I genuinely do take your point here, William. And, indeed, I suspect there would be some hideous pleasure in doing an autopsy on Barthes. I am luckily curtailed by my age. At thirty or so, I might have at, but I'm eighty, and common sense tells me I have limited time left. It'd take four to six months to do even a slender book on Barthes. That may not sound like much to you young 'uns, but it does to me, especially because I'm deeply imbedded in other projects.
One of them is a play I'm writing about a philosopher who has quit academia. As it happens, it has a passage that's obliquely pertinent to our exchange on Barthes et al. I should say I don't see this philosopher, Bren, as me blatantly cognito. I'm not a painfully modest chap, but I assert he's far more gifted than I ever was. He's also famous in the field. His speech here is a response to being asked if he didn't regret quitting philosophy, something he seemed so good at. It explains a bit of why Barthes need not cower in his grave for fear that I am coming: BREN . . . A famous man wrote that vanity is a necessity in a philosopher. I had it -- and I grew to hate it. But hating your bad traits doesn't kill them -- they seem to thrive on the attention. Whenever I published a paper, an angry rout of wolves would start circling, hoping to have me for breakfast. And I'd love it. Just come within range, puppies. No, I don't regret leaving philosophy. I left it for the same reason some people quit Wall Street, or defending criminals they know are guilty, or even selling insurance. I quit because I despised myself doing it! Seeing myself be gorgeously, hideously, clever. In other subjects you triumph by adding something new. In philosophy, to o often triumph entails slaying someone old, proving them wrong. At times I felt a gladiator's glee. There are many sweet-tempered philosophers. I wasn't one.
