After the Empire: The Francophone World

and Postcolonial F rance

Series Editor:
Valérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland

Advisory Board:
Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Claire H. Griffiths, University of Chester, UK;
Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred
Mortimer, University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana University;
Alison Rice, University of Notre Dame; Kamal Salhi, University of Leeds; Tracy D.
Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University; Nwachukwu Frank LTkadike, Tulane University

Recent Titles

Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone Ilorld: Filiations Past and Future,
edited by Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Paris and the Marginalked Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness and Exile, edited Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics
by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears
French Orientalist Literature in Algeria, 1845-1884: Colonial Hauntings, by Sage in the Francophone World
Goellner
Corporeal Archipelagos: Ilrriting the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women's
Literature, by Julia L. Frengs
Spaces ofCreation: Transculturality and Feminine Expression in Francophone Filiations Past and Future
Literature, by Allison Connolly
llomenllriters of Gabon: Literature and Herstory, by Cheryl Toman
Backwoodsmen as Ecocritical Motif in French Canadian Literature: Connecting Worlds
in the \Vilds, by Anne Rehill Edited by Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Front Cover lconography and Algerian lTomen's lTriting: Heuristic Implications ofthe
Recto-Verso Effect, by Pamela A. Pears
The Algerian lI/ar in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and
Subjectivity, by Jennifer Howell
Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in
Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, edited by Ousseina D. Alidou and Renée
Larrier
State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues:
Uncanrry Cîtizerxhip, by Hervé Tchumkam
Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories ofStones and Blood" by Véronique Maisier

I
I

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham . Boulder. New York . London
 Contents

Foreword vll
Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Introduction
Rajeshwari S. Tallury

1 Commemorating Past History or Documenting the Persistence

of Struggles?: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, and Phil
Watts as Archaeologists l1
Yves Citton
2 Free Indirect or Who Is the Subject of the Work of Fiction? JJ
Timothy Bewes
3 Time, Sense, and the Image in Raoul Ruiz's Za Tocdion
Suspendue and L'Hltpothèse du Tobleau Irolé 5l
Giuseppina Mecchia
4 Lévinas and Camus: Love, Literaturg andResistance 65
ChristiætC. Wood
5 Sacrificial Filiations: The Eichmann Trial, Hannah Arendt" and
the Dangers of "Monumental History" 81
RichwdJ. Golsæt
6 Linking the Aesthetic and the Political in Jean Genet: From
Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs to Les nègres to the Black Panther Party 95
PsmelaA. Pears
7 Torture, Terror, and Revolution under the Algerian Sun: Tragic
Consciousness in Mohammed Dib's Un étë africain 109
Rajeshwari S. Yallury

v
142 RédaBensmaia

21. As I write ttrese lines, I am reminded of what Abdelwahab Meddeb said in the beautiful
interview he gave Guy Scarpetta entitled "Algérie: l'Enfer et l'Amnésie" (in La Règle du Jeu,
September 1994), alluding to the relation of Algerian intellectuals with their "lieux de mé-
moire": "Tout ce que je sais, c'est que chacun sur le terrain ne doit pas lâcher . . . Le travail
intellectuel n'a pas été fait en Algérie. Les intellectuels avaient à mener le travail de ia levée de
l'oubli, en ce qui conceme la tradition, la trace arabe ancieoae, et aussi i,indispensable appren-
Chapter Nine
tissage qui mène à la maltrise. Quand on pense qu'un homme d'épée et de plume aussi consi-
dérable qu'Abd-El-Kader n'a littéralement pas été pensé en Algérie. . . . Quand on ne travaille
pas sur la mémoire, ça ne reste pas impuni. . . . Un autre exemple: pour régler et sufinonter
I'affaire coloniale, il aurait fallu un havail gigantesque sur le colonialisme, sur ses crimes. Est-
Desiring Anthropology
c€ que ça a été fait? Est-ce que les quarante-cinq mille assassinés de Sétif, ion de ce massacre
de l'après-guene qui a constitué un traumatisme considérable, ont donné lieu à un travail
équivalent, à ceiui de Klarsfeld, lorsqu'il a constitué, après une enquête de plus de 40 ans,la Roland B ar thes' s Ethnolo gical T emp t ation
Iiche identitaire des plus de soixante-dix mille juifs qui ont subi les persécutions en France?
Est-ce qu'on a révélé la fiche d'identification des quarante-cinq mille Algériens assassinés à
Sétif, est-ce qu'on a établi leur biographie? Est-ce qu'on a transmis leur mémoire?' (293_.94). Vincent Debaene
This, it seems to me, is what Djebar tried to do when, after recounting the terrible episodes
of the "enfumages" by Cavaignac, Saint-Amaud, and Pélissier, she writes: ..pélissier,
I'intercesseur de cette mort longue, pour mille cents cadavres sous El-Kantar4 avec leurs
houpeaux bêlant indéfiniment au trépas, me tend son rapport etJe reçois ce palimpseste pour y
inscrire à mon tour Ia passion calcinée des ancêtres"l (L'Amour, La Fantasia, g3). My empha-
sis.
Similar gesture, repeated innumerable times in the "novel" **rere the uriter lends her
voice, hand and body so that those unable to speak may finally do soo so that what could not be
uttered or expressed (symbolized, liberated), can finally be inscribed within the history of the Is it possible to escape the melancholy and commemorative mood that seems
Nation to come. læt us recall what Renan said with respect to the Nation and (the necessity of;
forgetting: "Dans le passé, un héritage de gloire et de regrets à partager, dans I'avenir un même to poison French intellectual life in recent years? Is it possible to celebrate
progaûrme à réaliser; avoir souffer! joui, espéré ensemble, voilà ce qui vaut mieux que des Lévi-Strauss and Beauvoir in 2008, Césaire and Camus in2013, Duras in
douanes cornmunes et des frontières conformes aux idées snatégiques; voilà ce que l'on com- 2014, Barthes in 2015 without a funt, dubious nostalgia for what some
prend malgré les diversités de langue et de race. Je disais tout à I'heure: 'avoir souffert ensem-
ble'; oui, la souffrance en coîlmun unit plus que la joie. En fait de souvenirs nationaux, les perceive as a greater time, back when France was a great empire, women
deuils valent nieux que les triomphes, car ils imposent des devoirs, ils commandent I'efort en were kept at home, and gay marriage not even thinkable? Can we think of
commun" (Ernest Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation?, Paris: Calmarm Lévy, 1882, https://
û.wikisource.org/dindex.php?title=Qu'est-ce_qu'rme_nation_?). My emphasis.
filiations, while emphasizing the present and the future, rather than focusing
on a past framed in terms of legacy-always hijacked-and tradition-al-
ways betrayed? Or more precisely, can we use objects of the past, not as a
means to diagnose the ailments of the present (as if we were somewhere
above history, able to safely and objectively compaxe then and now), but to
do something rather different: to unsettle our present? To use works of the
past not as tools for diagnosis, or to show how \ilrong (or right, for that
matter) we now are, but as reminders that there always remains some un-
thinkable, as clues toward that which we cannot think?t
This was Phil Watts's wager in his work on twentieth-century French
literature: first, in Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the
Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France-atopic that is particu-
larly vulnerable to hasty judgments and retrospective condemnations and
which he approaches with admirable political and ethical caution; then, in his
posthumous book Raland Barthes' Cinema published on the occasion of
Barthes's centennial.2 Consider for example, his following reflection on
Barthes, taken from his preparatory notes for the manuscript ofthe book:

