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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 101
predicated upon heterosexuality (271). As a result, the “truth” discovered
through the “absolute bliss” of Barthes’s jouissance is really only “coitus
interruptus”; meaning is produced by the frustration of pleasure. Bredbeck’s
critique of Barthes rises from his efforts to theorize the “absolute play” of
homosexual signification; Bredbeck seeks a homosexual language of desire. Yet
the prejudices implicit in Barthes’s theory may prove helpful to the objectives of
this essay. If indeed Camp causes a disruption of dominant-order discourse
through a destabilization of un-queer relations of “difference,” it is only through
an argument that acknowledges the logic of the dominant order that such a
disruption can be rendered visible.
Ironically, Barthes writes his text of “jouissance-interruptus” prior to his
“coming out of the closet” as a homosexual. Therefore, to the extent that his
debates defer to phallogocentrism and answer to dominant representation, The
Pleasure of the Text can be read as a closet text. To some degree, the
heterosexism and homophobia Bredbeck finds in Barthes’s text may be attributed
to the effects of the closet. Yet, despite its phallocentric connotations, Barthes’s
description of jouissance—as a condition of representation that hurls the subject
outside of the ties of dominant discourse by unsettling, among other things, his
or her historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions—appears to be
remarkably consonant with Case’s description of the unsettling of the queer
subject when he or she encounters the uncanny proscription of his or her desire.
Barthes’s model of jouissance explains a representational breakdown that is
similar to the disruption seen as a symptom in Sontag’s description of Camp.
Jouissance identifies an imposed “stage of loss” that “brings to crisis [the
reader’s] relation to language”; Camp marks the destabilization of commonly
assumed relations between statements, objects, and behaviors, thus razing the
hierarchy of Western culture binary logic. Most importantly, Barthes’s thoughts
on jouissance can be redeployed to elucidate the discussion of Camp as an
affective response—a jouissance-interruptus—of the queer subject that results
from the homophobic effects of an un-queer ontology. Camp discourse is the
epiphenomenon of the queer subject’s proscription in the dominant order; it is an
effect of homophobia. Through its resistance against definition and its unfixing of
relations of “difference,” Camp denotes and confronts queer crises in meaning.
Notwithstanding its investment in dominant representation (indeed, informed by
its phallocentrism), Barthes’s “theory from the closet” illuminates the closet
discourse of Camp.
What becomes manifest, what initiates the Camp condition, is the queer’s
position in a representational economy invested in the Platonic parameters of
Being. Camp results from the uncanny experience of looking into a nonreflective
mirror and falling outside of the essentialized ontology of heterosexuality, a
queer experience indeed. By this logic, Camp can be seen to be the aftermath of
a shattering of representation, a queer discourse that results from un-queer
proscriptions of same-sex desire. Mirroring Barthesian jouissance, or by way of
another metaphor resembling the ‘jump cut” experience of losing one’s place in