Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts

  130. In his article “La Fonction sociale du critique.”

  131. Roland Barthes published an article on the novel by Queneau, Zazie dans le métro (Gallimard, 1959) titled “Zazie et la littérature” in the August–September issue of Critique, reprinted in Essais critiques (OC, vol. 2, 382–88).

  132. Barthes wrote only one article on Morin, which appeared in the July 1965 issue of Combat (OC, vol. 2, 718–19).

  133. It is a question of Histoire de la folie published by Plon in 1961 under the title of Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.

  134. Henri Michaux published Connaissance par les gouffres with Gallimard in 1961. Yvon Bélaval did indeed address Michaux’s book in an article in the November 1962 issue of Critique titled “Introduction à la poésie expérimentale.”

  135. René Girard published Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque with Grasset in 1961. Barthes did not review it but he alluded to it in “Les deux sociologies du roman” in France Observateur in December 1963 (OC, vol. 2, 249–50). It was Michel Deguy who reviewed Girard’s book in the January 1962 issue.

  136. L’Observatoire de Cannes by Jean Ricardou appeared from Minuit in 1961 and Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour by Michel Leiris from Gallimard the same year. L’Ordre des choses by Jacques Brosse (1922–2008), with a preface by Gaston Bachelard, was published by Plon in 1958.

  137. Barthes makes a mistake regarding the title; it was an extract from L’Année dernière à Marienbad that appeared in Tel Quel 5 (Spring 1961).

  138. Barthes’s review appeared in the November 1961 issue under the title “Savoir et folie” and was reprinted in Essais critiques under the title “De Part et d’autre” (OC, vol. 2, 422–29).

  139. Girard’s thinking, which is a Christian philosophy of mediation, directly opposes modern “nihilism,” which he sees as an avatar of the “Romantic lie,” as is evidenced by this paragraph from the ninth chapter of Girard’s book, “L’Apocalypse dostoïevskienne,” in which Barthes is directly targeted: “Ten years will not pass before we recognize in ‘l’écriture blanche’ and its ‘degré zéro’ the increasingly abstract, increasingly ephemeral and stunted avatars of the noble Romantic birds.” Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961; Paris: Hachette Littérature, 2011), 297–98. Nevertheless Girard supported Barthes against Picard in the “quarrel” and invited him to the colloquium in Baltimore that he organized in 1966 (see the letter from August 27, p. XXX).

  140. “Critique de la poésie” appeared in Critique in March 1966.

  141. Pierre Verstraeten (1933–2013) never published anything in Critique during this period.

  142. Following the publication of the violent tract by Raymond Picard previously cited.

  143. Probably Fleurs bleues, published by Gallimard in 1965.

  144. Critique did not take a position in the debate between Barthes and Picard. On this subject, see Sylvie Patron, Critique, 1946–1996, 218ff.

  145. We have not been able to identify this name.

  146. Tzvetan Todorov published his Théorie de la littérature, textes des formalistes russes with Seuil in 1965.

  147. There is no article by René Lourau (1933–2000), but Roger Kempf published an article on the body in the October 1966 issue (“Sur le corps de Julie Beaujon”).

  148. This must be the article by Jean Batany on linguistics that appeared in the May 1967 issue.

  149. Michel Deguy published “Théâtre et réalisme” in October 1966.

  150. Jean-Pierre Attal published “Maurice Scève, la Délie” in July–August 1966.

  151. Marc Le Bot published no articles in 1966.

  152. We have found no trace of this Mr. Blemen.

  153. Barthes went to the large colloquium on criticism at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, held October 18–21, 1966, under the direction of René Girard, with Richard Macksay, Charles Morazé, Georges Poulot, Eugenio Donato, Lucien Goldmann, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan, Guy Rosolato, Neville Dyson-Hudson, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Nicolas Ruwet.

  154. Alain Badiou published an article on Louis Althusser titled “Le (Re) commencement du matérialisme dialectique” in the May 1967 issue of Critique.

