an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, Winter 2016/2017, ISSN 1552-5112
‘The Word
Shines Forth’: Barthes and Prose/Poetry
Barthes
in
‘Y a-t-il une écriture poétique?’,
the
fourth essay of Le Degré zéro
de
l’écriture (1953), turns his mind to the distinction between
prose and
poetry, concentrating on the difference between classical and
modernist
definitions of the genres. That move from classical to modernist
definitions
supports the main argument proposed by Degré
zéro as a history of writing: that the birth and development of
‘Literature’ as a concept and field of knowledge and experiment in the
19th
century is a history of the gradual destruction of bourgeois
consciousness as a
‘classical’ and transparent form of Enlightenment thinking; and a
movement
towards the radical reflexivity of post-Romantic writing and the ‘solidification
progressive’ which
creates the ‘Forme-Objet’
(172-3).
The history of writing, as Barthes suggests in his introduction,
begins with
Chateaubriand’s narcissistic compositional style as formal
self-regard, moves
through Flaubert’s sense of the formal object as the spectacle of
achieved
craftwork, and through Mallarmé’s destructiveness of all language;
culminating
with the degree zero of writing in 20th century modernism and late
modernism.
This is characterised by ‘neutral’ writing, a writing of negation,
powerlessness, and absence; a ghostly remnant of the formal object
after the
murder committed by Mallarmé.
The prose / poetry
distinction shifts from a
classical-social view of form: poetry is simply prose with decorative
elements
added on such as metre, rhyme, the ‘rituel
des
images’ (196). The shift from classical to modernist in poetry
is
mapped, for Barthes, onto the differences between Baudelaire’s
classicism and
Rimbaud’s radicalism. With Rimbaud, poetry is no longer merely an
attribute or
add-on, it is substance itself; poets thinking about their language as
‘une Nature fermée, qui
embrasserait à la
fois la function et la structure du langage’ (197).
This ‘Nature fermée’
is defined in the first
essay of Degré Zéro: ‘Qu’est-ce
que l’écriture’ as identical to
language-as-environment, where
‘une
Nature qui passé entièrement à travers la parole de l’écrivain, sans
pourtant
lui donner aucune forme’. It is like an abstract circle of
truths round the
subject ‘hors duquel seulement
commence à
se deposer la densité d’un verbe solitaire’ (177). With the
prose-poetic
context of ‘Y a-t-il une
écriture
poétique?’, Barthes is thinking of symbolisme
here, Mallarmé’s melancholy gardens, ‘l’oubli
fermé
par le cadre’ of his mirrors (‘Ses
purs
ongles très haut’).
The
park
or Eden implied by ‘Nature
fermée’
might tempt one to a transcendental sense of language as organic form;
but for
Barthes the hermeticism captures both the function and the structure
of
language since, with Mallarmé’s murderousness and Rimbaud’s anarchist
energy,
the enclosedness of the poem, given that it reproduces the
arbitrariness of
language as a system of signs, invites the potential for a radical
erasure of
the act of signifying: poetry ‘peut
très
bien renoncer aux signes, car elle porte sa nature en elle, et n’a
que faire de
signaler à l’extérieur son identité’ (197). The collapsing of
the
interior/exterior distinction that this hermetic principle of
arbitrary
language-space summons into being leads to the collapse of the
prose/poetry
distinction, too - by a complex act of intuitive reasoning: ‘les
langages poétiques et prosaïques sont
suffisament séparés pour pouvoir se passer des signes mêmes de leur
altérité’
(197).
It
is
worth dwelling a moment on the logic here. Since poetry constitutes a
whole
natural world to the poets, therefore they need not even seem to be
addressing
the social world as classically-trained bourgeois poets had done. The
poem is
its own world, its language-nature screening off the social world of
audience
and readership and conventions. ‘Prosaic’ language is identified with
bourgeois
social exteriority; since that has been screened off in the act of
enclosure, then
it follows that the traditional signs of difference between poetry and
prose no
longer pertain: the poetry of the garden is not ornamental, but
fundamental –
it can freely generate a distinction-free art-language that is neither
prosaic
nor conventionally poetic. This new form might be free verse, or prose
poetry,
or the stranger fictions we find in Un
coup
de dès or Illuminations;
what is essential is that the shift to the modernist form-object as
language
fetish that Barthes intuits in symboliste
hermeticism, replaces the old ornamental distinction between prose and
poetry
with a formal prose-poetic contradiction, whereby the form-object at
once
posits itself as ‘Nature fermée’
and
as zero-sign. The plus/minus logic of classicism (Poetry = Prose + a +
b + c /
Prose = Poetry – a – b – c) becomes the more radical self-canceling
language-object of modernism. Prose poetry is designed both to make
the
prose/poetry distinction so extreme as to erase the classical prosaic
altogether; and to enable a radical language that posits and cancels
at the
same time the signifying system so hermetically enclosed by the act of
composition.
