In the end it was impossible not to assign our names to these thoughts, which are only variations on a theme deeply and truly embodied by our friendship. You can consider this to be one of the most intimate letters I have written you. You know that well enough. Never until now have I felt in my life such a sensation of solemnity; but one could write a whole new letter on that essential feeling, so essentially tied to the existence of David. I live forever lost in the desire to see you again. I am hoping—trembling—to have a good letter from you very soon. Do not tire yourself, be happy, do not be uneasy on my account.
[…]108 of the friendship of your friend.
Roland
* * *
[Lausanne?,] Friday, February 15, [1946]
My friend,
I’m writing you a note from the Milhits’ house in this room where I even find traces of you since you have been here.109 I came down this morning in absolutely Greek weather (I believe that is your expression, and this morning confirmed how true it is). Today I am happy. This may be the first time since your departure. It’s because I am rediscovering life in all its splendor, knowing that I will see you again in two weeks. Before this, I willingly made myself the theorist of the Greek ethic that consists of savoring life’s rhythm of purifications after sensual pleasures, of asceticism after festivities. And it’s true that complete asceticism these last five months, dominated by the essential grief of your absence, gives a particular purity to this return to civilization. I left a Leysin ablaze with sunlight, it’s true, but from a coarse, inhuman sun that burns without melting the ice. Below, coming through the sunlight, there is a kind of humid caress; I feel ten times better. Also, my friend, I understand very well your deep happiness in looking forward to the walks we will be able to take together. This earthly life must be recognized as the splendor it is—especially when one knows he is going to see his friend in a few days. Otherwise the sun would only be grief. My coenesthesia has for […]110 nervousness. But here, below, it becomes less so, more like vitality. I feel stronger, and at the same time my back hurts and I am short of breath. But nothing serious, it seems to me. It was a bit like I was rediscovering my youth this morning, when I was less hardened, when I sensed so strongly the ineffable and the sacred in life. I rediscovered in myself the source of contemplation and sensibility—and curiosity as well. Perhaps that will remain true with these two blessings so close at hand: recovery and my friend.
I thought again about our last twenty-four hours together. What weighed on me then was stupor and an almost paradoxical impatience to leave you—as one is impatient for an operation—and the weight of the separation from Maman the day before when I took the little train from Vallorbe while you were waiting for me at the café, which had been so hard, an image of heartbreak that I had promised myself to erase as quickly as possible.
And you, what are you doing while I am writing this? I’m thinking of you, my old man, as you would wish. Having left that artificial place above, it seems to me the depth of my love has already regained the apparent moderation you wish for it. Or is this the euphoria of seeing you again soon? No matter, my friend, have faith; I will do my best to make sure you get something out of this reunion. Have faith in it. I think of you with the best of myself. And the happier I am, the more I think of you. Tomorrow I’m going to Berne and I’ll send you a note from there. Until soon, my friend, my dear Robert, do not worry, it won’t be long now. I will be there soon, I will shake you up!
Impatiently, your friend,
Roland
* * *
Sketch of a Sanatorium Societye
The facsimile of this text was published in the catalog for the Roland Barthes exhibit at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in 2002 (Seuil-Centre Georges-Pompidou-IMEC, 2002). The original belongs to the Barthes collection at the BNF.
* * *
In a sanatorium society everything conspires to return one to a situation defined and embellished with the attributes of an authentic society. The costs of this accumulation of artifice hardly matter, but first among them is considering as sufficient a society that is, alas, only parasitic. It is above all a matter of dissociating the consciousness of the ill person from the memory of not having been one; the junction of these two states would result in an intolerable strabismus. Hence the cheerful naturalization of the state of disease, and the creation of a triumphant sanatorium society where the consciousness of exile no longer has a place. The malaise of not being social is exhausted through social exercises re-created in the image of those from which one has just been excluded. The appearance of inner freedom is reestablished within a new social conformism imitating the old one. A sanatorium code is postulated; what goes by the name of freedom, what goes by the name of responsibility, restrained by very real chains, is the very means of escape. We know that irresponsibility is never so fully achieved as it is in the innocent process of oversocialization.
The bourgeois sanatorium fosters a puerile society. In the first place, medical authority establishes the rules of paternalism here. We know the ambiguous status of medicine in social consciousness: mocked, disputed, and always obeyed. That contradiction, elsewhere attenuated, makes its full weight felt here at every moment. As both miracle worker and hotelkeeper, the sanatorium doctor, despite himself and his patients, has final authority here, unrelated to pity and independent of the esteem or contempt elicited by the one who holds that authority. The hierarchy of sanatorium society is fixed in a way that seems truly absolute and eternal because its apex is immutable. No play of power, no shift in responsibilities, no change in values is possible here. It would be an understatement to say a patient confronts his disease at every turn; in short, he confronts a certain general, natural, human condition. The doctor is the one who reveals his disease, and, at the same time, is the only one with the power to save him from it. As in any given religious society, the deity both condemns and absolves the sinner. The point is that, between nature and man, there must be a living, conscious, omniscient element that, despite oneself, one must take for omnipotent. Here we can recognize a providentialist state of society; we can say that sanatorium society is a theocratic structure. Obviously this structure bears no relation to the individual doctor and the degree to which he uses his authority. It is enough that the patient’s irresponsibility is justified by the inevitable existence of a being who knows and does not suffer, whereas he suffers and does not know.
