to
be found in the stubbornness with which this subject holds to that
imaginary, despite the fact that one knows it is an illusion: “ce n’est
pas la vérité qui est vraie, c’est le rapport au leurre qui devient vrai.”
(282) [it is not the truth which is true, but the relation to the lure which
becomes true. (231)] This also means that, for Barthes, the awareness
of our being-toward-death is not a call to traverse the phantasmatic
appearance, but to find in the appearance itself a relation to the truth.
This goes not only for Werther, but also for the reader who identifies
with Werther: even though one knows very well that Werther is but a
character on the page, one can still recognise in him the double that
confronts one with our own irreducible bêtise. The bêtise that draws
the reader to those phantasmatic scenarios reveals in this way a truth
that is not transcendent, but one which, in its repetition, becomes the
touchstone for the relationship of the reader to oneself.
We should emphasise here that the demon can only appear in-
sofar as the reader does not coincide entirely with it: becoming-
Werther must not be confused with imitating Werther (from his
trademark blue jacket and yellow vest to his suicide), because this
would reduce the creative imaginary to the sterile, tautological imagi-

nary of the mirror image. The demon only functions if a certain dis-
tance is established—not the lucid renunciation of a subject who has
traversed the fantasy, but the passionate affirmation of the fundamen-
tal irreality of the imaginary, because it is precisely there that the sub-
ject can find its freedom. Barthes designates this experience, of which
he treats with the final figure in the Fragments, as sobria ebrietas,
‘sober intoxication’. Borrowed from mysticism, this oxymoron which
closes out the Fragments summarises perfectly the relationship of the
perverse reader to the imaginary: “Vin le meilleur et le délectable,
comme aussi le plus enivrant […] duquel, sans y boire, l’âme anéantie
est enivrée, âme libre et ivre! Oublieuse, oubliée, ivre de ce qu’elle ne
boit pas et ne boira jamais!” (Ruusbroec, quoted in Barthes OC V,
287) [The best and most delectable wine, and also the most intoxicat-
ing. . . by which, without drinking it, the annihilated soul is intoxi-
cated, a soul at once free and intoxicated! Forgetting, forgotten, in-
toxicated by what it does not drink and will never drink! (234)]
As we will see in the chapter that follows, it is starting from
this phantasmatic attachment to the text, that Barthes will further de-
velop his perverse reading strategy at the Collège de France.
A Reader at the Collège de France
7 January, 1977: The inaugural lecture
On 7 January, 1977, Barthes gave his inaugural lecture at the Collège

de France on the occasion of his election to the Chair of Literary
Semiology, which he would occupy until his death in 1980. While
Barthes had become a familiar name since the sixties both in France
and abroad, as a professor he had until then remained in the margins
of the French academic world. But now that he had exchanged the
École pratique des hautes études for the prestigious Collège de
France, change was on the way: his appointment could be seen as
formal recognition for his pioneering work in the field of semiotics
and constituted an honourable final chapter to his career. Barthes
would present the results of his research there for four years until, two
days after his final lecture of the 1979-80 academic year, he was
struck by a delivery truck as he was crossing the street. He would
eventually die from his injuries a month later (26 March, 1980) in the
famous French clinic, la Salpêtrière.
That Barthes’ position was controversial is apparent from the
fact that his appointment at the Collège de France encountered some
serious resistance. He had to lobby his case until Michel Foucault was
finally prepared to recommend him for a chair (cf. Calvet 1990/1994,
255/212). His candidacy was approved by a vote from the other pro-
fessors in March of 1976, but only with the smallest possible margin
of a single vote. Considering that, for a wide variety of reasons, he
never completed the most important precondition for an academic ca-
reer—writing a doctoral dissertation—many perceived Barthes as
simply part of a fashionable trend, as an essayist rather than a scien-
tist. Furthermore, primarily from Le Plaisir du texte onward, Barthes
had distanced himself increasingly from the rigorous semiotic ap-
proach which was largely responsible for his appointment in the first
place. In fact, Barthes seized the academic freedom provided by the
Collège de France as an opportunity to develop further his search for
the ideal reading praxis which had been the guiding thread through his
work since Le Plaisir du texte, and to work out his theoretical insights
into an alternative for classical semiology, an alternative which he de-
scribed in his inaugural lecture as “une sémiologie active” (OC V,
443) [an active semiology (Barthes 1982, 474)]
Yet once he had been named professor of literary semiology at
the Collège de France—a prestigious institution held in considerable
esteem by the community—he faced the irony that despite all the is-
sues with which he had been intensively occupied for the last few
years (the intimacy of the reading experience; the perverse reader who
continually tried to challenge the ‘law of reading’), Barthes himself
now ran the unavoidable risk of introducing a ‘law of reading’. A pro-
fessor at the Collège could not avoid being placed in a position of au-
thority (and thus power) with respect to his audience, an audience
which, moreover, was much larger than the select company of stu-
dents who had followed his seminars at the École pratique.
Barthes was extremely aware of this paradox. And thus, in his
inaugural lecture, before establishing the guidelines for the ‘active
semiology’ which he wanted to develop in the coming years, he first
discussed at length the problem concerning the exercise of power, a
problem he would often return to in his classes in a continual attempt
to deconstruct the authority afforded to him as a professor. According
to Barthes, the most significant obstacle in the attempt to neutralise
this power was language itself. This tempted Barthes into his hyper-
bolic statement that language is, in essence, fascist, because it com-
pelled one to speak (cf. 432/461). This also means that there is no way
to destroy power: as soon as one speaks, even if it is an act of resis-
tance, one is forced to obey the lexical, grammatical and social para-
digms of the symbolic order. But if he could not avoid the power as-
sociated with his position as a professor, Barthes believed he could
avoid it through the subject of his semiological research—literature.
Literature never gives a direct account of reality: while the writer does
make use of the various systems of knowledge which shape reality in
a particular historical period, one creates with one’s work a duplicate
of this reality which, through the code of fiction, is presented as absent
(because inexistent), a universe consisting of words alone. This im-
aginary doubling gives the reader the freedom to take distance from
reality which, from the perspective of doxa, appears to be a simple
matter-of-fact. This distance allows the literary experience to resist the
non-fictional discourses that surround it. For example, while Goethe’s

Werther may be read as an illustration of the romantic Zeitgeist, the
protagonist, precisely through his non-existence, cannot be reduced to
the spirit of the times. This allows Werther to elicit recognition even
in the contemporary reader who no longer believes in that romantic
world view. The imaginary nature of literature enables us, for exam-
ple, to experience the horrors of hell together with Dante and Virgil in
the Divina Commedia without, however, necessarily accepting the ex-
istence of hell; it enables us to listen to a musical phrase together with
Swann while we know all too well that neither the one who is listen-
ing, nor the piece of music listened to, exists anywhere else than in
Proust’s Recherche. At the same time, this freedom of imagination is
never completely disengaged from the existent reader insofar as the
absence expressed by the imaginary appeals to the presence of the
reading body. It is this corporeal presence that allows the reader to
feel involved with a text even if one knows very well that its referent
does not exist; in other words, even if one knows in the final instance
that this referent cannot be anything other than the imaginary in-
volvement of one’s own reading body: de te fabula narratur . . .
This view on literature also has implications for the figure of
the writer: according to Barthes, it is his task to position himself at the
crossroads of all the systems of knowledge which converge in that
particular age. (437/467) Barthes’ ideal writer is always vigilant to de-
tect the virtual within the discourse that structures reality, searching
for that which enables change and can set the existing discourse adrift,
en dérive. Incorporating a certain discourse into a literary text means
providing this discourse with an imaginary doubling which prevents
the discourse from coinciding with itself entirely.
What Barthes notes here about the writer also goes for the
semiotician occupied with literature. In his approach to literature he
also must position himself at the crossroads of the different discourses
and resist the temptation to reduce the imaginary force of literary texts
to an external discourse with which the text can be explained. This is
also, for example, the position Barthes took in his discussion of
Goethe’s Werther found in his Fragments: by relating the text to per-
sonal experiences and other textual passages that deal with love, he
not only brought the novel en dérive with respect to its original con-
text, but was also able to question, through the character of Werther,
the current doxa about love and make clear that, at the end of the
twentieth century, there are perhaps alternative ways of thinking and

feeling about the affect of love. This immediately turns a semiotician
into a perverse reader who, while knowing very well that every sign
only hides a void and every bodily affect is caused by an arbitrary ef-
fect of language, is not afraid of the pleasure that the body extracts
from language: this pleasure makes it possible for a text to become
‘writerly’ and enables it to run away with the reader, who is thereby
offered the chance to change, to re-write oneself.
It is at this point that Barthes introduces the fantasy as the cen-
tral notion that enables him to think the particular relationship be-
tween the body and the text from the perspective of an active semiol-
ogy:
Je crois sincèrement qu’ à l’origine d’un enseignement comme celui-
ci, il faut accepter de toujours placer un fantasme, qui peut varier
d’année en année. […] C’est à un fantasme, dit ou non dit, que le pro-
fesseur doit annuellement revenir, au moment de décider du sens de
son voyage (445).
[I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must

always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year. […] It is to
a fantasy, spoken or unspoken, that the professor must annually return,
at the moment of determining the direction of his journey (477)]
Bathes had already made sporadic use of the notion of fantasy, but
never really addressed it thoroughly. It thus seems that it was only
during the preparations for his inaugural lecture that Barthes recog-
nised the usefulness of the notion as an aid for his literary analyses.
For Barthes, this notion is found at the crossroads of two intertexts—
the psychoanalytic and the Nietzschean—which, as we have seen,
both played an essential role in the development of Barthes’ theory of
reading. It is therefore still necessary to keep both intertexts of fantasy
in the back of our minds if we are to obtain a thorough understanding
of Barthes’ interpretation of the fantasy and his use of this notion in
the development of what he called, at the end of his inaugural lecture
and with a reference to Michelet and Dante, his vita nuova, the crea-
tion of a different life, a different self (cf. 446/478).
Unfortunately, the nature and direction of this search for the
vita nuova, using the notion of fantasy as a compass, would remain
unknown for a long time to those who could not attend his lectures
personally. For more than twenty years, researchers working on
Barthes would have to be satisfied with brief summaries in the an-

nuaire du Collège de France, references from a few interviews and a
couple of readings or articles that re-examined elements from his lec-
ture series, such as ‘D’eux à nous’ (1978) (OC V, 454-5), ‘“Long-
temps je me suis couché de bonne heure”’ (1978) (OC V, 459-70) and
‘Ça prend’ (1979) (OC V, 654-6). It is only very recently that this fi-
nal chapter of Barthes’ oeuvre has been unlocked for a larger audience
with the publication of the Cours in the series traces écrites. This pub-
lication is based on Barthes’ lecture notes, which have been released
with as little editorial intervention as possible. While Barthes largely
had the habit to write out his lectures, this nonetheless means that the
reader is confronted with an elliptic style, often containing short sen-
tences linked with mathematical symbols (=, ≠, :, →) and abbrevia-
tions which sometimes give the notes a very ‘writerly’ character and
makes active participation by the reader indispensable. Fortunately, in
the meantime audio recordings in mp3-format have been made avail-
able, and these help to clarify the more cryptic passages.
I will first give a brief overview of the different lecture series
and of the successive fantasies the Barthes chose as his point of depar-
ture. With this I wish not only to show that the various fantasies from
the Cours are linked to one another and address the same problematic,
but also that these fantasies can each be traced back to Barthes’ earlier
work. I will limit my discussion to his lectures. Additionally, on two
different occasions Barthes also gave a seminar where he invited guest
speakers to talk on certain themes, and he was preparing a seminar on
‘Proust et la photographie’ (cf. La Préparation du roman (hereafter
PR), 384-95) at the time of the fatal traffic accident. Those seminars
were separate from the fantasy of the lectures and, in the absence of
the invited speakers’ texts, are incomplete and therefore less interest-
ing: this is why I choose not to discuss them here.
1976-1977: Comment vivre ensemble
The fantasy of Barthes’ first lecture was triggered by the concept of

‘idiorrhythm’, which he came across by chance in Jacques Lacar-
rière’s L’Eté grec. Une Grèce quotidienne de 4000 ans (1976) (cf.
Comment vivre ensemble (hereafter CVE), 37). It is found in a passage
about a small monastery on the Greek mountain Athos which was or-
ganised in such a way that every monk could follow his own rhythm
of life and yet still participate in a community that came together once
in a while for a communal meal or service. The way the monks lived
together up on the mountain was still in keeping with the lifestyle of
the early-Christian hermit who withdrew into the desert, either alone
or together with a small group. This tradition is in sharp contrast to the
way of life found in Western monasteries where the monks’ lives were
strictly regulated and focused primarily on the collective aspect, with
all kinds of rules and schedules—a way of life that gained the upper
hand when Christianity became the state religion in the fourth century.
It was in this double gesture toward, on the one hand, the desire to
withdraw from the world and, on the other hand, the need for belong-
ing to a small group that Barthes recognised his own fantasy.
Barthes not only devoted a great deal of attention in his lec-
tures to the monks on Mount Athos and the early Christian hermits in
the Middle East, but also to the Buddhist monasteries of Ceylon,
where he thought he had discovered the same idiorrhythmic ideal.
Additionally, Barthes recognised his fantasy in some forms of com-
munity as described in literary texts. He referred regularly to Thomas
Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), the modernist Bildungsroman about
Hans Castorp who visited his nephew Joachim in the Davos sanato-
rium where he was being treated for tuberculosis: what was initially
intended to be a short visit turned out to be a seven-year stay until
Hans Castorp finally returned to Germany to fight on the front at the
outbreak of the First World War. Cut off from ordinary society, the
sanatorium was the place where he established a community of indi-
viduals who were united not by a common belief, as on Mount Athos,
but by a common illness.
In two other texts that Barthes cited regularly, La séquestrée
de Poitiers (1930) (The Poitiers Incarceration Case) by André Gide
and the famous Robinson Crusoe by Daniël Defoe, the idiorrhythmic
fantasy seems less obvious, namely because both books focus on the
loneliness of the main character. Nonetheless, Barthes recognised in
these books aspects of his idiorrhythmic fantasy. Based on a collection
of juridical and medical documents, Gide’s text describes the fate of
Mélanie Bastian, a deranged woman who—with the knowledge of her
mother, brother and household personnel—spent twenty-five years in
a room with closed doors and shutters, surrounded by filth, excrement
and scraps of food until the police were finally informed and relocated
Mélanie to an institution. What most moved Barthes concerning this
story was the fact that the reports Gide cited do not make clear
whether or not her confinement was voluntary and whether Mélanie,
together with her brother and mother, had not developed an idior-
rhythmic lifestyle until the point when the doxa forbidding such a
community intervened.
The same can be said of Defoe’s novel in which the prototypi-
cal loneliness of Robinson Crusoe prior to meeting Friday at first
glance seems opposed to the notion of ‘living together’. And yet ac-
cording to Barthes, Crusoe—a drowning man who washed up on an
inhospitable island—was confronted with the same problems of ad-
justment as someone who wishes to integrate into a group (cf. CVE,
46).
What these different intertexts have in common is that they all
deal with fictions based on historical events. Gide based his work on
reports on the Blanche Monnier case; Daniel Defoe borrowed his in-
spiration from the story by Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who had lived
on an uninhabited island for a couple of years; and finally, Thomas
Mann spent three weeks visiting his sick wife at the tuberculosis-
health resort in Davos.
All of these works provided the juridical, autobiographical or
medical discourse on which they are based with an imaginary double,
a sheen of non-existence which makes clear that the fascination they
evoke must be sought in the imagination of the reader they stimulate
rather than in a supposed external reality. This imaginary doubling is
perhaps most apparent in Gide’s text where the fictionalisation is most
subtle: as announced, Gide based his work as faithfully as possible on
various reports, and he published photos of Mélanie and her family.
Still, La séquestrée contains an important fictional element: the name
Mélanie Bastian who provides the ‘real’ Blanche Monnier with an in-
existent, fictive double.
In the same way that Mann, Defoe and Gide fictionalise his-
torical sources, in his lectures Barthes would also use non-fictional
texts for his source material. This explains why Barthes, who actually
occupied the chair of literary semiology, often incorporated into his
body of work texts that strictly speaking were not written with literary
intentions. In this way, based upon various sources, Barthes created a
representation of Athos that, as he himself emphasised, was not at all
an objective report on an existing situation: “Athos (où je ne suis ja-
mais allé) procure un mixte d’images: Méditerrannée, terrasse, mon-
tagne (dans le fantasme, on oblitère: ici, la crasse, la foi.)” (CVE, 37)

[Athos (to which I have never been) gives me a mixture of images:
Mediterranean, terrace, mountain (in the fantasy, one effaces: here,
filth, faith.)]
If we go back to what Barthes called his very first text we can
find already the same idiorrhythmic fantasy in a pastiche he wrote on
Plato’s Crito as a seventeen year-old student. In contradiction to
Plato’s Socrates, the philosopher sentenced to death in Barthes’ ver-
sion allows himself to be convinced to flee to Tyrinthe where he could
continue his philosophical instruction while enjoying the idyllic land-
scape in the company of a small group of friends. This hedonistic
place of exile, symbolised in the text by the delicious figs which Crito
used to persuade Socrates, is contrasted with Athens, where sensual
bodily pleasure is sacrificed “à des choses aussi vaines et aussi peu es-
timées que les lois.” (OC IV, 500) [to things as vain and as little es-
teemed as the laws.]
This desire to withdraw from the rest of the world and to form
one’s own closed community again appeared in Sade, Fourier, Loyola
from 1971. According to Barthes, what these three divergent historical
figures had in common was that all three were Logothètes, founders of
language (cf. OC III, 701/Barthes 1997, 3). For Barthes, this neolo-
gism refers to their shared, carried-to-the-extreme obsession to de-
velop a new language, to establish a new social order. The most im-
portant precondition that must be fulfilled in order to achieve this was
seclusion, isolation. Loyola’s retreat, Fourier’s phalanstère, the re-
mote castles and monasteries as places of illicit sexual activity in
Sade’s work: each are variations of this need to remove oneself from
the influence of the outside world so as to avoid any interference, any
contamination of their new discourse by the discourse of the Other.
These disparate thinkers were thus bound to one another by the same
‘logothetic’ desire which Barthes also recognised in himself while
reading their texts. With this in mind it is no coincidence that Sade,
Fourier, Loyola, is the first book where Barthes, in his preface, em-
phasises the importance of reading pleasure in an analysis. In retro-
spect, we can suggest that Barthes recognised aspects of his own fan-
tasy in each of these three authors. Yet there is still a fundamental dif-
ference that makes their logothetic utopias—despite a similar desire
for seclusion and the need to create their own values—fail to com-
pletely satisfy Barthes’ idiorrhythmic fantasy.
The discourse of the logothete does indeed strive to disengage

itself from the power of the existing discourse in order to create a new
language, but in the case of Sade, Fourier and Loyola, it seems inevi-
table that this new discourse would itself soon becomes a discourse of
power. In which case, the logothete becomes a nomothete who lays
down the nomos, the law for the other, thereby essentially making the
idiorrhythm impossible for the rest of the group. Barthes, on the con-
trary, desired precisely a community free from all obligations handed
down by the Other, and where each separate individual has the right
and gets the chance to live according to one’s own rhythm. The fun-
damental problem of such a harmonic living together as formulated in
the idiorrhythmic fantasy is language itself. As a logothete, Barthes
tries to bend language to his will, and to this end went in search of
specific words, in a foreign language if need be—Greek, for example,
as in the case of ‘idiorrhythm’—but the result of this logothetic opera-
tion is ultimately a highly affected use of language: the typical Barthe-
sian style, full of neologisms and concepts which are often inconsis-
tent and used idiosyncratically. This style was attacked from different
circles as an unnecessarily complex and downright meaningless jar-
gon: from Picard’s Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture? to the
parodic Le Roland Barthes sans-peine from 1978, in which Michel-
Antoine Burnier and Patrick Rambaud take issue with Barthes’ unnec-
essarily complicated and ponderous philosophical vocabulary. Barthes
was always piqued by attacks such as these which he viewed as an in-
fringement by the conformist doxa on the ideal of idiorrhythm, and
more specifically on the right to an individual use of language, as he
defended in his inaugural lecture:
Qu’une langue, quelle qu’elle soit, n’en réprime pas une autre; que le
sujet à venir connaisse sans remords, sans refoulement, la jouissance
d’avoir à sa disposition deux instances de la langage, qu’il parle ceci
ou cela, selon les perversions, non selon la Loi. (OC V, 436-7)
[That a language, whatever it be, not repress another; that the subject
may know without remorse, without repression, the bliss of having at
his disposal two kinds of language; that he may speak this or that, ac-
cording to his perversions, not according to the Law. (Barthes 1982,
467)]
But Barthes’ position of a logothete who wanted to set the symbolic

law on the sidelines through his perverse use of language inevitably
resulted in others being intimidated by his style. Furthermore, his in-

accessible language sometimes even came across as being as arrogant
and aggressive as the stereotypes of the doxa which he abhorred. At
the end of Comment vivre ensemble Barthes touches on the same
problem of power that he had also brought to the forefront in his inau-
gural lecture. The idiorrhythmic fantasy irrevocably raises the ques-
tion of how to get around the power hidden in every discourse, how to
avoid that the language which the logothete takes as his own becomes
for the other a law that excludes, alienates, wounds.
Barthes went in search of the answer to this question with the
subject of his second series of lectures, Le Neutre, where he sought to
develop “une morale du langage” (Le Neutre (hereafter LN), 93) [an
ethics of language (Barthes 2005, 60)] which could solve the linguistic
problem of the idiorrhythm.
1977-1978: Le Neutre
With Le Neutre Barthes takes up once again the problematic which he

referred to in his inaugural lecture as the ‘fascism’ of language; the
fact that the speaking subject is condemned to a whole series of mean-
ingful binary paradigms. The fantasy of the neutral is the desire to es-
cape the arrogance with which these paradigms are imposed by lan-
guage, an arrogance which extends to almost all aspects of language.
According to Barthes, it even appears in the simple fact that every
unmarked statement directly establishes an order of things, which only
gives the reader/listener the paradigmatic choice to either accept or
deny the statement; and even denial can do nothing other than once
again posit another state of affairs. Language offers no space for the
‘neutralisation’ of a statement: even modal verbs or clauses expressing
a doubt or a wish, and which try in this way to nuance the affirmative
message, ultimately remain imprisoned in a certain grammatical
mode, and thus in a paradigm (cf. LN, 76-7/Barthes 2005, 44-5)
A different example of arrogance Barthes suggests in Le Neu-
tre is the adjective, which also establishes an unavoidable opposition.
Even an adjective meant as a compliment cannot escape this pitfall:
every compliment forces the subject into a particular position, a par-
ticular relationship to the Other, pins it down in a fixated imaginary,
and thus always signifies a violation of the desire for the neutral. (89
ff./55 ff.)
Another apparently evident expression in which Barthes saw this de-

sire undermined is the question. According to Barthes, the function of
the question is culturally determined: it is a figure borrowed from
classical rhetoric and is thus considered wrongly to be a ‘natural’
mode of discourse, and furthermore, it always installs a certain power
relation with respect to the one questioned: “[I]l y a toujours un terror-
isme de la question; dans toute question est impliqué un pouvoir. La
question dénie le droit de ne pas savoir, ou le droit au désir incertain.”
(145) [there is always a terrorism of the question; a power is implied
in every question. The question denies the right not to know or the
right to the indeterminacy of desire (107)] Barthes contrasted this
Western predilection for the question with Zen-pedagogy which
strives precisely to neutralise the arrogance of the question. The Zen-
master always offers an absurd answer to the student’s broad and
weighty philosophical-religious questions: a trivial anecdote, a citation
of verse, an unexpected gesture—a method which, Barthes adds,
would be unimaginable in Western intellectual debates:
Imaginez un instant qu’aux grandes questions pompeuses, arrogantes,
dissertatives, dont est abusivement tissée notre vie sociale, politique,
matière à interviews, à tables rondes, etc. (‘Y a-t-il une écriture spéci-
fique de la femme et une écriture spécifique de l’homme?’ ‘Pensez-
vous que l’écrivain cherche la vérité?’ ‘Pensez-vous que l’écriture est
vie?’, etc.), imaginez que quelqu’un réponde: ‘Je me suis acheté une
chemise chez Lanvin’, ‘Le ciel est bleu comme une orange’, ou que, si
cette question vous est posée en public, vous vous leviez, enleviez un
soulier, le mettiez sur votre tête et quittiez la salle → actes absolus car
déjouant toute complicité de réponse, toute interprétation; sauf bien
sûr: il est fou, mais cette ‘pertinence’ n’était pas retenue par le milieu
Zen. (156, italics in original)
[Imagine for an instant that to the large, pompous, arrogant, pedantic

questions, of which our social, political life is excessively woven, the
stuff of interviews, of round tables, etc. (‘Is there a writing specific to
women and a writing specific to men?’ ‘Do you think that the writer
seeks truth?’ ‘Do you think that writing is life? (etc.), imagine that
someone answers: ‘I have bought myself a shirt a Lanvin’s,’ ‘The sky
is blue like an orange,’ or that, if this question is put to you in public,
you stand up, take off a shoe, put it on your head, and leave the room
→ absolute acts because baffling all possibilities for a complicitous
reply, all possibility of interpretation; except of course: he is crazy,
but this specific ‘relevance’ had no currency among the Zen fellow-
ship. (117-8, italics in original)]
With this we can also see that Barthes chose to illustrate the fantasy of
the neutral with a philosophical rather than a literary intertext, which
in fact is characteristic for the entire lecture series. Together with Zen-
Buddhism, Barthes refers primarily to Taoism and Pyrrhonism, while
the share of literary texts was limited to a few literarily-tinted essays
by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Blanchot, Rousseau and Tolstoy’s novel
War and Peace (1869), a few passages from which Barthes com-
mented upon, but certainly not as thoroughly as he did in Comment
vivre ensemble with similar classic works such as Robinson Crusoe
and Der Zauberberg. But the absence of literary texts is only apparent:
the thought-systems that Barthes discussed in Le Neutre occupy an ex-
tremely marginal position thanks to their geographic and/or historical
distance from contemporary Western doxa. Consequently, Barthes can
use them—just as he did in Comment vivre ensemble with the monas-
tic tradition on Athos—as a stimulating imaginary that can make no
more of a claim to reality than literary fiction. Furthermore, one could
conclude that the literary discourse is, indirectly, indeed an important
subtext of Le Neutre. This appears from the fact that l’écriture du
Neutre, the writing of the neutral which Barthes promised to reveal at
the end of his lecture series (99/66), ultimately turns out to be the
genre of haiku. (Unfortunately, in the published lecture notes it so
happens that there is nothing to be found concerning haiku: the clos-
ing remarks of Le Neutre where Barthes discusses the haiku thus can
only be heard on the mp3 recordings of the lesson of June 3, 1978 (at
approx. 1:26 of the recording)).
What is striking in Barthes’ admiration for the genre of haiku,
which he had already approvingly discussed in L Empire des signes, is
that he pays almost no attention to the strict coding to which the genre
of haiku is subjected (such as the number of syllables, the presence of
seasonal words), and even less to the frequent intertextual references
in haikus to the literary-philosophical tradition. This makes clear that
a haiku is anything but a spontaneous account of reality without sym-
bols or hidden meanings, which is nonetheless how Barthes presents
it. Barthes’ uncritical stance is at first glance astonishing, because
when it concerns Western literature Barthes continually strives to un-
mask what is presented as ‘natural’ by exposing it as mere convention;
or as he wrote in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture: “l’écriture réaliste est
loin d’être neutre, elle est au contraire chargée des signes les plus
spectaculaires de la fabrication.” (OC I, 212) [The writing of Realism
is far from being neutral, it is on the contrary loaded with the most
spectacular signs of fabrication. (Barthes 1984, 56)] Some of Barthes’
critics were also unpleasantly surprised by this evolution. For in-
stance, in his Barthes (1983), Jonathan Culler suggests that “Barthes’
writings increasingly promote what seems a powerful myth, the myth
of ‘exemption from meaning’” (Culler 2002, 105), by which Barthes
ultimately “begins to present as a transgression what could easily be
taken as a reaffirmation of quite regressive, pre-semiological notions.”
(106) What Barthes attempted to avoid was that a new opposition
would impose itself between, on the one hand, the direct, naïve view
of language as doxa, and the reflective, aloof interpretive approach of
the semotician on the other, with the latter being on the correct—
because critical—side of the opposition. The escape from this impasse
is an affirmation of the bêtise as it repeatedly arises when the reader
gets caught up in one’s reading, coupled to an increasing awareness of
the fictional character of the language which shapes reality. Or as
Barthes remarked about himself in Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes:
En lui, une autre dialectique se dessine, cherche à s’énoncer: la con-

tradiction des termes cède à ses yeux par la découverte d’un troisième
terme, qui n’est pas de synthèse, mais de départ: tout chose revient,
mais elle revient comme Fiction, c’est-à-dire à un autre tour de la spi-
rale. (OC IV, 647, italics in original)
[In him, another dialectic appears, trying to find expression: the con-
tradiction of the terms yields in his eyes by the discovery of a third
term, which is not a synthesis but a departure: everything comes back,
but it comes back as Fiction, i.e., at another turn of the spiral. (Barthes
1994, 69, italics in original, translation modified)]
Thus while Barthes indeed celebrates the haiku as a genre that makes
the paradigms of meaning falter, this in no way signifies a return to
‘pre-semiological notions’ in which language is presupposed to simply
reproduce reality. In fact, Barthes just follows again a perverse read-
ing strategy—I know these are only words, but all the same. . .—
which allows him to catch a glimpse of the neutral; he experiences an
‘exemption from meaning’ that, pace Culler, is evoked precisely by
his phantasmatic relationship to the genre of haiku, and not so much
by the haiku itself.
At the end of Le Neutre Barthes announced that this writing of the

haiku would be the starting point of his next lecture series, La Pré-
paration du roman, in which he formulated his desire to develop his
own version of the ‘third term’, the Fiction that outplays the binary
opposition between the doxa and the meta-discourse. After years of
writing about literature, he wanted to join the ranks of literature him-
self as a writer, and this via what he calls, at the end of Le Neutre, la
voie royale, the royal road: the genre of the novel (cf. the mp3 re-
cording of June 3, 1978, 1:32).
1978-1980: La Préparation du roman
As he already indicated in his inaugural lecture, active semiology for

Barthes is linked closely to literature because both can provide the
dominant systems of knowledge with an imaginary doubling. With La
Préparation du roman Barthes tried to get over the hump definitively
and started out from the fantasy of the Oeuvre, the desire to write a
great novel in the classical tradition of Proust and Tolstoy. As Barthes
announced at the start of the first lecture series for La Préparation du
roman, he intended to spread his research into this fantasy out over
several years: this project would come to a premature end due to his
unexpected death in 1980.
As was announced at the end of Le Neutre, Barthes examined
in detail the genre of haiku in his first lecture series, subtitled De la
vie à l’œuvre. In doing so, he did not restrict himself only to Japanese
haikus: he also spoke to his audience about different varieties of the
haiku-experience which he found, for example, in the familiar notion
of ‘epiphany’ in Joyce, but also in photography, which would be the
inspiration for Barthes’ final book, La Chambre claire.
While Barthes labelled both the novel and the haiku as exam-
ples of ‘écriture du Neutre’, at first glance it does seem curious that
Barthes, given his desire to write a novel, would first spend so much
time and effort on the ultra-succinct genre of haiku. But it is precisely
in that difference between the short description of the haiku and the
comprehensiveness of the novel where Barthes’ greatest stumbling
block for his fantasy is found (PR, 46). Barthes ultimately did not suc-
ceed in finding a satisfactory solution for this compositional problem,
and at the end of his lecture series he had to admit that his attempts to
write a novel always came a halt on just this point—an inability that
we will later deal with at length.
In the second part of La Préparation du roman, with the title
L’œuvre comme Volonté, the focus is no longer on problems internal
to the text and other poetical difficulties; rather, Barthes goes deeper
into to the apparently banal, but therefore no less acute external prob-
lems with which every writer is confronted: how best to organise
one’s day; how to deal with writer’s block; how to determine which
style best suits him; how to reconcile his numerous social obligations
with the rest and solitude required to be able to write . . . ? Barthes il-
lustrated these problems frequently with respect to the concrete writ-
ing praxis of a few famous authors; primarily Proust, but also Flau-
bert, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand and Kafka.
As with the two prior fantasies that Barthes had chosen as his
starting point, we also find the fantasy of La Préparation du roman
appearing already in Barthes’ early work in his fascination for the
specific literary discourse. Initially, Barthes made an important dis-
tinction between, on the one hand, the romanesque (novelistic) as text
and, on the other hand, the roman (novel) as genre. For Barthes, the
‘novelistic’ stands for a kind of writing that possesses the power of
imagination, the stylised expression and the literary description of re-
ality which is typical of the novel, but due to its fragmentary character
it escapes the narrative, ‘readerly’ consistency of the classic novel.
Such novels, as the flagships of the bourgeois literary institution, are
so determined by formal and ideological conventions that they leave
the writing reader with little freedom. And yet already in an interview
from 1971, Barthes would assume a less dismissive position with re-
spect to the genre of the novel:
pour ma part, je ne me considère pas comme un critique, mais plutôt
comme un romancier, scripteur, non du roman, il est vrai, mais du
‘romanesque’: Mythologies, L’Empire des signes sont des romans
sans histoire, Sur Racine et S/Z sont des romans sur histoires, Miche-
let est une para-biographie, etc. C’est pourquoi je pourrais dire que ma
propre proposition historique […] est d’être à l’arrière-garde de
l’avant-garde: être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est mort; être
d’arrière-garde, c’est l’aimer encore: j’aime le romanesque mais je
sais que le roman est mort: voilà, je crois, le lieu exact de ce que
j’écris. (OC III, 1038, italics in original)
[As far as I’m concerned, I do not consider myself a critic, but rather a
novelist, a writer, not of the novel, it’s true, but of the ‘novelistic’:
Mythologies, L’Empire des signes are novels without a story, Sur