Barthes then makes the
following move:
modernist French poetry also inverts another binary, thought and
language. If
Enlightenment thinking conceives of thought as giving birth to
language which
translates and expresses that thought, subsequently in modern poetics:
les
mots
produisent une sorte de continu formel dont émane peu à peu une
densité
intellectuelle ou sentimentale impossible sans eux; la parole est
alors le
temps épais d’une gestation plus spirituelle, dans laquelle la
“pensée” est
prepare, installée peu à peu par le hazard des mots (197)
Language
becomes
a generative and aleatory power under such conditions, creating its
own
temporality, a dense time that gives birth to thought. This inversion
of
classical logic is indebted to the manner in which prose poetry (or a
textuality free of ornamental distinctions between genres) enables a
thick
texturing of chancy language as generative textual spacetime. The
density
Barthes is theorizing here is partly structured in opposition to the
relational
economy of classical language: wherein words point thinly to other
words in a
superficial chain of intentions. Words under the classical regimen are
neutralized in the negative sense, emptied of significance, colour,
texture by
convention and tradition (198), and reduced to algebraic gestures,
mere
vehicles of communication (198-99). Modernist language presents the
Word as
shining forth beyond signifying chains, beyond meaning-relations,
annulling
relational logic in order better to present its dense materiality:
Le Mot
éclate
au-dessus d’une ligne de rapports évidés, la grammaire est dépourvue
de sa
finalité, elle devient prosodie, elle n’est plus qu’une inflexion
qui dure pour
présenter le Mot. (199)
The
Word
shines forth above/beyond its relations to all other words so that
grammar
becomes prosody under the special temporal conditions of the poem:
what Barthes
implies here is that the syntactical relations that govern
instrumental
language are what Enlightenment folds into its classical idea of
prosaic logic.
These rule-bound conventions give way to procedures that isolate and
elevate
the language-object, just as the layout presentation to Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès creates the
conditions
for the possibility of ‘la
densité d’un
verbe solitaire’. That act of presentation foregrounds language
as
arbitrary, and as prosodic in the absolute sense that the gesture,
because it
so mysteriously posits and cancels itself out, triggers a reflexive
poetics
that invites deconstruction of Enlightenment language-logic as
‘grammar’.
Barthes is thinking of Mallarmé’s defence, in the note added to Divagations,
of his prose-poetic
procedures and his use of white space in Un
coup
de dès:
Sans
doute y
a-t-il moyen là, pour un poète qui par habitude ne pratique pas le
vers libre,
de montrer, en l’aspect de morceaux compréhensifs et brefs, par la
suite, avec
expérience, tels rythmes immédiats de pensée ordonnant une prosodie.
The
radically
fragmented, white-space-punctuated, a-grammatical and polysemous
compositional practice enables a prose poetics in Todorov’s sense of a
type of
discourse which lies above and beyond interpretation and technique: it
enables
the study of ‘the underlying properties of literary discourse itself’
(The Poetics of Prose,
transl. Richard
Howard [Oxford: Blackwell, 1977], p. 34) – at the same time as being
embodied
as rhythm of the mind. In Mallarmé’s
own
terms, this shift to poetics is also a trumping of prose poetry as
traditionally defined: ‘à ce qui
fut
longtemps le poème en prose, et notre recherche, d’aboutir, en tant,
si l’on
joint mieux les mots, que poème critique’ (bibliographical note,
Divagations). The
critical
poem is a fusion of poetry and prose that steps beyond prose poetry
towards an intellectual/affective and reflexive presentation of
language to the
eye and ear. For Barthes, the formal continuity of prose/poem (not
prose poem)
generates poetics as intellectual and sentimental density: a density
that
achieves the degree zero of a discourse beyond all social relations.
