Review

Authors(s): Steven Ungar

Review by: Steven Ungar
Source: MLN, Vol. 103, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1988), pp. 929-931
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905030
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M L N 929

Reda Bensmaia, The Barthes Effect: the Essay as Reflective Text

Trans. Patricia Fedkiw, foreword by Michele Richman Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 122 pages

This brief study says more about the writings of Roland Barthes than any

number of monographs devoted to his entire career. Quite simply, The

Barthes Effect is the most informed and provocative study on Barthes to

appear in recent years. Its focus on the essay allows for an approach to the

texts-starting with SIZ (1970)-that best illustrate what Barthes had the-

orized as early as 1953 (in Writing Degree Zero) as the multiple practices of

writing after or beyond Literature in the singular and with a capital "L."

Bensmaia first states his major premise in the form of a question, "Why is

there Genre, and not Literature instead?" (xxvii). The variation on Hei-

degger and Leibniz-"Why is there something rather than nothing?"-

suggests that the displacement from literature to genre is more of a critical

question yet to be resolved than a historical phenomenon or fait accompli

associated with Parisian structuralism of the 1960's.

Bensmafa's decision to cast his own text as an essay on the essay illus-

trates the general economy of style and tone which also serves as the os-

tensible object of his inquiry. This mimetic performance is neither a pas-

tiche nor a parody; it supplements his meditation on the Barthesian essay

with the materialist practice of writing in The Pleasure of the Text, Roland

Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, and Camera Lucida. Rather

than simply elaborating an account of the essay in terms of chronology,

evolution, and influence, Bensmaia looks for the systematic and transin-

dividual traits present in the writing practices of Montaigne, Valery, Blan-

chot, and Barthes. The result is a comparative project of poetics which

engages a surprising number of literary and critical concerns.

Why the essay? And why reflective? Although Bensmaia never states it

in so many words, his focus on genre-that is, his emphasis on the con-

cept of genre as well as his choice of the essay as a problematic case in

point-is a critical response to what proponents of the Nouveau Roman

referred to twenty to thirty years ago as the end of the book. Bensmaia

correctly sees SIZ as a programmatic text that sketches a "book to come"

which is less of a discrete object than a writerly text fragmented into bits,

pieces, and networks "that interact without any of them being able to sur-

pass the rest" (54). He also argues convincingly that Barthes's writerly

practice extends a similar focus on the essay and on the fragment in the

writings of Maurice Blanchot. (The relevant texts are Blanchot's L'Espace

litte'raire [1955], Le Livre a venir [1959], and "Nietzsche et l'&criture frag-

mentaire" in L'Entretien infini [1969].)

Bensmafa uses the term "reflective" rather than '"reflexive" because he

grants no privilege to reflexivity. He maintains that Barthes's late writings

do not merely turn toward themselves, they are also reflective in that they

illustrate speculative as opposed to applied thought. While Barthes's prac-

tice is directed toward particular objects (text, bliss, death), it does not

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930 REVIEWS

inscribe the particular within the universal. This quality, which Bensmaia

adapts from Kant's concept of reflective judgment, suggests the moder-

nity of a writing practice that Barthes shares with Blanchot. In both cases,

the particular is considered as radically distinct and thus removed from

universal rule, law, or principle. The fragment is irreducibly-that is,

nothing other than and nothing more or less than-a fragment whose

associations with an implied or explicit whole are definitively unstable.

A second reason for Bensmaia's focus on the essay as reflective text

devolves from the five codes-proairetic, hermeneutic, semic, symbolic,

and cultural-which Barthes uses in SIZ to simulate his reading of

Balzac's Sarrasine. To state the point somewhat differently, it is as though

Bensmaia reads Barthes as Barthes had read Balzac. The tactic is evident

when Bensmaia notes that the symbolic code is a "thinking of the body in a

state of language" (25) whose debts to Montaigne do not fully account for

the materialist writing practice which is one of Barthes's major contribu-

tions to modernity. Likewise, to the Montaignian claim (in Roland Barthes

by Roland Barthes) that the book is the book of the Self, Bensmaia adds, "In

this sense, like every 'modern' work, the Essay does not raise problems of

meaning, but rather a problem of usage (Deleuze) or, in other words, a

problem of effect and of meaning" (53). By emphasizing function and usage

rather than intention and meaning, Bensmaia addresses the material spec-

ificity of the essay as an entre-deux which also destabilizes conventional cat-

egories of genre: "One can say that the essay is not a genre like any other,

and perhaps not a genre at all: first because it is not one, but also because it

no longer obeys the rules of the game" (91-92).

