Barthes to Blanchot

“Roland Barthes to Maurice Blanchot, May 22, 1967

I found your letter when I returned from Italy and I’m responding to you with a word on the text that you sent me. The political analysis that it implies does not seem very accurate to me. It makes everything dependent on De Gaulle, whereas, it seems to me, it is the opposite accusation that must be made, beginning with the classes, the economy, the state, the technocracy. And if the analysis is not accurate, it inevitably involves false gestures. It seems to me that in wanting to treat Gaullism as a dictatorship pure and simple, without nuance (as if there were some advantage in entering a stereotyped intellectual situation), there is the risk of denying oneself the means to combat it. I confess moreover that I’m a bit shocked that this text totally ignores the global situation, although henceforth it is, to my mind, the only political matter that concerns us and everything must already be related to the United States’ future war against China. And finally, given my disposition, which you are aware of since it has already come between us, once, at a more serious moment than this one, I always feel repugnance toward anything that could resemble a gesture in the life of a writer. Such gestures occur outside one’s writing but nevertheless give credence to the idea that writing, independent of its actual substance and somehow institutionally, is capital that lends weight to extraliterary choices. How does one sign, in the name of a work, at the very moment when we are attacking from all sides the idea that a work can be signed?”