Any artist knows what it is to look at the world, and the dis-tance and otherness thereof is his primary problem.
— Iris Murdoch, interview with Bryan Magee So long as the gaze is directed upon the ideal the exact formula-tion will be a matter of history and dogma, and understanding of the ideal will be partial in any case. Where virtue is con-cerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking.
— Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”
“All is vanity” is the beginning and the end of ethics.
— Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’ ”
In Comment vivre ensemble, Roland Barthes anticipated the emergence of a new vision of home in the world, one that he hoped would come alive in a novel about a community of individuals committed to rethinking and living a meaningful life together. Had he indeed given novelistic form to his “phan-tasm” of the vivre- ensemble, it might have read like an estranged younger sibling of The Bell (1958), the fourth published novel of Iris Murdoch. Like Barthes’s community, Murdoch’s is imagined on the basis of a religious model: whereas Barthes felt an enduring fascination with the cenobites on Mount Athos and emphasized in his course the rebellious character of any retreat from the world, in Murdoch’s novel, the lay community at Imber Court, a group of “unhappy souls to which the world offers no home” (B, 71) lives in proximity of an enclosed abbey whose authority they respect.
Committed to “inventing” their rules, they combine individual pursuits and communal activities, and debate how the community should run and
define itself. The deliberation of everyday rules and principles is for these self- governing communities a diaita, a life- diet (Barthes’s word), a discipline of resistance to the established sociopolitical frameworks, to the regimen-tations, constrictions, and repressions characteristic of the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” The author of Mythologies (1957) was in agreement with Lefebvre’s diagnosis in Critique of Everyday Life; Murdoch had sketched this society, too, in the background of her earlier fiction, most notably in her debut novel Under the Net (1954).1 In The Bell, it is mostly an outside, a form of exteriority, with which the members of the community have an ambivalent relationship at best. It is an interesting coincidence that Barthes’s first book, Writing Degree Zero, and Murdoch’s own first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, were published in the same year— 1953— and that their subsequent writing careers bore the mark both of Sartre’s influence, and of their critical detachment from his notion of engagement.
The preoccupation with the elusive (right) distance does not simply origi-nate in the reaction to Sartre, however. In what follows, I will show that Murdoch, a trained philosopher, gave philosophical depth to the question that guided Barthes’s reflections on the ideal community— “at what distance should I keep myself from others in order to build with them a sociabil-ity without alienation and a solitude without exile?”— furthermore, that her notion of love as a moral ideal can be placed, as will be suggested by way of reading The Bell, on a continuum with Barthes’s délicatesse. The intricate plot of Murdoch’s novel recasts the aporias of Comment vivre ensemble, partially resolving them in the poetic mode. With literature, one thus moves in the realm of the ethical, which, Barthes appreciates, is “everywhere . . . inescapable” (N, 33). Murdoch could not have agreed more with such a pronouncement: She pointed to this idea explicitly in her critique of Sar-tre’s commitment, and illustrated it in her long career as a novelist invested in exploring the encounter between the everyday life of ordinary individu-als and the neatly drawn principles of moral discourse. That both the late Barthes and the young Murdoch took an interest in rethinking community speaks to their shared notion that the ethical questions attending the project of living with other people fall out of the picture of a world driven, on the one hand, by individualism and, on the other, by ideological or moral frame-works that obliterate the individual.
At first sight, the related communities imagined by Barthes and Murdoch recall the sociopolitical projects mentioned by MacIntyre in After Virtue, communities created with the purpose of fashioning a complete framework of values in accord with which the pursuit of a fulfilling life becomes possible.
What remains alive from the community that MacIntyre takes for a model, the polis presupposed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the spirit of deliberation characteristic of phronêsis: the virtue that stands both before and beyond all others, since it involves an intelligent grasp of particulars and the
“decision” concerning the application of the means to achieve an end. Insofar
as Barthes and Murdoch propose something in the way of a “virtue,” it rep-resents something far less ambitious— or perhaps more challenging— than a positive choice, than the endorsement of an already existing alternative;
rather, the attitude they foreground is one of lucidity, or “neutrality” (as we have seen with Barthes), and attention (as we are about to see in Murdoch’s moral philosophy). In a different parlance, délicatesse and love.
