Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany

posit the self as the metaphysical ground—and this places us squarely within the discourse of the transcendental subject—then we must agree with Sontag that Barthes was not fundamentally a political writer, that he merely “put on the armor of postwar debate about the responsibility of literature,” only to take it off again later; that he was “the opposite of an activist. . . one ofthe great modern refusers of history” (BR xix, xxii); that in his later work he systematically “divested himself of theories,” presumably to leave the unadorned, central, transcendent self open for all to view (BR xxxv). From this interpretation of Barthes arises “the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness” (BR ii).
    A compelling reading. And, in its striving for closure, for centrality, for the transcendence of the historical, an all-too-familiar one—as Barthes himself has shown us so convincingly. Such “retroactive completeness” is surely the retroactive imposition of precisely the discursive imperatives that so much of Barthes’s work was clearly positioned against. No, Barthes’s life and work did not end with the neat, closed parenthesis of the final revelation of his transhistorical self: he was, after all, struck down by a laundry van—a sign of the object-world of our industrial culture if there ever was one.
    Yet Sontag is indubitably right about Barthes’s style—it
is
irrepressibly aphoristic. Moreover, Barthes’s privileging of thematic/synchronic readings, which we noted earlier, would seem to be an emblem of the very discursive imperatives which so many other components of his work were contrived to contest. How are we to view Barthes, then? What are we to do with him? Are we to bracket all that was radical in him and place him on the altar of the sovereign self? Or does another, longer view suggest itself—and another course of action?
    Here we might do well to recall Delany’s words near the end of “Reading at Work”:
    As I conclude this minimal bit of work—of interpretive vigilance, of hermeneutic violence, of pleasure, of aggression—my eye lifts from the text and again strays, glances about, snags a moment at a horizon, a boundary that does not so much contain a self, an identity, a unity, a center and origin which gazes out and
defines
that horizon as the horizon is defined
by
it; rather that horizon suggests a plurality of possible positions within it, positions which allow a number of events to transpire, move near, pass through, impinge on each other, take off from one another, some of which events are that an eye looks, a voice speaks, a hand writes. (RW 117)
    In this ontology of the open horizon—which relativizes discourse to rhetoric, refuses closure and the transcendence of history, places the subject back into its object-context, and privileges the active, social self over the passive sovereign self—surely the proper response to Barthes would be to carry Barthes’s project forward. But that project is not the “national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne” of makingself-consolidation into public spectacle. It is, rather, Montaigne’s other project, marginalized by subsequent discursive practices but in fact preceding the rest of Montaigne’s work: the project of reading texts into their own radicalism, of writing the extended essay. It is that project, abandoned by Montaigne, which Barthes and the post-structuralists have begun to take up again—and which Delany carries significantly forward here.
    By ordinary standards—by ordinary readerly expectations—these essays, with their intricate formal strategies, their remarkable erudition, and their sheer length, may seem daunting, intimidating, “forbidding.” Yet far more so than the seemingly more