SOURCE: Gallop, Jane. “Feminist Criticism and The Pleasure of the Text.” In Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, edited by Diana Knight, pp. 188-201. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000

[In the following essay, first published in 1986, Gallop explores Barthes's ideas in The Pleasure of the Text as they relate to feminism, focusing on his association of pleasure with woman and leftist politics.]

In 1973 Roland Barthes, the foremost practitioner of structuralist literary criticism, published a book entitled The Pleasure of the Text.¹ It is an attempt to elaborate a theory of the text based on the notion of pleasure rather than, say, structure or cognition or ideology. According to Barthes, pleasure has been radically excluded from criticism, from scientific, serious studies or theories of the text, his own work included, presumably.

The title of the book—The Pleasure of the Text—has in fact a subtly double meaning. Grammatically “of the text” (du texte, in French) is both objective and subjective genitive, whence the duplicity of meaning: the text is both object and subject of pleasure. The title means both the text's pleasure (the pleasure that is in the text) and our pleasure (the pleasure the text affords). The distinction is subtle because it is difficult to imagine how we might separate the pleasure that is in the text from that which the text gives us. The double meaning points to a difficulty in separating subject and object within the realm of textual pleasure. Barthes writes: “On the stage (in the scene) of the text … there is not a subject and an object. The text outdates grammatical attitudes” (29).

The Pleasure of the Text represented something like a break with Barthes's previous writings, inaugurating what would be the last phase of his work. Previously Barthes had been engaged in more or less scientific study of literature as well as leftist-leaning ideological analyses of culture. Whether engaged in disclosing the workings of ideology or trying to formulate a scientific theory of the text, Barthes had been above all a “serious” writer. And that seriousness devolved from his writing stance. Often ironic, highly logical and systematic, sometimes bitingly polemical, Barthes wrote with appropriate critical objectivity about whatever object he was studying.

The object of this book is pleasure, but a new object would not constitute an epistemological break in Barthes's oeuvre since throughout his career he had considered widely varying objects. What is new about this book is reflected in the duplicity of the title, in the fact that the object of this book (pleasure) is not simply an object. If in the realm of textual pleasure it is difficult to separate subject from object, that dilemma might render it impossible to write objectively on the subject.

Pleasure is not simply an object in the text but is something that happens to the reader. Whereas structure, for example, would pretend to be immanent in the text where it could be studied and verified once and for all for any possible reading (hence affording structuralism a scientific status), pleasure depends on the individual reading and is thus uncertain. “Everyone can testify,” Barthes writes, thus grounding his statement not in objective fact but in subjective experience, “that the pleasure of the text is not sure: nothing can say that this same text will please us a second time: it's a friable pleasure, crumbled by mood, habit, circumstance, it's a precarious pleasure” (83).

Pleasure is, we might say, a subjective effect. And certainly what is new in the book and will intensify in Barthes's later works is the explicit subjectivity of his writing position. Yet he would not call this stance subjectivity, since it is not based on a unified, enduring subject but is related to things like “mood, habit, circumstance,” not to whom the reader is in any substantial, essential way but to the specific historical conjunction of reader and text, to the circumstances of the scene (the “stage,” the performance) of reading.

Barthes's change of style has provoked passionate response, both negative and positive. The polarity of response could be represented by two recent books on Barthes, each by an author long familiar with and committed to his work. Their respective titles reflect the divergence in viewpoints on the break with structuralist science and embrace of pleasure. Annette Lavers calls her book Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After.² Although a study of Barthes's work, it is also equally a book on structuralism, an introduction to structuralism. The last phase of his career, from The Pleasure of the Text to his death in 1980, is treated as mere aftermath, an epilogue to the story of structuralism. The book allots only one of its fifteen chapters to all four books of Barthes's last phase. That chapter, the last of the book, vigorously condemns Barthes for betraying his contestatory position as critical intellectual and taking on the bourgeois image of the writer. Lavers even attempts psychoanalytic explanations of Barthes's fall into weakness, his sacrifice of intellectual and political rigor for the sake of bourgeois acceptance. Steven Ungar, on the other hand, entitles his book Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire,³ a title which makes it clear that for Ungar the essential Barthes is that of the post-structuralist phase when pleasure and desire became central to his theorizing. Ungar's book treats the entirety of Barthes's pre-structuralist and structuralist work in the first of its four sections, as a prehistory to the hero of the title, the professor of desire. For Ungar the 1973 book marks the moment Barthes came into his own and began doing something really radical, calling into question his own authority, the authority of objective scientific criticism.

