Eve Tavor Bannet Research Articles

Demystification: A Dialogue between Barthes and Lefebvre

Mystification was a ubiquitous motif in France during the 1 950s. It was common currency in the political polemics of the time, and it also played an important role in the emergence of cultural criticism. In particular, it formed a point of convergence between Roland Barthes and Henri Lefebvre, two of the most influential French writers in this tradition. Both developed a sustained critical reflection on the domain of everyday life, drawing on the resources of literary criticism, philosophy, and social theory. But they are rarely discussed together. By examining their approaches to the question of mystification, and the links between them, it will become clear that the ideas of Barthes and Lefebvre were developed in dialogue and, for a period at least, converged in a common project. The relationship between Barthes and Lefebvre is acknowledged fleetingly in some of the broader surveys of intellectual movements of the period. Mark Poster, in his wide ranging Existential Marxism, notes that, as an early editor of the review Arguments, Barthes had connections with various currents of independent Marxism, and that his use of structuralism to analyze everyday life was akin to that of Lefebvre. He also surmises that Barthes's Mythologies probably influenced Lefebvre.' Kristin Ross, in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, draws on the contribution of both writers to the analysis of everyday life, but does not explore their intellectual affinities.2 Eve Tavor Bannet, discussing Barthes and other major structuralists, acknowledges that they are in various ways indebted to the work of early left-wing critics of modern

The Marriage Act of 1753: "A most cruel law for the Fair Sex"

The Marriage Act of 1753: “A most cruel law for the Fair Sex” Eve Tavor Bannet (bio) The Clandestine Marriage Bill of 1753 was presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Attorney General Ryder in such a way as to appeal to the private interest of every gentleman present. The Government said that the Bill was designed to prevent rich heirs and heiresses of good family from being seduced into clandestine or runaway marriages with their social or economic inferiors. Modern historians of the family have accepted this as truth, rather than as an attempt by the Government to get the Bill passed with a minimum of fuss. They have therefore largely ignored the Marriage Act in their evolutionary or counter-evolutionary theories about the emergence of the modern family. 1 After all, the Bill only required that people get married in what we now take to be the normal and natural way: with banns or a license and parental permission for minors, before witnesses and an authorized clergyman, and by recording the event in a Marriage Register. And hadn’t the Church been trying to impose many of these prescriptions on an unwilling populace for centuries? For eighteenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen, however, there was nothing normal or natural about the Marriage Bill’s prescriptions. Both inside and outside the House, opponents of the Bill protested that the Government was giving “the word Marriage . . . a different signification from what it had before.” It was making those “Circumstances” prescribed by the Bill (banns, witnesses, the Register) “part of the idea of marriage” for the first time. And it was voiding all unions “not performed in the Manner and Form, with all those Circumstances and Ceremonies which the Law hath appointed.” 2 The Government, they said, had changed [End Page 233] the meaning of marriage by making the existence of a marriage depend entirely on the couple’s public observance of some purely ceremonial and procedural forms. Before the Marriage Act, marriages had been based on the proposition that “what creates the married state and constitutes the contract” is “that FAITH by which the Man and Woman bind themselves to each other to live as man and Wife.” 3 If expressed in words of the present tense ( spousalia per verba de praesenti), the couple’s promises to live together as man and wife created a binding marriage, even when unconsummated, and even without any witness; if the couple’s promises were expressed in words of the future tense ( spousalia per verba de futuro), the marriage became binding as soon as consummation occurred. In either case, the marriage would in principle be sustained by the courts against any subsequent marriage—even if the latter had been celebrated publicly according to Church ritual and was followed by years of married bliss—because it was the private exchange of promises between a man and a woman to live together as man and wife which actually brought the marriage into being. 4 The public ceremony in Church or before witnesses was only viewed as a public repetition and solemnization of that primary promissory and contractual act. 5 It was therefore perfectly acceptable in many classes for a couple to exchange promises, go to bed and start a family before going to Church, or even to skip the Church ceremony altogether. 6 Church Courts and Justices of the Peace would uphold the claim of a pregnant woman that she had been “debauched under promise of marriage,” 7 and if necessary compel the man in question to perform his promise. Seductions, as well as abductions and clandestine marriages, were, for all intents and purposes, real marriages. Once the Marriage Act became law, however, a woman who yielded to her lover and was with child after exchanging promises of undying fidelity and devotion no longer had any recourse if he left her. The man who debauched her under promise of marriage could no longer be compelled to perform his promise. For the Marriage Act meant, in effect, that the couple’s private verbal promises to live together as man and wife no longer had any force in law, as Blackstone explains: “Any contract made, per verba de...

