Review: The Discourse of the Imaginary Author(s): Gregory L.

Ulmer Reviewed work(s): A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes ; Richard Howard Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes ; Richard Howard Source: Diacritics, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 61-75 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465041 Accessed: 12/01/2010 15:18
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THE

DISCOURSE OF THE IMAG INARY

GREGORY ULMER L.

Roland Barthes. A LOVER'SDISCOURSE: FRAGMENTS. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Roland Barthes. ROLAND BARTHES ROLANDBARTHES.Trans. Richard BY Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. In a recent issue of Yale French Studies devoted to the current reassessment of the relations between literature and psychoanalysis, Fredric Jameson (referring to Lacan's theory of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real1) suggests that, "at a time when the primacy of language and the Symbolic Order is widely understood-or at least widely asserted-it is rather in the underestimation of the Imaginary and the problem of the insertion of the subject that the 'un-hiddenness of truth' (Heidegger) may now be sought" ["Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject," YFS 55/56 (1977), 383]. He hopes that Lacan's distinctions, if brought to bear on the realm of aesthetic theory and literary criticism, would offer the psychoanalytic method "a more fruitful vocation than it was able to exercise in the older literary psychoanalysis" [Jameson, p. 371]. Roland Barthes, in his two most recent books, provides at least one version of what a new psychoanalytic writing, based on Lacan's Imaginary, could be like, a version that does indeed open a new dimension (the textual dimension) to the academic writer.

I. The "Schema" of a New Genre A Lover's Discourse puts into practice the promise of Barthes's early work, in which he stated that the critic (like the poet) is a writer. What he declares in Barthes by Barthes-that "it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel" [Barthes, p. 1]-is actually dramatized in the Discourse, the embodiment of his "new intellectual art," the "romanesque" or novelistic theory of the intellect (everything relating to the intellect that falls outside the boundaries of science). This science become fictional submits "the objects of knowledge and discussion-as in any art-no longer to an instance of truth, but to a consideration of effects" [Barthes, p. 90]. This idea is entirely in line with his project to stage the Imaginary, for as Jameson stresses with regard to Lacan's notion 1Followingthe practice of several translators(Anthony Wilden, Donald Nicholson-Smith)I will capitalize these terms.

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9.

of the subject of the mirror-stage(which fixes the agency of the ego in a line of fiction), narrativeand fantasy play an essential role in the attempt of the subject to reintegratehis alienated image [Jameson, p. 353]. In noting some of the features of the new intellectual art manifested in the Discourse, it is importantto keep in mind that the new genre deliberatelysubvertsthe conventions of the traditional scholarly discourse. A full appreciation of Barthes's Discourse, then, requiresthat it be seen in contrastto a traditionalacademic study of Goethe's Sorrowsof Young Werther,the literarywork featured in the fragments. In formal terms, for example, the first thing such a contrast might emphasize is the extraordinaryintroduction into a text of knowledge of the unreliable narratorof fiction. The distancing extends to several levels: the opening comment ends by
referring to "the subject of the book which begins here .. ," followed by a description

of "how this book is constructed."Likean old-fashionednovel, the Discourseprovides its own glosses, the firstone being as concise a descriptionof the plan of the book as it is possible to write. The methodologicalprincipleof the book is that "thedescription of the lover'sdiscourse has been replaced by its simulation, and to that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis"[Discourse, p. 3]. In the interestsof this dramatization,the methodological section introducesthe readerto still another speaker:"so it is a lover who speaks and who says." Many of the generic elements of the academic book are present in the Discourse, but, like the elements of the traditionalplay in Artaud'stheatre of cruelty, their places in the hierarchyof importance are rearranged,with the "marginal" elements being given new functions. For example, the debt to conversations with colleagues and students that the academic author reserves for mention on an acknowledgments' page, Barthesbrings into the body of the text, including the comment and references at the relevant point. But in place of the normal "body"of the study, organized by chapters, there is a kind of annotated index, an alphabetically ordered series of phrases or names, topics (from "to be engulfed"-s'abimer-to "will-to-possess").In place of a "study,"then, he providesan "encyclopedia of affects,"whose principle he "cannoteach text be defined by the numberof disparateobjects (of states in Barthes:2 knowledge, of sensuality) which it bringsinto view with the help of simple figures of contiguity (metonymies and asyndetons)?Likethe encyclopedia, the work exhausts a list of heterogeneous objects, and this list is the work'santistructure,its obscure and
irrational polygraphy" [Barthes, p. 148].

But these and other changes notwithstanding,the traditional academic reader will still recognize the Discourse as a work of criticism, for, at one level, it is a significant contribution to the "new rhetoric."At this level, the Discourse belongs to the deconstructive study of margins. As a "holophrase,"the I-love-you is a limitsituation: "Then to what linguistic order does this odd being, this linguistic feint, belong, too articulatedto be no more than an impulse, too phatic to be a sentence? [...] We might call it a proffering,which has no scientific place" [Discourse, p. 149]. In the methodological preface, Barthesexplains his special approach, the new perspective that he has developed to give access to a level of language and style that until now has resisted analysis. The "newness" of his rhetoric is built upon his redefinition of what constitutes a "figure"(one of the three structuringprinciplesof the book, the other two being alphabetical order and intertextualreferences). His
2Barthesby Barthescontains a host of theories, themes, and methods regardingthe kind of book(s) Bartheswould like to write next (as well as reflecting on worksalreadypublished). The Discourse is in fact the fulfillment of many of these ideas: "and I herald this book that makes me my own John the Baptist, I prophesy, I announce . . ." [Barthes, p. 174]. Hence I will frequentlycite Barthesto account for features of the Discourse. 3 The distinction between the ego-ideal and the ideal-ego, which in Lacanis quite problematic and vague, is clarified by MoustafaSafouan, "De la structureen psychanalyse, contribution a une theorie du manque," in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris:Seuil, 1968), pp. 266-67. Projected images belong to the ego-ideal, introjected images to the ideal-ego. Although this clarification is no doubt an over-simplification, it is useful to distinguish the dominants of Barthes'stwo workson the Imaginary. 62