It is noteworthy that both positions—the attack and the celebration—make explicit connections between Barthes's work and left-wing politics. Lavers: “Barthes takes refuge in passivity and the pleasures identified with the mother. But still, they are in his mind impossible to reconcile with socialism, and therefore guilty” (21). Guilty pleasure, guilty in relation to Barthes's “socialism.” Ungar: “Never a Marxist in an orthodox sense [Barthes's] sensitivity to the use and misuse of authority has often suggested a sympathy to left-wing politics” (xv-xvi).

Lavers considers it the responsibility of the intellectual to challenge the dominant ideology, that is, bourgeois values and myths. Ungar believes we should challenge the power and authority that is masked as scientific objectivity, which itself functions as a very powerful ideology. Both critics judge Barthes from what is in one way or another a leftist, contestatory point of view and come to opposite conclusions about The Pleasure of the Text. Certainly this is where the passion comes from.

Passion and politics; politics and pleasure; leftist standards; a book on pleasure. “An entire little mythology,” Barthes writes, “tends to make us think that pleasure is an idea of the right. The right, in one swoop, relegates to the left everything that is abstract, boring, political and keeps pleasure for itself. … And the left, out of moralism, suspects, disdains any ‘residue of hedonism’” (38). “An entire little mythology,” writes Barthes. Mythologies is the title of one of Barthes's first books, pre-structuralism, where he analyzed the workings of ideology in mass culture. That book was translated by Annette Lavers.⁴ The quotation above from The Pleasure of the Text is a rare use of the word “mythology” in this sense in the last phase of Barthes's work. We thus momentarily return to the language of cultural criticism in order to question the ideological segregation of politics and pleasure, which locates politics as a leftist value and pleasure on the right. At the same time this passage foretells the negative reaction to his own move toward pleasure, correctly imagining the left, morally outraged rejection of his hedonism, and presuming to analyze the ideological underpinnings of that rejection before it even occurs.

Christopher Norris, who in his review of The Pleasure of the Text decries Barthes's hedonism from an explicitly Marxist perspective, writes that “the sensitive place in Barthes's exposition is plainly the suasive piece about ‘right’ and ‘left’ conceptions of literature.”⁵ Norris feels that “the little mythology” is “plainly the sensitive place.” This is obviously the crux; the book clearly, certainly, self-evidently hinges on the question of left and right. By the expression “the sensitive place” Norris means the weak point, the vulnerable spot in the argument, but in the context of Barthes's theory of textual pleasure we could also hear “the sensitive place” as “the erogenous zone.” This is the point where the critic can get Barthes, but the attack takes on erotic connotations.

Connotations reinforced by Norris' overheated prose. Norris calls Barthes's last mythology a “suasive piece.” According to Barthes, “a word can be erotic … if it is unexpected, succulent in its novelty (in certain texts, words glitter, they are distractive, incongruous apparitions—it matters little that they are pedantic)” (Plaisir 68). For me, Norris' “suasive” is such a word, a word that sends me scurrying to the dictionary where I learn that “suasive” is the adjectival form of “suasion” which means persuasion and is “used chiefly in the phrase moral suasion.” In this “sensitive place” Barthes is using seductive rhetoric, working on the moral sense of his reader. In the “little mythology,” we remember, the moral sense is implicated in the left's suspicion of pleasure.

Plainly, “suasive” marks a “sensitive place” in Norris' exposition. Echoes of morality, seduction, and eros, here at the juncture of pleasure and politics, the passionately moral question of left or right. And in The Pleasure of the Text, “the sensitive place,” the place of passion where the text suddenly gives itself over to the reader's inquisitive touch, turns out to be, in keeping with Barthes's notion of the erotic as the unexpected, the sensitive place turns out to be not the explicitly sexual ideas and images but this discussion of the politics of pleasure.

The Pleasure of the Text does not seem to be a political text. In fact pleasure is there valued because it is beyond the conflictual positions of ideological struggle. Yet despite a certain impression of apolitical hedonism, politics and ideology are questions running throughout the book. If we try to read The Pleasure of the Text apolitically, banishing politics, embracing pleasure, then we have fallen into the reactionary side of the mythology. The right covers over political questions with aesthetic questions of pleasure; the left masks its pleasures with political positions. The book must be read, has been read, will be read within and against this “little mythology.” We must think politics and pleasure together. What are the politics of pleasure? What the pleasures of politics?