143
t44 Vincent Debaene
As I read responses to Barttres from the 1970s and 1980s, especially responses
from American and British critics, I am overwhelmed at the amount of time
expended in trying to explain Barfhes. Certainly, this serves a purpose, al-
though I've always felt that one of the least compelling missions that academic
discourse in the humanities assigns itself is to explain new thought. Barthes
wanted to be read, urderstood and used, not explained. . . . Barthes's writings,
on cinema and in general, neEd no explanation today. What I want to try to do
is to read through the theory to find other meanings, other enthusiasms, other
signs that might be of import to us today. 3
My aim here is to follow his incentive to read 'through" Barthes, not to
explain his thought, but 'oto find other meanings, other enthusiasms, other
signs that might be of import to us today."
Within the wonderful self-portrait Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
published by Le Seuil in 1975, one comes across an enigmatic fragment,
entitled "The ethnological temptation":
What pleased him in Michelet is the foundation of an ethnology of France, the
desire and the skill of questioning historically-i.e., relatively-those objects
supposedly the most natural: face, food, clothes, complexion. Elsewhere the
population of Racine's tragedies, and that of Sade's novels, have been de-
scribed as hibes, as closed ethnic groups whose structure must be studied. In
his Mythologies, it is France itself which is ethnographed. Further, he has
always loved the great novelistic cosmogonies (Balzas, Zola, Proust), so close
to little societies. This is becausc the ethnological book has a1l the powers of .
the beloved book: it is an encyclopedia, noting and classi$ing all of reality,
even the most hivial, the most sensual aspects; this encyclopedia does not
adulterate the Other by reducing it to the Same; appropriation diminishes, the
Self s certitude grows lighter. Finally, of all leamed discourse, the ethnologi-
cal seems to come closest to a Fiction. a
Speaking in the third person (as in most of the book), Barthes seems here to
identify in his own past work an "impulse" toward ethnography: many of the
books he wrote, he explains, such as Michelet (1954) or Mythologies (1957),
betray his desire to become an ethnographer of France; simultaneously, he
tends to think of the worlds of Proust or Racine-to which he devoted sever-
al essays-as small isolated societies, with their o$/n customs and rules,
which he might study and observe as an anthropologist in the field.
If, as suggested by Raji Vallury in her introduction, reevaluating the
theoretical and artistic legacies of the twentieth-century French-speaking
world cannot but summon the notions of Fiction, Politics, and Discourse,
then this somewhat cryptic fragment is very deeply, very typically a twenti-
eth-century piece of thought. First and most evidently, because what makes
anthropology valuable in the eyes of Barthes is that, of all the scholarly
discourses, it is the closest to Fiction; furthermore because this fragment
DesiringAnthropolog't 145
points toward a certain political (and ethical) ideal, an ideal (or idealized)
relationship to the Other, whose otherness is maintained and preserved; final-
ly, because it has to do with the frontiers of discourses: from what is Barthes
driven, as an apparent escape, toward anthropology? And above all why is
this move characterized as a temptation? What is this desire, what is this
repression, and why didn't Barthes yield to this impulse?
I will first situate this excerpt in the broader context of a history of
discourses in France in the twentieth century. This "ethnological temptation"
must be understood in direct relation to a symmetical impulse, namely the
"literary temptation" prevalent in the writings of so many French social
scientists, above all anthropologists, since Emile Durkheim. I will then eluci-
date the territorial metaphor associated with theïrotion of temptation, before
proposing an interpretation of what this ethnological temptation might mean,
and why it is so essential to Barthes.
In this fragment, Barthes identifies something which is indeed typical of
twentieth-century French literature: a desire to go outside of itself and to
move toward new discursive territories, territories that can be described as
"ethnographic," "ethnological," or "anthropological." There is no doubt that
something resembling an ethnographic impulse is present in many major
works written during the twentieth century and early twenty-first century-
one need think only of Surrealism, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Michel
Leiris, Georges Perec-and more recently, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Chamoi-
seau, François Bon, Pierre Michon, Raphaël Confiant. . . .5
This begs further exploration and differentiation-the ethnographic im-
pulse swely takes many forms-but through this reflective maneuver,
Barthes underscores a trait shared by many French literary \ilorks in the
twentieth century since Surrealism: a drive to go outside of itselt an atffac-
tion by forms of discourse that have to do with otherness, with the document,
and with science or at least scholarly interpretation-and more generally a
refusal to restrict itself to literature. Literature: "one of the saddest roads
leading to every4tring," as André Breton says in the first manifesto, setting
the tone for nearly a century of suspicion toward that which previous genera-
tions regarded as an almost unattainable ideal. We might interpret the literary
theory fever that grows from What Is Literature? (Sartre in 1948) to The
Death of the Author (Barthes in 1968) through llriting Degree Zero (Barthes
in 1953) and The Space of Literature (Blanchot in 1955) as an attempt to
come to terms with the contradictory "drives" toward a literature which is at
once an object of reverence and an object of distrust, which is simultaneously
idealized as a space for unique truth and, at the same time, suspected to be a
myth or a mystifrcation: there is a desire to reject it as an institution but
simultaneously to salvage it as an exercise of thought.6 Hence the paradoxi-
cal conclusion that to be truly litenry, a work has to be more than literature,
 146 Vincent Debaene
