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   Schor, Naomi, 1943-2001.

Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French, Yale University
 
 

Obituaries:
http://www.brownmagazine.org/storydetail.cfm?ID=854

Naomi Schor, of New Haven, Conn.; Dec. 2, 2001, of a brain hemorrhage. She was the Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale, where she had worked since 1999. She previously held distinguished professorships at Brown, Duke, and Harvard. A scholar of French literature and critical theory, she was a pioneer in the field of feminist theory. She was one of the leading interpreters of the writings of French theorists and philosophers Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, and was a major figure in the field of nineteenth-century French studies. At the Pembroke Center, she helped found a feminist journal, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, in 1989. She authored Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, which is used by scholars from such disciplines as French studies, art history, and visual art. Her other books include Zola’s Crowds (1978), Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (1985), George Sand and Idealism (1993), and Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995). She was on the editorial board and the executive committee of the Modern Language Association of America and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. She is survived by her husband, Howard Bloch; her mother, Resia; and a sister.


New York Times, December 16, 2001

Naomi Schor, Literary Critic and Theorist, Is Dead at 58
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Naomi Schor, a literary critic and theorist who combined psychoanalytic theory, avant-garde philosophy and feminism to come up with quirky, often startling insights into 19th-century French authors including Flaubert and Zola, died on Dec. 2 at a New Haven hospital. She was 58 and lived in Hamden, Conn.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said her sister, Mira Schor.

Dr. Schor, the Benjamin F. Barge professor of French at Yale University, brought French psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory to French studies in the United States, said Joan W. Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

As one example of how this worked, she cited Dr. Schor's essay on fetishism in the novels of George Sand, the cigar-smoking, cross- dressing novelist who was the most widely celebrated female writer in France in the 1800's. Dr. Schor found many ways that women in Sand's novels used fetishes, which are usually considered a male preoccupation.

Dr. Schor also used unconventional approaches to discover atypical ways in which the female body was represented in 19th-century French literature. She argued that when Zola depicted the uncontrollable passions of crowds, he used feminine means to express them.

Dr. Schor, who once wrote that she hoped to become "an intellectual bad girl," delighted in controversy. For example, in an article published last January in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, she explored the notion of male lesbianism, suggesting ways that Flaubert and other male authors seemed to speak from a lesbian perspective.

In her book "Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine" (Methuen, 1987), she argued that men, in taking the universal view, have historically tended to de-emphasize the importance of details. She suggested that details were considered ornamental or mundane, and as such, were deemed women's stuff.

But at the same time, theorists like Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher whom Dr. Schor knew and interpreted in her writings, were coming to consider traditional visions of universal truth irrelevant. To them, the truth was in the meaning of details.

"Does the triumph of detail signify a triumph of the feminine with which it has long been linked?" she asked. "Or has the detail achieved new prestige by being taken over by the masculine, triumphing at the very moment when it ceases to be associated with the feminine?"

She relentlessly challenged conventional understanding in her teaching and writing as well as in a feminist journal she helped found in 1989 at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Even the name of the journal — "differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies" — reflects her idiosyncratic outlook. She suggested putting the "s" in italics to make people think. (The lowercase "d" was chosen by graphic designers.)

"She had this amazing way of making the familiar look unfamiliar," said Elizabeth Weed, the other founding editor.

Dr. Schor was born on Oct. 10, 1943, in Manhattan. Her father, Ilya, was a painter, goldsmith and artist of Judaica. Her mother, Resia, was also an artist. They had fled from Poland to Paris to escape the Nazis, eventually reaching New York, by way of Lisbon, on Dec. 3, 1941.

Her parents moved in a cosmopolitan circle of intellectuals and artists in New York and spoke French, which was Dr. Schor's first language, at home.

Her public school teachers told her parents they doubted she would be able to read, a problem solved when her parents bought her eyeglasses. They placed her at the Lycée Français, where she remained through high school.

Her sister said she devoured books and seldom went outdoors, leading neighbors to think that the family had only one daughter. Already, she was aspiring to lead a life of the mind. She wrote in an essay for The Los Angeles Times in 1986 that this was not easy.

"For a girl it was an act of courage, not to say folly," she wrote. "It meant certain unpopularity, even ostracism."

She graduated from Barnard College, where she majored in English, and received her doctorate in French at Yale, where her first published articles were written not only on French but also in French.

"I knew that my advantage really lay in French," she said. "When I went to graduate school, it never occurred to me to do anything else."

Her literary and philosophical interests always seemed to be slightly ahead of the newest academic currents, said Sharon Marcus, an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a former student of Dr. Schor's.

