aAs if it were you and not me.
bThinking about it, this text wouldn’t work very well for this article. I can imagine a fourth article on this text alone (but it only appeared in the journal), a way of taking stock of Robbe-Grillet. [In 1954 Roland Barthes published “Le Point sur Robbe-Grillet?,” which was reprinted in Essais critiques (OC, vol. 2, 452–59).—Ed.]
c“Variation sur une ‘pensée,’ ” in Variété (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), 143–44.
d“L’Enseignement de la poétique au Collège de France,” in Variété V (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 289.
e“L’Enseignement de la poétique au Collège de France,” 290.
fRhumbs [in Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2:635].
g“Poésie et pensée abstraite,” in Variété V, 142–44.
hRhumbs, 619.
iRhumbs, [628–29].
j“Mémoires d’un poème,” in Variété V, 86–87.
k“Je disais quelquefois à Stéphane Mallarmé …” in Variété III (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 32.
lMauvaises pensées [in Mauvaises pensées et autres, in Oeuvres, 2:855].
mVariété, 56.
n“Études et fragments sur le rêve” in Variété, in addition to an unpublished chapter (Paris: Gallimard, 1925) [Oeuvres, 1:936].
4
A Few Letters Regarding a Few Books
Regarding Sur Racine
Louis Althusser to Roland Barthes
The first encounter between Barthes and Althusser took place on October 5, 1962, over the course of an evening spent with Michel Foucault as well.1 Althusser wrote to his friend Franca: “I think I am going to cultivate him [Barthes] because I undoubtedly have much to gain from his (theoretical) experience.”2 They saw each other again, always with Foucault, on November 11 that year and during the year of 1963. Althusser distanced himself from Barthes and from structuralism beginning in 1966 for reasons involving his position within the Communist Party.
* * *
[Paris,] May 7, 1963
Dear Barthes,
What a true pleasure it is to read that Racinian “psychology” and the famous “passions” to which, it seems, we owe this drama (to the greatest relief, no doubt, of those who would very much like to have such passions! or else have such “disreputable” ones!) do not exist. To read that language alone can offer a solution that the logic of the situation cannot possibly offer, and that from this language a universe is born. Not for a moment do you risk the dangers that, through modesty or through tact regarding your predecessors, you evoke; the words of Freud are perfectly at home here, in one of the worlds from which he borrows them.
I also liked very much your article at the end.… I don’t think that you have ever presented this challenge to the Universities so well, to have the courage of their thoughts!
How convincing and illuminating your book is. I say this to you without reservation, not only because it’s yours and one can read through the reasons of a friend, but because it’s true.
Yours with all my heart, gratefully,
L. Althusser
Regarding Critique et vérité
Louis-René des Forêts to Roland Barthes
March 17, [1966]3
Dear Roland Barthes,
This simple note to thank you very heartily for your magnificent book that I read immediately in one sitting. Such reading today has a kind of hygienic virtue for each of us. And how, finally, to tell you this without indiscretion: there is courage in truth and we can rejoice that you oppose a frivolous, inconsequential polemic with the sole violence of the serious, which is your distinctive characteristic.
Thank you again and with best wishes,
Louis René des Forêts
Jacques Lacan to Roland Barthes
April 12, 1966
Thank you, dear Roland Barthes, for sending me your book. It was necessary to respond—and in that way.
It seems to me that the situation is looking good.
Yours,
Lacan
I am working pretty well.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio to Roland Barthes
Place Île-de-Beauté, Nice, April 29, 1966
Dear Sir,
You are right, I’m completely on your side in the quarrel that sets you against traditional criticism. I read your response to Picard.4 I think that you are right not only because what you say is true, but also because that truth is expressed with nuance, fineness, and force—in a word, because it is intelligent. It’s no longer possible today to ignore the depths of literature; it’s no longer possible to remain in cozy comfort, easily satisfied, not when there is Rimbaud, Mallarmé, or Lautrémont. Your point of view is completely current and, for that reason, truly reasonable. But all that you must have already realized, given the quality of your friends and the mediocrity of your enemies. And the jealousy of the mediocre is sometimes very entertaining!
Thanks you again, yours with deep admiration,
JMG le Clézio
Regarding S/Z
Michel Foucault to Roland Barthes (BNF)
February 28, [1970]5
Thank you, dear Roland, for sending me your S/Z. I’ve just read it in one sitting. It is magnificent, the first true analysis of text that I’ve ever read. I’m leaving soon for America—Buffalo, where I must, in two months, teach “French Literature.” I’m taking S/Z, which I’ll assign to the students as a basic text. And we’ll get some practice.
Morocco? Will I see you when I return in May?
Yours, dear Roland, in friendship and admiration,
M. Foucault
Michel Leiris to Roland Barthes (BNF)
July 10, 1970
Dear Roland Barthes,
Don’t be surprised by my slowness in writing to you to acknowledge receipt of your S/Z.
In a way, I’m learning to read there, and this—exciting—apprenticeship is clearly quite long!
