[Note/Caveat: This post is pretty much reserved for PA's nerdier readership.]
I'm a Benjaminian. I think about things like ruins and detritus and the trashbin of history. I don't really think too much about Barthes, not these days anyway, where I can barely eke out time to think about dear Walter to begin with. Roland, he's gonna have to take a number if he wants time in this cerebral cortex.
Or does he? In the past month, I've come across more external references to Barthes than I've encountered in the past five years. It's a bit odd, given that 1.) I don't "do" French theory, and 2.) I leave Barthes to the purview of junior TAs who have to teach Mythologies to unsuspecting first year students in Cultural Studies-esque programs. Barthes is incredibly taxing on my poor brain, much more so than Benjamin -- and I can actually read Barthes in the original.
But here it is: in the past month, I've encountered a sports magazine editor who took out a section of a friend's article because it smacked too much of Barthes; a Benjaminian who wrote about how Barthes' Camera Lucida is actually A Lovers Discourse in disguise; and the leading London-based Joycean of our generation, who invoked Barthes in the liner notes of his band's recent EP (leading Joyceans of our generation also write compellingly heartbreaking songs -- who knew?). Barthes is making a roaring comeback into my life, whether or not I want him to. It's alarming.
[Quickly: external links to Barthes here.]
So it was in the midst of an email correspondence with JB (the aforementioned leading London-based Joycean of our generation), who reminded me that A Lovers Discourse was actually a quite compelling read, when it occurred to me that I actually hadn't looked at the text in a while. And that I didn't actually know where on my bookshelf it was hiding. After determining that it was not, in fact, on any of my shelves, I looked over at my yet-to-be-unpacked boxes labelled "Misc. Theory." Barthes had to be there. I opened up the box closest to me, only to find a handful of Freud texts. Something told me to dig further. Sure enough, buried beneath Sigmund, was a whole lot of Roland.
That ha-ha aside, here's the thing:
Yeah. Guess which version American audiences are forced to buy.
JB mentioned a third version -- pictured here -- involving a woman, her reflection, and the tantalizing possibility of a self-kiss on the mirror. "A tasty cover" is how our Joycean described it to me; upon closer inspection he deemed it not as tasty as he had initially remembered it, but no matter: between tasty mirror lady and air quotes, can the crappy medieval/italics excuse for a cover font really compare? I bitch about this now, but I know that soon enough, Barthes' US publishers are going to hire some young thing fresh out of RISD to design a new collection of Barthes' works, and I'm going to regret that even more. (See previous Benjamin cover post.)
If you've never read Barthes, you're definitely missing out on something pretty special. But the thing is, once you've read him, going back seems oddly perilous. Upon finding my copy of A Lovers Discourse, I noticed that one page had been dog-eared: the chapter entitled "I Am Mad." If one ever needed a reason to flee from Barthes, there it is -- one's own compulsion to fold in the page that describes, with eyebrow-raising accuracy, how "it frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is or is going mad."
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