and that the true aim of genuine literature must be its own cancellation, or at
the very Leastadépassement of itself toward something else.7
In addition, Barthes's fragment is predicated on a specific historical situa-
tion, on a discursive space which includes ethnologie as an option and a
possibility. The idea of tentation ethnologique, of the ethnographic impulse
of literature, requires that ethnography exist as a possible genïe, as a disci-
pline, as a career, as an identified discourse. Twentieth-century French litera-
ture is peculiar in this respect: it inhabits a discursive landscape that has been
transformed by the emergence of social sciences. In that sense, writing litera-
ture in the twentieth century is decidedly different from writing literature in
the nineteenth century; literature has to situate itself and to define itself
within a range of possibilities that has been dramatically transformed since,
for instance, Balzac and the nineteenth-century realist novel. In 1895, Gus-
tave Lanson could still conceive of psychology and mores as "the exclusive
and inalienable domain of novelists and poets," but twenty years later, this is
no longer possible: psychology, customs, and manners have been adopted by
scholars of the new disciplines of the science of man.8
without a doubt, this major shift affected the role and function of litera-
ture. Here, Piene Bourdieu's notion of the literary field canbe applied in an
almost literal sense: in the field of forces which shape literary creation and
account for its history, social sciences, and anthropology in particular, creat-
ed a magnetic pole which generated its own dynamics of athaction and
repulsion, and reoriented the entire space ofdiscourses.
But this dynamic is not limited to literature; it entails a// discowses. parallel
to the ethnographic impulse of many writers writing after Sunealism, there is
a symmetrical literary impulse prevalent among French ethnographers and
anthropologists throughout the twentieth century until the present. Examples
are countless, from Marcel Griaule to Georges Condominas, from Alfred
Métraux to Claude Lévi-Strauss, from Pierre Clastres to Marc Augé, from
Philippe Descola to-recently-Françoise Héritier. Crucially, this impulse
has been clearly and explicitly articulated as a temptation since Emile Durk-
heim and Marcel Mauss. This pattern of temptation is absolutely essential for
understanding the specificity of the French anthropological tradition. The
oft-noted originality of French anthropology does not stem ftom its proxim-
ity with literature (which would be found in other national traditions, in the
American or Japanese traditions for instance), but because its relationship
with literature was conceived as, and experienced as, a temptation.
Two brief examples serve to highlight these contradictory impulses. In
the first two pages af his Manual of Ethnography (1947), Marcel Mauss
insists that ethnography should be considered as a science d'enregistrement
(a'oscience of recording"); the ethnographer's primary goal is to collect and
assemble well-established documents and to objectively describe the society
DesiringAnthropology 147
he studies; he should not yield to intuition or impressionistic descriptions and
should be wary of any form of exoticism. However, the very last sentence of
this introduction betrays an unanticipated remorse, which nearly debases this
otherwise positivistic description of anthropology. It reads: "sociology and
descriptive ethnology require one to be at once an archivist, a historian, a
statistician . as well as a novelist, able to evoke the life of a whole
society.'e Similarly Marcel Griaule, the strongest advocate of scientific eth-
nography in the 1930s and beyond, occasionally leaves room for doubt. In
the section of Ttrs Méthode de I'ethnographie devoted to oorecording,', he
insists that "artistic effects should be considered with the utmost distrust."lo
But at the very end of the last chapter, devoted to the "exposition of the
results," he seems ta realize that such a dismissal of stylistic effects might not
be entirely applicable, or even desirable: o'It is . . . necessary to present facts
in detail to the reader . . . reducing the author's intervention to a minimum.
However, if one considers the atmosphere in which the facts took place [sic],
the author is allowed to include impressions, subjeotive incidents that will be
all the more useful to the description." He then concludes: "One has then to
satisfy two contradictory necessities. The author needs to disappear when he
is exposing the course ofa rite, and on the other hand, he needs to draw from
all the resources of his personality to render the atmosphere of the rite. In the
former case, he will use a cold, even flat, style; he will sacrifice all literary
effect in favor of precision. In the latter case, he shall be a good littéra-
teur,t'11
The best and most recent example of this rather schizophrenic relation-
ship with literature is the work of Pierre Bourdieu-himself an anthropolo-
gist by training-who insists dramatically on the need to avoid the çontami-
nation of social sciences by literature. In facto much of Bourdieu's work can
be read as the struggle of a scholarly superego repressing the literary im-
pulse. Two types of forces cohabit in his work. On the one hand, we find
various forms of rejection of literature, which is altematively described as a
mystification, a tool in the symbolic violence exerted by the classes domi-
nantes, a reservoir ofmisleading devices that hinder the understanding ofthe
social world (see for instance the denunciation of narative at the core of the
famous article "The Biographical Illusion") and, above all, fierce attacks
against the witer's ambition to decipher society. Sometimes, Bourdieu
comes close to a pure hatred of literature: among his late writings, one finds
very harsh, shocking when isolated, phrases against the "mystico-literary
exaltation . . . [of] poet-thinkers," the "triumph of arrogant incompetence
sublimated into writing."l2 On the other hand, though, his work also offers
expressions of admiration for Flaubert's and Virginia Vy'oolf s sociological
flair (which seems sometimes to exceed that of the best-trained sociologist)
and his prose is peppered with literary references and allusions. An entire