"She was always interested in charting the territory that was just a little more complicated than what everyone else was saying," Dr. Marcus said.

Her 5 books and more than 50 academic articles made her the sort of star that prestigious universities compete to recruit. She taught at Brown, Duke and Harvard.

In 1999 she joined the faculty at Yale, where her husband, Howard Bloch, teaches in the French department. In addition to her husband and sister, she is survived by her mother, who lives in Manhattan.

Dr. Schor once said she had love affairs with intellectual "ism's," including fetishism, realism, idealism, universalism and feminism, her favorite.

She organized a symposium titled "Man and Beast," which was to have taken place the weekend after she died. Scholars from many disciplines had planned to examine similarities and differences between humans and animals, perhaps under the rubric of speciesism.
 



Yale Bulletin, Jan. 18, 2002

Memorial service for Naomi Schor

A memorial service will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 29, for Naomi Schor, the Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French, who died suddenly on Dec. 2 at the age of 58.

The service will be held at 4 p.m. in Battell Chapel, corner of Elm and College streets.

Schor was a noted scholar of French literature and critical theory and was one of the pioneer feminist theorists of her generation. She was a leading interpreter of the writings of the French theorists and philosophers Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, and was a major figure in the field of 19th-century French studies.
 


HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
Dec. 13, 2001

Naomi Schor, former Harvard professor, dies at 58

Naomi Schor, former Harvard professor of Romance languages and literatures, died suddenly in New Haven, Conn., on Dec. 2. She was 58.

At the time of her death, Schor was the Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1999, she had held distinguished professorships at Harvard, Brown, and Duke University.

Schor, a pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, was regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory.
 
 

Naomi Schor: At an Intellectual Crossroads
By Marvin Hightower

Harvard University Gazette Staff
October 10, 1996

In recent decades, powerful theories have reshaped literary studies in this country, challenging scholars to reassess their intellectual tools and, sometimes, to reinvent themselves.

When Professor Naomi Schor left Duke last year to join Harvard's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, more than mere geographical change was afoot: she was also wrestling with a shift of intellectual direction that had begun to emerge several years earlier.

Since earning a B.A., cum laude, at Barnard (1963) and a Ph.D. at Yale (1969), Schor has gained an international reputation for integrating feminist and psychoanalytical insights into critical examinations of 19th-century authors like Flaubert and Zola.

Her extensive bibliography includes 5 books, 3 collaborative editions, and some 50 articles and anthology entries on topics as varied as aesthetics, Simone de Beauvoir, fetishism, Salvador Dalí, and turn-of-the-century French postcards. "I've always tended to be a bit eclectic," she says.

In addition to teaching at Yale, Columbia, Brown, and the universities of Michigan and California, she has guest-lectured at institutions throughout the United States as well as in Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland.

If  Schor now finds herself at an intellectual crossroads, she knows how she got there.

"In my professional lifetime, I have, as one would expect, seen many changes in the study of texts, most of which I have welcomed," she says. "Going from the formalist structuralist poetics of the '50s and early '60s to the more recent culturalist approaches, I have been forced to reexamine my founding assumptions about what literature is over and over again.

"As a '70s feminist -- somewhere between the pioneer figures and the second generation -- I was deeply involved in rethinking the French canon. Feminism has been institutionalized, and runs the risk of turning stale and predictable without bold theoretical advances. Above all, as with all recent approaches as they are currently practiced, the concern for what we once called 'literariness' -- what I understood literature to be -- has become an endangered species."

Schor has found feminist insights especially useful in making a case for the literary merits of such neglected figures as George Sand (Aurore Dudevant [1804-1876]), the sometime cigar-smoking/cross-dressing maverick sooner remembered by the general public for amorous liaisons with Sandeau, Chopin, Mérimée, and Musset than for literary achievements that made her the most widely celebrated French female writer of her day.

At the same time, feminist criticism allowed Schor to rediscover the canonical works she loves so much. "I don't like ideas for ideas' sakes," she says. "I like to be passionate about what I'm doing."

Since the late '80s, Schor has detected a growing struggle in the literary humanities "between people who define themselves as doing 'literature' and those who do 'cultural studies.' " In decades past, for instance, an academic major in French virtually guaranteed an interest in literature. Today, under the lens of cultural studies, it may mean anything French but that.

"I'm sort of caught between the two," Schor says. "Although I've done relatively little cultural studies and a great deal of literary criticism, I feel that for many reasons this is not a great time for doing literature."

