Diana Knight (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The disciplinary range of Barthes’s work is unusually diverse, as is that of its reception. An energetic contributor to the human sciences in postwar France, Barthes is credited with a pivotal role ...
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The disciplinary range of Barthes’s work is unusually diverse, as is that of its reception. An energetic contributor to the human sciences in postwar France, Barthes is credited with a pivotal role in the emergence of interdisciplinarity. But Barthes was alert to its recuperation by the technocratic higher-education reforms of 1968, referring to ‘the myth of interdisciplinarity’. He was equally wary of a federation of disciplines that would leave each one comfortably unchanged, rather than overturning the intellectual landscape. A more fertile interdisciplinarity originates in Barthes’s intensive reading of Michelet in the sanatorium. It is tracked through his euphoric discovery of structuralism to his teaching at the École pratique des hautes études, and his idiosyncratic aspirations for a ‘peripatetic’ chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. Barthes was interested in the historically shifting hierarchies of disciplines, noting the equal status of the trivium and quadrivium within the medieval septenium, and bemoaning the downgrading of language to mere instrumentality within the contemporary human sciences. Literature, which already contains within it all forms of knowledge, is proposed as a transformative discipline despite its current exclusion, a corrective for the refusal of the human sciences to pay attention to their discourse.Less
The disciplinary range of Barthes’s work is unusually diverse, as is that of its reception. An energetic contributor to the human sciences in postwar France, Barthes is credited with a pivotal role in the emergence of interdisciplinarity. But Barthes was alert to its recuperation by the technocratic higher-education reforms of 1968, referring to ‘the myth of interdisciplinarity’. He was equally wary of a federation of disciplines that would leave each one comfortably unchanged, rather than overturning the intellectual landscape. A more fertile interdisciplinarity originates in Barthes’s intensive reading of Michelet in the sanatorium. It is tracked through his euphoric discovery of structuralism to his teaching at the École pratique des hautes études, and his idiosyncratic aspirations for a ‘peripatetic’ chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. Barthes was interested in the historically shifting hierarchies of disciplines, noting the equal status of the trivium and quadrivium within the medieval septenium, and bemoaning the downgrading of language to mere instrumentality within the contemporary human sciences. Literature, which already contains within it all forms of knowledge, is proposed as a transformative discipline despite its current exclusion, a corrective for the refusal of the human sciences to pay attention to their discourse.
Philippe Roger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Barthes doesn’t think in terms of identity, even less national identity, yet amongst his contemporaries (the ‘French theorists’) his writing seems the most ‘French’. He admits this somewhat ...
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Barthes doesn’t think in terms of identity, even less national identity, yet amongst his contemporaries (the ‘French theorists’) his writing seems the most ‘French’. He admits this somewhat paradoxically by devoting sarcastic analyses to ‘Frenchness’ whilst testifying, in the more intimate pages of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, to a profound attachment to the ‘land’ of his childhood, the ‘light of the South-West’, ways of being and speaking, or of preferring pears to exotic fruit. This book sparked the revisionist reading of Barthes’s intellectual itinerary that would gather momentum after his death: behind the structuralist and fellow-traveller of the avant-garde lurked a conservative writer, a crypto-Gidian explorer of the self. In fact, a benefit of the 1975 commission was to enable Barthes’s return to anthropology. Michelet par lui-même (1954) and Mythologies (1957) had allowed Barthes to explore national identity in historical and anthropological terms, and a custom-made ‘ethnology of France’ (‘Notre France, in the manner of Michelet’) was a persistent project. Although formulated with calculated lightness, the question of Frenchness runs throughout this ‘Barthes by himself’; far from signalling a farewell to politics and ideology, it provided the right frame for a socio-anthropological exploration of France and Barthes’s ‘French’ identity.Less
Barthes doesn’t think in terms of identity, even less national identity, yet amongst his contemporaries (the ‘French theorists’) his writing seems the most ‘French’. He admits this somewhat paradoxically by devoting sarcastic analyses to ‘Frenchness’ whilst testifying, in the more intimate pages of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, to a profound attachment to the ‘land’ of his childhood, the ‘light of the South-West’, ways of being and speaking, or of preferring pears to exotic fruit. This book sparked the revisionist reading of Barthes’s intellectual itinerary that would gather momentum after his death: behind the structuralist and fellow-traveller of the avant-garde lurked a conservative writer, a crypto-Gidian explorer of the self. In fact, a benefit of the 1975 commission was to enable Barthes’s return to anthropology. Michelet par lui-même (1954) and Mythologies (1957) had allowed Barthes to explore national identity in historical and anthropological terms, and a custom-made ‘ethnology of France’ (‘Notre France, in the manner of Michelet’) was a persistent project. Although formulated with calculated lightness, the question of Frenchness runs throughout this ‘Barthes by himself’; far from signalling a farewell to politics and ideology, it provided the right frame for a socio-anthropological exploration of France and Barthes’s ‘French’ identity.