term "figures" not to be understoodin the conventional rhetoricalsense, "butrather is in its gymnastic or choreographicacceptation" [Discourse, p. 4]. "Figures," adds, is he "schema" in the Greek sense of the term, which he explains as "the body's gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the strainingbody can be immobilized." The methodological implications of Barthes'sdefinition are revealed by his use of the Greek "schema,"a term which is related to aisthesis (what Bartheshas in mind when he says he wants to write an "aesthetic"discourse, ratherthan a political or a scientific one) and stoicheion [F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University Press, 1967), p. 179]. Schema, in other words, is part of a materialisttheory of knowledge which, against the idealistswho exalt episteme as the only genuine source of truth, bases knowingon the senses (perception, sensation). An importantaspect of these ancient theories bearingon Barthes'susage is how aisthesis occurs-how, in the causal sequence leadingfroma perceivedbody via the mechanism of a sense organ to the "soul," matter becomes somehow "noncorporal,"becomes "meaning."While the physiology of the question was explained mostly in termsof the contact, mixture, or penetration of the bodies involved, the philosophers could not agree with regardto this process whether the knowercontacted the thing known on the basis of similarity or of difference (opposition). The question is central to a discourse of the Imaginary,for the Imaginaryis "a type of understandingin which factors such as resemblance and homeomorphismplay a decisive role, attesting to a kind of coalescence of the signifier and the signified" [J. Laplanche& J.-B.Pontalis, The Languageof Psychoanalysis,Trans.Donald Nicholson-Smith(New York:Norton, 1973), p. 210]. In the Symbolic Order,on the other hand, meaning arises out of the opposition of differentiated elements; the Imaginaryis the realm of images, the Symbolic the realm of language (understood to function according to structuralist principles). Thus the passage from the Imaginaryto the Symbolic (the entry into language, in Lacan'sterms) involves a shift from signification based on identity to with signification based on difference. It is also importantto note that the Imaginary, its specular images, is informedby the structuresof vision, of seeing, for it is precisely the sense of sight that gave most troubleto the physicaltheory of knowledge,although Democritus felt he resolved the problem by explaining that the visual image occurs not in the eye but is due to a contact in the air between the object and the beholder. The relevance of such theories to Lacan'sImaginaryis that he describes the structure of the ego (which derives from Imaginaryidentifications)as (topographically)similar to the physiology of the eye. Barthesuses these materialisttheories in the Discourse to explore the ancient analogy between loving and knowing. The other term relevant to "schema"-stoicheion or stoicheia-concerns the basic elements from which are constituted all material things. Certain ancient materialists-the atomists-compared the basic bodies of the physical world to the letters of the alphabet. And the alphabet, of course, is the organizing device of Barthes's"figures."These essential bodies-the stoicheia-are characterized chiefly by their position and shape (schema), from which Barthes derives the statuesque Anothertermthat appearsin the definition is "seed,"indicating qualityof the "figures." that these basic particles carrywithin them "all the things that are" [Peters, pp. 18085]. Barthes's "figures"-the posed bodies-are related to, and no doubt derive from-his interest in the alphabet drawn by the fashion designer Erteconsisting of women posed as letters [see Barthes'sintroduction to a recent edition of this work, Erte(Romainde Tirtoff),trans. William Weaver(Parma:FrancoRicci, 1972)]. Barthes is attracted by the idea that all Erte's drawingsof women, not just the ones posed A to Z, are letters of an "unheardof"language. And further,that the human body, not as such but in its positions, gestures, (its style, in short) can be a sign, a hieroglyph, is a writing which psychoanalysis has learned to decipher. Unheardof precisely because it is not communication, this writing ratheris a signal that functions at the level of the Imaginary.As Laplancheand Pontalis define it, the Imaginaryrelation of the subject to the environment (Umwelt, the world reflected as background in Lacan'smirrordiacritics/March 1980
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stage), "is typical of those which animal ethology has described and which are evidence of the potential efficacy of a given Gestalt to trigger behaviour patterns" [Laplanche, p. 210]. This Gestalt or "schema" has the power of Medusa (it derives from the image of the Mother) to paralyse the subject, to make him a statue. The touchstone example of this primal letter is Freud's case of the Wolf-man, whose dementia recoded for him the letter "V" (five o-clock, the hour of the primal scene). The image (fantasy) of the copulating parents was transferred to the maid in a certain position, the seed of the Wolf-man's repetition compulsion. "What fascinates, what ravishes me," Barthes says, discussing Werther's love at first sight, "is the image of a body in situation. What excites me is an outline in action, which pays no attention to me. Grusha, the young servant, makes a powerful impression on the Wolf-man: she is on her knees, scrubbing the floor" [Discourse, p. 193]. Barthes's project is to extend his theory of Text to include the writing (schemas) of these body images, to explore the idea that life itself is a Text. As a student of meaning and signifiance, Barthes is interested in the uniqueness of the letter or schema to the individual-an intractability in the that defeats language. For the lover it poses the question of fascination-what beloved object has the vocation of fetish, why the love for this one body out of thousands. For a materialist "epistemology" the question is the knowability of the particular: "I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth" [Discourse, p. 34]. Barthes's decision to order his figures on the principle of the alphabet (the second organizing principle of the Discourse), then, is more than just his preference for "an insignificant ordering, one which is distributional rather than integrative, but which avoids the accidental conjunctions, mistakeable for a philosophy of love that pure chance might produce" [Discourse, p. 7]. Rather, the alphabetic principle is already present in the very concept of "figures," and is itself a philosophy, or, an archeology (the seed is an arche). The phonetic alphabet used in the arrangement of fragments is itself a metaphor for this other, unheard-of alphabet operating in the body. The third and final structuring principle of the Discourse concerns "references" (the intertext). The amorous subject who speaks is composed of five pieces (like the ideal parts of a painting by Zeuxis): "some come from an ordinary reading, that of Goethe's Werther, some come from an insistent reading (Plato's Symposium, Zen, psychoanalysis, certain mystics, Nietzsche, German lieder). Some come from occasional readings. Some come from conversations with friends. And there are some which come from my own life" [Discourse, p. 8]. In the "Tabula gratulatoria" of the original French edition (omitted from the translation), Barthes lists the specific titles and names that go with these groupings. The fragments, he says, are a combination of the author's "culture" and the amorous subject's Image-repertoire, "indifferent to the proprieties of knowledge." In the following sections I will explore some of these readings, Barthes's "culture," especially the psychoanalytic works (including books by Bettleheim, Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Norman O. Brown, Theodor Reik, Freud, Lacan), as well as Barthes's own writings, in order to fill in part of the narrative that exists in the gaps between the fragments.