study could indeed be devoted to Bourdieu's titles as well as to his use of
148 Vincent Debaene
epigraphs (which a less-than-generous reader could easily mock as a typical
elitist wink to the happy-few readers familiar with the "scholastic point of
view" which, elsewhere, he denounces as the essential instrument of symbol-
ic domination in democratic societies). t: And one cannot but notice that he
also published, at the end of his life, the wolk Pascalian Meditations, and, a
fragmentary autobiography entitled Sbetch far a Self-Analysis, a text whose
very structure seems to illustrate a struggle against the literary temptation,
since the narrative and most personal sections are relegated to the end, fol-
lowing a much drier sociological first part. My point is not to reveal some
fundamental contradiction or to invalidate any of Bourdieu's analyses; it is
simply to identifr a prevalent pattem of desire and repression. Indeed, the
essence of temptation is that it is an internal conflict: one is at once desiring
and repressing, tempted but not surrendering to temptation. la
For the anthropologist, the origins of this pattern lie in the complex dy-
namics of inheritance and rejection that characterized the birth of social
sciences in France at the end of the nineteenth century: the social sciences
(history, sociology, anthropology) thought of themselves as both the opposite
and the offshoots of the Belles Lettres. On the one hand, they defined them-
selves in contradistinction to the knowledge of the "honnête homme," as
fields of expertise, with their own specific requirements, their methods, their
principles (observation, neutrality, etc.), their institutions, and a rejection of
rhetoric and imagination. On the other hand, though, they also considered
that they were resuming the mission of old forms of humanistic knowledge.
It is for this reason that the founders ofthe Revue historique could at once
praise Michelet and reject as unprofessional the historical writings of the
previous generation; and it is for this reason that the first students of the
Institut d'ethnologie could both praise Montaigne or Rousseau and reject as
unreliable nineteenth-century ethnography and travel writing. From this
point on, the social sciences enter a kind ofoedipal relationship to literature
that is, at one and the same time, viewed as a discourse they want to break
away from and as one of which they are the inheritors, simultaneously as a
comfort to which they must not give in and as a lost paradise, in which
rhetoric, imagination, and audacity were permitted. ls The literary temptation
was experienced even more acutely by anthropologists (in contrast with his-
torians or sociologists) for two reasons: first, because of their method; and
second, because of their object. By choosing as their object of study immate-
rial objects ("mentalities," o'states of mind," etc.) and by seeking to access
them through a subjective experience "in the field," anthropologists could
not but feel that the rejection ofrhetoric, narrative, figures, etc., was irrele-
vant. As a result, the field of anthropology became the site where the impos-
sibility of applying a oopositivist" and documentary paradigm to human facts
appeared in full light. to
DesiringAnthropologt 149
For the literary writer, the ethnograptric temptation originates in the same
history, although it is more complex and multifaceted-as we shall soon see
through Barthes's case. At times it is entwined with explicit nostalgia, and a
feeling of dispossessiorL with the bemoaning of an era when psychology,
customs, mores had not yet been taken over by the social sciences and were
still the realm of literature, At other times it has to do with a quest for some
form of collective or cultural identity and with the contradictions such a
quest always entails (see for example Patrick Chamoiseau,s play on the
figure of the ethnographer). It might also have to do with a fear of ,ogratuitous
formalism," especially in post-Iy'orzveau Roman years. In that case, the eth-
nographic impulse is a way for literature to reassert its political ambition and
its inscription in the social world (this is very explicit in Annie Ernaux's
work, for instance). In any case, these two symmetrical impulses-the liter-
ary impulse of French ethnography, and the ethnographic impulse of French
literature-these two contradicting forces are essential for understanding the
history and changes undergone by both discourses in the twentieth century as
well as their reciprocal influence on one another.
In this landscape of desire and repression, one finds some figures of gate-
keepers, of border guards, intent on preventing contamination and committed
to preserving each discursive territory-as shown by the example of Bour-
dieu-but Barthes was certainly not one of them. As the fragment demon-
strates, he was quite atfuned to this ethnographic impulse. Since he defines it
as a temptation (and not just a desire), he seems nevertheless to recognize in
it an element of mirage: this type of desire would be better left unfulfilled. It
seems rather obvious that ethnography or anthropology are not aclual exis-
tential or discursive options, and although Barthes was an avid reader of
Claude Lévi-Strauss's writings, he was probably never tempted himself to
study anthropology as such, and especially not to go o'in the fie1d."17 Rather,
ethnography appeam as an imaginary figure, something he liked to contem-
plate and fantasize about. But the question remains: what is it about ethnog-
raphy, for Barthes, that is so tempting?
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes began as a playful enterprise; Barthes
even used the word gag to describe it. He was asked by Denis Roche, then
head of the Seuil's renowned series, o'ÉÇrivains de toujours," to contribute
with a book about himself. t8 The premise of "Ecrivains de toujours" was to
have an author write about another author (de toujours). He or she would
follow a shared set of guidelines and a common outline: each text included a
description of the main themes of the work, supplemented by assorted docu-
ments and pictures, and at the end ofthe book, an anthology oftexts by the
écrivain de loujours, commented by the écrivain d'aujourd'hul. The goal
