Roland Barthes na China

Barthes é um dos pais da boçalidade moderna, mais um subproduto da intelectualidade francesa. Esse charlatão vazio e contraditório visitou a China em 1974 para se maravilhar com os milagres do maoismo. Por que será que os intelectuais franceses tem uma fixação por merda? Por que adoram a China, a Índia e o Brasil? Nesta resenha dos diários de Barthes em sua viagem a China fica claro que o comunista é um cínico, um canalha que viu o inferno criado por um dos seus ídolos, o assassino Mao, e cuja reação consiste em tédio e desconforto, mas jamais teve a coragem, a hombridade, de criticar o regime: Barthes traveled to China as part of a cadre of intellectuals associated with the journal Tel Quel, a publication still legendary today in some circles but caught up at the time in a Maoist phase that had prompted sniping with, among others, the official organ of the French Communist Party. The invitation had been extended via the Chinese embassy to the writer Philippe Sollers, co-founder of Tel Quel and translator of several of Mao’s poems. Aside from Barthes, the delegation comprised Sollers, the Franco-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (Sollers’s then- and current wife), and the critics François Wahl and Marcelin Pleynet, the last of whom would go on to publish his impressions of the visit in 1980 as Le Voyage en Chine (which, coincidentally, has reappeared this year in a corrected and expanded edition from Éditions Marciana). Barthes too expected to produce a book based on the journey, and sketches out plans for such a work toward the end of his notes, but although he carefully indexed and paginated his notebooks the project went unrealized.(...)Barthes ought to have listened to his boredom. One of his signal virtues as a critic was an unflagging openness to revising his own positions, a glee in periodically dismantling the “Roland Barthes” of popular acquaintance—an impulse that came off like a healthy allergy to the mainstream. It’s tempting to imagine Travels in China as a preliminary gesture toward the sort of demythologization of Maoism that he would never carry out in public life. But Barthes would live for another six years before his fatal brush with a laundry truck in the rue des Écoles, and his few comments on China—tepid interviews and remarks about the “blandness” of the People’s Republic—never rise to the level of disillusionment adumbrated here. Only in these heretofore-private notebooks do we encounter a Barthes who can say, wistfully but with dead certainty, “So it would be necessary to pay for the Revolution with everything I love.” Toward the end of his notes there’s something like a moment of resignation: his order having arrived at last from the tailor, Barthes wonders, with an air of defeat, “My outfit, the high point of the trip?” French Marxist goes to China for revolution, brings back cheap western suit. Plus ça change.