Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts

by Roland Barthes

  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.

  Thanks again for so much elegance and sympathy.

  Yours,

  R. B.

  Jude Stéfan to Roland Barthes

  May 30, [1975]

  Dear Sir,

  Thank you for your note, which reassures me, because writing this text was rather an honor, but the result could be misunderstood by a bad reader, who could see in it only the humorous reduplication, for example, or supercilious friends who may not feel how much it was prompted by fervor and gratitude.26 But that fervor is concealed by the writing. I had to write it quite—thus, too—quickly and left out some remarks (for example, on the first name R., whose resonances it would have been instructive to hear). In any case, this lexicon operates like a charm.

  Please accept my gratitude and admiration.

  Jude Stéfan

  Roland Barthes to François Châtelet (IMEC)

  Paris, January 11, [1976]

  Dear François Châtelet,

  It was good of you to write to me; I’m answering in haste, as always: I’m very much involved in the Benveniste problem (you know how much I like and admire him), with Foucault and Julia Kristeva.27 There is actually nothing to be done 1) because—in fact—his financial situation is not bad, 2) because his sister, a timid and stubborn person, evades any initiative. The only way to improve his lot—and it’s terrible, I went to see him—is to get him out of the suburban hospital where he is (very miserable) and into a more humane nursing home. But it’s not a question of money; in fact it’s his sister who is standing in the way. So, for the moment, we have given up. The obvious conclusion is that at all costs anything resembling a charity event (which he doesn’t need) must be avoided. If the radio wants to do an intellectual tribute to Benveniste—independent of his financial situation and without alluding to it—by all means, yes, of course; but that’s a whole other project.

  Can you explain that to Gonzoles—who strikes me as enterprising?

  Yours faithfully,

  Roland Barthes

  I haven’t yet read your book—always months behind—but I’m happy it’s out and being discussed.28

  Roland Barthes to Bernard Faucon

  Paris, May 12, 1977

  Your photos are marvelous; for me it’s ontologically (if you’ll allow me this pedantic word) the photo itself, to the point that speaks of the being: that fascination.29 Thank you.

  Would you like to try calling me again? My mother is doing better—but availability is still very much a problem for me. We’ll see.

  Yours,

  Roland Barthes

  326 95 85

  Roland Barthes to Pierre Klossowski (BLJD)

  Paris, Thursday February 16, 1978

  Thank you, dear friends, for this marvelous film, enigmatic and obvious from beginning to end.30 Denise was very beautiful and Pierre absolutely saturnine—the perfect manipulator. Thanks for this pleasure, this reflection. Your friend,

  R. B.

  Roland Barthes to Philippe Rebeyrol

  Paris, March 25, 197931

  My very dear Philippe,

  I’m a little unhappy about not coming, about failing to show up one more time, and I’ve been tormented by it for days. It’s so difficult to be sure of oneself! I would like to come see you, because now, very mysteriously, since the death of Maman, I have a great resistance to travel “in and of itself.” But this is what is happening: throughout these last months I’ve suffered from the endless intervention of “things to do” (courses, texts, theses, etc.) coming constantly to quash my personal work and separate me from it. There’s something about this work that’s essential to me, emotionally. I have to (for a commission by Cahiers du cinéma, which is beginning a book series) and want to do a text (a short book) on the Photo, but this text, on every level, as I’ve planned it, is profoundly tied to images of Maman. Hence my latent grief for months at not being able to do it. Now, free of the Course and all the rest, I can get started on it—and I have started immediately (although I’m not yet writing). I don’t have the heart to quash this project one more time, even for a brief trip, or to postpone it once more, even for a few days. I want and I need to continue, without a break; in short, a kind of deep, stubborn unavailability keeps me from leaving (except, of course, for Urt, where I can work as I do here). Of course, I was hoping to put a few days’ hiatus between the preparation of the text (the current stage) and the beginning of writing; but that’s very difficult to plan in advance. If by chance I finish this preparation soon, then, given about a day, I could plan to leave, and I’d telephone you immediately. But it’s more complicated because it’s Easter vacation and flights will be booked up. I’m sorry, Philippe, to hem and haw so—a little neurotic, I know. But I live in the fantastical idea of a kind of necessity of work that Proust expressed well when he cited for personal reasons these words from the Gospel, “Work as long as you have light.”