Which explains in part why Schor will spend much of her upcoming sabbatical in France. "What I want to do has very little to do with what I've done before, and I need open-ended time to reeducate myself." She is eager to explore French notions of universalism, one of several "isms" discussed in her latest book, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995, Duke University Press).

"I'm starting with a series of questions: why are the French so threatened by American multiculturalism, and why are Americans disturbed to find no equivalent for their identity politics in France? My hypothesis is that this cultural difference has to do with the idea of the universal: the French have taken it upon themselves to be the proselytizers for this idea, in part because of the French Revolution, which was 'the Universal Revolution.' "

In France, Schor explains, individuals can retain a socially accepted ethnic identity so long as they adopt a universal Gallic identity that paradoxically requires them to jettison ethnic languages and customs. The message, in brief? Be whatever you like, but speak and act "French."

"We in America have a very different idea. The melting pot didn't melt the same way in both places."

Over the past decade, however, large numbers of North African Muslims have chosen to settle in France but have refused to settle for assimilation, Schor says. "It was easy for France to assimilate Jews who were eager to be assimilated and Polish miners who were Catholic. But suddenly, the French have come across a substantial minority in which some women, for example, say, 'I want to be in France, but I want to wear my veil to class.' What makes this case so different, so symptomatic?"

Schor also hopes to investigate a related topic: the poetry and fiction of writers like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, first-generation leaders of the négritude movement, whose African/Caribbean values challenged both French assimilationist demands and European assumptions of cultural superiority. Although négritude promulgated contrarian values, it was no less universalist than the ideas it opposed. Schor wants to test her intuition of why this might be so.

"People are always assuming that the universal is 'imperialistic,' something that the West is trying to ram down the throats of others," she says. "But when France colonized people and set up their Republican or religious educational system, it brought colonial subjects into the universal. And if I understand correctly, these subjects were loath to give it up, even as they fought for the survival of their native cultural identities."

Schooling, in fact, turns out to be the source of Schor's own fascination with all things French. Before her birth, Nazi terror had forced her parents to leave Poland and settle temporarily in France. Two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they arrived in the U.S., where she was born in 1943.

"They ended up sending me to a French private school in New York, and that had a decisive impact on me," Schor says. Later, she majored in English at Barnard. "But I knew that my advantage really lay in French. When I went to graduate school, it never occurred to me to do anything else. I went into the 19th century, and have never regretted my choice."

Schor feels a special affinity for writers with a reformist or utopian turn of mind, like Zola (her doctoral dissertation topic) and Sand. In George Sand and Idealism (1993, Columbia University Press), she took up the challenge of moving beyond the widely known authors about whom she had already written.

"At a certain point in feminist criticism, you really were not recognized as a feminist critic if you did not write on women authors," Schor says. The book also reacquainted her with a captivating personality she had first encountered as a teenager in Lélia, André Maurois's 1952 biography of Sand. In graduate school, Schor considered reading Sand and writing about her, but she never managed to do either.

"In a way this is my thesis, 25 years later," she laughs. "But I ended up doing something completely different. I can't honestly say that I adore Sand, but she is an interesting writer who excelled in many genres" (e.g., articles, autobiography, novels, plays, and stories).

Sand's novels made her the toast of Transcendentalists in America and Victorians in England. Dostoevski read her in Russia. Once the sole woman in a dinner club that included Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Turgenev, she spent her last years with her artist son at Nohant making costumes for his puppet theater and writing stories for her grandchildren. She also made jam.

"She's actually the kind of woman I think I would have hated -- a sort of Superwoman," Schor admits. "But the book is not so much about Sand in this sense. It's also about the second term of the title, which is idealism." That outlook informs Sand's sympathies for the poor as well as her use of fictional protagonists who transgress artificial social barriers under the lofty banner of free association.

In what she recalls as "an epiphany," Schor came to appreciate "the importance of the notion of 'idealist art' and, specifically, 'idealist fiction' " after reading Hippolyte Taine, the 19th-century French philosopher, historian, and literary critic. "In art history, this idea has not disappeared into the abyss, but in literature it certainly has."

Taking a cue from deconstruction, Schor organized the book in part around the concept that "words signify because they are opposed to something else. Realism [as in Flaubert] is opposed to idealization or idealism in that sense," and idealism in turn becomes Schor's window onto fields as diverse as psychoanalysis and politics.

When it comes to classroom duties, Schor feels "very committed to teaching in French," as she does in the literary survey course French 70b. "Harvard students are so self-confident that as a newcomer, I cannot always tell what they do and do not know. I proceed assuming nothing and expecting everything.