The power of Babel: “Pure language” as intertranslation

Abstract It is certainly no exaggeration to assert that Walter Benjamin's ‘The Task of the Translator’ is one of the most significant essays in our time, Its importance can be gauged, not only by the number and eminence of the scholars who have engaged with it, but also by the relevance of the issues it deals with for our post‐structuralist, postmodernist world. In this article, I propose a reading of ‘The Task of the Translator’ that aims at pinpointing the four “universes of discourse” Benjamin weaves into his argumentation ‐ a poetics of modernism, an onto‐theological metaphysics, a philosophy of language and a theory of translation ‐ in order to grasp the significance of his crucial concept of “pure language”. Following hints taken from Derrida, Andrew Benjamin and Eve Tavor Bannet, I shall argue that pure language should be interpreted in the form of a non‐essentialist conception of meaning as intertranslation, which provides the basis for a new politics and epistemology of language.

Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent (review)

442Philosophy and Literature inevitabUity of bad faith are rejected by distinguishing two kinds of alienation, onlyone ofwhich is unavoidable. Third, questions concerningSartre's relativism and the ultimate futility ofactions are answered by appeal to die notion ofplay, the adoption of a nonserious, nonpossessive attitude. Fourth, Sartre's revolutionary condemnation of certain social structures is squared widi his daims about die inevitabUity of social alienation by a recognition that some sorts of avoidable alienation may be overcome by revolution. Finally, the possibUity of authentic relationships widi odiers is affirmed and instances of a serious alternative to sequestration and individualism are located in Sartre's work and in his life. BeU's attempt to present an adequate Sartrean ethics of autiienticity makes Uluminating use of the entire corpus of Sartre's writings, induding his literary works as well as his more conventionally phUosophical texts, and she is particularly good at resolving interpretive difficulties by juxtaposing writings not usuaUy connected togedier. She exhibits an impressive famUiarity with the bulky Sartrean canon, as well as with the large secondary literature on Sartre. AU this, together with the carefully focused scope of her project, makes the book a very useful contribution to the exegetical literature on Sartre. It is, however, very much a work in the commentarial genre, notwithstanding some welcome attempts to connect various of the issues treated with themes of other writers (including Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Hare). There is no real attempt to take the argument beyond what Sartre might have said and the exegesis, though lucid and thorough, is not philosophically suggestive in the way that, say, Danto's litde book on Sartre is. But within its self-imposed limits this is a meticulous and creditable piece of philosophical scholarship. Massey University, New ZealandRoy W. Perrett StructuralismandtL·LogicofDissent, by EveTavorBannet; 229 pp. Champaign: University of IUinois Press, 1989, $14.95. Eve Tavor Bannet's Structuralism and tL· Logic of Dissent focuses on four influential French thinkers,Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Her thesis is that all ofthese figures chiefly address the question of alienation. "If the blanket term, alienation, has come to seem rather oldfashioned to us today, it is in no smaU measure due to the efforts made by Lacan, Bardies, Foucault, and Derrida to redefine it and to deal widi it in smaller and more manageable sections." Moreover, Bannet thinks that such figures "have sought beyond the automatism of culture and the darkness of negation to find the thin small-wedge from which itis stiU honestand honourable Reviews443 to speak" (pp. 2, 3). Hence Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are brought back within the fold ofliberal humanism. In flagrant disregard of the positions staked out by Lacan et al., Bannet states, "It would be impossible to write this or any other book if God and the self were really dead; if the audior were really absent from his work; iflanguage were nothing but an aUen circuit which each of us is condemned to repeat . . ." (p. 1). Evidently, Bannet's readings are conditioned by a phUosophical outlook running counter to the audiors she reads. She cannot take seriously that French intellectuals actually mean what diey write. Rather, she believes they are only talking about the death of God and the author in order to get our goat. She is very much under the impression diat their writings are a type of negative theology intended to alert us to "affirmations of [the] desire for being, individuality, and truth" (p. 1). The individual chapters on Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida consist of dearly written basic summaries. But they do not make original contributions to the elucidation of these figures. Much of her summarizing is compUed from other people's commentaries. For example, the footnote apparatus shows that when Bannet discusses Lacan in relation to May 1968 she recycles but does not add anything to summaries made by commentators like Sherry Turkic Troublesome to me is her summary of Lacan's Poe seminar which has benefited, directly or indirectly, from the analyses ofJeffrey Mehlman, Shoshana Felman, and perhaps others. Yet, these analyses are not acknowledged or, what is more important to me, developed or challenged. This practice results...