Racine and S/Z are novels about stories, Michelet is a para-biography,
etc. That is why I could say that my own historical position . . . is to
be at the rear-guard of the avant-garde; to be avant-garde is to know
what is dead; to be rear-guard is to still love it; I love the novelistic
but I know that the novel is dead: this is, I think, the exact place of my
writing.]
As we saw earlier, primarily from Le Plaisir du texte on, Barthes

would more openly admit his preference for classic texts, a preference
which was at odds with the poetical convictions that he had until then
disseminated as a theoretician of the avant-garde. And while Barthes
in 1971 had already confirmed the ‘death’ of the novel and seemed to
reconcile himself with the novelistic as fragment, as ruins—in La Pré-
paration du roman he would finally articulate his desire to move from
the writing of novelistic fragments (like he in fact wrote them in Ro-
land Barthes par Roland Barthes and Fragments d’un discours
amoureux), to the creation of a classic novel: “j’ai souvent ‘flirté’ avec
le Romanesque; mais le Romanesque n’est pas le Roman, et c’est
précisément ce seuil que je veux franchir”. (PR, 42) [I have often
‘flirted’ with the Novelistic; but the Novelistic is not the Novel, and it
is precisely this threshold that I wish to cross.]
In La Préparation du roman, Barthes also approaches the
writing of a novel as an almost sacred task by which he hoped to find
the fulfilment of the fantasies from the previous series of lectures: in
the fictive universe of the novel Barthes projected the ideal, idior-
rhythmic place into which he could withdraw (PR, 40) because the lit-
erary style of the novel provides the subject with a ‘neutral’ language
that makes no claim on the other:
En rapport avec notre idée du Neutre, je dirai: le Roman est un dis-
cours sans arrogance, il ne m’intimide pas; c’est un discours qui ne
fait pas pression sur moi – et donc envie d’accéder moi-même à une
pratique de discours qui ne fasse pas pression sur autrui: préoccupa-
tion du cours sur le Neutre → Roman: écriture du Neutre? (PR, 41)
[In relation to our notion of the Neutral, I would say: the Novel is a
discourse without arrogance, it does not intimidate me; it is a dis-
course which does not exert pressure on me—hence the desire to at-
tain myself a style of discourse which does not exert pressure on oth-
ers: concern of the course on the Neutral → Novel: the writing of the
Neutral?]
Nevertheless, Barthes would not actually succeed in writing the novel

he fantasised about, and in his final lecture he had to admit that his
fantasy would not be fulfilled (cf. PR, 377). Seen in this way, Barthes’
lectures constitute the perfect illustration of psychoanalytic theory,
which always claims that failure is inextricably bound up with the fan-
tasy. However, when we look at Barthes’ interpretation of the fantasy
more closely, we quickly see that psychoanalytic theory only enables
us to understand to a certain extent what is at stake in Barthes’ project
at the Collège de France.
The search for the vita nuova
If we compare with one another the central fantasies of the different

lecture series from a psychoanalytic perspective, they seem to express
an underlying desire for a pre-oedipal paradise, for a mythical prehis-
tory before the advent of language and the establishment of lack by
the oedipal separation from the (mother’s) body.
This hypothesis can be supported by the many biographical
elements which show that Barthes’ relationship with his mother had a
more than considerable impact on his life and work (cf. Calvet
1990/1994, 269 ff./225 ff.) This close tie—as a homosexual bachelor,
he would continue living with her until her death in October, 1977—
was undoubtedly strengthened by the absence of a father. Louis
Barthes lost his life in the First World War when Barthes was less
than a year old, and according to Barthes’ description of his life in Ro-
land Barthes par Roland Barthes, he was never replaced: he did not
mention a single word about his half brother, or about that boy’s fa-
ther.
Barthes’ mother appeared more frequently his works during
the last years of her life, and this is especially the case in his lectures
at the Collège de France. Barthes spoke repeatedly of the mother-
figure, which appeared to him as the perfect incarnation of the Sover-
eign Good. For Barthes, the interaction between mother and child
ought to be a shining example of an idiorrhythmic relation. Barthes
argued that the neutral revealed itself in a sort of ‘motherly’ talk,
which in his view is characterised by a suspension of judgment: “la
mère n’est-elle pas la seule qui ne qualifie pas l’enfant, qui ne le met
pas dans un bilan?” (LN, 89) [she alone, isn’t the mother the only one
who doesn’t qualify the child, who doesn’t force him into an assess-
ment? (Barthes 2005, 56)] Just like the mother’s cherishing discourse,
the ideal writing style of the neutral (the haiku, the novel) withdraws
from the arrogance of language which, through various forms (the
question, the adjective) is continually criticising the subject. The writ-
ing of the neutral is a utopian form of language which expresses the
subject and its relationship to the world without criticism, without the
exercise of power, without oedipal conflict. Such an idyllic represen-
tation of the relationship between mother and son would no doubt
raise the psychoanalyst’s brows because the mother’s desire does in-
deed exert an enormous, even compelling influence on the develop-
ment of her child and is not in the least free from power or mutual ag-
gression. It is clear that Barthes is guided by this ideal image through
the effect of a bêtise, and furthermore by one that he had dismissed
earlier as a myth of doxa. In ‘Sur ‘La Mère’ de Brecht’ (On Brecht’s
Mother) from 1960, included in Essais critiques (1964), he praised
Brecht because he stripped the mother figure and her relation with her
son of all supposed existential attributes: “dans La Mère, la liberté cir-
cule au cœur même du rapport humain le plus ‘naturel’: celui d’une
mère et de son fils.” (OC II, 402) [In The Mother, freedom circulates
at the very heart of the most ‘natural’ human relation, that of a mother
and her son. (Barthes 2000, 141)] In the later Barthes, these ironic
quotation marks around ‘natural’ have disappeared: the mother is pre-
sented in La Chambre claire as the essence of goodness, and the free-
dom in the relationship with her son is no longer the freedom of an
ideological dialectic, but precisely of the absence of any ideology, of
every attempt to convince the other:
Chez Brecht, par un renversement que j’admirais autrefois beaucoup,
c’est le fils qui éduque (politiquement) la mère; pourtant, ma mère, je
ne l’ai jamais éduquée, convertie à quoi que ce soit; en un sens, je ne
lui ai jamais ‘parlé’, je n’ai jamais ‘discouru’ devant elle, pour elle;
nous pensions sans nous le dire que l’insignifiance légère du langage,
la suspension des images devait être l’espace même de l’amour, sa
musique. (OC V, 848)
In Brecht, by a reversal I used to admire a good deal, it is the son who

(politically) educates the mother, yet I never educated my mother,
never converted her to anything at all; in a sense I never ‘spoke’ to
her, never ‘discoursed’ in her presence, for her; we supposed, without
saying anything of the kind to each other, that the frivolous insignifi-
cance of language, the suspension of images must be the very space of
love, its music. (Barthes 1981, 72)]
The mother’s enormous influence is also apparent in the way her lin-
gering sickness, and finally her death in 1977, gives a melancholy,
almost desperate undertone to the lectures. And yet the biographical
circumstances of Barthes’ personal sorrow should not make us forget
that, according to psychoanalysis, mourning is inherent to the struc-
ture of the fantasy: the subject is always again confronted with the fact
that the object evoked by one’s fantasy does not exist except as an il-
lusion that disguises an empty place in the symbolic. A fantasy cannot
but fail, and this also explains why every lecture series eventually
ends in an impasse that confronts both Barthes and his audience with
the impossibility of actually concretising the phantasmatic object of
desire. Thus, in the final reading of Comment vivre ensemble, Barthes
abandons his original plan of working out a concrete form of idior-
rhythmic society on the basis of his own corpus, supplemented by
suggestions he received from participants during the lecture series:
such a utopia, in Barthes’ view, could only be the result of an individ-
ual text, “une écriture – ou si l’on préfère un acte romanesque (sinon
un roman)”. (CVE, 178) [a writing—or if one prefers, a novelistic act
(if not a novel)]
The fact that the idiorrhythmic fantasy is unattainable thus
immediately conjures up another fantasy, the fantasy of the novel
which Barthes would eventually explore in his last two lecture series,
via the necessary detour—and the equally necessary frustration—of
another fantasy; namely, that of the neutral. For, in order to speak
about the neutral, Barthes was forced to use language, and this means
that he could not remain outside the play of oppositions: the neutral
can only gain significance in opposition to the non-neutral, in which
case, strictly speaking, it ceases to be neutral and subscribes to such-
and-such a paradigm, the umpteenth opposition between ‘good’ and
‘evil’.
Besides this conceptual paradox of the neutral, Barthes also
came to the realisation that the neutral sometimes does indeed exist,
but in this capacity it is not something that arouses fascination, but
aversion. At the beginning of a lecture, Barthes tells how he, seduced
purely by the name, had bought an inkpot, the colour of which was
called ‘neutral’. When home he immediately opened the pot out of cu-
riosity, but accidentally spilled it, causing several stubborn, dark grey
stains. A different confrontation with an undesirable realisation of the
neutral—and one less anecdotal than the story about the inkpot—is the
remark made by one of his listeners who brought to Barthes’ attention
the striking similarities between his fantasy and “la critique Ni-Ni”
(Neither-Nor criticism) that Barthes had exposed in his Mythologies
(OC I, 783, ff./Barthes 1972, 81 ff.) In Barthes’ opinion, this critique
forms part of a bourgeois ideology which kept its distance from radi-
cal positions, thereby creating the illusion of being a balanced judg-
ment inclined to neither one nor another particular standpoint. But in
practice this invariably came down to a defence of the status quo, the
ideal strategy for those in power. While in his reaction to this critique
Barthes referred to the difference between the ‘ni-nisme’ and the neu-
tral, which wants to disassociate itself from the power involved in
every form of judgment, he also admitted that there is a connection to
be established: “en un sens c’est une ressemblance terrible, à la fois
hideuse et ridicule: le ni-nisme serait la copie-farce du Neutre”. (LN,
116) [in one sense, it’s an awesome resemblance, simultaneously
hideous and ridiculous: neither-norism as the farcical copy of the Neu-
tral. (Barthes 2005, 80)]
The neutral’s power of attraction thus only seems to work if it
is kept at a safe—because unbridgeable—distance: once the neutral is
realised, the fantasy disappears, giving way to a ‘farcical copy’ which
is every bit as dull and vague as the dark grey ink spilled by Barthes.
This is why Le Neutre, just like Comment vivre ensemble, cannot but
end with a ‘forward flight’, namely, the introduction of a new desire,
the promise of a new object: the haiku, as an example of the ideal
‘writing of the Neutral’ which had actually already appeared at the
start of La Préparation du roman as a surrogate for another object, the
real object of fantasy, namely, the Novel. But even if, in the end, the
actualisation of the fantasy also seems impossible, Barthes still does
not give up on his desire. This is evident from the very last sentence of
his very last lecture of 23 February, 1980: “C’est là, pour finir, l’objet
de mon désir: écrire une œuvre en Ut Majeur.” (PR, 384, italics in
original) [That, ultimately, is the object of my desire: to write a work
in C major.]
In his general introduction for the publication of the Cours,
Eric Marty contends that central to Barthes’ teaching is precisely the
awareness of this unrealisable nature of the fantasy, a negativity which
“est toujours déjà-là comme pour annuler, dès l’origine, l’objet même
de cette recherche.” (Marty in CVE, 11) [is always already there to
cancel, from the outset, the very object of this research.] Yet, by em-
phasising this negativity, Marty seems to pass over Barthes’ ambigu-
ous relationship to psychoanalytic discourse. As Barthes noted in
Fragments d’un discours amoureux, the truth of the subject is hidden
in its relation to the ‘lure’ of the fantasy, and thus there is no reason to
start digging for an underlying, ‘more real’ truth. From a psychoana-
lytic point of view, it is nevertheless tempting to look for the origin of
all these different fantasies in a perverse desire to deny the oedipal
conflict, and thus to deny lack. Interpreted thusly, the idiorrhythmic
fantasy strives to replace the symbolic law organising society with a
perverse contract. This ‘social contract’ allows the subject to set up a
group in such a way that one is able to escape the power of the Other
and establish a kind of autarchy. The idiorrhythmic community needs
nothing but itself and is thus no longer marked by lack: “Le groupe-
ment est défini comme une pure machine homéostatique qui
s’entretient elle-même”. (CVE, 83) [The group is defined as a pure
homeostatic machine which supports itself] The same perverse aver-
sion to lack also seems to be the motor for the fantasy of the neutral
which aims to deny the lack in language. This lack appears precisely
in the binary differences, seeing that the one term always possesses
what the other one lacks. The basis of this system is, according to psy-
choanalysis, sexual difference: the father who has the phallus versus
the mother who lacks it. The perverse subject cannot accept this and
therefore denies the fact that the mother is lacking something—or, in
psychoanalytic jargon, is ‘castrated’. The fantasy of the neutral wants
to exchange this fundamental difference for a whole series of differ-
ences, nuances which eventually erase the contradiction. This can be
seen in the figure of the hermaphrodite in Le Neutre, which Barthes
analyses on the basis of Freud’s ‘Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leo-
nardo da Vinci’. Da Vinci remembers how one day a vulture came to
rest on the edge of his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail. (cf.
Freud 1957, 82) Freud brought this phantasmatically-loaded memory
into connection with a phallic mother-goddess on the basis of a trans-
lation mistake (Leonardo da Vinci himself mentioned a kite, not a vul-
ture). (cf. LN, 243; Barthes 2005, 194)
Through the figure of the hermaphrodite, the neutral appears
not only in the image of a phallic mother, but also in the image of a
father stripped of his oedipal severity: “On peut encore préciser,
dériver, rêver, susciter la figure du père-mère, du père maternel, du
père pourvu de seins: du père tendre: figure absente de notre mytholo-

gie occidentale, carence significative.” (LN, 243) [One can specify
more, derive, dream, arouse the figure of the father-mother, of the ma-
ternal father, of the father with breasts: of the tender father: figure ab-
sent from our Western mythology, significant lack. (Barthes
2005,194)] While this tender father figure may be absent in Western
mythology, this was not the case in Barthes’ personal mythology
where his father appears as caring, loving figure and not at all an
oedipal rival: in the photo found in Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes, he is looking into the camera with a soft smile. It was a simi-
larly vague and ‘androgynous’ smile that Freud often saw returning in
da Vinci’s paintings, whether of women or men, with the most famous
example of course the mysterious Mona Lisa. Barthes links this smile
to:
l’idée que le paradigme génital est déjoué (transcendé, déplacé), non
dans une figure de l’indifférence, de l’insensibilité, de la matité, mais
dans celle de l’extase, de l’énigme, du rayonnement doux, du souve-
rain bien. Au geste du paradigme, du conflit, du sens arrogant, qui se-
rait le rire castrateur, répondrait le geste du Neutre: le sourire. (244)
[the idea that the genital paradigm is baffled (transcended, displaced)

not in a figure of indifference, of unfeeling, of matteness but in that of
extasy, of enigma, of gentle radiance, of the sovereign good. To the
gesture of the paradigm, of the conflict, of the arrogant meaning, rep-
resented by the castrating laugh, the gesture of the Neutral would re-
ply: smile. (195)]
The denial of lack also plays a central role in La Préparation du ro-

man, and at issue here is indeed the ultimate lack: death, as Barthes
had just experienced in a painful way with the death of his mother. It
is for sure a classic topos that the written word overcomes time, and
thus oblivion, and in Barthes’ view this is specifically the case with
the novel. Perverse desire is the reason why writing here no longer
appears as a discourse that negates or kills (cf. ‘La mort de l’auteur’),
but preserves, immortalises (cf. PR, 40): it is a problematic to which I
will return when I discuss the role of ‘time’ in the Cours.
It is worth noting that Barthes himself at no point tried to clar-
ify his own fantasies psychoanalytically, made no attempt to discover
which truth lay buried under the rubble of the different fantasies he
discussed in his classes. Barthes did not share psychoanalysis’ prefer-
ence for archaeological metaphors any more than did Deleuze. Barthes
took his fantasies for what they were, and explored them on the sur-
face “comme une mine à ciel ouvert.” (CVE, 37) [like an opencast
mine]. As Barthes proposed in his inaugural lecture, the practitioner of
active semiology is not an analyst looking for a truth beyond the signs,
but a Nietzschean artist who tries to create his own truth via the play
of signs: “Le sémiologue serait en somme un artiste […]: il joue des
signes comme d’un leurre conscient, dont il savoure, veut faire sa-
vourer et comprendre la fascination.” (OC V, 443) [The semiologist
is, in short, an artist […]. He plays with signs as with a conscious de-
coy, whose fascination he savors and wants to make others savor and
understand. (Barthes 1982, 475)] Such a semiotician tries to follow
the Nietzschean ideal of the person who does not allow oneself to be
intimidated by any external law (or, translated into Barthes’ vernacu-
lar, by any ‘meta-language’). From this follows Barthes affinity for
literature: he believes that this discourse remains aloof from power,
not only because of the clearly fictional nature of the literary text—
which for this reason can make no authoritative statement concerning
truth—but primarily because of the marginal scientific position occu-
pied by the literary institution. Barthes attributes literature’s loss of
prestige to the fact that the contemporary writer no longer possesses
an obvious moral authority, and to the fact that since May ’68 the uni-
versal humanistic values that literature claimed to transmit had come
under fire. But precisely because of this marginal, somewhat ne-
glected position, literature became an interesting area of research for
the ‘perverse’ artist-semiotician that Barthes wanted to be in the
Cours:
La sémiologie littéraire serait ce voyage qui permet de débarquer dans
un paysage libre par déshérence: ni anges, ni dragons ne sont plus là
pour le défendre; le regard peut alors se porter, non sans perversité,
sur des choses anciennes et belles, dont le signifié est abstrait, périmé:
moment à la fois décadent et prophétique, moment d’apocalypse
douce, moment historique de la plus grande jouissance. (OC V, 444)
[Literary semiology is, as it were, that journey which lands us in a

country free by default; angels and dragons are no longer there to de-
fend it. Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and
lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at
once decadent and prophetic, a moment of gentle apocalypse, a his-
torical moment of the greatest possible pleasure. (476)]
As Deleuze’s discussion of Sacher-Masoch makes clear, perversion is

not so much an oedipal challenge to the law of the father as an attempt
to explore new possibilities through a process of deterritorialisation.
Perverse enjoyment is not an aim in itself, but forms part of the search
for unknown corporeal possibilities. From Deleuze’s Nietzschean per-
spective, the real of the body is not an inaccessible Thing, but is an
amalgam of different, vacillating intensities, drives brought to expres-
sion in fantasies. According to Barthes, these fantasies can always be
used to develop the ‘pathos of distance’, a concept to which Barthes
often returned in his lectures and which for him, as for Nietzsche, re-
fers to a process of self-overcoming through the affirmation of differ-
ence. Because of the rough interpretation schemes of the doxa, these
subtle nuances often go unnoticed, but—as we will take up again later
when we discuss the importance of the ‘detail’ in literary texts —
Barthes imputes to literature the gift of being able to articulate them,
or at least to suggest them. For Barthes this literary search for the nu-
ance is more than refined aesthetic enjoyment, and he attributes to it
the status of a fully-fledged ethical project:
Ce que je cherche, dans la préparation du cours, c’est une introduction
au vivre, un guide de vie (projet éthique): je veux vivre selon la nu-
ance. Or il y a une maîtresse de nuances, la littérature: essayer de vi-
vre selon les nuances que m’apprend la littérature. (LN, 37)
[What I am looking for, during the preparation of this course, is an in-

troduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live ac-
cording to nuance. Now, there is a teacher of nuance, literature; try to
live according to the nuances that literature teaches me. (Barthes 2005,
11)]
With this ethic as a starting point, the function of the fantasy in the
Cours also proves to be different from its function in psychoanalysis:
Barthes does not use it as a hermetic instrument which reveals the
structure of subjective desire, or the personal, infantile experience at
its foundation. For Barthes the fantasy is first and foremost a means to
extrapolate new nuances, new ways of thinking and feeling. This ac-
tive, creative role played by the fantasy in the Cours threatens to go
unnoticed if we reduce it to the expression of a regressive desire for a
lost motherly paradise, or if we would explain it as a continual circling
of the negativity that lies at the basis of every desire, as does Marty. In
the Cours, the fantasy functions more as a sort of Deleuzean program,
an experimental process of becoming-idiorrhythmic, becoming-

neutral, becoming-novelist; in short, the development of a new life-
style that Barthes in his inaugural lecture termed the vita nuova.
The fantasy thus encourages the reader to take distance from
what one was, to bring oneself en dérive. Barthes was looking for a
line of flight which always opens to the neutral whenever a particular
paradigm imposes itself and forces the subject to make a sterile choice
between two opposing positions. It was such a line of flight that
Barthes tried to trace between the two most significant intertexts of his
Cours, namely the Nietzschean and the psychoanalytic approach to the
fantasy-concept. This prompted an attentive listener, Hervé Dubourjal,
to write an elaborate letter to Barthes during the course of Le Neutre,
in which he, among other things, interpellated on the strange theoreti-
cal combination of Deleuze and Lacan (cf. LN, 99 ff., Barthes 2005,
66 ff.).
While Barthes did not give any direct response to this remark,
during his course it seemed as if he was nonetheless trying to find a
way out of this theoretical conflict. Faithful to the fantasy of the neu-
tral, he went in search of a third term which would outplay and thus
elude the binary opposition between these two contradictory stand-
points. As we already saw in the first chapter, he discovered this third
way in his revaluation of something that Deleuze and Lacan for once
agreed upon in their radical rejection of it: the imaginary, and more
specifically, the ego as imaginary construction. The return of the re-
pressed ego in Barthes’ theory began in Le Plaisir du texte with the
idea of the self as ‘a final fiction’ which Barthes would then try to
construct in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes and Fragments d’un
discours amoureux.
The imaginary played a central role in the Cours as well. Al-
ready in his inaugural lecture Barthes made it clear that the imaginary
was the best object of research for active semiology:
ses objets de prédilection, ce sont les textes de l’Imaginaire: les récits,
les images, les portraits, les expressions, les idiolectes, les passions,
les structures qui jouent à la fois d’une apparence de vraisemblable et
d’une incertitude de vérité. J’appellerais volontiers ‘sémiologie’ le
cours des opérations le long duquel il est possible – voire escompté –
de jouer du signe comme d’un voile peint, ou encore: d’une fiction.
(OC V, 443)
[ [i]ts objects of predilection are texts of the Imaginary: narratives,

images, portraits, expressions, idiolects, passions, structures which
play simultaneously with an appearance of verisimilitude and with an
uncertainty of truth. I should like to call ‘semiology’ the course of op-
erations during which it is possible —even called for— to play with
the sign as with a painted veil, or again, with a fiction. (Barthes 1982)]
At the beginning of La Préparation du roman he hinted that the theo-

retical disapproval of the ego had gone on long enough: “Mieux valent
les leurres de la subjectivité que les impostures de l’objectivité. Mieux
vaut l’Imaginaire du Sujet que sa censure.” (PR, 25) [The lures of sub-
jectivity are more valuable than the deceits of objectivity. The imagi-
nary of the Subject is more valuable than its censure.]
In Le Neutre, Barthes devoted the entire lesson of 1 April,
1978 to the experience of self, the effect of which he compared with a
drug. With this he meant the intoxication that can be brought on by a
resolute awareness of our irreducible being-there, which we can com-
pare to the ‘sober intoxication’ Barthes discussed at the end of his
Fragments d’un discours amoureux. He now applies to this intoxica-
tion what he had remarked in the same Fragments concerning the af-
fect of love: he rejects the classical idea that this intoxication con-
fronts us with Rimbaud’s ‘je est un autre’, claiming that “la cons-
cience-drogue suit un tout autre chemin: = un approfondissement infa-
tigable du même que je suis, mais le même ainsi traité devient comme
un autre, en ce qu’il est impensable: devenir autre à force d’être
même.” (LN, 138) [the consciousness-drug follows an entirely differ-
ent path: = a tireless deepening of the same that I am, but from being
so treated the same becomes something like an other, insofar as it is
inconceivable: to become other by dint of being the same. (Barthes
2005, 100)] This description of the experience of self is linked closely
to what I called the confrontation with the demon in the chapter on
Foucault; an imaginary figure which expresses the relationship to our
self-becoming. This self-becoming ultimately results from what Fou-
cault describes as the ‘care of the self’, the necessary self-discipline
that make someone able ‘to become what one is’, to be the artist of
one’s own life, to transform oneself into a work of art. I also believe
that Barthes’ project of the vita nuova may be seen as a similar proc-
ess of self-becoming on the basis of strategies he borrowed from the
literary style of writing. Barthes treated the everyday fabric of events
as a text that must be made ‘writerly’, by which the question ‘how to
live?’ falls together with the question ‘how to write?’ (cf. PR, 29)
Therefore, all of the practical, technical problems of the profession of
writing, which Barthes discussed at length in La Préparation du ro-
man, also mirror on another, more intimate level the obstacles that
Barthes encountered as an individual in his attempt to turn his own life
into an ‘oeuvre’. The opposition between the writer and that which he
writes, between the ‘form’ and the ‘man’ hereby becomes meaning-
less:
Il y a une dialectique propre à la littérature (et je crois qu’elle est

d’avenir) qui fait que le sujet peut être livré comme une création d’art;
l’art peut se mettre dans la fabrication même de l’individu; l’homme
s’oppose moins à l’œuvre s’il fait de lui-même une œuvre. (PR, 229)
[There is a dialectic particular to literature (with, I think, potential for

the future) whereby the subject can be shown like a work of art; art
can put itself into the very making of an individual; man is less in op-
position to the work if he makes himself into a work.]
In order to achieve the transformation of the self into a work of art,

one obviously needs a careful self-education, or as Deleuze called it in
his discussion of Nietzsche, a paideia: a training and evaluation of the
affects and forces that traverse the body. In what follows I would like
to examine the techniques Barthes used in the attempt to give this self-
education a concrete form in interaction with literary texts.
The paideia of literature
In his lecture courses Barthes gathered heterogeneous fragments from

various divergent sources (literary, philosophical, historical...), frag-
ments that he used at random without much consideration for their
original context or scientific value. This method of working is more
than just a perverse provocation to the scientific discourse: it is above
all a way to build the necessary bridge between what general knowl-
edge offers and what the singular body needs to realise the vita nuova.
In so doing, the entirety of the Cours can be read as a peculiar ency-
clopaedia which is no longer driven by a desire for comprehensiveness
but by the pleasure that can be derived from knowledge: “le geste en-
cyclopédique a pour moi sa valeur de fiction, sa jouissance: son scan-
dale.” (CVE, 182) [the encyclopaedic gesture has, for me, its value as
a fiction, its bliss: its scandal.] It is precisely this ‘encyclopaedic ges-
ture’ that Barthes will adopt in his lectures by making full use various
formal attributes of the encyclopaedia, and adapting it to his particular
reading strategy.
A typical characteristic of the encyclopaedic genre that
Barthes adopted is the notion of the dossier, the overarching lemma,
around which specific knowledge is gathered. Dividing up the lectures
into different traits, as Barthes called it (cf. CVE, 52), fits perfectly
with his predilection for the fragmentary and serves to burst the illu-
sion of a research working toward a polished conclusion. Just as in an
encyclopaedia, every trait stands on its own so that in principle the
reader, after the explanation of the fantasy which forms the basis of a
given Cours, can start or stop reading anywhere without missing the
development of a particular argument or a conclusion.
Just as with the ancient technique of hypomnèmata, the link
between all of these fragments of encyclopaedic knowledge would be
the person who brings all of these pieces together, in order to then
constitute and transform oneself through the fragments chosen. Or as
Barthes clarifies his method in the introduction to Le Neutre:
j’ai promené le Neutre non pas le long d’une grille de mots, mais d’un
réseau de lectures, c’est-à-dire d’une bibliothèque. Cette bibliothèque
[est] ni raisonnée […] ni exhaustive: bibliothèque infinie: encore
maintenant, je puis lire un livre nouveau dont certains passages peu-
vent cristalliser autour de la notion de Neutre comme une sourcellerie
fantaisiste: je lis, la baguette se lève: il y a du Neutre là-dessous et, par
là même, la notion de Neutre s’étend, s’infléchit, se modifie: à la fois
je m’obstine et je me modifie. (LN, 33-4, italics in original)
[I took the Neutral for a walk not along the grid of words but along a
network of readings, which is to say, of a library. This library [is] nei-
ther analytical […] nor exhaustive: infinite library: even now, I can
read a new book in which certain passages will crystallize around the
notion of Neutral as whimsical sourcery: I read, the water-diving rod
rises: there is Neutral underneath, and for this very reason, the notion
of the Neutral expands, inflects itself, modifies itself: I persist, and I
transform myself at the same time. (Barthes 2005, 9, italics in origi-
nal)]
Barthes does not disguise the fact that his corpus came about in an
impertinent fashion on the basis of the private library at his holiday
home in Urt in south-western France where, during the summer holi-
days, he prepared his lectures for the coming academic year: “c’est-à-
dire lieu-temps où la perte de rigueur méthodologique est compensée
par l’intensité et la jouissance de la lecture libre.” (34) [which is to

say, a place-time where the loss in methodological rigor is compen-
sated for by the intensity and the pleasure of free reading (9)]. For
Barthes, as we saw earlier, the ideal space for the reader is the private
library where one is not obliged to ask for a book, to borrow and re-
turn it, but can use the object of the reading experience as a kind of
fetish. And this holds as well if the reader is a professor at the Collège
de France:
j’ai opéré des choix très arbitraires de lecture, j’ai assumé de ne pas
contrarier ce que j’appellerai une esthétique du travail (valeur exclue
par la science): […] par exemple: en psychanalyse, je retiens de lire
du Freud ou du Lacan, mais Karen Horney ou Reich, ça tombe hors de
ma sensibilité de lecture et donc de travail: je ne ‘cristallise pas’ (mot
amoureux). (34)
I made some very arbitrary choices of reading, I decided not to go

against what I will call an aesthetic of work (a value ruled out by sci-
ence): […] for example, in psychoanalysis, I continue to read some
Freud or some Lacan, but Karen Horney or Reich, that falls outside
my reading and thus outside my work sensibility: I don’t cristallize
(lover’s word). (9)]
This working method connects with what Barthes noted about the
reading experience in ‘Sur la lecture’: to the extent that the reading is
driven by a desire, it cannot but be impertinent and withdraw from the
law of reading—in casu the academic law of reading which empha-
sises exhaustiveness, representability, relevance. The reader whom
Barthes defends in his Cours is always an amateur, in both senses of
the word: a reader who neither cares what one is supposed to read, nor
how one should read. In the same way that Barthes, when choosing
texts, took into account no other criteria than his desire, he also did
not want his interpretation of those texts to be hindered by their origi-
nal meaning and function. It is not about removing the original signi-
fied from the text entirely—this is impossible—but about depriving it
of its power to reduce the entire text to a single interpretation, a reduc-
tion which leaves no room for the reader’s desire. Barthes accom-
plished this by fictionalising the texts in question, by depriving them
of their ultimate referent, such as the existence of God in the case of
the mystics, or the political situation in Sartre’s case (cf. CVE, 43).
Barthes in this way skirts the law of reading which would deny en-
trance to someone from his intellectual caste into certain texts that are
considered ‘wrong’ because of their undesirable connotations. Barthes

also defended his choice of religious texts or forms of community by
abstracting from their religious meaning and substituting for it the fan-
tasy that the texts evoked in him: “C’est donc travailler à un non-
refoulement: moins refoulant de parler des moines sans la foi, que de
n’en pas parler.” (CVE, 43) [It means working at a non-repression: it
is less repressing to speak without faith of monks than to not speak
about them.]
As Barthes indicated in his inaugural lecture, such a free read-
ing had become possible because the literary discourse was no longer
safeguarded by influential authors and institutions who established the
correct meaning of a text. Barthes remarks in the same passage that
this type of reading is not without perversity (cf. supra)—a certain part
of perverse reading pleasure is indeed found in the recalcitrant reading
of a text right in the face of the powerless Other who cannot interfere
because the author has been declared dead and the literary institution
no longer has the authority or the prestige to forbid such a ‘heretical’
reading.
Yet we must not forget that even a perverse reading strategy
ultimately cannot do without the Other. Even read explicitly through a
fantasy, the denotation and the connotations remain active in a text
and exert an unavoidable influence on its reception. The same is true
for the selection of the corpus, which cannot in the least outstrip the
law of reading: on further consideration it seems that Barthes himself
is guided in his choice by various ‘micro-laws’ from which he does
not appear able to free himself. Is his preference for Freud and Lacan,
for example, purely due to his own idiosyncratic desire rather than to
the fact that both authors played a far greater role in the French theo-
retical tradition than Horney or Reich? The same observation can be
made about the supposedly provocative preference that he, as an
avant-garde theoretician, had for classic literature: first of all, he chose
for the ‘greats’, such as Proust, Gide, Flaubert, Chateaubriand—
authors who were undoubtedly part of the French literary canon; and
second of all, Barthes’ fluctuating preference followed a shift within
Tel Quel which, under the influence of Sollers at the end of the nine-
teen-seventies, transitioned toward a more accessible, more classical
poetics and more conservative assumptions (cf. Kauppi 1990, 234).
Barthes’ fascination for Eastern philosophy, and more specifically
Zen-Buddhism—which received a great deal of attention in the West
during the sixties and seventies—also seemed to be at least partially