  155. Jacques Derrida had the same response: “like Barthes, I find it irritating at least because of its tone, the airs the author gives himself, the ‘notes’ he distributes as on the day of general inspection or the last judgment,” but he agrees to its publication (letter from Derrida to Piel from February 26, 1967, cited by Patron, Critique, 1946–1996, 88).

  156. Alain Badiou notes in this article Michel Foucault’s “powerlessness to produce, on the structural basis—however universal—that he designs, the distinctive operators of science and nonscience” and “the pretheoretic lightness of his judgments on Marx.” See Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 273–74.

  157. René Girard published “Symétrie et dissymétrie dans le myth d’Oedipe” in the February 1968 issue, number 249.

  158. “La parole selon Constant” was published in Critique in August–September 1968.

  159. Claude Hodin published an article entitled “L’Écrivain au travail” in the October 1970 issue of Critique, regarding especially Le Journal d’un inconnu by Jean Cocteau (Grasset, 1953). The article on La Voie lactée by Luis Buñuel (1969) was not published.

  160. See our note 1 for the letter of April 5, 1970, p. XXX.

  161. Barthes asked to meet with Lévi-Strauss regarding his thesis and did so on January 16.

  162. This is a matter of the first version, or the rough draft of Système de la mode, which was not published until 1967. Here Barthes is hoping that Lévi-Strauss will agree to advise his thesis, which did not happen.

  163. The two books must be Totémisme aujourd’hui and La Pensée sauvage, which were published respectively by PUF and by Plon in 1962.

  164. “Pour une sociologie du vêtement,” Annales, March–April 1960.

  165. In Le Monde on December 18, 1965, there was a page devoted to the matter of “nouvelle critique” and the dispute with Raymond Picard that was very critical of Barthes, as we have seen. The newspaper published an inset in which appeared a text by Lévi-Strauss, brought to Le Monde’s attention by “a reader,” that was published in the Italian review Paragone in April 1965 and that enlists Lévi-Strauss in the controversy on the side of Picard. The extract begins with this sentence, “The fundamental vice of literary criticism with structuralist pretensions stems from the fact that it too often comes down to a game of mirrors, in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the object from its symbolic resonance in the consciousness of the subject.” In its December 25, 1965, issue, Le Monde published Lévi-Strauss’s clarification that Barthes mentions: “In a recent ‘literary page,’ Le Monde devises for a few sentences of mine a fate that troubles me, involving a text I wrote in June 1964, thus predating (if I am not mistaken) the controversy on which someone seems to have me taking a position. My response to an Italian review was only trying to explain that, contrary to what researchers seem to admit, structuralist criticism and historically dictated criticism, far from mutually excluding each other, mutually involve each other. A good structuralist study always assumes that one has passionately inquired into history and, in the case of a literary subject, linguistics: the best feature of both domains is submitting the hypotheses of the researcher to external controls. Thus the sentences you quoted were only aimed at allegedly structural criticism that appears unconcerned with this double truth.”

  166. Jacqueline Piatier (1921–2001) edited the literary supplement of Le Monde.

  167. Mythologiques, vol. 2, Du miel aux cendres (Plon, 1967).

  168. BNF.

  169. A reference to the famous letter from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Roland Barthes regarding S/Z. Later, after Barthes’s death, Lévi-Strauss told Didier Éribon in an interview that he had written the letter as a joke, ironically, to have a little wild f
un with the book: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Éribon, De près et de loin (Paris: Points-Seuil, 1990), 106. We are not reproducing this letter since Lévi-Strauss published it himself (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Reading this second letter, one may get the feeling that Lévi-Strauss is mocking himself just as much, as his parodic discourse here so closely resembles that of some of his Mythologiques.

  170. To celebrate the publication of Anthropologie structurale deux (Plon, 1973).

  171. La Voix des masques was published in 1975 by Skira, in the same “Les Sentiers de la création” collection as Barthes’s L’Empire des signes.

  172. “Plus loin que le degré zéro,” Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française, September 1953, reprinted in Le Livre à venir (Gallimard, 1959) under the title “La Recherche du point zéro”; and “La Grande tromperie,” Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française, June 1957, reprinted in La Condition critique: Articles, 1945–1998 (Gallimard, 2010).

