Search Results

Barthes and the Visibility Turn: For a Non-Mimetic Image

Éric Marty

in Interdisciplinary Barthes

With Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), Barthes broke with a taboo on the image shared by most Modern thinkers: a Marxist and structuralist puritanism closely associated with a violent ... More

With Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), Barthes broke with a taboo on the image shared by most Modern thinkers: a Marxist and structuralist puritanism closely associated with a violent critique of mimesis. The break Barthes introduced derived primarily from his uncoupling of mimesis from the regime of visibility particular to the image. The importance of Barthes’s little book will be explored by placing it in the context of Modernity. On the one hand, it will be read in relation to readings of the image associated with Barthes’s contemporaries (for example, Foucault on Velazquez’s Las Meninas); on the other, it will be read alongside his earlier and later proclamations relative to the image, from Mythologies to La Chambre claire. A shift will be traced from the rejection of mimesis in favour of non-figuration, to the emergence of a more fundamental visual paradigm for Barthes of animate/inanimate, initially accounting for his stated preference for photography over cinema, but ultimately neutralised, in the second part of La Chambre claire, through his discussion of the female automaton sequence in Fellini’s Casanova, and its fetishistic relation to the invisible/visible presence of the Winter Garden photo of Barthes’s mother as a child.Less

Barthes and the Emotions

Patrizia Lombardo

in Interdisciplinary Barthes

Barthes’s œuvre is significant not simply for the ‘linguistic turn’ of the second half of the twentieth century, but also for the interest in the emotions that has marked a number of disciplines ... More

Barthes’s œuvre is significant not simply for the ‘linguistic turn’ of the second half of the twentieth century, but also for the interest in the emotions that has marked a number of disciplines since the early 1980s. This chapter analyses Barthes’s changing relationship to affectivity in general and to art considered as an emotional experience. The early Barthes, enthralled by Brecht’s dramaturgy and Japanese Bunraku, denounced traditional Western theatre for its privileging of the expression of emotions and the audience’s participation in the feelings of fictional characters (Barthes’s comparison of two operatic death scenes, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Debussy’s Mélisande, is a key example). By the late 1970s, Barthes has rethought his negative evaluation of emotion. In Fragments d’un discours amoureux, he draws on Sartre’s phenomenological Esquisse pour une théorie des émotions; in the Proustian ‘“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”’, he stresses the reader’s participation in fictional ‘moments of truth’ and proclaims his own need to write a novel of pathos; in La Chambre claire, he valorises an emotional relation to photography. Barthes’s late vita nova cannot be fully understood without this new focus on affectivity, a positive acknowledgement of pathos, and the emergence of joy.Less

Displacing Barthes: Self, Other and the Theorist's Uneasy Belonging

in Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory

This chapter analyses the writing of Roland Barthes. It begins with a reflection on the exile of the mythologue in Mythologies, and goes on to contrast the jubilant fantasies of L'Empire des signes ... More

This chapter analyses the writing of Roland Barthes. It begins with a reflection on the exile of the mythologue in Mythologies, and goes on to contrast the jubilant fantasies of L'Empire des signes with the nostalgia and also the emptiness that trouble the narrative voice of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire, and the essays collected in Incidents. It is argued that the theoretical consideration of otherness is consumed, at the same time, with uncertainty concerning the position of the writing persona in his text. If Mythologies sketches a concrete critique of colonial discourses of identity, the more subjective conclusion, together with the fantasies and insecurities of works such as L'Empire and Incidents, also contribute to postcolonial debate, since they dramatise the unwitting anxieties and textual projections that can trouble our attempts to contemplate the other.Less