was to offer not an academic reading of the work of the "timeless" author,
but rather a nonprofessional, "affective" reading-these were books about
r50 Virrcent Debaene
authors, yes, but just as importantly, they were about the relationships be-
tween a present-day author and a timeless author. 1e
Barthes himself had contributed early in the series with a book on Miche-
let, in 1954. However, inviting him again, twenty years later, to contribute to
this series ofbiographically oriented books, after he had famously declared
the death of the author---and in addition, to contribute with a book about
himself-was almost a provocation. He nevertheless accepted the challenge,
at first lightheartedly, before realizing that the editorial constraints of the
series might actually take him in some unexpected and productive direction:
It would be interesting-as well as amusing-asking a writer to act as the
critic of his own body of work. I had initially conceived of this book in that
spirit, as a sort of gag, a pastiche of myself; allowing all the amusements of a
splitting into two. But as I began to work, everything changed; serious issues,
related to theory and to the practice of writing, arose, which made the simple
game I had initially intended to play seem piddling. It occurred to me that I
should take advantage of the situation that was presented to me, to stage, if I
may siry so, the relationship that I might have to my own image, that is to say
my "imaginary"; and since my previous work is that of an essayis! my imagi-
nary is an imaginary of ideas.2o
The first step for Barthes was, in compliance with the guidelines of the
series, to reread his entire body of work, and to identiff themes that could be
included in an index at the end of the book. In the process of doing so, he
comes to detect, in his past writings, an "ethnological temptation." Although
not strictly adhered to, the alphabetical order provides a basic structure: the
fragment before o'The ethnological temptation" is about esthëtique, the next
one about étymologie. The use of the third person needs to be understood
along the same lines: it is not, of course, self-aggrandizement, but results
from the position of the author commenting on another author----except that
the other author here happens to be Barthes himself.
However, things are more complex and subtle than they initially seem.
First, the third person is just one of the three forms used by Barthes to
designate himself (along with the first-person, and sometimes the second-
person); then, and above all, the third-person is all but a straightforward
reference to some clearly identified individual from the past:
[T]o speak about oneself by saying "he" can mean: I am speaking about
myselfas though I were more or less dead. . . . Or even: I am speaking about
myself in the manner of the Brechtian actor who must distance his character,
"show" rather than incarnate him.21
[P]ronoun ofthe non-person, [the third person] annuls and mortifies its refer-
en! it canr:rot be applied without uneasiness to someone one loves; [if I happen
to sayl "he" about someone, I always envision a kind ofmurder by language.2z
Desiring Anthropologt l5l
And sometimes . . . "he" gives way to "Io' under the simple effect of a syntactic
confusion: for in an extended sentence, "he" can refer without warning to
many other referents than me.23
Every one ofthese excerpts deserves a close reading, but taken as a group,
they allow us to understand two things. First, they highlight an unmistakable
continuity with "The Death of the Author": "as though I were more or less
dead," o'a kind of murder by language." Contrary to widespread opinion,
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes does not embody a break with the 1968
arlicle,2a nor any kind of "return": neither a retum ofthe subject (the infa-
mous retour du sujet after poststructuralism), nor a reûrm to more conven-
tional genres, such as autobiography. Indeed, "The Death of the Author"
describes the scriptor-4he one that comes "after" the author-as an o'im-
mense dictionary," (147) a scattered "subject" that is not a source of dis-
courses but, on the contrary, produced by discourses, not an origin, but the
result of a weaving together of multiple heterogeneous discourses. In this
context, the requirement of an index, for instance, which is part of the chaxter
ofthe series o'Écrivains de toujours," or the playful character ofthe alphabeti-
cal organization take on a very different meaning. As Anne Herschberg
Pierrot notes: ooThe formation of the author's lexicon allows the writer to
transcend the narcissistic issue of self-representation, by replacing the "per-
son" with an interweaving of languages." And "the dictionary-form" allows
for an alphabetical ordering of subjects, which avoids any sort ofhierarchy
and opens up an interpretative pluralism."zs Both offer some form of practi-
cal illustration of the fragmentation inherent to the work of writing, as de-
picted in "The Death of the Author":
[Should the writer] wish to express himself he ought at least to know that the
inner "thing" he thinks to o'translate" is itself only a ready-formed dictionary,
its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely. . . .
Succeeding the Author, the smiptor no longer bears within him passions, hu-
mours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which
he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the
book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost,
infinitely deferred.26
The relationship between the (absent) first-person ofthe speaker/scriptor and
the third-person should therefore not be understood as a commentary: Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes is not a meta-book in which a self-assured first-
person is commenting upon the author he once was. The fragments of Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes, whether in the first-, second-, or third-person
are all in an intertextual relationship; the use of the third-person simply
acknowledges the nonexistence of a subject that would precede writing.2?
152 Vincent Debaene
The fragment "The ethnological temptation" illustrates this even further,
because despite the title's reference to a single ethnological temptation (as if
