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B/O—Barthes's Text/O'Hara's Trick

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Gregory W. Bredbeck
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Abstract

Barthes's principle of jouissance provides an erotics of reading that counters essentialist textuality. Yet much feminist inquiry has also found implicit phallocen-trism in the concept. I use the poetry and poetics of Frank O'Hara to reread Barthes's Pleasure of the Text. Gay male sexuality, I claim, offers a model that refuses to privilege the phallus. Moreover, O'Hara's poetics symbolically embraces the gay male body and demonstrates an absolute jouissance. I juxtapose O'Hara's poetry with an ironic myth of gay male sexuality, the “signifying clone.” The comparison shows that both this sexuality and O'Hara's poetry reconstruct “meaning” as an ex post facto decision—in contrast to traditional androcentric notions of meaning as an a priori truth. I suggest that the material experience of sexualities can provide a basis for a theorization that unwrites the homogenizing transcendence of the androcentric phallus. (GWB)

Type
Cluster: Figuring Gender
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , March 1993 , pp. 268 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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