Pluralist Theory-Fictions and Fictional Politics

Eve Tavor Bannet PLURALIST THEORY-FICTIONS AND FICTIONAL POLITICS Despite the now widespread practice of reading texts in contexts, context is rarely, if ever, invoked when French poststructuralist theory is considered.1 The divorce ofFrench theory from French politics and society has facUitated its appropriation by the new historicisms and by politicized literary criticism outside France. At the same time, this divorce has deflected attention from the social and political myths naturalized by theoretical structures, thus permitting French theory to present itself as a universally applicable tool. But French theory is not capable of making contemporary political points in every culture or of being harnessed to the study ofjust any historical period. The political fictions enshrined in French poststructuralist thought may have made sense in the political and discursive context of France in the late sixties and early seventies—even if they did prove largely ineffectual as "active interventions in history and politics."2 But the same political fictions enshrined in the same plural and decentered structures make little political sense when they are exported to other countries; and they make even less sense when they are imposed, as invariable grids, on the cultures of the past. The political force oftheoretical structures cannot be assessed without considering their function and reception in different social, political, and discursive contexts. For instance, the plural structures of French theoretical writings have found much more ready acceptance in the United States than they have, say, in England, because, as William E. ConnoUy has pointed out, "pluralism has long provided the dominant description and ideal of American politics."3 In the American context, where pluralism and decentralization are referential terms as well as 28 Eve Tavor Bannet29 highly prized values, nothing could be more intellectually and politically respectable than to espouse them, and it is not immediately obvious why the structures of French theoretical writings should be either fictional or questionable. The abstract universalism ofmuch political rhetoric also tends to mask the fact that there are almost as many varieties of pluralism as there are of novels or of criticism or of anything else.4 A Frenchman asserting that "The plural, the collection ofsingularities, this is just what power, capital, the law of value, personal identity, the identity card, the University, responsibility, the family and the hospital repress and quell,"5 is speaking in a particular discursive context. He is echoing two generations of French left-wing intellectuals who viewed with intense disfavor France's rapid transformation after World War II from a predominantly agricultural society into a modern, capitalist, industrialized, and—as they thought, "Americanized"—"technological society." French left-wing critics of modernization ignored what Raymond Aron and Michel Crozier tried to tell them: that France was not like America; that in America, the bureaucratic and technological organization of society was not accompanied by authoritarian centralism and dirigisme; and that totally centralized power, authoritarian control of the economy, the media, and education, and lack of direction from the margins to the center were peculiar to French social and political structures, and had been at least since Napoleon.6 As far as the French left was concerned, modern capitalist society was virtually indistinguishable from centralized direction. This is why they tended to argue that there is no difference between "totalitarianism" in Russia, America, and France, and it is why the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as expounded by Kojève became fundamental to the thinking ofthe French left. This identification ofmodern "Americanized" society with the programmed society also explains why French left-wing critiques of the symbolic and social order—including those of Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida—tend to be accompanied by stringent attacks on centralism, hierarchical structures of authority and domination , standardizationand programmed conformities,justas it explains their rejection ofall theoretical totalizations, whether modeled on Hegel and Marx or on structuralism and semiotics. In this peculiarly French context, the valorization ofthe margins over the center, militant nonconformity, and the assertion of difference, constituted a recognized contestatory political position. It also represented a potential, a projected and imagined alternative to the status quo in France. We should not forget that for the French left, decen- 30Philosophy and Literature tralization, pluralism, and the abUity to make...