  173. “It allowed me to see a man like Blanchot, a man whose thinking was extremely sharp, extremely elevated, the highest in literature, solitude, negativity, become engaged in an activity that had all the imperfections of activism.” OC, vol. 5, 778–81. More generally on this project, see the cited dossier published in the September 1990 issue of Lignes.

  174. Maurice Blanchot published L’Attente oubli that year with Gallimard.

  175. Barthes was writing on the letterhead of the Arguments review, which was founded in 1956, as we have seen, by Edgar Morin, Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud, and Colette Audry, in reaction to the reemerging Stalinism, notably with the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops, which would shut down, coincidentally, at the end of 1962.

  176. The “Revue internationale” discussed in the introduction to this chapter.

  177. The French editorial staff then included Robert Antelme, Michel Butor, Louis-René des Forêts, Marguerite Duras, Michel Leiris, Dionys Mascolo, and Maurice Nadeau. In Italy, it was mainly Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Vittorini, Alberto Moravia, and Francesco Leonetti. In Germany it was Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Martin Walser.… Barthes would introduce Georges Perros into the enterprise (see his letter to Perros from December 28, 1962, p. XXX).

  178. Gallimard would drop the venture very quickly, and Julliard would become the official publisher for France for this review that would never actually exist.

  179. OC, vol. 2, 559–61.

  180. This must be Sur Racine.

  181. The Zurich meeting was difficult, revealing very strong political differences between the various groups (see the letter from Maurice Blanchot to Uwe Johnson from February 1, 1963, in “Le Dossier de la ‘Revue international.’ ”); among myriad disagreements, let us cite, for example, the charge directed at the French for being abstract and ignoring the concrete (268–75).

  182. We date this letter from May-June 1963 because that was when Mascolo left for Italy for a week to try to save the “Revue internationale” by making it a French-Italian venture. Ibid., 289–92.

  183. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s position was to publish “three separate reviews with international leanings” (letter from Mascolo to Leonetti from May 22, 1963; ibid., 289). Beginning in 1961, Enzensberger and the Germans in general were tied up with the crisis linked to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. See his letter to Mascolo from September 19, 1961, calling into question “the German participation in the plan” (232) and ending in profound pessimism regarding history and a certain rupture in positions but also hostility toward the mandarin aestheticism of the French (letter from Enzensberger to Mascolo from February 25, 1963; ibid., 278–80).

  184. Francesco Leonetti was one of the most persistent of the “Revue internationale” initiators; for example, in spring 1964 he published in the Italian review Il Menabò, under the title “Gulliver,” a group of texts that constituted a kind of preliminary issue, even though the review seemed to be abandoned.

  185. It must be Critique et vérité.

  186. We are reproducing here the carbon copy of the letter retained by Barthes, which explains why there is no opening or formal closing, which Barthes would have added by hand to the typed original he sent to Blanchot, which has not been found.

  187. As early as 1959, in response to an investigation into General de Gaulle’s regime in the 14 Juillet review, in which Blanchot participated, Barthes refuted all characterizations of de Gaulle as a “fascist” (OC, vol. 1, 984–86).

  188. Barthes is alluding here to his refusal to sign the Manifeste des 121, a “Declaration on the right to rebellion in the war of Algeria,” written largely by Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo, signed by André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Leiris, etc., and published September 6, 1960. Barthes preferred to sign the text by Claude Lefort, Edgar Morin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, etc., published October 6, 1960, in Combat and less indulgent toward the nationalism of the National Algerian Liberation Front.

  189. See his summaries in the school’s annual (OC, vol. 2, 747–49 and 875).

  190. See, for example, Barthes’s letter to Butor from August 16, 1964, p. XXX.

  191. At the end of the section “The First Barthes,” p. XXX.

  192. OC, vol. 3, 527–601.

  4. A Few Letters Regarding a Few Books

  1. Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963).

  2. Lettres à Franca (Paris: Stock-IMEC, 1998), 229.

  3. Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966).