Barthes writes of a form of ecstasy (intensest, most disruptive mode of pleasure, which he calls jouissance), a form of ecstasy that “consists in depoliticizing what is apparently political, and in politicizing what apparently is not” (Plaisir 71). One of the disturbing but also pleasurable effects of this book may be this radical shuffling of the place of the political so that it is not where we expect it and only appears when unexpected. Yes, indeed, the book is a depoliticization—reactionary gesture, Lavers' complaint—; it flees serious ideological struggle and escapes to the self-indulgent realm of pleasure. But it seems also, at least in its effects, to make pleasure a serious political question (leftist gesture).

Immediately after the sentence “another ecstasy … consists in depoliticizing what is apparently political and in politicizing what apparently is not,” there is a dash like those marking another voice in dialogue, and we read, “But no, see here, one politicizes what ought to be and that's it.” Immediately after positing another, more pleasurable relation to politics, one that is outside “the little mythology,” another voice speaks, a critical, impatient voice from within the text that would call Barthes back into line, back to moral obligation. The word “ought” (“one politicizes what ought to be”) is in italics. This is the voice of the orthodox left for which there is a moral obligation to politicize everything. Any depoliticization shirks that responsibility. The voice could be Lavers', but it is coming from within Barthes's text. As Lavers says: “[Barthes's pleasures] are in his mind impossible to reconcile with socialism and therefore guilty” (212). The question of Barthes's complacency and cooptation by reactionary values is unavoidable, precisely because the book is literally in dialogue with that question.

Barthes's critics debate the politics of his hedonist gesture. So does his text. What is the politics of pleasure? That will be one of our questions here. A question I ask in the light of femininism.

Feminism has gone a long way to “politicize what apparently is not,” or perhaps I should say, “to politicize what ought to be.” “The personal is the political” is now an overly familiar feminist slogan. And we are indebted to feminism for the most cogent political analyses of sexuality, just as we must thank an early feminist literary critic, Kate Millett, for the phrase sexual politics. In Barthes's little book pleasure is always strongly tied to sexual pleasure. Is feminist sexual politics a politics of pleasure? Or does pleasure remain, for feminism, a suspicious depoliticization of the sexual?

Barthes and feminism, strange bedfellows? To my knowledge Barthes never discusses feminism, anywhere: The Pleasure of the Text never even mentions sexual difference, although both sexuality and difference are central themes. Lavers implies that feminists are, with good reason, hostile to Barthes, although her sentence about it is more than usually obscure, obscured, no doubt, by passion (208). Lavers cites Claudine Herrmann's book of feminist literary criticism, Les Voleuses de langue, as her example of the feminist critique of Barthes. Herrmann uses a passage from The Pleasure of the Text to show that for Barthes both bad writing and its reader are feminine, not of course explicitly but in the imagery. For Herrmann, Barthes is only one of an entire tradition of male writers who associate denigration and femininity.⁶

Even Ungar, Barthes's champion, can only say, “Barthes is certainly something less (or other) than a feminist” (90). Writing from a 1980s American progressive point of view, Ungar characterizes Barthes as “less than a feminist.” Not to be a feminist in this age is to be lacking, inadequate. But in parentheses he adds “or other,” hoping to free Barthes and himself from this moral responsibility, from an oppressive standard into some sort of alterity. The gesture is ironic since the history of phallocentric thought has considered woman “less than man,” inferior, castrated, and feminists have argued that we are not less but other.

For Ungar's Barthes the tables are turned, and if this inversion seems suspect or glib, it might also point to some common ground between Barthes's project and feminism. Both, we might say, attempt to rethink what is traditionally “less than” as “other.” Barthes writes: “The pleasure of the text is always possible as the exercise of a different physiology” (Plaisir 49). In that valorization of “a different physiology,” in the insistence on a positive reading of difference in the body, I hear something potentially friendly to feminism.

The politics of Barthes's book is a sexual politics as well as a politics of sexual difference, but sexual there refers not to the sexes but to eroticism, and sexual difference is individual difference, perversion, rather than the difference between the sexes. Textual pleasure and its wilder cousin textual ecstasy are presented not only as bodily and erotic but as specifically perverse. Perversion is here defined as “pleasure without function” (31), just as perverse sexuality, according to Barthes, “removes ecstasy (orgasm) from the finality of reproduction” (40). Pleasure is perverse when it is not subjugated to any function, like reproduction. Textual pleasure is not only perverse sexually (by not serving the reproduction of the species), but also without any higher function such as instruction, communication, or ideological stance. Or rather, I would say, it is not that the latter functions do not obtain, but that the pleasure of the text is not subordinate to them in any predictable way.