As I mentioned in passing above, the dispersion of fixed and stable

meaning which Bensmaia explores in the Barthesian essay points to a mi-

metic gesture in his own writing which derives as much from Blanchot and

Derrida as from Barthes. Bensmaia's stratagem is to have written a ref lec-

tive text whose interplay of heterogenous materials evokes Barthes's

writing beginning with SIZ. Aptly, there are at least two ways to read The

Barthes Effect. The first would be as critical study (on Barthes, on the essay)

within a conventional history of literature and philosophy from Plato to

Montaigne and Valery. The second-inspired more by Blanchot and

Derrida-would illustrate the materiality of writing for which the first

would account primarily as concept and/or theory. This second reading

does not exclude the first but supplements it by a gesture of illustration

which Bensmaia performs throughout his defense. Illustration and de-

fense? My variation on the title of Du Bellay's 1549 Difense et Illustration de

la langue francaise is intentional. It means to convey Bensmaia's emulation

of a Barthesian practice of writing which, despite its modernist qualities,

never succeeded in erasing its humanist grounding. Since Montaigne's

Essais is a prime precedent for the concept of the essay as reflective text, I

might also suggest that Bensmaia has written what amounts to an Apologie

de Roland Barthes!

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M L N 931

Bensmaia's essay-expanded from a first version published in French

as Barthes a l'essai: Introduction au texte reflechissant (Tubingen: G. Narr,

1986)-appears at a moment of relative silence surrounding Barthes. Ex-

cept for Phillippe Roger's Roland Barthes, roman (Paris: Grasset, 1986) and

Vincent Jouve's La Litte'rature selon Barthes (Paris: Minuit, 1986), Barthes

has seemingly been relegated to inclusion among the targets of a revi-

sionist rewriting of the 1960's led by Jean-Paul Aron's Les Modernes,

Tzvetan Todorov's Critique de la critique (Paris: Seuil, 1985), and Luc Ferry

and Alain Renaut's La Pense'e 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). Such rewriting is

not, however, uncontested. Along with Antoine Compagnon's "Les Deux

Barthes" (in La Troisieme Republique des lettres [Paris: Seuil, 1983]), The

Barthes Effect provides evidence that Barthes's contribution to literary and

critical practices will outlast the current wave of polemicized reception.

The University of Iowa STEVEN UNGAR

Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987.

227 pages

This is a provocative and essential book for anyone interested in the Euro-

pean eighteenth century. Thomas Kavanagh undertakes an interpretation

of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's oeuvre organized around a family structure

that not only determines the vast range of Rousseau's writing, but also

suggests how Rousseau conceived of the form and possible failure of his

work. The analysis begins with the recounting of Rousseau's roman fa-

milial, as presented in Book I of the Confessions. Kavanagh points out that

Rousseau, whose mother's death was the very condition of his own life,

was led to define the standard Oedipal situation in terms of tearful com-

plicity (rather than rivalry) with his father. He notes the recurrence of this

pattern in Rousseau's subsequent relationships with parental figures

(Claude Anet, Mine. de Warens, et al.); each time Rousseau disavows any

desire to take the father's place, and even erases all traces of the father's

existence, so as to leave room only for the self-sufficient, desexualized

diad of mother-become-sister and brother ("standing before their mutu-

ally recognized yet always denegated father"; 11) As both cause and effect

of this idyllic diad, the father is always denegated (denied and implicitly

recognized), but never does Rousseau seek to replace him. Although it

uses this modified Oedipal triangle as a point of departure, and is in-

formed by psychoanalytic concepts, Kavanagh's approach is not really psy-

choanalytic, and certainly not psychological. Despite the Lacanian refer-

ences (imaginary, symbolic), he is more concerned with demonstrating the

role of this triangle as a structuring element in all of Rousseau's attempts

to "write the truth," on the personal, social, and political levels. For ex-

ample, Kavanagh moves from the beginning of the Confessions to the

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