ECRITURE FEMININE AND VISUAL SIGNIFICATIONS IN THE WRITINGS OF
ROLAND BARTHES AND HELENE CIXOUS
Jacqueline Claire Oboussier
A thesis submitted to the University of Bristol
in accordance with the requirements for the degree of
Ph.D. in the Faculty of Arts
Bristol University French Department
September 1994
Abstract
This study takes as its point of departure the fact that Roland Barthes’s work has most often been read as theory before writing. This is an approach which, whilst justified with regard to his earlier texts, when carried through to those of (broadly) the last decade has the effect of overlooking their substance as writing. Here however Barthes’s text is given priority as writing. Taking ecriture feminine as developed by Helene Cixous as an intertext, this reading traces how Barthes’s texts as writing intersect with this economy and share many of its poetic characteristics and epistemological concerns. The thesis is constituted of seven chapters, each divided into subsections, which explore different paradigms of signification (beyond the representational theory of signs) influential or, Barthes and mobilised by him within the writing process. The opening chapter, which also functions as an introduction, considers the notion of ecriture feminine and how it may be seen as both an approach to and a production from Barthes’s (mainly) later writing. Thus it proposes the intertextual relationship between the writing of Cixous and Barthes to be expanded in the chapters to follow. Chapter two explores the notion of the body as it is written by both authors; how they inscribe an analogous relationship between body and text and how this relationship, in turn, generates a materialist paradigm of signification which challenges the closed-circuit of representation. Chapter three examines Barthes’s recourse to the Orient (most notably Japan and China) as a utopian and ultimately atopian model of signification and how this model functions within the writing, its successes and its limitations. Chapter four takes up visual signification as addressed in the writing of Barthes and Cixous. It considers their attentiveness to the materiality of language as poetry, their respective textual reactions to painting and, ultimately, their shared ambivalence towards the visual. Taking its lead from this ambivalence, chapter five discusses synaesthesia as an expanded field of signification operating in the writing of both Barthes and Cixous. Chapter six traces the evolution of Barthes’s writing on photography. It examines the notion of l’obrus and how, from an early stage, photography embodies a transgressive potential for signification. The final, concluding chapter again deals with photography in the context of Barthes’s last work La Chumbre claire which, it proposes, marks a significant shift in the economy of Barthes’s writing. La Chambre claire, it is argued, takes as its underlying economy a feminine relation to the gift and, more specifically, to depense, the axial characteristic of ecriture feminine.
Contents
List of Illustrations 1
Introduction 3
Introduction Notes 5
Chapter 1: The Feminine as approach 6
Notes 14
Chapter 2: The Embodiment of writing 16
The body writing back 18
Figurations of the body in writing 21
The body as pictogram 25
The body as voice/voice as music 29
Barthes’s voice 32
Beyond the Lacanian Imaginary 37
Atopias of language/languages of atopia 46
Notes 50
Chapter 3: Cette bdance d’utopie: Barthes’s Orient(alism) 57
Barthes’s Japan: The Orient as utopia 57
Japan: Signing differences 62
Barthes writing Japan 69
Alors, !a Chine?: Towards silence 81
Notes 90
Chapter 4: Visual Writing and writing the visual 96
From idea to image 97
roland BA RTHES par roland hartlres and 100
Fragments d ‘un discours antoureu.r:
Configurations of the Imaginary
A/phabetlsme: plaisir or jouissance 107
Writing from painting to writing 111
Masson, Rcyuichot and Twombly: Une peinture 116
scriptible
Notes 130
Chapter 5: Barthes and Cixous: A Synaesthetic writing 136
The marginalisation of sensorial perception 138
The Man Who Tasted Shapes: Synaesthesia 140
and neurology
Metaphorical effects and corporeality 145
Clarice Lispector: Sensing the world 146
Signifiance: Meaning as sense 153
Writing from Twombly 157
Rhythm 166
Chapter 6: Unspeakable images: Barthes, photography 175
and femininity
The photographic paradox: Connotation vs. 175
Denotation
‘Le Troisieme sens’: L’ohvie and 1’ohtus 181
Cindy Sherman and L’ohtus 186
Le seas obtus and intersuhjectivity 195
Droit duns les yeur: The photographic look 199
Notes 209
Chapter 7: Le reveil de I’intraitable realite: 213
La Chambre claire and writing as depense
Depenser: A feminine relation to the gift 215
Une Matlresis singularis 220
The suspension of images 223
The Studium and the Puncttun 227
A recantation: Wholeness and fragmentation 231
The Real: Resisting the Simulacrum 237
Un-thinking time 240
La Chambre Claire: Death and life 244
Notes 250
Bibliography 258