II. Criticism as Transference Barthes's recent work may be summarized as an experimental application of the concept (or phenomenon) of transference to the situation of the literary critic. Transference, as Lacan notes, "is the enactment of the reality of the Unconscious" [Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 146]. Taking place between the analyst and analysand during treatment (but existing also in other situations), transference involves the patient's unconscious wishes (a phantasm), is an immediate reexperience (in symbolic form) of repressed infantile relationships with parental figures [see Laplanche 64

pp. 455-61]. Although the activation of the phantasm serves at first as a resistance to therapy, its very exposure in analysis, manifesting forgotten or repressed impulses, ultimately contributes to the patient's release from compulsive repetition of behavior. The analyst's role in this situation is to remain silent-cadaverized, representing death-to withhold response to the patient's demand, couched in terms of both love and aggression. Uninterrupted and thus free to flow into its compulsive patterns, the patient's discourse ultimately reveals all the secrets and disguises of the Imaginary [Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 251-56, 266]. The other crucial point to keep in mind is that in the transference the analyst is in the place of the Mother, not the Father as is sometimes mistakenly assumed. Indeed, the purpose of analysis is to assist the analysand in completing the oedipalization process-the passage from the Imaginary (dual relation with the Mother) to the Symbolic Order (socially mediated relationships). The analysis ends when the patient's dependency on the Mother is overcome. To understand Barthes's intentions in adopting (adapting) transference as a model for a new critical practice, we should first consider how he has applied this model to his pedagogy. For some years now Barthes has practiced in his seminar Lacan's own teaching strategy-to place himself in the position of the analysand and his audience in the role of analyst [Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 147]. Thus in the teacher's "exposition" it is not knowledge but the subject's "body" (of images) that is exposed [Barthes, "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers," in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 194-95]. The purpose for this reversal of roles, relating to the student audience as analysand to analyst, is "to substitute for the magisterial space of the past-which was fundamentally a religious space-a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor student, would ever be in his final place" [Image, p. 205]. The structure, or topology, of relations in the seminar, then, is modeled upon the very topology of the Unconscious itself which is constituted as a field or structure regulating the relation of the subject to his world (objects, others, language). In the same way that the aim of Barthes's textualist writing is to stir the Doxa (stereotypes of public opinion) to "keep language from sticking" [Barthes, p. 162], so too does the seminar "protect the instability and, as it were, the giddying whirl of the position of speech." The point of shifting places, then, is not to change masters, but to subvert the very structure of authority. Seminar relationships are not oedipal, but (referring to Fourier's utopian communities) "phalansterian." The Imaginary, therapeutic discourse of the teacher as analysand is directed explicitly against the "name-of-the-Father" (the law) that is inherent in the Symbolic Order of language, to show, using a speech that is out of control, how the "Master's" speech is punctured, "runs away from him," no matter how he tries to tack it down with the authority of science or politics. Barthes's seminar strategies provide a context for an assessment of his experiment with transference in criticism. As in the seminar, the most obvious difference between Barthes's methodology and the old psychoanalytic criticism is precisely the reversal of poles, so that the critic is no longer in the position of the "one who is supposed to know." The failure of the old method (mentioned by Jameson) was due to its "technocratic" conception of the relation of the human sciences to the arts-its application of a (supposedly objective) specialized discourse to a human question (in the way technology is used to "master" nature). Against the "myth" of objectivity which pretends that the scholarly article merely reports "transparently" the truths accumulated through research, Barthes insists that the scholar's choice is finally between two styles-the plain (ecrivance-"clarity, suppression of images, respect for the laws of reasoning"), or the rhetorical, that is, writing (ecriture): "to enter himself into the play of the signifier, into the infinity of the enunciation [.. .] to withdraw the 'self,' whom he believes himself to be, from its imaginary shell, from the scientific code, which protects but which also deludes, in a word to throw the subject across the blank page, not to 'express' it (nothing to do with 'subjectivity') but to disperse it: which is to break out of the regular discourse of research" [Barthes, "Jeunes chercheurs," Com-

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munications, 19 (1972), 2, my translation]. He adds that writing (as opposed to ecrivance) reveals to the researcher "the irreparability of his word and ends up substituting the it [id] speaks for I speak." Writing, that is, transforms the inability of the researcher to "tack down" his words from a failure into a methodology. The thing to be explained with this new methodology is not the "object of knowledge," the literary work (Barthes agrees with the deconstructors who maintain that literature is self-explanatory), but the "subject" of knowledge, the knower, the process of knowing. It is natural that Barthes should base his method on Lacan's work, since for Lacan the "subject" of psychoanalytic study is precisely the subject of science (punning on the meanings of subject) [Ecrits, (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 863]. Lacan approaches this question from "within" by putting into question his own position as researcher. The problematic he establishes is that of the "double inscription"-the relation of the discourse of science (which produces knowledge) to the the Other (which produces truth). He gains access discourse of the Unconscious-of to the two inscriptions present in any work by studying the function of the analyst's own desire in the analytic situation (transference and counter-transference) in order to take into account "the desire that lies behind modern science" [Four Concepts, p. 160]. The contribution of psychoanalysis to the field of science, Lacan says, is its concern for the "subjective drama of the savant" (the very topic of Barthes and the Discourse). An example of the double inscription noted by Lacan is listed in the bibliography Fragments of a Great Confession by ("Tabula gratulatoria") of the Discourse-the Theodor Reik [Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1973]. In this "psychoanalytic autobiography" Reik returns to his study, written some twenty years earlier, of Goethe's romance with Friederike (as told in Goethe's autobiography and commonly associated with the experiences that led to the writing of Werther). Reik discovers that the study, which at the time it was written he considered to be an objective application of his science, is filled with (is expressive of) his personal conflicts: he has been a scientist and a writer at the same time. Reik discovers that his desire to know (about Goethe) is linked to certain unconscious desires. He explains the projection of his own conflicts into Goethe's situation (which, he says, does not alter the validity of his study) by pointing out that Freud named Goethe as one of the Great Men of Western Culture whose status is linked thus to the parental images in the Unconscious. With this association the critical discourse takes on the structure of transference. Reik related to Goethe, in other words, as to an "idealized object," and in Freudian terms such idealizations are the result of a narcissistic process that begins in infancy with the child's choice of love-objects-the image of the child's own body, or of the Mother (to be discussed later in relation to Lacan's mirror-stage). The point for now is that in ordinary criticism the critic (unconsciously) identifies with the artist, relates to the object of study as to a love-object. The critic's values or motives are open thus to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic which serves Lacan as a model for the workings of the ego (formed out of the identification process) and which accounts for the aggressive struggle for recognition as well as for the over-valuation of authors that characterize much academic writing. "Normal" criticism, because it ignores this possibility of transference, is in fact "neurotic," governed by repetition compulsion and therefore in need of therapy-the critic as analysand. Barthes's intention is to devise a therapeutic discourse, a writing that "agrees to practice that imaginary ['the way the subject gives himself to others-theatrically or the discourse'] in the full awareness of what it is doing" as a phantasm-within "Science versus Literature," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael [Barthes, Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 414]. There is another alteration in Barthes's adaptation of transference to criticism that should be noted at this point. As is evident in the subversion of authority that results from Barthes's reversal of the teacher's and the critic's paternalistic position as the "one who knows," the goal of his therapeutic discourse is not oedipalization. Rather, Barthes's interest in the Imaginary may be seen as part of the "politics of the Imaginary" that emerged after the May '68 events in France. Like the Romantics 66

