Idols of the Fragment: Barthes and Critique

Abstract:

Critics often valorize fragmentary writing as a device for subverting systems and liberating thought. Roland Barthes is an acknowledged aficionado of this style; this essay argues that he is equally one of its astute skeptics. While his early writings announce the need to dismantle bourgeois ideology in scattered strokes, his later works scrutinize the value of the piecemeal writing even as they ramify its aesthetic possibilities. Barthes's ambivalence replays an episode from the eighteenth century, when the Jena Romantics abruptly renounced the fragment on the grounds that its utopian promise easily devolved into parochial uses. Twenty-first century publishers continue to advertise fragmentary books as avant-garde provocations, but we should view this gesture as a conceit with a long history.