Kathrin Yacavone
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Despite his infamous thesis of the ‘death of the author’ in the 1960s, in the last decade of his life, Roland Barthes developed a conception of authorship that brings together textual and ...
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Despite his infamous thesis of the ‘death of the author’ in the 1960s, in the last decade of his life, Roland Barthes developed a conception of authorship that brings together textual and biographical realities, coining the terms biographème and biographologue to describe the relation between the author’s life and work. This was accompanied by a renewed and related interest in photography, as evidenced by his illustrated Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La Chambre claire (1980). Taking this conjunction of authorship and photography as its starting point, this chapter juxtaposes Barthes’s understandings of the author with the evolving photographic iconography of his own authorial persona. It shows that theoretical reflection on authorship was already closely linked with photography and the visual representation of the writer figure in the early Michelet par lui-même (1954), before exploring how this relationship becomes more pronounced and self-reflexive in the 1970s. Analysis of photographic portraits of Barthes, focused on their iconography and style, reveals that the role photography has played in Barthes’s posthumous reception has followed its own dynamics, related to, yet transcending, his highly intentional photographic self-construction.Less
Despite his infamous thesis of the ‘death of the author’ in the 1960s, in the last decade of his life, Roland Barthes developed a conception of authorship that brings together textual and biographical realities, coining the terms biographème and biographologue to describe the relation between the author’s life and work. This was accompanied by a renewed and related interest in photography, as evidenced by his illustrated Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La Chambre claire (1980). Taking this conjunction of authorship and photography as its starting point, this chapter juxtaposes Barthes’s understandings of the author with the evolving photographic iconography of his own authorial persona. It shows that theoretical reflection on authorship was already closely linked with photography and the visual representation of the writer figure in the early Michelet par lui-même (1954), before exploring how this relationship becomes more pronounced and self-reflexive in the 1970s. Analysis of photographic portraits of Barthes, focused on their iconography and style, reveals that the role photography has played in Barthes’s posthumous reception has followed its own dynamics, related to, yet transcending, his highly intentional photographic self-construction.
Antoine Compagnon
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Roland Barthes constantly complained about being overwhelmed with requests and importunities; people were always sending him texts to read, and strangers would write or phone for appointments, ...
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Roland Barthes constantly complained about being overwhelmed with requests and importunities; people were always sending him texts to read, and strangers would write or phone for appointments, articles, and advice. What he called the burden of administration (‘la gestion’) took up as much of his time as creative work. And he entertained the dream of a Vita Nova, liberated from supplications. The decision of ‘15 April 1978’, recorded in La Préparation du roman, was a revelation: henceforth, all of his life would be concentrated around literature – the novel – and he would switch to an ex-directory phone number. Yet Barthes, at the same time, loved the pressure of demands; he was addicted to the flow of requests and could not work without the stimulus of commissions and deadlines. In fact, as he well knew, most of what he produced started out as a commission (whether a ‘demande’ or a ‘commande’), right from the very first articles in Combat and his many contributions to book clubs. All through his life the pressure of writing for journals never ceased: Existences, Esprit, Théâtre populaire, Lettres nouvelles, L’Observateur or France-Observateur; later Critique, Communications, Tel Quel… This is the paradox to be explored in this chapter.Less
Roland Barthes constantly complained about being overwhelmed with requests and importunities; people were always sending him texts to read, and strangers would write or phone for appointments, articles, and advice. What he called the burden of administration (‘la gestion’) took up as much of his time as creative work. And he entertained the dream of a Vita Nova, liberated from supplications. The decision of ‘15 April 1978’, recorded in La Préparation du roman, was a revelation: henceforth, all of his life would be concentrated around literature – the novel – and he would switch to an ex-directory phone number. Yet Barthes, at the same time, loved the pressure of demands; he was addicted to the flow of requests and could not work without the stimulus of commissions and deadlines. In fact, as he well knew, most of what he produced started out as a commission (whether a ‘demande’ or a ‘commande’), right from the very first articles in Combat and his many contributions to book clubs. All through his life the pressure of writing for journals never ceased: Existences, Esprit, Théâtre populaire, Lettres nouvelles, L’Observateur or France-Observateur; later Critique, Communications, Tel Quel… This is the paradox to be explored in this chapter.
