John Thobo-Carlsen, Benjamin&Barthes
Transcript of John Thobo-Carlsen, Benjamin&Barthes
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Orbis Litterarum 1998:
53
1-41
Printed in Denmark AN rights reserved
C o p y r i g h t M u n k s g a a r d 996:
OKBIS
i t t emm
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ISSN 0105-7510
Barthes meets Benjam in?
A
Relating
of
their
Views on the Conjunction between L anguage and
Literature
John Thobo-Curlsen, University of Odense, Odense, Denmark
For Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes literature appears to be
inseparable from the language in which it speaks. With their theor-
ies of language as the starting point,
I
discuss how their views on
literature meet.
Their paths cross, for example, in the antithesis: the idea that
the allegorical counter-image creates the field of tension in the text
that is able to release one from all that which is cramped and
unfree in existence. This release always comes ‘from within,’ from
language’s concrete use of emblematic or coded stereotypes. And
not ‘from without,’ like the impact of an already existing truth or
release in a symbolic indirectness in the text. In Benjamin’s critique
of the ‘profane concept
of
symbols’ of classical-romantic aesthetics
and in his indication of the cognitive potential of the dialectic
concept of allegory there is an attitude which is fundamentally in
agreement with that of Barthes regarding the semiotic way in
which both the content and the expression sidesof language func-
tion.
When,
on the one hand, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) claims that the pleasure
and distaste, that a person feels when reading or writing literature is linked
to the challenge and the trouble which the body has in reconciling itself to
the generality of language, and, on the other hand, Walter Benjamin (1892-
1940) is of the opinion that one’s body and those of others are only cogniz-
able in the act of naming only, of course, to the extent that the body is
disposed to be announced (“mitteilbar ist”),
or, to
put it in another way, the
announceability concerning human beings and things is that which has to do
with language
then
it would seem to be obvious that for both of them
language was something there simply was no getting round.
Barthes also says that “literature resembles Racine’s heroine Eriphile in
the tragedy
ZphigCnie,
who dies on discovering who she is, but who lives by
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Barthes m eets Benjamin?
3
Language, literature and morality
By
means of literature (and the study of literature) we attempt in a tragic
and, as far as literature is concerned, in an almost ‘hysterical’- way to avoid
the sometimes uncomfortable fact that we are bound by language when we
are to understand the world. The evasion assumes the character of a gigantic
mimetic role play. On the one hand, we have insight into the language’s funda-
mental status and unavoidable role in human selfunderstanding and compre-
hension of the outside world and the relationship between them. Or, as
Benjamin puts it:
“There is no event or thing either in non-living or living nature that does not
in some way partake in language, for it is essential for everything to announce
its spiritual content. The use of the word ‘language’ in this context, however, is
by no means a metaphor. For it is a cognition that has completely to do with
content when we say that we are unable to imagine anything which does not
announce its spiritual content in its expression; the higher or lower level of
consciousness with which such an announcement apparently (or in, reality) is
linked cannot alter the fact that we in no instance can imagine the absence of
lang~age.”~
On the other hand, we have a longstanding experience of language actually
being used for practically anything at all also, therefore, in our (almost)
hopeless struggle to be allowed to do something as apparently simple as live
and reflect at one and the same time. For we have discovered that language
has a number of functions or roles we can play on, and allow to play off
against each other3 the first one we can refer to as
the pragmatic.
We play
on this one when we place ourselves at the disposal of the practical under-
standing of reality which is also the dominating form. When we want to
pair with normal language usage in an attempt, via analogy and imitation to
reach the reality we demonstrably crave for. The second form we can call the
utopian,
even though it is
concretely linguistic,
in Benjamin’s case too. For it
has realized the hove-to position of the first project and prophesies in a
sort of deconstruction process of an allegorically concrete nature (since it has
to live with and yet reshape the first function) the idea of a freedom in an
immediate and unmediated understanding of man’s life in and with reality.
So one could in fact n Barthes’ case at any rate call the second function
the more realistic and the first one the more idealistic.
No
matter what one
calls them, both language roles have the same objective: to experience the
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4
Joh n Thobo-Carlsen
adventure of reality. That is, what advenes from the reality, if you are set
towards it.
The first role uses language as a tool he ‘direct’ route through language.
In
fact it seems illusionistic to the extent it is satisfied with ‘usual practice,’
and as a system of signs, it tends toward a renunciation of its reflexive and
reversible roles, or ‘simply’ decides or ‘agrees’ (consensus)
that this is reality
and it is a fact .
The second role has to remain in language, in the speech of signs, since it
has to live with the consequences of the unconcernedness of the first one. It
has to make the detour which is required to litigate or neutralise, as fa r as it
is actually possible,
the meanings that the
first
one has institutionalised. Of
course, we meet both language roles in literature.
The second role is linked to textuality and is concretised as mode in
a
more
or less intense edition of its semiotic symbiosis with the first one. The first
role is linked to
the text
as a
semiotic concretisation
and typically
finds
its
form in the work. Concerning the possibilities of advancing along this second
route using the given conditions, Barthes says the following:
“In language servility and power are inextricably mixed. If that which one calls
freedom is not simply the ability to avoid power but also - and especially is
the ability not to make anyone servile, then freedom can only exist outside
language. Unfortunately, human language does not have anything outside: it is
a closed door. One can only get outside it by paying an impossible price: by the
mysterious singularity, as described by Kierkegaard when he defines Abraham’s
sacrifice as an unheard of act which, emptied of every even inner word, stands
up against the common, flock mentality, the morality of language; or by the
Nietzschian amen which is like
a
jubilant support of the servility of language,
of that which Deleuze calls its
manteau
reactif; its reagent cloak. But for
us,
who are neither crusaders or supermen, there is nothing else to be done, if I
may put it thus, than to cheat with language and lead it up the garden path.”7
Literature can be the way to
do
it. After Barthes’ pointing out of the compel-
ling nature of language’s manifestation of power (rather than execution of
violence), against which his view of literary use of language has to be seen,
it is characteristic to see how Benjamin arrives at the conclusion that lan-
guage must be society’s non-violent sphere par excellence. The proof of this
would be that the lie goes unpunished:
“Is
it at all possible to settle conflicts non-violently? [...I The profoundest ex-
ample
is
perhaps the conversation, seen as a technique for civil agreement. Here
non-violent agreement is not only possible; that violenceis principally excluded
can be proved by an important condition: that the lie goes unpunished.[...I This
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Barthes m eets Benjamin?
proves tha t
in agreements
between
people there exists
a
sphere that is so non-
violent tha t it is completely inaccessible to violence: the
true
sphere of ‘under-
standing’
language.”’
If Barthes’ view of the relationship between the power manifested in the com-
mon use of language and the
possibility
of literary language circumventing
this has its roots in the transcendental being of existentialism, this example
confirms that Benjamin’s view of language which will be presented in the
next section ~ has been reduced a priori to that which is disposed to be
announced. Since language,
no
matter in what guise it appears, idealistically
announces itself, violence and power are broken down in language into
special, mythical versions of that which is disposed to be announced which,
if they are to be challenged in the service of truth, have to be opposed to
images, which show the hollowness of the myth whilst also revealing the striv-
ing towards a truth that not only transcends being but also transcends the
finite world.
In this somewhat inverted way, Barthes’ and Benjamin’s relationship to
literature also gradually becomes a question of morality, i.e. how far litera-
ture and the study of literature decline to make any form of self-presentation
(in an anti-subjective perspective). “Morality should be understood here as
the exact opposite of morals (i.e. thought concerning the body in a linguistic
~ense).”~ore explicitly: if literature as language and writing lives up to its
obligation to present the body, or more precisely to link the body and
emotional life, which ‘modern’ civilisation has dissociated and separated,
Benjamin, as we shall see, would view this division from the perspective of the
Fall and define it as a purely metaphysical construction that has its origins in
an empirical consciousness and its basis of cognition in a scientific picture of
the world. Literature would be the concrete, historical place which, by means
of its special linguistic formative ability (allegories and the like) can mediate
the hope of a healing of the divided, of the undifferentiated, of the paradisiac.
Barthes has written
off
belief in a religious sense, replacing it by the ritual in
a broad sense of the term (loc.cit., p. 146). His highest pleasure is so much
of this world that it does not get past language, i.e. the act of performing in
language; on the other hand, language assumes an almost physical character.
One of his more amusing versions of this coincidence
of
physical sensuality
and speech the reader should hardly be spared so here it is in its entirety:
“According to
a
hypothesis of
Lerio-Gourhan’O
man became
able
to talk when
he
had
managed to free
his
forelimbs from
walking
and
thereby
his
mouth from
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6 John Thobo-Carlsen
his prey. I would add:
and able to kiss.
For the organ of speech is also that of
kissing. When man began to walk on two legs, he discovered he was free to
invent language and love: this perhaps marks the anthropological birth of a
double perversion: talking and kissing. Consequently, the more people have
been free (mouthwise), the more they have talked and kissed; and a logical
extension
of
this is that on the day people, thanks to progress, are liberated
from all man ua l work, they will d o noth ing else than talk a nd kiss
Let us imagine
a
com mo n exceeding of this double, jointly located function
born of a sim ultaneous use of talking and kissing:
talking while kissing, kissing
while talking. One must assume that this pleasurable experience takes place,
since lovers constantly ‘drink the words th at com e fr om the beloved’s lips.’ Th at
which they taste is then, in the lovestruck competition, the play of meaning as
it unfolds and is interrupted: the function which
is interrupted:
in short ,
the
stammering body.
”
(/oc.cit. p. 144)
The above contains his moral conception of the entire textuality complex,
role qf writer-texl-role o reader as a whole.
Language and cognition
For Benjamin an d Barthes literature app ears, as mentione d, to be inseparable
from the language in which it speaks. On the one hand, it is so to such an
extent that its value for those wh o
make
use ofit (the formu lation is deliber-
ately neutral) lies in the particular ability language has that makes it capable
of
taking measures against itself. This we know from Roman Jakobson as
languuge’s po efic jun ctio n. I O n the other han d its value would quickly dim in-
ish if this quality of language did not at the same time have the function of
making its users better able in a subtle way of understanding, accepting and
challenging the reality in which they live. But in order to understand better
why things are like this, we must look a bit more a t Benjamin’s and Barthes’
mo re fundam ental attitudes to the phenom enon of language, after which we
will return to literature.I2
Wultrr Benjamin.
Benjamin’s epistemological perspective is transcendentally
absolutistic, while his routes are concretely linguistic. Barth es break s free of
an epistemological view that is based on a purely empirical objectivity in
challenging its mythical conception of Truth via the approximate nature of
the presentation seen from t he perspective of th e linguistic subject.
Seen from Benjamin’s point
of
view, man’s ‘language ability’ is closely
linked to the Fall, as previously m entioned: “the Fall is the mom ent
of bir th
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Burthes meets Benjamin? 7
of the human word” (see no te
5 ,
p. 153). Very summarily put, it is true that
Benjamin follows the sto ry of the C reation:
“In
the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John I, l) , with Go d
creating things in nature and man in and with language. But things and
human beings were not created in the same way
~
there was a crucial differ-
ence. Natural things were created in language by name. And it was by its
name that the thing became
capable of being cognized,
But the
absolute
re-
lation of the name to cognition only exists with God, only there does the
name exist, because at its innermost level it is identical with the creating
word, the pure medium of cognition”
h e i t . , p.
148). Since Go d names the
things after they have already been given names and thereby cognizes them
“and God saw that it was good,” as Benjamin quotes, and
so
also man.
Therefore, man was no t created by the word, man was not nam ed, Go d did
not want to make man subservient to language, but instead to give man a
language himself. M an was created in God’s image (the image of the C rea tor ,
i.e. in the image of the Creator’s language) an d thereby became t he cognizer
in the language in which God created. At the same time, man received the
language in which God had created as a gift and thereby was able to name
things. God passed
on
the language to man of which everything minus man
has been created and made capable of being cognized; on the other hand,
man was created capable of cognizing and naming. By which is understood
that “man’s spiritual nature
is
the language in which creution took place”
(loc.cit., 149), while man’s language, when used for
naming, is
only a reflec-
tion of the Creator’s. Thereby man’s spiritual nature as language must be
understood as differing from his language fo r naming, bu t therefore differing
as the difference between two languages. Two languages which can never
reach each other without mediation and which can never cover each other.
The closest they can get to e ach oth er is in
proper names
and
in
man’s naming
of things. The proper name, however, has a special nature, which does
not
correspond to any cognition t almost has the natu re of an invocation. “The
prop er nam e is man’s fellowship with God’s creating word” ( locc i t . , p. 150).
Thing s, on the o the r hand , were created by God’s word a n d are cognized
via man’s naming of them with th e language that was hand ed down to m an .