there were just one impulse experienced by one stable subject), the "il" itself
is pluralized. It successively occupies different positions, in a fluidity that
seems impossible to pin down or stabilize. 'oHe" appears first as a reader of
ethnography or ethnographies (in the person of Michelet, here compared to
oohe"
an ethnographer); then is himself an ethnographer of the fictional
worlds of Racine and Sade; ttren'ohe" is an ethnographer of the real world-
la France inthe Mythologles; then again an ethnographer of fictional worlds,
studying the "miniature societies" of Balzac, Zola, and Proust. In the end, we
are unsure if "the ethnological book [which] has all the powers of the be-
loved book" is a book that Barthes dreams of writing or a book that he
dreams of reading. However, this does not come as a surprise, for it illus-
trates what is perhaps the fundamental consequence of the article "The Death
of the Author": the lack of separation, the permeability between the producer
and the receiver of the text. Indeed, the 1968 article famously ends on the
elevation ofthe reader at the expense ofthe author ('1he birth ofthe reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Author").28 But it would be misguided
to think of this reader as an individual "taking the place of'the author; he is
himself nothing if not the outcome of the play of writing, "that someone who
holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is
constituted."2e The reading of the book is simply the completion of a process
of coproduction of fragmented "subjectivities."
So what does ethnolog,, designate? De quoi l'ethnologie est-elle le nom? Ina
book conceived as a way to displace the expectations of self-representation
and which is entirely oriented by the refusal of an imaginary stability of the
subject, ethnography is valued because it does not designate a genre but a
process, a process which itselfis threefold. First, it contributes to the denatu-
ralization of the historical reality-even the most allegedly 'latural" is his-
torical and relative: 'oface, food, clothes, complexion." This is indeed the
theoretical program of the Mythologies. Then, and conversely, it contributes
to the essentialization offictional worlds, which deserve to be taken as seri-
ously as if they were real: the societies presented in Racine's world and
Proust's world deserve to be analyzed and studied as actual tribes. Above all,
ethnography is a process that forbids the substantiation of the subject: eth-
nography ends up designating a spiritual exercise that contributes to a gener-
al movement of desubjectivation. What is most striking-and perhaps indi-
rectly reveals something about our own present-is that, rather originally
(and contrary to what is usually acknowledged), ethnography appears here as
the opposite of exoticism. Instead of constructing the Self through its differ-
ence with the Other, ethnography derealizes the Self.
Desiring Anthropologt 153
In the end, ethnography appea$ as the idealized form of the in-between: it
fulfills a desire for knowledge but does not betray the object it studies; it is
totalizing but not authoritative or hierarchical (even the most trivial things
bear meaning); it is taxonomic but does not lose the sensory qualities of the
objects in the process of inventory; it creates order, but does not betray
subjective attachment to objects. As such it can only be envisioned and
dreamed about, but never concretely realized. It should not be dismissed,
though, rather acknowledged for what it is: not a model, but a horizon for
discursive practices.
In a way, the impulse, la tentation, is the very mode of being of French
literature in the twentieth century; it is typical of a moment in history when
literature cannot be defined by a domain of objects anymore, and relies on its
own power of negation, defining itself through a repeated and infinite rejec-
tion of discursive territorialization. But what Barthes helps us to understand
here is the privilege given to ethnography (above, for instance, more "staid"
forms of knorvledge such as history or sociology): for many reasons, ethnog-
raphy embodies the in-between, the precarious balance maintained between
contradictory impulses.
In the end, we would do well to read Barthes's fragment as his own
'olnvitation au voyage." Baudelaire's phrase "Invitation au voyageo'fi,mctions
both as a generic title and as a thematic title (to borrow Gérard Genette's
vocabulary). It designates the speech act of the poem (the lover-sister-
child is invited to consider leaving with the poel: ooMon enfant, ma soeur/
Songe à la douceur / D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble"), but it also designates
the destination of the voyage: a room in a port where one could watch the
ships come and go, in other words a place where one would be constantly
invited to travel. It is not the promise of a voyage, but the promise of a
perpetual promise of a voyage. t
Roland Barthes's ethnological temptation follows the exact same logic,
except that where Baudelaire dreams about sensations, perfumes, and lights,
Barthes dreams about discourses and ideas: *My imaginary is an imaginary
of ideas."3o "La tentation ethnologique" is a thematic title (i.e., "there is in
my past work an identifiable etbnographic impulse"), but at the same time, it
also designates the speech act of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The
word'otemptation" invokes confession, invitation, or meditation: a genre as
much as a theme, and precisely the expression of (discursive) desires, before
they take actual shape.3l The book itself might as well be subtitled Tempta-
tions.Hence, the reflective dimension of the excerpt "The ethnological temp-
tation." Indeed, what better description of this self-portrait than that of the
ethnological "beloved book" mentioned in the fragment?
154 Yîncent Debaene
[A]n encyclopedi4 noting and classiSing all of reality, even the most trivial,
the most sensual aspects [think for instance of the fragments on Bayonne's
tramway, of the fact that he is left-hande{ or of all the anamneses, like the one
on the cold'sugared milkl; this encyclopedia fRoland Barthes by Roland
Barthes is indeed organized through a variation on the alphabetical order] does
not adulterate the Other by reducing it to the Same [the grammil does not