And as if
to exemplify the shining forth of the Word, it is whilst defining the
encylopedic and virtual totality-effect of Mallarmé’s critical poetics
that
Barthes’ own prose rises above normative and relational logic:
Chaque
mot
poétique est ainsi un objet inattendu, une boîte de Pandore d'où
s'envolent
toutes les virtualités du langage; il est donc produit et consommé
avec une
curiosité particulière, une sorte de gourmandise sacrée. Cette Faim
du Mot,
commune à toute la poésie moderne, fait de la parole poétique une
parole
terrible et inhumaine. Elle institue un discours plein de trous et
plein de
lumières, plein d'absences et de signes surnourrissants, sans
prévision ni
permanence d'intention et par là si opposé à la fonction sociale du
langage,
que le simple recours à une parole discontinue ouvre la voie de
toutes les
Surnatures. (200)
Something
of
the surnatural (which
Barthes had
defined in ‘Qu’est-ce que
l’écriture’
as transgression of the enclosed Nature of language as a system [177])
is
traceable in Barthes’ own critical prose here, where the ghost of a
six-beat
measure is discernible:
une
‘boîte de
Pan’dore d'où s'en’volent ‘toutes les virtuali’tés du lan’gage;
il est
‘donc
pro’duit et conso’mmé avec une ‘curiosi’té particu’lière,
[…]
Cette
‘Faim du
‘Mot, co’mmune à ‘toute la poé’sie mo’derne,
‘fait
de la
pa’role poé’tique une pa’role ter’rible et inhu’maine.
Elle
insti’tue
un dis’cours ‘plein de ‘trous et ‘plein de lu’mières
At
the
same time this rhythmical regularity is broken by interpolated long
and short
clauses, as though in concert with the double nature of the
performance. The
critical poem is full of holes and of light, of absences and
over-nourishing
signs insofar as it posits and cancels, feeds and nullifies, signifies
and
abolishes all signifying. Barthes captures the rhetoric of this act or
presentation as poetics in the fusion of a rhythmical prose
(re-presenting
Mallarmé’s ‘rythmes immédiats de
pensée
ordonnant une prosodie’) with an inhumanly intellectual
a-rhythmical clause
where the musical voice breaks down (cf. the deliberately exhausting
over-nourished rhythm – 8-beat/9-beat – of
‘sans prévision ni
permanence
d'intention et par là si opposé à la fonction sociale du langage,
que le simple
recours à une parole discontinue ouvre la voie de toutes les
Surnatures’).
Barthes practices an inhuman and discontinuous ‘parole’ at the very moment the ear registers a prose-poetic texture
to the vocalization.
This discontinuity is a
direct effect of the
breaking down of the social communicableness of Enlightenment
language: ‘Le discontinue du
nouveau langage poétique
institute une Nature interrompue qui ne se revèle que par blocs’
(200-201).
The effect of this discontinuous poetics is to isolate the
word-as-object, and
to reveal a spacetime of the poem as virtual environment (as of ruins
on a
desert plain). In essence, virtuality is key to the prose/poem since
the
natural is a language-environment: yet the rhythmical embodied power
of the
performance gives objective materiality to the objects found in the
text-world:
‘La Nature y deviant un
discontinue
d’objets solitaires et terribles, parce qu’ils n’ont que des liaison
virtuelles’
(201). The paradox here is a direct consequence of the double-nature
of the
critical poem: it de-realizes (since it is so virtually textual) at
the same
time as it materializes (form-objects summoned into tactile, haptic
being by
the extraordinary focus, foregrounding and isolating procedures the
discontinuous style enables). Virtuality becomes a verticality of a
real object
in the text-world, its roots plunging into all the verbal
potentialities of the
word-as-object (‘la Nature
deviant une
succession de verticalités’ [201]).