Andy Stafford
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Using an unpublished seminar that Roland Barthes delivered in 1966–7, this chapter considers the challenge to rewrite, re-use, and ‘re-cover’ other writers’ texts. It shows, first in Critique et ...
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Using an unpublished seminar that Roland Barthes delivered in 1966–7, this chapter considers the challenge to rewrite, re-use, and ‘re-cover’ other writers’ texts. It shows, first in Critique et vérité, then across the seminar ‘La linguistique du discours’, and finally in the 1970 essay S/Z, that Barthes was developing a creative, literary-critical, practice rather than promoting ‘la nouvelle critique’. In this spirit of creative criticism, using Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Menippus, Barthes designed his radical approach to Balzac in S/Z. An egregious reading of Barthes’s approach notwithstanding (Bremond and Pavel, 1998), three elements are identified in his essayistic rewriting of Balzac’s Sarrasine that point to creative criticism: digression, drama, and historiality. These techniques allow Barthes’s essay both to distance and bring nearer the ‘tutor-text’ Sarrasine which, written in 1830, raised important questions about the cusp of modernity, and how to write criticism as literature.Less
Using an unpublished seminar that Roland Barthes delivered in 1966–7, this chapter considers the challenge to rewrite, re-use, and ‘re-cover’ other writers’ texts. It shows, first in Critique et vérité, then across the seminar ‘La linguistique du discours’, and finally in the 1970 essay S/Z, that Barthes was developing a creative, literary-critical, practice rather than promoting ‘la nouvelle critique’. In this spirit of creative criticism, using Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Menippus, Barthes designed his radical approach to Balzac in S/Z. An egregious reading of Barthes’s approach notwithstanding (Bremond and Pavel, 1998), three elements are identified in his essayistic rewriting of Balzac’s Sarrasine that point to creative criticism: digression, drama, and historiality. These techniques allow Barthes’s essay both to distance and bring nearer the ‘tutor-text’ Sarrasine which, written in 1830, raised important questions about the cusp of modernity, and how to write criticism as literature.
Michael Moriarty
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Recent publications have enabled a much fuller understanding of Barthes’s religious (Protestant) background. The work published in his lifetime shows a negative attitude to religion, to Christianity ...
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Recent publications have enabled a much fuller understanding of Barthes’s religious (Protestant) background. The work published in his lifetime shows a negative attitude to religion, to Christianity in particular, fairly typical of French left-wingers of the period; but certain religious preoccupations continue to inflect his thought. In the lectures published as Comment vivre ensemble he discusses religious communities of various kinds. The notion of the Neutral is asserted as a value against the arrogant and intolerant certitude of faith. He shows a strong interest in Eastern mysticism, as distinct from Christian varieties of mystical experience. Yet the experience of bereavement sends him back to reading Pascal and to passages of Proust with a marked religious resonance. Thinking about his mother’s relationship to religion leads him to think again about what Christianity could mean and to ponder the possibility of a faith without violence. The chapter concludes by asking whether, along the lines of Barthes’s distinction between politics (an object of suspicion) and the political (a value to be affirmed), it is possible to make a similar distinction between religion and the religious.Less
Recent publications have enabled a much fuller understanding of Barthes’s religious (Protestant) background. The work published in his lifetime shows a negative attitude to religion, to Christianity in particular, fairly typical of French left-wingers of the period; but certain religious preoccupations continue to inflect his thought. In the lectures published as Comment vivre ensemble he discusses religious communities of various kinds. The notion of the Neutral is asserted as a value against the arrogant and intolerant certitude of faith. He shows a strong interest in Eastern mysticism, as distinct from Christian varieties of mystical experience. Yet the experience of bereavement sends him back to reading Pascal and to passages of Proust with a marked religious resonance. Thinking about his mother’s relationship to religion leads him to think again about what Christianity could mean and to ponder the possibility of a faith without violence. The chapter concludes by asking whether, along the lines of Barthes’s distinction between politics (an object of suspicion) and the political (a value to be affirmed), it is possible to make a similar distinction between religion and the religious.
Jonathan Culler
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Roland Barthes’s writings were very positively received in the United States – in 1979 Wayne Booth called him the strongest influence on American criticism today – but America played a strange, often ...