determined by intellectual fashion. So when Barthes wrote about an
“anarchisme des sources” (CVE, 44) [anarchy of sources], one must
ask if he really proceeded as anarchically as he would have his listen-
ers believe. According to Barthes, the private library is still a mirror of
its owner’s identity: “Décrire cette bibliothèque, expliquer son origine,
serait entrer dans la biographie, l’histoire familiale: bibliothèque d’un
sujet = identité forte, complète, un ‘portrait’” (LN, 34) [To describe
this library, to explain its origin, would mean to enter into biography,
familial history: library of a subject = a strong, complete identity, a
‘portrait’ (Barthes 2005, 9)] By limiting himself to his private library,
Barthes’ corpus indeed threatened to become a mirror, a narcissistic
‘portrait’ in which the imaginary recognition is bereft of its transfor-
mative effect. Is it not precisely by taking up a text which at first glace
seems very distant to us, but wherein we suddenly, in an uncanny
way, encounter something of ourselves, that the subject can be
brought into process? Barthes should have realised through his read-
ing of Freud and Lacan that when a text leaves a reader indifferent, or
even inspires aversion, this can be a sign of resistance. In which case
the text does not offer too little appeal, but too much, and threatens to
reveal an aspect of the fantasy displeasing to the reading ego.
Furthermore, Barthes also missed the negative aspects of his
fantasy in the texts he did deal with. We can illustrate this with respect
to the idiorrhythmic fantasy in Comment vivre ensemble. While
Barthes asserts, in his introductory lecture, that the fantasy has its
negative counterparts, and that an ‘infernal’ version of living together
can easily be imagined (cf. CVE, 35), Barthes noticeably ignores this
negative aspect, not only in his selection, but also in his interpretation
of texts. Comparable to the way in which Barthes, in Roland Barthes
par Roland Barthes, carefully avoided the oedipal conflict when de-
scribing his life, thereby actually creating an extremely oedipal story,
in his discussion of Robinson Crusoe he remained entirely blind to the
colonial exploitation and racism implied in this novel, and in his dis-
cussion of La séquestrée paid little attention for the family terror suf-
fered by Mélanie—in particular that carried out by the mother. (cf.
Gide 1949, 131 ff.) Barthes defends this selective reading with his ba-
sic assumption, whereby meaning is suspended in favour of the fan-
tasy. But the point is precisely that, in the end, this suspension to a
certain extent always fails insofar as a portion of its meaning (experi-
enced negatively) is still invested with unconscious, phantasmatic en-

joyment which manages to disturb the idyllic, idiorrhythmic picture.
It is not my intention to assert that Barthes, in his lecture se-
ries, kept the aggressive sides of his desire hidden from himself and
his public. Such an accusation passes over the way in which Barthes
used the fantasy in his Cours: not as a means of confession, as an oc-
casion to ‘come out’, to expose his emotional life—“la règle = donner
l’intime, non le privé” (PR, 219, italics in original) [the rule = to yield
the intimate, not the private]—but as a sort of touchstone, a basanos
which served to evaluate and adjust his life. The ‘mistake’ Barthes
made here is thus not a moral one, but a pragmatic one: it is not about
him being unwilling or unable to recognise the truth of this aggres-
sion, but rather that by failing to take account of these aggressive im-
pulses he was ultimately unable to bring the logos he distilled from the
vita nuova into agreement with his bios. By failing to take into ac-
count the other, violent side of the fantasy, his efforts were bound to
always fail, primarily because this unconscious aggression turned on
Barthes himself and was expressed in the akedia about which he com-
plained in the Cours: the fits of melancholy he described in the post-
humously published diary fragments included in Incidents (1987); and
finally the loss of his fighting spirit he displayed after his traffic acci-
dent—which at first glance was not at all life-threatening. (cf. Calvet
1990/94, 296 ff./249 ff.) The self-destructive attitude of melancholy is
traditionally interpreted by psychoanalysis as a repressed aggression
toward an object turned back upon oneself. Barthes’ aggression re-
mained subjected to an uncanny return of the repressed precisely be-
cause he was unable to recognise something of his own demon in the
aggression that he tried to exorcise by every possible means. And
thus, it was precisely that which Barthes had tried to exorcise that
came back to haunt him as a ‘copy-farce’. Because not recognised, the
double became an adversary, a shadow which continually prevented
him from realising his program.
In the next chapter I will discuss Barthes’ inability to integrate
the negative, destructive aspects of his fantasies into the program of
the vita nuova. Here I will examine Barthes’ active semiology more
closely in light of four important notions from literary studies: more
specifically, the space of literature; the function of the detail in liter-
ary description; time and the author. I will dedicate a separate section
to each of these notions.
Elements of an Active Semiology:
Space, Detail, Time and the Author
Space
Heterotopia
In the first lecture of Comment vivre ensemble, Barthes proposes that

the exploration of a text starting from a fantasy still goes together with
the creation of a space where the phantasmatic scenario can play itself
out: “pour qu’il y ait fantasme, il faut qu’il y ait scène (scénario), donc
lieu.” (CVE, 37) [A fantasy requires a scene (a scenario), it therefore
requires a place.] This phantasmatic space arises between the two
spaces which play a role in the act of reading, more specifically, the
extra-textual space where the reader is located, and a space as repre-
sented in the text—in this case, for example, Mount Athos. This
means that an active semiology must remain constantly aware of the
interaction between both spaces as brought to life in the reader’s im-
aginary. In an effort to think through this interaction, I will call upon
the notion of heterotopia which Foucault developed in his text, ‘Des
espaces autres’ (Different spaces). In this reading from 1967—first
published in 1984, the year of his death—Foucault distinguishes be-
tween utopias and heterotopias. He defines utopias as places that do
not actually exist, but that maintain a distinct relationship with actual
society as either its reversal or its perfection. Heterotopias are also
places where the normal social arrangement of space is in one way or
another undermined, but in contrast to utopias they are real, localis-
able places. (cf. Foucault 2001b/1998, 1574-5/178-9)
Foucault delivered this reading on the heterotopia to the Cir-
cles d’études architecturales and it was eventually published in Archi-
tecture, Mouvement, Continuité. It should thus be obvious that the fo-
cus in ‘Des espaces autres’ was primarily on the impact that the con-
crete, architectural arrangement of communal space had upon the sub-
ject. The different examples Foucault gives of the heterotopia (hon-

eymoon hotels, asylums, prisons, zoos, graveyards, fairs…) at first
glace seem to have nothing to do with literary space. Literature shows
us a place that does not exist and is thus only, strictly speaking, a spe-
cific variation of utopia. Still, Foucault admits that it is sometimes
possible to speak of an overlap between utopia and heterotopia; more
specifically, the mirror. On the one hand, Foucault sees the mirror as a
utopia insofar as it is a “un lieu sans lieu” (Foucault 2001b: 1575) [a
placeless place (Foucault 1998a, 179)], but on the other hand it is a
kind of heterotopia:
dans la mesure où le miroir existe réellement, et où il a, sur la place

que j’occupe, une sorte d’effet en retour; c’est à partir du miroir que je
me découvre absent à la place où je suis puisque je me vois là-bas. À
partir de ce regard qui en quelque sorte se porte sur moi, du fond de
cet espace virtuel qui est de l’autre côté de la glace, je reviens vers
moi et je recommence à porter mes yeux vers moi-même et à me re-
constituer là où je suis. (1575)
[in that the mirror really exists, in that it has a sort of return effect on
the place that I occupy. Due to the mirror, I discover myself absent at
the place where I am, since I see myself over there. From that gaze
which settles on me, as it were, I come back to myself and I begin
once more to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself
there where I am. (179)]
Seen logically, a mirror image might be but a two-dimensional sur-

face, nevertheless it still creates the impression of having a spatial di-
mension. This effect is buttressed by the fact that when I look at my-
self in the mirror, I first see myself in that other space, and then start-
ing from there I construct myself on this side of the mirror, as happens
with the child in Lacan’s mirror stage.
I would like to extend this description to the reading experi-
ence which confronts me with my absence as a reader from the very
place where I sit and read. In this experience, I see myself reflected on
the other side, that other space, in a textual double that subsequently
returns me to myself, and with which I then construct myself on this
side of the mirror. In this way the literary space can be both a utopia
and a heterotopia: utopia because literature indeed describes a non-
lieu; heterotopia because literature always remains a sort of material-
ised utopia, even if only through the presence of the book and the need
for a space in which this book can be read in peace.
Elements of an Active Semiology 197
In his lectures to the Collège de France, Barthes used litera-

ture specifically as a heterotopy where certain taboos can be sus-
pended and certain alternatives explored (concerning taboos, think for
example of the taboo on sentimentality which Barthes denounced in
his Fragments d’un discours amoureux). To be sure, literature has the
capacity, through its marginal, ‘heterotopic’ position, to experiment,
but at the same time its influence on the normal social space remains
limited. It is thus somewhat ridiculous (or perhaps worse, hypocriti-
cal) to believe that literary practice can have revolutionary potential,
and to foster overly ambitious expectations about the impact that its
radical lines of flight could have. Still, however little influence fiction
may exercise on the existing social order, like every heterotopia the
novelistic space is never sealed off hermetically from the space sur-
rounding it—namely, the space of the reader and the concrete social
situation in which this reader is located. Fictional elements can estab-
lish connections with the reading body and sweep it up into a line of
flight, setting off a process of becoming which often remains clandes-
tine and is hardly noticeable, not even by the subject who is undergo-
ing it. This deterritorialisation allows the subject to unexpectedly dis-
cover new virtual spaces.
As Barthes proposed in his inaugural lecture, fantasy serves as
the compass for this literary exploration. In this chapter I wish to ex-
amine how fantasy and space interact with one another, first from a
psychoanalytic, and then from the Nietzschean intertext. Considering
that Barthes actually inserted little or no theoretical reflection on this
interaction into his Cours, I will also return to a few of his other texts
which may help to give us a better image of the role played by space
in Barthes’ perverse reading praxis.
Potential space
We could call potential space, as described by D.W. Winnicott in his

Playing and Reality, the first ‘heterotopic’ space in the development
of the child. This clearly delineated play area makes it possible for the
child to project internal psychic processes onto the external world, and
to give various objects a phantasmatic, animated glow which is lost
once they are outside the circle of play. In his inaugural lecture,
Barthes compared the courses he wanted to give with such a Winni-
cottian play area, such as occurs between the mother and child, so that
the textual fragment would come to function as a transitional object:
J’aimerais donc que la parole et l’écoute qui se tresseront ici soient
semblables aux allées et venues d’un enfant qui joue autour de sa
mère, qui s’en éloigne, puis retourne vers elle pour lui rapporter un
caillou, un brin de laine, dessinant de la sorte autour d’un centre paisi-
ble toute une aire de jeu, à l’intérieur de laquelle le caillou, la laine
importent finalement moins que le don plein de zèle qui en est fait.
(OC V, 444-5)
[I should therefore like the speaking and the listening that will be in-
terwoven here to ressemble the comings and goings of a child playing
beside his mother, leaving her, returning to bring her a pebble, a piece
of string, and thereby tracing around a calm centre a whole locus of
play within which the pebble, the string come to matter less than the
enthusiastic giving of them. (Barthes 1982, 476-7)]
The image of tranquil space surfaces frequently in the rest of Barthes’

work, and is termed “maternal space” by Diana Knight in her Barthes
and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (1997) (cf. Knight 1997, 244 ff.)
As an attractive alternative for the space of doxa, dominated as it is by
the arrogance of language, this ‘maternal space’ constitutes literally
the alpha and omega of Barthes’ oeuvre. It appears already in his very
first text, the pastiche on Plato’s Crito, as the charming Tyrinthe
where Socrates could philosophise in peace, far away from Athens
and its inhumane laws. In this place of exile he could enjoy the land-
scape and delicious food in the company of his friends, but also with
the maternal figure of Eurymedusa, Socrates’ midwife (cf. OC IV,
501). And in ‘On échoue toujours à parler de ce qu’on aime’ (1980)
(One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves), the very last text
Barthes wrote, and which was still in the typewriter at the time of his
fatal traffic accident, he again discusses the same idyllic space. This
time Barthes’ alter ego is not Socrates but Stendhal who, in his travel
diary, makes the distinction between beautiful, maternal Italy with its
many delights, and the paternal, oppressive France (cf. OC V,
907/Barthes 1989, 297) But as an evocation of the lost, pre-oedipal,
pre-linguistic paradise, Italy per definition falls outside the symbolic
system and is thus impossible to describe. Inevitably, Stendhal fails
time and again to represent his fascination for Italy—hence the title of
Barthes’ article.
The desire to travel to a similar idyllic space, far away from

conflict and the doxa, also plays an important role in Barthes’ own bi-
ography (cf. in addition to Knight 1997, also Higgins 1981 and
Kandiyoti 1995). As he remarked in La Préparation du roman, his tu-
berculosis and resulting stay in the sanatorium were perhaps—at least
in part—the psychosomatic expression of a desire to escape (cf. PR,
293). Irritated by the student protests of May ’68, Barthes had a simi-
lar flight-response when he decided to accept the invitation to lecture
in Morocco, accompanied by his mother. (cf. Calvet 1990/1994, 209
ff./170 ff.) But ultimately this country did not really satisfy his expec-
tations: although somewhat delayed, the Moroccan students were also
ignited by the revolutionary élan of their Parisian colleagues and be-
gan to resist what they perceived to be the bourgeois and colonial
study of French literature. (cf. Calvet 1990/1994, 211 ff./172 ff.) Fur-
thermore, Barthes felt somewhat trapped in the small circle of for-
eigners with his numerous social commitments, which bored him to
no end. But during his short stay in Rabat Barthes was able to work on
L’Empire des signes, a text which resulted from a few short visits to
Japan a couple of years earlier. Precisely because of the fact that he
did not live there permanently, he could continue to harbour dreams of
Japan as a ‘maternal place’, and could suspend or ignore the inevitable
conflicts found in every society, and with which he was continually
confronted in Morocco.
In his lectures at the Collège de France as well, Barthes would
also go in search for variations of this maternal space in different
texts. While Comment vivre ensemble was undoubtedly the most ex-
plicit thematic approach to this space, the descriptions of, among oth-
ers, Mount Athos, Crusoe’s island, the Castorp’s sanatorium and Mé-
lanie’s room as places where the idiorrhythmic fantasy can be played
out, make clear that the other two fantasies are unthinkable without a
spatial dimension. And so, in Le Neutre, Barthes devoted an extensive
trait to the retreat, the hiding place to which one can withdraw from
the public space and appointments with the doxa (cf. LN, 186/Barthes
2005, 144) In his view, the haiku—of which Barthes treated thor-
oughly as a writing of the neutral in the first part of La Préparation du
roman—also evokes a phantasmatic space. The three short lines of a
haiku immediately evoke in the reader an imaginary scenario into
which one can project oneself. (cf. PR, 107) And in the second part of
La Préparation du roman, Barthes points out the necessity of letting
the act of writing be preceded by the creation of a space, not only

figuratively (taking time, freeing oneself from social obligations), but
also literally: Barthes describes in meticulous detail the actual furnish-
ings of the room in which one writes, and deliberates on whether it is
better to write while lying on a bed or at a table. (cf. PR, 301, ff.)
What all these divergent places have in common is their au-
tarkic character: they are spaces in which the subject lacks nothing
and is protected from the invasive external world—as in the ideal
writing room—and from the arrogance of language, as in the Zen-
space of the haiku. And yet the lack which is apparently absent in this
space eventually resurfaces in the relationship the reader establishes
with these imaginary spaces. These spaces remain inaccessible pre-
cisely because they exist nowhere else than in the imagination of the
reader, even if they do refer to an actually existing space. Barthes thus
recognises, for instance, in Comment vivre ensemble, the difference
between actual monastic life on Athos on the one hand, and Athos as a
phantasmatic place serving as a symbol for the idiorrhythmic commu-
nity on the other. The desire to retreat to Athos thus is revealed to be
an impossible desire: just like his year in Rabat, an actual stay on the
Greek mountain would surely have disappointed Barthes insofar as it
would confront him with that which he had effaced in his fantasy.
This is why the ideal spaces that Barthes discusses in his work
are always fictional, or are at least fictionalised spaces: they each rep-
resent in their own way the Sovereign Good, but postulate this ulti-
mate object as unattainable because of their fictional status. In the end
it is precisely this fundamental impossibility that makes this desire
possible and sustains it, as is illustrated by Barthes’ fascination in La
Chambre claire for an old photo by Charles Clifford, Alhambra:
“Cette photo ancienne (1854) me touche: c’est tout simplement que là
j’ai envie de vivre.” (OC V, 819, italics in original) [This old photo-
graph (1854) touches me: it is quite simply there that I should like to
live. (Barthes 1981, 38, italics in original)] The photo thus creates the
illusion that the Sovereign Good can be found at that place, but the
photo itself remains a two-dimensional image of a space which—
given the age of the photo—no longer exists as such. Through the fan-
tasy, the distance required to transform the experience of the pre-
linguistic (mother’s) body from a horrifying, ‘exitimate’ Thing into a
utopian, desirable ‘maternal space’ is established. The ideal landscape
can only be heimlich (domestic, intimate and secret) to the extent that
the subject, paradoxically enough, cannot make of it one’s home, but

always remains on this side of the photo, of the mirror. It is the same
process that enables the child in Winnicott’s play area to project its
internal psychic space onto elements of external reality: only on the
condition that the child remains conscious that its game, however se-
riously it is played, is not real, can the play area receive a phantas-
matic aura.
However valid and important this Winnicottian play area
might be for a solid understanding of Barthes’ active semiology, in the
previous chapter we established that this psychoanalytic intertext
alone is not sufficient, but must be joined to another, more Deleuzean
approach. This goes as well for the notion of ‘space’. It is thus also too
one-sided to always reduce the spaces Barthes discussed in his lec-
tures at the Collège de France—and by extension the other spaces
which receive a clear phantasmatic dimension in his work—to the rec-
reation of a maternal area of play, a purely nostalgic evocation of an
impossible, pre-oedipal paradise which was lost with the advent of
language.
For Barthes, imaginary space also serves as a sort of virtual
laboratory where, in a controlled environment, an experimental proc-
ess, a perverse act of deterritorialisation is begun: “to cross the hori-
zon, enter into another life…,” as Deleuze cites D. H. Lawrence
(Deleuze & Parnet 2004b/2007, 47/36). This exploration of the rela-
tionships a subject can establish with a still unknown world forms an
essential aspect of Barthes’ paideia. We rediscover retroactively this
experimental aspect in Barthes’ earlier texts, which also prove useful
in understanding the relationship between the vita nuova and space as
found in active semiology.
Experimental cartographies
It was not only in ‘On échoue toujours de parler de ce qu’on aime’

that Barthes displayed his fascination for Stendhal’s love for Italy. Al-
ready in 1957 he had written the introduction for a publication of
Stendhal’s Quelques promenades dans Rome. An important pre-
condition for Stendhal is that the traveller does not behave in Rome
like the classic tourist who never diverges from the pre-planned route
as designated in one’s Baedecker travel guide. One would never dis-
cover anything new about the place one is visiting if this were the
case; mentally at least, this kind of traveller has never left home. For
Stendhal, the tourist is also “un homme ridicule, parce qu’il visite
l’étranger mais ne l’habite pas: il commet le péché majeur, qui est de
manquer d’imagination, de ne pas savoir sortir de lui-même.” (OC I,
913) [a ridiculous man, because he visits a foreign country but never
lives there: he commits the major sin which is a lack of imagination,
of never taking leave of oneself.] A trip only becomes interesting if
we become involved phantasmatically, doubling in our imagination
the spaces we encounter, so that a virtual, imaginary space opens up to
us, in order to “rendre compte de l’intensité du réel” (OC I, 914) [give
an account of the intensity of reality]. This account does not mean an
exhaustive description of a reality that one can objectify and classify,
but rather the reality as it is experienced by the traveller: the discovery
of Italy thus means in the first place the discovery of unknown aspects
of one’s own body, or—formulated Deleuzean-style—the develop-
ment of a cartography in which new lines of flight can be traced and
still-unknown connections of affect can arise. A decade later, with
L’Empire des signes, where Japan in effect fulfils the same role as It-
aly did for Stendhal, Barthes would try to work out a similar travel
journal, one that does not follow the predetermined plan of a travel
guide, but rather the affects of the travelling body. In this way,
Barthes presents the land of the rising sun as a fictional universe con-
structed from a series of disconnected elements, traits he had collected
during his stay in Japan:
Je puis […] sans prétendre en rien répresenter ou analyser la moindre
réalité (ce sont les gestes majeures du discours occidental), prélever
quelque part dans le monde (là-bas) un certain nombre de traits […],
et de ces traits former délibérément un système. C’est ce système que
j’appellerai: le Japon. (OC III, 351, italics in original)
[I can […] though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze real-

ity itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) — iso-
late somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features
[…] and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this sys-
tem which I shall call: Japan. (Barthes 1983, 3, italics in original)]
Stendhal’s becoming-Italian or Barthes’ becoming-Japanese

are programs that can never be achieved fully. During this process, the
virtual object (Italy, Japan) is itself transformed and comes to differ
from itself under the refractory gaze of one who has not been born and
raised in Italy or Japan. This also reveals the paradox of the traveller:
it is precisely this desire to let one’s subjectivity be altered through

contact with a new world which cannot be eclipsed. In the end, this
desire is the reason why the traveller always remains a Fremdkörper, a
foreign substance in the places one visits: one’s fascination is not
shared by the inhabitants of the world toward which one’s desire is di-
rected, as Barthes himself was forced to accept after having written
L’Empire des signes, when it appeared that the Japanese could not
recognise themselves in the book. (cf. OC IV, 476)
As Barthes would later remark in Fragments d’un discours
amoureux, our fascination confronts us with the fact that ultimately
we cannot become someone other than ourselves. The traveller unrav-
els a virtual world with one’s loving gaze, a space in which the dérive
is possible; but always travelling together with this gaze is the bêtise
that guides the dérive, as has already been clarified in our analysis of
Gradiva. Even more, the process of transformation is only possible
because of the bêtise: without Hanold’s stubborn obsession with a
woman’ foot, his Italian experience never would have been possible.
Thus when Barthes describes Stendhal’s love for Italy as “la passion
de cet autre qui est en lui-même” (OC V, 908) [the passion for that
other which is in himself (Barthes 1989, 298)], we could perhaps bet-
ter reformulate this as the passion for the same which is always pre-
sent in the other. It is in this way that the travelling subject encounters
its demon, that aspect of oneself that one simply, stubbornly, keeps
repeating. And it is precisely in this repetition where the minimal dif-
ference is established which enables the vita nuova to become possi-
ble.
On the occasion of his arrival in Turin in April of 1888, Nietz-
sche wrote a letter to Heinrich Köselitz in which he described the city
as “the first place in which I am possible! . . .” (Nietzsche 1969, 295,
italics in original) The fact that Turin would also be the place where
Nietzsche would descend into madness makes clear that the space in
which the subject is ‘possible’, in which one can truly become oneself,
must always remain virtual. Unless it fades away in a schizophrenic
delusion, the subject cannot do otherwise than continue to distinguish
between its own world and the imaginary duplicate it creates during
its travels. The final ‘homecoming’ thus cannot be realised: the travel-
ling ego can never coincide completely with the virtual double con-
structed in imaginary space.
In fact, the reader is a prime example of the sort of traveller

who knows one can never reach the actual destination. Alongside the
fictitious world of words that do not allow me to access it, there is still
that other space which I seem to forget while reading, but which I can
never really leave: the space where my body sits and reads. This also
explains why the literary promised land, the goal of literary semiology
as Barthes presented it in his inaugural lecture, ultimately remains in-
accessible.
This final impossibility does not however prevent the reader
from exploring the literary landscape—such as Barthes did with his
fictional spaces in the Cours—which like the system-Japan or the sys-
tem-Italy offer an alternative system of knowledge. The difference is
that the traits of this virtual encyclopaedia are no longer assembled by
travelling, but by reading. But also, in this case, the reader must ad-
here to the same principle as the traveller and not allow oneself to be
led by a literary studies-version of the Baedecker guide which tells
one what one must read: just as with his journey through Japan, in his
Cours Barthes lets himself be guided by the body, and more specifi-
cally by the fantasy presented by the body, which then serves as the
compass for every journey. The heterotopic space of literature in this
way becomes an essential part of the process of becoming that Barthes
attempted to initiate in his lectures. It is not for nothing that the subti-
tle of Comment vivre ensemble, ‘Simulations romanesques de
quelques espaces quotidiens’ [novelistic simulations of some spaces of
daily life] is one which Barthes, in the introduction, explains as fol-
lows: “Les romans sont des simulations, c’est-à-dire des expérimenta-
tions fictives sur un modèle, dont le plus classique est la maquette. Le
roman implique une structure, un argument (une maquette) à travers
lequel on lâche des sujets, des situations.” (CVE, 44) [Novels are
simulations, that is to say, fictional experimentations on a model, the
most classic of which is the scale-model. The novel implies a struc-
ture, an argument (a scale-model) through which one releases sub-
jects, situations.] Concretely, this means that Barthes projected him-
self into the space of Mount Athos, the space of the haiku, the writing
room of an admired author, among other places, and in so doing he
always investigated the extent to which these spaces enabled him to
‘become what he is’, the extent to which they could help him create a
vita nuova on this side of the mirror.
It goes without saying that the heterotopic literary space as

such only constitutes the condition of possibility for this experiment.
This space can only assume the function of an encyclopaedic system
of knowledge insofar as it is also filled with concrete elements and
specific characteristics. It is this content we will now take a closer
look at.
Detail
The affect of the real
Seeing that Barthes’ discussion of space is invariably about textual

spaces mediated by the imagination of the writer-reader, even if they
refer to an existing space, the filling-in of these spaces cannot occur
other than via a verbal description. The detail forms an important as-
pect of this description. In a well-known article, ‘L’effet de réel’ (The
Reality Effect), Barthes analysed the details in a literary text as a spe-
cific procedure of realism, namely, the exclusion of the signified in
the sign, in favour of “la collusion directe d’un référent et d’un signi-
fiant”. (OC III, 31, italics in original) [The direct collusion of a refe-
rent and a signifier (Barthes 1989, 147)] But just because such details
are characteristic for the genre of realistic description, according to
Barthes they do in fact receive a meaning: “c’est la catégorie du ‘réel’
(en non ses contenus contingents) qui est alors signifiée; autrement
dit, la carence même du signifié au profit du seul référent devient le
signifiant même du réalisme”. (32) [it is the category of ‘the real’ (and
not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the
very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the reference alone,
becomes the very signifier of realism (148)] The meaningless detail in
a text thus remains nothing but a sign that can never simply refer to a
referent, considering that it simultaneously has the meaning of a fea-
ture of the realistic genre. But despite Barthes’ initial reserve concern-
ing the detail, it would become increasingly important in his own writ-
ing. In L’Empire des signes, Barthes presents his fictitious ethnology
of Japan by means of a series of small details which escape any form
of structuring (cf. OC III, 412/Barthes 1983, 79). An eye for detail is
also typical for the genre of haiku which Barthes so admired. This
short poem endeavours to merely refer, and no longer to signify. It

was this admiration of Barthes for the ‘meaningless’ haiku that critics
such as Jonathan Culler did not know what to do with: with his at-
tempts to free the signifier from the signified and to reduce it to pure
indication, Barthes seems to fall blindly into the same trap that he
himself, in ‘L’effet de réel’, had defined as a regression to the belief in
“une plénitude référentielle”. (OC III, 32) [a referential plenitude
(Barthes 1989, 148)] Yet a critique of this sort does not take enough
into account the fact that Barthes’ focus in the meantime had switched
from the text to the reader. Thus when Barthes, in his Cours, strove to
remove the ‘signified’ from the sign, this was not so much about the
evocation of a textual reality-effect, as about the creation of a corpo-
real reality-affect through which certain signifiers, once freed of their
meaning, are able to connect with the body of the concrete reader.
The perverse delicacy
Because of the attention it devotes to the apparently insignificant de-

tail, the haiku is also the ideal genre to express what Barthes defined
earlier —in Comment vivre ensemble (cf. CVE, 170, 179 ff.) and pri-
marily in Le Neutre (LN, 58 ff., 79/Barthes 2005, 29 ff., 47)—as the
principle of the délicatesse (tact, delicacy), where respect and atten-
tion are nourished for all the little things that determine our relation-
ship to our surroundings:
j’ai eu cette intuition vive […] que descendre dans l’infiniment futile,
cela permettait d’avouer la sensation de la vie → (c’est en somme une
règle romanesque) → La délicatesse est donc du côté du vivant, de ce
qui fait sentir la vie, de ce qui en active la perception: la saveur de la
vie toute pure, la jouissance d’être vivant. (LN, 79)
[I had this vivid intuition […] that to fall into the infinitely futile helps
one’s awareness of the feeling of life → (it’s after all a novelistic
rule). → Tact is thus on the side of vividness, of what allows life to be
felt, of what stirs the awareness of it: the utterly pure taste of life, the
pleasure of being alive. (Barthes 2005, 47)]
When we look at the unexpected source of this concept, it becomes

clear that this preference for the detail relates to a perverse reading
strategy: namely, Barthes borrowed it from a letter written from prison
by the Marquis de Sade to his wife in reaction to her request for him
to send his dirty linen. Her intention, of course, was only that he
would send them to her so that they could be washed, but this is not
the way the Marquis interpreted her request:
Charmante créature, vous voulez mon linge sale, mon vieux linge?
Savez-vous que c’est d’une délicatesse achevée? Vous voyez comme
je sens le prix des choses. Écoutez, mon ange, j’ai toute l’envie du
monde de vous satisfaire sur cela, car vous savez que je respecte les
goûts, les fantaisies: quelque baroques qu’elles soient, je les trouve
toutes respectables, et parce qu’on n’en est pas le maître, et parce que
la plus singulière et la plus bizarre de toutes, bien analysée, remonte
toujours à un principe de délicatesse. (Sade, quoted in Barthes LN, 58)
[Charming creature, you want my dirty linen, my old linen? Do you

know, that is complete tact? you see how I sense the value of things.
Listen, my angel, I have every wish in the world to satisfy you in this
matter, because you know the respect I have for tastes, for fantasies:
however baroque they may be, I find them all respectable, and be-
cause one is not the master of them, and because the most singular and
bizarre of them, when well analyzed, always depends on a principle of
tact. (Sade, quoted in Barthes 2005, 29)]
With this letter Sade shows himself plainly as a perverse reader, and
then for a double reason. Firstly, because he intentionally misreads his
wife’s message and derives great pleasure from provoking her with his
insinuation that she—who is not at all a libertarian—would herself de-
rive perverse pleasure from his dirty linen; secondly, because he indi-
cates that one can always derive sexual enjoyment from objects and
situations which, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with the sexual
act, even if it is only something as futile and banal as dirty linen.
Typical of Barthes’ univocally positive view on perversion, in his dis-
cussion of this fragment he takes no account of the fact that with this
letter Sade was deliberately showing contempt for his wife, and in-
stead devotes his attention solely to the perverse enjoyment in futility,
which Barthes also recognised in his own analysis of literary texts:
L’énonciation de Sade laisse voir ce qu’est le principe de délicatesse:
une jouissance d’analyse, une opération verbale qui déjoue ce qui est
attendu (le linge est sale pour être lavé) et fait entendre que la délica-
tesse est une perversion qui joue du détail inutile (infonctionnel) […]
c’est ce découpage et ce détournement qui est jouissif → on pourrait
dire: jouissance du ‘futile’ […] En somme, délicatesse: l’analyse […]
qui ne sert à rien. (58-9)
[Sade’s very utterance exposes what the principle of tact is: a pleasure
[jouissance] in analysis, a verbal operation that frustrates expectation
(the laundry is dirty in order to be washed) and intimates that tact is a
perversion that plays with the useless (non-functional) detail […] it’s
this cutting and rerouting that is the source of pleasure → one could
say: pleasure in the ‘futile’ […] In short, tact: analysis […] when aim-
less. (30)]
From a Deleuzean perspective this reading perversion consists in the

improper use of a textual detail without taking the whole into account,
in order to ‘deterritorialise’ the detail and have it result—together with
several other details—in a specific individuation of the reading body.
Seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, it furthermore becomes evi-
dent that Barthes’ focus on the futile, meaningless detail is also aimed
at challenging the symbolic order. The perverse reading pleasure
evoked by the detail also lies partially in the fact that the detail, be-
cause of its futility, makes the infernal meaning-machine of linguistic
paradigms misfire, if only briefly. This is what Barthes found so inter-
esting in Zen-philosophy. According to Barthes, this entire philosophy
can be summarised with a famous haiku by Basho: “Comme il est ad-
mirable/Celui qui ne pense pas: ‘La Vie est éphémère’/En voyant un
éclair!” (Basho, quoted OC III, 407, also quoted in PR, 124) [How
admirable he is/Who does not think ‘Life is ephemeral’/when he sees
a flash of lightning! (Basho, quoted in Barthes 1983, 72)]
The practitioner of Zen tries precisely to become this figure
worthy of admiration: someone who does not see the lightning flash as
a sign of something else, but experiences this event in its contingency
and thus in all its meaninglessness. Zen strives to focus attention on
the detail which is too futile to have any meaning or to be interpreted
as an allegory or symbol; to focus attention on that which stays behind
as a recalcitrant remnant after the analysis of a text. Through the re-
production of the meaningless detail, the text suggests a world beyond
the web of language. For Barthes, this also turns the detail into a nec-
essary ally in the creation of his ‘maternal space’, that mythical, pre-
oedipal space prior to the advent of language, symbolised by the pro-
hibitive father figure which separates the child from its first love ob-
ject, the mother. This becomes clear when Barthes, in Comment vivre
ensemble, analyses the pleasure he experienced when reading Robin-
son Crusoe. He concludes that this pleasure is primarily aroused by
the detailed description of the practical organisation of Crusoe’s resi-
dence. When the actual story begins and various plot developments
and events bring Crusoe’s solitary existence to an end, this pleasure