If the pleasure of literature is “an idea of the right,” sexual perversion is not. Thus by insistently sexualizing pleasure, Barthes breaks up the mythological solidarity of aesthetics and conservative values. By laying bare the perversion of aesthetic pleasure, he renders textual pleasure unacceptable to the right although it remains condemnable to the left as decadent “hedonism.”

What is the relation between sexualizing pleasure and politicizing pleasure? According to Barthes “there are few [writers] who fight against both ideological repression and libidinal repression” (58). The politicizers and the sexualizers are on the whole different. Yet, as I have suggested, feminism is at least nominally the place of sexual politics: explicitly sexual explicitly politics. Perversion, however, is a thorny problem for feminism.

If perversion is defined as the liberation of sexuality from reproductive ends, then many of the central issues of feminism would find common cause there. Abortion, contraception, lesbianism, clitoridectomy all involve questions of the right to non-reproductive sexual pleasure. Indeed the central gesture in modern feminist sexology, the displacement of the primary female sexual organ from vagina to clitoris, can be understood as a move from an organ of reproduction to an organ of pleasure which does not serve reproduction. This displacement might then itself be considered a perversion, in Barthes's sense of “removing orgasm from the finality of reproduction.”

Feminism has expressed continual solidarity with the gay liberation movement and thus defended this “perversion.” But it should be added, of course, that the usual feminist move is not to embrace perversion, as Barthes does, but rather to challenge the notion of homosexuality as perverse. If classically the clitoral woman, whether homo- or heterosexual, is considered perverted, the politics of feminism has been to challenge the classification and redefine the clitoris and lesbianism as normal.

Thus, in fact, feminism has not embraced perversion, but has defined it differently than Barthes does. And indeed, large sectors of the feminist movement stand in violent opposition to perversion which is understood to be male. The pervert—child molester, rapist, porno fan, fetishist, voyeur, exhibitionist, sadist, masochist, etc.—is seen as symptom of an aggressive, male sexuality that is inherently perverted and a primary enemy of feminism.

In its efforts to reclaim the clitoris and the lesbian from the realm of perversion, feminism has constituted a new standard for normal sexuality. The norm for feminist sexuality is an egalitarian relation of tenderness and caring where each partner is considered as a “whole person” rather than as an object of sexual fantasy. This norm clearly devolves from feminist critiques of patriarchal, phallocentric sexuality. Since relations between the sexes are, in a feminist analysis, considered the equivalent of relations between class-enemies, the egalitarian standard renders questionable whether any heterosexual relation (at least at this point in history) can be “normal.”

Normal feminist sexuality is thus lesbian. If this seems in some way absurd, since the vast majority of feminists are still practicing heterosexuals, let us remember that likewise according to Barthes's biologico-psychoanalytico-Catholic definition of normal sexuality as subordinate to reproduction, only a small portion of sexual activity could be considered normal. Whatever the standard, few people seem to be sexually normal. When thinking about the functioning of sexual norms, we should bear in mind that, especially in the realm of the sexual, a norm is not a mean but an ideal.

In an excellent article on pleasure, sexuality, and feminism, Cora Kaplan, a feminist literary critic, notes that since both radical and revolutionary feminism “have located the universal truth of gender oppression in a sadistic and insatiable male sexuality, which is empowered to humiliate and punish [, a]ny pleasure that accrues to women who take part in heterosexual acts is … necessarily tainted.” If male sexuality is sadistic, female heterosexual pleasure must necessarily be masochistic. Tainted pleasure, bad, sick, masochistic: perversion. Liberated from subjection to biologico-Christian standards, pleasure must now be politically correct. Kaplan continues: “at the extreme end of this position, women who ‘go with men’ are considered collaborators.”⁷

My point, let me be clear, is not to complain that lesbians oppress their heterosexual sisters. Lesbians are an oppressed minority group who do not have the power to enforce their own hierarchies even if they wished to. My point rather is that there is a standard of normal sexuality in feminist thought, of politically correct sexuality which functions as morality and condemns pleasure that is not subordinate to it. (Witness the scandal created within feminism by the “coming out” of lesbian sadomasochists.)

