Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, and the “désir d’écrire”

Abstract

The profoundly anti-Hegelian or Nietzschean gesture of twentieth-century French thought has been emphasized numerous times. Not only does this gesture signify a critique of the idea of a system, of the concept of totality, and of the conceptual instrument of dialectics (or sublation), it also calls attention to the desire for the establishment of an antifoundationalist and antiessentialist culture that leaves the individual room for postmetaphysical and genuinely idiosyncratic forms of self-creation. This kind of culture, bringing the histrionic and the idiosyncratic together, highly values the constant change of, or play with, (final) vocabularies and the invention of new ways of speaking or new sets of metaphors. Not presenting itself as frivolously irresponsible and insisting on the complexity of certain moral and ethical imperatives, a postmetaphysical and antifoundationalist culture urges us to recognize the crucial nature of the attempt creatively to redescribe our predecessors and, moreover, it strives to make us see the importance of innovative conceptual revolutions. As we have already seen, Richard Rorty calls this kind of postmetaphysical culture, which no longer needs the reliability and certainty of what is more than another human creation, a literary or poeticized culture.