disappears: “Je deviens sujet du suspense, du meurtre du Père – et non
plus sujet du nid, de la Mère: l’événement comme Père (l’Œdipe est le
protocole de l’événement; tout événement est œdipien).” (CVE, 123)
[I become a subject of suspense, of the murder of the Father—and no
longer a subject of the nest, of the Mother: the event as Father (Oedi-
pus is the protocol of the event; every event is oedipal).]
In other words, what the detail does is obstruct the narrative:
as classic narratology teaches us, a story is an attempt to fill a lack and
obtain the desired object. It is precisely by pausing over the detail that
the reader can defer the narrative (and thus the lack). Within the story
itself, the detail plays no role in the development of the plot, and out-
side the story it does not fit into any interpretation: the detail which
has no function coincides with itself and no longer guides the reader’s
desire in an endless quest for a different object. The detail thus be-
comes a fetish through which the perverse reader attempts to return to
the point where, for the infant, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign
was still unclear and the imaginary sign was still equated with the ob-
ject. The haiku tries to achieve this direct expression of the referent
without the intervention of the signified. So in his later work Barthes
provides a much more positive evaluation of this moment where lan-
guage as a system of signs becomes nearly invisible, and an ‘reality
effect’ arises, than he did in the article of the same title from 1968.
Ultimately this lifting of the barrier of language as a system of
signification is only possible in the clearly demarcated space of fic-
tion: should language actually disappear, then the subject would dis-
appear along with it insofar as it can only exist through language. It
thus becomes clear that Barthes in fact signed a perverse contract with
the haiku: he acted as if the fetish was the real object and that the
haiku could coincide with the thing.
This search for a pure, unmediated representation of reality in
La Préparation du roman brought Barthes, via the haiku, to a brief
elucidation of photography (cf. PR, 113 ff.) which would serve as the
starting point for Barthes’ final book, La Chambre claire. Photogra-
phy fascinated Barthes, much as did haiku, with its ability to evoke the
presentation of a referent which refers to nothing other than itself. Le
Chambre Claire thus signifies a noticeable change of course in
Barthes’ way of thinking about photography, seeing that he himself, in
‘La mythe aujourd’hui’—the concluding remarks in Mythologies—
still presented the photographic image as the ultimate weapon of the

doxa. As an example he chose a photo from Paris-Match in which a
black soldier is shown saluting the French flag. The photo, in Barthes’
view, represents a concrete, indisputable reality—but behind the ap-
parent naturalness of the photo (‘it is what it is, just look, this is a real
person’) he sees an unmistakable ideological message, namely that
France is a great nation, “et qu’il n’est de meilleure réponse au détrac-
teurs d’un colonialisme prétendu, que le zèle de ce noir à servir ses
prétendus oppresseurs.” (OC I, 830) [and that there is no better answer
to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this
Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (Barthes 1982, 101-2)]
The positive revaluation of the photographic image seems thus
an apparently naïve return to positions of which he had earlier been
very critical. In his reading of La Chambre claire, Jonathan Culler is
disturbed by “the ease with which Nature slips back into his writing:
above all in the guise of the body, but also as the ‘intractable referent’
in photography, what is simply there, authoritative and indubitable.”
(Culler 2002, 104-5, italics in original) Yet Culler passes over too
quickly the important distinction Barthes made in La Chambre claire
between the studium and the punctum of a photo. Barthes defines the
studium as the general interest elicited by a photo, the cultural context
in which it appears to the viewer, such as, for instance, the colonial
connotations associated with the photograph of the black soldier salut-
ing the French flag: “Reconnaître le studium, c’est fatalement rencon-
trer les intentions du photographe, entrer en harmonie avec elles, les
approuver, les désapprouver, mais toujours les comprendre, les dis-
cuter en moi-même”. (OC V, 810) [To recognize the studium is inevi-
tably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony
with them, to approve or disapprove them, but always to understand
them, to argue them within myself (Barthes 1981, 27-8)]
The inevitable discursive function of photography is a dimen-
sion that Barthes certainly does not deny in La Chambre claire, but he
short-circuits it with a different aspect:
Ce second élément qui vient déranger le studium, je l’appellerai donc
punctum; car punctum, c’est aussi: piqûre, petit trou, petite tache, pe-
tite coupure – et aussi coup de dés. Le punctum d’un photo, c’est ce
hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne). (OC
V, 809, italics in original)
[This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore
call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and
also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which
pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (Barthes 1981, 27)]
As a detail which suddenly strikes the viewer, the punctum—

just like the useless detail in fiction—is that which disrupts the matter-
of-factness of the doxa. In this way, the punctum of a photo can have
just as critical a function as an analysis of the ideological subtext via
the studium of a photo. In La Chambre claire, Barthes discusses an-
other colonial photo of Savorgnan de Brazza sitting on a rock, with
two black boys in sailor suits behind him. The colonial ideology is
crystal clear: the Western clothes worn by the black boys, the tough,
determined look on Brazza’s face, whose paternal authority is sealed
by a tender gesture: one of the ‘sailors’ places his hand on the knee of
the explorer. But for Barthes, the punctum lies not in this pose, but in
the crossed arms of the second boy. (cf. 830/51)
Barthes undoubtedly would have been conscious of the fact
that these crossed arms are just as staged, as ‘inauthentic’ as the hand
on the knee, and yet the positioning of the two boys still seems to es-
cape the ideological intention of the photographer, and provoke the
viewer into a discordant, perverse reading of the ideological message.
The sturdy, crossed arms resist any attribution of meaning, and thus
almost constitute a symbol of the reserved, closed-in-on-itself inacces-
sibility of the punctum itself—were it not that I would indeed destroy
it as a meaningless detail by pointing this out.
In La Chambre claire, Barthes gradually comes to the insight
that the stubbornness of the punctum in a photo is not only caused by
the detail. At the beginning of the second part of the text, Barthes ob-
serves that his definition of punctum to that point was incomplete:
Je sais maintenant qu’il existe un autre punctum (un autre ‘stigmate’)

que le ‘détail’. Ce nouveau punctum, qui n’est plus de forme, mais
d’intensité, c’est le Temps, c’est l’emphase déchirante du noème (‘ça-
a-été’), sa représentation pure. (865, italics in original)
[I now know that there exists another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’)

than the ‘detail.’ Thos new punctum, which is no longer of form but of
intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-
been’), its pure representation. (96, italics in original)]
The photo in effect can do nothing else than represent directly

the fact that what is depicted is in the past. Thus, every photo also re-
fers at the same time to the mortality of the one depicted on it. This
especially stroke him with pictures of his mother. While such photos
painfully confronted Barthes with how time slips away and with his
mother’s inevitable death, the photographic procedure still seemed the
only one capable of holding onto a once-real presence. In this way the
photo can become a perverse fetish, the ultimate denial of death: “La
photo est littéralement une émanation du référent”. (854) [The photo-
graph is literally an emanation of the referent (80)]
The second part of La Chambre claire concerns Barthes’
search for a photo in which he could definitively rediscover this be-
loved ‘referent’, his mother. But as Barthes quickly discovered by
glancing through a pile of old photos, the magical presence of the ref-
erent in the photograph does not evoke automatically the moment of
recognition he was so feverishly seeking. This is ultimately due to the
fact that while the punctum indeed expresses the inexpressible being-
there of the referent, it can only truly appear as a ‘reality effect’
through the affect brought about in the viewer, just as with the haiku.
The punctum is thus not inherent in the photo. This also explains why
La Chambre claire, where Barthes nevertheless posits the reality of
the photographic as central, is dedicated to Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. In
this book, when he is discussing photography, Sartre emphasises the
necessity of the supplement provided by the imagination, because oth-
erwise the photo would leave the viewer indifferent (cf. Sartre
1975/2004, 55/25) As we have seen earlier, Sartre also defines the
imaginary as a ‘fundamental absence’: at the moment when the punc-
tum of a photo strikes me, and I begin to ‘imagine’ it, the object itself
is absent. Yet there is no reality effect so long as my own gaze cannot
add an imaginary dimension to it, a doubling where that which is por-
trayed comes to life once again. The moment of recognition of the
reader-viewer is thus only possible starting from phantasmatic in-
volvement, and this is why Barthes could not initially rediscover his
mother in the many pictures of her in his possession.
The significant role played by fantasy here seems apparent
from the photo in which Barthes finally did believe to have rediscov-
ered his mother: an old, yellowed photo of Henriëtte as a five-year-old
girl, standing on a little bridge with her brother in a winter garden—
and thus, a photo of his mother as he never could have known her be-
cause he had not yet been born. Barthes’ selection of this photo in par-
ticular only becomes comprehensible if we see it as a continuation of
the activation of a specific fantasy which we also came across in the
series of photos at the beginning of Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes, where we find on display the absence of a forbidding father-
figure. For him, his mother alone was the Law, a Law that he himself
had generated through a perverse scenario: “Elle, si forte, qui était ma
Loi intérieure, je la vivais pour finir comme mon enfant féminin […]
moi qui n’avais pas procréé, j’avais, dans sa maladie même, engendré
ma mère.” (OC V, 848) [Ultimately I experienced her, strong as she
had been, my inner law, as my feminine child. […] I who had not pro-
created, I had, in her very illness, engendered my mother. (Barthes
1981, 72)] Barthes hereby turns the tables and assumes the place of
the father, a reversal which transforms his mother into his daughter: a
Mobius circle on which there is room neither for the one who had
made a mother of a five-year-old daughter, nor for death. Through the
photo, his old, sick mother changed at the end of her life into a young,
healthy girl: death may very well be inevitable, but in the flash of the
photograph she will always remain five years old. Our confrontation
with the reality in the photo is thus always a missed encounter: in the
viewer’s fascination is revealed the irrevocable rupture which causes
the subject to be forever separated by the filter of a fantasy from the
desired object. As is evident from La Chambre claire, this rupture
must not only be considered as spatial, but also as temporal. The fan-
tasy situates the subject—via the detail, the punctum—not only in a
fictitious space, but equally in an anachronistic time. The precise role
played by time in Barthes’ reading will be the topic of the next sec-
tion.
Time
The kairos
One of the notions to which Barthes ascribed a distinct trait in Le

Neutre is the Greek word kairos. (cf. LN, 214 ff./Barthes 2005, 169
ff.) The word refers to an important event which happens at just the
right moment, at just the right time. In a more specific, rhetorical con-
text, it also refers to the speaker’s gift for finding the appropriate word
at the appropriate moment. But as Barthes makes clear in his discus-
sion of the notion, this rhetorical kairos can also be a means to disrupt
the normal course of time: “il s’agit de défaire le temps du système,
d’y mettre des moments de fuite, d’empêcher que le système prenne.”
(216) [it is all about undoing the time of the system, about putting
moments of flight in it, about preventing the system from taking.
(170)]
This undoing of time seemed to be increasingly necessary dur-
ing the last years of Barthes’ life. The numinous kairos can often only
arise via an anachronistic link to the past through the language of an
outmoded discourse. Barthes provides an example of such a kairos in
La Préparation du roman: during a flight to Biarritz (Barthes even
gives the exact date: 29 August, 1979), he was suddenly struck by
Pascal’s Pensées, which he was reading at the time:
je me disais: aimer la littérature, c’est, au moment où on lit, dissiper
toute espèce de doute sur son présent, son actualité, son immédiateté,
c’est croire, c’est voir que c’est un homme vivant qui parle, comme si
son corps était à côté de moi, plus actuel que Khomeiny ou Bokassa;
c’est Pascal ayant peur de la Mort, ou s’en étonnant jusqu’au vertige,
c’est trouver que ces mots anciens […] expriment parfaitement les
choses présentes qui sont en moi, c’est ne pas sentir le besoin d’un au-
tre langage (PR, 353, italics in original).
[I said to myself: to love literature is, at the moment when one is read-
ing, to dispel all room for doubt concerning its present, its actuality,
its immediacy; it is to believe, to see that it is a living man who is
speaking, as if his body were next to mine, more alive than Khomeiny
or Bokassa; it is Pascal being afraid of Death, or astonished by it to
the point of vertigo, it is discovering that the most ancient words […]
express perfectly the things that are present in me; it is no longer feel-
ing the need for an other language.]
Parallel with this, he began to lose interest in the claims of the avant-
garde which he had supported unreservedly in the fifties and sixties,
and which pretended to express the kairos of modernity. In this way
the avant-garde became that ‘other language’ which he required less
and less in order to express adequately what was occupying his
thought. We saw this increasing rancour concerning the pretensions of
the avant-garde already emerging in couched terms in Le Plaisir du
texte, where Barthes made a cautious appeal for a revaluation of the
themes and style of classical, ‘readerly’ literature. And in his Frag-
ments d’un discours amoureux, Barthes allowed a subject in love to

speak, in his attempts to steal (plagiarise) an old language, always ran
up against the modern disdain for all that is old-fashioned:
Tout ce qui est anachronique est obscène. Comme divinité (moderne),
l’Histoire est répressive, l’Histoire nous interdit d’être inactuels. Du
passé, nous supportons que la ruine, le monument, le kitsch ou le ré-
tro, qui est amusant; nous le réduisons, ce passé, à sa seule signature.
(OC V, 219, italics in original)
[Whatever is anachronistic is obscene. As a (modern) divinity, History

is repressive, History forbids us to be out of time. Of the past we tol-
erate only the ruin, the monument, kitsch, what is amusing: we reduce
this past to no more than its signature. (Barthes 1979, 177)]
This preference for anachronism also appears regularly in the lectures

at the Collège de France, primarily in the second part of La Prépara-
tion du roman which is undoubtedly the most explicitly anachronistic
of Barthes’ lecture series at the Collège. Here Barthes defends outspo-
kenly the qualities of the classical novel à la Tolstoy’s War and Peace
and Proust’s Recherche, and expresses his desire to continue in this
tradition by writing a ‘Great Novel’. Such a desire, according to
Barthes, was completely out-of-date and was no longer shared by con-
temporary writers, who had a much cooler, pragmatic view on the lit-
erary industry. Barthes makes abundantly clear that, for these reasons,
the large majority of recent literary production was not to his liking:
he mocked the inadequate attention to style and above all the utter
lack of respect for the book as a valuable, almost sacred Magnum
Opus. (cf. PR, 243)
Barthes wanted to take distance from the hysterical demand to
innovate, to be original at all cost. In his lecture notes he refers ap-
provingly to a statement from the composer Verdi: “Tournons-nous
vers le passé, ce sera un progrès” (Verdi, quoted in PR, 381). [Let us
turn to the past, it will be a progress.] Barthes would also openly plead
for a return to classical literature in La Préparation du roman, because
in its old-fashioned, out-of-date style, the kairos—such as he had ex-
perienced during that one flight to Biarritz when he was so struck by
the Pensées—again becomes possible.
Yet the anachronistic kairos is at the same time the experience
of loss, and at this point we should not forget the radical significance
that the death of his mother had for Barthes. Her death signified a fault
line, the result of which was that his return to the classical style in La
Préparation du roman was less playful and unengaged than in the
days of Le Plaisir du texte. It sometimes seems as if Barthes, in his fi-
nal lecture series, wanted to transpose his mourning for his mother
into an apocalyptic vision of general cultural decline, and he therefore
described what was in his view the approaching end of literature as
“une sorte de génocide spirituel” (PR, 190) [a sort of spiritual geno-
cide]: for him, the world without the novel felt as unbearable and grey
as the world without “Maman”.
Barthes’ attempts to return to the classical novel made him re-
alise that this classical style, and literature in general, were perhaps
indeed on the road to their inevitable disappearance: “je puis précisé-
ment sentir la littérature en train de dépérir, de s’abolir: dans ce cas, je
l’aime d’un amour pénétrant, bouleversant même, comme on aime et
on entoure de ses bras quelque chose qui va mourir.” (PR, 353) [I can
feel precisely that literature is in the process of disappearing, of abol-
ishing itself: in which case, I love it with a profound, even over-
whelming love, like one loves and wraps ones arms around something
that is going to die.] The pronounced grief which went together with
his glorification of classical literature points to another meaning of
kairos in classical Greek; kairos also refers namely to a vulnerable
spot on the body where a deadly wound can be inflicted (cf. LN, 214/
Barthes 2005, 169). Barthes’ kairos is indeed such a wound, a painful,
stabbing pain that the reader experiences while reading, comparable to
the punctum of photography: it is the tragic moment when he discov-
ers the object of desire, the right words, the perfect photo, but at the
same time knows that this text, that photo, has become inaccessible to
him due to the unrelenting past, the ‘that-has-been’ to which the object
in the meantime belongs. In this way, the experience of the passage of
time becomes the ultimate object of lack: when the child discovers,
realises for the first time that his mother at certain moments is not
there, even if it is just because, in the classical oedipal triangle, the
mother sometimes leaves the child to be with the father. Because of
the early death of his father and the fact that he always lived with his
mother, to a certain extent Barthes was able to deny the oedipal law
which forces the child to take distance from his mother. And yet in or-
der for subjectivity to be possible, a minimal separation is required in
the relationship between the mother and son. Therefore, the mother
must to some extent replace the absent father and establish the sym-
bolic oedipal prohibition which enables her to be desired as the lost

object via various substitutes.
Perhaps we should take literally Barthes’ remark in La Cham-
bre claire that his mother was his ‘inner law’: lacking a father-figure,
his mother was the guarantee of his symbolic order. This ‘symbolic
function’ of the mother-figure perhaps also explains the connection of
his mourning to his pessimistic view on language, as if he had been
abandoned twice: first by the mother, then by his mother-tongue.
When his mother died, the external mooring of his ‘inner law’ also
disappeared, leaving him at risk of falling prey to melancholy, the dis-
concerting experience of being absorbed by the Thing and of losing all
desire, all interest in the external world. Therefore, it may paradoxi-
cally enough be fitting to interpret Barthes’ search for a magical form
(haiku, the photograph) capable of re-presenting the real as an ingen-
ious manner of once again establishing a filter to keep the real Thing
at a distance. Thus the fantasy that once again secured his subjectivity
was created, precisely because the desire expressed in it could never
be fulfilled. Just as he projected the desired object of his fantasies into
an impossible space (fictitious Japan, the romantic universe), he also
projected it into an impossible past (the photo in the Winter Garden,
classical literature). This created the necessary condition for drawing
up a perverse contract, a contract that on the one hand needs the law
(in casu the law of time) which separates the subject from its object of
desire, but at the same time continually challenges this law and claims
it to be insignificant. In this way, Barthes could again create the play
area in which, while reading, he played with fragments form the past:
knowing full well that these fragments could never really make the
past present, he nevertheless went undisturbed about his business do-
ing as if.
This is why Barthes’ reactionary refusal of avant-garde arro-
gance is so ambiguous. By striving hysterically for the new, they
made the classical literary style ‘impossible’, thereby establishing a
law forbidding any return to the past. But at the same time, it is pre-
cisely the presence of a prohibition that makes perverse transgression
possible, a transgression every bit as ambiguous as the Sadean deli-
cacy. On the one hand, Barthes’ reactionary statements undoubtedly
shocked a portion of his public who came to listen to one of the lead-
ing figures of the theoretical avant-garde: as long as they continued
attending his lectures, this public is admitting implicitly that this past,
experienced as obscene, can still be enjoyed. On the other hand, in his

lessons he also displayed the inexhaustible pleasure of offering a read-
ing of a text which goes against the grain, the enjoyment of a con-
sciously chosen anachronistic formulation, an enjoyment as subtly
perverse as the pleasure in the meaningless detail.
The fetish
We have already been able to establish that Barthes employs a per-

verse reading strategy with respect to history. Paradoxically enough,
this means that the historical as such is ignored, precisely because to
consider the past as the past would lead us into confrontation with the
lack inherent in the passage of time, a lack which perversion attempts
to deny. The historical object only becomes interesting for a ‘per-
verse’ reader if it can become a fetish which the reader can freely tear
from its present context and use in an unconventional manner by put-
ting it in service of one’s own reading body.
We can find an excellent illustration of the role of time in such
a perverse reading strategy if we turn to the historian Michelet, whose
work continued to fascinate Barthes after he had read the entire His-
toire de France during his stay in the sanatorium. It is thus not by
chance that Barthes, in his inaugural lecture, cited Michelet as a pre-
cursor to (and an inspiration for) his own phantasmatic research (cf.
OC V, 445/Barthes 1982, 477). The reason for this explicit reference
to Michelet becomes clearer when we go back to Barthes’ Michelet
(1954) where he examines in-depth the exceptional role played by the
body, and more specifically blood, in the work of the historian.
Barthes relates this to Michelet’s personal, fetishistic fascination for
women’s menstruation. In his short article, ‘Fetishismus’ (1927),
Freud offers what has become the classical psychoanalytic explanation
for fetishism: the child who suddenly discovers by means of a stolen
glance that the woman does not have a penis, and seems thus to be
‘castrated’, wants to repress this disconcerting image by choosing a
certain object which can serve as a substitute for the missing penis.
According to Freud, this object is often based upon the last object that
the child would have seen prior to viewing the supposedly castrated
genital, such as, for instance, a woman’s shoe, underwear, garters (cf.
Freud 1961, 152-158). Michelet’s fetishism is particularly ingenious
in the sense that he makes the very sign of castration—menstrual
blood—into the fetish which replaces the absent phallus. And just as
the masochistic scene in Sacher-Masoch becomes the impetus for
what Deleuze called “une conception générale de la nature humaine et
du monde” (Deleuze 2004b: 47-8) [a general conception of human na-
ture and of the world (Deleuze 1991, 53)], the sight of a bleeding
woman for Michelet is, according to Barthes, “un véritable trauma-
tisme – physique ou existentiel – dont il tire, comme toujours, une
nouvelle organisation de l’univers.” (OC I, 389) [a veritable trauma-
tism—physical or existential—from which he derives, as always, a
new organization of the universe. (Barthes 1992, 148)]
Michelet’s personal obsession thus grows into a new vision of
the world in which the woman, precisely because of her monthly cy-
cle, is superior to the (male) linearity of history as an irreversible
process of: rise, peak, and decline. Because of her cycle, the woman
overcomes the grim singularity of the timeline: her body always re-
covers, returning to a prior condition. This explains Michelet’s fasci-
nation for blood as a medium that can also offer him healing access to
the cyclical process of regeneration. This happens in the first place via
the voyeuristic gaze that compels the woman in his vicinity to reveal
her monthly secret. (cf. OC I, 391/Barthes 1992, 150)
The same mechanism is also hidden in Michelet’s view on
history: with his work, out of sympathy for their fate, he wants to
avoid that historical figures become prey to forgetfulness; but at the
same time he wants to reinvigorate himself with the regenerative
power that always bring them back to life:
Michelet dévore les morts (‘j’ai bu le sang noir des morts’) il est donc
l’un d’eux. Sous la finalité morale de l’Histoire micheletiste, il y a une
finalité intime qui désigne tout le passé comme nourriture de Mich-
elet. Toute l’Histoire se dévoile pour que Michelet en vive. Un rapport
magique consacre le monde comme aliment de l’historien, le marque
comme terme d’une consommation. (OC I, 351)
[Michelet devours the dead (‘I have drunk the black blood of the
dead’); he is therefore one of them. Under the moral finality of Mich-
eletist History, there is an intimate finality which designates the entire
past as Michelet’s nourishment. All of History discloses itself so that
Michelet may live on it. A magical relationship consecrates the world
as the historian’s nutriment, marks it out as the goal of a consumma-
tion. (Barthes 1992, 83-84)]
Michelet’s historiography thus becomes a fascinating secular version

of the Pauline teaching that proposes that Christ died so we would
live: via the communion—by consuming the host as the real presence
of Christ, which is also a perverse denial of symbolic lack—the be-
liever becomes part of a community that has overcome death through,
with and in Christ, just like the historian comprehends his own death
through the blood of the dead, and thus transcends it, turning it into a
moment in a cyclical process.
This specific coupling between the past and one’s own body
in the present found in Michelet’s historiography was extremely ap-
pealing to Barthes. It also shows that his perverse reading of the past
is more than the denial of lack and a provocation of the Other by an
improper use of history: it is also—and above all—a creative process,
an attempt to extrapolate from the past those intensities useful for car-
rying out a contemporary program. This also means that the past is
only significant for Barthes’ active semiology insofar as it phantas-
matically appeals to the present (and the future) of the reader.
This is why to a certain extent one could even argue that the
future of the avant-garde was on Barthes’ mind perhaps more than
ever with his ideal of a vita nuova, although for him, this future can
only be found in an unexpected return to the surprising powers of
classical literature. This is well summarized in the quote from Verdi—
“Let us turn to the past, it will be a progress”—which undoubtedly has
a nostalgic, reactionary undertone, but at the same time is about
change and progress, and furthermore comes from a passage in La
Préparation du roman where Barthes discusses the requirements for
the novel he intended to write in the near future. His journey to the
past is thus primarily a necessary detour by which he hopes to arrive
at a new style, a new world view. By going in search of that which
still touches us in the old texts, and which may very well suit us better
than whatever discourse is en vogue at a certain moment, texts that are
literally no longer of this time take on a critical function. Via the vari-
ous schemes which were used to map out an earlier world, we are bet-
ter able to distinguish the time-bound and relative character from our
contemporary prejudices, modes and systems of thought: in short,
from the doxa. The past continues to help in this, but is never an end
in itself.
The untimely
The critical function Barthes gives to anachronistic discourse turns his

active semiology not so much into something reactionary or anti-
modernistic as it makes it ‘untimely’. As is well known, this is the ad-
jective that Nietzsche, in his ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie
für das Leben’ (1874) (On the uses and disadvantages of history for
life) included in Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Medita-
tions), ascribed to his ideal form of classical philology: “I do not know
what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were
not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby
acting on our time, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”
(Nietzsche 1983, 60)
Nietzsche opens this essay with a citation from Goethe—“In
any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augment-
ing or directly invigorating my activity” (59)—which encapsulates
perfectly his own standpoint with respect to historiography. For Nietz-
sche, the ideal form of historical research was a stimulus that could
give a certain culture “the capacity to develop out of [it]self in [it’s]
own way, to transform and incorporate into [it]self what is past and
foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate bro-
ken moulds. (62, translation slightly modified) Just like Michelet,
Nietzsche applies a sort of perverse reading strategy to history which
begins with the needs of the historian. This requires an open mind, not
only with respect to the demand to be ‘new’ and ‘up-to-date’, but also
with respect to the original historical context. In his lectures at the
Collège de France, Barthes would call upon a similar open approach
with respect to the past in order to defend his idiosyncratic use of his-
torical sources:
j’essaye de créer, d’inventer un sens avec des matériaux libres, que je
libère de leur ‘vérité’ historique, doctrinale → je prends des bribes ré-
férentielles (en fait des bribes des lecture) et je leur fais subir une
anamorphose: procédé connu de tout l’art maniériste. (LN, 98)
[I try to create, to invent a meaning from independent materials, which

I liberate from their historical, doctrinal ‘truth’ → I take the referential
bits (in fact, bits of reading), and I submit them to an anamorphosis: a
process known to all mannerist artists. (Barthes 2005, 65)]
Seeing that historical elements can also be used by Barthes to

serve as material for the creation of the vita nuova, the kairos that
Barthes encounters in a historical text need not exclusively be a trau-
matising confrontation with what is definitively past. As Barthes ar-
gues in Le Neutre, kairos also involves “un élément, un temps énérge-
tique: le moment en soi en tant qu’il produit quelque chose, un chan-
gement: c’est une force”. (218) [an energetic element, an energetic
time: the moment as such insofar as it produces something, a change-
over: it’s a force (172)] It is this transformative power available to the
untimely kairos that Barthes wanted to employ in the present. With
this it also becomes clear that for Barthes, the historical artefact does
not function merely as a fetish, but primarily as a virtual object, a
fragment which—loosed from the moorings of its original context and
floating through the present—forms a part of the reader’s process of
becoming and enables the link between old codes and new affects.
Thus at the same time, the possibility of a future line of flight, a be-
coming, is attached to the melancholic ‘ça-a-été’ (‘it has been’), the
punctum of the past. Therefore, a Deleuzean view on the past is also
not so much aimed at a concrete object as it is at the intensity of time
itself, which is in fact the precondition for this becoming: every form
of the past—a personal experience, a historical document—bears wit-
ness to a certain particular style of becoming, a creative connection
which once resulted in a certain constellation, the product of a specific
problem. Every artefact, however old it may be, still bears within itself
this search for a future solution, and therefore remains interesting for
our own way of (re-)thinking about the future. It is for this very reason
that Barthes so often referred to history in his lectures at the Collège
de France: the early-Christian monasteries, Tao philosophy, the nov-
els of Tolstoy and Proust, all of these formed constructions which
were the result of problems that Barthes as well had encountered on
the line of flight of his respective fantasies. And just like a becoming-
Japanese creates a virtual space existing independently of the real Ja-
pan, a space which is only possible for someone who is not Japanese,
the becoming—which is expressed in historical artefacts—creates a
virtual time which can only be experienced from another age as an
experimental line of flight. Barthes illustrates this view in his intro-
duction to a reissue of Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé. The book is un-
interesting so long as it is read only from the historical context of the
protagonist or the writer: Rance’s religious monastic life, just like
Chateaubriand’s romanticism, is in itself no longer relevant for the

reader. What makes the book so intriguing for Barthes, however, is
precisely the anachronistic link to his own situation:
Cette sorte de distorsion posée par le temps entre l’écriture et la lec-
ture est le défi même de ce que nous appelons littérature; l’œuvre lue
est anachronique et cet anachronisme est la question capitale qu’elle
pose au critique: on arrive peu à peu à expliquer une œuvre par son
temps ou par son projet, c’est-à-dire à justifier le scandale de son ap-
parition; mais comment réduire celui de sa survie? A quoi donc la Vie
de Rancé peut-elle nous convertir, nous qui avons lu Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, Sartre, Genet ou Blanchot? (OC IV, 55, italics in original)
[This kind of distortion, afforded by the time between writing and

reading, is the very challenge of what we call literature: the work read
is anachronic, and this anachronism is the crucial question it puts to
the critic: we manage, little by little, to explain a work by its time or
by its project, i.e. to justify the scandal of its appearance; but how to
reduce that of its survival? To what, then, can the Life of Rancé con-
vert us, we who have read Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Genet or
Blanchot? (Barthes 1980, 41, italics in original)]
This is also the ‘scandal’ at which Barthes’ active semiology takes

aim: the fascination for anachronism, for the kairos that suddenly pops
up in a text and cannot be explained via the referent (which is irrele-
vant, because old-fashioned), but can be explained via the fantasy of
the reader insofar as it is bound to the historical artefact. Only the me-
diation of the fantasy enables knowledge of the past to provide a valu-
able contribution for the encyclopaedia that Barthes tried to compile in
his Cours. The next issue I want to investigate is how this ‘untimely’
experience plays a concrete role in Barthes’ own phantasmatic read-
ing.
The demon of memory
The past obviously plays an important role on various levels of read-

ing. Attention for the past also constitutes an essential part of Barthes’
encyclopaedic project which was the basis of his striving for a vita
nuova. The lecture series serves as an external memory in which
Barthes brings together the material for the intended transformation of
the self. A certain childhood memory, Sade’s principle of delicacy or
the classical stylistic attributes of the novel: each one deserves to be
protected against the reactive power of forgetting.
Psychoanalysis knows this form of forgetting as the principle

of repression, where events and affects which are displeasing to the
ego are stashed away. But for Barthes, in contrast to psychoanalysis,
forgetting is a power that may also be active and even indispensable.
Modern man has expanded its ability to remember the past in impres-
sive fashion. It has therefore become impossible to survey everything,
and the demand for strict selection is very important, because other-
wise we could suffocate in the excess of information which prevents
us from translating our historical knowledge into concrete action. It is
in this sense that Nietzsche, in ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil’, ridicules
the encyclopaedic passion to collect, by which the individual
in the end […] drags around with him a huge quantity of indigestible
stones of knowledge, which then, as in the fairy tale, can sometimes
be heard rumbling about inside him. […] Knowledge, consumed for
the greater part without hunger for it and even counter to one’s needs,
now no longer acts as an agent for transforming the outside world but
remains concealed within a chaotic inner world. (Nietzsche 1983, 78)
The paideia requires a strict diet in which we only consume those

pieces of the past that can be digested. We are here concerned with a
double task whereby, on the one hand, we consume the nutritious
parts and recombine them into building materials for the construction
of the self; and on the other hand, we try to expel, to forget the delete-
rious elements (such as painful memories that make us resentful or
bad habits and assumptions that lead us to a dead end, old fears that
paralyse us . . .). At the close of his inaugural lecture, Barthes referred
to this Nietzschean need to forget:
J’entreprends donc de me laisser porter par la force de toute vie vi-
vante: l’oubli. […] Vient peut-être maintenant l’âge d’une autre expé-
rience: celle de désapprendre, de laisser travailler le remaniement im-
prévisible que l’oubli impose à la sédimentation des savoirs, des cultu-
res, des croyances que l’on a traversés. (OC V, 446, italics in original)
[I undertake therefore to let myself be borne on by the force of any

living life, forgetfulness. […] Now perhaps comes the age of another
experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change
which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges,
cultures, and beliefs we have traversed. (Barthes 1982, 478, italics in
original)]
The process of self-becoming thus must not only be one of continual