"What I find peculiar to Harvard culture has something to do with the fact that the students are so bright and the library is so good. When I mention a book in class, I don't have to say, 'Go and read it.' Some students will go and find it anyway. They're interested. They want more. That I find extremely pleasurable.

"The students I like best are the ones who combine a feel for language and literature with an interest in cultural studies. I think that's probably the way to go." At the very least, it's a path that Schor herself has found more and more worth traveling.

"Such epoch-making changes as the predominance of visual culture, the waning of the book, the dizzying technological transformations require all of us who love literature to rethink its history and future. One of the things that drew me to Harvard was the combination of courses reflecting the most recent trends in the humanities and courses that keep alive the tradition of literary studies."
 


 from University of Notre Dame
February 2001
 

The Provost's Distinguished Women's Lecturer Series at Notre Dame
presents

Naomi Schor, Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University and leading Feminist Theorist and Critic
 

From February 19th to 21st, the University of Notre Dame hosted the Provost's Distinguished Women's Lecturer Naomi Schor, Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University and a leading feminist theorist and literary critic whose works have inspired many Notre Dame faculty.

Before an audience of approximately one hundred, in her public lecture entitled "The Crisis of French Universalism," Naomi Schor addressed the philosophical and political debate at work in the notions of essentialism and particularism by highlighting major issues imbedded in French universalism. Rather than an oxymoron, she argued, this notion signals a program aiming to assimilate the "Other" in France, as contrasted with the United States' multicultural universalism which has a more concrete and differential content.

Thus, an analysis of French universalism as given expression in theoretical works and political undertakings, uncovers, behind the idealism this notion suggests, an intolerance of the otherness of the "Other." Naomi Schor demonstrated the applicability of such an analysis to countries outside of France, and more particularly to those participating in francophony.

Her lecture also focused on the 1990s "parité" debate in France, through which women have recently gained equal representation in the political sphere without letting go, however, of the notion of French universalism. Hence the rallying cry adopted by French women in search of equal representation, "liberty, equality, parity," replacing the republican slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity." Although one would expect a more combative attitude in those who have been traditionally excluded from universalism ever since its public inception during the French Revolution of 1879, such facts divulge how deeply ingrained the notion of universalism has remained in France.

At the Tuesday roundtable, which brought together a number of Notre Dame's more prominent intellectuals, such as Professors Fred Dallmayr in Government and Luke Gibbons in English and Film Studies, Naomi Schor explored in greater depth the issues she had broached in her public lecture, and especially the opposition between ontology and ethics, which transcends national borders.

Thus, her contribution to the intellectual life of Notre Dame was stimulating for all those who attended the events in which she participated. Professor Dallmayr, for instance, said to Naomi Schor that he is "a great admirer" of her work and commented later that she was, "...serious and engaged, listening and responding to all points of view. It was one of the best instances of a truly scholarly conversation."

Naomi Schor's busy schedule included meetings with Provost Nathan Hatch, Dean Mark Roche, and Associate Dean Julia Douthwaite, at which she discussed concerns regarding the hiring and retention of women faculty at the University of Notre Dame.

She also took time to visit the senior seminar in French literature, "Representations of the Feminine in Twentieth-Century French Prose," and offered valuable insights to the students who had prepared for her visit by reading her 1994 essay "French Feminism Is a Universalism."

Informed of Naomi Schor's forthcoming presence at Notre Dame, the University of Indiana extended an immediate invitation to her for a lecture on their campus in Bloomington, which took place in the evening of February 21st.

The Provost, by supporting her visit, promoted a collegiality beneficial to the institutions involved, while Indiana University's gesture highlighted the value of Naomi Schor's presence at Notre Dame. Her visit clearly enhanced Notre Dame's role as a focal point in the Midwest academic sphere, justifying the University's efforts to draw prominent scholars and recognized public figures to our campus.
 

http://www.nd.edu/~romlang/news/schor.html

Naomi Schor has been a major participant in the most significant moments of recent literary theory and criticism in France and the United States. She has written extensively on French literature, particularly nineteenth-century texts, to which she has applied techniques of close reading and theoretical analysis. After exploring psychoanalytical criticism, she has turned to cultural studies without abandoning either the study of literature or the notion of sexual difference which she considers central to feminist criticism. In her introduction to Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995), Schor asks, “will a new feminist literary criticism arise that will take literariness seriously while maintaining its vital ideological edge?”

Naomi Schor's distinguished career has taken her from Columbia University to the universities of Brown, Duke, and Harvard, before her 1999 appointment as Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, among which the N.E.H. (two research fellowships, and travel grants), the A.C.L.S. (two research fellowships, and travel grants), and a Guggenheim.