How does a community fare, equipped with such elusive ideals? This ques-tion prompts a return to an aspect I briefly touched on in the introducques-tion, concerning Barthes’s use of “distance” in the plural, and with reference to con-crete, lived experience. Both Barthes and Murdoch were concerned with the everyday, aware that, even as their communities cherish some ideals or sense of purposeful life, they still have to navigate contingency. In The Powers of Distance and the The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson has isolated the notion of distance as a hermeneutic category, confirming its close association, in the British tradition and more generally in that of Western Enlightenment, with objective rationality enabling detachment. The Victorians cherished such ideals of distance, Anderson shows in her first book, but they were also ambiv-alent about them; our contemporary “cultures of theory,” Anderson enjoins in the last chapters of her second book, should however still rely on the ide-als of distance implicit in, for example, Habermas’s communicative ethics.2 In short, distance is for Anderson an epistemological category with moral valences in the Victorian era, with political— that is, liberal— stakes today. To use “distance” in the plural is to shift emphasis: a “socialism of distances”—
the notion comes from Nietzsche, but Barthes does not unpack its original use— accommodates more modes of relating than one, and the question at the heart of his lectures suggests that a community might be just the space where various modes of interaction have to come together and coexist, in per-manent (re)negotiation. Pluralism is here brought back to the rough ground of everyday life, to the field of practical experience, and distance, given the obsolescence of absolutes, no longer acknowledged as an ideal; rather, a mise- en- commun des distances (a conjoining of distances) keeps alive the necessity to resume deliberation, if perhaps not always in explicit fashion.
That Barthes and Murdoch’s ideas about community remain tethered to the practical experience of everyday life— both in the sense of Erlebnisse, random, unexpected occurrences, and of Erfahrung, the accumulated and sharable wisdom derived from them— suggests the alignment with phronêsis to be meaningful both by way of a positive characterization of “distances”
and as a way to illuminate the challenges and discontents of such a notion, perhaps even its impossibility. In the Nichomachean Ethics, phronêsis is integrated into a coherent system of the virtues, where it has the privileged position of a capacity to grasp intelligently the particulars of a situation and to determine the application of (the other) virtues in conformity with the demands of that particular context: it presupposes acuity of perception, knowledge of the good, deliberation of the means leading to decision or
choice (for lack of a more suitable contemporary notion). Translated most commonly as prudence, phronêsis is vital for the well- being of the individual, with the proviso that well- being as a rendering of eudaimonia is of course misleading, since the state of fulfillment, of happiness that the good life pur-sues in and through the cultivation of virtues (that is, both as a telos and, most importantly, as a way of life) is determined by, and in accordance with, considerations about the harmonious life in, and of, the polis. Thus for Aris-totle, morality and politics famously converge; the polis includes both the social and the political, without discriminating between them. As MacIntyre, among others, has unequivocally shown, such an all- inclusive framework is foreign to the denizens of late modernity:
This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world. This is how we sometimes at least think of schools, hospitals or philanthropic organizations;
but we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man’s good as such.3
The communities imagined by Barthes and Murdoch, both reliant on mod-els of monastic life, are in retreat from the world and its alienating social arrangements. The challenge lies in constructing a new framework of exis-tence, central to the endeavors of the community. In The Bell, Catherine introduces Dora, a visitor at Imber Court, to the life of the community: “It’s difficult, you know, for a lay community where nothing’s ordained. It all has to be invented as you go along” (125). What is the meaning of “invent” here?
Surely, values are not just made up: old ones have to be reevaluated, and configured in a new arrangement through constant deliberation among the members of the community, as a response to the needs that appear as they
“go along.” It is this aspect of phronêsis that I am retaining here: the impera-tive to evaluate a context, a state of affairs, lucidly, with sensitivity, and to deliberate what the best way of addressing a situation might be, in light of the common good. Barthes insists however that his community has no telos, and that its success is in the practice itself, which is a life- diet. Murdoch’s com-munity is equally open on both temporal ends: it brings together individuals disappointed with life outside and sharing a rather vaguely articulated spiri-tual aspiration, but no founding moral principles other than a loose Christian background, and it has no stated or commonly acknowledged understanding of its finality. If deliberation occurs, Murdoch suggests, it does not go hand in hand with the expectation of stable consensus; nor does it imply an idealiza-tion of raidealiza-tionality, of objective detachment— hence the plural of distances.