remembering but also one of continual forgetting, a persistent unlearn-
ing of earlier habits and views. It is only by forgetting that the subject
can escape itself and become someone else. It goes without saying—
and the many lemmas in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which
make use of personal memories show this as well—that this self-
creation cannot occur outside of a certain relation between biography
and writing. The classical genre of the hypomnemata helps clarify this
dialectic of memory and forgetting. As Foucault stresses, these writ-
ings can in no way be read as a scrupulous autobiography in which the
subject tries to present its life as carefully, sincerely and as completely
as possible, precisely because the aim of the hypomnemata was in the
first place directed at a future self. Nevertheless, memory plays a ma-
jor role in these writings: passages are cited, events recorded so that
the subject will not forget, and can also later apply the lessons they
contain.
The subject, via memory, is thus able to select those elements
(personal or collective) from one’s history which are essential for the
creation of a future. In Barthes’ active semiology this selection always
occurs through the detour of literature, precisely because it is capable
of making possible an alternative form of remembering, a “mémoire
non arrogante” (nonarrogant memory), as he calls it in Le Neutre (LN,
202/Barthes 2005, 158). It is these types of literary works, works that
create a personal memory, that Barthes, in La Préparation du roman,
used as models for is own work which he had yet to write. (PR, 42)
The best example of such a novel is, of course, Proust’s Recherche,
which uses the intensities of memories not to write a chronological
autobiographical story, but to create a recombination of affects which
would become the expression of the self as a work of art. At least this
is what Barthes proposes in ‘“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne
heure”’: “Proust a compris (c’est là le génie) qu’il n’avait pas à ‘ra-
conter’ sa vie, mais que sa vie avait cependant la signification d’une
œuvre d’art”. (OC V, 464) [Proust understood (and this is genius) that
he did not have to ‘recount’ his life, but that his life nonetheless had
the signification of a work of art. (Barthes 1989, 283)] The protagonist
of Recherche is, according to Barthes, also “simplement un autre
Proust, souvent inconnu de lui-même” (464, italics in original) [sim-
ply another Proust, often unknown to himself. (282, italics in origi-
nal)]
The obstruction
However much Barthes may have admired Proust’s Recherche, he

quickly discovered that he could not use the past in the same creative
way. Barthes was indeed fascinated by the untimely power of frag-
ments from the past, but shied away from confronting that which is
irrevocably past. Barthes’ problem was not so much the act of remem-
bering itself but rather his inability to bring these memories together
into a whole, like Proust did (cf. PR, 42 ff.). It was only via the fet-
ishistic fragment that Barthes could twist the timeline into a spiral and
have the lost object return at another point in time. Again it was the
narrative structure and the lack implied therein which proved to be the
greatest obstacle for Barthes: the narrative arises when the fragments
threaten to form a chain of reminiscences, and when it does so the lack
also inevitably arises so that perverse denial becomes untenable.
In the first lecture series of La Préparation du roman Barthes
tried to get around this impasse by turning to the genre of haiku. To be
sure, the haiku expresses the past, the ‘that-has-been’ which Barthes
also found in the photograph, but once this past is gone irretrievably,
with its short duration (seventeen syllables, the flash of a photo) it be-
comes a memory-detail that can withdraw from the narrative; it thus
does not need to reveal the passing of time. Yet Barthes realised that
this succession of events was precisely what he needed to arrive at a
novel; otherwise all these memories would remain “immédiatement
épuisés par la forme brève […], d’où l’impression de ‘romanesque’
qu’on peut avoir, mais aussi, précisément, ce qui le sépare du Ro-
man.” (PR, 43) [immediately exhausted by the short form […] hence
the impression of the ‘novelistic’ which one may have, but also, pre-
cisely, that which separates it from the Novel.]
This impossibility to connect memories reveals Barthes’ own
phantasmatic (and problematic) relationship to anachronism. The
anachronistic is attractive as long as it is a fragment, a fetish that at-
tempts to deny the passing of time by challenging the law of chronol-
ogy and by bringing the past to life for the future, but which becomes
unbearable as soon as the emphasis comes to lie on the passing of time
which it also implies. Afraid of confronting the passage of time, and
thus of the inherent lack that the associative chain of memories brings
along with it, Barthes seems invariably to want to freeze the past in
the unique moment of the ‘that-has-been’. This may perhaps explain
why Barthes, while theoretically convinced of the need to transform

the past and to let it return at another point of the spiral, in practice
never did succeed in dealing with the past in such a way that it lead
him to the creation of a work of art.
In the second part of La Préparation du roman, Barthes would
try to accomplish this reactivation of the past which he was unable to
make happen in the first part, where he drew upon the content of the
classical novel (namely, memory): but this time he would try to do it
via the form; more specifically, via the classical literary style which he
wanted to employ in his novel. But here as well he realised that this
form could never again return as such: “C’est […] parce que l’écriture
littéraire n’est plus durable qu’elle est allégée de son poids conserva-
tif, et peut être pensée activement comme un devenir, quelque chose
de léger, d’actif, d’enivrant, de frais”. (PR, 374, italics in original)
[Because literary writing no longer lasts, it is relieved of its conserva-
tive weight and can be thought actively as a becoming, something
light, active, intoxicating, fresh.]
Barthes was also thoroughly aware that this becoming was
only possible if this literary style is disturbed by something new,
which also inevitably suggests the passing of time. (cf. PR, 381) De-
spite these good intentions, in the second part of La Préparation du
roman as well Barthes failed in his attempt to convert the kairos of the
past into the creation of a work of art. He kept getting bogged down in
his reading of classical novels and was unable to develop a new form
of writing via their style. And this is why, at the end of his lecture se-
ries, he also admitted that his novel for the time being could not be
written. Even more: at the close of La Préparation du roman, Barthes
wondered—in a passage that he never did pronounce due to a lack of
time—if he would ever succeed in actually writing that work. The rea-
son he cited for his doubt was precisely the mourning for his mother
(cf. PR, 377-8). This mourning had remained primarily only a reactive
force and had so infiltrated his desire that his program for the vita
nuova stagnated, remained unproductive. His inability to accept the
death of his mother forced him into a purely fetishistic relationship
toward the past which ultimately could not flow into a truly creative
reading strategy.
Thus, at the end of the lecture series, nothing remained for
Barthes to do but to once again affirm his desire and express the hope
that he, for the time being, would discover the anachronistic line of
flight which could bring his mourning to an end, thereby transforming

his love for the past into the creation of the new:
Sans doute, l’Œuvre Nouvelle […] n’est-elle possible, ne peut-elle
prendre son départ réel, que si un goût ancien est transformé, un goût
nouveau apparaît […] Alors accomplirais-je peut-être le vrai devenir
dialectique: ‘devenir ce que je suis’; mot de Nietzsche: ‘Deviens qui
tu es’, et mot de Kafka: ‘Détruis-toi… afin de te transformer en celui
que tu es’ → Alors, aussi, se trouve tout naturellement abolie la dis-
tinction du Nouveau et de l’Ancien, tracé le chemin de la spirale, et
honoré le mot de Schönberg, fondateur de la musique contemporaine
et reconducteur de la musique ancienne: il est encore possible d’écrire
de la musique en ut majeur. C’est là, pour finir, l’objet de mon désir:
écrire une œuvre en Ut Majeur. (PR, 384, italics in original)
[Doubtless the New Work […] will not be possible, will not really
proceed unless an ancient taste is transformed and a new taste appears.
Tghen perhaps I will accomplish a true dialectical becoming: ‘becom-
ing what I am’; Nietzsche’s ‘Become who you are’, and Kafka’s ‘De-
stroy yourself… in order to change into the person you are’ →
Thereby, the dinstiction between the New and the Old would be quite
naturally done away with; the path of the spiral would be followed,
and honouring the words of Schönberg, founder of contemporary mu-
sic and re-conductor of old music: it is still possible to write music in
C major. That, ultimately, is the object of my desire: to write a work
in C major.]
The tragic fact that Barthes was run over by a delivery van two days
after this statement, and would never again be capable of undergoing
the desired transformation, naturally strengthens the impression that
his desire for the novel was an unrealisable desire, a fantasy that—as
psychoanalysis posits—can only circle an empty place, an absent ob-
ject.
According to Nietzsche, it nevertheless makes no sense to dis-
count a fantasy simply because of its illusory character: every system
is a result of a phantasmatic perspective formed by corporeal effects
through which reality can appear to us, and with which we can also
manipulate reality. The fantasy thus must not so much be destroyed as
evaluated, and if so needed (and if possible), adjusted.
During La Préparation du roman, Barthes thus came to the conclusion
that the fantasy which had initially opened the line of flight of the
novel now erected a barrier for the actual realisation of that novel, and
did not stimulate the right active forces which could help him develop
a line of flight and would enable him to avoid the obstacle of his
mourning. (cf. PR, 265-6)
Even in the final months of his life, Barthes did not abandon
this search for a way out. Therefore, it is also a mistake to read the
closing passage of La Préparation du roman as Barthes’ last words,
seeing that they had already been written down on November 2,
1979—even though they were only recited on February 23 of the fol-
lowing year. In the months that followed, Barthes would continue to
search for a way to write a novel. His very last text, ‘On échoue tou-
jours à parler de ce qu’on aime’, shows this as well. Other than what
the title suggests, this essay is primarily about how Stendhal finally,
after an initial failure, succeeded in expressing his experiences in a
novel. With this, Stendhal became the last in a whole series of authors
and artists that Barthes consulted. In the next section we will also ad-
dress, in this respect, the important function that Barthes’ active semi-
ology ascribes to the author as a figure who inspires the reader to be-
come a writer himself.
The author
The figure of the author
As we established at the close of the prior section, Barthes did not

seem able to achieve a creative work himself: his fantasy-program
seemed to be obstructed at essential points. It is primarily from an at-
tempt to remove this obstruction that Barthes returned to the figure of
the author in the final part of La Préparation du roman.
In his notes for the lesson of January 19, Barthes already ad-
mitted his fascination as a reader for what he called “la nébuleuse bi-
ographique” (PR, 276, italics in orginal) [the nebulous biographical],
a curiosity about the life of a particular author. He also admitted that
he sometimes preferred to read the diaries of known writers such as
Kafka and Tolstoy rather than their actual works, and advocated a “dé-
refoulement” [de-repression] of the author (276).
Because there had been problems with the microphone in the
previous lecture, Barthes was obliged to skip a portion of his notes,
including also the passage containing the quotations cited above. Were
this not the case, his statements would have undoubtedly caused a
great deal of consternation in his audience, because with this explicit
‘return of the author’ he was partially reversing the position from one
of his articles which had caused the biggest stir, ‘La mort de l’auteur’
from 1968. This article served as one of the most notorious program-
matic texts of post-structuralism influenced literary studies and was a
direct attack on the dominant position occupied by the author in liter-
ary criticism.
While Barthes, in La Préparation du roman, would himself
try to transform his person into a work of art and diligently searched
biographies and writer’s diaries for the best way to achieve this, in this
text from 1968 he refers primarily to the impossibility of linking the
work to a person: the voice of the author, his highly personal ‘out-
pourings’ dissolves into the anonymous, anarchistic web of signifiers.
Just as with the ‘reality effect’ which Barthes initially gave a negative
connotation, but later came to revalue as an important, even essential
quality of the literary experience, Barthes’ changing view on the au-
thor can again only be understood if we take into account the shift in
his way of thinking from the text to the reader. The author whose
death is required in order to make possible the birth of the reader, as
we heard in the famous closing line of ‘La mort de l’auteur’, can thus
be resurrected again immediately in the same reader: it is the point
where the reader, via one’s own fantasy, feels oneself addressed by
the imaginary figure of the author. Therefore it is also no coincidence
that Barthes—right at the beginning of Sade, Fourier, Loyola, a book
in which he repeatedly detects aspects of his own (idiorrhythmic) fan-
tasy in the three very different authors—speaks about “un retour ami-
cal de l’auteur”. (OC III, 705) [the amicable return of the author
(Barthes 1997, 8). At the same time, Barthes emphasised that this au-
thor should not be confused with the author as it had functioned in lit-
erary criticism to that point:
L’auteur qui revient n’est certes pas celui qui a été identifié par nos
institutions (histoire et enseignement de la littérature, de la philoso-
phie, discours de l’Église); ce n’est même pas le héros d’une biogra-
phie. L’auteur qui vient de son texte et va dans notre vie n’a pas
d’unité; il est un simple pluriel de ‘charmes’, le lieu de quelques dé-
tails ténus, source cependant de vives lueurs romanesques, un chant
discontinu d’amabilités (OC III, 705).
[Of course, the author who returns is not the one identified by our in-
stitutions (history and courses in literature, philosophy, church dis-
course); he is not even the biographical hero. The author who leaves
his text and comes into our life has no unity; he is a mere plural of
‘charms’, the site of a few tenuous details, yet the source of vivid nov-
elistic glimmerings, a discontinuous chant of amiabilities (Barthes
1997, 9)]
In other words, the roles are reversed: the author who here returns is
no longer the authority at the source of the text, but rather a character
created by the reader. This entails that the evaluation of the figure of
the author in the reading process is independent of the position that the
reader ascribes to this figure during the course of reading. Expressed
in Nietzschean terminology, the author can thereby be the manifesta-
tion of a reactive power, an obstacle that prevents the reader from es-
caping the meaning imposed on the text by the supposed intention of
the author. This intention can be legitimated and distributed by literary
institutions, but also can eventually be summoned by the reader one-
self if one is in need of a safe framework of interpretation and recoils
from working out one’s own trajectory while reading. On the other
hand, the author can also become an active force; a figure whose de-
sire for writing is expressed in the text, and thus also incites in the
reader the desire to relinquish its position as a pure consumer, to turn
one’s reading into writing.
One who does not take enough into account this determinative
role of the reader sees nothing in Barthes’ theoretical approach with
respect to the author other than a troubling inconsistency. Sean Burke,
for instance, in his Death and Return of the Author (1998), criticises
what in his view is the utterly capricious way in which Barthes first
does, and then does not recognise the author of a text: “Why is it that
he will allow full authorial rights to some authors—a class to which
belong, beyond the logothetes, Michelet, Proust, Bataille, Sollers and
so on—and deny them to others, most notably Balzac?” (Burke 1998,
41) What seems to escape Burke here is that the authors to whom
Barthes, in his opinion, does ascribe ‘full authorial rights’ only borrow
this right from the affective response that they provoke in him as a
reader. For Barthes, the author functions as an exceptional character
whose becoming is the line of flight of writing itself. His attention to
the ‘intimate diary’ is thus not intended to reduce the work to, or ex-
plain it from, the standpoints and personal experiences of an author,
but to track down the constellation of intensities and affects which
leads to the point that an author’s desire for writing at a certain mo-
ment is crystallised into a work. It is via the character of the author
that Barthes, in La Préparation, can encounter the demon that encour-
aged him to realise his fantasy and become a writer: “Je me pose
comme écrivain, dans toute l’ampleur, dans tout le sacré du rôle, pour
m’aider à le devenir.” (PR, 295-6, italics in original) [I pose myself as
a writer in all its fullness, in all the sanctity of the role, in order to
help me to become one.] It is precisely because Barthes was incapable
of presenting himself as a literary author that he borrowed from clas-
sical authors who were driven by the same demon, a demon he no
longer found in contemporary authors. Much like the character of
Werther in the Fragments, the figure of the admired author appears
here as a virtual object. As we have seen, such a virtual object pro-
vides no comfortable imaginary calibration point with which the sub-
ject can identify: the double always remains in a certain sense un-
canny because it can never coincide completely with the one it dou-
bles. In the Deleuzean process of becoming, the object changes to-
gether with the subject, and therefore the desire to write may not be
confused with the desire to copy the beloved author and become, for
instance, the ‘new’ Proust or the ‘new’ Tolstoy. Opposite the notion of
the copy, Barthes also places—with a term he borrowed from Severo
Sarduy—the pulsion de simulation (drive for simulation):
cette pulsion pousse non pas à être un autre, mais à être autre […].
Passer du lire amoureux à l’Écrire, c’est faire surgir, décoller de
l’Identification imaginaire au texte, à l’Auteur aimé (qui a séduit), non
pas ce qui est différent de lui (= impasse de l’effort d’originalité), mais
ce qui en moi est différent de moi: l’étranger adoré me pousse, me
conduit à affirmer activement l’étranger qui est en moi, l’étranger que
je suis pour moi. (PR, 195, italics in original)
[this drive does not urge one to be an other, but to be other […]. To
pass from amourous reading to Writing, is to make arise, to break
away from the imaginary Identification with the text, with the beloved
Author (who has seduced), not that which is different from him (= im-
passe of the effort of originality), but that which in me is different
from me: the adored stranger urges me, drives me to actively affirm
the stranger in myself, the stranger that I am to myself.]
Here it is thus not about a mimetic rivalry with the mirror image of-
fered by a certain author, but rather about an expedient with which a
new position can be assumed with respect to the fantasy, a position

from which one can avoid reactive forces.
In Barthes’ active semiology, the figure of the author is thus used in
the same perverse manner as space, the detail, the untimely: it is re-
moved from its original context and applied as a useful element in the
program of the reader.
Yet there is an important difference with the earlier elements
of Barthes’ active semiology. Namely, an author is no en-soi, to use
Sartre’s terminology, but is rather a pour-soi; like the reader, he has a
subjectivity which comes to expression unmistakably in his work. In
other words, the reader also encounters the fantasy of an other in the
figure of the author, whose relationship to his own body, to the bêtise,
continually withdraws from the symbolic but nevertheless insists in
his writing. Therefore, in the literary text there always again appears
that empty place, the phantasmatic point where the real touches the
symbolic. This unattainable final destination at which the writer’s de-
sire takes aim in effect overlaps the ultimate goal of a text, namely,
the reader. Thus we see the latter, while reading, is positioned pre-
cisely in this open space as the writer’s object of desire. This primarily
has to do with the fact that the reader does not have any clear function
for a literary text: if I read an instruction manual for one or another
household appliance, I know that the intention is that after having read
it I know how to use the appliance; if I read a political pamphlet, I
know that the author is trying to convince me of a particular stand-
point. But when reading literature, I am principally the passive witness
of someone else’s desire to imagine something. In other words: pre-
cisely because the literary discourse has, strictly speaking, no practical
function, it manifests the fantasy of writing much more directly. Fur-
thermore, it is precisely the author’s phantasmatic involvement in the
fictional universe that one creates, and one’s desire to communicate
this universe to the reader, that arouses our interest as readers. The au-
thor’s desire is thus the necessary precondition for me as reader to feel
involved in the text; as Barthes writes in Le Plaisir du texte: “Le texte
que vous écrivez doit me donner la preuve qu’il me désire.” (OC IV,
221, italics in original) [The text you write must prove to me that it
desires me. (Barthes 1975, 6)]
Now, it is a classical postulate of Lacanian psychoanalysis
that our desire is always the desire of the Other: at a certain moment
the discourse of the Other hands the subject, albeit not consciously, a
desire that the subject can then make its own. This also holds true for
the desire to write, which transfers to the reader as soon as one no
longer identifies with the desires of the literary characters, but rather
with the desire of their creator. In this way the reader becomes a writer
because one answers the author’s desire with one’s own desire. Al-
though it comes from the Other, the desire to write is directed toward
a work which as such can only be created by me. Accordingly, Bar-
thes remarks that:
[t]oute belle œuvre, ou même toute œuvre impressive, fonctionne
comme une œuvre désirée, mais incomplète et comme perdue, parce
que je ne l’ai pas faite moi-même et qu’il faut la retrouver en la refai-
sant; écrire c’est vouloir réécrire: je veux m’ajouter activement à ce
qui est beau et cependant me manque, me faut. (PR, 189, italics in ori-
ginal)
[ [e]very beautiful work, or even every impressive work, functions

like a desired work, but incomplete and as if lost, because I did not
write it myself and because it must be rediscovered and rewritten; to
write is to want to rewrite: I want to add myself actively to that which
is beautiful and which, however, I am lacking, I need.]
In what follows we will examine, with reference to a few authors who

were very significant to Barthes, the way in which he tried to integrate
their desire for writing in his own quest for the novel.
Gide’s ‘Journal’
The first author we will discuss is André Gide who inspired Barthes to
choose for a life of writing, or at least he claims as much in Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes (cf. OC IV, 677/Barthes 1994, 99). What
primarily attracted Barthes to Gide was his aura as a writer, which
Barthes calls “l’écrivain comme fantasme” (655) [the writer as fantasy
(77)] Gide’s actual novels and stories play a subordinate role in this
fantasy, insofar as they are not absent altogether. The aspiring author
thus only assumes the desire to write, not the work itself: this one has
to achieve on one’s own. Barthes therefore indicates that the research
of primary sources places too much emphasis on an author’s intertex-
tual influences and thus misses the actual figure of the author who was
the stimulus for the subject to begin writing in the first place (cf.
677/99).
But if the actual work does not play an important role, the
question immediately arises as to what does in fact make the reader
identify with this specific author. In Gide’s case, Barthes refers to a
few biographical similarities: Gide’s parents also originated from dif-
ferent parts of France, he was raised Protestant just like him and also
loved literature and playing the piano. Like Barthes, Gide lost his fa-
ther at a relatively young age and was thereafter raised by his mother.
She gave him a deep religiosity which would actually quite quickly
come into conflict with the seductiveness of Greek philosophy and,
above all, the ‘Greek principles’. Gide ultimately sought a way out of
just this conflict via his writing, more specifically by linking the Prot-
estant tradition of the diary, the written confession which mercilessly
dissected one’s own weaknesses, with the classical striving to turn
one’s life into a work of art. Wrestling with the same homosexual in-
clination and with the same tense relationship with respect to his own
family, Barthes too would try to explore this way out. And yet Barthes
himself would never succeed in keeping a journal. To be sure, Barthes
did include a few personal diary fragments in the article ‘Délibération’
(Deliberation) (1979, OC V, 668-81/Barthes 1982, 479-495), but he
placed them directly within a comprehensive theoretical discussion. In
an interview from 1979, Barthes blames this reservedness to the prob-
lems that the genre of the diary raises for a contemporary writer. (cf.
OC V, 750) According to Barthes, the biggest stumbling block is the
problem of sincerity when speaking in the first person, a problem Gide
has not dealt with. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism are aimed at un-
dermining the self-image as self-deception: what one sees as the inti-
mate expression of one’s personality are nothing more than habits ac-
quired by one’s upbringing, with which the one class distinguishes it-
self from the other. Its outpourings are in reality a narcissistic parade
which is primarily aimed at assuming, via the mirror of the reader, the
imago of a writer whose behaviour reveals something of the mystery
of his genius. Gide was ultimately unusable as a source of inspiration,
not only because the Gidean ‘intimate diary’ was a problematic genre
for Barthes due to its appeal to authenticity, but also because Barthes,
certainly in Le Neutre, was primarily attracted by the figure of the old
Gide who described himself as “un pneu qui se dégonfle” (LN, 43) [a
tire that flattens (Barthes 2005, 16)] It was an image in which Barthes
saw reflected his own exhaustion and apathy after the death of his
mother, just as he recognised himself in Gide’s notorious hesitant
character. Even if, according to Barthes, something of the glimmering

of the neutral was perceptible in the weariness of the old Gide, what
he recognised of himself in Gide were anything but those elements he
could use to transform his life into a work of art. It is for this reason
that Barthes, in the second part of La Préparation du roman, turned to
another author whom, just like André Gide, had always been one of
the most significant literary references throughout his work: Marcel
Proust.
Proust’s miracle
As we also saw with Gide, the desire to write is often an attempt to

find a way out of a situation deemed intolerable, an attempt to crystal-
lise a certain problem in writing and thereby to reformulate it into a
program. In Proust’s case the problem was mourning. At the outset of
his Recherche, Proust found himself in a crisis comparable to Barthes’
after the death of his mother: her death threatened to rob his world of
all meaning, and only via a new way of writing could he try to escape
the sterile melancholy in which his process of mourning threatened to
get bogged down. It is tempting to read what Barthes wrote about
Proust’s search for the right form of his work in ‘“Longtemps, je me
suis couché de bonne heure”’ as a description of his own situation:
il a déjà écrit, et ce qu’il a écrit (notamment au niveau de certains
fragments) relève souvent d’une forme mixte, incertaine, hésitante, à
la fois romanesque et intellectuelle. […] Proust cherche une forme qui
recueille la souffrance (il vient de la connaître, absolue, par la mort de
sa mère) et la transcende. (OC V, 461)
[he has already written, and what he has written (especially on the
level of certain fragments) often derives from a mixted, uncertain,
hesitant form, both fictive and intellectual. […] Proust is seeking a
form which will accommodate suffering (he has just experienced it in
an absolute form through his mother’s death) and transcend it.
(Barthes 1989, 279)]
As long as his mother was alive, she incarnated for Barthes the ‘inner
Law’ which provided him with a minimal symbolic identification. But
with her death this last mooring threatened to fall away. Proust dis-
played in his work a ‘perverse’ way of avoiding this collapse, namely
through the creation of a new, fictional order via a novelistic recrea-
tion of the world.
In classical rhetoric there exists the topos of the mundus inver-

sus, an impossible, inverted world in which a different set of laws ap-
plied; in fact, we find a more subtle heir of this ‘inverted world’ in
every novel that has the ambition to construct an entire cosmos, as, for
instance, the Recherche. An important role is thereby reserved for
what Barthes called the “Je proustien” (PR, 331, italics in original)
[Proustian I]. By letting a literary character, ‘Marcel’, bear witness to
his own desire to write, Proust avoids the narcissistic trap of the Jour-
nal in which an autobiographical ‘I’ is portrayed who wants to meas-
ure itself against the authentic image of a writer. By allowing a fic-
tional character to perform in a fictional world, he gives the stage to
an ‘I’ that, per definition, does not coincide with the author:
ce ‘je’, si l’on peut dire, n’est déjà plus tout à fait un ‘moi’ (sujet et
objet de l’autobiographie traditionnelle): ‘je’ n’est pas celui qui se
souvient, se confie, se confesse, il est celui qui énonce; celui que ce
‘je’ met en scène est un ‘moi’ d’écriture, dont les liens avec le ‘moi’
civil sont incertains, déplacés. (OC V, 464)
[this ‘I’, one may say, is not quite a self (subject and object of tradi-
tional autobiography): ‘I’ is not the one who remembers, confides,
confesses, he is the one who discourses; the person this ‘I’ brings on
stage is a writing self whose links with the self of civil life are uncer-
tain, displaced. (Barthes 1989, 282)]
In this way Proust can explore the possibilities of another self, and at
the same time give the reader the chance, via the character Marcel, to
get started on one’s own search for this unknown other. It is this abil-
ity to say ‘I’ and at the same time not be egoistic that Barthes calls “le
miracle du Je proustien […] une générosité” (PR, 331, italics in origi-
nal) [the miracle of the Proustian I . . . a generosity], and which he
himself wants to try to achieve. But as we have seen, at the end of the
second series of La Préparation, Barthes was forced to admit that he
had not succeeded, as Proust did, in having his fragmentary writing
undergo the necessary metamorphosis.
And yet in his final lecture notes, Barthes would assemble a
list of a few concrete guidelines that he at least supposed might be the
key to his new style of writing, guidelines which sometimes differed
radically from the poetic standpoints he had earlier assumed. Again,
with this we should not forget that for Barthes, this new writing al-
ways remained linked to the fantasy of a vita nuova. This means that
these technical guidelines also take on, at a different, more intimate

level, an important ethical implication.
Sancta simplicitas
The first precondition that Barthes himself proposed is that of sim-

plicité (simplicity) (PR, 376). The first part of this new ‘simple’ aes-
thetics was to strive for lisibilité (readability). Barthes plea for a return
to the classical style went together with a position against avant-garde
poetics. These poetics attempted to disturb specifically the readability
of texts so that their linguistic, construed character became visible,
thereby preventing the reader from succumbing too easily to the temp-
tation of the imaginary. It is on this point that Barthes takes distance
from both Lacan and Deleuze: as we have seen, for him the imaginary
contains an active, transformative power. The self-image that I de-
velop as a reader via the Other of literature is not a mirror image af-
firming my identity, but a demon, a figure in which I recognise my-
self, but which nevertheless continues to differ from me. Precisely in
order to be able to recognise this demon I need a readable text which
gives me the illusion that I can rediscover my fantasies in it. In La
Prépration, Barthes argues that a crucial precondition for this read-
ability is the presence of a Story (cf. PR, 379). This statement is as-
tounding, primarily because up to this point Barthes had been am-
biguous, if not downright negative about the narrative form.
Thus in the preface to Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes he
noted that an autobiographical story is impossible once his life as a
‘text-producer’ had begun: “Dès que je produis, dès que j’écris, c’est
le Texte lui-même qui me dépossède (heureusement) de ma durée nar-
rative.” (OC IV, 582) [Once I produce, once I write, it is the Text it-
self which (fortunately) dispossesses me of my narrative continuity.
(Barthes 1994, 4)] Also in the introduction to the Fragments he op-
poses “l’histoire d’amour, asservie au grand Autre narratif” (OC V,
32, italics in original) [the love story, subjugated to the Great narrative
Other (Barthes 1979, 7)] and chooses, just as he does later in the
Cours, for the fragmentary succession of figures, the arbitrary order of
which must make clear that his discourse is not working toward a con-
clusion. But certainly in the Cours there was nevertheless a strong nar-
rative dimension present through the fantasy, in the form of a search
for, respectively, the idiorrhythm, the neutral, the novel.
We also see the same ambiguity crop up in La Chambre

claire: on the one hand Barthes presents every photo as a unique
fragment, a haiku that freezes all narrative development into a singular
moment, but at the same time—and this is certainly true of the second
part—the search for the photo of his mother is presented to the reader
as a story, going as far as using the passé simple so characteristic of
the narrative genre. Here also it is the fantasy that places the subject in
a narrative structure as the search for the lost object of desire: as soon
as the infant goes through the separation from the mother’s body, a
condition of lack is established which makes possible the development
of the story. Because this first, mythical object is taken away from me,
I am forced to go on a quest for an object that can fill this lack: my
personal life history can then be seen as a succession of different at-
tempts to obtain this object. It is in effect this oedipal lack which lies
at the basis of every story that makes Barthes shy away from the
‘Story’ and opt for the fetishistic fragment, the detail. His inability of
writing a story is, in other words, not so much technical as psychical:
how, as a ‘fragmented subject’, to give himself the cohesion of a self-
as-oeuvre without doing harm to the intensities of these exceptional
experiences? How to reconcile the unique, singular, timeless detail
with a narrative pattern characterised by the causal sequence of a plot:
‘This, and then that’?
It is also this question that occupied Barthes in his very last,
unfinished text on Stendhal. While travelling through Italy Stendhal
was fascinated by the exotic detail, by the fragmentary impressions
that a foreign land left upon him, and he sought for a way to represent
these impressions as faithfully as possible. Barthes concluded from
Stendhal’s travel diaries that he was not able to communicate the ori-
ginal intensity of these impressions to his readers. According to
Barthes, the reason for this failure was inherent to Stendhal’s striving
to represent the real, actual Italy directly in language. The haste to ex-
press the sensation immediately in fact led only to trivial clichés
quickly scribbled down, which ultimately made these diaries displeas-
ureable to read, if not altogether unreadable (cf. OC V, 910/Barthes
1989, 300)
It is not surprising that Barthes gave so much attention in his
text to Stendhal’s failed attempts to express his experience of Italy be-
cause he, to a certain extent, could also recognise in it the fiasco of his
own work. Was he himself not running the danger of getting caught in
a (melancholic) aphasia in his attempts to get around the essence of

the symbolic system, the paradigm? The meaningless reaction of the
reader to the reality effect, that is to say, to the corporeal affect that
overcomes one while reading, threatens to remain just as inexpressible
as Stendhal’s description of the ‘Italian effect’. In a similar way, the
affect evoked in the reader by a text remains imprisoned in that one,
unique moment of reading, and yet disappears in that moment as well.
Reading then becomes a succession of different affects which cannot
be transcribed, and thus also remain unreadable. The virtual self which
arises while reading is thus fragmentary, reduced to pieces: to arrive at
a work, the different affects must be able to be welded together into an
overarching program and thus must be detached from the one fleeting
stimulus that caused them. Applied to Stendhal: to preserve his Italian
experience, he thus had no choice but to call upon the symbolic for
help. The symbolic separates the subject from its corporeal affects and
establishes the distance required for the subject to express them ver-
bally. In order to come to a successful expression of Italy, Stendhal
must thus in fact pass through a variant of the Oedipus complex: the
transformation of the travel diary into the novel only becomes possible
when discovered that idyllic Italy can only be expressed indirectly,
and then via the oedipal myth in its simplest form: “d’un côté le Père,
de l’autre les Femmes”. (914) [on the one side, the Father; on the
other, Women.” (304)] To be able to describe Italy as a mythical, pre-
oedipal region, Stendhal thus needed precisely those paradigms which
are no longer viable in that region.
We encountered the same paradox earlier in Barthes’ lecture
series on the neutral: by contrasting the desire for a place beyond the
paradigms of the doxa, a new opposition is created automatically, by
which the neutral is again subsumed in a paradigm. But this paradigm
is required to make the neutral available to thought, and to thereby
challenge the arrogant ‘not-neutral’ of the doxa. It is a paradox that
once again comes down to the ambiguous relationship the subject as-
sumes against the oedipal structure. Even if the creation of every crea-
tive work is a perversion of the established order, the Nietzschean art-
ist still needs to wrestle with the law, for it is only by challenging the
law that he can found his own fiction as a fiction. As a rule, the sym-
bolic order is the Other that performs us as a character on a stage
which is not of our choosing. In a perverse scenario however, I at-
tempt to no longer be the marionette of the Other (in oedipal terms: of
the father who assigns us a name, a position); rather I strive to occupy

the paradoxical position in which I become my own spiritual father,
and thus am simultaneously both author and character. In order to do
this I need at least a minimal interpretation of the oedipal Other. As
soon as my belief in an external symbolic order which assigns me an
identity via injunctions and prohibitions completely fades away, the
perverse pleasure of undermining the Other by performing a fictional
self-creation also disappears: the unfolding of the pathos of distance
makes no sense if the other remains indifferent to that difference. Al-
ready in La Plaisir du texte, Barthes indicated the enjoyment that goes
together with the telling of the myth of Oedipus, even if it at the same
time is experienced as a fiction:
La mort du Père enlèvera à la littérature beaucoup de ses plaisirs. S’il
n’y a plus de Père, à quoi bon raconter des histoires? Tout récit ne se
ramène-t-il pas à l’Œdipe? Raconter, n’est-ce pas toujours chercher
son origine, dire ses démêlés avec la Loi, entrer dans la dialectique de
l’attendrissement et de la haine? Aujourd’hui on balance d’un même
coup l’Œdipe et le récit: on n’aime plus, on ne craint plus, on ne ra-
conte plus. Comme fiction, l’Œdipe servait au moins à quelque chose:
à faire de bons romans, à bien raconter. (OC IV, 248)
[Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures.