Thereby they also participa te in a “language fellowship with God’s word,”
as
Benjamin puts it though o ne less close tha n the fellowship of the pro pe r
name. Even
so,
man’s naming in language is no t unrestricted o r spontaneo us,
but
‘governed’ b y the original so
to speak by its
availability,
Barthes would
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8
John Thobo-Carlsen
say. The cognition in the naming
is
in fact dependent on how the thing an-
nounces itself to man.
According to Benjamin, the ability to cognize which
is
handed down to
man in language manifests itself a s f a r
as
some are concerned as receptivity
(loc.cit., p. 150). Th is receptivity is to be understo od as a special responsive-
ness (or sensibility) to that in the language of things which
is
disposed
to
be
announced (now understood as the communicable in the language of things)
which man cognizes in the human act of naming. There is, then, a “trans-
lation of an imperfect language into one th at is mo re perfect” (loc.cit, p. 151).
H um an language adds something to the language of things in the receptivity
of
the communicable and in the naming respectively, says Benjamin, some-
thing the language of things lacked, i.e. the name. But what is it that man
names and cognizes by the process of nam ing? No t the thing as such, as we
have experienced that it cannot be reached (since the Fall), but that part of
the things or its spiritual na tur e - that is disposed to be announced, i.e. its
nature as language. This might perha ps be called its predisposition t o b ecome
more completely or validly named. Benjamin provides an example that I
think many people would nod to in agreement:
“The language
of
this lam p does not a nno unc e the lam p (for the lamp’s spiritual
natu re, insofar as it
is
disposed
to he
annou nced is by n o m eans the lam p itself),
but: the language lamp, the lamp in a presentation, the lamp unfolded.”
(loc. cit. p. 142)
‘The lamp’ in a language version, just like fashionwear in the fashion lan-
guage version,13 the sun in a poetic v ersion, Paris in Baudelaire’s version, etc.
The thing has its own language, insofar as it is disposed to be a nn ou nc ed .
This
language
is
picked up
by
man, insofar if (the thing’s own language) is
disposed to be announced (that must be a consequence to which Benjamin
does not seem to draw sufficient attention, although it is important in this
context ) and in the naming, i.e. the translation in to hu m an language, man
adds cognition to the thing’s language.
The back ground for an understandin g of Benjamin’s general view of the im -
possibility of standing ou tside language in any com m unication of a spiritual
con tent is thus inextricably linked to the difference between the spiritua l na tu re
an d the linguistic he language of nam ing (the Fall yet again ). The linguistic
is only identical with the spiritua l nature to th e extent tha t the sp iritual is dis-
posed to be announced . A hum an being w ho ann ounces som ething essential
in the sense of moving a spiritual message from o ne place to a no the r -will no t
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Barthes meets Benjamin?
9
be able to grasp this if the spiritual message does not “allow itself” to be an-
nounced, which in turn means: if it is not disposed to be cognized. Benjamin
says:
“so
there is no such speaker of the languages, if one thereby means a
speaker who announces himself via these languages. The spiritual nature an-
nounces itself
in
a language and not
via
a language.” (Benjamin,
loc.cit.,
p. 142).
And, in continuation
of
what has been said about receptivity, one can surely
allow oneself to understand this speaker as the person who, generally speaking,
names, i.e. all of us when we attempt to cognize in linguistic acts. For man has
certainly been entrusted with the linguistic ability to name hough, it should
be noted, in
a
controlled and not an ‘untamed’ version controlled as it is by
that which
is disposed
to be named. And as Benjamin also finally draws atten-
tion to directly
in
“Uber Sprache uberhaupt und uber die Sprache des Mensch-
en” as a symbol of that (and controlled by that) which is not disposed to be
announced (... “zugleich Symbol des Nicht-Mitteilbaren”,
loc.
cit. 156). (And
what is that? Here one can begin to feel a bit anxious, for how much is there of
that which is not disposed to be announced compared to that which isdisposed
to be announced?) Although the direction or purpose
of
the ability to be
announced or communicability contained in the lingu istic allowing itself to be
named, is clear in Benjamin.
Things announce themselves to man. “This is no anthropomorphism. The
truth of this answer is shown in cognition and perhaps also in art. Moreover:
if the lamp, the mountain and the fox did not announce themselves to man,
how would he ever be able to name them?” (Zoc.cit., p. 143). Things are also
able to announce themselves to each other “via a more or less material fellow-
ship’’ (loc.cit., p. 147) (It would seem somewhat unclear, however, how this
could take place. What is the material fellowship’s relationship to their cre-
ation by God’s word?) But since things are cognizable in their names, in the
act of naming, it ought to be possible for man’s special, God-established
receptivity to crack the code of this internal communication and ‘understand’
it in the sense of cognizing it. Since the language of things is, as mentioned,
imperfect, man, with his cognition, can perhaps bring a greater degree of
perfection to these languages, so that they become able to translate each
other more richly, more satisfyingly (i.e. more completely) and more validly.
This would mean less frustration in the internal communication of things.
Mun announces himself to God. Or, more precisely: in the naming of
things, man announces his spiritual nature to God. There is nothing remark-
able about that really - it is a form of returning the compliment. The circle
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John Thobo-Curlsen
is complete. Who understands me better than He who created me in His
image, although imperfect yet with (almost) the same creative powers? But
with this last reference this train of thought also runs the risk
of
ending up
as self-affirmation. As G od saw tha t H is own work of creation was good, so
too He is
to
sanction man’s. It looks like a tautology which omits taking an
essential condition into account. When man was created out of matter, he
not only was given language but a body as well. Where has it
got
to in
Benjamin’s view of man?
I
shall return
to
this later.
Benjamin’s own underlining of the fact th at th e spiritu al nature is identical
with the linguistic nature to the extent that it is disposed
to
be announced
(understood actively), does, however, create the possibility of reading him
ulong
with
Barthes, and perhaps in doing
so
of giving him back the body
O ne could thus claim that from a Barthesian perspective although still
showing solidarity with Benjamin’s understanding of language ~ the striving
is intercepted by a second, receptive ‘linguistic subject’ (even though it was
directed towards something transcendental, e.g. God), whereby cognition is
added
to
the ‘spiritual nature’ of the first in a linguistic edition by the na ming
of the second linguistic subject us t as when man translates the mu rky
language of things to human language, adding cognition to it. And
so
on:
the naming of this second subject is intercepted
...,
etc., etc. In such a n in ter-
pretatio n one uses each o ther as each other’s allegories, contrasts, antitheses,
where the real synthesis, even though it cannot be gained from God and in
the direct confrontation with Truth, is even more
so
than that which Benja-
min gives aesthetical consideration, i.e.
the
p u m d o x i s m
in the “Truuerspiel”
(Benjamin
UddT,
p .
390)
and more than something as meek and intimating
as
the
imuge of un expectation, which is the synthesis of Goethe’s
Die
Wuhlverwundtschujten [T h e Elective Affinities]
according
to
Benjamin.
Something has now manifested itself that resembles an Eliot-like objective,
concretely linguistic correlative between two hu m an nam ers which is oriented
towards m utually
translating
“the yearning
to
break the mist of the symbolic
relations that constitute it as a mythical web
~
o r, a text fo r ~ h o r t . ” ’ ~he
orientation of the naming towards the absolute referent o n the one hand an d
its orientation towards a second linguistic subject on the other hand is per-
haps
the
decisive difference between Benjamin an d Barthes.
Rolund Buuthes. Barthes’ relation to language is also concrete, though more
pragmatic. He is interested in language as a fact, a powerful fact linked, as it
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Barthes
meets
Benjamin? 1 1
always is, to the actual discursive event and the possibilities of avoiding this
immediate powerfulness with the aid of language’s own built-in hesitancy or
dual nature.
A
way of trying to u nderstand this could be to clarify wh at B arthes act u-
ally said an d w hat it was th at caused such a g reat furore when, in 1964, he
took Saussure at his word an d aired the possibility th at linguistics “ on e day”
should n ot only be understood as “ pa tron general de toute sCmiologie”,’6 a s
Saussure had called it, but as the overall concept for semiology, in the sense
that the science of signs could be considered as being part of a science of
language:
“In sh ort , one now h as to reckon with the possibility
of
one day breaking down
Saussure’s theorem, i.e., that linguistics is not a part of the general science of
signs, not even a privileged part but that, [on the contrary], it is semiology
which is part of linguistics: to be completely precise, the part which seeks to
deal with the
large signifVing
units of discourse; in that way the unity in the
research concerning the concept of signification th at is a t present takin g place
within anthrop ology, sociology, psychoanalysis an d stylistics would become vis-
ible.”17
(My addition in [ I).
From the outset we have
to
realise that, as far as Barthes is concerned, it is
not a question of demarcating language from signs, that is,
if
signs exist
which are no t language o r vice-versa. In other words, if anim als comm unicate
with each other with the aid of something we humans would call signs. Or if
things can be signs for each other. Or even if something living can be a sign
for som ething non-living, whether o r no t it
has
been living at some point or
not. Signs can only be signs as signs for something or someone. There are
endless examples of this in nature an d am ong h um an s (and, by the way, also
within hum ans, seen from a somatic an d psychosomatic po int of view).18So:
the quality of language is contained in the quality of the sign. This is w ha t
we are not dealing with. That which we are here exclusively dealing with is
whether the science of language is a pa rt of the science of signs, o r vice-versa.
It is at this level that Barthes has made his remarks, not whether signs exist
tha t are no t language, or w hether all signs are language.
The schism is
apparently linked to the whole problem area of dislocation
that I dealt with earlier. We reflect in and with language ~ and only there,
Only in language (and here I am thinking only of
man’s
doubly articulated
verbal language, not of some other understanding of the concept of lan-
guage
~
a meta pho rical o r ‘semiological’ one) do we unders tand ourselves as
being dislocated in relation to some form of origin or beginning as an
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John Thoho-Carlsen
individual and as a species. This must surely be what is referred to as the
‘language-philosophical’ version of the myth of the Fall.
In
that sense all
othe r sign-giving is non-reflexive (and non-reflective) it can no t reflect on
itself, it cannot, for example, be self-ironical. The signs of nature, for ex-
ample, see no purpo se in expressing dou b t why shou ld they? It may well
be th at we think tha t they do ; in which case they do so without knowing it
themselves Nature does not
know
anything; it
is
hum ans w ho know. An d we
know
in
and with our talking and writing. So what sort of knowledge is it
that we possess which the rest of nature d oes n ot possess? It is the knowledge
we have by virtue of language and nothing else. Knowledge and language are
two sides of the same coin. Not only that. Since language is inextricably
linked to ou r being different, o u r knowledge is also different. Or, our knowl-
edge is linked to ou r dislocation from the rest of nature, in the sam e way that
language is dislocated. Furthermore, we know that we know, but here too
only by virtue of language. There is no end to this involution (a verbal mise
en ahime).
Only nature fixes the limit, either
as
power or
as
fatigue. From
that position knowledge of language, science
of
language or linguistics is
superior t o knowledge of signs, science of signs o r semiology (semiotics).
In 1977, Barthes wrote about the relationship in this way:
“Semiology, which c an be defined cano nically a s the science
of
signs - all types
of signs is with its oper ation s, concep ts derived fro m linguistics. B ut linguistics
itself, it seems to me, is [ I on the point of be ing torn ap ar t f rom wi th in : o n
the one hand, it is attracted towards a formal pole
-
a n d a s a result of this
inclination it becomes [ I increasingly formalised; o n th e other h and , it gains
control of more a nd m ore contents that l ies further an d furth er away from i ts
original sphere
[ I
in the political, the social, the cultural. In that sense, the
subject-matter
of
linguistics is boundless: Iunguuge,
us
Benveniste reulised,
is
the
sociul itself: [My italics]. In a nutshell, an excess of asceticism or an excess of
hunger, thick or thin: linguistics is
o n
the poin t
of
becoming deconstructed. It
is this deconstruction which, for my part, I call semiolugy.”
(Barthes: Leqon, p. 29-30)
Benveniste understands language as
the
sociul
itself
“convinced with B enveni-
ste that all culture is exclusively langu age” (see no te 9, p. 142, my italics). For
Roman Jakobson language is the centre of all human, semiotic systems, and
the most imp ortant of them.19
But there is anoth er hurdle to all of this an d it is perhaps the most i m po rt-
an t aspect of the entire language question w hen we are talking ab ou t Barthes.
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Barthes meets Benjamin.? 13
When the language system wants to understand itself, wants to gain knowl-
edge about what it itself says in a rational sense, this knowledge will unfortu-
nately never be exhaustive (this Godel*’ has almost proved), even though one
might immediately think that language would be able to get closer to itself
than the other ‘alien’ systems of signs. On the other hand, a challenge exists
in things being that way. That one can only approach oneself and one’s com-
munication partner through language asymptotically. f one wants to tak e up
this challenge, one comes across the ‘we’ that all the time has to understand
or know or communicate. As mentioned, in the science of signs and the
science of language the ‘we’ only has language to unfold in.