If the critical poem in
modern mode generates
a prose/poetics of dédoublement,
that
doubling is not only a feature of Degré
Zéro
textuality (i.e. both materializing and de-realizing procedurally on
the page),
but can be traced throughout Barthes’ work beyond the
structuralist/deconstructive borderlines of his time. In a very real
sense, the
dédoublement at the limit
horizon between
prose and poetry inaugurates the very forms and modes of Barthes’ own
late
modernist procedures as theorist and writer. Those limits can be
registered
most fruitfully in Barthes’ sensing of the aural peculiarities of
writing: from
the seemingly narrow question – how do we hear the new prose/poetic
surfaces of
late modernist textuality? – blossoms a beautifully fructifying
Barthesian
polemic and meditation on language and the world. The dédoublement we have been featuring in the arguments concertinaed
into
‘Y a-t-il une écriture poétique?’
sound out in Barthes’ theorizing of ‘double entente’ in S/Z, for
instance. The
double meaning marshaled by a poised ambiguity or ‘équivoque’ (Barthes’ example is the tenor’s ‘Vous ne risquez pas de rival’ which can mean both ‘because you are
loved’ or ‘because you are courting a castrato’) are not, for Barthes,
reducible to the simple double-signifying (two signifieds for one
signifier) of
a play on words: they demand two addressees, two subjects, two
cultures, two languages
and, critically, ‘deux espèces
d’écoute’.
Double hearing divides hearing itself so as to generate noise,
rendering
communication ‘obscure,
fallacieuse,
risquée’ (OC III, 239). This is the ‘dark’ side to the doubling:
yet,
Barthes insists, in a doubling move indebted to the prose/poetics
theorized in Degré Zéro,
noise is also an act of
communication, an offering to the ear of the reader as nourishing
text: what
feeds, is counter-communication itself. The
noise
breaks down classical literature as such, impregnates it, and presents
the text
as counter-communicating discursive surface: ‘ce que le lecteur consomme, c’est ce défaut de communication, ce manque
de message’ (240).
The double hearing of a prose/poetics
creates white noise that drowns out classical forms of communication,
then, at
the same time as it offers a pregnant verbal surface that nourishes
because it
baffles easy comprehension. The dédoublement
is therefore a fusion of listening procedures: we can listen for the
blankness
and obscurity as annihilation of voice, or we can listen for the buzz
of rival
voicings, hearing both as ‘un
discours
plein de trous et plein de lumières’. That sensing of double
listening was
sustained and held to by Barthes throughout the 1970s: in 1977, he
collaborated
with Roland Havas on an entry for the Encilopedia Eidaudi, ‘Ecoute’.
Double hearing is theorized as
an aural/discursive form of the fort/da dichotomy. The first stage is
the
listening for the return of the mother: this is the moment of the
sign, and of
possibility. Then follows the second stage where listening mimes the
regular
return in semi-symbolic or play-ritual form: this is the moment of
meaning and
of secrecy. The double hearing is
generated by
the contradictory manner in which the mind encodes the sounds
heard/made: ‘ce qui, enfoui dans
la réalité, ne peut
venir à la conscience humaine qu’à travers un code, qui sert à la
fois à
chiffrer cette réalité et à la déchiffrer’ (343). The
entwining
of first and second forms of listening (listening out for mother;
playing the game that mimes the sounds of her returning) fashions a
double
hearing that encrypts and decrypts at the same time. The blend can be
taken up
a level, the first phase of which Barthes calls hermeneutic listening,
or
hearing as decoding for the secret:
…écouter,
c’est
se mettre en posture de décoder ce qui est obscure, embrouillé ou
muet, pour
faire apparaître à la conscience le ‘dessous’ du sens (ce qui est
vécu,
postulé, intentionnalisé comme cache) (‘Ecoute’, p. 343)
This
is
blended with the second elaboration: psychoanalytic listening, which
involves
an encoding of the sounds being made by one’s own game with one’s own
unconscious; encoding that is itself double since its fort/da
structure fuses
degree zero neutrality with purposeful textuality, emptying of content
with
higher forms of theoretical action: ‘elle
est
ce movement de va-et-vient qui relie la neutralité et l’engagement,
la
suspension d’orientation et la théorie’ (347). This is difficult
and
itself, one might argue, encrypted by Barthes. What he means is that
the very
movement of the vocal performance of the analysand between revelatory
and
baffling procedures creates a resonance which invites the
psychoanalyst into the
core of the unconscious (347). That resonance is, I would suggest,
comparable
to the coming together of the contradictory soundings generated by
prose/poetics. ‘Ecoute’
compares the
resonance that double hearing yields to the manner in which the act of
listening
chimes with hearing oneself speak. Barthes believes that, at the
psychoanalytic
pitch, we hear the voice of the other as purely musical (‘les modulations et les harmoniques de cette voix’) and connect that
with the strangeness of listening to one’s own voice through ‘les
carités et les masses de notre anatomie’
(347-8). The doubling caused by the very mediations merge interior and
exterior
as they merge decoding and encoding, unconscious and ego-defences,
hearing with
music-making, prosaic event with a poetics combining hermeneutic and
psychoanalytic hearing.