If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn’t every narrative
lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for
one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the
dialectic of tenderness and hatred? Today, we dismiss Oedipus and
narrative at one and the same time: we no longer love, we no longer
fear, we no longer narrate. As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for
something: to make good novels, to tell good stories. (Barthes 1975,
47)]
The pleasure caused by the fiction of Oedipus is of the same order as

the pleasure the subject obtains from inventing a fictive identity (cf.
258/62) Therefore, the nihilism which levels everything out (every-
thing has the same value, everyone is equal, there is no norm) is un-
bearable for the Nietzschean philosopher-artist. That principle of be-
ing of the elected is the core of the artist’s narrative. It is precisely this
continual battle with the world, the narrative in which the work is
wrenched away from a hostile Other, as is clearly noticeable in Proust
and Gide, but also—and perhaps best—in Kafka’s diaries, that finally
gives to their respective works their persuasiveness. Of course this
‘Story’, the myth of the “Héros littéraire” (PR, 357) as Barthes calls it,
is easily deflated: from the perspective of the history of literature, it

can be interpreted as an heir of romantic poetry, and via the know-it-
alls of psychoanalysis and Marxism so irritating to Barthes we can
easily reduce the investment in the work to a narcissistic auto-
eroticism or the creation of a surplus in symbolic and economic capi-
tal. To create a work of art in spite all of this, I must subject these so-
ciological and psychological commentators to the Nietzschean art of
forgetting and allow myself, as a subject who desires to write, a cer-
tain naïveté, a certain directness.
This is why, alongside readability, Barthes also referred to an-
other factor which must guarantee the simplicity of the work, namely,
“que l’œuvre cesse d’être, ou ne soit que discrètement, un discours de
l’œuvre sur l’œuvre” (PR, 379, italics in original) [that the work
ceases to be, or would only discretely be, a discourse of the work on
the work.] The continual reflection on the work itself is a typical as-
pect of post-modern writing, whereby the author above all wants to
make clear the extent to which he does not want to get taken for a ride
by his own creation, and so constantly stresses the fact that he is only
playing an intertextual game with genre codes, archetypical charac-
ters, quotations and with the role he thereby fulfils as an author:
aujourd’hui, nous (dont je suis parfois) passons notre temps à mettre à
notre texte un système complexe de guillemets, en fait visibles de
nous seuls, mais dont nous croyons qu’ils vont nous protéger, montrer
au lecteur-juge que nous ne sommes pas dupes de nous-mêmes, de ce
que nous écrivons, de la littérature, etc. (PR, 380)
[Today, we (myself sometimes included) spend our time to provide

our text with a complex system of quotations, in fact only visible to
ourselves, but of which we believe that they will protect us, to show
the reader-judge that we are not fooling ourselves with that which we
write, with literature, etc.]
The work as Barthes envisions it is, on the contrary, aimed precisely at

relinquishing this false security of ironic quotation marks. This indeed
means the return to a certain naïveté, for as Barthes himself showed in
‘La mort de l’auteur’, for an author it is impossible to write without
quoting other texts, because his text (and his desire to write a text) al-
ways originates in the Other. But it is just that insight that I, as an as-
piring writer, must relinquish in favour of the perverse fantasy of self-
creation: I must nevertheless make the conscious choice to accept the
bêtise that urges me on as my own bêtise, even if it comes from the

Other. The fantasy may be a structure that I have not chosen, it is my
body that reacts to this fantasy, simply and stubbornly holding onto it,
and it is from these corporeal affects that I can finally construct my
novelistic ‘I’ as a sinthome.
At the time of La Préparation du roman, such a lucid affirma-
tion of the bêtise was taboo, and that is still true today. The result is
that the average contemporary intellectual is scared to death of being
caught still believing in one of these outmoded illusions, or at least
still being affected by one. The philosophical obligation to be less
foolish, stands in sharp contrast with Eastern philosophy, which con-
siders the bêtise to be a virtue.
We can elucidate the crucial role that this bêtise played in
Barthes’ active semiology in light of the Zen-dialectic which Barthes
discusses briefly in Le Neutre: initially, things are simply what they
are; mountains are mountains, waterfalls are waterfalls. Via Zen in-
struction, the student learns in effect to bring all ‘being’ into discus-
sion and comes to the insight that mountains are no mountains, water-
falls are no waterfalls. This negative phase flows into a third move-
ment in a sort of mystical innocence: the mountains again become
mountains, waterfalls again waterfalls (LN, 164-5/Barthes 2005, 125)
According to Barthes, we in the West are at this moment immersed in
the second phase. It is in this second phase, that we can also locate a
large share of Barthes’ semiological research since Mythologies,
aimed against the bêtise of the doxa and intended to critically interro-
gate the apparent obviousness of a given social order. But the defini-
tion Barthes gave of active semiology in his inaugural lecture, namely
“le cours des opérations le long duquel il est possible – voire escompté
– de jouer du signe comme d’un voile peint, ou encore: d’une fiction”
(OC V, 443) [the course of operations during which it is possible —
even called for— to play with the sign as with a painted veil, or again,
with a fiction. (Barthes 1982, 475)] again refers to the desire to push
through to the final dialectical step, whereby the preceding critical dis-
tance is certainly not forgotten, but in which the bêtise does again re-
ceive a place. With this, the question of course arises concerning how
we can distinguish this latter bêtise from the initial bêtise. A first im-
portant difference is that the bêtise of the doxa obviously does not
recognise itself as bêtise because it arrogantly, and with self-certainty,
believes that it is supported by a transcendental signified (‘Nature’,
‘God’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Postmodernism’) that legitimises the dis-

course, protecting it from the inside out against eventual criticism.
The action of the bêtise as brought to light in active semiology
transports me as a reader back to the fantasy that I encounter in my
reading, a fantasy which I realise has no foundation outside of my
reading body. This bêtise is a source of uncertainty because I am
aware that it continually traverses my reading without me being able
to separate it entirely from the text that has evoked it. My fantasy de-
termines the singularity of my reading experience and is responsible
for the fact that a different reader can never have the same experience
with the same text; but at the same time I cannot invoke myself as a
source of legitimacy (as a sort of ‘literary expert’) because the fantasy
always escapes me, and I can never determine completely on which
line of flight it has placed me. All that is left for me to do is to accept
my reading (and the writing that emerges from it) as a Nietzschean
fiction. My bêtise cannot invoke some transcendental signified which
will protect me by transforming stupidity into wisdom: only through a
subtle but insistent pathos of distance can I affirm what drives me
against every form of doxa that tries to reduce, judge and objectify it.
The inability to lie
The same Zen-dialectic also makes clear—as we have seen in the

chapter on ‘Time’—why Barthes, in his active semiology, develops a
preference for old discourses: now that their original doxical bêtise —
Werther’s romantic approach to life, the Athos monk’s belief, the lit-
erary heroism of authors such as Proust and Kafka—has been stripped
of its obviousness by a prior critical phase, the bêtise of the reader can
assume the place that has opened up and replace the transcendental
signified in the reading with the creative possibilities of the fantasy.
This is why Barthes, alongside simplicité, puts forward filiation as the
second requirement for being able to achieve the work:
il ne s’agit pas de reconduire, de recopier, d’imiter, de conserver; il
s’agit de recourir à une sorte d’hérédité des valeurs nobles, comme un
aristocrate sans argent, sans héritage, peut rester un aristocrate; une
écriture a besoin d’une hérédité. (PR, 381, italics in orginal)
[it is not a question of revisiting, copying, imitating, conserving; it is a

question of resorting to a sort of legacy of noble values, like a penni-
less aristocrat without inheritance does in order to remain an aristo-
crat; writing needs a legacy.]
In the previous chapter we saw how Barthes’ writing program

got stuck on this point because he did not succeed in transposing the
inheritance of classical literature into a concrete writing praxis. We
attributed this obstruction to Barthes’ inability to accept the passage of
time and the experience of lack that goes along with it. But perhaps
this obstruction is additionally to be attributed to another, perhaps
more essential incapacity, namely the incapacity to relinquish this be-
lief in the transcendental signified as the truth of the text, and to
choose in favour of his own fictional, phantasmatic bêtise. Barthes ran
up against an unexpected barrier precisely in the necessity to accept
the bêtise as the only foundation of both his reading and his writing.
Despite his theoretical praise for the body of the reader, for the strat-
egy of the Nietzschean artist who turns appearance into a work of art
and for Eastern philosophy which takes its own bêtise as the founding
principle of its thinking, Barthes did not appear capable of applying to
himself that which he subscribed to theoretically. We can perhaps at-
tribute this failure of Barthes’ perverse reading strategy to the conflict-
ing intertexts that Barthes used in his Cours. As a Nietzschean, he cer-
tainly knew (and acknowledged) that the truth that the Other guaran-
tees is nothing more than a fiction provided with external legitimacy,
and that every individual must create one’s own, unique fiction. But
from his psychoanalytic reading he realised this self-created fiction
was also a phantasmatic misunderstanding which must be traversed in
favour of the truth of pure desire. Because of this, Barthes remained
stuck in the second phase of the Zen-dialectic and could not make the
leap from the hysterical exposing of truth as an illusion which uncon-
sciously hides a bêtise, to the perverse creation—also from a bêtise—
of an alternative illusion:
parvenir à faire un roman […], c’est au fond accepter de mentir, par-
venir à mentir […] – mentir de ce mensonge second et pervers qui
consiste à mêler le vrai et le faux → En définitive, alors, la résistance
au roman, l’impuissance au roman (à sa pratique) serait une résistance
morale. (PR, 161, italics in original)
[to succeed in creating a novel […] boils down to agreeing to lie, to

succeed in lying […]—lying this secondary and perverse lie which
consists in blending the true and the false→ finally, then, the resis-
tance to the novel, the inability to produce the novel (to write it)
would be a moral resistance.]
We are now in a position to better understand what is at stake in

Barthes’ final text on Stendhal: he is also unable initially to take dis-
tance from the ‘moments de vérite’ which he had experienced during
his trip to Italy, and which he tried to represent as faithfully as possi-
ble in his Journals. Barthes claimed that Stendhal only appeared able
to summarise his fascination for Italy in a work once he had learned
the art of lying, or more precisely, once he exchanged the diary for the
novel:
Quand il était jeune […], Stendhal pouvait écrire: ‘…quand je mens,
je suis comme M. de Goury, je m’ennuie’; il ne savait pas encore qu’il
existait un mensonge, le mensonge romanesque, qui serait à la fois – ô
miracle – le détour de la vérité et l’expression enfin triomphante de sa
passion italienne. (OC V, 914)
[When he was young […] Stendhal could write: ‘…when I tell lies, I
am like M. De Goury, I am bored’; he did not know that there existed
a lie, the lie of novels, which would be — miraculously — both the
detour of truth and the finally triumphant expression of his Italian pas-
sion. (Barthes 1989, 305)]
It was precisely this turning-point, the apparently absurd leap into the
‘novelistic lie’ that Barthes, despite all his attempts, was unable to
make. This seems clear, for example, from the Fragments d’un dis-
cours amoureux. The reader soon realises that the Fragments has not
become a twentieth-century Werther: an amorous subject is speaking
who, to be sure, is speaking in the first person, but at no point does it
exude the seductiveness of a character from a novel. Here we are also
far removed from the ‘generosity’, the ‘miracle’ of the Proustian ‘I’.
The reader of the Fragments is invited to project one’s desire onto this
subject in love, but at the same time this projection is immediately
thwarted. The amorous bêtise is still kept at a critical distance because
the lover’s statements clearly remain citations, brought together in an
alphabetical succession of figures, each of which are again accompa-
nied by what Barthes calls an argumentum, a succinct description
which serves as an Brechtian instrument of distancing (cf. OC V,
30/Barthes 1979, 5) So Barthes own relationship with the admired
readerly texts remained primarily a question of quotations and frag-

ments, because Barthes in fact presented them via a writerly text. One
only needs to compare the reading of Goethe’s Werther with the
Fragments to conclude that the latter is anything but notable for its
simplicité. When reading Goethe I can eventually let myself get swept
up passively in the tragic love of the protagonist, but with Barthes’
own text I am continually forced to reflect, to interpret, to combine the
disconnected characters into a personal reading pattern. The same can
be said of Barthes’ method of working in the Cours: he explored his
fantasies there as well primarily through reflection on fragments from
novels, anecdotes and concepts. In this way Barthes continually hid
behind the voices of others who speak in his place about the bêtise of
his fantasy. This is also the case for La Préparation du roman, for
while Barthes here overcame for the first time his aversion for narra-
tive, and presented his lectures as a ‘Story’, the more or less consistent
story of a character who wants to write, this novelistic character also
remains an fragmented amalgam of different writers, including
Barthes himself (cf. PR, 234)
Just as the Fragments did not become a new Werther, neither
did the two parts of La Préparation du roman grow into a new Re-
cherche. They did not get past continual reflection on the work. This
finally overran the work itself, and as a result made it impossible. Per-
haps Barthes would only have overcome his inertia if he had really
tried to write the fantasy without quotation marks, and had he actually
tried to become the characters that he presented; if he, in other words,
would have succeeded in replacing the sober Brechtian distance of the
Fragments with Nietzsche’s pathos of distance.
However much Barthes’ interpretation of his fantasies may
have inclined toward intellectual exhibitionism, in fact it above all
remained a form of voyeurism. Barthes in effect manoeuvred himself
into the position of the spectator: he let a few single characters (him-
self included, but then as a figure with which he as narrator did not co-
incide) perform the fantasy. In the ‘Story’ of the Préparation, for ex-
ample, he presented a series of characters who wanted to write, while
he himself remained but an invisible narrator situated outside the
story, not succumbing to the ‘lure’ of the fantasy he was describing,
and thus suggesting that he would not let himself be fooled by it. Nev-
ertheless, as we saw in our psychoanalytic discussion of the fantasy,
this is only apparently a position outside the fantasy. The role of the
spectator is in fact also one of the imaginary positions that the ‘I’ in
the fantasy can occupy: his fascinated gaze betrays that he is just as
involved in the phantasmatic scene. The extensive discussion of the
fantasy in his lectures thus becomes for Barthes perhaps the most sub-
tle, ingenious manner of resistance against concrete changes made
possible by the fantasy. The aloof gaze keeps the enjoyment impris-
oned in passive looking-on, so that it cannot be used to spring into ac-
tion oneself.
Naturally, it remains an open question whether Barthes, had
he lived longer, would have ever found the solution to overcome his
resistance and to at last transform his long theoretical obsession for
literary discourse into the creation of a literary work. His very last, un-
finished text on Stendhal proves in any case that even in his final mo-
ments he continued to pursue this fantasy of writing a Novel. Who
knows if Barthes may have had a flash of insight while retyping his
manuscript, enabling him to take a different, more productive position
within his fantasy and allowing him, like Stendhal, to create a ‘novel-
istic lie’.
On that fatal 25th of February, fate decided otherwise: Barthes
had just placed a second sheet of paper in his typewriter when he was
forced to set the manuscript aside for a lunchtime appointment with
Jack Lang and François Mitterand, among others. It was while walk-
ing home after the meal that he was run over by a delivery van as he
was crossing the street. His injuries in themselves were far from fatal,
but complications with his lungs as a result of earlier tuberculosis, and
a weakened will to live due to his mourning for his mother, conspired
to end his life on March 26 in the hospital to which he had been taken
a month and a day before (cf. Calvet 1990/1994, 294 ff./248 ff.)
The desire to die
Barthes’ sudden death provides his search for the vita nuova with a
bitter anti-climax and confronts us with the death of the author—this
time literally. How should we consider this death from the perspective
of the fantasy of the novel? It is this question that we will try to an-
swer via the third precondition that Barthes imposed on the work he
wanted to write: the necessity of desire. With this third and last pre-
condition, desire, Barthes did not aim so much at the content or the
form of the work, as at its function: a book needs to arouse desire. (cf.
PR, 382)
This applies in the first place to the writer himself to the ex-
tent that he feels trapped in a certain lifestyle which no longer sparks
his desire. He thus lands in attitude of indifference, for which Barthes,
in Comment vivre ensemble, uses the Greek term akedia. It is the feel-
ing of being completely trapped in an undesirable situation, and at the
same time lacking the energy to do something about it, to imagine
how it could be different. This is why Barthes also describes akedia as
“deuil non de l’image, mais de l’imaginaire.” (CVE, 55) [mourning
not for the image, but for the imaginary.] The distinction between the
image and the imagination to which Barthes alludes here becomes
clearer if we return for a moment to Foucault’s discussion of Bin-
swanger. Here the image is summarised as a fixation on the process of
imagination which deprives the subject of the possibility to change,
and thus to abandon the becoming inherent to the imaginary in favour
of a permanent identification. The cause of my mourning is thus in the
first place my own apparent death as a desiring subject: I see myself
reduced to an inert in-itself. The project of the novel is aimed pre-
cisely at awakening the desire to escape from this image, thereby cre-
ating a new perspective from which I can reorient my life: “Roman:
Pratique pour lutter contre la sécheresse de cœur, l’acédie.”(PR, 41)
[Novel: Practice for fighting against the shrivelling of the heart,
l’acedia.] Via the work I can once again activate my imaginary and
destroy the image that I have become for myself, and for others.
Barthes calls this moment of rupture, with a nod to the famous
opening verse of the Divina Commedia, “le milieu de la vie” (Barthes
OC V, 467) [middle of life (Barthes 1989, 285)]. In ‘Longtemps je me
suis couché’, he defines this as:
ce moment où l’on découvre que la mort est réelle, et non plus seule-
ment redoutable. Ainsi cheminant, il se produit tout d’un coup cette
évidence: […] je n’ai plus le temps d’essayer plusieurs vies: il faut
que je choisisse ma dernière vie, ma vie nouvelle, ‘Vita Nova’ (467).
[the moment when you discover that death is real, and no longer
merely dreadful. Journeying thus, there occurs all of a sudden this ob-
vious situation: […] I no longer have time to try several lives: I must
choose my last life, my new life, ‘Vita Nova’. (285)]
As we have seen with Foucault’s discussion of Stoic philosophy, this

contemplation of death is not a paralysing, negative force confronting
the human being with an irremovable lack, but is more of an ultimate
confrontation with one’s possibilities. Like a compelling appeal it de-
mands an answer to Epictetus’ question: ‘And you, in the midst of
what occupation do you want to be taken?’ My own mortality thus be-
comes the final horizon against which my existence is outlined in all
sharpness; it proposes the problem which forces me into an individual
response: the vita nuova. Only by becoming aware of one’s own mor-
tality can the subject arrive at the insight that one does not have an
eternity to create the work.
This ‘middle of life’ was revealed to Barthes with the death of
his mother. As he noted in La Chambre claire about his life after her
death: “Ma particularité ne pourrait jamais plus s’universaliser (sinon,
utopiquement, par l’écriture, dont le projet, dès lors, devait devenir
l’unique but de ma vie). Je ne pouvais plus qu’attendre ma mort totale,
indialectique.” (OC V, 848) [My particularity could never again uni-
versalize itself (unless, utopically, by writing, whose project hence-
forth would become the unique goal of my life). From now on I could
do no more than await my total, undialectical death. (Barthes 1981,
72)] What is important here is that which Barthes places between pa-
rentheses: it not only again clarifies the extent to which his search for
a new project in his life remained bound to the necessity of writing,
but it also points to the important function this project has, namely;
granting the particularity of my existence a universality which also
makes it worthwhile in light of my eventual absence. This is simulta-
neously the paradox of the work: as Foucault emphasised, the self as a
completed work is a condition the subject can never attain. As long as
I live, the work can never appear as a real object, but remains an eter-
nally virtual point of escape. As soon as a writer completes a book
starting from this desire, it loses (as least for the writer) the magical
aura of the work. While writing, it stimulates an imaginary which
brought the subject into process, but once completed it again clots into
an image, a lifeless statue with which I—at the moment that I have
written my last sentence and made my final corrections—no longer
coincide: “c’est quand [l’écrivain] fait l’Œuvre qu’elle est pour lui vi-
vante; faite, elle devient morte (au moment où elle devient vivante
pour d’autres)”. (PR, 315) [it is while [the writer] is writing the Work
that it is alive for him; written, it becomes dead (at the moment when
it becomes alive for others)]
As soon as I die, the texts that I leave behind are, as incom-
plete realisations of the work, the only tangible part that remains of
my desire for that work, and they become, in the eyes of the Other, the
actual work. This work can only stay ‘alive’ for the reader if his desire
focuses on the open place in the text and comes to identify with the
author’s desire, incorporating it into one’s own program and thereby
transcending the death of the author. The fantasy of the novel in this
way obtains an intersubjective dimension: the arousing of desire
which initially had to do with the author is now directed at the reader:
“le problème, me semble-t-il, pour un écrivain, n’est pas d’être
‘éternel’ (définition mythologique du ‘grand écrivain’), mais d’être
désirable après sa mort.” (PR, 382-3) [the problem for a writer, it
seems to me, is not to be ‘eternal’ (mythological definition of the
‘great writer’), but to be desirable after his death.]
Of course, this survival of the work must not be taken in the
classical sense of a monument which eternalises my singular existence
for future generations. If Barthes chose ‘De la vie à l’œuvre’ (From
Life to Work) as the title for the first part of La Préparation du ro-
man, we must also keep in mind the title of one of Barthes’ earlier ar-
ticles, ‘De l’œuvre au texte’ (From Work to Text), from 1971 (OC III,
908-17; Barthes 1989, 56-64). The work that ultimately assumes the
place of life is thus in turn condemned to dissolve irrevocably in this
“destructeur de tout sujet” (OC III, 705) [destroyer of every subject
(Barthes 1997, 9)]—which is Barthes’ description of the text in his
preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola. If there nevertheless still remains,
beyond this destruction, “un sujet à aimer” [a subject to love] in the
text (the figure of the author), then this is purely as a
sujet dispersé, un peu comme les cendres que l’on jette au vent après
la mort (au thème de l’urne et de la stèle, objets forts, fermés, institu-
teurs du destin, s’opposeraient les éclats du souvenir, l’érosion qui ne
laisse de la vie passée que quelques plis). (705, italics in original)
[ [dispersed] subject […], somewhat like the ashes we strew into the
wind after death (the theme of the urn and the stone, strong closed ob-
jects, instructors of fate, will be contrasted with the bursts of memory,
the erosion that leaves nothing but a few furrows of past life) (9, ital-
ics in original)]
Barthes called these active, fertile particles of ash, the final remains of
the life-as-oeuvre, biographèmes:
si j’étais écrivain, et mort, comme j’aimerais que ma vie se réduisît,
par les soins d’un biographe amical et désinvolte, à quelques détails, à
quelques goûts, à quelques inflexions, disons: des ‘biographèmes’,
dont la distinction et la mobilité pourraient voyager hors de tout destin
et venir toucher, à la façon des atomes épicuriens, quelque corps futur,
promis à la même dispersion (705).
[were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the
pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself
to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘bi-
ographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate
and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined
to the same dispersion. (9)]
It is not insignificant that Barthes presents himself here as a writer in

the conditional tense. The most obvious explanation is in fact that
Barthes, in this preface, (still) did not see himself as a literary writer
of the ilk of Sade, Fourier and Loyola. But perhaps there is also a dif-
ferent explanation possible for this curious formulation, ‘if I were a
writer, and dead’: the conditional tense represents the subject of the
sentence as something that still must become—in casu, a writer—just
as it also represents death as something still to come: it is via the im-
aginary framework offered by the conditional tense (as a grammatical
form indeed a clear example of fictionalisation, related to the past
tense which is often used in children’s play) that I can phantasmati-
cally imagine myself on the other side of the work that I leave behind
and which constitutes me as a (absent) writer.
The death of the author thus becomes a double fantasy for the
Barthesian reader: on the one hand, it helps one break free from a pas-
sive consumption of the text, but on the other hand it implies reciproc-
ity. It functions as a sort of memento mori to the extent that this reader
has made the text writerly and has thus, in turn, become a writer, ‘des-
tined to the same dispersion’. The fate that one as a reader makes the
writer undergo—one holds back only a few details, fragments used in
one’s own program—will ultimately be one’s own fate as well, as
soon as another subject reads the written reflections of that program.
At that moment there will also be nothing left over of him but a ‘fig-
ure’, a collection of details that an other, future reader may use in his
writing at his own discretion. The Stoic contemplation which so fasci-
nated Foucault in that case means that the subject who wants to write
anticipates this situation by presenting oneself as a (dead) writer in the
presence of the Other.
In 1964, in his introduction to the first Essais critiques, Bar-
thes remarks that “[é]crire ne peut aller sans se taire; écrire, c’est,
d’une certaine façon, se faire ‘silencieux comme un mort’, devenir
l’homme à qui est refusée la dernière réplique; écrire, c’est offrir dès
le premier moment cette dernière réplique à l’autre.” (OC II, 273, ital-
ics in original) [[w]riting must go hand in hand with silence; to write
is in a sense to become ‘still as death,’ to become someone to whom
the last word is denied; to write is to offer others, from the start, that
last word. (Barthes 2000, xi, italics in original)] However altruistic
this definition of writing may sound, if we consider it from the track
of the work, this ‘deathly silence’ is only a final step in the contract
that the perverse subject enters into with the text. In a perverse strat-
egy I initially instrumentalise myself as the object of desire of a virtual
Other, a demonic doubling of myself which wants to let me become
what I am. I hereby put myself completely in service of a becoming
which in the course of the process slowly destroys my old identity in
favour of a still unknown self which must be expressed in the work.
But yet another new figure looms beyond that work, namely, the fig-
ure of an other reader. Through the work, a perverse contract is also
entered into with this reader, whereby I as author of the work declare
myself prepared to sacrifice myself to the improper use that this future
reader will make of my work. I give him the right to ‘the last word’,
and realise that in this process, my identity will be destroyed a second
time. And yet the gaze (and the judgment) of the reader as Other is no
longer the same petrifying gaze of the Other that assigned me a self-
image, which is precisely what I tried to escape via writing. Behind
the apparent self-sacrifice is also hidden the final victory over the
Other as a legislative instance that passes judgment. By arousing the
reader’s pleasure via my writing, the other loses this (illusion of) an
external position from which he can judge impartially about the exist-
ing work because he notices that, as a spectator, he has become entan-
gled in the seductiveness of the fantasies which are the driving force
behind this work.
We can illustrate this with respect to Barthes himself: after
reading his extensive work I can certainly, as a reader, form a certain
portrait of him; but unless I commit the sin of bad faith, at the same
time I cannot do otherwise than admit that this image remains impure
and unstable because Barthes—as soon as I decided to write about
him—has also become a double of myself. That is to say, something
of my own bêtise has become attached to his texts; something of his
figure receives the uncertainty of my own becoming. So yes, Barthes
gives the last word to me as a reader, but at the same time he makes
sure that this word is no longer mine: the fantasies drawn by the lines
of flight in his later works become linked to my own (reading) experi-
ences, so that the lines of force—here with a Deleuzian connotation—
contained in his thinking graft onto my own desires to write. An im-
portant precondition for this transfer is that the author is indeed actu-
ally dead in the text, which is to say that I imagine him as dead—and
not only symbolically, as an incarnation of the one and final meaning
of a text, but also imaginarily, as a figure:
Lire l’auteur mort est, pour moi, vivant, car je suis troublé, déchiré par
la conscience de la contradiction entre la vie intense de son texte et la
tristesse de savoir qu’il est mort: je suis toujours triste de la mort d’un
auteur, ému par le récit des morts d’auteur (Tolstoï, Gide).→ Le deuil
est vivant. (LN, 35)
To read the dead author is, for me, to be alive, for I am shattered, torn
by the awareness of the contradiction between the intense life of his
text and the sadness of knowing he is dead: I am always saddened by
the death of an author, moved by the story of the deaths of authors
(Tolstoy, Gide) → To mourn is to be alive. (Barthes 2005, 10)
With a gesture toward Michelet, Barthes defended this “bibliothèque

d’auteurs morts” (35) [library of dead authors (9)] which he chose as
his most important intertexts in Le Neutre:
exemple de Michelet: absolument présent à son siècle, mais travaillant
sur la ‘vie’ des Morts: je fais penser les Morts en moi: les vivants
m’entourent, m’imprègnent, me prennent justement dans un système
d’échos – plus ou moins conscient, mais seuls les morts sont des ob-
jets créateurs = nous sommes tout pris dans des ‘modes’ et qui sont
utiles; mais seule la mort est créatrice. (34-5)
[Michelet’s example: absolutely present to his century, but working on

the ‘life’ of the Dead: I make the dead think in myself: the living sur-
round me, penetrate me, lock me up precisely in an echo chamber—of
which I am more or less conscious—but only the Dead are creative
objects = we all are caught up in ‘fashions,’ and they are useful; but
only death is creative. (9-10)]
It is the same position that I assume as a reader with respect to

Barthes’ work: only to the extent that Barthes’ texts are literally and
figuratively dated does his work receive the active force of anachro-
nism, and it perhaps becomes for the contemporary reader just as in-
spiring as the works by Gide or Proust were for Barthes.
At the close of this chapter on the author, there is still another
important consideration to make: with respect to the intersubjective
dimension of the fantasy, we have limited ourselves to the dialectic
between author and reader. We should not forget here that Barthes
developed his phantasmatic reading strategy in lecture notes, which
immediately suggests that there is still another relationship which
played an important role in Barthes’ active semiology; namely, that
between professor and student. However much the individualistic self-
education, the paideia of the reader was central to the Cours, just like
the classical hypomnemata they still had an unmistakably pedagogic
component which went further than individual reading and writing. To
this point we have primarily assumed the fantasy as an important as-
pect of a reading strategy: in the final chapter of this book I intend to
investigate whether the fantasy can also function as a teaching strat-
egy; and if yes, how are we to consider this relationship between
phantasmatic reading and teaching?
Lessons from an Amateur
Synaxis and the Reader
As we saw in the previous chapter, Barthes’ active semiology assumes

that I, as a reader, become conscious of the fantasies that haunt me
while I am reading, so that I can then use them to turn the texte lisible
into a texte scriptible. It is uncertain, however, whether this reading
method transcends the hyper-individual level. In other words: does
Barthes’ appeal to write what one is reading on the basis of fantasy
also mean that when I speak about this reading to others, that I should
do it based upon the same fantasies of reading? Seeing that the fan-
tasy, according to psychoanalysis, is the product of a personal history,
and the program, according to Deleuze, is aimed at a singular line of
flight, the question arises immediately whether or not this actual fan-
tasy can be utilised by someone else, someone with a different history
and a different becoming. At the conclusion of the previous chapter
we suggested that this transference was possible via the detour of writ-
ing, provided that the author surrenders the direct link with the cause
of his affects and is prepared, via mediation of the symbolic, to give
the last word to the reader—as Stendhal did when he exchanged his
journals for the novel, so that he could convey to the reader his affec-
tive bond with Italy. In other words, phantasmatic involvement is, in
the best case scenario, writable, but it can never be presented or dem-
onstrated directly. It was for this reason that Barthes abandoned his
intention to provide a concrete description of his idiorrhythmic utopia
at the end of Comment vivre ensemble:
Seule l’écriture peut recueillir l’extrême subjectivité, car dans
l’écriture il y a accord entre l’indirect de l’expression et la vérité du
sujet – accord impossible au plan de la parole (donc du cours), qui est
toujours, quoi qu’on veuille, à la fois directe et théâtrale. (CVE, 178)
[Only writing can gather together the full depth of subjectivity, for in
writing there is an agreement between indirect expression and the
truth of the subject—an agreement impossible on the level of speaking