Recent titles among Naomi Schor's publications include:

  • Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
  • Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987; Paris: Nathan, 1994)
  • George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
  • Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought (coedited with Carolyn Burke and Margaret Whitford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
  • Another Look at Essentialism (coedited with Elizabeth Weed; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)
  • Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995)
  • Queer Theory Meets Feminism (coedited with Elizabeth Weed; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
Naomi Schor is also founding editor, with Elizabeth Weed, of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1989--

Naomi Schor has authored countless essays and articles;
forthcoming titles include:

  • "The Crisis of Universalism"
  • "La Femme indépendante"
  • "Agape and Anorexia"


Publications:

The Essential difference / edited by Naomi Schor, Elizabeth Weed.
Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1994.
xix, 196 p. ; 25 cm.

Engaging with Irigaray : feminist philosophy and modern European thought / edited by Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford.
New York : Columbia University Press, c1994.
vii, 428 p. ; 23 cm

Feminism meets queer theory / edited by Elizabeth Weed amd Naomi Schor.
Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 1997.
xiii, 341 p. ; 24 cm.

Flaubert and postmodernism / edited by Naomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski.
Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, c1984.
xvi, 219 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.

Bernheimer, Charles, 1942-
Decadent subjects : the idea of decadence in art, literature, philosophy, and culture of the fin de siècle in Europe / Charles Bernheimer ; edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor.
Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
xviii, 227 p. : ill. ; 23 cm

Sand, George, 1804-1876.
Mauprat / George Sand ; translated and edited by Sylvia Raphael ; with an introduction by Naomi Schor.
Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1997.
xxiii, 307 p. ; 19 cm

Bad objects : essays popular and unpopular / Naomi Schor.
Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, c1995.
xvi, 208 p. ; 25 cm

Breaking the chain : women, theory, and French realist fiction / Naomi Schor.
New York : Columbia University Press, 1985.
xiv, 203 p. ; 24 cm

George Sand and idealism / Naomi Schor.
New York : Columbia University Press, c1993.
xiii, 275 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

One hundred years of melancholy / Naomi Schor.
Oxford ; New York : Clarendon Press, 1996.
15 p. ; 22 cm.

Reading in detail : aesthetics and the feminine / Naomi Schor.
New York : Methuen, 1987.
x, 184 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Zola's crowds / Naomi Schor.
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, c1978.
xv, 221 p. ; 24 cm.
 



 

Roland Barthes: Necrologies

NAOMI SCHOR

La voix de l'être aimé, je ne la connais jamais que morte, remémorée, rappelée à l'intérieur de ma tête, bien au-delà de l'oreille; voix ténue et cependant monumentale, puisqu'elle est de ces objets qui n'ont d'existence qu'une fois disparus.

-- Roland Barthes,

Fragments d'un discours amoureux

In a clever piece entitled, "Decoding Roland Barthes: The Obit of a Structuralist," which appeared in the August 1980 issue of Harper's, Hugh Kenner combined in unequal proportions polemics (a large dose) and piety (a minuscule dose), mocking semiotics even as he marked the passing of Roland Barthes. This tour de force is brought off by subjecting Barthes's New York Times obituary to the reading practices developed by Barthes in his writings, notably S/Z. A brief excerpt is amply sufficient to convey Kenner's waspish tone:

No matter that we've never before heard of the man; on page 11 of section B (March 27) a headline rapidly creates him for us, so compellingly we feel a need to know more. What's entered our heads is a verbal construct called "Barthes," made up of clichés governed by what Barthes called the Five Codes.

The codes interweave with computerlike sureness. Play it over in slow motion. "Roland Barthes" -- and who is he, taking all this newspaper space? Code 1, the Hermeneutic Code, has posed a question, and by the time the other codes have reinforced it we'll be deep in the smaller print seeking an answer.1

However much I would like to dismiss and/or dismantle Kenner's piece, I cannot deny its shock-value. What I found shocking about this piece last spring when a student in my Barthes seminar brought it to my attention, what I continue to find shocking about it today, is the quasi-astronomical distance Kenner puts between himself and the figure he describes at one point as "the quirky fellow."2 Visibly unseduced, not to mention unconvinced, by what he has read of Barthes, Kenner wrote of him from a vantage point that radically defamiliarizes or, in Barthes's terms, denaturalizes the Barthes whose fame has spread, in another critic's words, from "the plains of Iowa" to "the slopes of Mount Fuji."3 It is a far cry from Kenner's "Obit" to Susan Sontag's graceful elegiac tribute to Barthes, "Remembering Roland Barthes," and her equally eulogistic introduction to A Barthes Reader, which is nothing less than a canonization:

Teacher, man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer . . . of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure.4

Kenner and Sontag constitute the two poles of what we might call the Anglo-American critical response to Roland Barthes's death: on the one hand, the irreverent lack of respect for the dead of a perennial empiricist gadfly, on the other, the respectful, pious praise by one who has been described accurately as one of the "official liaisons between French and American intellectual life."5 The last is a quote from Elizabeth Bruss's Beautiful Theories, in which separate chapters are devoted to Barthes and his ever faithful American friend, Sontag.6 To introduce Bruss's name into this cursory survey of the necrologies that have appeared in the wake of Barthes's death is to complicate the somewhat facile binary opposition I have set up between Kenner and Sontag, for Bruss's position vis à vis Barthes is less readily immediately classifiable. Initially it might appear closer to Kenner's, if only because Bruss is careful to establish herself as a reader responding to a radically foreign Barthes:

. . . It is as an imported, a translated figure that I shall be treating him -- a being constructed from a name [cf. Kenner's, "a verbal construct called 'Barthes"'] and a body of writings that made their appearance on the Anglo-American scene at a particular moment and have established there a function and meaning independent of whatever they might have meant or been in their original context. If Bloom [Harold] may be used, loosely, to exemplify the native strain, Barthes may serve us as the representative foreigner.7

In the prefatory section of her Barthes chapter, Bruss makes good on her promise, charting with exemplary finesse the complex process of what Graham Hough calls "the importation of Roland Barthes," locating precisely Barthes's place in what Bruss terms, "the Anglo-American Imaginary."8 Nevertheless, though approaching Barthes with both feet squarely planted on American soil, it is evident from Bruss's highly sympathetic reading of Barthes's texts that she is closer, infinitely closer, to Sontag than to Kenner. For Bruss, as for Sontag -- and, I might add, for myself -- Barthes is primarily an aesthete, with no pejorative meaning intended.

But even the triangular configuration I have just sketched is inadequate to account for the variety of positions on Barthes staked out in the numerous articles written about him since his death. Indeed, one might observe that these positions or slots, in what begins to look very much like a semiotic square (!), are merely entrenchments, reinforcements of positions occupied during Barthes's lifetime and in no way redrawn following his death. However many slots one adds to the diagram, one thing is clear: one's place in the semiotic square is determined by the degree of proximity/distance one adopts between one's self and Barthes. The question of establishing the "proper distance" between subject and object, reader and text, is always urgent, but never more so, it would appear, than in the case of Barthes. Consider what has become a topos of sorts in Barthes criticism: the neat oppositional pairing of the rival brothers, Stephen Heath and Jonathan Culler. In this scenario of mimetic doubling, Heath is invariably cast in the unenviable role of the myopic epigone who, in his book on Barthes, Vertige du déplacement, "adopts without resistance the categories, language, and ideas of the material he is studying."9 Culler, on the other hand, is assigned the noble part (beau rôle) of the far-sighted "highly skeptical critic for an entire corpus of theoretical operations of which Barthes was simply one practitioner."'10 While Culler characterizes Vertige as "intelligent hagiography,"" Steven Ungar -- an outspoken partisan of Heath and the author of some of the most consistently useful contextualizing commentary on Barthes to come out of American French departments in the seventies -- calls Culler "an interpretive agent who no longer represents the interests of the various parties in question."12

Inescapably, the question arises, Who is, in the words of one participant at the Cerisy Colloquium on Barthes, "my Roland Barthes"?13 This would be the appropriate place to insert an "autography"14 detailing my formation as a speaking subject (in short, my education at the Lycée Français de New York), my first inauspicious contacts with Barthes (or, before Yale was Yale . . . ), and culminating in my privileging of Barthes in an ongoing writing project (tentatively titled, "The Detail as Aesthetic Category"). Instead, a biographeme. During the first year of Barthes's appointment to the Collège de France, I found myself in Paris. Although I missed the inaugural lesson, I did attend with some regularity the open lectures. Unfortunately these lectures were held in an auditorium far too small to accommodate the large crowds eager to hear Barthes speak. One day I arrived too late to claim a prized seat in the packed auditorium and, along with other disappointed latecomers, found myself being ushered into an adjoining room where one could follow Barthes's lecture over a loudspeaker. In retrospect, the experience of listening in rapt attention to Barthes's faceless but hardly disembodied voice being piped in over the sound system strikes me as emblematic of my relationship to Barthes's texts. Barthes's is a voice in my ear, but it is a voice heard from another room.

