… writing is fundamentally assertive: the best remains to accept it stoically, “tragically”: to speak, to write, and to hold still about the wound of affirmation.
This is from The Neutral by Roland Barthes (1978). This book is a taken from Barthes’s written notes to the course that he gave at the Collège de France over thirteen weeks from February to June of 1978:
Affirmation
… language is naturally assertive: to utter a word is immediately to affirm its referent; …
… The assertive constraint moves from language to discourse, since discourse is made of propositions that are naturally assertive. Which implies that, in order to withdraw, to preserve the discourse from affirmation, in order to nuance it (toward negation, doubt, interrogation, suspension), one must ceaselessly fight against speech, raw material, “law” of discourse.
This leads to permanent, insistent consequences for us who speak and who, by and in language, have to assume responsibility for our imago in front of others (language: the problem is not to make oneself understood but to make oneself recognized); our image (provided by language) is “naturally” arrogant. This appears clearly when discourse is set up on a negative intention and when, nevertheless, it ends up being recuperated by affirmation → squaring of the circle, aporia, despair of language: its impotence to allow the subject the perfection (the respite) of the negative. It’s how I interpret the following quotation from Pascal: “Discourses of humility are a source of pride in the vain, and of humility in the humble. So those on skepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of skepticism.”
… The writing subject feeling the statutory arrogance of language-discourse is tempted to relativize his sentences in a coded way: it’s the “oratorical precaution”: “in my humble opinion,” “it seems to me,” “for my part,” “I believe that …” Of course (I understood this very quickly), this doesn’t change anything to anything: the assertion, the arrogance remains intact, for the only thing the precaution does is satisfy the imaginary of the speaking subject, who tolerates his image more easily if he dampens down its “superb” (that obviously depends on his ethics, on his education, on his neurosis). In fact, writing is fundamentally assertive: the best remains to accept it stoically, “tragically”: to speak, to write, and to hold still about the wound of affirmation.
At this point, following the section on Affirmation, Barthes has a sort of “aside” from his course material:
… Concerning the course. Inside me, from one Saturday to another [the course classes took place on Saturdays], the course “works.” Even though prepared ahead of time (however little), it keeps moving: it gets a new topicality from what wants to be incorporated into it retrospectively: whether by thoughts posterior to its verbal presentation (esprit de l’escalier) or because small events in my weekly life resonate with what was said. I believe that it is important to let such things happen and to admit this, because it shows that the course is not the presentation of the current state of a “thought” but rather (at least ideally) the shimmering of an individuation → one could then accept the word “course” without bad feelings: its connotation being bad mostly if the “course” is “magisterial.” While, after all, course < cursus: what runs, what flows (course of a river): … “without interruption”; I would say: without the present being interrupted.
Concerning “Tact.” I return to “Tact” because I have the persistent feeling that I haven’t really explained the reason why I gave so much importance to all the sophisticated protocols of Japanese tea [not quoted in this blog ... yes, I was wondering why]. I thus return to “Twinklings,” “Minutia.” Going out, evenings at dusk, sharply receiving tiny, perfectly futile details of street life: the menu written in chalk on the windowpane of a café (chicken mashed potato, 16 francs 50 — kidneys crème fraîche, 16 francs 10), a tiny priest in a cassock walking up the rue Médicis, etc., I had this vivid intuition (for me, the urban dusk has a great power of crispness, of activation, it’s almost a drug) that to fall into the infinitely futile helps one’s awareness of the feeling of life → … Tact is thus on the side of vividness, of what allows life to be felt, of what stirs the awareness of it: the utterly pure taste of life, the pleasure of being alive …
My most recent previous post from Barthes’s book is here.
-Julie