More
Roland Barthes’s writings were very positively received in the United States – in 1979 Wayne Booth called him the strongest influence on American criticism today – but America played a strange, often contradictory role in his work. In his middle years he visited the US four times – in 1958, 1961, 1966, and 1967 – but his initial enthusiasm for New York City was soon qualified by a range of negative comments about the country and its culture, and after 1967 he only returned once, very briefly, though he was much in demand. While opposing the knee-jerk anti-Americanism common among French intellectuals in his day, and especially resistance to America’s modernity, he soon made America a foil for Japan, which represented true exoticism, the opposite of bourgeois Western culture. There are relatively few references to America or American literature in his writings, though American cinema was a significant cultural reference for him, but these do help to reveal the complexity of Barthes’s affective and intellectual engagements, especially since there is often a comparative dimension to them. This chapter explores the varying attitudes and comments about America in Barthes’s letters and his published writings.Less
Roland Barthes’s writings were very positively received in the United States – in 1979 Wayne Booth called him the strongest influence on American criticism today – but America played a strange, often contradictory role in his work. In his middle years he visited the US four times – in 1958, 1961, 1966, and 1967 – but his initial enthusiasm for New York City was soon qualified by a range of negative comments about the country and its culture, and after 1967 he only returned once, very briefly, though he was much in demand. While opposing the knee-jerk anti-Americanism common among French intellectuals in his day, and especially resistance to America’s modernity, he soon made America a foil for Japan, which represented true exoticism, the opposite of bourgeois Western culture. There are relatively few references to America or American literature in his writings, though American cinema was a significant cultural reference for him, but these do help to reveal the complexity of Barthes’s affective and intellectual engagements, especially since there is often a comparative dimension to them. This chapter explores the varying attitudes and comments about America in Barthes’s letters and his published writings.
Tiphaine Samoyault
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of ...
More
This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of Barthes; second, it derives from a part of Barthes’s writing he kept separate from the rest. This part is called ‘ordinary’ because it corresponds to those modest gestures of writing we all share: writing letters, postcards, to-do lists, notes, messages, or shopping lists. In Barthes, it is a kind of writing cut off from the rest, but that silently accompanies literary or intellectual production. His early habit of methodically recording his academic research on fiches develops into the production of the enormous self-archive he maintained all his life, a repository of things seen, read, and heard, of thoughts and projects, of impressions of places and people, of quotations he liked, or of bedside scribbles. This fichier is a malleable form absorbing all forms of ordinary writing, a kind of hypertextual document allowing flexibility for infinite redistribution, and the chapter concludes with discussion of Barthes’s diary-writing practice and its relation to the tenacious reworking of notes, plans, and fiches for the projected ‘novel’ he called Vita nova.Less
This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of Barthes; second, it derives from a part of Barthes’s writing he kept separate from the rest. This part is called ‘ordinary’ because it corresponds to those modest gestures of writing we all share: writing letters, postcards, to-do lists, notes, messages, or shopping lists. In Barthes, it is a kind of writing cut off from the rest, but that silently accompanies literary or intellectual production. His early habit of methodically recording his academic research on fiches develops into the production of the enormous self-archive he maintained all his life, a repository of things seen, read, and heard, of thoughts and projects, of impressions of places and people, of quotations he liked, or of bedside scribbles. This fichier is a malleable form absorbing all forms of ordinary writing, a kind of hypertextual document allowing flexibility for infinite redistribution, and the chapter concludes with discussion of Barthes’s diary-writing practice and its relation to the tenacious reworking of notes, plans, and fiches for the projected ‘novel’ he called Vita nova.
Lucy O’Meara
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Roland Barthes was a classicist by training; his work frequently alludes to the classical literary canon and the ancient art of rhetoric. This chapter argues that ancient Greco-Roman philosophy ...