  I know you’ll understand. Maybe I can call you soon; that depends on the meanderings of my work; but of course don’t trouble yourself in the least about this “suspended” plan.

  With all my love, Philippe,

  Roland

  The Postage Stamp

  This “mythology” on the postage stamp, dating from June 1964, is the text of a short film made that same year by Jean-Marc Leuwen, Microcosmos. The text is spoken by Pierre Santini, the musical accompaniment is Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.

  * * *

  What is a stamp? For the State, it may only be a convenient way of paying for postal service. But for us, when we stick that little bit of paper onto the envelope we are about to mail, it is no longer a fee that we’re paying, it is an image that we’re looking at. And what has more prestige than an image? A stroke of genius: we’re enchanted by an image without considering that we’re paying a tax.

  If that image distracts, instructs, and makes us dream, it may be due to its small size; because what is small must be full and can be varied. In the past, for centuries, our civilization was nourished by the art of the miniature. That art was both very free imaginatively and very precisely designed; it treated two great subjects: everyday life and spiritual adventure. Our postage stamp is today’s miniature; precise and inexhaustible, it too reminds us of how we live and how we think. An album of postage stamps is a bit like the book of hours for modern times.

  In the stamp, we find represented all daily human employment, as it occurs throughout the world. Stamps tell us what work humans do, what their occupations and businesses are; they tell us what humans build: palaces, bridges, dams, monuments. Finally, they make an inventory of everything humans want to know: countries, faces, sites, strange animals, and unfamiliar flowers. The stamp is an illustrated dictionary of all the subtle objects that humans or nature construct and perfect.

  The stamp shows us all the creators of our art, our thinking, our technology, and our sciences: the creators of images, music, and words, from Clouet to Mozart, from Carpeaux to Apollinaire; the creators of thought, like Descartes and Bergson; the creators of history, like kings and revolutionaries; the creators of the unknown, like sports heroes and scientific inventors.

  Thus a kind of spiritual Olympus is assembled here; and since the stamp is a fluid image, given to all combinations, among these Olympians from all times and all countries, an immense conversation goes on. On the same envelope, Beethoven can converse with Maryse Bastié, Bugeaud with Michelangelo, Gargantua with the Queen Mother.

  The stamp has its moral code. Wherever it goes, its responsibility is to give expression to a certain idea of the Good. This idea is that man must act, must overcome the obstacles of nature, the resistance of matter. In this code of usefulness and solidarity, there is no place for worry. Revolutionaries are only admitted if time ha
s rendered them inoffensive, and accursed poets only if they have been converted. The stamp represents only what has been consecrated by society. The stamp is well behaved, well behaved as an image.

  And nevertheless the stamp is a conqueror; it endlessly annexes unexpected new subjects like colombophilia, haute couture, pelota, or the Smiling Angel of Reims. On the stamp one finds all the objects that could go into an encyclopedia. Thus the stamp involves a confident possession of the world, all the objects of which are caught and acclimated by the image. And the reassuring order of the products over which man rules is restored. Unflaggingly, the stamp makes everything signify.

  The first stamps were austere, and occupied primarily with allegory: Ceres, Peace and Commerce, the Sower. Since then, this little paper rectangle has gradually absorbed the representation of the entire world, of all it contains in the way of famous beings, sites, monuments, flowers, animals, memories, and achievements. Meant to travel the world, the stamp has itself become a world; succeeding the universe of stained-glass windows, illumination, and heraldry, a new microcosm is born.