In the second place, there is the gang, the band, the team, whatever you want to call it. One can imagine how common this almost-feudal social condition is in the sanatorium. The homogenous, hierarchized, exclusive company formed within an already-closed environment is solidly sealed in a very different way. Here, the weakest ones look to the strongest ones to defend them against their freedom, and all together they surround and defend one another against the exterior that defines them. The pranks that are the favorite diversion of gangs serve as pretext here for additional warmth and oversocialization in human relationships. Each member of a club accumulates what he knows to be the most winning, most rewarding social attributes; by molding his actions, initiatives, reactions, and opinions according to watchwords of the group (watchwords that are often diffuse, barely verbalized, reduced to a certain esoteric spirit), he saves himself the trouble of adapting. Others create for him, in relation to a “public” that represents the necessary otherness, this salutary automatism. Here again, ritual serves as the standard expedient. We know the liturgical function of laughter among gangs whose profession is the prank. For nothing in the world does a member desert such a group; the joy of being admitted overcomes the illusion of supersociability.
“Always together as much as possible,” that secret slogan of every sanatorium society clearly formulates the normative image of the patient who looks after himself, essential to the sanatorium and not to be undermined. In general, sanatorium society is horrified by anything that seems to contest the seriousness or usefulness of its own social structure. Any society closed i
n upon itself is hostile to friendship. In a manner very much belonging to entities that see themselves as multiple, it condemns the couple for intolerably negating its own usefulness, and is scandalized that one could be happy outside of it. It testifies to the contempt felt by any moral system supposedly based on the common good when it must confront the single and the whole, without questioning whether the asocial nature of sanatorium society does not justify one’s right to act freely there and to reserve the full exercise of one’s sociability for the time when one returns to authentic society. As for the solitary patient, he is a kind of libertine who denies the laws of sanatorium-human-nature. Thus he is banished and, without flinching before the contradiction, organized sanatorium society excludes him, so that he himself wants to renounce it.
The most liberal form of the sanatorium gang is the cultural club whose guiding principle involves grouping together a certain number of shared noble tastes. Here, the illusion of social interaction is embellished with disinterested motives that can justify any humanist ideology. Sanatorium society thus aims for a philosophical, Platonic structure. Clubs, art and discussion groups, circles, and so-called work teams are endlessly created (because they are endlessly dissolving). The social illusion achieves its height. A gang of pranksters acknowledges a certain self-serving structure through its declared goal, which is diversion; a cultural club claims to be exercising an eternal truth, that is, the natural superiority of culture, a notion that is most often only empty talk here. These clubs compensate for the instability of their purpose and the insufficiency of their means by appealing to the cooperative mystique. But here the sentimental humanist ethic is an empty exercise; aid and benefits are expected more from the method than the purpose, so that idealism too can confuse ends and means (art for art’s sake, action for action’s sake, choice for the sake of choice, etc.). That is because sanatorium society develops more as a community than as a true society. Its members find it enormously helpful to view their time here within a teleological order and not simply a causal one. There is a constant shift from the contingent to transcendent, and interested parties endlessly disguise what is very difficult—because very useless—as providential and finally beneficial. Thus meditation, which may—or may not—result from idleness, is usually presented as the mystical meeting of suffering and truth and not as the conditional result of disease, as a revelation and not as a contingent operation. Or even, inversely (but we can see it is the same thing), the patient will be invited to profit from this interruption by making it a salutary cure for his frivolity. From two sides, physis and antiphysis, there is great pressure to give disease meaning; according to a well-known mechanism, a causality is turned into a finality because the mind finds the idea of meaningless catastrophe intolerable. At all costs, the disease must contribute to the notion of destiny and it must be acknowledged that such a contribution is very generous, capable of dignifying the destiny of an infinite number of “spiritual families.”
Paternalist, feudal, or liberal, bourgeois sanatorium society, through various pretenses, always tends to revert to the irresponsibility of childhood. It is an essentially puerile society, corresponding in its various facets to the bourgeois image of childhood. We know that for most French writers over the last century nothing is as perfect, nothing is as happy, as childhood and there is no human mission more vital than recovering it. This is not the place to recount the history of that myth, from the moment when Descartes and Pascal declared childhood to be a time lost to reason, up until its most baroque expression (Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles)111 and perhaps beyond. Suffice it to say that the bourgeoisie spontaneously use the sanatorium as a substitute for rediscovered childhood. Once again, here is a place cut off at the roots from the world of serious people. This place lives for itself; it is given over to those who inhabit it, even as it still belongs to an external presence that justifies it (the Doctor). Playing in the hayloft, playing war, playing high society: transposed, all the elements of childhood revisited (a particularly bourgeois myth) are the very ones of sanatorium society. One can object that collectives and clubs are, after all, accidents belonging to any human group. The point is that nowhere else but in childhood and the bourgeois sanatorium does one witness the pretense of such groups attributing to themselves the elements of a complete society, within which the social supposedly has the same restrictive value as in actual society.
