Where is She? I can't find HER.

(1) SARRASINE * The title raises a question: [STAR Does it really raise a question? Could we say that rather it presents itself as the answer to a question yet to be asked (by Barthes, perhaps)? Or, more generally, what constitutes a question in the first place? Is it the very operation of the "?"? To what extent is the naming always a question, or, more precisely, to what extent does a name always suggest content in the pure absence of a 'real' referent? My hermeneutics, it will have been noted, will always be a question of the always already or the question before the question.] What is Sarrasine? A noun? A thing? A man? A woman? This question will not be answered until much later, by the biography [STAR For that matter, isn't a biography nothing more than the narrative of a life? Isn't it only possible once one takes for granted the very name as a whole and stable construct exactly commensurate with the person?] of the sculptor named Sarrasine [STAR This is curious; how can Barthes even recognize Sarrasine as a question unless he has already read the 'end'? Is this a question that can only ever be seen in the future anterior?]. Let us designate as hermeneutic code (HER) all the units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or dealt its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution [STAR It doesn't strike me as surprising that coincidence which marks Barthes association of hermeneutics, of enigma and the question of the text with HER. In English, we use the SEM to find an association: woman. More specifically, woman as object, woman as the very question at the bottom of every narrative. Woman as inscrutable, woman as depth, woman as keeper of secrets, woman as that which enables man's curiosity]. Thus, the title Sarrasine initiates the first step in a sequence [STAR This strikes me as odd, since these metaphors of stepping and sequentiality further reinscribe the linearity of reading, a linearity we hope to oppose since it is the primary metaphor of direct author to reader transmission. The writerly text which we want should have no such necessary linearity to it.] which will not be completed until No. 153 (HER. Enigma 1--the story will contain others--: question). ** The word Sarrasine has an additional connotation, that of femininity, which will be obvious to any French-speaking person [STAR If this is obvious to any Francophone reader, does that mean that femininity carries different economies of signification for every language? Or, can we generalize this statement to any signifier of femininity? And, if so, does this mean that since any feminine signifier is only situated linguistically, there is no such thing as an essence to femininity?], since that language automatically takes the final "e" as specifically feminine linguistic property, particularly in the case of a proper name whose masculine form (Sarrazin) exists in French onomastics. Femininity (connoted) is a signifier which will occur in several places in the text it is a shifting element which can combine with other similar elements to create characters, ambiances, shapes, and symbols. Although every unit we mention here will be a signifier, this one is of a very special type: it is the signifier par excellence because of its connotation, in the usual meaning of the term [STAR I star this here because it is perhaps the very "usual meaning of the term" which is most at stake for woman, for femininity and for feminism here. Shouldn't we, in following Barthes, resist the very usual meaning of any term? Shouldn't we be searching for exactly those places where our readings are unique and self constructed? I, along with Barthes, acknowledge that we are certainly limited in this project due to our inextricability from the milieu of our vernacular. However, isn't our project here strictly speaking to strain the normal workings of text and language until we can begin to see it fraying at the seams?]. We shall call this element a signifier (without going into further detail), or a seme (semantically, the seme is the unit of the signifier), and we shall indicate these units by the abbreviation SEM, designating each time by an approximate word the connotative signifier referred to in the lexia (SEM, Femininity). [STAR With this starring I have hoped to provide a hermeneutics of the hermeneutic at work in Barthes own analysis of Sarrasine in this first word that Barthes says he takes as his starting point {though I hope to have questioned that}. I hope to have twisted his words in an idiosyncratic way; from S/Z to ~/N.]