So, thank you,
And with best wishes,
Michel Leiris
Roland Barthes to Alain Bosquet (BLJD)
Rabat, May 22, 1970
Dear Alain Bosquet,
I don’t really know where to write to you, having no access to your address here; and nevertheless I want to tell you how touched I was by your text on S/Z in Combat.6 It’s a new way of taking a book seriously, of incorporating it without enslaving oneself to it, expressions of great joy, a way of recognizing a work without bringing an immediate judgment to bear on it; in short, a dialogue (an overworked word, but made new here), full of subtlety and soundness, that’s able to find and say what unites us: love for the text.
All that is poorly said, but I assure you that, among the few articles devoted to S/Z, yours “resonates” especially—and I’m deeply grateful to you.
Very cordially yours,
Roland Barthes
Regarding L’Empire des signes
Roger Caillois to Roland Barthes (BNF)
May 18, 19707
Dear Roland Barthes,
I found your letter when I returned from Morocco. Thanks for being so kind as to try to find me a car that fulfills my wishes. In fact, I’ve come up with a simpler solution, which I should have thought of immediately: bringing my own car. But I didn’t know there were boats that specialized in that kind of transport. I’m no less grateful to you for the trouble you took. I only passed through Rabat, so I didn’t try to come by to say hello.
I very much liked your Japan, which made me see more clearly into many impressions that had remained vague and that your analysis gave meaning by locating in a new, convincing coherence. I think that you received L’Écriture des pierres.8 And I would be happy if that book gave you a small portion of the pleasure I found in your book (your books).
Very attentively yours with all sorts of good wishes for the happy progress of your work,
R. Caillois
Jean-Pierre Faye to Roland Barthes (BNF)
[1970]
Dear Roland, thank you for the
wonderful empire (of signs)—and also for your wish to see “the clouds pass.”
(Even clouds that build from “old women’s gossip.”)9
With best wishes,
J.-P. Faye
Regarding Sade, Fourier, Loyola
Louis Althusser to Roland Barthes
December 4, 197110
Dear Roland Barthes, thank you for your book, your attention, and your friendly note, which touched me deeply. Alas I won’t be among the number celebrating with you on December 8 at Seuil, and I’m sorry. Nevertheless let me tell you from a distance—a very close distance—in what high esteem I hold your effort and your writings, your lucidity and your courage. Yours with very best wishes, L. Althusser
Alain Jouffroy to Roland Barthes
December 6, 1971
Dear Roland Barthes,
I was very happy to receive your book on Sade-Fourier-Loyola, the most beautiful, the most effective of your books, perhaps. I had many encounters there, and you may catch a glimpse of yourself by reading the PS of the poems attached. I also found you intact and enigmatic in the penetrating, unexpected answers you gave to Thibaudeau’s first questions for the ORTF interview reprinted in Tel Quel.11 Warmly yours,
Alain Jouffrey
André Pieyre de Mandiargues to Roland Barthes
36, rue de Sévigné, Paris IIIe, May 1, 1972
Your Sade, Fourier, Loyola delighted me, dear Roland Barthes. It is, for my tastes, the most “ravishing” of your books. I truly thank you for it and send you my most cordial regards.
André Pieyre de Mandiargues
(In Venice, saw SADE on equipment for electrical power distribution equivalent to the EDF; thus the lofty name is often read in big letters on lightning cables, transformer boxes that contain mortal power …).12
Regarding Nouveaux Essais critiques
Louis Althusser to Roland Barthes
October 4, 197213
Thank you, dear R. Barthes, for your book, where it’s good to reread Degré zéro and (for me) to discover many of your luminous articles (Loti!).14
Yours in faithful friendship,
Louis Althusser
Regarding Plaisir du texte
Hélène Cixous to Roland Barthes (BNF)
Montreal, March 2, 197315
Thank you, Roland, for the pleasure of finding many unexpected sources here, from a kind of primitive exasperation, a vast and mobile blank, a language that struggles. Rarely seen such a contrast between the moments of repression and of such strong censures lifted. Quick and slow.
With love,
Hélène Cixous
André Green to Roland Barthes (BNF)
Roussillon, February 23, 1973
Dear Barthes,
Thank you for sending me Le Plaisir du texte—I think I too can say, “That’s it!” I say this even more because sometimes it has happened that I can’t say it at all. I’ll tell you this in person when we see each other. This latest work seems to me, in any case, to mark a break. A break that projects a return from the repression that your linguistic period—I understand the need for it!—helped to delay.
Nevertheless, if you’ll permit me this criticism, I believe that we haven’t grappled with the suffering of the text. Pleasure, no doubt, but as triumph over what grief? Well, the important thing is that life goes on.
Until soon, yours truly,
André Green
Regarding Alors, la Chine?
Roland Barthes to Christian Bourgois
February 14, 197616
I’m very happy with all these reactions—surprised even that your correspondents took the trouble to talk about the text and so freely, given that their remarks—for once—were not addressed to me, but to you.17 So thank you for all that.
