ABSTRACT
Barthes, a critic o f culture stunningly reminiscent of Socrates, concluded that any reasoned response to the predicament is inevitably co-opted by the institutions and languages of the prevailing tribes: its acceptance invests it with a value it would not otherwise have, thus beclouding the issue of what its own value is. Socratic in his insistence that one can never with justice stop examining what is given nor with justice take anything to go without saying, Barthes faces the question of how one can critically examine received opinions when, as he has supposed, the languages of criticism are co-opted by the powers in place. This is formally sim ilar to another question his work addresses, namely, how can one criticise the tradition that
spawned the current doxa when all critical languages bear the press of
tradition’s weight, or how can one break from tradition to make
something new when one has only tradition’s tools with which to work
and it lenses through which to see? In a word, how can there be
anything new? Barthes’s answers to these questions effect a rewriting of the con-
cept o f the human subject radical in its insight and implications, and explain why the work of his last decade has evoked such disparate responses. Some have said that Barthes has taken the revolution
working itself out through structuralism and post-structuralism to the
limit o f an extreme subjective relativism, others that he has betrayed
the revolution. Some think Barthes’s return to the revolution’s other
side good, others think it bad. The former include Frank Kerm ode, who has called Barthes a ‘reconstituted hum anist’ , an old-fashioned
man of letters, and Yves Bonnefoy, Barthes’s successor to a chair in literature at the College de France, who joins the number of critics who hold that in his last years Barthes was overcoming ‘the contemporary reluctance to raise the question of the self’ , implying that he
was resurrecting a conception that had become buried under the
notion of a m aterial subject determined by language and by history.1