On the other hand, both Barthes and Murdoch find problematic romantic love, or the model of the couple, in their attempts to rethink community; this
exclusion brings them in proximity of the philosophical reflection on friend-ship in the Western tradition, which draws a line between friendfriend-ship and love based on the absence or presence of teleology. In Interrupting Derrida, Geof-frey Bennington begins the chapter “Forever Friends” with a brief reminder of this basic distinction:
Friendship, unlike love, does not tend towards a fusion of the parties to it. If I love you, I want to become one with you, or so the tradi-tion would have it, to fuse with you to the point of death; but if I am your friend, such a clear telos is absent, or such a telos is not really clear. The point of loving seems clear enough, even if we might think it absurd, irrational or unhealthy; the point of friendship is harder to grasp, and perhaps that makes it more attractive still. Love is some-thing we can’t do much about, it takes us over and sweeps us on and away, maybe into disaster; friendship seems cooler, more calcu-lated, involves a salutary distance that, in principle at least, prevents it being such a mess.4
Derrida’s Politics of Friendship translates the lack of telos in friendship as the necessary maintenance of distance: “There is no respect, as its name con-notes, without the vision and distance of a spacing. . . . The co- implication of responsibility and respect can be felt at the heart of friendship, one of the enigmas of which would stem from this distance, this concern in what concerns the other: a respectful separation seems to distinguish friendship from love.”5 Bennington and Derrida share a view of love as fusional— that is, as lacking distance— which is the very reason, as we shall see, why Barthes and Murdoch exclude it from their respective communities.6 Living- together then becomes the challenge of expanding the framework of friendship—
typically limited to two individuals who thus are unconditionally available to each other— to several persons. Although excluded, erotic love provides both Barthes and Murdoch with the principle of delicacy and the inclina-tion to regard others in a certain way, that friendship alone, when cultivated in community, seems to lack. And this has a bearing, as we shall see, on the way one comes to understand not only being with others, but one’s notion of self.
Let us first tease out the principles that drive Barthes’s community, which in turn will help us focus on the complex interplay of “distances” in the com-munal setting in Murdoch’s novel. My aim here will be to show that although both Barthes and Murdoch start with what appear to be small, closed “com-munities of work,” to use Jean- Luc Nancy’s term, the attention both authors pay to interpersonal distance— to the ways individuals / characters approach, interact with, or avoid one another— unworks these communities from the inside, exposing their flaws and their necessary impossibility.
Comment vivre ensemble: The Community of Délicatesse
“A somewhat provocative word today,” says Barthes about délicatesse; no less intriguing is its source in a passage featuring the Marquis de Sade from his previous book, Sade Fourier Loyola. Writing that text, Barthes was well aware that the perverse libertine de Sade would seem out of place in the ven-erable company of the other two figures; but what did bring them together, he claimed, was their incontestable merits as “logothetes,” founders of language.
In the spirit bequeathed by de Sade, part of the freedom Barthes arrogates himself in the lectures is to ground each course in a personal fantasy (phan-tasme), and to imagine himself “mining it in the open, like a quarry.” In Comment vivre ensemble and Le neutre, the idea of fantasy itself relates to the capacity to distinguish fine nuances, making and savoring them in the slippery alleys of language. The original passage from Sade Fourier Loyola, which made its way into Comment vivre ensemble and Le neutre, reads:
La marquise de Sade ayant demandé au marquis prisonnier de lui faire remettre son linge sale (connaissant la marquise: à quelle autre fin sinon le faire laver?), Sade feint d’y voir un tout autre motif, pro-prement sadien: “Charmante créature, vous voulez mon linge sale, mon vieux linge? Savez- vous que c’est d’une délicatesse achevée?
