HARK, HARK! A DOG WAS BARTHES, PART 1

In the August essay PRESENCE-AND-ABSENCE-MINDED PROFESSOR I referenced an ongoing online forum-argument in which my opponent, in the course of making some arcane point, made what seems to have been an unattributed reference to Derrida's "theology of presence." I didn't recognize the concept being referenced, which apparently also goes by the name "metaphysics of presence," but either phrasing probably would've have missed the boat as I've next to no interest in Derrida. So in PROFESSOR I simply discussed the topic of presence and absence from a myth-critical POV.

After that, in the comments-thread to this post, sometime correspondent Charles Reece sought out said online argument, whose main topic thread (if you can call it that) revolved around not Derrida but rather, that Maven of Marxist Mendacity himself, Roland Barthes. Charles used the word "hatred" to describe my contempt for Barthes, described in this earlier essay. Be that as it may, I like to think that I hate the icon of the sinner, not the sinner personally (who's worm food now, anyway, as we all shall be one fine day). I hate that Barthes is respected as a first-rate thinker when in fact (as the subsequent installment of this essay will show) he's so unremittingly sloppy and ideologically polluted that I'm not sure he even deserves "third-rate" status.

In the comments-thread, Charles references no particular remark by myself or my opponent. Charles merely says that I am "wrong" about something or other. This blog's few readers will be better informed (though probably not much enlightened) to know that Charles and I have argued about Rollicking Roland Barthes before this in another time and clime. I don't intend to reference the particulars of that past argument any more than I will those of the current forum-fight. All I'll say of Forumfight #1 is that neither of us convinced the other of anything, but I did garner a pretty good idea as to why Charles validates Barthes, even if I don't know specifically what he's talking about re: Forumfight #2.

As it happens, I was already thinking about doing a summing-up of Barthes' shortcomings for both this blog and Forumfight #2, but I'll make it a separate post from this, which stands as something of a prelude.

In the aforesaid comments-thread Charles remarked that Barthes was not an "empiricist." Maybe, maybe not, but Barthes certainly wanted to make his interpretations seem as if they had a firm basis in the then-as-now still-evolving science of semiology. The summing-up will specifically address his problematic debt to the pioneering semiotic work of Ferdinand de Saussure.