  4. See our note 3 in chapter 3 in the letter to Michel Butor from November 21, 1965, p. XXX.

  5. Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970).

  6. Alain Bosquet published a review of S/Z in Combat on May 14, 1970, titled “Roland Barthes ou la critique devient un rêve.”

  7. Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970).

  8. L’Écriture des pierres appeared the same year as L’Émpire des signes, also from Skira.

  9. An allusion to the big quarrel between Jean-Pierre Faye and Philippe Sollers that same year, following an interview with Faye in La Gazetter de Lausanne, in which he violently called Sollers into question. See the letter from Roland Barthes to Philippe Sollers from October 25, 1970 (OC, vol. 5, 1044).

  10. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971).

  11. An interview published in the fall 1971 issue (OC, vol. 3, 1025–42).

  12. SADE stands for Societa Adriatica di Elettricita.

  13. Barthes, Nouveaux Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

  14. Éditions de Seuil had just reissued Le Degré zéro de l’écriture followed by Nouveaux Essais critiques in which appears the text on Aziyadé by Pierre Loti.

  15. Barthes, Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

  16. Barthes, Alors, la Chine? (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975).

  17. Christian Bourgois did indeed receive numerous letters to thank him for publishing Alors, la Chine?—from, for example, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Rancière, Daniel Wilhem, François Di Dio, and Jacques Aumont.

  18. The manuscript of Voyage en Chine, which would be published by POL in 1980, and later republished by Éditions Marciana, 2012.

  19. Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977).

  20. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

  21. Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1980).

  22. Poetic texts by Prigent.

  23. Prigent sent pages from the thesis he was writing on Francis Ponge, under Barthes’s direction.

  24. Christian Prigent sent Barthes his book Du Côté de l’imaginaire (Terra incognita, 1977).

  25. See the following letter.

  26. Jude Stéfan’s text on Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes was reprinted in Xénies (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Later in a brief tribute, Jude Stéfan wrote, “Barthes has spoken of an ‘erotic of the proper noun’ and poets often think about the value of names. In his, there are many things: the initial ‘B.’ A literary ‘B’ espec
ially for that generation of the 1950s that was reading Breton, Borges, Blanchot, Bataille. The word ‘ART,’ concealed in the name. There is also the ‘H.’ Essential, central, although slightly hidden, toward the end of the name. The ‘H’ with its horizontal bar that can link two human beings, he wrote. In his case, two beings of the same sex. The ‘H’ of “finding the H” of Rimbaud’s poem, which he must search for and find in his homosexuality. And then: the ‘H’ that is both his English and Greek. The English, elegant, musician Barthes; the learned Greek Barthes, professor of classical literature Barthes. And finally, there is the ‘ES.’ A feminine ending that is not pronounced. The sign of a plural noun, which he was.” Globe Hebdo, November 3–9, 1993.

  27. Émile Benveniste suffered an attack in December 1969 that left him aphasic; he died on October 3, 1976.

  28. François Châtelet had just published a novel, Les Années de démolition, with Éditions Hallier.

  29. In October 1978, the following year, Barthes published a text on Bernard Faucon’s photographs in Zoom (OC, vol. 5, 471–74).

  30. In his “columns” for the Nouvel Observateur, Barthes will praise the film by Pierre Klossowski and Pierre Zucca, Roberte, ce soir, which he refers to here (OC, vol. 5, 650).

  31. On Philippe Rebeyrol, see p. XX.

  32. Fragments from a seminar given at the Université Paris 7 in 1975. Transcribed, presented, and annotated by Claude Coste with the help of Éric Marty.

  33. This text was reproduced in June 2010 in the Genesis review, presented by Éric Marty and transcribed by Arlette Attali.

  34. In chapter 10.

  35. In 1967, the article “Flaubert et la phrase” appeared as a tribute to the linguist André Martinet in the Word review (April, August, December 1968), before being included in Nouveaux Essais critiques in 1972. The Barthes archives related to Flaubert include a collection of course notes, the first version of the article from 1967.