So
in one way
of other its status as a
language-unfolded
1st person, an
‘I’
or
a
‘we’, must be
included. When we talk about a science of signs or a science of language we
are talking about the formation and communication of knowledge. But this
always takes place via an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ that incorporates both the writer and
reader aspects o the communication. This ‘I’
or
‘we’ that understands and
forms knowledge are also signs in a system of signs, which as a science can
only be understood in language.
A
scientific discourse on any system of signs,
including that of language, must therefore also be a statement which includes
an ‘I’ or a ‘we.’
A
scientific discourse communicates then at the same time
with the unfolding of knowledge by virtue of a ‘self-presentation, to which
cognition is linked. ‘Self’ understood as an active subject-perspective and
not as
a
subject in a unifying sense. An analysis or a scientific discourse can
thus be either subjectively interpreting, with a metaphorical relation to the
object of analysis, or
self-presenting,
with a metonymic relation to that which
the discourse presents.
Barthes felt it was important to take up this challenge. In current scholar-
ship there is a tendency to treat this relation in isolation, as an independent
area of research within the framework of psychoanalysis. Co-reflection rarely
takes place in scientific discourses at all. Such co-reflections are like atmos-
pheric interference, having an adverse effect on the ‘objective,’ purely com-
municative use of language in which one is engaged. This insight Benjamin
and Barthes would seem to be in complete agreement about. Goldbrek sum-
marises Benjamin’s standpoint as follows:
“For Benjamin, cognition is exclusively linked to presentation as self-presen-
tation , i.e. to the concept a s mediator of the non-subjective, the name-language,
the utopian status
of
things outside the subjectively jud ging sphere of language.
For Benjamin, the most important cognition-critical prerequisite is thus that
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14
John Thobo-Cavlsen
science recovers its mimetic aspect. By mimetic he does not mean the imitation
of the factual, but of the authentically possible and non-realised, of the virtual
in history and in things.”
(see note
28,
p. 125)
It
would seem as if it
is
through Benjamin’s thoughts a bo ut the comm unicat-
ive quality of language and about the investment of the
translutubility
of
the
text or the attempts to d o so in connection with the establishing of symbolic
or allegorical prophecies, that a person like Barthes would find (finds)
an
echo for his thoughts a bo ut und erstanding linguistic statem ents on the basis
of
an inclusion in the ‘self-presentation
of
that which one could call the re-
versibility of ’announceability’ (‘Mitteilbarkeit’), on the basis of a
non-ddin-
eution of the reference points
of
that which now can be described as com-
munica tion. Th is is textuality’s (Barth es: “T he Text’s’’)
intentio sine qua non,2’
whether it is considered a scientific concept or not:
“ I no longer believe
-
nor do
I
desire tha t Sem iology should be a simple
science, a positivist science, and this for a primordial reason: it is the responsi-
bility
of
Semiology, and perhaps
of
Semiology alone of all the hum an sciences
today, to question its own discourse: as
a
science of language, of languages, it
cannot accept its own language as a datum, a transparency, a tool, in sh ort as
a metalanguage; strong with the powers of psychoanalysis, it interrogates itself
as to the place fr om which it speaks, an interrogation without which any science
an d any ideological criticism a re ridiculous: f or Sem iology, at least so
I
hope,
there exists no extraterritoriality for the subject, even if he is a scientist, with
regard to his discourse; in other words, finally, science know s n o site of security,
and in this
i t
must acknowledge itself as
writing.”22
Barthes considered this question to be o ne a bo ut scientific ethics. H e defined
a science, using Nietzsche’s term, as an udiuphovic science, an indifferent
science, when it keeps its speaking or w riting a nd urge tow ards such activities
ou t of its discourse.
In
1977, he talks unequivocally about this,
so
that there
is no doubt anymore to anyone, including himself
“If it is true th at the subject of science
is
the subject which does not make itself
visible and that it is basically this retention of the scene which we call ‘meta-
language,’ then, when I want to talk ab ou t signs using signs, I am forced to face
this ridiculous coincidence full on, forced to assume this strange cross-eyedness
which brings me into the ranks of Chinese shadow-actors, which at one and
the same time shows me their han ds an d th e rab bit, duck, wolf, whose silhouette
they are imitating. And if anyone exploits that condition
to
deny the active, the
writing seniiologist any connection with science, one must make them compre-
hend that it was an epistemological misunderstanding
that is beginning to
crumble
preci.wly
now
when we equate meta-language with science - as if the
one is a necessary condition for the other, even though it is only its historical,
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Barthes m eets Benjamin? 15
i.e. disputable, characteristic; perhaps it is time to distinguish between meta-
linguistics, which
is
a label like everything else, and science, whose criteria are
to
be found elsewhere.”
(Barthes: Legon, pp. 36-37)
The theory of textuality would thus seem to have gained another disciple in
Benjamin retrospectively so to speak. But this calls for an explanation,
as
the ‘agreement’ is not complete. Barthes and Benjamin only meet in language
and in literature because their paths cross there; their aims, however, were
not identical. And this is interesting for a number a reasons. Partly because
it opens up a language- and history-philosophical perspectivising of Barthes’
position concerning literature and the concept of reading which others have
been distinctly sparing in providing,2’ possibly because he himself has been
relatively understated in the areas of his own production that were not linked
to the reasonably accepted structuralist trend, and without a doubt also be-
cause
of
diverse power struggles in academic circles.24And of course because
he also had other energies and ambitions connected to writing and working
on language. This was an obvious extension of the view he had of language
and the functional roles of language.
Conversely, it is interesting because the comparison of Barthes and Benja-
min accentuates, actualises and, if necessary, demystifies Benjamin’s lan-
guage- and philosophy-historical theses. Just let me remind readers of the
following Benjamin theses: “In every epoch the same attempt must be made
anew
to
wrench the tradition from the conformism which is in the process of
subjugating it,” or
“To articulate the past historically
does not mean to recog-
nize ‘how it actually happened.’ It means to tak e possession
of
a recollection
that strikes in the hour of With Barthes’ prophecies about a science
of language as a superior, unifying form of reflection for other sciences and
with his pointing out that insight, validity and truth can only be retained in
an(other) in a traditional sense non-metalanguage discourse, Benjamin would
seem to have found support for an important part of his theory of self-
presentation as described above.
Literature as a simultaneously original and utopian site
So
despite these quite different approaches to the phenomenon of language,
Barthes and Benjamin would both seem to be interested in the same essential
qualities in language, i.e. its immediate capacity for communication and its
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16
John
Thobo-Carlsen
proximity to that which it presents. It is therefore interesting to investigate
to what extent they might possibly qualify and supplement each other’s
points of view.
To recapitulate: language has at least two functions, those we refer to as
the pragmatic and the utopian. The pragmatic presents the practical under-
standing of and striving for reality, while the utopian presents the idea of
a freedom in an immediate, unmediated understanding of man’s life in and
with reality. In other words, an insistence
on
languages utopian function in
coexistence with the pragmatic. And yet, “the utopia, naturally, offers no
guarantee against power”, as Barthes puts it, “the utopia
of
language is rein-
corporated as the language
of
utopia
t
is a genre like any other (se note 7,
p.
25).
For Barthes, utopia is not identical with something principally unat-
tainable or transcendental in relation to reality; it is rather making linguisti-
cally visible that which cannot otherwise be said or be taken for granted (e.g.
‘naturally’). For Benjamin, there lies in the linguistically presented utopia a
striving for a Truth beyond finiteness.
One of the problems could therefore be: How do we live with two lan-
guages simultaneously how do we live with the simultaneous presence of
finiteness and infinity?
Apparently it takes place in a productive complementarity (or reconcili-
ation). We are well able to function with systems of variety or infinity. For
we are after all unable to survey infinity. But this does not mean that we deny
their existence. I am perfectly capable
of
looking at the stars and enjoy the
experience without disappearing into the infinity
of
the universe. My physical
finiteness restricts my gazing, but infinity lives on both there and here in me,
influencing what I say and
do
as if I was not limited. My field of vision is
limited, but my body as such takes part in infinity and contributes to my
experience. Both finiteness and infinity are the basis
of
my experience. With
both feet planted firmly in this world and without being engaged to its limited
vista, cognition does not surpass the experience, but the experience surpasses
the empiricism. Therefore the utopia can be set in motion here and now by
every so-called linguistic subject which in its linguistic utterance gives mean-
ing to the obvious and names the nameless. In this way literature is of course
the utopian site
par
excellence.
For Barthes, characterized by an asymptotic
attempt to approach language to reality. For Benjamin, by the shadow theatre
of truth we perform with whatever images and reusable fragments we happen
to be in possession of.
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Barthes meets Benjamin? 17
Barthes and Benjamin meet from their respective positions in an under-
standing of the fact that a new cognition is only attained in an antithetic
dynaniism, a dialectic with the discourse that has established itself. Barthes
often calls this
doxa
(Gr.=opinion, assumption). This, for example, is treated
in a myth-analytical way by him under the title “Petite mythologie du mois”
in the 1950s in the journal Lettres Nouvelles (later published in extracts in
the book Mythologies (1957)). But everywhere Barthes works he both reads
this dialectic oscillation between doxa and paradoxa,26 between ‘image’ and
‘contra-image’ in the text he is reading and practices it himself in his own
writing. As is seen in his reading of such writers as Racine, Balzac, Poe,
Flaubert, Proust, and many others. He explains himself (with the social as-
pect in focus) in the following way:
“Principle of explication: this work swings between two terms:
~ at the original term one finds the intransparency of the social relationships.
From the outset this intransparency has manifested itself in the burdensome
form of the stereotype (the obligatory figures
of
the school essay, the co mm unist
novels in Le DegrC zCro de l’kcriture). Since then, thousa nds of o ther form s of
the
Doxd;
~ at the final (utop ian) term o ne finds the transparency: the tender feeling, the
desire, the sigh, the yearning for a rest, as if the texture
of
social conversation
one day could be clarified, lightened, perforated to the invisible.
1 The social division creates intransparency (ap par en t paradox: there where the
social is heavily divided, it appears intransparent, massive).
2.
The subject struggles against this intransparency in every way it can.
3 . But if he himself is a linguistic
subject,
[my italics], his struggle c an no t directly
gain a political solution, for that would mean refinding the intransparency of
the stereotypes. So this struggle becomes apocalyptical in its movement: he
divides to the extreme, he exhausts a complete set of values, and at the same
time he is living in a utopian way
-
one could say: he is
inspiring:
the final
transparency of the social relationships.”
(Barthes: Roland Burthes, p. 141)
1.e.
on
the basis of
an
intransparency (the hypothesis [1])27 a transparency
(the utopia or the synthesis [3]) is created (the antithesis [2]). The antithesis
is itself the active contrasting. 1.e. both the linguistic reading
of
the inner
dialectic (ifit exists he whole thing could be pure doxa Or, to use Benja-
min terminology: if it
is diposed to be anonnounced)
and the unfolding or
presentation of this reading in a new text, or something similar.
As
we recall,
Benjamin made a part of the human powers of creation
a
receptivity. For
Benjamin, the dynamic lies in the allegorical opposition to that which is laid
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18 John Thobo-Carlsm
down and already determined in advance, as he demonstrates, for example,
in the Trauerspiel study and the analysis of Romanticism.28
But what about (the) science (of literature)? Is it prepared to challenge
reality on language’s premises (for it too cannot avoid its language role)?
A
reaction could be that if science is not to be satisfied with the analogous
formation of knowledge (and myths about it), as called for by the pragmatic
role of language, it must find a form in which it can allow itself to think
along other lines than those laid down by other language users. Not to
be
understood to mean that one is not to adopt an attitude to such lines, for
that is precisely what one has to do in a way there is nothing else to do.
Rather than one includes in one’s thoughts the projection of one’s own point
of departure (e.g. language usage codes),29 n the understanding of the object
one is investigating. Steinhagen formulates Benjamin’s view on this in
a
way
reminiscent of that of Barthes:
..
when the projections
of
all dealings with literature,
also
the academic, are
unavoidably at stake and cast doubts
on
its academic nature there is no point
in closing one’s eyes to the fact, in the belief that it can be eliminated by a
methodically objective procedure; then the surmounting
of
the simple projec-
tion of meaning on the object ~ which certainly cannot claim to be academic
cognition
~
only conceivable when one consciously recognizes the projection as
being unavoidable, as Benjamin constantly did; then one can only acknowledge
its unavoidability and at the same time hope for cognitions that fit the objects,
i.e. where the previous projections are broken. For Benjamin, therefore, all inter-
pretation, all
explication de te xte
and all criticism are first and foremost allegor-
esis which, like the classical Homeric allegoresis, adds its own meanings to the
text, project into the objects their subjective conjectures, assumptions, ideas and
views. It therefore
is
at the same stage as pre-understanding in the hermeneutic
approach, which produces a first, subjective draft
of
meaning, which is subse-
quently, step by step, replaced by a matter-of-fact understanding that at the
same time self-critically corrects the pre-understanding or virtually becomes
criticism of the object.”30
The difference between pure, analogous knowledge (or literature for that mat-
ter), which dons the pragmatic mask (without knowing it is a mask), and the
antithetical, which dons the utopian mask (and points to it all the time)
is
fundamental. The first
in
a utopian way
is
retrospective, one could say,
whereas the other in a utopian way is prospective. In a utopian way retrospec-
tive because its idea of the Origin
is
a naturalised Beginning (related to the
unifying feel of the concept
of
Truth, by the way) and it always fades out
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Barthes m eets Benjamin?
