ABSTRACT
The old values are no longer transmitted, no longer circulate, no longer im press; literature is desacralized, institutions are impotent
to defend and impose it as the implicit model of the human. It is not, if you like, that literature is destroyed; rather it is no longer protected, so that this is the moment to deal with it. Literary semiology is, as it were, that journey which lands us in a country free by default; angels and dragons are no longer there to defend it. O ur gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely
things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at once decadent and prophetic, a moment o f gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest possible pleasure. [Em phases
add ed]1
Barthes’s Inaugural Lecture is a quiet manifesto o f postmodernism in literature. W hat goes by the name of postmodern is an attitude toward the past, an attitude that turns on the suspicion that the distinction between past and present is dissolving even as the idea of human beings as centres o f consciousness constitutive of their worlds loses its hold on our imagination. The postmodern is a certain conjunction of the classic and the modern, a conjunction between classical works and a modern conception of literature. The classical conception is what is no longer handed down from one generation to the next, and is out o f date by virtue o f not being part of a common inheritance. No longer in circulation, it rests in an archive, and should our glance fall upon it there we are not sliding back into the past along the line o f continuous development beloved by the nineteenth century, where even what was out of date was thought to contain in germ what was present and to be therefore itself present in what was born from it, as the child is present in the man he has become. The line has broken off. Nor are we bridging a gap, drawing a dotted line to cover the gap from then to now; for this suggests that the line is virtually
continuous and a collective forgetting has driven segments of it into
shadow or underground. This is to deny that the line has broken off. It
may seem not to matter much whether we say that some past works
are deep buried but at bottom connected to the present or that they
stand to present time in the sam e relation of strangeness as M artian or
M ayan time stands to our time. But it is not perverse to slide along a line or to move within the space co-ordinate with a time, and the moment of sliding is no moment of apocalypse. What threatens doom and what goes against nature is letting our gaze fall upon those old and lovely things whose signified is abstracted from the line on which we travel back and forth between present and past, the line that connects past conceptual schemes with the present ones. The sign of
(the classical conception of) literature under which the lovely things
were signed as literature is out o f play, the things are out of date. Between the subject and the objects of the gaze there is a rupture, a chasm.