Heterosexual feminists may experience their sexuality as a disturbing contradiction to their political stance. Within feminism heterosexual desire has only been theorized negatively. For example, penetration enacts the subjugation of women by men. Women's attraction to men reinforces phallocentrism and women's sense of their own inferiority. In such models there is little place for pleasure, which then becomes perverse, rebellious, insubordinate to political reason. Lesbian pleasure, to be sure, has been celebrated in feminist writing: theoretical, fictional, poetic, but the pleasure celebrated is respectably subordinate to correct politics. Pleasure is put in its place, reinforcing sisterhood.

A few years ago, Elaine Marks, an important feminist critic and at that time director of the substantial Women's Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, gave a talk in which she confessed that she loved to read Proust even though she did not know how Proust fit in with her position as a feminist. Marks is confessing a guilty pleasure, a pleasure insubordinate to feminism. What is the relation between Proust and feminism? Neither antagonism nor solidarity? Indifference? Barthes: “[Pleasure] is a drift, something … that cannot be taken care of by any collectivity. … Something neutral? It is evident that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral, but because it is atopic” (39). “Atopic”: strange word, formed on the model of utopic. Barthes italicizes it as he does “neutral” before it. Neutral: neuter, neither one nor the other; atopic: not of a place, neither here nor there. Indifference? Or simply difference? Proust “is certainly something less (or other) than a feminist.” Proust and feminism, strange bedfellows? Perversion?

Proust has a special place in The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes writes: “I understand that Proust's work is, at least for me, the reference work … the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony … that does not at all mean that I am a Proust ‘specialist’: Proust, is what comes to me, it is not what I call; it is not an ‘authority’ (59). Barthes is not a Proust specialist; he is not supposed to write on Proust; he does not seek and research Proust; but Proust comes to him. Not an “authority,” like Freud or Nietzsche, Proust is something personal, individual, perverse, “at least for me, the reference work.” Proust accompanies Barthes, his companion in textual pleasure.

Marks confesses that she loves reading Proust but does not know how to align this with her feminism. Barthes is writing what is in certain ways a manifesto for postmodernist texts—Sollers, Robbe-Grillet, Severo Sarduy—but Proust is what comes to him unsolicited. I confess that I love reading Barthes but do not know how to align this with my feminism, although that indeed is the project of this paper. When I assigned myself the title “Feminist Criticism and the Pleasure of the Text” my wish was to take this book which is a source of great pleasure to me and reduce the scandal of its atopicality by subordinating my pleasure to some feminist idea.

In the first phase of feminist criticism, literary critics schooled in the tradition of male authors turned on that male canon to show how the great authors were sexist pigs, that is to say that the images of women in literature by men were distorting stereotypes that contributed to women's oppression and our alienation from self. Male literature had given us inhuman binary roles: madonna vs. whore, child-woman vs. bitch. Like the analysis of heterosex, the analysis of male literature taught us to see subjugation and alienation in place of romance and beauty. Yet women readers had experienced pleasure in reading Rousseau or D. H. Lawrence, had enjoyed identifying with virgins and whores. The analysis showed us that our pleasure was “tainted.”

In a second phase, feminists turned to women writers—the few already in the canon, the rediscovery of lost women writers from the past, and contemporary literary progeny of the women's movement. Feminist criticism moved from negation to affirmation, and suddenly there was a place for joy. Legitimate textual pleasure. A feminist can enjoy her identification with the heroine of Kate Chopin's The Awakening or Virginia Woolf's Orlando. It is politically correct to find women's writing gratifying. Normal pleasure, pleasure properly subservient to political principle.

These two phases are obviously schematic and the neat bipolarities betray a sinister distortion. I should add, of course, that many feminist critics devote themselves to proving various male authors (from Shakespeare to Lacan) sympathetic proto- or crypto-feminists just as other feminist critics exert themselves in vehement critique of diverse women writers. The actuality and plurality of feminist criticism has a tapestried complexity that makes my tight binary scheme of attacking male pigs and celebrating female identity what Barthes might call a “little mythology.” Yet my point might be that “an entire little mythology” makes us think that feminists should critique and demystify male writing and find pleasure in female writing. Feminist ideology produces a morality that could condemn as deviant any pleasure that does not serve the enhancement of female identity.