19
into all that is past. The antithetical conception of
a
science, on the other
hand, imagines that cognition (insight, transparency, change for the better)
lies immanent in the actual language dynamic. For this reason, existence must
constantly be ‘re-created’ to be understood and accepted. This is closer to
Benjamin’s concept of
Ursprung
(cf. note 21, pp. 225-226), here summarised
by Goldbzk: “Ursprung means the complete cognition of an event seen from
the final point, from the finished process. But
Ursprung
also means this pro-
cess in its further, future, not yet cognized course towards a utopian realis-
ation.” (see note
28,
p. 98)
For all sciences, the point of departure is important where the phenom-
enon
is
seen from, in what perspective, what is taken for granted, the nature
of the dynamics in the phenomenon, etc. For this reason the concept of
origin
is important. Both science perspectives relate explicitly to the idea of origin
and dynamics. The retrospective utopia of the first has to do with the special
mythical form of conception of origin that underlies its conception of science
and which contrasts it with the antithetical idea of science conception about
origin that can be linked to the opposing concept
of
genesis (Benjamin: “Ent-
stehung”), the coming into existence of that which is created, or,
as
mention-
ed, to the concept of
Ursprung,
according to where the perspective is.
There would appear to be a conception of the beginning of life inspired by
natural science, in a naturalised mythical version, behind the tendency and
the need to round off and demarcate ~ such as in the discourse which is
partial to concluding, to summarising, ‘to determining how far we have got,’
to appealing to ‘the reasonableness of the meaning of this or that thing being
determined as being’ such and such, ‘so that we can know where we stand,
etc. This form of mythologisation
of
the Origin differs from the prospective
utopian creation myths with which we are dealing here, i.e. by being ‘word-
less,’ and by only considering language as a tool. In the pragmatic concept
of Genesis the perspective is always: the world seen from the outside: The
individual, man,
comes into bring
and is defined (named) in relation to his
immediate surroundings (in relation to everything else he is undefinable). He
thus
gets a language which he can use to understand the rest of mankind and
the world around him, which defines him. That is how it is, that is how the
individual and things coming into existence in an intracontextual system
of
causation. Language is a tool like all other possible tools. It has its function;
it is defined in relation to that which it is to be used for, as all other things
are. Its meaning is determined by relations to its surroundings, i.e. they point
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20
John Thobo-Carlsen
at them as signs for them. Everything is defined by being the sign for other
things. Language, the com ponen ts of language, hum an beings, things, every-
thing in nature. Everything is held together in a vice, as it were. Everything
clings to each other in a m utu al understanding for and of each other, as if
saved from
a
fear of the great, emp ty signless and wordless void aro un d them .
The causal logic of science, whereby we understand nature
on the basis o
physica l and chemical laws, is without a d ou bt in many respects ad equ ate and
conforms to the actual conditions. But it simply cannot explain man’s con-
scious (and unconscious) way of cognizing, experiencing and understanding
the world as adequately (i.e. as validly). In or de r to gain a total understand -
ing
of
human life and nature it has to be supplemented
by
an epistemology
that, with the concrete human being as its starting point, in a n ad equ ate way
lives
up to the language-based semiosis-logic which we happen to make use
of - for we can d o n o other when seeking the t rut h. “T he idea is a linguistic
and very likely
the
feature of the nature of the word, in which it is a symbol”
(Benjamin:
EJ ,
p. 216, see note 21). Barthes says, almost taking the words
ou t of B enjamin’s m ou th:
“The Origin is one of Nature’s (Physis’) harmful figures: by a calculated fallacy
Doxa ‘presses’ Origin and Truth together to make them into one proof, where
each
of
them in turn neatly comes
to
each other’s rescue: are not the humanities
etymological
in their search for the etymon (origin and truth) of all things?”
(Barthes: Rolund Burthes,
p .
142)
And continues, for his own account an d risk, with a
sort
of self-commentary:
“In order to counteract the Origin he [Barthes himselfj first completely cul-
turalises Nature: nothing natural anywhere, only something historical: this cul-
ture (convinced with Benveniste that all culture is exclusively language) he then
reinstates in the infinite movement
of
discourse, the one placed on top of the
other (and not generated), as in the pancake game [the one with hands placed
alternately on top of each other]”.
( o p c i t . ,
p. 142, my square bracket)
Th at so rt of logic does not have as its point of depa rture the dawn of history
bu t the present day. Th e present day a nd each of history’s now s are the actual
origin,
the actual starting point for all cognition. O ur now is a m elting down
of all other nows. “Th e Origin stands in th e midst of th e Genesis current like
a whirlpool, pulling the material of genesis into its rhythm” (Benjamin:
UddT, p. 226). An anecdote and a m etaph or of this: Barthes was once
asked by a student to comment on a project she had called “An ideological
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Barthes meets Benjamin?
21
critique of semiology.” This provoked him so much tha t he fo un d a n occasion
to acco unt fo r what Semiology m eant to him as a science. In sh or t, he divided
his life with Semiology into three periods, with the titles Hope, the Sciences
an d Text. Th e first phase was dominated by th e attemp t to c om bine linguis-
tics, existentialism and marxism into an ideology-critical, hopeful unmasking
project. The second phase was dominated by the idea that Semiology had a
future for itself within the academic world, when he discovered that it was
mainly the systematics in the project that stimulated him, and that it had a
more exciting future outside the academic world, but “a chambermaid
( )
relationship to certain sciences,” a s he later put it. Th e third phase was dom i-
nated by the concept of the Text, which started with the g rou p arou nd Kriste-
va, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and
Tel Quel.
Now to the metaphor . When
Barthes was to explain where he stood “today” he replied as follows:
“It is said that Louis XVIII , a royal gourmet, had his chef prepare several
cutlets piled upon the other, and ate only the one on the bottom, which had
recieved the juices trickling into it from all the others. In the same fashion, I
should like the present moment of my semiological adventure [from
udvenes:
what comes to me f rom the signifier] to receive the juices of the earlier ones -
for the sieve to be, as in the case of the royal cutlets, woven of the very substance
that i t strains, for the filtering medium to be the filter itself,
as
the signified is
the signifier- so that consequently you will find in my present work the pulsion
which have animated the whole past of this semiological adventure: the will to
unite myself with a community of rigorous investigators, and loyalty to the
tenacious alliance of the political and the semiological.”
(se note 22, p.
7)
Presentation and literature
In the following I want to deal in greater depth with the literary and litera-
ture-related forms of presentation (Benjamin’s Davstellung) and to see how
on the one han d they convey the interaction between Benjamin’s an d B arthes’
theories
of
language and naming and, on the other hand, between the role
of the writer and that of the reader. There will, however, not be room here
for a more detailed presentation and discussion of the special view of the
receiver or reader of a work of art that finds expression in “Die Aufgabe des
Ubersetzers”,31an d in Benjamin’s language-philosophical w ritings. In them ,
the reader-subject or recipient position is considered on the basis of the fun-
damental philosophy of language and naming presented above, which has
been shown to have strong resemblances t o Barthes’ theories of reading.
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22 John Thobo-Curlsen
As Peter Collier rightly points out in his short presentation “Roland
Barthes: the c ritical subject, ( an idea fo r research),”32 there is everywhere in
Barthes and f one look s carefully n the early Mythologies as well, a sense
of unease with the simply structural myth- and ideology-critical analysis of
the treated ‘consciousness products of everyday life,’ as they were called. In
Barthes’ text, both in the mythologies and the subsequent “Myth Today,” we
come across a critical, active subject perspective, whose namings and con-
siderations can only extremely inadequately be explained by the structuralist
myth model put forward by B arthes. T he ‘n arra tor ’ of the mythologies is not
only
a
naturalised I-object who is to be manipulated to a certain expected
reaction based on the analysis’ structural determination or how the text
de
f u c f o is constructed an d functions. The ‘na rrat or’ of the mythologies
is
the
active reader- and observer-subject who reveals himself in this way early on
in his writing, but who we meet in a more explicit version as Barthes gradu-
ally drops his ambitions within the structuralist field.
Desire, pleasure and that which is stronger when reading (in the broad
sense of the term) comes through as the perversion of the system which the
text immediately manifests, but and this is crucial his takes place a t the
request or invitation of the text itself.’3 And, generally speaking, we are get-
ting more and more of these invitations and are becoming more and more
sensitive to the m in this m od er n age, i.e. from the middle
of
the 19th century
onw ards.34 Th is particularly applies as a result of the increasing sense of
unease at capitalist society’s hypostasising and naturalising
of
the ego. A
meaningful explanation has been given, as by Barthes himself, from within
the F re ud ia n-Lac an ia n framew ork o f ~n d e r s t a n d i n g , ~ ~ut it can definitely
be supplemented by the Benjamin concepts concerning cognition through the
presentation of the self-presentation of
things
(and of language), leading to a
critical theory of the narrator- and reader-subject, for which Benjamin pro-
vides a basis in his language-philosophical and literary studies from Baroque
Trauerspiel via such authors as Goethe, Baudelaire and Lesskow to Proust.
Dialectics
and
allegory. Litera ture is, or can be, such a self-presentation. Tex-
tuality is this. It is its determination, its modus vivendi. Seen in this light it is
no t
so
surprising that Benjamin and Barthes both take a stand on Hegel’s
dialectics, even though they diverge in their conception of the nature and
status of the synthesis. Indeed, taken to its utmost conclusion it is resolved
for both
of
them. For Benjamin, literally speaking in the idea, the synthesis
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Burthes m eets Benjumin? 23
can never be represented (in the symbol, for example), only presented as
a counter-image. For Barthes, in the subject-loss and discursiveness
of
the
presentation, in the move towards le neutre:
“As a figure of opposition, the sharpened form of binarism, the Antithesis is
the very theatre of meaning. One comes out of it: either by the neutral or
through the exit to the real (...) or with the aid of the supplement
(...),
or by
the invention of a third (deporting) term.
He himself often resorts to the Antithesis (...). Yet another contradiction? -
Yes, and one which will always be explained in the same way: the Antithesis is
a linguistic
rape: I borrow the violence of everyday speech
for
the benefit of my
own violence, of the-meaning-for-me.”
(Barthes,
Roland Burthes,
p. 142)
An example of this antithetical theatre of meaning could be Goethe’s mythi-
cal shadow play as presented in the novel D i e W ~ h I v e r w a n d t s c h a j t e n . ~ ~n
Benjamin’s manuscript for his book on Goethe’s D i e W u ~ Z v e r ~ ~ u n ~ t s c h u f t e n
we find in the plan the division: “Part One: the mythical as Hypothesis [ I
Part Two: the redemption as Antithesis
[ I
Part Three: hope as the Syn-
t h e s i ~ . ” ~ ’he opposition between the mythical and the redemption is spiced
in Benjamin’s analysis with the pair of concepts “Sachgehalt” and
“Wahrheitsgehalt,” which for Goldbaek are respectively the concrete pattern
in the novel and the primeval images. Goldbaek continues:
“Between the level of ideas [Wahrheitsgehalt] and the external signs [Sachgehalt]
there is
a n
abyss. Which in turn means that the concrete, the things
of
empiria,
have become impenetrable riddles and gestures they cannot be directly related
to a whole: ‘If man has sunk to this stage, then even the lives of dead things
assume power.
A
criterion for the mythical world is precisely this inclusion of
all things in life’ (Benjamin:
G’s
Wahlw., p. 139, cf. note
38).”