before them, the new "naturalists" the Rousseauistsense) believe in the power of (in language to affect reality (with the "talking cure" of psychoanalysis as a kind of corroboration).Politically, the movement accepts the Maoist idea that social change may be brought about by acting directly on the superstructureor ideology. The revolutionaryeffect is created, according to Julia Kristeva(whose La revolution du langage poetique is listed in the Discourse's bibliography), by introducing into the Symbolic Order of meaning and law the pre-social or extra-social energies of the Imaginary[Turkle,p. 82]. Barthes'sexperiments with the conventions of the critical essay are an attempt to introduce these energies into academic writing. The ethical function of the confrontation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, Kristevasays, is not to promote the ImaginaryOrderas such, but to subvert domination and dissolve all narcissisms [Kristeva, Langage (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 203]. In other words, to be the calls the "Thetic"), revolutionary text must create an a-topicalspace (which Kristeva like Barthes'sseminarspace, that preventsthe subject from being absorbedwholly by the Father(the Symbolic) or the Mother (the Imaginary).The lover'sdiscourse is the best one in which to representthis effort since Lacanstates that the phenomenon of love operates precisely at the junction of the Imaginaryand the Symbolic [Lacan,Le Seminaire, LivreI (Paris:Seuil, 1975), p. 298]. IIl. The Readeras Lover Another obvious reason, given his use of transference as a model for criticism, why Barthes wrote specifically a lover's discourse is that, according to Lacan, the structures of love and of transference are essentially the same, with both being governed by the Imaginary.In extending the model to criticism, the analogy passes from the analytic to the critical relationship-the critic-readerrelates to the literary work as a lover to the beloved. That is, as previouslynoted with regardto the concept of "schema,"The Discourse is a theory of knowledge, and, more specifically now, a theory of reading. The mode of reading set forth in the Discourse is deliberately unscientific, opening itself to all the lures and deceptions of the Imaginary."In the theory of literature,"Barthessays, describing the way in which Wertheris being read in the Discourse, "'projection' (of the reader into the character) no longer has any [Discourse,p. 131]. tonality of imaginativereadings" currency:yet it is the appropriate The Discourse, in fact, is the most complete realizationof Barthes's long-standing attempt to open a "thirdfront" in criticism, referringto the three levels at which literaturemay be approached-science, criticism, and reading. Neither a science of literature(articulatingthe intelligibilityof a work by setting forth the rules by which meaningsare generated), nor the criticismof literature(generatingspecific interpretations) is a substitute for reading:"forof the sense that readinggives to the work, as of the signified, no one knows anything, perhaps because this sense, being desire, establishes itself beyond the code of language [langue]. Only reading loves the work, maintainswith it a rapportof desire. To read is to desire the work, is to want to be the work" [Barthes, Critique et verite (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 78-9, my translation and emphasis]. Thisthird level-reading-is, Barthessays, a "new epistemological object": "an object nearly disdained by all classic criticism [. . .] which has never understood more than middlingly the reader, whose link to the work, one thought, was simply projection" [Barthes, "Texte (Theorie du)," in Encyclopaedie UniversalisXV (1968), p. 1016, my translation].But the process disdained by classic criticism as projection is promoted in the theory of Text as "production,"in which reading becomes a kind of writing:ratherthan merely "consuming"a work, a textual reader"is one who wants to write, giving himself to an erotic practice of language." The erotic pleasure in the production of a reading takes place "whenever the 'literary'Text (the Book) transmigratesinto our life, whenever another writing (the Other'swriting)succeeds in writingfragmentsof our own daily lives, in short,whenever
coexistence occurs" [Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), pp. 7-8, my emphasis]. He cautions, however (showing that his