Elaine Marks, whose credentials as a feminist are good and strong, avows that she loves Proust. To be sure, Proust is not one of the enemies of feminism: no Henry Miller or Norman Mailer, he. But neither is he one of its heroines. Indifferent, atopic, neutral. For Barthes, the wonderful thing about textual pleasure is that, in a world of raging ideologies, in the war of discourses, textual pleasure can be neutral. And Proust is Barthes's point of reference in the pleasure of the text.

One might remark that both Proust and Barthes were male homosexuals. And that male homosexuality may figure as the exemplary thorn in feminism's thorny relation to perversion. We must affirm the normality of homosexuality in order to celebrate lesbianism, yet male homosexuality is also highly phallocentric male sexuality and partakes of all the perversions of male heterosexuality: rape, pornography, child molesting, etc. In practice the allegiance between lesbians and gay males is always problematic. Male homosexuality can neither be condemned nor celebrated. In the highly polarized world of feminism, male homosexuality might be ne-uter, neither one nor the other.

But I am not prepared here to explain Proust and Barthes as male homosexual authors. For I do not know how to articulate the relation between their lived homosexuality and their writing. Not that it is irrelevant. Proust functions as a model for the late Barthes in that in Proust there is an unusually profound intrication of text and life. Homosexuality and biography are explicitly important questions in both Proust and (late) Barthes. But it is not clear to me what constitutes the homosexuality of their texts.

In contemplating a feminist reading of The Pleasure of the Text I felt discouraged by the lack of markers of sexual difference there, those markers that the feminist critic grabs onto in her intercourse with the text. Barthes never uses the words “masculine” or “feminine,” for example. Athough there is much talk of sexual activity, the object of erotic desire is sexually indifferent. When Barthes writes “the most erotic place on a body is it not there where clothing gapes?”, he lists as his examples of intermittence: “the skin that glistens between two pieces (pants and sweater), between two edges (the half-open shirt, the glove and the sleeve”) (19). The examples seem applicable to either sex; all items of clothing are unisex with the possible exception of the shirt. A faint hint of homosexual desire but set against a general impression of neutrality. Sexual indifference, neutrality in the war between the sexes.

I recently gave a seminar on The Pleasure of the Text, a “straight” seminar on the book, no attempt to do a feminist analysis. But I did mention that elsewhere I was trying to work out a feminist reading of the text. Two women spoke out in anticipation of what might be my feminist reading. One asked if I as a woman did not find this book offensive. I never found out what she meant, but I can only presume that “as a woman” she found the explicit perversion offensive, since in some analyses perversion is by definition intricated with male sexuality's assaults on women's civil rights. The other woman asked what I made of the word “neuter” in the text. I was surprised since I hadn't known Barthes used the word. I was reading the French text and they were reading the English translation. The word “neutre,” which I had always understood as “neutral,” has been translated as “neuter.”

The word “neutre” appears three times in this book. Each time I would translate it as “neutral” for it refers to pleasure's atopicality, its status outside the war of values. I am puzzled by the fact that the translator chose to use “neuter,” and at first dismiss it as carelessness. Yet in my frustration with the lack of sexual difference in Barthes's erotics, I find myself returning again and again to the word “neuter” as if it shed new light on Barthes's neutrality. On all three appearances of “neutre” in The Pleasure of the Text, the word is in italics, as if one should remark something about it, as if the meaning were somehow changed without becoming another word, as if the word had become foreign. Five of the six meanings given for “neutre” in the dictionary could be translated by the English word “neutral.” But the other meaning of the word, which is used in the field of linguistics, is “belonging to a grammatical category in which are grouped the nouns … that do not present the characteristics of masculine and feminine,” in other words, what we in English call neuter nouns. In French, of course, there are no neuter nouns; the neuter is there exotic, atopic perhaps. And it is noteworthy that neutre as neuter refers to linguistic gender, to sexual difference as it operates within language, within the text.

A few days after the seminar, I came across an example of Barthes using the word neutre in this linguistic meaning. In 1977, in his Inaugural Lesson at the College de France, Barthes stated: “I am forced always to choose between the masculine and the feminine, the neuter [le neutre] or the complex are forbidden me.” I found this sentence in an analysis by Danielle Schwartz of the relation between language and power in Barthes's thought.⁸ Schwartz notes that Barthes talks about language in terms of the dichotomy constraint/freedom. In this example, Barthes is constrained to choose either masculine or feminine; he is not free to choose the neuter (neither masculine nor feminine) or the complex (presumably some combination of the two).