Nonetheless it is unmistakably a voice. A leitmotif running through several articles published in the commemorative issues devoted to Barthes in France -- special issues of Poétique, the Revue d'Esthétique, and Critique -- is Barthes's celebrated voice. With significant frequency, those who enjoyed the closest proximity to Barthes, in particular the members of his seminar, evoke the elusive, inimitable "grain" of their master's voice. No need, however, to quote from their testimony, for in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes himself devotes an entire fragment to "His voice." He begins on a tentative note:

I try, little by little, to render his voice. I make an adjectival approach: agile, fragile, youthful, somewhat broken? No, not quite; rather: overcultivated, having a faint British flavor.15

But, confronted with the impossibility of finding words adequate to his object, he goes on to say:

Such impotence has a reason: the voice is always already dead, and it is by a kind of desperate denial that we call it: living; this irremediable loss we give the name of inflection: inflection is the voice insofar as it is always past, silenced.16

Barthes had, of course, read Derrida. He knew that the lifelike quality of speech is a lure, its immediacy an illusion. Far from ensuring presence -- the speaking subject's self-presence or the interlocutor's presence -- the voice is inhabited by death, coextensive with absence. But Barthes is not content or able merely to mime Derrida; by inflecting inflection, he effectuates his characteristic displacement of the tutelary theoretical system. For Barthes, inflection names the trace of the speaking subject's particularity that can be heard only in absentia; inflection is the deferred effect of the voice:

. . . It is characteristic of the voice to die. What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory. This phantom being of the voice is what is dying out [l'inflexion], it is that sonorous texture which disintegrates and disappears. I never know the loved being's voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear; a tenuous yet monumental voice, since it is one of those objects which exist only once they have disappeared.17

If we take Barthes for the "loved being" -- and he is -- we might well ask, How do we hear his voice now that he is dead? If the only loved voice is a dead voice, are we now in a position to hear Barthes's voice perhaps for the first time? Has Barthes's death made audible, at least to our inner ear, the unheard of his texts? Which is not to say, of course, something new and unheard of, rather something which was always already there, always already dead but, at least on this side of the Atlantic, inadmissible. To listen to the testimony of those who knew Barthes and who had the unique experience of hearing the lectures that became the books and articles, it would seem that what I have called the unheard of Barthes's texts may be something on the order of their orality. Thus, comparing Barthes to Walter Benjamin's Storyteller, one former student wrote:

It seems to me little has been made of how much Barthes borrowed from and contributed to the great oral tradition (not only in his teaching, but in the very texture of his criticism), whereas all those who heard him know and speak of the extremely musical sound of his voice.18

That the late or last Barthes attempted to theorize the body, to write a polymorphously perverse text, is too well known to bear repeating; what has received possibly less attention is Barthes's struggle to body forth his voice, to forge a language which would abolish the difference between writing and speech:

Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language.... 19

It is not the least of paradoxes that often when Barthes speaks of the voice, he speaks in someone else's voice: now Derrida's, now Kristeva's, now Lacan's. It is as though to speak about the voice is somehow to be dispossessed of one's own voice. Yet this paradox may be more apparent than real: for Barthes's ventriloquism occurs purely on the level of the signified, and the voice is precisely bound up with the signifier in its carnal materiality. To begin to hear Barthes's texts, to respond to their vocality, one must attend closely to the way in which Barthes's sentences mime what is the distinctive trait of Barthes's speech: its flow. Unlike Flaubert's sentence -- the written sentence par excellence -- which, as Barthes has shown, can be revised both on the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes, the spoken sentence is, like desire according to Lacan, always propelled on the axis of metonymy:

Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it. To cross out here is to add.... All that one can do in the case of a spoken utterance is to tack on another utterance. The correcting and improving movement of speech is the wavering of a flow of words, a weave which wears itself out catching itself up, a chain of augmentative corrections which constitutes the favoured abode of the unconscious part of our discourse.... The eponymous figure of the speaker is Penelope.20

Now, according to at least one of his translators, Annette Lavers, there is something Penelopean about Barthes the writer, as he endlessly spins out his sentences, resorting to all sorts of ruses to delay the moment of closure, the final and finalizing period. Speaking of Mythologies, Lavers noted:

. . . a sometimes disconcerting use of punctuation, which must regrettably be normalized in English. (Was it absolutely necessary? But that is another, a sociological story . . . ). On the surface of the sentence something like eddies appear, suggesting hesitations, difficult choices, contradictory desires, and often a reluctance to cloture the sentence before having perfectly exposed the argument. Whence a biosyncratic usage . . . of periods, colons, semicolons, and parentheses.... 21