(Goldbzk, p. 67, see note
28)
Benjamin reads a n antithetical s tructu re explicitly in to the novel, in the sense
that the main story or framework is read
mythically
(as the hypothesis) and
conceived of as Sachgehalt, while the novel itself, most strongly in the in-
serted novella, provides images of the ideu (the antithesis), which is conceived
of as the Wahrheitsgehalt. In the first instance, the point is meant to be
tha t w hile the external signs
of
life can be presented directed and concretely
(although still as a shadow play, in costumes), the level of ideas can only be
shown in counter-images. It
so
happen s th at the antithetical ca n assume vari-
ous
disguises. The allegory can take part in the
play of opposites
with a
greater or lesser degree of serenity. In Die Wahlverwandtschaften there are
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24 John Thobo-Curlsen
several examples of this. I do not intend at this point to carry out an actual
analysis of the novel, only to point to the relative serenity of the novella in
relation to a number of the more painful images for the setting of the myth
in the outer story. Everyday life, social life,
is
seen
f rom the inside
as destiny,
but by the Nurrutor Benjamin, as Goldbzk calls him, “as a mythical shadow
play in G oethe-age costum es their con tent man ifests itself.”38 In any case, it
is everyday life, social life even when experienced as destiny, that feeds the
fire, i.e. the hope
of
its own destruction. It builds up in the grudging way that
it breaks down. “Only with the will of hopelessness is hope granted us” (op.
cit., p.
201).
The synthesis in a semiotic version. Or, to use Barthes’ words:
“Literature is like phosphorus, it gleams most brightly in the instant it is
broken down” (see note 34, p. 39), as yet anot he r contribution to t he host of
light-metaphors for transfiguration that we often find in Benjamin’s work:
“
..
based in the very form of her light”, “
..
it is a completely different light
from the tr iumphan t light,” ... the light of reconciliation,” “
..
like a star fall-
ing from the sky,” ... pre-light,” etc.
If one was to trunslute the concept-pair “Sachgehalt” and “Wdhrheitsge-
halt,” it would be important to retain their mutual relative relationship of
dependency and opposition.
As
is known, semiotics supplies a number of
models which take account of this, but the
denotation-connotation mo del,
as
used by Barthes in the reversible version, fulfils these requirements. In the
sense that Sachgehalt can be read in both a denotative and connotative per-
spective. Connotatively in relation t o the de no tati on system of reason, a s the
myth in Die Wuhlverwandtschaften
is
co nte nt for, an d denotatively in relation
to the Wdhrheitsgehalt (primeval images) as conn ota tion .
The basic model is the well-known diagram provided with the co nn ota tio n
an d the reversibility between the deno tation an d the con no tatio n:
LANGUAGE OF ign2
LANGUAGE OF
ignl
DENOTATION
expression
.
content
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Bart hes m eets Benjum n?
25
~~
The model for Benjamin’s reading of Goethe’s Die Wuhlverwandtschaften,
where each ‘higher’ level is connotation for each (lower) as denotation:
Benjamin
as
reader
personsand
1
the shadow play in the
Goethian costumes
Level
One
is
the actual shadow play in the Go eth ian costumes, a s it imm edi-
ately takes places am on g humans an d things. It functions as den otatio n for
Level Two, which consists of the characters presented in and with their lives
as subject to an d fighting against what is conceived of as the force of destiny.
In relation to Level On e the presentation conno tes destiny. A t the same time
it functions as denotation for
Level Three, which is the contemp orary reader’s presentation of (and the author
Goethe’s own o pinion ab ou t) the relation of the players to destiny: nature f i -
nally triump hs over reason. In relation t o Level Two the prese ntation con note s
the presentation
mj’th.
A t the same time it functions as denotation for
Level Four,
which is the reader Benjamin’s presentation of what takes place
in and with the textuality, i.e. the actual text and invested writer and reader
roles, including his own. Here, for example, Goldbaek’s
narrator Goethe
(see
note 28, p. 80) is to be fo un d. The Goethe that Benjamin ‘saves.’
Benjamin reads: a) three mythical efforts in the text and
b)
two breaks
with the myth:
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26
John Thobo-Carlsen
a )
Nuture
seen as myth,
Rationality
seen as myth an d the
Primeval images
as
mythical mediation of an extra-textual meaningfulness.
b) The myth of nature is broken in the struggle for rationality and the myth
of rationality is challenged in antithetical allegories. The will to reconciliation
in the midst of hopelessness func tions as a n image of hop e. Herein lies the
novel’s self-understanding, which at the same time has to be its ability to
announ ce itself o r its translatability. Its ‘writability,’ as Ba rthes migh t well
have called
it
(cf. note 39, p. 1l), as it is this about the novel that can only
be presented as rewriting, which cannot be represented in, for example, an
interpretation. For that would mean returning to the myth of rationality,
which is precisely what is under attack.
Benjamin calls the analysis that is on levels 1-3
the Commentary.
It deals
with the work’s Sachgehalt. A nd the analysis tha t goes fur the r evels 1 4
and deals with the work’s
Wahrheitsgehult,
he refers to as
the Critique.
With
a little ingenuity this could be said to correspond to a distinction between
the
structuvul
and the
textual
analysis (see note 2 3 ) .
Our reading (and Benjamin’s) of the myth has its counterpart in the role
of the writer. The writer here assumes two main roles. The one invested in
the special presentation of the destiny-linked nature of everyday life, which
provides food for the life of the myth. The other (th e narrator Goethe) in-
vested in a breaking down of the myth through various
caricatures
of the
belief in destiny of the players. It is always the way in which, it is always as
f o r m
tha t a den otation becomes th e expression of a new content.
A
structure
which Barthes has dealt with in such a stimulating way in “M yth Today” an d
which, by the way, also underlies
his
allegorical view of much of the literature
he reads a nd ‘saves’ in the sam e way a s Benjamin ‘saves’ the B aroque an d
Goethe. But i t is important
to
note,
if
one compares the two models, that in
the semiotic reading-writing model or, to use more Benjamin-like terms, the
cognition-naming model, the possibility of synthesis does not only exist as a
transcendental wholeness but
-
when it takes place as
a
‘worldly’ cogn ition
and new naming which, for Barthes, has a corporal nature and
can
have the
quality of
bliss
(jouissance). In other words, utop ia realised but as theatre .
Pleasure (plaisir) is of a less enjoyable na tu re a nd is, broadly speaking, linked
to recognition an d legitimization.
Benjamin and Barthes agree that the truth of a work cannot be extracted
an d considered by means of analysis t can only be grasped en
passant ,
be
presented, be “caught up in a discourse” (see note 30, Le bruissement de lu
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Burthes meets Benjumin? 27
langue, p. 51), as Barthes says ab ou t the phen om enon “Text” (textuality). But
for Ba rthes this is then possible. W hen it is successful, that’s it ha t is th e
closest you will ever get. There is no point in waiting for somebody to come
along and sanction w hat you have done.
You
will no t get any closer n th at
particular staging Fo r Benjamin, trut h cann ot even be caught up in a dis-
course, only the image of it and, nota bene, not as a depiction but as a
counter-image. But, on the other hand, he allows himself truth as a distant
utopian sighting point:
“The mystery is the dramatic element where it moves from its own language
into a higher language that is unattainable for the former language.
I t
(the
mystery) can therefore never be expressed in, words, solely in the p resen tation ,
it
is,
in
the strictest sense
of
the word, the ‘dramatic’.”
(Benjamin,
op.
cit . , pp. 200-201)
This is the essential na ture of Benjamin’s concept of Durstellung (presen-
tation), compared to Barthes’ concept of ‘writing’ as a signifying process.
The concepts of naming and unfolding belong to the same category “that
which lies outside th e articulated language, but n on e the less within the co m -
munication” (see note
48,
p. 55).
The autonomy
o
the literary work.
It is on the basis of the same underlying fear
of the pow erful an d possibly terroristic consensus of systematic tho ug ht co n-
cerning that which is tru e an d that which is good in cognition an d in existence
as such ha t Benjamin argues fo r the literary work as the fo rm of tru th par
excellence an d tha t B arthes rejects understandin g literature as being “a corp us
or a series of works.” In the sam e spirit, Ro m an Jak obson was unwilling to re-
duce th e poetic sphere to p oetry an d, conversely, to restrict poetry to t he poetic
function (cf. note 11, p. 356). For Barthes, the work is a strongly coded, struc-
tural whole th at “is the Text’s imaginary tail” (B arthes , Zoc.cit., p. 71, cf. note
30).
But Benjamin does not , however, absolutise the work quite the opposite.
When Benjamin insists on th e autonom y of the literary work it is partly in o rder
to coun teract a tendency towards centralisation an d sectorisation of science
and the form s of cognition, an d partly t o su pp ort the literary work’s stat us as
not capable of being annexed - by virtue of its special, exemplary form of
Wuhrheitsgestultung - by a hermeneutics which seeks to consider the work as
being metaphorical
in
relation
to
a truth. Benjamin never abandoned the
thought of the absolute, but it could only be attained along a metonymically
imaging route. Barthes a nd B enjamin were no t in disagreement ab ou t the route.
But also for Barthes there is too m uch language an d thoug ht of power as well
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28 John Thobo-Carlsen
as institutionalisation linked to the work a n d the history of the work fo r it to
be able to be used
as
an absolute model. So Benjamin would perhaps have ap -
plauded Barthe’s immortal definition of literature:
“This pleasing fraud, this dribbling, this magnificent bluff which makes it poss-
ible to apprehen d language outside of power, in the lustre of a pe rm an ent revol-
ution
of
language use, I give the name of literature.
By literature I do not understand a corpus or a series of works, not even a
line of business or an education sector, but rather the complex graph of tracks
left by practice: tracks of a writing practice.”
(Barthes: L e p n , p.
16)
And it is
this
literature then which
Barthes
wants to ‘save,’ no t fo r posterity
like some gem, but fo r the cognition of it in the naming. Th ink , for example,
of his well-known analysis
S/Z
of Balzac’s novella S ~ r r a s i n e , ~ ~f his reading
of F l a ~ b e r t , ~ ~ven though he belongs to the authors who in
a
linear-time
perspective has begun to ‘save’ himself by
as
Barthes says on a number of
occasions proceeding while pointing to their ma sks (Larevatus p rodeo), or
of the reading of the dramatist Baudelaire, where Barthes in
a
fascinating
analysis4’ reads the hopeful in Baudelaire’s fiasco as a dramatist as a basis
for the special form
of
Lesf leurs
du
mnl.
In the article “Tacite et le baroque funkbre”. (“Tacitus and baroque of
death”)42Barthes offers a n analysis
of
Tacitus’
Annuls
(c. 90-100AD concern-
ing the dead an d destruction spread by the R om an terror regimes (Tiberius).
His aim is to analyse the Baroque way of presenting Death. T h e analysis is inter-
esting
in
this context, because, apart from being congenial as far as the Ba-
roqu e is concerned ~ with Benjamin’s view of the Baroqu e,
as
it emerges in his
analysis of Trauerspiel, it partly confirms his saving an d actualising way o f con-
sidering things o n the basis of an analysis of non-literary m aterial, the chronicle
type, and partly provides an example of a relationship between Barthes’ theory
of discourse and Benjamin’s view of history. B arthes en ds his reading of Ta-
citus’ presentation of the one gruesome m anner of dea th after the other
in
the
following w ay:
“To die, here, is to sensc life. [ I everything reproduces itself and yet nothing
repeats itself
-
that is perhaps the meaning of this universe of Tacitus, where
the brilliant description of The Phoenix Bird VI, 34) seems to establish death
as life’s purest instant.”
( locci t . ,
p.
1
11,
my italics)
Th e article appeared in 1959 in the journ al L’Arc, the same year incidentally
as
Benjamin’s CEuvres Choisies was published in Paris (which did not, how-
ever, include the Trauerspiel study).
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Barthes meets Benjamin? 29
Symbol and semiotics. Seen in such perspectives it does not seem all that
remarkable that a semiotic approach to Benjamin is fruitful. The indirect or
the symbolic are from “The Creation” the basis of his conception of human
beings’ way of reflecting. For Benjamin, the idea is the symbolic nature of
language, or that of the nature of language that is symbolic. At first, not all
that far from Saussure’s understanding
of
the sign, which
on
the one hand is
arbitrary both as regards its reference to reality and internally in the relation
between le signijiant and le
sign$&,
and on the other hand is a purely spiritual
phenomenon, or phenomenon of consciousness as we normally call it; Ze
signijii
is a (‘concept’) and le signfiant is an ‘image,’ an inner picture. For
Benjamin, however, this ‘distance’ is not determined by convention. “Lan-
guage never gives mere signs” (see note 5, p. 150). It is true that man is
creative, but also receptively creative. Things are created by God’s word and
they are cognized by the name which man gives the things at their invitation.
Things announce themselves, and this self-announcing man is able to pick
up and, in accordance with this, man names each thing. In this name man
announces his spiritual nature to God - but that is another matter.