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method has no relation to the "mimetic" correctness that characterizes "normal" academic criticism), that this (erotic) reading does not include an imitation of the program traced in the book (the way Goethe's readers imitated Werther's suicide). Barthes makes explicit the specific way in which this meeting (lover-beloved, readerbook) is to take place: "to be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else" [Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 24]. The effect of this distraction from the book is due to the productive entry into the reading process of the reader's fantasies (phantasm): "our daily life then itself becomes a theatre whose scenery is our own social habitat" [Sade, p. 8], and, I would add, whose characters are drawn from the image-repertoire. But in seeking to render such a reading in writing, Barthes faces the dilemma of the saint or mystic (hence all the allusions to mystics in the Discourse)-how to convey in language an exemplary experience that lies outside language. The method which Barthes proposes as a solution to this dilemma (a solution already suggested in Barthes and finally dramatized in the Discourse) he calls "The Book/Life (take some classic book and relate everything in life to it for a year" [Barthes, p. 150]. The point is not just to do an active reading, but to produce a portrait (the scene) of an active reading in process-to show the writer without his books, not writing but fantasizing. And fantasy, he says, is "a kind of pocket novel you always carry with you," and which you can open in a cafe while waiting for a rendezvous (the very setting of the Discourse, to be dealt with in more detail in the next section). As opposed to the of the internal fable, and that of dream, the fantasy opens a double space-that conscious reality-the cafe. The result is a kind of fugue: "something is woven, braided-without pen or paper, there is an initiation of writing" [Barthes, p. 88, my emphasis]. The portrait or dramatic technique is necessary, then, to capture this "writing" that consists of the articulation between (Barthes's) fantasy (image-system) and his culture (his books, the Symbolic). We should note, too, that in terms of "schema" this mode of reading is Imaginary in that it functions on the basis of identity -"aisthesis" occurs with like recognizing like. IV. Mirror writing The projective-productive style of reading is the method of a critic in the position of analysand whose writing is a deliberate effort to expose his own Imaginary Order. Barthes dramatizes the consequences of this approach by taking as the generating principle of his two most recent books Lacan's theory of the mirror-stage, the phase in child development which gives rise to the alienating images of the ego-the Imaginary. "Myself by myself? But that is the very program of the image-system! How is it that the rays of the mirror reverberate on me? Beyond that zone of diffraction-the only one upon which I can cast a glance [. . .] there is reality, and there is also the symbolic. For the latter, I have no responsibility (I have quite enough to do, dealing with my own image-repertoire!): to the Other, to the transference, and hence to the reader. And all this happens, as is obvious here, through the Mother, present next to the Mirror" [Barthes, p. 153]. This statement could just as well be in the Discourse, for both works "stage" Barthes's image-system, but with different emphases. One way to distinguish the emphases of the two books concerns the relation of each with one of the three passions Lacan associates with his categories-ignorance, love, and hate. Ignorance, which Lacan says functions at the junction of the Real and the Symbolic, refers to the subject's relation to the "discourse of the Other" (the Unconscious): "if the subject engages in the search for truth as such it is because he is situated in the dimension of ignorance" [Lacan, Seminaire, pp. 298, 306]. In analysis, that is, the lies the patient tells about himself reveal his truth. The book of the "passion of ignorance" is Barthes: "this book consists of what I do not know: the 68

unconscious and ideology, things which utterthemselves only by the voices of others"
[Barthes, p. 152].

In this context Barthes'sreview of his own book ["Barthespuissance trois," La Quinzaine Litteraire205 (1975), 1-5] takes on added significance. In the review he of describes Barthesas a "refusal" sense, which may be taken to mean that its goal is to discover the fundamental and irreducible"non-sense"of the subject, "non-sense" of meaning in this instance the "formula" the phantasmthat is unique to each person (the Imaginary involves precisely what is specific to the embodied individual, a personal vocabulary or reservoir of myths). Hence, to study the Imaginaryis to engage in a kind of "pataphysics"-the science of exceptions. His book, he says, debates at this individual level with two "figures"-Value (likes and dislikes) and Stupidity(Betise, described as "the internalthing which he fears, in brief, 'LaChose,'" by which he must mean, in this context, Freud'sdas Kleine, the fear being castration anxiety). At the level of the historical subject, these two figures, he adds, may be subsumed under the contemporary concepts of the Imaginaryand Ideology. His concern is not the Symbolic, nor bliss, but the Mirror-those deceiving modes under which he imagines himself, or under which he wants to be loved. The photos in Barthes,he notes, deliberately feature himself and his mother, alluding to the mirrorstage. His reason for "descending" into such banal or embarrassingmaterials is to offer "silently," in a "stoical manner," evidence for the contaminating power of ideology-"the way petit bourgeois ideology speaks in me" (referringto all those outmoded themes-reflection, amour-propre, sincerity-that appeal to his taste). The Discourse takes up another set of banalities-the purely expressive phrases of love (so trivial, Barthesnotes, that they are scarcely language at all). But, like the banalities of the subject talking about himself, the "sweet nothings" of love are models for the discourse of the patient in analysis, whose speech, Lacan says, "resembles in its opacity the ejaculations of love, when, lacking a signifier to name the object of its epithalamium, it employs the crudest trickeryof the imaginary.'I'll
eat you up ... Sweetie!'" [Ecrits: A Selection, p. 183].

But it is not enough to distinguish the presentationsof the Imaginaryin Barthes and the Discourse by defining their respective "dominants" ignoranceand love, for as both books involve a (love) object-choice originating in the identifications of the Lacanmaintainsthat there are three identifications associated with the mirror-phase. mirror-phase-with one's body image, with the image of the Mother, and with the objet a. When the infant looks into the mirror,regardingthe first identification, he perceives and identifies with the visual Gestalt of his own body, which, in contrast with his undeveloped motor skills, represents an ideal unity. The experience of jubilationthat accompanies this firstanticipationof himselfas a unified being becomes the source of an idealization-a want-to-be (sometimes called the ego-ideal3)-which the individual projects in his behaviour.A choice of love-object directed by this egoideal is called narcissistic. And Barthes is essentially a record of Barthes'sego-ideal, the exposure of his narcissism, itemizing the images of himself which he presents to the world. This mode is obviously the correct one in which to couch a review of one's published works. The other idealization that derives from the mirror-phaseis the identification with the image of the Mother who holds the child up before the mirror.An objectchoice based on the model of the parental figure is called anaclitic (distinguished from narcissistic,although both choices fall within the general theory of narcissism). The jubilation experienced in identifying with the "omnipotence" of this figure (specified in the theory as the Mother) gives rise to another idealization-the ideal ego. "Theideal ego serves as the basis of what Lagachehas called heroic identification, i.e. identification with outstanding and admirable personalities"[Laplanche,p. 202]. in the context of criticism, recalling Reik'sexplanation of his relation to Goethe, the ideal-ego directs the critic's attitude to the literarywork. My point is that Barthes,the account of Barthesas critic, his relation to his own and that the Discourse is an work, is structuredby the ego-ideal of the mirror-stage, account of Barthesas reader,his relationto literature,especially to the works he reads diacritics/March 1980
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but does not write about (works that arouse in him the desire to write as such): "Hence there must be a distinction between the authors about whom one writes, and whose influence is neither external nor anterior to what one says about them, and (a more classical conception) the authors whom one reads; but what comes to me from the latter group? A kind of music, a pensive sonority" [Barthes p. 107]. In the Discourse Barthes attempts to expose the source of this feeling (music)-a jubilation-of the desire to write by returning to the original jubilation of the mirror identifications. The dominating (the only) scene of the Discourse is, indeed, a representation of the ideal-ego, of an image that lies at the source of his desire to write which precedes all writing. This scene displays the amorous subject seated at a cafe, perhaps wearing dark glasses, alternately reading a pocket edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther and pausing to reflect while observing the people who enter the cafe. The "plot" of the Discourse may be said to consist of this scene in the cafe (recurring like a leit-motif) where the lover waits to receive a phone call from the loved-object, meditating while he waits on the relation of his situation to Werther's and to psychoanalytic theory. Finally, disappointed, the lover departs having decided to "break up" with the beloved. Barthes is right to deny in his introduction that his fragments can be reduced to such "histoire," because the real significance of this scene, with regard to the any mirror-stage identifications, is clarified by recalling the fragment in Barthes entitled "The Writer as Fantasy."