If we return now to Barthes's passage on "His voice," we become aware that it can be read not as a theoretical statement on the problematic of the voice, but rather as a bodying forth of Barthes's voice, with its "biosyncratic" punctuation -- and punctuation is etymologically linked to punctum, the piercing detail so prominent in Camera Lucida -- imperfectly rendered in the English translation. The first sentence, for example, is presented in French as a mock dialogue, with a dash separating the two voices; in the English version, the dash has been dropped, taking with it the split subject or reducing the cleavage to a contradiction. Furthermore the repetition of the word voix and the triple anaphora of il s'agit -- the stigma of speech -- have been corrected by ellipsis and displacement:

(Il ne s'agit de la voix de personne. -- Mais si! précisément: il s'agit, il s'agit toujours de la voix de quelqu'un.)

(No one's in particular. Yes, in particular! It is always someone's voice.)22

That Barthes accomplishes on the level of the signifier what he declares impossible on the level of the signified does not in any way alter the main thrust of this tricky passage: the condemnation of description, of which the description of the voice is a particularly fitting instance. The effort to render that which is always already dead -- e.g., inflection -- is a doomed project because the agency of description, the adjective -- a part of speech Barthes held in constant suspicion and suspension -- is mortiferous:

.. ."As if alive" [faire vivant] means "apparently dead" [voir mort]. The adjective is the instrument of this illusion; whatever it says, by its descriptive quality alone, the adjective is funereal.23

Whatever we write about Barthes in the wake of his death, the adjectival approach is to be avoided at all cost, lest we kill him all over again. Fortunately, by defining writing as he did, Barthes saw to it that our adjectives would miss their mark:

. . . Is not writing that language which has renounced producing the last word [ la dernière réplique], which lives and breathes by yielding itself up to others so that they can hear you?24

The title of the fragment from which I have just quoted is "Deaf to one's own language."
 

NOTES
1. Hugh Kenner, "Decoding Roland Barthes: The Obit of a Structuralist," Harper's (August 1980): 68.

2. Ibid., p. 71.

3. Graham Hough, "The Importation of Roland Barthes," Times Literary Supplement, no. 3951 (9 December 1977), p. 1443.

4. Susan Sontag, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes," A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. vii.

5 Elizabeth Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 370.

6. Susan Sontag, "Remembering Barthes," New York Review of Books 27, no. 8 (15 May 1980): 22: "('Ah, Susan. Toujours fidèle,' were the words with which he greeted me, affectionately, when we last saw each other. I was, I am.)"

7. Bruss, Beautiful Theories, p. 363.

8. Ibid., p. 380.

9. Eugene Goodheart, "The Myths of Roland," Partisan Review 47 (1980), 199.

10. Bruss, p. 381.

11. Jonathan Culler, "The Ever-Moving Finger," Times Literary Supplement, no. 3782 (30 August 1974), p. 934.

12. Steven Ungar, "Doing and Not Doing Things With Barthes," Enclitic 2, no. 2 (Fall 1978), n. 13, p. 103. See also his "RB: The Third Degree," Diacritics 7, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 71-77.

13. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Pseudo-Barthes," Prétexte: Roland Barthes, ed. Antoine Compagnon (Paris: 10/18, 1978), p. 204; translation mine.

14. In a review of the recent Critique issue devoted to Barthes, George Raillard coined the term to describe the very personal nature of most of the contributions.

15. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 67.

16. Ibid., p. 68.

17. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 114.

18. Yve-Alain Bois, "Ecrivain, artisan, narrateur," Critique 423024 (1982), 659; translation mine. See, in the same issue, Patricia Lombardo, "Contre le langage," p. 730. See also Dominique Noguez, "La conquète du'je': esquisse d'un hommage à Roland Barthes," in Sartre/Barthes, Revue d'Esthétique 2 (1981), pp. 83-89. And last (in order of appearance) but not least (in order of proximity), see Julia Kristeva, "La voix de Barthes," Communications 36 (1982), 119-123. Kristeva wrote: "The present remains the only dimension in which I can think, read, hear Barthes. Is that because I have the impression that what this writer gives us primarily and essentially is a voice?" (p. 119; translation mine).

19. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1948), p. 66.

20. Roland Barthes, "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers," Image/Text/Music, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 190-191.

21. Annette Lavers, "En traduisant Barthes," Tel Quel 47 (1971), 120-121; translation mine.

22. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1948), p. 72, and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 67.

23. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 68.

24. Ibid., p. 170.