Sanatoriums can be great families, no doubt about it. But if one is obliged to spend time there, must he be complicit in such a cheerful familiarization with disease?
June 25, 1947
aThis quote is a consequence of my erudition. You see, I choose my authors.
bDespite Lesserre, I cannot write without adjectives. [Pierre Lasserre, an intellectual close to Action Française, author especially of a very critical essay on French Romanticism, makes the adjective one of the signs of Romantic decadence. For example, with regard to George Sand’s Lélia, he speaks of a “deluge of nouns and epithets.” In Le Romantisme français: Essai sur la révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle (Amsterdam: Nabu, 2010), 202. (Originally published in Paris by Mercure de France in 1907.)—ED.]
cRegaining weight, but not good looks, I am afraid, at least in one case.
dSilly mistake: I mean Les Temps modernes (confusing Sartre and the Dominicans!)
eThe analysis focuses on society in a private sanatorium. It involves intentional sociability of course and not natural sociability.
2
The First Barthes
1. Return to the World of Institutions
Roland Barthes to Philippe Rebeyrol
[Alexandria, Egypt,]1 April 1, 1950
My dear Philippe,
Maman told me that you’re in Barcelona. What are you doing there? Are you there for a long time? And most importantly how is your health? I’m afraid that you may not have been feeling very well for some time after that illness this winter. Please, give me a few actual details; tell me how you’re feeling and what your plans are. For me, this year is offering no satisfaction and a few bitter subjects. I’m not speaking of thankless Alexandrian social life, which is base, conformist, vain, hostile to all intelligence and sensitivity, where any contact results only in injuries and indignation; or of nonexistent employment, because that is rather a good thing. I live intensely with the Singevins, where I take my meals, occupying two rooms with the family close by.2 I reflect after a fashion on the problems of my work through the grand portal of laziness, even of sleep, due to the climate that everyone acknowledges to be harmful, difficult, not unhealthy but lulling and injurious for those who like having many activities. It’s very hard to fit into twenty-four hours one’s occupation, rest, small pleasures, and work. Everyone experiences this problem here, and there’s no question of considering an extended stay in this bleak country; all the same I would like to remain for another year. That is not at all guaranteed. In December I was summoned before a medical board regarding my civil servant post and was rejected because of a formality, that is, because I had had a pneumothorax. This is all the more ridiculous since it’s not a question for them of hiring me long term or of having any financial responsibility in the case of a relapse (the contract specifically covers them); but their law is retrograde—at least compared to France—you’ll remember that I was trained last year, despite the very same pneumothorax—and they bring to it an incredibly literal and formalist spirit. The matter has dragged on since then; I am paid—fortunately!—but I have yet to be appointed and no decision has been made for next year. I thought that it could easily be settled through some administrative decision, and surely that’s so. The trouble is that in this country where obvious formalities are only overcome by pulling strings, which goes on incessantly, I have no one supporting me, no one really pulling strings for me. Langlade, the department head, who could surely obtain a quick and favorable solution, does nothing. And I’m afraid that even if his inaction is not concealing his actual opposition,
which I cannot rule out, it may end up costing me my post. I don’t want to condemn the fellow and blame him for all the low political maneuvers and intrigues of the Egyptians. This is the first time I’ve seen that and, naively, I’m surprised by it. My only other experience was in Bucharest, and everyday I see more clearly the price I’m paying. Finally Langlade directed at me all his rancor against the Vichy, spending a nasty fifteen minutes on the Liberation. He felt me to be an enemy, not because of my ideas—he has no idea what they are or what they are about, since I have never opened my mouth here. Are they even clear to me? But because he instinctively hates any mind that believes in History, philosophy, the sciences, nonacademic criticism, etc., everything I try to be much more than I really am.a That all seems unbelievable but each day I see more clearly that it’s true. I will not give details; they are of limited interest. The important thing is that the fellow does no harm. I don’t really know anymore how to start sorting out the situation. No one here—with influence—has any reason to back me: the consulate remains empty or indifferent; a cultural attaché greeted me in a hallway and doesn’t do anything. Of course if you knew the situation here, you could give me good advice, dear Philippe. You see, basically, since that first year when you let me stand on my own two feet, I miss you. I still need you and this disease pursues me like a fatum and there are not enough of those who love me to conspire against it. Must I notify Cultural Relations, and according to what procedures? Can they do anything in a situation that only involves the Egyptians? Yves Régnier, the cultural attaché, is backing out because the minister just denied him something. And in the case, which is ultimately possible, that I couldn’t come back here next year, do you think that Cultural Relations would get involved again with such a questionable candidate? I’m thinking about all this, dear Philippe, and I think that if I can’t get an assistantship, that is, a work schedule compatible with my thesis (the only reason I want to stay here), then, for work, I’d rather be a pawn in some Paris lycée, and give my heart and mind some rest at least, if not my body—in my own country.
Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts Page 11