Barthes is here talking about the linguistic notion of selection. According to Schwartz, “the notion of selection designates the work peculiar to the speaking subject consisting in choosing a signifier in an entire paradigmatic chain. This notion, which in Jakobson for example, is a scientific description, is here taken up and psychologized on the model of the alienating choice. The existential problematic of choice comes and grafts itself on the linguistic notion, thus giving the mechanisms of language a predestination that prepares his political version.” Barthes is, according to Schwartz, in the process of recasting the laws of language, and our place under those laws, as a political dilemma. And with the example of the obligation of feminine or masculine, the prohibition of the neuter, one can imagine that the politics of language could become and might already be a sexual politics, or rather truly a politics of gender, not as we have come to use the word “gender,” meaning biological sex, but in its dictionary meaning as sexual differentiation within language, textual sexuality.

Schwartz concludes her analysis of this sentence thus: “Implicitly in Barthes's text are manifested the regret and the wish for a counter-language, for an emancipation from constraints.” And part of Barthes's liberated language, linguistic utopia would be access to the neutre, sexual neutrality. Feminism too has decried our compulsory, either-or masculine or feminine, created words like chairperson, spokesperson. Feminism too has longed for a freedom to be neuter or complex. Yet beyond the masculine/feminine dichotomy is the realm of perversion. Homosexuals used to be called the third sex. This utopic italicized neutre may be a sensitive zone of Barthes's homotextuality. It certainly is part of a wish to escape the constraints of bipolar gender differentiation. And so perhaps he shares in feminism's liberatory project.

And yet I am suspicious of neutrality, suspicious of the wish to deny sexual difference. Women have historically been associated with sexual difference, have been sexually differentiated from the generic so-called mankind. The wish to escape sexual difference might be but another mode of denying women. I distrust male homosexuals because they choose men over women just as do our social and political institutions, but they too share in the struggle against bipolar gender constraints, against the compulsory choice of masculine or feminine.

Barthes edges toward an escape from that compulsory choice into something he calls neutre: neutral, neuter, sexually indifferent, outside the ideological war of the sexes. The neutre may be emancipatory but it is not free from eroticism. The neutre is reached through perversion and pleasure. Near the end of his book Barthes writes: “Pleasure is a neutre (the most perverse form of the demoniacal)” (102). The neutral here is far from innocent. Neuter sexuality, outside the dichotomy necessary for reproduction. Neuter, but not asexual, neither one sex nor the other, but not asexual.

Complex, perhaps. Near the beginning of the book Barthes imagines: “Fiction of an individual who would abolish in himself barriers, classes, exclusion … by simple riddance of that old spectre: logical contradiction. … Now this counter-hero exists: It's the text reader, in the moment when he takes his pleasure” (9-10). In textual pleasure one is rid of either-or, momentarily. Including, guiltily enough, feminine or masculine, and worse yet, feminist or sexist.

The pleasure of Proust. A guilty pleasure. On the question of feminism: neutre. The pleasure of Barthes, but what about feminism? What is Barthes's position on women? He never takes a position on women. (Out of homosexuality perhaps? Neutrality? Exclusion?) A possible exception: the word woman occurs once in The Pleasure of the Text.

In a section of the book called “War,” Barthes opposes pleasure to “the warrior value,” lauds pleasure's atopicality in ideological conflict. At the end of the section, however, he specifies that the text is not, nor does he want it to be, devoid of ideology. He writes that “Some people want a text (art, painting) without a shadow, cut off from ‘the dominant ideology’; but that is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of The Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow: this shadow, it's a bit of ideology”(53). “The Woman without a Shadow” is a story by Hofmannsthal about a woman who could not bear children because she had no shadow. By speaking of a text without a shadow he is equating text and woman. Susan Gubar, well-known feminist critic, in fact cites this passage from Barthes as yet another example of the longstanding masculinist tradition of woman as text, as art object, rather than artist.⁹ Yes, but … that is not where I connect to this passage, which has, I believe, a certain homosexual specificity.

