One of the main aims of this article is to suggest that a major characteristic – or tactic – of 'French Theory' is the deployment of 'undialectics', a mode of critical thinking somewhere between what Malgorzata Kowalska calls 'dialectics after dialectics', and Jean-François Gava 'contrariety without dialectics'. It takes Roland Barthes's engagement with both Hegel and Marx to consider his use of dialectics as one of both paradox and spiral, in particular in relation to Voltaire, in an article that Barthes wrote in 1958 just as General De Gaulle was about to assume power. The analysis starts with Barthes's reading of Hegel in his early writings on Gide, moves through the work on Racine and the research on fashion, in order to show that the undialectical, at least in Barthesian thought, involves the philosophical reversal of determinants. It ends by considering the nature of contradiction that he finds in the 1970s in the work of both Mao and Brecht, and how contradiction becomes a key component in the 'Non-Vouloir-Saisir' of the Neutral and the voluntarism of the intransitive. What does it mean to be 'undialectical' in social theory on the one hand, and in literary critique and creativity on the other?
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)