(thus of lecturing) which is always, regardless of what you wish, at
once direct and theatrical.]
One of the most important motivations for Barthes to eventually

choose for the explicit formulation of a fantasy as the yearly starting
point for his seminars was the scruples he had concerning the position
of power he enjoyed as a professor. He realised that from this point
forward he would teach before a significantly larger audience than in
the École pratique des hautes etudes. Furthermore, he would be part
of an institution that, even if it occupied a marginal position within the
French educational system and did not award any diplomas, neverthe-
less had a very prestigious reputation which in any case bestowed
upon the teachers considerable authority. Additionally, for Barthes,
teaching could never be disassociated entirely from the exercise of
power for the simple reason that it occurred via language. And lan-
guage—as Barthes formulated hyperbolically in his inaugural lec-
ture—is always fascist.
To get around this power he chose literary discourse as the
theme of his chair. He believed that, because of its express fictional
character, it was a non-arrogant discourse which offered a way to es-
cape the totalitarian claims of language. Barthes tried to extend to his
public the perverse freedom that he himself enjoyed as a reader by
presenting his material via traits ordered arbitrarily. These traits were
to dispel the illusion of a discourse heading toward an unequivocal
conclusion. In the closing remarks of his first lecture series he com-
pared them with the loose pieces of a puzzle, with the audience as the
players who should make the final picture as they like. (cf. CVE, 181)
In practice, however, this ideal ran up against two important
obstacles. First, while this ‘final picture’ may very well be formed by
those following the course, Barthes remained the only one who se-
lected the different traits and determined the final corpus of the lec-
ture series. The second obstacle arose from the prior difficulty: even if
the selection was subjective, the audience still assumed that Barthes,
considering the fact that he had indeed selected precisely these texts
rather than others, could speak with authority about that corpus, and
that the views he developed during his discussion of them was also
immediately accepted as the most relevant and exciting. But here as
well Barthes attempted to undermine the audience’s assumptions
about him. And so, in Le Neutre, at the beginning of a lecture he ad-
dressed publicly a remark by a listener who informed him—

concerning an earlier lecture—that his commentary on an anecdote
about the Buddha was not at all in agreement with the meaning this
anecdote has in Buddhist teaching.
à la limite: quand je cite du bouddhisme ou du scepticisme, il ne faut
pas me croire: je suis hors maîtrise, je n’ai aucune maîtrise, et, pour
bien le signifier, il me faut bien (Nietzsche) ‘ne pas respecter le tout’:
car le maître c’est celui qui enseigne le tout (son tout): et je n’enseigne
pas le tout (du bouddhisme, du scepticisme). Ma visée = n’être ni maî-
tre ni disciple, mais, au sens nietzschéen (donc aucun satisfecit), ‘ar-
tiste’. (LN, 97-8)
[pushed to the limit: when I cite form Buddhism or from Skepticism,

you must not believe me: I am outside mastery, I have no mastery
whatsoever, and, to make it clear, I have no other choice than (Nietz-
sche) to ‘lose respect for the whole’: for the master is the one who
teaches the whole (the whole according to himself): and I don’t teach
the whole (about Buddhism, about Skepticism). My aim = to be nei-
ther master nor disciple but, in the Nietzschean sense (thus with no
need for a good grade), ‘artist.’ (Barthes 2005, 64)]
What Barthes wanted to make clear to his audience was that, in his
discussion of a particular text or theme, he always replaced the classi-
cal interpretation with a creation that was driven by a fantasy which
appealed to him personally: “Si j’interprétais, mon interprétation serait
fausse et mon auditrice aurait raison de la contester → j’essaye de
créer; d’inventer un sens avec des matériaux libres, que je libère de
leur ‘vérité’ historique, doctrinale.” (98) [If I interpreted, my interpre-
tation would be false and my listener would be right to object to it → I
try to create, to invent a meaning from independent materials, which I
liberate from their historical, doctrinal ‘truth’ (65)]
As teacher, Barthes emphasised this phantasmatic involve-
ment in every text he discussed. When a person in love talks about his
passion, we are willing to believe that he—from the standpoint of his
desire—speaks the truth; but we do not consider him the most appro-
priate person to also make an objective judgment about his object of
desire. In the teaching method Barthes uses here, there is thus no hori-
zon of truth to be found external to the speaking subject: the only truth
is the intimate truth of his desire, a truth which, from the perspective
of the other, can only be a ‘lure’, a fiction. This position dictates that
the audience is also forced to determine their own phantasmatic rela-
tionship to the material presented. Confronted with the postulation of

a truth, as a listener I can either accept this truth or challenge it; con-
fronted with the expression of a desire which has no other validity
than the personal experience of the subject who pronounces it, I can-
non but answer with my own desire. The essential precondition to ar-
rive at such a circulation of desires is, of course, that no single desire
(whether that of the speaker or of the listener) comes to dominate,
thereby obstructing the other’s desire. Therefore, the subject must not
take distance from its desire (by, for instance, remaining silent about it
or repressing it), but should keep it at a distance from the other so that
it does not force the other into something, does not take possession of
it. Such an attitude follows from an important ethical value that
Barthes calls the principle of delicacy, which we discussed earlier. To
comply with delicacy means that I do not reduce the other to the im-
age that I would form of her or him. By refusing to feed the imaginary
of a relationship, where each is forced into a specific role by the other,
I leave all the more room for the intimate imaginary of the other, al-
lowing the other to take leave of her or his self—to become other. It is
thus an ethical attitude which does not start from the idea that the
other is radically different than me, and that I can never do justice to
this alterity via my own imagination, but rather that the other is radi-
cally other to himself, and thus can never coincide with himself. In
Barthes’ ethics, this demands not so much tolerance or appreciation as
it does discretion. This discretion is needed at the moment I notice the
otherness of the other, not as a quality which distinguishes him from
me, but as that which makes him differ from himself: that which I
should treat discretely, without judgment, is precisely the impossible
relation of the other to the intraitable in itself. In psychoanalytic
terms: his extimacy, his impossible relationship to his libidinal being.
Or as Rudi Visker puts it in Truth and singularity (1999):
Isn’t the Other not only an Other to me, but also someone who owes
his ‘own’ alterity to some ‘Thing’ which remains ‘other’ to him and
yet singularizes him at the same time? In other words, perhaps the
Other is, like myself, primarily a ‘stranger’ not because he is without
those roots that I possess, but because we are both attached to ‘some-
thing’ which is too close to leave us indifferent, but not close enough
to be called our possession. (Visker 1999, 142, italics in original)
It is an ethical attitude that we can also reformulate in less negative

terms, no longer considered from out of the other’s (and my) singular
symbolic lack, but from the becoming which is manifested there in

that lack, as the open space in the symbolic territory at which the lines
of flight take aim. Delicacy thus becomes a Deleuzean strategy of
“conduites inventives, inattendues, non paradigmatisables, la fuite
élégante et discrète devant le dogmatisme”. (LN, 66) [inventive, un-
expected, nonparadigmatizable behaviour, the elegant and discreet
flight in the face of dogmatism. (Barthes 2005, 36)] By respecting
these unanticipated behaviours of the other, I keep open the lines of
flight which make the other differ from himself. The principle of deli-
cacy that Barthes also wanted to apply in his lectures was, in the first
place, a scarcely hidden appeal to his audience to use the same discre-
tion with respect to his public exploration of texts via his fantasy, and
for them to withhold judgment, even were that judgment to be posi-
tive. (cf. 66/36)
On the other hand, the teacher must also consider delicacy
with respect to his audience: they as well must not become intimidated
in their listening by the figure of the dominant teacher, who keeps the
audience so under the influence of his personality that they lose their
ability to think about what has been presented to them. Like the author
to the reader, the teacher must also be prepared to give the last word to
the audience. It is the moment that the teacher relinquishes the pieces
of the puzzle and accepts that every listener is individually, according
to one’s own desire, going to do with it what they will. Faithful to the
fantasy of the neutral, what Barthes tried to achieve with this was to
upset a classical paradigm in the western view on desire, namely, the
opposition between Platonic Eros and Christian (or more accurately,
Pauline) Agapè. Barthes’ method of teaching tried to reconcile the
loneliness of Eros—an incommunicable phantasmatic involvement of
the subject in that one object of desire—with Agapè, a sympathetic,
universal care of the other.
The opposition between the two forms of love primarily came
to be known through Anders Nygren’s voluminous standard work,
Agapè and Eros (1930-36). While Eros is passionate, egocentric and
particular, and moves the subject to ecstasy, Agapè is sympathetic,
generous and unconditional. Nygren therefore regrets the fact that
these—in his view irreconcilable—notions have, over the course of
time, become so entangled in Christian teaching “that it is almost im-
possible to disentangle them.” (Nygren 1953, 55)
But perhaps it is also unnecessary—at least from a secular,

non-theological perspective—to want to separate Eros and Agapè so
rigorously. Thus Julia Kristeva adds an Agapè-dimension to psycho-
analytic Eros via her notion of ‘the loving Other’ which adjusts La-
can’s relatively pessimistic view on the symbolic.
The impact of Agapè in the reading process may be just as
important as that of Eros: it is the encounter with a sympathetic Other
which offers the reader a discourse that helps one to put one’s affects
into words. We experience this form of Agapè every time we meet a
recognisable phrase in a poem or novel, a phrase that seems to formu-
late something that is on our minds at the moment we are reading.
This experience resembles an unexpected moment of grace, an uncon-
ditional gift from someone who cannot know us personally, but who
nevertheless writes words or sentences which, years later and across a
great distance, will touch us because they seem to create an intimate
connection between author and reader. We have already noted a good
example of such an experience: namely, the moment that Barthes was
reading Pascal on a flight to Biarritz, and felt that he need no other
language (cf. PR, 353). With this we may also think of the definition
that Barthes gives of the figure in his preface to the Fragments: “une
figure est fondée si au moins quelqu’un peut dire: ‘Comme c’est vrai,
ça! Je reconnais cette scène de langage.’” (OC V, 30, italics in origi-
nal) [[a] figure is established if at least someone can say: ‘That’s so
true! I recognize that scene of language.’ (Barthes 1979, 4, italics in
original)]
At this point in the reading, the inherent loneliness of Eros is
momentarily traversed by Agapè’s recognition: ‘That’s so true!…’
Literature, of course, can never make present the object that I desire,
but it can offer me the right formulation to provide this desire with an
imaginary (and thus a possibility, a line of flight). It is primarily the
later Barthes who, afflicted with mourning for his mother, emphasised
the need to revalue this ‘loving’ function of literature, however bizarre
and out-of-date such a position might sound from the perspective of
avant-garde poetics. This mixture of Eros and Agapè not only played
an important role in reading, but also in teaching. For, however clearly
Barthes indicated in his inaugural lecture that his lecture series would
come to stand under the sign of Eros by his repeated choice of a per-
sonal desire as his starting point, in Barthes this Eros was always ac-
companied by Agapè. Barthes sought to provide his audience with a
sort of accessible library which functioned like a communal, het-

erotopic space where everyone could locate an expression of one’s
own desires. As Claude Coste correctly remarked in a footnote in
Comment vivre ensemble, the synaxis—the hall in which the monks on
Athos, who were living their idiorrhythmic lifestyle, came together for
a common meal or communal prayer—closely resembled Barthes’
ideal library (cf. Coste in CVE, 38 n.21). The principle of synaxis cre-
ates the perfect balance between the intimate loneliness of the individ-
ual reader (like Barthes described in ‘Sur la lecture’) and a community
of readers who once in a while escape their loneliness and gather
around certain texts.
Perhaps we can push Costes’ remark somewhat further and
also interpret Barthes’ utopian synaxis as a modern, secular variant of
a different kind of gathering which was also designated by the name
‘agapè’: the communal meals that the first Christians held as an imita-
tion in memory of the final supper, a gathering which was likely in-
spired by pagan burial ceremonies. This is why—despite the belief in
resurrection—the aspect of mourning also played an important role in
these ‘agapès’. As we have seen, mourning is also a prominent pres-
ence in Barthes’ lectures: not only because of the terminal illness and
the death of his mother, but also because Barthes realised that, to a
certain extent, the fantasy would always fail, that it can never be fully
realised or shared with another. It is precisely on the basis of this im-
possibility, intrinsic to Eros, that Barthes wanted to gather a group of
listeners every week at the Collège de France. It is precisely the deli-
cate understanding that something in me will always remain inacces-
sible and foreign not only to the other, but also to myself, which forms
the foundation of the idiorrhythmic fantasy which makes Agapè pos-
sible as—and perhaps this is not an exaggeration—a form of comfort
for the fear that is inseparable from this loneliness. Or as Barthes
summarised it in a lyrical image at the close of his next-to-last lesson
of Comment vivre ensemble, with a gesture toward the complines, the
monks’ final prayers of the evening: “Vivre-ensemble: seulement
peut-être pour affronter ensemble la tristesse du soir. Être des étran-
gers, c’est inévitable, nécessaire, sauf quand le soir tombe.” (CVE,
176) [Living-Together: simply, perhaps, to confront together the sad-
ness of evening. Being strangers to each other is unavoidable, neces-
sary, except when night falls.]
The professor’s transference
However valuable we might find this attempt to achieve a method of

idiorrhythmic instruction according to the principle of delicacy, in do-
ing so Barthes again overlooks the aggressive, uncontrollable side
hidden in every fantasy. As soon as it appears, desire can effectively
be nothing other than a violation of the delicacy Barthes values so
highly. Someone who desires, makes a choice which cannot but fail to
do justice to everything that is not desired. This also applies to the
teaching situation, for, by speaking about a desire, the teacher exerts
an influence on the desires of his listeners who in turn transform their
own desires. Furthermore, it is not the case that a desire made explicit
is by definition capable of undermining the power that is controlling
the discourse, as Barthes still seemed to believe in his inaugural lec-
ture. Perhaps just the opposite is the case: as the psychoanalytic notion
of transference makes evident, authority and power become possible
at the moment they are supported by desire. In the specific context of
a psychoanalytic session, transference happens when the analysand’s
desire puts the analyst in the position of the so-called ‘subject sup-
posed to know’. The analysand thinks that the Other, in the form of
the psychoanalyst, possesses secret knowledge about the analysand, so
that even the silent moments of a session always seem loaded with un-
spoken significance. The analyst’s desire is thus a desire for knowl-
edge, and this desire inevitably gives the analyst a certain authority
over the analysand on the sofa. (cf. Evans 2001, 211 ff.)
Barthes’ active semiology places the reader in the position of
the analysand. At first glance this seems counterintuitive: the critic is
normally the one who assumes the position of the analyst with respect
to the text, and who is assumed to reveal those things which the text
does not divulge directly, such as: certain structures or genre codes;
the unconscious influence of a particular ideology (patriarchal, colo-
nial, Euro-centrism . . .); or, in a strict psychoanalytic reading, the au-
thor’s unconscious obsessions. But for Barthes, the real ‘subject sup-
posed to know’ during the act of reading is literature itself. While
reading, I get the impression that a certain text contains exceptional,
even if implicit, knowledge about what makes me tick. But just as in
the analytic context where it is only the desire to know that ultimately
causes knowledge itself, the answer offered by the text only comes
about through interaction with the reader. This is the moment where
the fantasy is defined, as for instance was the case with Barthes when,
while reading, he stumbled across the word ‘idiorrhythm’.
A similar transference is also present when one is teaching. In
an article from 1971, ‘Écrivains, intellectuals, professeurs’ (Writers,
Intellectuals, Teachers), Barthes even argues that “la relation ensei-
gnante n’est rien de plus que le transfert qu’elle institue”. (OC III,
891) [the teaching relation is nothing more than the transference it in-
stitutes (Barthes 1989, 314)] According to Barthes, it is therefore the
professor who assumes the position of the analysand. When explain-
ing the lesson to the class, the teacher is exposed to a silent Other who
listens: anyone who has ever delivered a talk during a class, or has
been confronted with a gaze one does not directly know how to inter-
pret, or has heard excited whispering after having made a statement,
realises that every audience contains a ‘subject supposed to know’.
Every time the teacher speaks he exposes his subjectivity to the inac-
cessible gaze of the other who esteems and judges him upon this de-
sire, but who, remaining silent, does not express this judgment. (cf.
890/312-3) Consequently, the ideal of delicacy—namely, to not re-
duce the other to an image—here provokes anxiety: it sends me back
to that open place toward which my desire is directed, a potential vir-
tual self, one that is responsible for the fact that I can never coincide
fully with my current self-image. My insecurity about the Other’s
judgment here intermingles with my uncertainty about who I am actu-
ally becoming. This uncertainty is strengthened even more if I notice
that it is causing the other great pains just to listen to me: “Imagine-t-
on une situation plus ténébreuse que de parler pour (ou devant) des
gens debout ou visiblement mal assis? Qu’est-ce qui s’échange ici? De
quoi cet inconfort est-il le prix? Que vaut ma parole?” (897, italics in
original) [What would be a more dubious situation than speaking for
(or before) people who are standing or uncomfortably seated? What is
being exchanged here? What is such discomfort the price of? What is
my speech worth? (320, italics in original)]
This unease was certainly also true for the teaching situation
at the Collège, where the audience had to arrive very early to still
command one of the few available seats, and otherwise would have to
stand in a crowded auditorium; at a certain point there was even a sec-
ond auditorium made available where people could follow the lectures
over the loudspeakers and Barthes often had to interrupt his lectures
due to technical problems with the sound system.
Yet it was not only this uncomfortable situation that made

Barthes feel uneasy about the value of his lectures. Considering the
fact that his instruction was only granted legitimacy on the basis of a
fantasy, and thus by his subjective relationship to the material he was
teaching, the value attributed to his lectures thus ended up being a di-
rect value judgment on the speaking subject. Why does the other come
to listen if what he hears has nothing to do with an objective truth, and
if he is not compelled by any necessity (such as wishing to obtain a
diploma) to put up with all the difficulties? Barthes had become a
fashionable thinker after the success of the Fragments, and some peo-
ple undoubtedly came to listen purely out of curiosity or intellectual
snobbery. But can that really be the only reason to account for the
enormous interest in his lectures? Barthes clearly wrestled with his
uncertainties about the motives of his audience. The reason for this
underlying anguish is that Barthes’ desire did indeed require the desire
of the Other to want listen to him. And precisely because he was so
dependent on the listening Other, to a certain extent he always wanted
his speaking to be seductive; and to accomplish this he had to con-
stantly—at the expense of delicacy—form an image of the desire of
the Other so that he could play upon their desire, and in this way en-
tice the Other to join him, week after week.
We already interpreted Barthes’ preference for out-of-date
discourses as a perverse strategy whereby he (partially) obtained his
pleasure by provoking the Other. In doing so he occasionally adopted
rather reactionary standpoints (see also Compagnon 2005). What
strikes us here is that many of these remarks, while contained in
Barthes’ lecture notes, were often not pronounced. It is as if, at the last
moment, Barthes shied away from the risk of offending his audience.
And so, never pronounced are those passages where he claims to pre-
fer Kafka’s journals to his actual novels; where he contemplates the
contemporary ‘spiritual genocide’; or where he quotes Verdi approv-
ingly about the return to the past being a form of progress. While there
was always an objective reason for not doing so, mainly a lack of
time, is it not coincidental that the passages Barthes usually omitted
were those passages which, upon rereading, he perhaps found too
abrasive? Barthes thus played with the provocatively perverse position
and also undoubtedly at times reeled it in, but in the end he remained
extremely dependent on the Other’s judgment. It was difficult to trans-
late the perverse reading strategy that Barthes employed with respect
to literature into his lectures. Barthes seemed to end up in a primarily

hysterical position: the value of his desire always needed the affirma-
tion of the Other. This ultimately leads to an ambiguity in Barthes’
point of departure. The perverse strategy is aimed essentially at escap-
ing from, or even destroying the image that the Other has of me and
reflects back upon me, while the hysteric, in all his uncertainty, needs
the Other who conjures up a stable identity for him. This perhaps also
explains Barthes’ half-hearted attitude with respect to speaking in the
Cours, a speaking that turned him irrevocably into a theatrical subject,
that exposed him corporeally to the direct gaze of the Other, thereby
imprisoning him in a particular imago with the result being that his
imaginary coalesced into the one hysterical question: which image do
I give to the other, what am I in their eyes?
On the one hand, Barthes tried everything in his power to nul-
lify this theatricality. This can be seen in his aversion from the mo-
ment that the audience broke their silence and began asking questions.
In principle, the teacher is, for the person who asks a question, only a
medium by which to arrive at a certain knowledge which he assumes
that the teacher possesses, but which has not been expressed thor-
oughly in the lectures. But considering that the encyclopaedic knowl-
edge involved in Barthes’ Cours ultimately derived from a personal
fantasy, Barthes always interpreted questions as having to do with him
personally: the other constructs a particular image of the speaker, one
which is loaded with both positive and negative affects that this image
has (unconsciously) conjured up, and reflects this image back upon
the speaker in the form of an apparently objective request for informa-
tion. The speaker does indeed feel this affective connotation, but is
only expected to deal with the denotation (cf. OC III, 896/Barthes
1989, 319). In Le Neutre Barthes discussed thoroughly the genre of
the question as a violation of the neutral: “il y a toujours un terrorisme
de la question; dans toute question est impliqué un pouvoir. La ques-
tion dénie le droit de ne pas savoir, ou le droit au désir incertain.”
(LN, 145) [there is always a terrorism of the question; a power is im-
plied in every question. The question denies the right not to know or
the right to the indeterminacy of desire (Barthes 2005, 107)] The ques-
tion is the ultimate form of indiscretion: it forces me to display a con-
sistent image of myself, and to defend this image by taking a position,
by clarifying where I stand and thereby exposing the uncertain dy-
namic of my intimate imaginary to the petrifying gaze of the Other. It
is thus no surprise that Barthes refused to answer direct questions

from the audience during his lessons. (cf. 95/62)
On the other hand, and despite his aversion, Barthes needed
the gaze of the Other to affirm and legitimise him in the fictitious
identity that he himself stages. As Barthes made clear at the beginning
of the second part of La Préparation du roman, he made a conscious
effort to perform himself as a character which was presented to the
audience for approval. He compares his role as a professor to Sartre’s
famous example of the waiter in L’être et le néant. (cf. PR, 233-4)
Here we should also not forget that Sartre used the example of the
waiter to illustrate bad faith: the waiter perfects the mannerisms and
actions that people expect from a waiter, and thus plays the role that
he is in the eyes of the other. But, in reality, his game obscures the
choice that he made at that moment to behave like the ultimate waiter
in the eyes of his customers, and he ignores his freedom to not want to
be a waiter for the Other.
A similar—albeit more subtle, but consequently all the more
dangerous—variant of this bad faith perhaps also typifies Barthes’ po-
sition. Firstly, the fantasy functions as a way for the literature profes-
sor to destroy bad faith: it forces one to consider her or his relation-
ship to one’s own jouissance and thus deprives her or him of the right
to hide behind an objective teaching method, a universal canon. No
more than the waiter does the professor have the right to hide behind
one’s job description. But a new form of bad faith threatens to once
again unfold in Barthes’ lectures precisely by staging that fantasy so
openly. By presenting himself as someone who wants to write, and by
positioning himself as a character, Barthes can, as a spectator, appar-
ently take distance with respect to the scenario he performs for the au-
dience at the Collège de France. Just like the waiter, he hides behind
his occupation, behind his status as a professor which now forces him
to appear before the Other in a particular role. But by taking the role
of aspiring writer upon himself, and then parading it about like the
waiter with his mannerisms, it became impossible to actually get
down to writing on the basis of that fantasy. As Deleuze states in Dia-
logues, writing compels the subject to step out of one’s role, to be-
come someone else, and thus also to finally abandon the image of be-
ing a writer: “[écrire] c’est devenir, devenir autre chose qu’écrivain”.
(Deleuze & Parnet 2004b, 89) [ [writing] is becoming, becoming
something other than a writer (Deleuze & Parnet 2007, 74)]
In this way, the lectures at the Collège perhaps indeed pro-

vided Barthes with the ideal excuse not to begin writing his work: as
long as he felt obliged as a professor (because he, in a way, was ‘paid
for it’) to display his fantasy as illustrational material, to stage it for an
audience, he was unable to realise this fantasy in a literary praxis.
When encapsulated in his lectures, his fantasy loses its transformative
capacity: Barthes always again postponed the creation of the vita
nuova via the fantasy (which, as appears from the conclusion of
Comment vivre ensemble, can only happen offstage, via clandestine,
intimate writing), putting it off until a later lecture series, which was
then invoked as an argument to suspend preparing the previous lecture
series for publication. An unmistakable inertia is displayed here, a re-
active resistance on Barthes’ part, a hysterical attempt to misrecognise
his singular bêtise as it appears in the fantasy by contracting this fan-
tasy out to the character that he was for his audience. For the profes-
sor, the danger emerges that the ‘taught’ fantasy becomes imprisoned
in the transference relation with his audience, and becomes unproduc-
tive, precisely by making his desire theatrical.
The transference of the audience
The danger of an unproductive transference also lurks in the relation-

ship of the audience to the teacher. The latter may well have the im-
pression that one’s audience is the ‘subject supposed to know’, but
looked at from their standpoint, it is actually the teacher who assumes
this position simply because he is the one who has the institutional
right to speak and is therefore assumed to have a wealth of knowledge
at his disposal which he is prepared to share with the audience lecture
after lecture. As we have seen, Barthes tried to dispel the illusion of
authority as much as possible by presenting himself more as ‘desiring’
than as ‘knowing’. But in doing so, Barthes did not take into account
the influence of transference. Even if Barthes had succeeded in con-
vincing his audience that he was only speaking as an amateur, and that
the knowledge he conveyed in his lectures was transformed by what-
ever his individual fantasy happened to be at the time, this fantasy
would nevertheless still lose its arbitrariness due to to the transference
of the audience. The simple fact that Barthes taught on the basis of a
desire while serving in the capacity of known intellectual and profes-
sor at the Collège de France immediately turns this desire into some-
thing exceptional. Barthes thus becomes a subject supposed to know
. . . what one should desire.
In a letter to Barthes on the occasion of his lectures about the
neutral, Hervé Dubourjal referred to the following paradox in Barthes’
Cours: “Être Roland Barthes et dire ‘je désire le Neutre’ n’impose
rien, mais une partie importante de l’auditoire dira: ‘Il faut désirer le
neutre.’” (LN, 100) [To be Roland Barthes and to say: ‘I desire the
Neutral’ may not impose anything except that a large part of the audi-
ence will say: ‘One must desire the neutral.’ (Barthes 2005, 67)]
Barthes read this fragment from the letter aloud in his lesson and ad-
mitted that the person who wrote the letter had indeed revealed an im-
portant aporia which, in his opinion, was impossible to remove. Who-
ever speaks of his desire, in order to avoid becoming an intellectual
guru, ironically enough always runs the risk of becoming the guru of
desire. Barthes hereby exchanged the position of the master based
upon the transference of knowledge, for a position of the master based
upon the transference of a practice. In the eyes of his audience he oc-
cupied a position comparable with that of Foucault’s parrhesiastes:
someone who attuned one’s bios to one’s logos and who led one’s
own life in accordance with the principles one proclaimed in one’s in-
struction, in this case, according to the ethics of the neutral.
In Barthes’ case, this logos is created by the fantasies that he
took as his starting point and with which he was able to develop his
vita nuova. In doing so, Barthes practiced a form of truth-saying ap-
parently without any transcendent legitimation, but for which he nev-
ertheless stood as a guarantee with his own existence. The danger in
this is that ultimately the personal touchstone of the desire of the other
comes to serve as an ethical imperative. The speaker’s power of per-
suasion then becomes so great that his desire is appropriated and the
teacher’s ‘I desire . . .’ changes into the audience’s ‘I should desire . .
.’. Hervé Dubourjal’s remark thus touches upon an essential problem
in Barthes’ phantasmatic instruction. For just as the teacher’s fantasy
runs the risk of becoming unproductive through its imaginary relation-
ship with his audience, the danger also exists that the audience’s de-
sire becomes blocked when they attune themselves imaginarily to the
image they form of the teacher’s desire, and subsequently try to orient
themselves in the line of this desire.
The art of failure
The question now is how a teacher can also finally get around the
master position founded upon parrhesia. One obvious answer would
go like this: by simply failing in the paideia, by openly failing as a
parrhesiastes. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this failure is, in
fact, unavoidable because the goal that the parrhesiastes sets for him-
self can never be attained. There will always be an extimate kernel
which prevents me from becoming who I am; an excessive jouissance
which can neither be mastered nor integrated, and which not only hin-
ders my bios and logos from ever overlapping harmoniously, but also
serves as an obstruction to the actualisation of the fantasy. This fun-
damental failure can always become conscious through external fac-
tors, like those of the hysteric, which maintain the illusion that without
these factors perhaps the fantasy could have succeeded after all. Ap-
plied to Barthes: had his mourning not been so excessive, had he not
felt so intimidated by the audience, and above all, had he only paid
more attention when crossing the street . . .
Barthes also provided us unintentionally with the image of a
failing professor in the posthumously published journal fragments
from Incidents (1987). The Barthes who is speaking to us here feels
lonely, gloomy: he mourns for his mother, is bored by his work and by
the books he has to read. He is plagued by migraines and feels disap-
pointed in his relationships and dissatisfying contacts with gigolos,
wanders aimlessly through the streets of Paris on damp, rainy nights:
not exactly the vita nuova that he presented to himself and his audi-
ence in his seminars. We also find a similar image of Barthes as the
failing professor from the biographical givens about his last month in
La Salpêtrière. His injuries were far from fatal and it indeed seemed
as if Barthes simply let himself slip away into death, as if his fatigue
with life and the desperation caused by the death of his mother had
overrun his will to live. Thus appears the figure of Barthes as someone
who ultimately succumbed to ressentiment in a very un-Nietzschean
manner, half-heartedly resisting his fate but still seemingly unwilling
to recover, thereby displaying a total lack of ‘care of the self’. Is this
then perhaps the ultimate (since posthumous) way for a teacher to
break the spell of transference? The moment that we—with a degree
of disappointment—are forced to conclude that a chasm separated
theory and practice, logos and bios? Owing to the fact that the parrhe-
siastic authority has fallen to pieces, for the time being Barthes seems
to have reached his goal: the place of the master is finally empty.
Yet this position does not stay empty for long: a new image of
Barthes appeared quickly, one which goes together with a new form of
authority: a figure of a master who knows that he knows nothing, who
knows that his only legitimacy is the desire which he did not yield,
and who finally abandoned every illusion that an ideal lifestyle could
be achieved via that desire. The ethics of this Barthes is a Lacanian
ethics, a rigorous ethic of failure, of the subject that does not give up
on his desire despite the lucid awareness that this desire circles a void
and is nothing more than the phantasmatic relationship to its libidinal
being. But such a Lacanian ethics in fact makes failure theatrical: lit-
erally, for Lacan uses tragic heroes such as Antigone or Oedipus at
Colonus to illustrate his point, heroes who acquire an aestheticised
magnetism due to their failures and the stubbornness with which they
meet their fate. In this way there thus appears yet a final incarnation of
the master as the subject supposed to know . . . how to fail.
From this we may conclude that, whichever different phase of
transference we are going through, a master figure will always surface
again who fixates desire in an imaginary relationship—so long as the
relationship between professor and student stays moored in the hys-
terical position. The question now becomes whether or not we can
also formulate an approach to a perverse teaching strategy alongside
Barthes’ perverse reading strategy; a teaching strategy able to avoid
the trappings of hysteria by means of an affirmation of the bêtise.
The art of perverse teaching
The bêtise might just be the solution which prevents an extremely per-
sonal discourse such as Barthes’ from having the effect of a doxa—by
which desire becomes law through the effect of transference—on an
intimidated other. I can indeed turn the other’s desire into my desire,
but never his bêtise, for even if I, to a certain extent, can enjoy the fact
that I can discern this enjoyment in the other, for the neurotic subject
there is always a remnant of hysterical resistance to this jouissance of
the other. I can hear someone speak on the basis of his desire; I can
even mirror myself imaginarily on this desire, but this identification
lapses as soon as real enjoyment begins to echo through the others
speech. It is an idiotic enjoyment that the other perhaps does not even
notice, but which nevertheless repulses me, irritates me because it
makes the body of the other visible in all its obscenity; namely, right
at the point where this body becomes a stranger to the other himself
. It
is precisely by showing one’s enjoyment that the speaker loses the po-
sition of the master, not because one fails openly as a master, but be-
cause one enjoys something that one cannot overmaster. The un-
bridgeable gap which separates my body from the other is in this way
exposed, without necessarily excluding the possibility of intersubjec-
tivity. It is a communal ideal which we also rediscover as a utopia in
Barthes when he, in Le Plaisir du texte, pleads for the establishment of
a Société des Amis du Texte (Society of the Friends of the Text):
ses membres n’auraient rien en commun (car il n’y a pas forcément
accord sur les textes du plaisir) sinon leur ennemis: casse-pieds de
toutes sortes, qui décrètent la forclusion du texte et de son plaisir, soit
par conformisme culturel, soit par rationalisme intransigeant (suspec-
tant une ‘mystique’ de la littérature), soit par moralisme politique, soit
par critique du signifiant, soit par pragmatisme imbécile, soit par ni-
aiserie loustic, soit par destruction du discours, perte du désir verbal.
(OC IV, 226)
[its members would have nothing in common (for there is no neces-

sary agreement on the texts of pleasure) but their enemies: fools of all
kinds, who decree foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure, either by
cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism (suspecting a ‘mys-
tique’ of literature) or by political moralism or by criticism of the sig-
nifier or by stupid pragmatism or by snide vacuity or by destruction of
the discourse, loss of verbal desire. (Barthes 1975,15)]
Barthes attempted to bring the ideals of this Société into prac-

tice in his seminars at the École pratique des hautes études and in his
lectures at the Collège de France. The ideal was for a reading com-
munity in which different subjects got together to tackle literary texts,
and was constituted of subjects who could accept that the other just
plain enjoys; I accept that the other, because of his enjoyment, lays
claim to me momentarily, and vice versa. In a text from 1974, ‘Au
séminaire’ (To the seminar), Barthes compared this with ‘The Slip-
per’, a round game in which a person is chosen to sit in the middle of
a circle of players. The person in the centre must close his eyes while
a certain object, such as a ring or a handkerchief, is passed from per-
son to person behind their backs. At a certain moment the person in
the middle opens his or her eyes and has to choose who is holding the
object at that moment. If we make Barthes’ comparison more explicit,
we can say that this object is the object of desire which is passed con-
tinually from text to reader, from reader to co-reader, from co-reader
to co-reader, but can never be apprehended so that the game can never
end. And in fact, that is also not the intention: it is about the capricious
cartography of all those different lines of flight and the unanticipated
encounters that occur when two lines cross. It is at this crossroad that I
briefly catch an image of the fantasy of an other, acquire insight into a
process of becoming that is not mine, and momentarily detect the en-
joyment that is its motor; and in turn, I allow someone else to do the
same to me. Both parties thus remain discrete enough to accept the
other’s fantasy as it is, but are simultaneously perverse enough to ob-
tain enjoyment from the sudden encounter, to use it as inspiration for
one’s own becoming. This fleeting encounter is not the final, ‘official’
purpose of the game, but according to Barthes, nonetheless its hidden
goal: “le propos est de faire passer l’anneau, mais la fin est de se
toucher les mains”. (OC IV, 507) [the object is to pass the ring, but the
goal is to touch each other’s hands (Barthes 1989, 338)] Of course, the
image that the other constructs of me with this ‘touching’ is a misun-
derstanding, is a deformation of my desire; and I in turn naturally mis-
recognise the radical ‘otherness of the other’ by integrating it into my
fantasy. But perhaps this mutual exchange does indeed offer the only
possibility to speak about the fantasy from outside a position of mas-
tery, without having to relinquish the enjoyment in that desire.
Such a perverse reading and teaching strategy does not have to
be limited to institutions such as the Collège de France or those of a
specific nature, that is to say, to those without course requirements,
without exams, without diplomas. Barthes active semiology is not a
hedonistic competitor for all the other implicit objectives that litera-
ture education can propose, and also need not hinder in the least the
evaluation of these objectives via exams or papers. Active semiology
is more of an unanticipated supplement, like touching one another’s
hands playing ‘The Slipper’. Indirectly, it wants to point out to the
reader and the student the bêtise present in every reading, in every
teaching method, not so as to discredit the results of the research, but
to activate the creative force of this bêtise while doing the research. It
is the bêtise that enables the text to bring the subject into process and
actually changes it, carried along in a dérive or, as Barthes calls it in