The double hearing of a
prose/poetics may
entwine binaries in ways that resemble structuralist oppositions; but
for
Barthes what makes the combination of pairs go beyond binary
oppositions is the
degree zero inhuman virtuality that he had identified as constitutive
of
prose/poetics’ fusional resonance. That degree zero he theorized as a
form of
the neutral, or of neutralization; always in aesthetic terms set
against
classical literature as transparent communicative form, and
dynamically both
resonating cause and consequence of the entwining of contradictory
texts and ‘ententes’. In
1965, he meditated on
Philippe Sollers as a writer, and admired Sollers’ braiding together
of ‘il’
and ‘je’ to unleash the voice of literature as a drama of encounter:
two
languages wrestling and meshing to create verbal being (OC V, 594).
That verbal
being has, paradoxically, body: a body close to the breathing presence
of the
prose/poetic text, but a body not transparently a sign of the subject,
but
rather signifying a double hearing of subjectivity as neutralized, in
the
specific Barthesian sense of suspended dynamically between
neutralisations as ‘un langage
de l’abolition qui se cherche’
(594). As such, Barthes moves on from
the
formalist dead inhuman of Degré
Zéro
where the neutral is identified as a purely formal negative absence of
literariness as such: ‘l’écriture
se
réduit alors à une sorte de mode negative dans lequel les caractères
sociaux ou
mythiques d’un langage s’abolissent au profit d’un état neutre et
inerte de la
forme’ (OC I, 218). Neutralization is a sign, rather, of the
double hearing of fort/da poetics, a dynamic pitching together of
abolition and
self-probing. It is the discontinuous, oscillating engagement that he
talks
about in his 1977 seminar on the ‘Neutre’:
cf
interview V 737. If the double hearing is this very fusion of
abolition and
richly reflexive enquiry, this matches the manner in which Barthes’
own writing
doubles up as critical prose, the texts being analysed/listened to. In
his 1972
essay on Genette, Barthes had pondered Genette’s poetics, and thought
about how
Genette, in his readings of Proust, becomes a poet with his prose; not
only in
terms of style, but in the ways Genette allows Proust to haunt his own
sentences, engendering, Barthes says, ‘un
vibrato différent de celui
auquel nous
avait habitués une lecture compacte de l’oeuvre’ (‘Le retour du poéticien’, OC IV, 144-7 [p.145]): where the vibrato
is like the resonance generated by psychoanalytic hearing, for it
foregrounds
the critic’s own double hearing as textual prose/poetics, an
abolitional/questing language that doubles up the creative with the
critical,
or ‘[Genette] le poéticien
devient poète’
by creating a second ‘langage’
through
analysis of Proust’s language, a language vibrating with Proust’s
accents, yet
fully (and emptily) Genette at the same time.
This doubled up music comes
across as a
neutral hybrid of two tongues: Barthes in the essay on Chateaubriand
in his Nouveaux essais
critiques (1972)
reflects on the entwining of two languages generated by the neutral
double
hearing of art, and theorizes the prose/poetic hybrid as anacoluthon,
the
rhetorical figure of radical discontinuity whereby ‘la langue humaine semble se rappeler, invoquer, recevoir une autre
langue (celle des dieux, comme il est dit dans le Cratyle)’ (IV,
60). That
anacoluthon inaugurates a new logic characterized by extreme verbal
rapidity,
Barthes writes – meaning that the sudden jump-cut that the figure
describes
enables a sudden speeding up of thought on the page. The example
Barthes
explores in Chateaubriand is in his writing on the Cardinal de Retz
and the
sudden and unexpected appearance of the orange groves of Valence: the
anacoluthon has the effect, Barthes writes, of introducing ‘une
poétique de la distance’ (61); in
other words, the discontinuity acts like a spatio-temporal jump-cut, a
form of
montage, juxtaposing two different languages, two different tongues,
generating
neutral power, with the force of a neutralizing prose/poetic
chronotope.