Surely there is no longer a single adolescent who has this fantasy: to be a writer! Imagine wanting to copy not the works but the practices of any contemporary-his way of strolling through the world, a notebook in his pocket and a phrase in his head (the way I imagined Gide traveling from Russia to the Congo, reading his classics and writing his notebooks in the dining car, waiting for the meals to be served; the way I actually saw him, one day in 1939, in the gloom of the BrasserieLutetia, eating a pear and readinga book)! Forwhat the fantasy imposes is the writeras we can see him in his private diary, the writer minus his work: supreme form of the sacred: the markand the void. [Barthes,pp. 77, 79]
The image of the amorous subject at the cafe is this very image of Gide at the Brasserie Lutetia, is Barthes playing Gide, performing the want-to-be of the ideal-ego. Barthes himself realizes that everything he has written is a concealed attempt to reproduce "the theme of the Gidean 'journal'": "the origin of the work is not the first influence, it is the first posture: one copies a role, then, by metonymy, an art: I begin by reproducing the person I want to be. This first want (I desire and I pledge myself) establishes a secret system of fantasies which persists from age to age, often independently of the writings of the desired author" [Barthes, p. 99]. The Discourse (and Barthes) finally brings this clandestine book into the open. But like the romantic discourse, the journal is "out of fashion," in need of renewal. The twist Barthes gives to the journal form by passing it through the Imaginary is that it becomes (as we shall see in a moment) not the place of an avowal (a confession), but of a disavowal (the fetishist's denial of castration). The Unconscious in Lacan's theory is described as "the fragment of a discourse" [Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 136]. Alluding to this fact, Barthes's title (fragments of a lover's discourse) indicates that he is staging the Unconscious. So it is not surprising to find side by side the various levels of motivation, the motive for the identification with Gide being, we know from the theory of the mirror-stage, the identification with the Mother. Indeed, the mother figure, or the mother-child relationship, is constantly in the lover's thoughts ("let the other appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking for her child")

[Discourse, p. 17].
As noted earlier, the normal process of development (sometimes in need of assistance from analysis) is a passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic through the intervention of the Father-the third term (the name-of-the-Father, the law that is 70

carried in the Mother's speech) mediating the mother-child relationship. This intervention constitutes "castration" or oedipalization, the acceptance by the child of the law of culture that separates him from the mother-and incest taboo-the the acknowledgment of sexual difference. It also represents the articulating cut that makes language possible. What Barthes reveals (discovers) about himself in relation to the imago of the Mother is that he has not been (fully) oedipalized, a factor that has shaped his personal value system: "the lover botches his castration? Out of this failure, he persists in making a value" [Discourse, p. 230] (and all theory, he says, is an alibi for value). Barthes, in other words, presents the amorous subject as a fetishist, one who refuses castration (the authority of the Father) and denies sexual difference. The fetishist believes in the Mother's phallus, the undecidable place of which is taken a small a), the thing by the metonymic object-the objet a (the "autre"-other-with in respect to which the instinct seeks to attain its aim. The objet a, the third identification met with in the Imaginary (whose effects are those of fetishism), picks up where the ideal-ego leaves off since it concerns not the "gratifying" (present) Mother (who points to the mirror and says "that's you") but the silent (absent) Mother, a figure of death [Discourse, p. 168]. The process of separation from the Mother, Lacan says, "institutes an identification of a strangely different kind"--it is a question of "this privileged object, discovered by analysis," that object "that rises in a bump [referring to one of his diagrams of the Unconscious] like the wooden darning egg in the material which, in analysis you are darning-the objet a" [Four Concepts, p. 257]. Barthes provides a number of images conveying the suffering caused by the mother's absence-for example, an image of himself waiting at the bus stop for his working mother to return: "the buses would pass one after the other, she wasn't in any of them" [Discourse, p. 15]. The relation of the absent mother to the objet a centers upon Freud's famous example of the child playing "gone" (the fort/da game), upon which, it is said, Lacan's entire theory depends. Barthes's amorous subject muses on this very example: "absence persists- I must endure it. Hence I will manipulate it: [. . .] make an entrance onto the stage of language (language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother's departure and return: a paradigm is created)" [Discourse, p. 16]. Lacan emphasizes that the fort/da game is not an example of mastery, but of alienation. To grasp the radical articulation (the paradigmatic opposition between the two phonemes, the vowels in fort and da) the subject, Lacan notes, needs "the help of a small bobbin, that is to say, of the objet a" [Four Concepts, p. 239]. This bobbin that assists the separation from the mother (the entry into language) is what D. W. Winnicott (whose works are listed in the "Tabula gratulatoria") calls the "transitional object." As Winnicott explains, the transitional object (Lacan's "metonymic object") is the first use of a symbol, and, as such, is the origin of art: there is a direct line of development from the transitional object through play to cultural experience. In terms of this developmental process Barthes discovers (or reveals) that his desire to write is not a result of (normal) sublimation, in which the drives are desexualized and attached to socially approved practices, but that his writing is a practice of fetishism in which the erotic and the rhetorical are equally present. In short, he relates to intellectual systems and to literature itself as to a fetish, treating them as the objet a. Indeed, the ultimate consequence of the transference model is that the literary work acquires the status of the objet a. The objet a of the identification process is represented in the Discourse by Werther. There are several reasons for the choice of Goethe's novel to play the part of the transitional object. The principal reason is that Lacan himself uses Werther as the exemplum of the anaclitic love that operates in psychoanalytic transference as well as in Romantic love: The image of the self-from the single fact that it is an image, the self is ideal self-summarizes all the imaginary relations in man [. . .] this image of oneself the subject rediscovers endlessly as the framework of his categories,