‘Écrivains, intellectuals, professeurs’, in a flottement:
En somme, dans les limites mêmes de l’espace enseignant, tel qu’il est
donné, il s’agirait de travailler à tracer patiemment une forme pure,
celle du flottement (qui est la forme même du signifiant); ce flottement
ne détruirait rien, il se contenterait de désorienter la Loi: les nécessités
de la promotion, les obligations du métier (que rien n’interdit dès lors
d’honorer avec scrupule), les impératifs du savoir, le prestige de la
méthode, la critique idéologique, tout est là, mais qui flotte. (OC III,
906-7, italics in original)
In short, within the very limits of the teaching space as given, the need
is to attempt, quite patiently, to trace out a pure form, that of a floating
(the very form of the signifier): such floating destroys nothing; it is
content to disorient the Law: the necessities of promotion, profes-
sional obligations (which nothing henceforth keeps from being scru-
pulously fulfilled), imperatives of knowledge, prestige of method,
ideological criticism—everything is there, but floating. (Barthes 1989,
331, italics in original)
It is with this flottement that active semiology recommences Sartre’s

engagement with which this investigation began, and confronts the
reader with one’s irreducible, singular involvement in the text lying
before him. It is precisely the enjoyment of the dérive which makes
the reader realize that he, and no other, is reading the text. Active
semiology applies an ethics that does not attempt to hide behind bad
faith, but which demands attention for the changes which literature
sets before us personally: for that which always allows itself to be read
or heard when language does not serve purely to convey meaning, but
is used improperly in the fantasy of the reader. This is, after all, what
Barthes’ principle of delicacy searched for, like an meandering line of
flight: the kairos of literature by which, as Barthes already stated at
the conclusion of Sade, Fourier, Loyola, “analyse et jouissance se
réunissent au profit d’une exaltation inconnue de nos sociétés et qui
par là même constitue la plus formidable des utopies.” (OC III, 850)
[analysis and bliss join together to produce an exaltation that is un-
known in our societies and which constitutes therefore the most for-
midable of utopias. (Barthes 1997, 170-1)]
Exit Barthes.
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Index
active semiology, 26, 28, 164, 166, becoming, 19, 81, 84, 101, 115, 123,
176, 185, 187, 194, 195, 201, 220, 197, 204, 222, 227, 231, 232, 249,
221, 223, 225, 229, 233, 243, 244, 254, 257, 261, 274
255, 257, 264, 274, 275 -animal, 81
adjective, 172, 180, 221 -bird, 81, 82
Agapè, 261, 262, 263 -gay, 123
Agostinelli, A., 91 -Gradiva, 85, 124
akedia, 194, 249 -idiorrhythmic, 187
anachronism, 25, 213, 214, 215, 218, -Italian, 202
221, 223, 226, 228, 255 -Japanese, 202, 222
analysand, 31, 32, 46, 47, 51, 52, 56, -neutral, 187
78, 85, 115, 124, 128, 264, 265 -Oedipus, 94
analyst, 31, 32, 34, 44, 51, 70, 105, -perverse, 89
185, 264 -Werther, 157, 160
arrogance, 172, 173, 178, 180, 198, writing as -, 268
200, 217 being-toward-death, 14, 16, 18, 19,
Athos, Mt., 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 77, 116, 126, 160
195, 199, 200, 204, 244, 263 Benjamin, W., 174
autarchy, 183 Bergson, H., 73
authenticity, 119, 235 Bernini, G., The ecstasy of St. Teresa
authority, 32, 60, 87, 110, 118, 130, of Avila, 17
144, 147, 151, 154, 164, 185, 192, bêtise, 25, 28, 141, 142, 143, 144,
211, 231, 258, 264, 269, 272 145, 147, 148, 156, 159, 160, 175,
autobiography, 25, 91, 130, 150, 151, 180, 203, 233, 243, 244, 245, 246,
152, 158, 160, 225, 237, 238 254, 269, 272, 274
avant-garde, 57, 58, 59, 138, 139, Binswanger, L., 114, 115, 116, 117,
141, 157, 177, 178, 192, 214, 217, 119, 121, 126, 153, 249
220, 238, 262 biographèmes, 140, 251, 252
bad faith, 13, 16, 20, 253, 268, 275 biography, 136, 138, 140, 150, 158,
Bakhtin, M., 58, 138 193, 199, 225
Balzac, H. de, 231 Blanchot, M., 117, 119, 174, 223
Sarrasine, 23, 136, 137, 138, 147 body, 12, 17, 18, 19, 24, 26, 35, 38,
Barthes, H. (mother of R.B.), 20, 27, 39, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54,
133, 150, 152, 179, 184, 199, 212, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 71, 73, 74, 79,
213, 215, 216, 217, 227, 235, 236, 80, 81, 85, 87, 91, 94, 95, 102,
239, 248, 250, 262, 263, 271 112, 113, 118, 124, 126, 133, 134,
Barthes, L. (father of R.B.), 20, 151, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145,
152, 179, 184, 216 146, 150, 151, 154, 156, 159, 165,
basanos. See touchstone 166, 169, 179, 186, 189, 197, 200,
Basho, 208 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 214, 216,
Bataille, G., 59, 119, 231 218, 220, 233, 239, 243, 244, 245,
Baudelaire, Ch., 113, 174 252, 273
bourgeoisie, 13, 16, 20, 21, 46, 85,
142, 152, 177, 182, 199
Brazza, P. Savorgan de, 211 death, 14, 18, 56, 57, 86, 116, 117,
Brecht, B., 22, 180, 246, 247 118, 120, 125, 126, 127, 159, 213,
Die Mutter, 180 214, 220, 249, 251, 252
Brown, A., 134 as creative force, 254
Buddha, 259 contemplation of, 126, 249
Buddhism, 168, 259 dream of, 116
Burckhardt, J., 79 of Barthes, 25, 248, 271
Burke, S., 231 of Barthes' mother, 27, 133, 181,
Burnier, M.A., 171 184, 212, 215, 227, 235, 236,
Butor, M., 22 250, 263, 271
Caesar, J., 79 of Foucault, 127
Calvet, L.-J., 139, 151, 152, 163, 179, of the author, 119, 120, 136, 230,
194, 199, 248 248, 251, 252, 254
care of the self, 27, 100, 107, 108, of the Father, 241
109, 110, 111, 112, 125, 130, 188, of the novel, 178
271 deconstructionism, 145, 164
cartography, 80, 83, 94, 95, 202, 274 Defoe, D., 169
castration, 183, 218 Robinson Crusoe, 168, 169, 174,
Cervantes, M. de, Don Quixote, 50 193, 199, 208, 209
Char, R., 112 Deleuze, G., 18, 19, 23, 25, 67, 72,
character (fictional), 11, 14, 21, 25, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81,
50, 51, 52, 65, 92, 93, 94, 95, 134, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,
146, 150, 153, 154, 156, 160, 165, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102,
168, 231, 232, 237, 240, 241, 246, 105, 106, 113, 119, 121, 124, 125,
247, 268, 269 129, 132, 146, 147, 157, 158, 184,
Chateaubriand, F.-R. de, 177, 192, 186, 187, 189, 201, 219, 238, 257,
223 268
Vie de Rancé, 222 delicacy, 206, 217, 223, 260, 261,
chora, 58, 139 264, 265, 266, 275
Christ, 79, 220 delirium, 79
Christianity, 103, 107, 130, 168 demon, 19, 100, 114, 121, 122, 123,
Clerc, Th., 10 124, 129, 131, 132, 135, 148, 159,
Clifford, Ch., Alhambra, 200 160, 188, 194, 203, 223, 232, 238
Colebrook, C., 75 dérive, 142, 148, 153, 158, 165, 187,
Coleridge, S.T. 203, 275
'willing suspension of belief', 53, desire, 18, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 41,
147 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56,
Compagnon, A., 266 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72,
compliment, 172 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84,
compulsion to repeat, 125, 132 85, 86, 90, 91, 94, 103, 104, 105,
conditional tense, 252 106, 107, 108, 114, 115, 117, 124,
confession, 90, 103, 105, 109, 110, 128, 131, 145, 176, 179, 182, 183,
130, 131, 152, 158, 194, 235 184, 186, 191, 192, 203, 217, 227,
Coste, C., 10, 263 233, 240, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251,
Cressole, M., 88 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265,
Culler, J., 175, 206, 210 266, 267, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274
Dante, A., 28, 165, 166 and aggression, 194
Divina Commedia, 165, 249 and negativity, 186
Works Cited 287
for comprehensiveness, 189 187, 188, 193, 198, 203, 224, 237,
for knowledge, 264 243, 246, 247
for seclusion, 170 ego-psychology, 44
for submission, 90 Emanuele, V., 79
guru of -, 270 encyclopaedia, 28, 189, 190, 204, 223
indeterminacy of -, 173, 267 engagement, 21, 24, 275
'logothetic', 170 enjoyment, 17, 25, 37, 38, 41, 43, 52,
not to read something, 155 53, 55, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 85, 86,
object of -, 18, 35, 36, 40, 41, 48, 87, 124, 125, 127, 141, 144, 145,
49, 51, 53, 57, 66, 73, 74, 126, 146, 147, 186, 194, 207, 218, 241,
146, 157, 181, 209, 213, 216, 248, 272, 273, 275
217, 233, 239, 253, 259, 261, Enlightenment, 31, 111, 244
262, 274 en-soi, 11, 13, 17, 18, 233, 249
of the analyst, 264 Epictetus, 127, 250
of the audience, 270 epiphany, 176
of the author, 233, 251 Eribon, D., 101, 102
of the mother, 180 Eros, 64, 261, 262, 263
of the reader, 191, 209, 251 eternal recurrence, 122, 125
of the text, 233 ethic of failure, 272
to die, 116 ethical turn, 27
to disappear, 123 ethics
to escape, 172, 199, 200, 249 and delicacy, 260
to fly, 82 existentialist -, 15, 19
to know, 264 Foucauldian -, 127
to travel, 199, 203 Greek -, 109
to withdraw, 168, 170 Lacanian -, 56, 57, 127, 272
to write, 176, 178, 182, 215, 227, of Barthes' project, 25, 27, 186,
228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 260, 275
237, 242, 250, 254 of language, 172
deterritorialisation, 81, 87, 94, 186, of the neutral, 270
197, 201, 208 Ette, O., 143
Ding an sich, 37 Eurymedusa, 198
Dionysius, 79 Evans, D., 129, 264
doppelgänger. See double event, 76, 77, 99, 123, 124, 188, 208,
double, 19, 65, 100, 118, 119, 120, 209, 213, 224, 226
121, 126, 129, 131, 159, 160, 169, exhibitionism, 247
194, 196, 203, 232, 253 existentialism, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
doxa, 20, 21, 25, 142, 164, 165, 169, extimacy, 37, 38, 131, 150, 260, 271
171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 180, 186, fantasy, 10, 18, 19, 26, 28, 37, 38, 39,
198, 199, 210, 211, 220, 240, 243, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52,
244, 272 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 65,
Dreyfus, H.L., 104, 105, 107, 113, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78,
130 80, 83, 88, 90, 91, 92, 101, 105,
Dubourjal, H., 187, 270 113, 116, 121, 125, 127, 132, 135,
Eco, U., Foucault's Pendulum, 146 161, 166, 167, 170, 176, 182, 186,
ego, 15, 25, 44, 47, 48, 52, 56, 76, 80, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 200,
87, 92, 96, 99, 100, 107, 113, 115, 204, 212, 217, 223, 228, 229, 230,
116, 118, 128, 129, 133, 153, 158, 233, 234, 238, 239, 242, 244, 247,
252, 255, 257, 258, 259, 261, 263, Gide, A., 159, 169, 192, 193, 234,
264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 235, 236, 241, 254, 255
271, 274, 275 La séquestrée de Poitiers, 168,
etymological meaning of, 41 169, 193
fundamental -, 47, 48, 56, 76, 77, God, 52, 159, 191, 244
79, 96, 124, 129 Goethe, W., 32, 157, 159, 221, 247
idiorrhythmic -, 167, 168, 170, The Sorrows of Young Werther,
171, 172, 181, 183, 193, 199, 157, 159, 160, 165, 232, 244,
230, 263 246, 247
of the neutral, 172, 174, 181, 182, governmentality, 107
183, 187, 261 Greimas, A., 21
of the novel, 176, 177, 179, 182, Guattari, F., 18, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81,
228, 232, 248, 251 87, 89, 90, 95, 96, 105, 113, 121,
original -, 66 132
traversal of the -, 56, 57 haiku, 174, 175, 176, 180, 182, 199,
fetish, 84, 86, 146, 147, 155, 191, 200, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212,
209, 212, 218, 219, 222, 226, 227, 217, 226, 239
239 Heidegger, M., 114
Flaubert, G., 177, 192 hermaphrodite, 183
Dictionnaire des idées reçues, 142 hermit, 168
'impassibilité', 52 Herschberg-Pierrot, A., 143
La tentation de Saint-Antoine, 117 heterotopia, 195, 196, 197, 204, 205,
Madame Bovary, 50, 52, 144 263
focalisation, 51 Higgins, L.A., 199
for-itself. See pour-soi historiography, 97, 107, 220, 221
Foucault, M., 18, 19, 25, 67, 96, 97, Hoffmann, E.T.A., 32
98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, Horney, K., 191, 192
105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, hypomnemata, 130, 131, 132, 135,
112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 159, 225, 255
119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, hysteria, 50, 65, 139, 143, 144, 145,
127, 129, 130, 131, 135, 153, 163, 146, 147, 148, 155, 215, 217, 245,
188, 195, 196, 225, 249, 250, 252, 267, 269, 271, 272
270 identification, 22, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52,
Fourier, Ch., 170, 171, 252 60, 79, 95, 115, 123, 141, 145,
freedom, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 153, 156, 158, 236, 249, 272
56, 61, 112, 115, 116, 137, 155, idiorrhythm, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171,
161, 163, 164, 177, 180, 258, 268 172, 178, 179, 181, 183, 187, 193,
Freud, S., 18, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 194, 199, 200, 230, 238, 257, 263,
43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 62, 264, 265
64, 65, 66, 82, 83, 84, 85, 94, 105, imaginary, the, 12, 26, 37, 41, 44, 45,
114, 115, 118, 121, 122, 125, 183, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54, 60, 61, 62, 100,
184, 191, 192, 193, 218, 223 115, 128, 134, 148, 150, 153, 154,
Gaillard, F., 143 156, 160, 161, 165, 172, 174, 187,
gaze, 9, 12, 16, 17, 42, 43, 47, 48, 51, 188, 212, 238, 249, 250, 260, 262,
57, 185, 196, 202, 203, 212, 219, 267, 272
247, 253, 265, 267, 268 and father figure, 151
generosity, 237, 246 and figure of the author, 230
Genet, J., 223
Works Cited 289
and reading, 25, 117, 119, 121, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66,
134, 149, 153, 195 67, 74, 76, 77, 79, 107, 115, 121,
of the lover, 26 126, 127, 128, 129, 135, 149, 150,
of writing, 153 160, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196, 238,
imagination, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 29, 262, 272
41, 50, 60, 61, 65, 81, 115, 156, Lacarrière, J., L'Eté grec. Une Grèce
165, 169, 177, 200, 202, 205, 212, quotidienne de 4000 ans, 167
249, 260 lack, 36, 38, 41, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63,
individuation, 75, 94, 125, 208 64, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 86, 90, 106,
in-itself. See en-soi 126, 139, 144, 146, 151, 155, 157,
intoxication, 161, 188 179, 209, 216, 226, 249, 261
intraitable, 142, 260 and narrative, 239
Italy, 33, 34, 56, 83, 84, 124, 198, denial of -, 86, 183, 184, 220
201, 202, 203, 204, 239, 246, 257 in the text, 51, 131, 144, 145
Jakobson, R., 21 of pertinence, 154, 157, 158, 159
Japan, 139, 147, 199, 202, 204, 205, Lang, J., 248
217, 222 Laouyen, M., 151
Jensen, W., 32, 118 Laplanche, J., 67
Gradiva, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 43, 44, Lautréamont, Comte de, 58
47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 64, law, 88, 90, 153, 171, 185, 198, 240,
65, 66, 73, 83, 84, 85, 94, 118, 272, 275
124, 158, 203 and Barthes' mother, 213, 217, 236
jouissance, 37, 48, 53, 67, 76, 141, and perversion, 86, 146, 147, 151,
142, 145, 148, 171, 185, 189, 191, 171, 183, 216
206, 207, 208, 268, 271, 272, 275 micro-, 155, 192
Jouve, V., 24 of reading, 154, 155, 164, 191, 192
Joyce, J., 128, 129, 176 of the father, 186, 241
judgment, 87, 98, 123, 141, 145, 179, of time, 217, 226
182, 253, 259, 261, 265, 266 Lawrence, D.H., 93, 201
Jung, C.G., 114 Léger, N., 10
Kafka, F., 8, 90, 177, 228, 229, 241, libidinal being, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 47,
244 51, 56, 57, 58, 60, 66, 69, 70, 71,
kairos, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222, 223, 74, 76, 79, 85, 92, 115, 124, 126,
227, 275 129, 145, 146, 260, 272
Kandiyoti, D., 199 library, 15, 117, 155, 190, 193, 254,
Kant, I., 73, 111, 112 263
Kauppi, N., 192 lifestyle, 89, 91, 103, 112, 157, 168,
Klein, M., 36 169, 187, 249, 263, 272
Klossowski, P., 121, 122 line of flight, 81, 82, 85, 92, 93, 94,
Knight, D., 198, 199 95, 123, 124, 132, 157, 158, 187,
Köselitz, H., 203 197, 222, 228, 231, 244, 257, 262,
Kristeva, J., 18, 25, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 275
61, 62, 72, 96, 138, 139, 151, 153, lisible. See readerly
156, 262 logothete, 170, 171, 231
Kundera, M. Lotringer, S., 84, 124
'The Hitchhiking Game', 54, 55, 95 loving Other, 59, 60, 151, 156, 262
Lacan, J., 18, 19, 23, 25, 37, 38, 39, Loyola, I. de, 170, 171, 252
41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53,
madness, 80, 95, 98, 100, 101, 116, Nietzsche, F., 25, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72,
125, 126, 160, 203 73, 79, 94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 102,
Mallarmé, S., 58, 119, 177 103, 122, 124, 129, 142, 149, 186,
Mann, Th., 169 189, 203, 221, 223, 224, 228, 247,
Der Zauberberg, 168, 199 259
Maoism, 139 novel, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 43, 51, 64,
Marx, K., 223 66, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 124,
Marxism, 20, 145, 235, 242 136, 138, 150, 154, 157, 158, 159,
masochism, 86, 87, 219 165, 169, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179,
maternal space, 198, 199, 200, 208 180, 181, 184, 193, 204, 215, 216,
mauvaise foi. See bad faith 220, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229,
May ’68, 139, 145, 185, 199 234, 237, 238, 240, 245, 246, 248,
melancholy, 181, 194, 217, 236 249, 257, 262
meletê thanatou. See death, novelistic, 177, 178, 181, 197, 204,
contemplation of 206, 226, 231, 236, 243, 246, 248
Melville, H., 93 nuance, 71, 150, 151, 157, 172, 183,
menstruation, 218 186
Michelet, J., 20, 25, 149, 166, 177, Nygren, A., 261
178, 218, 219, 220, 221, 231, 254 obscenity, 157, 215, 218, 273
Miller, J., 101, 102, 103, 106, 114, obsessional neurosis, 143, 145, 146
116, 121, 123 Oedipus, 78, 94, 183, 186
mirror absence of -, 151, 180
-as heterotopia, 196 and event, 209
image, 41, 42, 44, 46, 51, 61, 115, and father figure, 152, 183, 184,
128, 131, 153, 158, 161, 196, 209, 240
232, 238 and narrative, 151, 193, 239, 241
library as -, 193 complex, 35, 36, 59, 64, 78, 89,
stage, 41, 115, 150, 153, 160, 196 90, 91, 153, 216, 240
misrecognition, 44, 51, 53, 60, 63, 67, myth, 64, 240, 241
126, 128, 160 pre-, 36, 58, 72, 179, 198, 201,
Mitterand, F., 248 208, 240
monk, 167, 244 paideia, 95, 124, 125, 189, 201, 224,
Monnier, B., 169 255, 271
Moriarty, M., 138 Panamarenko, 82
Mortimer, A.K., 141 paranoia, 143, 146
mourning, 27, 152, 181, 216, 217, Parnet, C., 74, 82, 83, 90, 92, 93, 95,
227, 228, 229, 236, 248, 249, 262, 201, 268
263, 271 Parrhasios, 42
mundus inversus, 237 parrhesia, 100, 109, 110, 111, 270,
Nabokov, V., Pale Fire, 146 271, 272
Name-of-the-Father, the, 79 parrhesiast, 271
Neefs, J., 119 passé simple, 239
Neither-Nor criticism, 182 pathos of distance, 69, 71, 72, 94, 99,
neurosis, 90, 143 135, 157, 186, 241, 244, 247
neutral, the, 172, 174, 175, 178, 179, perverse reading strategy, 25, 26, 28,
180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 190, 134, 135, 143, 147, 148, 149, 154,
199, 236, 238, 240, 267, 270 157, 161, 164, 166, 175, 192, 197,
Works Cited 291
206, 208, 218, 221, 245, 266, 272, punctum, 210, 211, 212, 213, 216,
274 222
perversion, 25, 28, 73, 85, 87, 88, 89, Pyrrhonism, 174
102, 129, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152, question
153, 154, 157, 183, 184, 185, 186, aggression of the -, 267
189, 192, 201, 207, 208, 209, 211, arrogance of the -, 173
213, 217, 218, 220, 226, 236, 240, genre of the -, 173
245, 253, 266, 267 Rabaté, J.-M., 128, 129, 141
phalanstère, 170 Rabinow, P., 104, 105, 107, 113, 130
phallus, 183, 219 Racine, J., 23, 135, 177, 178
photography, 26, 167, 176, 200, 209, Rambaud, P., 171
210, 212, 216, 217, 226 readability, 238, 242
Picard, R., 135, 136, 145, 171 readerly, 137, 138, 141, 158, 177,
Plato, 64, 159 214, 246, 257
Crito, 170, 198 real, the, 37, 42, 47, 58, 63, 64, 115,
Laches, 110 186, 217, 233
Timaeus, 58 realism, 22, 205
Platonism, 43, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 83, reality effect, 209, 212, 230, 240
109, 111 Reich, W., 191, 192
anti-, 73 reterritorialisation, 85, 96, 106, 158
pre-, 72 Rimbaud, A., 'Je est un autre', 160,
play area, 49, 197, 201, 217 188
pleasure, 25, 27, 28, 44, 46, 55, 100, Robbe-Grillet, A., 22
104, 105, 106, 108, 116, 134, 139, romanesque. See novelistic
140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 166, Rousseau, J.J., 174
170, 185, 189, 191, 192, 206, 207, Roussel, R., 119, 120
208, 218, 241, 253, 266, 273 Ruusbroec, J. van, 161
Pontalis, J.-B., 67 Sacher-Masoch, L. von, 73, 129, 147,
pope, the, 157 186, 219
post-structuralism, 11, 23, 73, 107, Sade, Marquis de, 157, 170, 171, 206,
118, 230 207, 217, 223, 252
potential space, 49, 50, 53, 60, 197 sadomasochism, 86, 102, 103, 123
Pound, E., 128 Salzedo, A., 152
pour-soi, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 233 Salzedo, M., 152
program, 19, 25, 28, 73, 80, 81, 83, sanatorium, 168, 199, 218
84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, Sarduy, S., 'pulsion de simulation',
95, 96, 113, 121, 123, 124, 127, 232
131, 132, 135, 139, 147, 148, 157, Sartre, J.-P., 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
159, 186, 194, 220, 227, 229, 233, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 41, 42,
236, 240, 245, 251, 252, 257 43, 56, 60, 115, 191, 212, 223,
Proust, M., 20, 73, 91, 92, 133, 136, 233, 268, 275
167, 176, 177, 192, 222, 225, 226, Saussure, F. de, 21
231, 232, 236, 237, 241, 244, 255 schizoanalysis, 79, 80, 82, 83
À la recherche du temps perdu, 39, scriptible. See writerly
91, 92, 133, 165, 215, 225, 226, Sein zum Tode. See being-toward-
236, 237, 247 death
psychosis, 79, 143 self, 102, 107, 108, 112, 115, 121,
123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 142, 158
technologies of the -, 108, 112, 127, 128, 139, 143, 144, 146, 147,
120, 129 151, 153, 164, 181, 198, 208, 217,
self-as-oeuvre, 25, 28, 100, 126, 131, 233, 240, 241, 257, 262
239, 251 symptom, 45, 76, 107, 127
self-becoming, 25, 101, 102, 109, synaxis, 263
115, 122, 123, 125, 132, 151, 188, Taoism, 174
204, 225, 228, 253, 265, 271, 274 Tel Quel, 57, 117, 139, 192
self-creation, 100, 129, 153, 225, 241, territory, 81, 82, 83, 261
242 thetic phase, 59, 96
self-image, 42, 44, 56, 115, 153, 235, Thing, the, 18, 19, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42,
238, 253, 265 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 60, 62, 63, 70,
semiotic, the, 58, 59, 72, 96, 139 72, 75, 86, 92, 146, 186, 200, 217,
Seneca, 130 260
sentimentality Tholen, W.B., The Arntzenius Sisters,
obscenity of -, 157 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 28
sexuality, 46, 64, 98, 100, 101, 102, Thomas, D.
103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 'Do not go gently...', 57
207, 235 Thurston, L., 129
Shakespeare, W., 32 Tolstoy, L., 176, 222, 229, 232, 254
Hamlet, 65 War and Peace, 174, 215
simplicity, 238, 242 touchstone, 110, 123, 141, 160, 194,
sinthome, 128, 129, 145, 243 270
Slipper, the game of the -, 273 trait, 190, 202, 204, 258
smile, 184 transference, 31, 257, 264, 265, 269,
sobria ebrietas, 161 270, 271, 272
Société des Amis du Texte, 273 transgression, 58, 59, 80, 89, 97, 175,
Socrates, 110, 170, 198 217
Sollers, Ph., 192, 231 transitional object, 49, 52, 60, 74,
Sophocles, 32 156, 198
Antigone, 272 Ulysses, 118
Oedipus, 65, 94 uncanny, the, 65, 66, 118, 121
Oedipus at Colonus, 272 untimely, 221, 222, 223, 226, 233
Sovereign Good, 64, 179, 184, 200 utopia, 181, 196, 257, 273
speaking being, 18, 47, 58 Verdi, G., 215, 220, 266
Spinoza, B., 73 Vinci, L. da, 81, 82, 183, 184
Stendhal, 198, 201, 202, 203, 229, Mona Lisa, 184
239, 246, 248, 257 virtual object, 73, 75, 81, 82, 84, 85,
Quelques promenades dans Rome, 91, 93, 94, 131, 202, 222, 232
201 Visker, R., 260
Stoic philosophy, 126, 131, 249 vita nuova, 28, 166, 179, 187, 188,
structuralism, 11, 22, 23, 24, 25, 107, 189, 194, 201, 203, 204, 220, 222,
133, 137, 138 223, 227, 237, 248, 249, 250, 269,
studium, 210, 211 270, 271
stupidity, 25, 124, 142, 244 voyeurism, 247
subject in process, 59, 72, 96 West, E., 116
sublimation, 39, 43, 49, 50, 83, 146 will to power, 71, 87, 93
symbolic, the, 37, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, Winnicott, D.W., 49, 50, 74, 156,
56, 58, 59, 64, 67, 79, 85, 86, 126, 197, 201
Works Cited 293
Wright brothers, the, 82 Zen-Buddhism, 173, 174, 192, 200,

writerly, 137, 138, 140, 141, 148, 208, 243, 244, 245
149, 153, 155, 157, 166, 167, 188, Zeuxis, 42, 43, 51, 63
246, 252, 257 Žižek, S., 126, 127, 128

[Faux titre no. 353] Pint, Kris_ Gemerchak, Christopher M._ Barthes, Roland - The perverse art of reading _ on the phantasmatic semiology in Roland Barthes&#39; Cours au Collège de France (2010, Rodopi).pdf

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[Faux titre no. 353] Pint, Kris_ Gemerchak, Christopher M._ Barthes, Roland - The perverse art of reading _ on the phantasmatic semiology in Roland Barthes&#39; Cours au Collège de France (2010, Rodopi).pdf

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The Perverse Art of Reading

On the phantasmatic semiology in

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2010

Photography: Tom Haartsen.

Cover design: Pier Post.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

The Fantasy: A Psychoanalytic Intertext 31

The Fantasy: A Nietzschean Intertext 69

A Reader Writes Oneself 133

A Reader at the Collège de France 163

Elements of an Active Semiology:

Lessons from an Amateur 257

Works Cited 277

A painting of girls, reading

The reader will then forgive me this: in my search for an ex-

A project of consciousness, reading

In Sartre’s monumental L’être et le néant (1943) (Being and Nothing-

Simplement la qualité même ‘homme-lisant’, comme rapport de

[The quality “man-reading” as the relation of the man to the book is

This passage forms a good illustration of the well-known distinction

phenomenological psychology of the imagination). In this study of the

the apparently absent gaze knows of no ‘elsewhere’; it cannot be any-

girls to life as a riddle that confuses me and ultimately throws me back

[C’] est ce que je nommerai modification esthétique du projet humain,

death and the fundamental freedom of the human being through a

The fantasy of the reading body

And yet . . . I examine once again the representation of the reading

essential—experience of reading it portrays. I needed a theory con-

Lacan’s; and gained by the latter thanks to La volonté de savoir (1976)

for a proper understanding of Barthes’ literary theory. More than just

The reader of Roland Barthes

doxa in fact strips people of the notion of freedom, of the possibility

ings of language, makes visible the mechanisms by which language

tion of Sur Racine (1963) (On Racine), in which he rather provoca-

Je n’ai pas fait de philosophie. Je suis, du point de vue des études, un

[I never studied philosophy. I am, from the point of view of my stud-

mostly from philosophy. They thus have a very different conception

Nevertheless, Barthes was always well aware of the latest develop-

which an intellectual such as Barthes found himself, and which en-

Following this deliberate staging of his own imaginary came Frag-

ten overcrowded, impersonal auditorium in France’s most prestigious

With this approach he in fact anticipated what would come to be

Third, because we can determine the way in which Barthes’

When Freud published his famous Traumdeutung (The Interpretation

a consistent theory for it. Freud’s interpretation of Gradiva is in any

which we incorporate into our lives that fundamental, irremediable

In the beginning was the Thing

Psychoanalytic research into the origin of the subject arrived initially

from within. Hunger is a good example of this. As an internal stimula-

A rhythm given to the real

The first phantasmatic ‘arrangement’ of the Thing is primarily a ques-

part of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. We read

[It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate

We can call the feeling aroused by a certain aesthetic object—in

que et fixe, étrangère à eux, comme des bijoux donnés, ou même en

[agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so

Swann is incapable of making the phrase entirely his own, of finding a

A blind spot in the imaginary

The distance established by the fantasy with respect to the personal

Thing—every bit as much as is the imagination. When the child bor-

An anchor in the symbolic

mental fantasy as ‘A young woman strolls by, her dress raised

[Faux titre no. 353] Pint, Kris_ Gemerchak, Christopher M._ Barthes, Roland - The perverse art of reading _ on the phantasmatic semiology in Roland Barthes' Cours au Collège de France (2010, Rodopi).pdf

[Faux titre no. 353] Pint, Kris_ Gemerchak, Christopher M._ Barthes, Roland - The perverse art of reading _ on the phantasmatic semiology in Roland Barthes' Cours au Collège de France (2010, Rodopi).pdf