I am interested in the association between fertility and dominant ideology. Barthes specifies later that there is only dominant ideology, no such thing as dominated ideology, that ideology is the idea inasmuch as it dominates. Fecundity and ideology, both are shadows, outside the light of reason, the lightness of atopic pleasure. Normal sexuality for Barthes, as we have seen, is fertile, reproductive sexuality. That is also the dominant ideology of sex. Perversion is pleasure without reproduction, without ideology, without shadow. Yet in this passage he is instead asserting the necessity for a bit of reproduction. The totally perverse text is sterile. And at the moment he would affirm “a bit” of reproductive sexuality, he writes the word “Woman.”

The word is capitalized, refers to another text (“The Woman without a Shadow”) and not to some extratextual being. The woman he mentions is in fact nonreproductive, that is, perverse. Yet in order to propose a negative image of nonreproductive sexuality, an image of sterility rather than perversion, the woman appears, for the first and only time in the book. Perversion, pleasure, the neuter are positive images throughout: nonreproductive sexuality is glorified. But suddenly when Barthes needs to counter this by showing nonreproductive pleasure in a negative light, woman appears. As if nonreproductive sexuality were glorious for men (male homotextuality) but a sterile woman were still a shame, a failure, less than rather than other.

Is woman for Barthes intricated with dominant ideology, normal reproductive sexuality, all that he is writing and struggling against? Pleasure has traditionally been associated with woman, particularly in its erotic sense. In the male heterosexual tradition, subversive pleasure that lures one away from productive duty is female. Women have thus been suspicious of pleasure because it relegates us to the nonserious, nonproductive, non-warrior side of things. In a male homosexual tradition woman may be on the other side, allied with duty, productivity, and ideology. This tradition is hardly restricted to overt practicing homosexuals; it includes, for example, a long tradition in American literature, as recognized by Leslie Fielder and his wake. Certainly this role is equally constraining for women. And oddly enough it may rejoin a certain tendency in feminism which calls women to their ideological duty (political seriousness, warrior values, feminine identity) and away from any nonproductive pleasures.

So Barthes's pleasure book also has “a bit of woman” and that bit is certainly “a bit of dominant ideology,” the ideology that considers woman inadequate unless she is mother. Woman is overshadowed by the mother, femininity masked by maternity. Remains to be considered: Barthes and Proust, both had similar close relations to their mothers, late into their adult lives. Male homosexuality and the mother, strange bedfellows, yet to be retheorized, in the wake of feminism.

And what of pleasure, perversion, and the mother? Lavers, who is always on the lookout for Barthes's collaboration with the dominant ideology, writes: “Barthes takes refuge in … the pleasures identified with the mother. But still, they are in his mind impossible to reconcile with socialism, and therefore guilty” (212). Barthes's pleasures are identified with the mother. And these pleasures are guilty. Lavers suggests that in Barthes there is an identification between the mother and the bourgeoisie, whence Barthes issues. Guilty, forbidden pleasures of a return to the maternal bourgeoisie. Of course in Freud's Oedipal schema the pleasures of the mother are the archetypal guilty pleasures. And for Barthes, the writer is that kind of pervert: “The writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother” (60).

Guilty from the point of view of socialism, from the political point of view. The chapter called “Politics” in The Pleasure of the Text consists of one lone sentence: “The text is (should be) that impertinent person who shows her/his behind to Father Politics” (86). The sentence is wonderfully provocative, but for our purposes let us note the phrase “Father Politics,” capitalized and italicized. Politics is paternal, and so of course pleasure with the mother would be guilty in the eyes of politics, according to one's political (socialist) superego. “The pleasures identified with the mother are in his mind impossible to reconcile with socialism, and therefore guilty.”

Feminism shares with Barthes the goal of an impertinent stance toward the father and a reconciliation and valorization of the mother, and yet we should question that little mythology: paternal politics vs. maternal pleasure. Another pleasure: to politicize what apparently is not, to depoliticize what apparently is. Another pleasure: to politicize motherhood, to find pleasure in the father—but no, see here, we politicize what ought to be and that's all.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973). All translations mine; page numbers will be given in the text. The book has been translated by Richard Miller as The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

2. Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

3. Steven Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

4. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Translated by Annette Lavers as Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).

5. Christopher Norris, “Les plaisirs des clercs: Barthes's Latest Writing,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 14 (1974) 253.

6. Claudine Herrmann, Les Voleuses de langue (Paris: des femmes, 1976) 16-18.

7. Cora Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism” in Formations of Pleasure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) 29.

8. Danielle Schwartz, “Barthes, le langage et le pouvoir,” La Nouvelle Critique, 106 (1977) 56.

9. Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity” in Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 76.