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of his apprehension of the world [. . .] if the other saturates, fulfills this

image, it becomes the object of a narcissistic investment which is that of Verliebtheit[overvaluationof the object]. Recall Werthermeeting Charlotte at the moment when she has in her armsan infant-it fits just right into the narcissistic imago of the novel's young hero. [Lacan Seminaire, p. 311, my translation] Wertheralso representsfor Lacan the epitome of Hegel's belle ame-the Romantic solipsist-which Lacanequates, again, with the character of the subject in analysis. The belle ame generally suffers from "noble self-deceptions,"a confusion of subject and object, a loss of reality-a refusalof necessary alienation. In short, the belle ame representsthe problemsof the personalitymade "schizoid"by refusingthe castration that would give him access to the Symbolic [Anthony Wilden, ed., The Languageof the Self (New York:Dell, 1968), pp. 287-88]. Recallingnow the context in which all of this takes place-the readeras lover-the theme of the Mother and her substitutes (the objet a) provides Barthes with a frameworkin which to consider the source of his fascination for literature.Truthis a woman, Nietzsche said; more specifically, Barthesdiscovers the woman is his mother. One must think about truth the way an infant thinks of its mother, a Zen story counsels (a fable implicit in Barthes'smany referencesto Zen). Barthescites a passage from the Tao Te Ching in which the sage says, "I alone am different from other men, for I seek to suckle at my Mother'sbreast"[Discourse, p. 213]. In the same vein, the amorous subject experiences a "sensation of truth" thinking of his love (explicitly identifiedwith the Mother)[Discourse,p. 229]. Butwhat is the natureof this sensation for the critic?As a lover, the reader'srelation to the work may be explained in terms similarto those that informtransference:"Asa specular mirage,"Lacansays, "love is essentially deception," because what one loves in the beloved object is one's own image(s). In the transference, the analyst is in the position of the objet a ("this paradoxical, unique, specified object"): "the analysand says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this-I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you-the objet petit a-I mutilate you" [Four Concepts, p. 268]. Barthes,relatingthis experience of "excess"to fetishism, shows his lover "mutilating"the beloved: "I am searching the other's body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the mechanical cause of my desire were in the adverse body (I am like those children who take a clock apart in order to find out what time is)" [Discourse, p. 71]. He uses the same analogy in Barthesto describe his attitude to intellectual systems which he says he plays with like unfamiliargadgets to see how they make the "click of sense." His pursuit of the objet a in the beloved is the simulacrumof the scientist's"objectivity"-"thisoperation is conducted in a cold and astonishedfashion; [.. .] and I was fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment" [Discourse, pp. 71-2]. Love, then, is "an intense curiosity"[Discourse, p. 199] which has its origins, according to Melanie Klein, in certain primal fantasies: "The desire for knowledge [of the mother'sbody] arises simultaneouslywith the destructive trends and is very soon pressed into the service of masteringanxiety. By means of the penetrating penis which is equated with an organ of perception, to be more precise, with the eye, the ear or a combination of the two he wants to discover what sort of destruction has been done inside his mother by his own penis and excrementsand by his father's, and to what kind of perils his penis is exposed there" [Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children,trans. Alix Strachey (New York:Delta, 1975), p. 245]. In making the association of the desire for knowledge with fantasies about the mother Klein has in mind Freud'sconclusions, based on his own dream of the botanical monograph, which, along with its associated memories, led Freudto assimilate his mother to all books: "The unconscious wish to commit incest (to be a passionate discovererof his mother) is sublimated, thanksto the gift of the Bible [fromhis father] and the scene of tearing up the book, into a passion for reading and scientific discovery"[Lemaire,pp. 172-73].
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We know, then, what the psychoanalytic answer is to the question Barthes poses for the critic: "What is a piece of 'research'? To find out, we would need to have some idea of what a 'result' is. What is it that one finds? What is it that one wants to find? What is missing?" [Image, p. 197]. Psychoanalysis holds that the desire to know, to be a critic, to write, are expressions of the "demand" for the impossible object. From these theories Barthes learns that his own inclination to transgress the known, his preference for novelty, is a manifestation of repetition compulsion, for what the unknown promises him is knowledge of the desire of the Other. Barthes does not Lacan-into his texts accept these theories as fact (he only puts science-including for its "collage" effect) but as the signifier (or allegory, for he composes in the manner of a medieval scriptor) of value-the force, the intensity beyond any communication with which art affects a reader, regarding which there is finally no (need for) explanation, but only affirmation, testimony.