Vous voyez comme je sens le prix des choses. Ecoutez, mon ange, j’ai toute l’envie du monde de vous satisfaire cela, car vous savez que je respecte les goûts, les fantaisies: quelques baroques qu’elles soient, je les trouve toutes respectables, et parce qu’on n’en est pas le maître, et parce que la plus singulière et la plus bizarre de toutes, bien analysée, remonte toujours à un principe de délicatesse.”7
The marquise de Sade had asked the imprisoned marquis to hand her his dirty linen (knowing the marquise: obviously to wash it, what else?), but Sade pretends to see there a rather different reason, a typi-cally Sadian one: “Charming creature, you want my dirty linen, my old underwear? Do you know it’s of an exquisite delicacy? You see how I appreciate the value of things. Listen, my angel, by all means, I want to satisfy your desire; you know that I respect all tastes, all fantasies: however baroque, I find them all respectable, both because one cannot master them, and because even the strangest and most eccentric of all, well analyzed, has its origin in a principle of delicacy.”
In Barthes’s account, de Sade’s enunciation is itself illustrative of the princi-ple of délicatesse: “Delight (jouissance) of analysis, a verbal operation which frustrates the expectation (the dirty laundry that needs to be washed) and conveys that delicacy is a perversion relying on the useless detail” (N, 58).
The image of de Sade imprisoned, yet incorrigible in his perverse delights,
both explains and confuses, or at least complicates, the word that helped crystallize Barthes’s own phantasm of living- with- others. And this is pre-cisely the trouble, one might note in passing, with Barthes’s refusal to pin down exact meanings and his preference for examples: Each of them goes beyond the limits of a possible definition, and thus leads astray the disciple/
reader who focuses too closely (tactlessly?) on just one illustration. De Sade’s example speaks eloquently, which is to say, disturbingly, to the logic of the residual supplement of délicatesse. Here is, first of all, what Barthes calls a fantasy: “un retour de désirs, d’images, qui rôdent, se cherchent en vous, parfois toute une vie, et souvent ne se cristallisent qu’à travers un mot” (a return of images, of desires, that prowl, wander about in yourself, sometimes a lifetime, and sometimes they only crystallize in the encounter with a word) (CVE, 36). The word that the image of the marquis complicates is idiorryth-mie, a combination of idio (individual) and rhutmos (oppressive rhythms of society, of a group) that Barthes lifts from Jacques Lacarrière’s L’été grec and refashions for his own purposes. Originally, rhutmos was linked to a personal rhythm, a supple, mobile form, a changing pattern: idiorrythmie would have been a pleonasm, Barthes explains, if rhythm had not acquired the oppres-sive connotations of power inherent to collective life (CVE, 36– 39). (The de Sade case— his eccentricities in the boudoir, his confinement in the Bastille—
incidentally illustrates both the initial excess of the juxtaposition idio- rhutmos and the frictions of idiorrythmie.) Barthes’s thinking about the ideal commu-nity conjoins thus the spatial metaphor of distance with the dynamic qualities of rhythm, and the challenge to synchronize multiple rhythms. This can result in oppressive dysrhythmie: “Le pouvoir, sa subtilité— passe par la dysrythmie, l’hétérorythmie— c’est en mettant ensemble deux rythmes différents que l’on crée de profondes disturbances” (Power, its subtlety— goes through dysryth-mie, heterorhythmy— it is by bringing together different rhythms that one generates great disturbances) (CVE, 69; Foucault is mentioned here). The opposite of dysrhythmy is the utopia of idiorrhythmy, which Barthes’s reader might link, encouraged by the adverb “ensemble” in the original course title, to the attunement of music instruments and their performance as an
incidentally illustrates both the initial excess of the juxtaposition idio- rhutmos and the frictions of idiorrythmie.) Barthes’s thinking about the ideal commu-nity conjoins thus the spatial metaphor of distance with the dynamic qualities of rhythm, and the challenge to synchronize multiple rhythms. This can result in oppressive dysrhythmie: “Le pouvoir, sa subtilité— passe par la dysrythmie, l’hétérorythmie— c’est en mettant ensemble deux rythmes différents que l’on crée de profondes disturbances” (Power, its subtlety— goes through dysryth-mie, heterorhythmy— it is by bringing together different rhythms that one generates great disturbances) (CVE, 69; Foucault is mentioned here). The opposite of dysrhythmy is the utopia of idiorrhythmy, which Barthes’s reader might link, encouraged by the adverb “ensemble” in the original course title, to the attunement of music instruments and their performance as an