artificially tmifi and substantiate a scriptor that "The Death of the Author"
describes not as the subject but as the predicate of the bookl; appropriation
diminishes, the Self s certitude grows lighter.32
This is why, in the end, the ethnological temptation, the ethnographic im-
pulse is so essential; it is not solely a discursive impulse among others but-
just as the "Invitation au voyage" is the promise of a promise-it is an
impulse toward an impulse, denoting not just a desire, but the desire for a
desire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland . Mythologies. Translated by Armette Lavers. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
YZ, Translated by Richard Miller. New York Farrar, Staus and Giroux,l974.
"The Death of the Author." ln Image Music Text. Essays selected and translated by
-. StephenI'Yriting
Heath, 142-48. London: Fontana Press, 1977.
Degree kro. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill
andWang, 1977.
by Richard Howard. Berkeiey: University of California Press,
-. 1992. Michelet. Translated
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthp-s. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Mac-
millan, 1989.
Le Lexique de I'auteur: Sénirnire à I'Ecole pralique des haules études 1973-1974
Suivi defragments inëdits du Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 2009.
Blanchot Maurice. The Space of Literatwe. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1 989.
Boundieu, Piene. "L'Illusion biographique." ,4 ctes de la recherche en sciences sociales 62, no.
I (1986):6%:72.
View." Culnral Anthropologt 5, no.4 (November 1990):
"The Scholastic Point of
380-91.
Pascalian Meditations. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University
Press,2000.
Sketchfor a Self-Analysis. Translated by Richard Nice. Chicago: University ofChica-
go Press,2008.
Debaene, Vincent. "La collection < Ecrivains de toujours >r (1951*1981)," http:ll
www. fabula.org/ateli-
er.php?La_collection_o/o26laquoolo3B Ecrivains_de_toujours_o/o26raquoo/o3B_o/o281951-1
98lo/o29.
"A Case of Cultural Misundentanding: French Anthropology in a Comparative Per-
spectle;' Cultural Anthropologt 28, no. 4 (2013): 64'l -49.
Far AJield: French Anthropologt between Science and Litefature. Translated by Justin
ïzzo.Chicago & London: The University ofChicago Press, 2014.
"Reading (with) Phil Watts," Ronranic Review 105, no. 1-2 (201$:98-99.
-.
Denida, Jacques. "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques
Defida." Acts of Literature. London: Routledge, 1992.
DesiringAnthropologt 155
Foucault, Michel The Use of Pleasure. Ihe History of Sexuality, vol. 2. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage Book, 1990.
Griaule, Marcel. Méthode de l'ethnographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
Herschberg Pierrof Anne. "Lexique d'auteur et miroir encyclopédique." Recherches & Tra-
vazx Bn ligne], 7 5, 2009. http:l ltechercheshavaux.revues.org/370,
Hollier, Denis. Absent lVithout Leave: French Literature Under the Threat ofl\ar. Translated
by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Mauss, Marcel. Mantal of Ethnography. Translated by Dominique Lussier. New york &
Oxford: Durkheim PressiBerghabn Books, 2007.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? Translated by Bemard Frechhnan. London: Methuen &
Co. Ltd, 1950.
Watts, Philip. Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of
Ilriters and Intellectuals in France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Roland Barthes' Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2016.
-. NOTES
" 1. "The object [is] to leam to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free
thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently." Michel Fouca.ult,The
Use of Pleasure, vol. 2, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York Vintage
Books, 1990), 5. The original French version adds: "rather than legitimate what we already
know."
2. Allegories ofthe Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials ofl|triters and
Intellecnals în France (Stanford University Press, 1999); Roland Barthes' Cinema (Oxford
University Press, 201 6).
3. For an extensive quote and the broader context ofthese remarks, see Vincent Debaene,
"Reading (with) Phil Watts," Ron anic Review 105, no. l-2 (2014):98-99.
4. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Macmillan,
1989),84.
5. I borrow the phrase "et$nographic impulse" from Alison James, who used it as the tifle
for an interesting session she organized at the MLA in Chicago in 2014.
6. This tension is the very point ofdeparture ofDen'ida's "interview-essay," This Strange
I ns t itut i on C al led L iterature.
7. Denis Hollier's Absent withour Leaw explores this theme of literature æ essentially
impossible.
8. See Vincent Debaene, Far f/ield,22814.
9. Mæcel Mauss, Manual of Ethrcgraphy, 7.
. Marcel cria,ile, Méthode de I 'ethnographie, 83 . My translation.
10
11. Ibid., 103-4. My translations.
12. Bourdieu, Sl<ztch, 44 and 36. See also, rn Pascalian Meditations (1997), passages that
seem to revive the style and indignant slanderous rhetoric that characterize the political
pamphlets: "The most heroic breaks have become the irrherited privileges of a caste, now
within the scope ofevery hack writer intent on transgression and the most mediocre celebrant
of the academic cult of the anti-academism." Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations,Sî.
13. See Bourdieu, "The Scholastic Point of View."
14. Although there wouid be no better English translatioî of tentation ethnologique than
ethnological ternptation, we should specift that the word tentation covers a wider range of
meanings than the English temptation, In French, the idea of tentation is more internal; a
tentation is often experienced æ an impuise coming from within, whereæ it seems that, in
English, one is rather tempted by an entity; in other words, temptation requires an outside
object when it is not necessarily the case in French, as shown by the frequent use of the
inbansitive phras e céder à la tentation. The nuance of fault and sin also seems to be stronger in
English, whereas in French the stress is instead placed on the impulse itself-and there is
something enjoyable about it.
15. See Debaene, Far Afeld, 12-19.
156 Vincent Debaene