  On Seven Sentences in Bouvard et Pécuchet

  We know Barthes’s taste, even his fascination for the work of Flaubert and for Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) in particular.32 The chapter “L’Artisanat du style” in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture testifies to this ongoing passion as early as 1953. Characterized as a “marginal work,” that is to say, atypical and unclassifiable in a writer’s opus, Flaubert’s last novel occupies a major place in the seminar that Barthes gave at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1971, which, for the most part, revolved around the bêtise and the copy. A few years later, in the spring of 1975, but this time within the framework of a seminar at the Université de Paris 7, Barthes once again devoted his research to the Flaubert novel, establishing a dialogue with his earlier work. In fact, he took long passages from his notes from 1971, as the manuscript clearly shows. But quite quickly he moved away from his first work and defined a new subject for study: the sentence. For him, of course, the subject was not new; as something between intellectual fascination, affective projection, and moral investment, Barthes, we know, “idolized the sentence” (“Deliberation,” 1979). The article “Flaubert and the Sentence” (1967) already emphasized the importance of syntax in Flaubert’s aesthetics and ethics. Here, Barthes selects and isolates seven sentences from Bouvard et Pécuchet for which he proposes analyses far removed from the usual means of explicating texts. For supplementary reading, see the lecture “Phrase—Modernité” given in the spring of 1975.33

  Beginning of Research

  It’s a matter of a simple point of departure for research, with an uncertain future, of an uncertain duration. (Maybe, if this doesn’t work, we will stop to do something else—and in any case, we have only a few sessions together.) What point of departure?

  1. In contact with the guardian-text, it’s a matter of discovering pleasures (mine? for the moment, that’s inevitable). Desire, that’s what is displayed by another. Desire is not imposed, but displayed; it takes or it doesn’t take. Professors of Utopia? We are the puppet masters of desires.

  2. I must anticipate roughly what I’m doing with them; in what field of knowledge they may take place, what digressions (and thus, potentially, what writing) they may trigger.

  1. So I’m rereading (once more, this spring 1975) Bouvard et Pécuchet. I’m searching: What is it I savor? What is it that gives me pleasure, responsive to the text? What makes a bell go off in me? The work? Too vague. The “construction”? Surely not. The passages? I believe this for a moment and I begin to try to make for myself a personal anthology of Bouvard et Pécuchet (which would lead me to a series of textual explications, but no matter). I keep at least one passage that pleases me: the peacock episode.34 But, in searching for others, I get bogged down; impossible to mark them out, to cut them out. The attempt fails.

  Nevertheless, in searching for my passages, I manage to locate my pleasure (my emotion? my excitement?), which I more clearly understand to be intermittent (sensual delight is based on intermittence). The discursive form of this intermittence is the sentence. I’m fascinated by certain sentences. So that’s where I must go; what makes a bell go off in me is the sentence.

  2. Object of pleasure, the sentence (Flaubert’s sentence in Bouvard et Pécuchet): What does it have to do with knowledge? Can I hope to work on these sentences that delight me?

  A vague “dispatching” of knowledge takes shape. What do I potentially have at my disposal?

  (a) What general knowledge of the sentence? It is not assembled and remains very fluid. Here and there, piecemeal, there are some propositions:

  —In Saussurian linguistics? Very little, because the sentence falls into the domain of speech (and thus the combinative). We find a little in Martinet.35

  —In Chomsky? Yes, we find a theory on the sentence. But the Chomskian sentence is statutorily infinite. It proliferates (until the death of the subject) through interlocking parts, according to rules. And I already know that the fascinating point of my sentence is the closing. We’ll see, of course; but this is not the stylistic ϕ, the written ϕ.36

  —Maybe we’ll find more things looking into rhetoric: Aristotle, the Stoics, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, peri hypsous,37 the medieval dictatum.38

  —I sense that there would be many things to look for in the vast field of ethnology, in civilizations (especially through the angle of religion) where production is regulated by formulaic expressions, verses, “coined” phrases.

  (b) There are two clearer approaches that we can mention right away—and we are going to do that:

  1—On the ideology of the sentence, which greatly interests us, we find a decisive, new, accurate approach by Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique. Part B: “Le Dispositif sémiotique du texte,” chap. 2, “Syntaxe et composition” (with regard to Un Coup de dés), p. 265 and following.39 This will be our theoretical reference text, the framework that will allow us to ask questions, our questions. That is the purpose the work of others serves, if it is intelligent.