V. Mourning There is still another aspect of transference used by Barthes that will help clarify his attitude to the Imaginary. This aspect is the work of mourning, borrowed from Freud's description of the gradual process by which one copes with the loss of (detaches oneself from the memory of) a loved one. Barthes uses the concept as it is applied in the analytic situation: "I then go into mourning for my beloved, as the patient goes into mourning for his analyst: I liquidate my transference, and apparently this is how both the cure and the crisis end up" [Discourse, p. 108]. When he gives up the "amorous condition," the subject is exiled from his image-repertoire. At the level of methodology this means: "To understand the Imaginary of expression is to empty it, since the Imaginary is misunderstanding" [Barthes, Communications, p. 5]. As in the analytic situation, each image is brought into consciousness, exposed, in order to be exorcised. Consisting of those things that are an "embarrassment" (that only a mother listens to willingly, without benefit of "forepleasure"), the Imaginary exposed in the Discourse represents Barthes's embarrassing (unfashionable) attachments: his desire to be a well-known writer (Gide), his taste for "classic" (bourgeois) literature, his love for his mother (the family). This context-Barthes's sacrifice of these images-puts into perspective the "dilemma" of pronouns. In Barthes, he struggled with pronoun usage in the subject of the sentence: "I can say to myself 'you' as Sade did, in order to detach within myself the worker, the fabricator, the producer of writing, from the subject of the work (the Author [. . .] and to speak about oneself by saying 'he' can mean: I am speaking about myself as though I were more or less dead" [Barthes, p. 168]. In the Discourse the problem shifts to the predicate, but the "reference" is the same-the beloved object ("she," "him") is Barthes's "self." The drama is intra-subjective, corresponding to the theory of narcissism, supported by the myth of the androgyne (the desire to merge with the other, to which Barthes alludes several times) which, according to Lacan, represents the effort of the split psyche to regain (impossible) unity. In the predicate, too, then, he is speaking about himself "dead"-the mourning is for the "death of the author," for the unified subject of Western metaphysics, and for the "person" of his ego. There are several lessons for the academic critic in Barthes's work of mourning. For one thing,. according to the transference (therapeutic) model, the primary effect of writing is registered in the writer-one writes for oneself as a kind of ethical exercise. But Barthes and the Discourse are exemplary for the rest of us as well, being models for a new academic writing. The Discourse, with its exposure of anaclisis (the object-choice based on dependency, in which the sexual instincts rest upon the instincts of self-preservation), may be read as an "allegory" of the critic becoming a writer, leaving the security of the Mother, speaking finally in his own voice, without authority, rather than with the voice of the critical agency formed through identification with parent figures. Throughout the course of his career, Barthes says, "he worked diacritics/March 1980 73

successively under the aegis of a great system (Marx, Sartre, Brecht, semiology, the Text). Today, it seems to him that he writes more openly, more unprotectedly" [Barthes, p. 102]. And yet the feeling of solitude, exclusion, that accompanies this autonomy is itself a dependency, a final dependency on the psychological image-system: the Imaginary, constituting the individual's uniqueness, states this very scene of exclusion (it is the feeling of the "I am," the ego, the Apollinian). Hence he writes the book of anaclisis to escape even Lacan by playing with the psychoanalytic categories, dropping the quotation marks: to pose deliberately (play statue) the figure of his image-system alters it, makes it a kind of kitsch [Barthes, p. 125]. He deconstructs the scientific category of narcissism by stealing its language, the literary language of Werther, and the scientific language of Lacan, which is the double tactic of Text: "it is necessary to posit a paradigm in order to produce a meaning [this counters Doxa which insists that meanings are natural, not produced] and then to be able to divert, to alter it" [which counters Science's need for identity, consistency [Barthes, p. 92]. One important aspect of the Discourse, then, is that it reaffirms Barthes's commitment to the principles of Text. Barthes suggests that Text, textuality-the introduction of the texture of desire into the rational image-system of semiological science-was itself becoming fixed, stuck, in need of defamiliarization. The Discourse shows, however, that only a shift of attitude is necessary. Since science itself is finally an attitude one adopts toward the object of knowledge (or of love), to change science one must first of all change this attitude. The Text provides the right method since textuality is precisely a method of change: a Text does not communicate, it transforms -its goal (after Marx) is not to interpret the (cultural) world, but to alter it. What is needed, then, is not the annihilation of desire (Text, love) but a different style of loving: no more fetishism (trying to find out what the object (objet a) is, or means); no more will to power over the object. Barthes's decision is to love not what the beloved is, but that he (she, it) is, thus exiting the realm of value ("every judgment is suspended, the terror of meaning is abolished") [Discourse, p. 222]. The mode of writing that corresponds to this manner of loving, Barthes says, is the Text, "to which I can add no adjective," in which one may delight without needing to decipher, in which the Image-repertoire and its "novelistic" properties ("Imitation, Representation, Analogy") are abolished. There is no other in the Text, only language, the play of the signifier, so that only the Text itself speaks. Taking account of a major difference between the critical and the analytic situations (between writing and speaking), the Text functions without the pole of transference-the analyst's person and presence are eliminated, thus preventing the Imaginary identifications of the family structure from arising [Kristeva, pp. 83-4]. The Text, then, has no designs on the reader-it is not addressed and has no signature. It is, rather, an "empty" process which therapeutically lifts the repressions that mask the seductions and aggressions of signification. The Discourse itself, however, is not a Text but a demonstration of the process which critical discourse must undergo in order to achieve.textuality. It does attempt to simulate the textual effect by asking the reader to participate, to fill in the Topics with his own history. Barthes ends with the question, "can you still write anything?" answered by, "one writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring." The Discourse might seem to extinguish the desire to write unless its method is understood as a work of mourning: the word of love, Barthes says, is put to work "like a mourning"-a process of renewal "like the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name," (the way a body replaces all its cells while retaining its identity) [Barthes, p. 114]. Barthes, then, continues to desire and to write. Following the books of ignorance and of love, will his next book be the book of hate, thus completing the trilogy (a book for each emotion associated with Lacan's Imaginary)? This would be the book of rivalry with the Father, so perhaps Barthes, who never knew his father, may not choose to write this book (perhaps Harold Bloom has already written it in The Anxiety of Influence). Hate in the Imaginary involves the aggessive side of the identification process, the struggle for pure prestige, revealing (in terms of critical and scientific 74

writing)that the desire to know is transposedfrom the desire to be known. If Barthes were to write such a book, he might well call it "TheDiscourse of the Overman,"for it would be an account of Nietzsche's admonition to the new intellectual to practice self-overcoming, to eliminate in oneself the spirit of revenge or resentment. Barthes himself is the bridge to this overman, a practitionerof the Gay Science who writes with "the idea that life itself could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge" [Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 255].
GregoryL. Ulmer teaches in the HumanitiesDepartmentat the Universityof Florida.

4RolandBarthes'suntimely death occurred after this issue of Diacritics was already in page proofs.-Ed.

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