The blend of human with
other-worldly language
that Chateaubriand’s poetic prose generates out of itself and the
accents of
the other times and voices under exploration is a music of dédoublement that goes to the heart of Barthes’ sense of the
pleasure of the text. That pleasure can be summoned through the
paradox of the
neutral voice: seemingly inhuman (divine), it is sensuous, and at the
same
time, deeply musical with the body’s own sounds. ‘L’écriture à haute voix’
(261)
summons this strange prose/poetic hybrid, singing the ‘grain de la voix’, an erotic mix ‘de timbre et de langage’
that is at once simply phonetic, a matter of ‘incidents pulsionnels’, and richly embodied: ‘un texte où l’on puisse entendre le grain du gosier, la patine des
consonnes, la volupté des voyelles, toute une stéréophonie de la
chair
profonde: l’articulation du corps, de la langue, non celle du sens,
du langage’
(261). The double hearing is matched here by a double articulation,
releasing the timbre from the language surfaces in the body’s own
performance
of the words. And Barthes releases his own verbal music in that
articulation, a
patterned texture (3: 2/2/2; 4: 3/3):
un
texte où
l’on puisse entendre:
le grain du gosier,
la patine des
consonnes,
la volupté
des voyelles,
toute
une
stéréophonie de la chair profonde:
l’articulation du corps, de la
langue,
non celle du sens, du
langage
But
it is
a pattern that pitches itself as stereophonic mix of phonetic play
(note the
camp poetasting alliteration – ‘grain
du
gosier’, ‘volupté des
voyelles’)
courting the inner ear, and syntactical textures designed to court the
logical
eye (note the ‘on’-repetition
from ‘l’on’ through ‘consonnes’ to ‘stéréophonie’
and ‘profonde’).
That stereophony is for
Barthes cinematic in
the sense that it zeroes in so closely, as with the double effect of
close-up
and amplified sound, on the body’s performance of the sounds of words.
Once
again, Barthes’ own verbal performance doubles up what he is saying
with its
own prose/poetic procedures. Cinema, he writes, picks up the melodic
sound of
words very intimately:
…et
fasse
entendre dans leur matérialité, dans leur sensualité, le souffle, la
rocaille,
la pulpe des lèvres, toute une presence du museau humaine (que la
voix, que
l’écriture soient fraîches, souples, lubrifiées, finement
granuleuses et
vibrantes comme le museau d’un animal, pour qu’il réussisse à
déporter le
signifié très loin et à jeter, pour ainsi dire, le corps anonyme de
l’acteur
dans mon oreille: ça granule, ça grésille, ça caresse, ça râpe, ça
coupe: ça
jouit. (261)
Again,
we
have order and pattern to the ear: note, for instance, how the triplet
‘fraîches, souples, lubrifiées’
is
stereophonically matched by its neighbours ‘finement’-‘souffle’ -‘lèvres’. We have a
design that
courts the eye too: note the way the 5:1 shape of ‘ça granule, ça grésille, ça caresse, ça râpe, ça coupe: ça jouit’
matches the 5:1 of ‘dans leur
matérialité, dans leur sensualité,
le
souffle, la rocaille, la pulpe
des
lèvres, toute une presence du museau humaine’ or the 5:1 (rather
more
arbitrarily it is true) of ‘fraîches,
souples,
lubrifiées, finement granuleuses et vibrantes comme le museau d’un
animal’. But this designedness is cut across by the anacoluthon
effect of discontinuity, the montage surprise jump-cut effect of the
weird
list: ‘ça granule, ça grésille, ça
caresse, ça râpe, ça coupe: ça jouit.’ The proximity to the
human voice and
body sounds that cinema enables becomes Barthesian resonance and
vibrato here,
there on the page as a music of purely virtual phoneme (the ‘corps
anonyme’ of the otherworldly
language) and of deep grainy voicedness (the actor’s voice there in
the ear).
That double articulation may have a net effect of neutral white noise,
yet its
sensuous proximities are what constitute the very real pleasures of
the text,
the very real pleasures of reading Barthes’ prose/poetic voices, at
one’s ear,
resonating before one’s eyes, self-abolishing phonetic game and
body-performance
in the grain and granulations of the text as voiced. Barthes’ text
doubly
hears, doubly speaks, and makes one double up with pleasure, with a dédoublement that tracks as
it generates
a textual jouissance as
intimate
language-object that is as much ours, now, as it used to be Barthes’
own
prose/poetic body.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume
13, Winter 2016/2017, ISSN 1552-5112