16. rbid.,67*76.
17. In this respec! he is quite different from writers of the previous generation such as
Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, or Paul Nizan who all starrd writing in the 1920s or early 1930s,
all took classes at the Institut d'ethnologîe, and seriously considered anthropology as a career-
making ofit, in Leiris's case, his/a de facto profession.
18. On the genesis of the book, the main source is the critical edition provided by Anne
Henchberg Pierrot of Barthes's seminar, Le Lexique de l'auteur: Séminaire à l'Ecole pratique
des hautes études 1973-1974 Sutvi de fragtnenîs inédits du Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes. She offers additional elements in an article in which I found most of my information:
Anne Herschberg Pienot, "Lexique d'auteur et miroir encyclopédique," Recherches & Travaut
Index
[En ligne], 75,2009, http://recherchestravaux.revues.org/370 (posted online on June 30, 2011,
consulted on September 4,2013).
19. On this series, see Vincent Debaene, "La collection. Ecrivains de toujours."
www.fabula.orgAle.
20. Mytanslation.TheoriginalFrench,fromal9T5interviewreads:"Ilseraitintéressant-
pour ne pas dire amusant--{emander à un écrivain de se faire un jour le propre critique de son
oeuvre. J'avais conçu ce livre dans c€t esprit, comme une sorte de gag, de pastiche de moi-
même, autorisant tous les divertissements d'un dédoublement. Mais en me mettant au travail,
tout a changé; des problèmes sérieux, de théorie et de pratique d'écriture, se sont posés, rendant
un peu dérisoire le simple jeu préw au départ. J'ai cru comprendre (cela n'a pas été immédiat)
que je devais profiter de l'occasion qui m'était offertg pour mettre en scène, si je puis dire, le
Aeschylus, ll0, l14 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes,
rapport que je puis avoir avec ma propre image, c'est-à-dire mon imaginaire; et comme mon
oeuvre passée est celle d'rm essayiste, mon imaginaire est un imaginaire d'idées." Barthes, aesthetic education, 7 1 44-1 45, 1 49-1 52, 1 53-1 54. See als o
quoted in Anne Herschberg Pierro! "Lexique d'auteur et miroir encyclopedique," 22. aesthetic regime, 4,3Ç37 ,3840 ethnological impulse or temptation;
21. Barfrtes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,168. aesthetics, 1; and politics, 3; ofthe subject
22. rbid.,169. fragment, 7 Baudelaire, Charles: L' Invitation au
23. Ibid.,169. Algerian War of Independence, 116, 131, voyage,153
24. Anne Herschberg Pierrot also underlines this idea: "The venture does not indicate a
133, 135, 1.36, 138n2; use of torture in, Beneveniste, Émile, 43, 45
reversal with respect to the 'death ofthe author"'(28). My translation.
25. Ibid., 28-29. My translation. lt6-117 Bergson, Henri, 14lnl6
26. Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Lon- algorithm (as structuring device), I 34-l 35, Black Panther Party, 6; and Jean Genet, 95,
don: Fontana Press, 1977),14Ç47 . l40nl0 98, 102, 104, 104-105, 105-106
27, "I abandon the exhausting pursuit of an old piece of myself, I do not W to restore Allende, Salvador, 52-53, 54 Blanchot, Maurice, 44, 45
myself (æ we say of a monument). I do not say: '(I am going to describe myself' but: "I am anthropoiogy.,See fiction; literary impulse Bonamy, Robert, 22, 24, 25
writing a text, and I call it R.8." I shift from imitation (from description) and entrust myself to
or temptation; social sciences Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 146, 147 -148, 149
nomination." Ro land Barthes by Roland Barthes,56.
archaeological documentation, 3, 27
28. Barthes, "The Death of the Au|hor," in Image Music Text,148.
29. rbid.,t47. Arendg Hannah,T,116, 119,126; and Camûs, Albert, 5, 7; and tragedy, 110-1 12;
30. Quoted in Anne Herschberg Pienot,22, my translation. See also the fragment entitled sacrificial violence, 88, 9 l-92: banality Donjuanism, 66,67-68: ethics in,
"Love ofan idea" in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,57-52. of evil, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 9 l; criticism 65-66, 67,69; ethics ofquantiry, 5, 66,
31. "The writerly pe scriptiblef is the novelistic without the novel, poety without the poem, of,88-90; Eichmann in Jerusalem , 6, 68, 69; humanism of, 65-66, 70; love
the essay without the dissertation, writing without style ." Barlhes, S/2, 5.
82-83,84, 8G88 in, 65, 66, 6ffi7, 68, 69-7 0, 7 0; Myt h
32. Barthes,"Theethnologicaltemptation,"inRolandBarthesbyRolandBarthes,S4.
Aristotle, I10, 111 ofSisyphus ,66,67--68, 69, 112;
arangement or ordering: of narrative politics of 65-66, 66-67, 7 0; the
fiction, 134, 134-135, 140n9. See also absurd, 66, 6749. See a/so repetition;
dispos itif,, disp ositio tragic consciousness
Aslam, Nadeem, 4; The Wasted Vigil, Césaire, Aimé, 114, 116
35-i6, 37, 37 -38, 44, 4445, 45, 46 chaos. See Assia Djebar
chaosmos. See Assia Djebar
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 40, 42, 46 Classicism: forms of, 109; aesthetcs of,
banality of evil. ,See Hannah Arendt 110,112
Barthes, Roland, 8,28, 132, 143-144; Coetzee, J.M., 3, 46; Elizabeth Costello ,
Death ofthe Author,145, l5l,152, 34-35,36,37, 42, 43, 44, 45
1 5 4; Myt hol o gie s, 1 44, 1 45, 1 52;

157