  2—On Flaubert’s sentence? I go back to a first approach I made with the value-sentence that I will evoke again (not the sentence in Flaubert [this is not a grammatical or stylistic study], but the sentence for Flaubert).40

  […]

  So, our research principle is to learn why a relationship of pleasure (and for the moment let us not refine the distinction between pleasure and sensual delight)41 is established between certain sentences in Bouvard et Pécuchet and my reading—and in that way, perhaps, as though in passing, in sideswiping, we will start toward some knowledge on the sentence, as an object composed of ideology and sensual delight.

  Choice of These Sentences?

  (a) I will proceed according to a principle of individuation (according to an arbitrary point of departure): I will retain the ones that interest me—without yet knowing by virtue of what type of interest (we can also say of someone we desire: you interest me).

  (b) How many? At first I considered a very large inventory (sometimes two or three per page), even if that meant noting and listing, without always commenting. That would be the proper method, because the quantity of the inventory can engender a new perception of the issue. But it’s impossible because of the very limited number of sessions (three or four still).

  I will choose about twenty “good” sentences—from throughout the work—potentially rich in commentary, that is, in possibilities for knowledge, according to a chrestomathic principle (the most “useful” sentences). But chrestomathy differs from anthology; anthology is a matter of a principle of pleasure. Realized as sensual pleasure, a text is always anthologic (made up of islands, marks, losses, isolates). It is a centon (cento, onis), a patchwork. We must retain the anthologic principle—and not the chrestomathic one.

  Consequently, we will analyze a very small number of sentences—by necessity—but without being obliged to choose from throughout the work. We will tak
e them in the order of reading, thus by remaining—by necessity—at the beginning. This is the point of departure, the prefiguration of an inventory that we cannot take very far but that will thus be postulated.

  Method of Commentary?

  Even though aimed at an object that is formal in principle (the sentence), we will not exclude the pleasures or interests of content.

  Of course the point of departure will be linguistic (see our introduction on the normative syntactical structure), but with the linguistics maintaining a Saussurian imperative (the meaning is part of the language; semantics, part of the linguistics).

  The distinction between form and content constitutes a false dichotomy. Content is itself a form (a code). One cannot halt a sentence at its form. One can limit its extension, not its intention.

  What interests us is the sentence-object. That object is voluminous; it is made of layers, like an onion (we must retain the metaphor of the onion, which is different from the one of fruit; with the onion, no “pit,” no secret hidden beneath the skin).

  Consequences of the “Anthologic” Operation?

  By isolating sentences, by treating each one as a separate object, we are subjecting these sentences to an operation of disconnection.

  Under cover of a simple operating option, we approach a radical transmutation of consciousness. We are going to start seeing the sentence, to disconnect it from its fabric within which we don’t see it. See Bataille, Méthode de méditation: “The system of known elements in which our activity is inscribed is only the product of it. An automobile, a man entering a village: I do not see either one, but the fabric woven through an activity of which I am part. There where I imagine seeing ‘what is,’ I see the subordinating ties to the activity that is there. I do not see; I am within a fabric of knowledge, reducing to itself, to its servitude, the freedom (the primary sovereignty and nonsubordination) of what is.”42

  To see the auto, we disconnect it from its everyday function within the space of the village—just as, to see the sentence, we disconnect it from its narratological or reasoning (discursive) function. To disconnect is to separate from a use, a function; it is to convert an instrument into an object (see Duchamps and the ready-made). We separate the sentence from its (supposed) function of communication that itself conceals a thetic function (it’s a matter of setting out a truth). We pass from paranoia to perversion (disconnected, the sentence can become a fetish). Thus from the very beginning—and no matter what sentences are chosen—we must speak of a sensual pleasure of disconnection. The disconnected sentence thus takes on the power to fascinate, to shatter us (see the root in Sartre’s La Nausée).43 That is how we must understand the sovereignty of the sentence.