That which distinguishes Benjamin’s conception of language and signs
from, for example, Saussure’s, is at the same time that which moves him in
the direction of, for example, Barthes. This should be understood as meaning
that in the semiotic showdown with Saussure, as formulated by Barthes, Kris-
teva, Derrida, e t ~ . , ~ ~aussure’s conception of the sign was criticised for being
too static, nominalistic, logocentric and formalistic in the sense ‘algebraic,’
which was also by the way Roman Jakobson’s reason for rejecting the Danish
linguist Louis Hjelmslev’s attempt to distinguish between phonemes and
sound. A form-substance issue, which may be related in some way to the
arbitrary nature or intentio of language that interests
us
here. I do, however,
not intend to go any further into this in this article.44 Instead, a draft for
semiotics was prepared that was less mentalistic and more substantial, as it
dealt with practice in a more detailed way than the distribution life of Saus-
sure’s signs in society and, first and foremost, it was generally dynamic and
open.
But
it
was the widespread understanding of the fundamental significance
of dialectics and reversibility for the formation of language and signs and
the use of these which underlay the idea that the discourse of the individual
only existed by virtue of another person’s discourse and that it is always
directed towards this second person at the same time as it is being directed
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30
John Thobo-Carlsen
towards what is being spoken about. Kristeva clearly formulated it at that
t ime in the concepts of translinguistics and inter te~tuali ty,~~nd later in her
distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic,46 as two inseparable sides
of the fo rm at io n of the signifying process.
A
distinction that collects together
experiences stretching way back in ou r life with language an d signs. It is that
intentio which lies in the orientedness, this always already th at f or m s a bridge
to Benjamin’s semiotics of self-announcing , o r semio-symbiosis.
In the article “Reading signs of illness” (see note
14)
I have tried to show
how this symbiosis develops in the respective reading of sym ptom s an d n arra -
tive presentation of the body, the patient, the doctor or the person carrying
ou t the treatmen t.47 In his article “Le troisieme
sen^ ^'
Barthes has dealt in
an image-analysing context with the tremendously com plex, mimetic fo rm of
comm unication of which art a n d literature in particular m ake use and which,
in the distinction made between the obvious and the obtuse focus on the
transition from the semiotic
to
the symbolic or, more specifically, from the
denotative to the c ~ n n o t a t i v e . ~ ~
In th at way, language can b oth stand
f o r
w hat it says (the symbol) and for
precisely what it does
not
say (the allegory). It can do this by virtue of both
being
wha t it says (self-announcing) a nd
not being
wh at it says (message). O n
several occasions, Benjamin poin ts to this link between language’s ‘symbolic’
way of functioning and the sign, where he also expresses his understanding
for the complexity of the way in which the sign functions:
“For language is always not simply announcing that which is disposed to be
announced but also a symbol of that which is not disposed to be announced.
The symbolic side of language has to do with its link to the sign, but also
stretches, for example, in certain respects to nam e a nd judgm ent. These d o not
only have a communicating aspect but in all probability also have
-
closely
linked to this ~ a symbolic function.”
(see note 5, p.
156 ”
Their paths cross once more in the antithesis. Here, for example, their idea
that the allegorical counter-image creates the field of tension in the text that
is able to release one from all that which is cramped and unfree in existence.
Th is release always comes ‘from w ithin,’ from language’s concrete use of em-
blematic stereotypes.” And not ‘from without,’ like the imp act of a n already
existing truth or release in a symbolic indirectness in the text. In the case of
Benjamin and the Baroque this takes place with roots in the hieroglyphics of
antiquity;“ fo r Barthes, with roots in the doxa of everyday speech, a s fo r
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Barthes meets Benjumin? 31
example in his reading of the fragmentary discourse
of
loves3 and the myths
of everyday.s4In Benjamin’s critique of the ‘profane concept of symbols’ of
classical-romantic aesthetics and in his indication of the cognition potential
of the dialectic concept of allegory there is an attitude which is fundamentally
in agreement with that of Barthes regarding the semiotic way in which both
the content and the expression sides of language function.
“Like a flame, all the mimetic about language can more likely only become
visible with the aid of a bearer. This bearer is the sem iotic. Such is the cohesion
of meaning involved by words or sentences the bearer whereby the similarity
can not become visible except as a stroke of lightning. For its
production through
the humun being is ~ in the same way as the taking care of it through the humun
being
-
in many, and especially the important, instances linked to
a
sudden
flaring up. The similarity rushes past. So it is not improbable that the speed of
writing an d reading increases the fusion of the sem iotic and the mimetic within
the field of language.”55
In the classical-romantic interpretation the symbolic, qua its mere production
or appearance, was to mediate a direct transmission of the Beautiful to the
True (the divine).shAccording to Benjamin, it is in such mystifying consider-
ations of the symbolic that traditional art criticism finds fertile ground for
its ideas about the permanent, static interconnectedness between expression
and content and thus lacking any dialectic feeling and experience it avoids
taking account of the content in its analysis of the expression and of the
expression in its analysis of the ~ontent.’~
It is in opposition to the classically direct intimacy in the understanding of
how literature functions and works that Benjamin’s focusing on the dialectic
character of opposites in allegory is to be ~n d e r s t o o d . ~ ~his is not so dissimilar
to Levi-Strauss’ theories of myth in character consider, for example, the
linkings of mutual structures of opposites in the (Edipus analysis. The counter-
myth speaks (in the sense readdspeaks: understands it
in
itself,
in
its language)
the primary myth by virtue of the opposition
notu bene
on
a
common basis.
Dialectics only functions on a common semantic axis. The myth speaks its own
language
as
Barthes also emphasized in
Myth Today:
“Myth is a type
of
speech.” (see note 54, p. 193). A speech different from the immediate type of
speech. In the same
way,
allegory challenges established speech,
it
offers itself
as a counter-image for only in the interaction with it is the hardened (em-
phatic) and illusory opened up in immediate speech.
For Benjamin ~ and that must not be suppressed his theory of crackling
contains a hope of returning by this path, and only by this concrete path,
to
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32
John Thobo-Curlsen
wholeness, a cognition of and a life in spiritual and physical unity and bal-
ance. But even though this method of paradoxality par excellence really has
this aim for Benjamin, a number of elements in the method seem to indicate
that he and Barthes are rather aiming for a more ‘realistic’ objective - an
epistemology
of
language, a theory of cognition that is based on man’s life
and experience in and with language. In a way, this was the point of departure
for both of them. The story of the Creation for Benjamin, and the corre-
sponding conception of a language without blemish that may lie behind the
early concept in Barthes of an
Pcriture b l ~ n c h e , ~ ~
ike a,fata
morguna
of writ-
ing. The idea of an ‘ecriture blanche’ has to do with an actual, ongoing
‘desacralization’ and ‘deritualisation’ of the way of writing literature, as prac-
ticed by Mallarme and others. A revolt against the naturalising and mythol-
ogising tendencies in the evaluation of literary language usage. The aim was
“to create an ‘ecriture blanche’ that has been freed of every type of depen-
dency on a certain norm of language usage” (see note 2,
Le
degrP
z t r o
de
I’tcriture,
p.
55).
An attempt to create a literary form that broke with the
stereotype, with the cliches, with the mannerisms, whilst re-establishing itself
as a ‘neutral,’ innocent,’ ‘indicative,’ linguistic form of naming. With a refer-
ence to Camus
1’Etrunger
Barthes sums up as follows:
“the writing is thus reduced to a sort
of
negative mode, where the social and
mythical characteristics in a language use are suspended for the benefit of the
neutral and immobile status of the form; in this way thought retains all its
responsibility, without filling in an ancillary commitment concerning the form
in a historical situation which does not suit it.”
op.ci t . ,
p. 56)
The relationship of this aim to that of Benjamin’s becomes more and more
evident. The allegorical counter-structures of the Baroque, which function
with the aid of hieroglyphic sanctities, must, according to Benjamin, be inter-
preted as (Barthes would say: connotes with) an expression of the conception
of
an Adamical language. “Allegory is both convention and expression;
and that is basically a contradiction.”h0 In its form, Baroque Truuerspiel is
fragmentary in its mode of expression, as is language. The parts speak the
whole not i n the form of an addition, but rather like a multiplication:
“Perhaps it
is
that which is baroque: a progressive opposition between unity
and the whole, an art where the extension is not summative, but multiplicative
-
in brief, an accelerative density”.
(Barthes: “Tacite
..”
p. 108,
se
note
42)
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Barth es meets Benjamin.?
33
Like myths and folk tales, by the way, which speak their sorrow. A ‘bricolage’
which we first came across in Levi-Straws, but which we realise is a funda-
mental condition for our semiotic way of announcing ourselves.
To
read these
conventionalities is like carrying our active mourning. One follows the labori-
ous path one has to take if one is to understand in a valid way what (after
all) is being said. Like the one haiku poem that reads the other. As a reader
one reads in one’s own language. And that which one reads is the second
and other language. In this case, the Baroque
Trauerspiel,
which performs
a language where the code is known.61 It consists of culturally laid-down
unambiguities, which in the special allegorical shadow play rouse the reader’s
own language ability.
Truth and Beauty
Barthes had to abandon the hope of writing that was totally immaculate,
that was not to “be subservient to some triumphant ideology” ( L e degrk
zkro ...,
p.
55,
see note
2),
because “nothing (‘after all’ [my addition])
is
more
unfaithful than an ecriture blanche”
( locci t . ,
p. 57). He later revised his con-
cept of ecriture from being a diachronic, transitive entity to being a dia-
chronic, intransitive entity. In a corresponding way, Benjamin seems to be on
a collision course with himself. His wholeness utopia as a return to God’s
Word
prevents him from attaining the final atonement of body and soul in
human language production, as Barthes in his way supplies a draft theory of
textuality. But when Benjamin insists on the exemplary, fragmentary
Wahrheitsgestaltung in literature, as we have seen, in a constant perspective
of modernity and not ‘classical-centristic,’ as Barthes called it, then it seems
to be even more difficult to argue for an extratextual total synthesis. And
when Benjamin even
so
seemingly have to do this, it rather favours the neo-
Kantian progressive ideology of harmony, peace and tolerance between
people than his important epistemological project on the presentation and
development of science and literature “not of the factual but of the authenti-
cally possible” (Goldbaek, p. 125, see note 28).
The Benjaminean redemption is found in allegory’s illusion-free insight-
fulness into the mythical substratum, based on a physical presence, but com-
bined with an expectation concerning the reversal in the symbol, as the syn-
thesis, the finite reference to truth or God. The Barthesean redemption is
found in the same place as regards the allegorical level. And he could prob-
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34
John Thobo-Carlsen
ably also conceive of a pure language of the imaginary as a language utopia,
but as he regards language as a place for the body to be lost in and the act
of writing one’s reading as being the actual act of physical release ~ with the
bliss experienced thereby (when successful) as a sy n t he d 2 he must in his
efforts to
attain reality
“give up his ‘sincerity”’
(Fragments d’un
discours
am-
oureux, p. 115, see note 2) and not look back :
“What the writing demands, and what
no
person in
love
would be prepared
to
accept without being torn apart, is to offer Ljust] (my bracket)
/ i t f le of
the
Imaginary and in that way secure a bit of reality footing round its language.
[ I
The Imaginary language
would be
(my italics) nothing less than the utopia
of language; a completely original, paradisiacal Adam-language, a ‘natural lan-
guage completely free of distortion and illusion, a cloudless mirroring of the
senses, a sensual language (die sensualische Sprache)’: ‘In the sensual language
all
souls
talk to each other, they do not need anything else than language, since
it is the language of nature’.”
(opc i t . ,
p.
115,
Barthes mentions that the inserted
quotations are from Jakob Bohme)”
Thereby Barthes differs
immediately
from Benjamin on an important point
that seems to have to do with the difference in their conception of and interest
in the reader. This in turn has to do with the fact that where Benjamin was
unable to look for the synthesis in the meeting or confrontation with the
other in a Lacanian or psychoanalytical sense - as Barthes seems to do, even
though everything in Benjamin’s way
of
looking at the language of literature
points in this direction there Benjamin goes for an unambiguous solution.
Not because he calls upon the beloved as a martyr that is both in accord-
ance with Barthes and an immanent consideration but because he, in
answer to the relevant question “whether truth is able to do beauty justice,”
sticks to Plato, who “ascribes to truth the task of letting beauty be respon-
sible for being.” Truth is transcendental and
is
more than beauty for Benja-
min. While Barthes chases truth
in
beauty and has to admit that truth
will
never be able to do beauty justice. Beauty is more than truth.
“Eros (..,) is not unfaithful to his original endeavour when he lets his longing
be for truth; for truth
is
also beautiful.
It
is not
so
much beautiful in itself as
for Eros. The sume applies to human love: u person is beautiful for the beloved
not in himself or herselji and precisely becuuse his or her body presents it se lf in a
higher order than that of
the
beautiful. The same also applies to truth: it
is
not
so
much beautiful in itself as
fo r the person seeking it.
(...)
