Lost and yet to come

Barthes’s comparison of a rejected lover with a prisoner at Dachau hangs frozen on the page. It is indecent, but it is also characteristic of much of the philosophy of the last two decades of the twentieth century in its rejection of history, abuse of scale and hence values, and in the removal of context which, if present, would render the point grossly inappropriate. From the perspective of a materialist history, the two situations have nothing in common.

The comparison is intended to demonstrate the dehumanising loss of ‘self’, yet, while self-confessedly self-centred, Barthes chooses to ignore the differences between a one-to-one relationship and the state-initiated and state-controlled Holocaust, indeed ‘one of the most unimaginable insults of History’. But like so much else in our post-modern culture, and in the arts of the fin du millennium, there is a dangerous absence of historical readings, of differences of context.