Yours faithfully,
RB
Roland Barthes to Marcelin Pleynet (BLJD)
Paris, February 25, 1979
Dear friend,
I read your travel journal immediately and all in one sitting.18 Truly, I was delighted by the simplicity, accuracy, and precise kindness. You can imagine how sensitive I was to the absence of all dogmatism, arrogance, and hysteria. You can also imagine how at each instant, as in the margin, my personal memories linked up with what you were reporting, but you remembered for me as well, recalling things that I had no doubt repressed. And then, it’s quietly novelistic, to the extent that you were able to convey to each of us a “mood.” And the poems are very beautiful.
Thanks for your thoughtfulness in letting us read your text first. I’m yours, dear Marcelin, in faithful friendship.
Roland Barthes
Regarding Fragments d’un discours amoureux
André Pieyre de Mandiargues to Roland Barthes
April 12, 197719
Delighted, in the purest sense of the word, by your Discourse amoureux, dear Roland Barthes, I thank you for this beautiful gift, which I hope to have the opportunity to talk with you about someday, and I remain yours in friendship.
André Pieyre de Mandiargues
Michel Tournier to Roland Barthes (BNF)
Choisel, August 26, 1977
Dear Roland Barthes,
I’m very struck by a passage in the interview with you in Playboy. It concerns that particular category of pickup artists, those who “look for pickups to find someone to be in love with.” You add that this category is quite common in homosexual circles. I expressed something similar in my novel Les Météores.20 There, I have the homosexual Alexandre say, “I am all of a piece, I’m a whole man! Love = sex + heart. The others—most of them—when they go out hunting leave their hearts at home. Tied to their wife’s or mummy’s apron strings. It’s safer. When love is sick or old it breaks down into two component parts. Sometimes—it is the usual fate of heterosexuals—desire is extinguished. Only affection is left. Affection based on habit and knowledge of the other. Sometimes the reverse is true: the faculty of affection becomes atrophied. Only desire is left, fiercer and more demanding the more it becomes barren. That is the usual fate of homosexuals.
“I am not threatened with those two kinds of degeneration. Physical desire and the need for affection are fused in me in a single ingot. That is the very definition of health and strength. Eros athlete. Yes, a formidable strength, a dangerous health, an energy liable to explode and strike back. Because the absence of a quarry, which to others only means desire unsatisfied, rouses me to despair, and the presence of a quarry, which to others brings only satisfaction of desire, in my case calls forth a display of all the panoply of passion. With me, everything always comes down to emotions.” End of quote (pp. 91–92).
In short, this is a particular kind of pickup that could be called “total” as in “total war.” That pickup artist is an anti–Don Juan type. It’s likely that he’s more often homosexual than heterosexual, but why?
Yours sincerely,
Michel Tournier
Regarding La Chambre claire
Marthe Robert to Roland Barthes
February 22, 198021
A very, very beautiful book, my dear Roland, and for me at this moment a moving friend. Because I lost my mother last November and I’m also searching for the image of her that would contain all the others, that would be the only essential one. Because of that, I wasn’t able to read your book as I would have under other circumstances, but I did read it all the same. I know it by the mixture of sadness and strange sweetness in which it continues to immerse me.
Thank you for sending it to me. But, my dear Roland, why don’t you come here? We would be so happy to see you, you really must sacrifice an evening to us.
With love,
Marthe
Other Letters
Roland Barthes to Christian Prigent
Urt, August 25, [1973]
Thank you very much for thinking to send me these texts of yours.22 As you can imagine, they affected me; I read them with interest and they resonated totally. I would like very much to discuss them with you but am, for the moment,
still too tired.
Perhaps we can see each other?
In the meantime, thanks again,
R. Barthes
* * *
June 28, 1974
I’ve received your texts (for which I thank you) just as I’m leaving and I cannot bring them along.23 But what I skimmed, from that “perspective of writing” from which phenomenology should be done, captivates me; it seems excellent. I would like to talk with you someday on texts; we’ll try to do that in the fall when school starts—and we can talk about this mailing then. For now, thank you.
Yours,
Roland Barthes
* * *
Paris, April 2, 1977
I’m very concerned at the moment with my mother’s health, and I can only offer these few lines to tell you that your letter touched me—and that I feel much sympathy with your problems. I would truly be happy to talk to you about them, as soon as things improve here and I’m available. Be in touch with me as we agreed when the third term starts.
Best wishes,
R. Barthes
* * *
Paris, May 30, 1977
Dear Prigent,
Thank you for this very unsettling text.24 It’s your “Prigent par lui-même”—and amusingly corrosive—and very beautiful. Thank you for including me among your first dedicatees.
Yours,
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes to Jude Stéfan
May 17, 1975
I very much liked your utterly friendly text and I thank you for it.25 You taught me, among other things, that even our differences turn out to be false because what I like in Satie is precisely … La Mort de Socrate, and so forth.
Album Page 25