Truth’s nature,
us
richness qf ideas presented by itself rather embodies the idea thut talk o f truth’k
beauty can never be hroken of : (...) The appearance of the beautiful as a se-
ducer, as long as
it does
not seek to
d o
anything else than appear, attracts the
pursuit of reason and allows its innocence to be cognized when it flees to the
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Barthes meets Benjamin? 35
“The
altar of truth. Eros follows this flight, not as
a
pursuer, but as a lover; in such
a way that beauty for its own appearance’s sake always flees, both out of fear
of the reasonable and out of fear of the lover. And only the lover can bear
witness to the fact that truth is not a revealing that destroys the secret, but
instead a revelation which does it justice.
Is
truth able to
do
beauty justice? is
the crucial question raised in Plato’s Symposium. Plato answers it, since he as-
cribes truth the task oj let tin g beauty he responsible fo r being. In this sense he
therefore unfolds truth as the content of beauty.”
(see note 21, p. 21 1) [my italics]
person is beautiful for the beloved, not in himself or herself:’ and pre-
cisely because his or her body ‘(Presents itselfin a higher order than itself.”
Truth is beautiful for “the person who is seeking it.” “The appearance of the
beautiful as
u
seducer
I ’
“Only the lover can bear witness” that truth does
not appear as the result of a revealing, but it rather “appears in an event”
(loc.cit., p. 211).
At last the body comes into focus, here seen through Benjamin’s special
prism, although Barthes would relish the issue for, as he says:
“I
do
not dream
1
am forming sentences: it is the body as
I
regard it, and no
longer the body as I listen
to
it, which acquires a
phatic
(contacting) function
between my language production and the fluid desire on which this production
feeds
-
by latching on to an observing, not a message”
(Barthes: Roland Burtlies, p. 144-145)
As
we saw in Benjamin, man is naming and cognizing in language, but was
created of matter. Man was created in God’s image, i.e. in the image of the
creating substance, which is language. In other words, the body too was
created in the image of the creator language. 1.e. the body, one’s own and
that
of
others, is cognizable in the act of naming, but, it should be noted,
only that part of it which is disposed to be communicated. At the same time,
the nature of naming is dependent on how it is diposed to be communicated.
For, as we recall, “spiritual nature is only identical with the linguistic insofar
as it is disposed to be announced [...nur sofern es mitteilbar ist]” (see note 5,
p. 142). In other words, what we are talking about is the body’s linguistic
communicability. Bodies are also able to communicate excellently without
recourse to words, as we all know. Like all other things in nature they have
their own silent language. It is this silent language which we translate with
our verbal language and to which we add cognition.
So we can conclude that nor is truth about the body beautiful in itself, but
it might become
so
in a (literary) presentation, a self-presentation, and only
for the person set towards it. For Barthes (and for Benjamin) Truth has no
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36 John Thobo-Carlsen
relation to the intentional: language announces that which is djposed
to
be
announced an d that which
is
disposed to be announced is the linguistic.
Truth does not take
up
with the intention; it manifests itself as a certain
procedure. For Barthes, Truth is the approachin g n ature of th e presentation,
e.g. writing (or in some oth er way unfolding) one’s reading. T his seems to be
the only possible way
of
com bining the world
of
cognition a nd th at
of
living.
(Translation
by John
Irons)
NOTES
1. Ro land Barthes: “Litterature e t meta-langage” (orig. 1959) in:
Essais critiques,
Paris
1971. p. 107.
2. Ro land Barthes:
Le de gr i zPro de l’ecriture,
Paris, 1953, p.
5 5 ,
see also p. 12 an d
Frag-
ments
d’un
discours amo ureux ,
Paris 1977,p. 1 15.
3. Walter Benjamin: “Der Begriff der K unstkritik in der deutschen Ro m antik ” (1919)
in: Gesammelte
Schrijten
I,1, Fra nkf urt a m M ain 1974, p. 21, which quotes Joha nn
Gottlieb Fichte:
Sumtl iche Werke,
Vol. I, (1845-1846), Berlin 1965, p. 67: “[Die]
Handlung d er Freiheit, durch welche die Fo rm zur F orm der Fo rm als ihres Gehaltes
wird und in sich selbst zur iickk ehr t, heiBt Reflexion.”
4. Joh an n Gottlie b Fichte: “D as System der Sittenlehre nach d en Principien de r Wis-
senschaftslehre” in: Samtliche
Werke,
Vol. IV, (1845-1846) Berlin 1965, pp. 23-24.
5. I 140-141 in Walter Benjam in: “U be r Spr ache iiberhaupt und i iber die Spra che des
Menschen” in:
GesammelteSchriften,
I I I Fran kfurt am M ain 1977.
6. Cf. Samuel Beckett:
Murphy
(orig. 1938), Lo nd on 1963, where M’s daily life is di-
vided into zones tha t correspond to the various functions an d roles of language as
mentioned here. In M ., Dante’s three stages: Inferno, P urg ator io an d Paradiso are
the compa rison. In the 1st zone “the fo rm s have parallels,” says M., “here the pleas-
ure was reprisal, the pleasure of reversing th e physical experience” (p .78) “here t he
entire physical fiasco cou ld become a roa ring success.” Th e 2nd zone is the sphere
of
contemplation and aesthetics. Here there
is
a cha ir which
M.
sits down on w hen he
wants to s top registering the world of realities. This zone is the space of peace a nd
individuality. The 3rd zone, Paradiso in Dante, is the goal of M’s dreams. It
is
the
place of the irratio nal, the resolution
in
a higher totality - he calls it abso lute free-
dom
-
Cf. my analysis of the b oo k in: Joh n Thobo -Carlsen:
Es te t i k og kommunik -
ation (Aesthetics and
C o ~ m ~ ~ i c a t ~ o n ~ ,dense 1984.
7. Roland Barthes:
Legon.
Leqon inaugurale de la chaire de semiologie littkraire du
College de France, p rononce le 7 janvier 1977. Paris, 1978, pp. 15-16.
8. Walter Benjamin: “Z ur Kr itik der Gew alt”, in:
Gesammelte Schriften,
II,1, 1977.
9.
Roland Barthes:
Roland
Barthes,
Paris, 1975,
p.
148.
10. Andre L eroi-Gourhan: “L e geste et la parole”, Paris 1965.
1 1. Ro m an Jak obson: “Linguistics an d Poetics” (orig. 1960), in: Style in
Language,
T.
A . Sebeok(Ed.), Mass. 1966. Rom an Jakob son uses the expression “the set toward”
an d writes ‘Einstellung’ in a n ex planatory parenthesis concerning setting toward
oneself. Of course, it is always possible to discuss whether language can d o a ny thing
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Barthes mee ts Benjamin? 31
by itself, or whether language can only unfold in the meeting between language users
in reader and writer roles respectively and therefore also can set toward itself or ad-
opt a position towards itself in the special form of communication which places its
own communicability in focus.
For
a further discussion and use of this passage in
Roman Jakobson you are referred to Thobo-Carlsen:A st e ti k og konzmunikation, p.
77ff. (see note 6).
12. A more thorough presentation is provided in John Thobo-Carlsen: Ankomsten ti1
virkeligheden. Om orholdet mellem litterar sprogbrug og la m ing i orlrengelse af Ro -
land Barthes, R oman Jakobson og Walter Benjamin. [ Th e adventure of Reality. On
the Relation between the Literary
Use
of Language and Reading in Continuation of
Roland Barthes, Rom an Jakobson and Walter Benjamin]
Odense: Pjecer fra Institut
for Litteraturvidenskab og Semiotik, Odense Universitet 1993, of which this article
is
a
revised version of the final section.
13. Cf. Roland Barthes:
SystPme de la mode,
Paris 1967.
14. For a possible application of these ideas, cf. John Thobo-Carlsen: “At lase syg-
domstegn [Reading Signs of Illness]”, in:
Agrippa.
Psykiatrisk Tidsskrift, Cop. 1993.
15. Rodolphe Gasche: “Saturnine Vision and the Question
of
Difference: Reflections
on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language” in: Rainer Nagele (Ed.): Benjamin’s
Grounds. ew Readings
of
Walter Benjamin, Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1988, seep. 91.
16. Ferdinand de Saussure:
Cours de linguistique gknir ale ,
(orig. 1915), Paris 1968, p.
101.
17.
Roland Barthes: “Presentation,” in: Communications 4 Paris 1964,p. 2: “I1 faut en
somme admettre dbs maintenant
la
possibilite de renverser un jour la proposition de
Saussure: la linguistique n’est pas une partie, mime privilegike, de la science generale
des signes, c’est la semiologie qui est une partie de la linguistique: trbs precisement
cette partie qui prendrait en charge les grandes unitks signifante s du discours; de la
sorte apparaitrait l’unite des recherches qui se mbnent actuellement en anthropolog-
ie, en sociologie en psychoanalyse et en stylistique autour du concept de significa-
tion.”
18.
Cf. Thobo-Carlsen:
A t
l a w
sygdornstegn
(see note 14).
19. Roman Jakobson: Essa is de lingu istique gCnCrale, Vols. 1 and 2, (orig. 1963), Paris
1973, p. 28.
20.
Cf. Kurt Godel: “Uber formal unentschiedbare Satze der Principia Mathematica
und verwandter Systeme I” in: Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik, Vol. 38,
1931, pp. 173-198 and John Thobo-Carlsen: “Semiotique de la lecture” in:
DegrPs
no. 72: L’interpretation (II), Brussels, 1992.
21. Intentio understood acc. to Walter Benjamin:
“ ..
Intention auf die Sprache als sol-
che” (in “Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers” in: Gesamm elte Schrijten I V , 16) in a non-
subjective and nonempirical perspective; intentio not understood as consciousness
through its will having an intentional relation to a Truth that it wants to bring out
but as a discourse being directed or oriented towards something or other
-
ts com-
municability. Or “Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis als ein in der Begriffsintention
bestimmter ist nicht die Wdhrheit. Die Wahrheit ist ein aus Ideen gebildetes inten-
tionsloses Sein.
(...)
Die Wahrheit ist der Tod der Intention” (Walter Benjamin: “Erk-
enntniskritische Vorrede” (preface to: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (orig.
1925) in: Gesamm elte Schrijten. I , l , Frankfurt am Main, 1974, see p. 216).
22. Roland Barthes: “L‘aventure semiologique” (orig. 1974) in: L hventure skmiolo-
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38
John Thobo-Curlsen
gique,
Paris 1985, pp. 13-14, Here translated from “In trod uc tion: Th e Semiological
Adventurer” in Roland Barthes: The Semiotic Challenge, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988, see pp. 7 8.
23. Cf. John T hobo-C arlsen: “Liesningens semiotik” (“Semiotics of Reading”), in: K &
K no. 75, Cop . 1993 (in French: “Skm iotique d e la lecture” in: D egres no. 72: L ‘inter-
pretation
(11), Bruxelles, 1992) an d “ Om glz de n ved a t Iiese” [On the Pleasure of
Reading]” in Svejgaard og Thob o-Carlsen (Eds.): Fantusi og$ktion (Imagina tion
and
Fiction]
Odense 1989.
24. Barthes was obliged to pu t up with quite a lot himself, partly in conn ection with the
argume ntation for the rejection of the dissertation Systime de
la
mode and not
least in connection with the protracted dispute with P rof. Ra ym on d Picard a nd a
whole series of university- and o the r personalities of established and traditional lit-
erary-critical a nd literary-interpretative persuasion concerning Racine a nd litera-
ture in general. Barthes’ bo ok Sur Racine appeared in 1963, bu t it was written in the
years 1958-1960. Picard’s atta ck o n Barthes an d the so-called “Nouvelle Critique,”
to which he believed Bar thes belonged,
Nouvelle Critique
ou
nouvelle imposture
was
published in 1963, an d Barthes’ reply an d gathering together which was also a
sketch of the possibilities of establishing a real science of literature
Critique
e t
Vkr-
i t k appeared in 1966. Th e same year, by the way, as Gre imas’ Skmantique Structurale,
which by m any is considered t o be the basis fo r an d the beginning of the science of
literature as an independent university discipline, in Denmark at any rate. This is
interesting to note. But, on the o ther ha nd , one can also say tha t B arthes, in the argu -
ment with Picard, struck one of the blows that was apparently going to be stru ck on
behalf of the future literary discipline. It is also interesting, that it was not only
Barthes who ha d dissertations o r draft dissertations tur ned down. D errida, du ring
roughly the same period, had a dissertation o n related issues turn ed down in Paris,
and a ‘Habilitationsschrift’ [a do ctor al thesis th at would qualify for university lec-
turing] by Benjamin suffered the same fate at the o ther end of the E uro pea n axis in
Berlin. Despite the difference in time, I would da re to claim th at the essence of the
advanced reasons was virtually the same. The recognition of Barthes comes as a
compromise with a professorship a t College de Fra nce (n ot on the initiative of F ou-
cault, as implied in various sources, but on th at of Barthes himself, later su pp orte d
by Fo ucau lt) Benjamin’s recognition as a university teacher never comes, altho ug h
he gains a certain degree
of
recognition through the Fran kfu rt School (e.g. Ad orn o
teaches for a term in 1931 in Benjamin
s
rejected Habitationsschrift (U dd Tse e note
21) at F ran kfu rt U niversity). Derrida’s dissertation becomes a Doc tora t d’Eta t sur
travaux, i.e. a comp ilation of formerly published works hu s achieved de facto . In
1967 Barthes published the third version of
SystPme
u
mode
instead of handing
it in as a dissertation, although Andre M artin et already ha d accepted to diriger lu
thPse.
25. Fr om Walter Benjamin: “U be r den Begriff der G eschichte (1940)” in:
Gesammelte
Schrijtten, 1,2, 1974,VT my italics).
26.
Paradoxa is also a central aesthetic mode of presentation in Benjamin: e.g. UddT, p.
390 and
E.v.,
p. 93. Also fou nd in innumerable instances in B arthes, thou gh in
Ro-
land
Barthes,
Paris 1975, p. 75 the risk of th e pa rad ox a tipping over into doxa is also
discussed: the coun ter-language can also become rigid.
27. Th e figures in the square brackets refer to those of th e quota tion immediately above.
28. A fine treatment of these analyses is to be fo un d in Henning Goldbiek: De
tavse sire-
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Barthes meets Benjamin? 39
29.
30.
31.
32.
33
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
ners
sang. Oplysningens dialektik hos den tidlige W alter Benjamin (T h e Song of the
Silent Sirens. The Dialectics of the Enlightenment at the Early Walter Benjumin]
Cop. 1990.
Codes are here to be understood as a linguistic tendency, convention or quotation-
perspective, as
in
Roland Barthes:
S/Z,
Paris 1976 (orig. 1970) and in “Analyse tex-
tuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe” (orig. 1973) in: L’aventure semiologique, Paris 1985
i t is talked about as a deji-vu, -ecrit, -lu, -fait og vecu, i.e. as the “already” that con-
stitutes our culture and everything we undertake. Cf. Thobo-Carlsen: “Lresningens
semiotik” (see note 23), which deals with the code concept
on
the basis of the men-
tioned texts.
Harald Steinhagen: “Om Walter Benjamins allegori-begreb [On the Concept of Alle-
gory of Walter Benjamin]” (orig. 1978) in: Kultur
&
Klasse 47, Cop. 1983, pp. 100-
101. Cf. about the inclusion of the reference points in the study object, Roland
Barthes: “De L‘oevre au texte” (1971) in:
Le
bruissement de la langue. Essais critique
IV.
Paris 1984.
Walter Benjamin: “Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers [The task of the translator]” in: Ge-
sammelte Schrijten,
IV,
l , 1974.
In the article “Roland Barthes: the critical subject (an idea for research)” in:
Paru-
gruph
vol. 1 no.
1 ,
1988, pp. 175-1 80 Peter Collier puts forward the idea
of
a study
on
the relation between Barthes og Benjamin:
“A
full-scale study
of
the conjunction
of Barthes and Benjamin would be a daunting and exciting project” (p. 178). Cf. also
Catherine Coquio: “Roland Barthes et Walter Benjamin: image, tautologie, dia-
lectique” in: Catherine Coquio et Regis Salado (Eds.): Barthes
aprPs
Barthes. Une
actualitk en question,
Pau 1993 and Dieter Mettler: “Friedrich Schlegel- Walter Ben-
jamin
-
Roland Barthes. Philosophische Begrundungsversuche der Literaturkritik”
in: Wit-kendes Wort Deutsche Spruche und iterutur in Forschung und Lehre. Vol. 40
(3), 1990, pp. 422434.
Cf. the articles “Sur la lecture [On reading]” and “Ecrire la lecture w rit ing reading]”
in:
Le
bruissement de
la
langue
f
The R ustle
of
Lan gua ge]. Essais critique
IV.
Paris
1984, which is dealt with in Thobo-Carlsen: “Om glreden ved at lcse” (see note 23).
Roland Barthes: Le Degrk zero de I’kcriture, (see note 2) provides a brief history of
literary language usage during the period.
Cf. i.e. Thobo-Carlsen: “Om glreden ved at Irese” on this subject (see note 23).
In
the following
I
have sought support in Henning Goldbak’s interpretation of Ben-
jamin’s analysis of Goethe’s novel. Cf. Goldbrek “De tavse sireners sang” (see note
28).
Walter Benjamin: Gesamm elte Schrijten 1,3: 835-837: Erster Teil: Das Mythische als
Thesis
(...)
Zweiter teil: Die Erloschung als Antithesis
(...)
Dritter Teil: Die Hoffnung
als Synthesis”.
Walter Benjamin: “Goethes Wuhlverwandtschaften,” (orig. 1925) in: Gesammelte
Schrijten, I,1, Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 140-141.
Barthes: S / Z (see note 29).
Barthes:
Le
DegrC zt ro de l’kcriture,
the section on “The Craft of Style” (see note 2).
Barthes:
Le Degrk zkro
de I’kcriture, the section
on
“The Dramatics of Baudelaire”
(see note 2).
Roland Barthes: “Tacite et le baroque funebre” (orig. 1959) in: Essa is critiques, Paris
1971.
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4
John
Thobo-Car l sen
43
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51
~ ~
Emblemata. M artin Opitz:
Deutsche Poeterey ( I
624) calls em blems
hidden theology.
An emblem consists of: image (picture), title (inscriptio), epigramme (subscriptio).
Cf.Thobo-Carlsen: B s t e t i k og kommunikation, the section “E n skematisering af det
semiotiske sted [A S ketching of the S emiotic Site]” p. 241ff.
I have dealt with this in op.cit., p. 61f and p. 132.
Introduction and references concerning this, see e.g. Thobo-Carlsen
op.cit.,
es-
pecially the section “Tekstproduktion og det poetiske sprog [Text Production and
Poetic Language].”
Cf. Julia Kristeva:
La rtvolution
du
languge p ottiyu e,
Paris 1974. Here she also
proses that the term intertextuulity be replaced by the term transposition (p. 60), be-
cause, as she says, there has been a tendency to interpret intertextuality as being a
fo rm of sou rce critique. By the word transposition she wishes to stress that moving
from a system of meaning to an othe r system calls for a completely new form ulatio n,
i.e. in term s of the den otatio n and the statement.
See also the article John T hobo -Car lsen: “A t laese spillet [Reading the Game],” in the
daily newspaper
Injormation,
18.6.92.
Ro land Barthes: “ Le troisikme sense” (orig. 1970), in: L’obvie et lbbt us. Essais cri-
t i m e
ZII Paris 1982.
For a treatment of this, linked to R om an Jakobson’s concept of the poetic, see Joh n
Thobo-Carlsen: “At laese det man ser [Reading what you see]” in: Bo Hakon
Jsrgensen, L ars Ole Sauerberg an d Anne S cott Ssrensen (Eds.):
A t
se
teksten
[Re-
garding the te xt ], Odense 1993.
Therefore i t would seem to me to be not only more prom ising but also more valid
to emphasise the similarities between Benjamin’s conception of language, signs and
semiotics an d tha t of Barthes and Kristeva rath er tha n their dissimilarities, as e.g.
Lars Erslev Andersen does in: “[Benjamin on the M ove. Ab ou t the Use
of
Benjamin
in Am erica],” in: Tore Eriksen et al. (Eds .) Tankestreger. Essa ys
om
Walter Benja-
min. Arhus 1989, p. 113, note 3: “In Benjamin, the Expression ‘Semiotic Languag e
refers to a Lan guag e which conveys M eaning , which is Intentional. ‘The Semiotic’
thus has the oppo site meaning for him th an the on e given by Kristeva in Die Revo-
lution der poetischen
Spruche (F ra nk fu rt am Main 1978). Firstly, intentionality in
Benjam in is in this con text language’s built-in comm unicability an d no t a question
of my manifesting som e intention or other, c f. note 21 above. Secondly, Benjamin is
fully aware of language’s various layers of p resentation , as is
so
beautifully revealed
in this and the following Benjamin quo tations from “Ub er S prache uberhau pt ...”,
p. 156 and from “U ber d as mimetische Vermogen,” p. 123 (see no te
55).
On the other
han d, the semiotic in K risteva is not the un coded o r non-directed. o r in som e wav
or o ther the m ere presence of more or less chance p articularities as a basis for sign
formation (cf. the description of the symptom in my above-mentioned article on
signs of illness). The semiotic in Kristeva consists of a stadium which has always
already been articulated , w hich in itself is not made u p of signs but wh ich is oriented
towards being able to enter in to
a
sign relation (“pre-signes,” Kristeva,
p.
39). You
are reminded of Hjemslev’s substance category as formed meaning. Sign derivates
or functives which ‘seek like’ to enter into a sign relation with. E.g. in the d iagnosis
and therapy situation in the form of the subject, who comes o nto the stage an d takes
(responsibility for) sign formation by naming the thing or telling its story. Benja-
min’s an d Kristeva’s pa ths also cross in language, the sign an d nam ing as the path to
understanding.
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Bar thes meets Benjamin? 41
(Goldblek, p.
11
7 an d p. 11 : “the emblem books the public was familiar with”).
Benjam in names emblems in U d d T , p. 339. See also B arthes’ fragm ent ‘“L‘emblbme,
le gag ” in: Roland Barthes, p. 83 (see no te 26).
52. Hieroglyphs. Benjamin quotes Schopenhauer UddT, p. 338, who mentions hiero-
glyphs. “T he historical basis of allegory was the enigmatic hieroglyphs, which were
an antiq ue puzzle system of images which stood fo r words an d letters. This an tique
system was discovered in the Renaissance, when people believed th at th e enigm atic
hieroglyphs were the anc ient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were considered t o be div-
ine images” (G old bz k, p. 117).
53. Cf. Roland Barthes: Fragments d’un discours amoureux, (see note 2 ) .
54. Cf . Ro land Barthes:
Mytologies,
Paris, 1957.
55. Walter Benjamin: “U ber d as mimetische Vermogen” in: Cesamm elte Schriften, I I , l ,
Fra nk furt am M ain 1977, p. 213 (my italics).
56. “Als symbolische Gebilde sol1da s Schone bruchlos ins Gottliche ubergehen” (Ben-
jamin: UddT, p. 337).
57. “Bei diesem, dem vulgaren Sprachgebrduch, ist da s Auffallendste, daB der Begriff,
de r in gleichsam imperativischer Ha ltun g auf eine unzertrennliche Verbundenheit
von F orm und Inh alt sich bezieht, in den D ienst einer philosophischen Beschoni-
gung der Unk raft trit t , der d a mangels dialektischer Stahlun g in de r Formanalyse
der Inhalt, in der Inhaltsasthetik die F orm entgeht.” (Benjamin, opci t . ,
P.
336).
58. “D em gegenuber ist die barocke Apotheose dialek tisch. Sie vollzieht sich im U m -
schlagen von E xtremen.” (Benjamin, opci t . , p. 337).
59. In
Le Degr t
zPro
de
I’tcriture p. 55f (see no te 2) .
60.
..
die Allegorie ist beides, Konvention und A usdruck; und beide sind von H au s au s
widerstreitend.” (B enjamin: UddT, p. 351).
61. Concerning reading and codes, see Thobo-Carlsen: “Llesningens semiotik” (see
no te 23).
62. A construction that unifies Barthes’ efforts from his very first meeting (through
Gre imas) w ith the D anish linguist Viggo Brerndal’s concept of n eutrality via le deg rt
z t r o (cf. Barthes: “Rkponses” in:
Tel
Qu el47 , 1971, p. 98) an d
tcriture blanche,
to
his work with “le neutre” (cf. Barthes:
Roland Barthes,
p. 128 ). (Cf. also Bern ard
Comment: Vers le Neutre, Paris 1991).
63.
Frugm ents d’un
discours amoureux was written o n th e basis of a systematic reading of
Goethe’s
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.
In this book Barthes also mentions Jakob
Bohme (p. 197), bu t here quoted in No rm an
0
Brown
Life Against Death.
The
psychoanalytic Meaning ofH istory London : Sphere Books 1968 1959). Bohm e lived
1575-1624. He was a Ge rm an p hilosopher, but m ade his living as a cobbler. He de-
veloped a theory o n the inner relationship between opposites: something ca n only
be explained by its opposite. In connection with this, theories about natural lan-
guage an d sensual language (“die sensualische Sprache”). H e was a source of inspi-
ration for many G erm an philosophers, i.e. Hegel, as well as for W alter Benjamin.
John
Thobo-Carlsen.
Bo rn 1943. Ph.D. (Copen hagen). Lecturer in Gen era l Literature,
University of Odense. Has published books on Knut Hamsun and general aesthetics