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Roland Barthes was a classicist by training; his work frequently alludes to the classical literary canon and the ancient art of rhetoric. This chapter argues that ancient Greco-Roman philosophy permits insights into Barthes’s very late work, particularly when we understand ancient philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a mode of thought which prioritises an art of living. This chapter will focus on Barthes’s posthumously published Collège de France lecture notes (1977–80) and on other posthumous diary material, arguing that this work can be seen as part of a tradition of thought which has its roots in the ethics and care of the self proposed by ancient Greco-Roman philosophical thought. The chapter uses the work of the historian of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot, to set Barthes’s teaching in dialogue with Stoic and Epicurean thought, and subsequently refers to Stanley Cavell’s work on ‘moral perfectionism’ to demonstrate how Barthes’s final lecture courses, and the associated Vita Nova project, can be seen as efforts by Barthes to transform his ‘intelligibility’. Barthes’s late moral perfectionism, and the individualism of his teaching, corresponds to the ancient philosophical ethical imperative to think one’s way of life differently and thereby to transform one’s self.Less
Roland Barthes was a classicist by training; his work frequently alludes to the classical literary canon and the ancient art of rhetoric. This chapter argues that ancient Greco-Roman philosophy permits insights into Barthes’s very late work, particularly when we understand ancient philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a mode of thought which prioritises an art of living. This chapter will focus on Barthes’s posthumously published Collège de France lecture notes (1977–80) and on other posthumous diary material, arguing that this work can be seen as part of a tradition of thought which has its roots in the ethics and care of the self proposed by ancient Greco-Roman philosophical thought. The chapter uses the work of the historian of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot, to set Barthes’s teaching in dialogue with Stoic and Epicurean thought, and subsequently refers to Stanley Cavell’s work on ‘moral perfectionism’ to demonstrate how Barthes’s final lecture courses, and the associated Vita Nova project, can be seen as efforts by Barthes to transform his ‘intelligibility’. Barthes’s late moral perfectionism, and the individualism of his teaching, corresponds to the ancient philosophical ethical imperative to think one’s way of life differently and thereby to transform one’s self.
Éric Marty
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Patrizia Lombardo
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Claude Coste
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked ...
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Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked right up to his death on his Vita nova project. What is less known is that another project entered into competition with it. In the last months of his life, Barthes was hesitating between writing a fictional work or writing the literary history he referred to as ‘Notre littérature’ (Our literature). The existence and gestation of this project, which can be traced in Barthes’s fichier, offers an illuminating example of this filing-system at work. The fichier can be seen as a curious intellectual object: autonomous and self-renewing, but in constant dialogue with previously published texts; often, these return to their starting point as fiches, before being recycled by Barthes in new contexts. More specifically, this chapter has two aims: first, to present the detail of Barthes’s project of a ‘subjective’ history of French literature, contextualising it within his earlier publications on literary history; second, to analyse his very late hesitation between the two forms of writing he wished to renew – a fictional work or a literary history.Less
Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked right up to his death on his Vita nova project. What is less known is that another project entered into competition with it. In the last months of his life, Barthes was hesitating between writing a fictional work or writing the literary history he referred to as ‘Notre littérature’ (Our literature). The existence and gestation of this project, which can be traced in Barthes’s fichier, offers an illuminating example of this filing-system at work. The fichier can be seen as a curious intellectual object: autonomous and self-renewing, but in constant dialogue with previously published texts; often, these return to their starting point as fiches, before being recycled by Barthes in new contexts. More specifically, this chapter has two aims: first, to present the detail of Barthes’s project of a ‘subjective’ history of French literature, contextualising it within his earlier publications on literary history; second, to analyse his very late hesitation between the two forms of writing he wished to renew – a fictional work or a literary history.
Anne Herschberg Pierrot
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter explores the connections between Le Lexique de l’auteur (the seminar of 1973–4 in which Barthes reflects on the genesis of the text that will become Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), ...
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This chapter explores the connections between Le Lexique de l’auteur (the seminar of 1973–4 in which Barthes reflects on the genesis of the text that will become Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), La Préparation du roman (his last Collège de France lecture course of 1978–80), and critical essays he wrote in the mid- and late 1970s on scription, the ductus, and writing as gesture (from an anthropological point of view, as in the posthumously published Variations sur l’écriture, and within the paintings of Bernard Réquichot and Cy Twombly). The main focus will be on Barthes’s reflection, across the two seminars, on the idea of the virtual work: his exploration of the modalities of literary genesis in the grammatical mood of the ‘as if’, and his development of ways of modelling literary genesis through the concept of the œuvre-maquette. This bringing together of modelling, genesis, and writing as process, placed in relation to the desire to write as a significant dimension of actual writing, is one of the strikingly original aspects of Barthes’s 1970s thought. It is one that the posthumous publication of the seminars and lectures allows us to understand.Less
This chapter explores the connections between Le Lexique de l’auteur (the seminar of 1973–4 in which Barthes reflects on the genesis of the text that will become Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), La Préparation du roman (his last Collège de France lecture course of 1978–80), and critical essays he wrote in the mid- and late 1970s on scription, the ductus, and writing as gesture (from an anthropological point of view, as in the posthumously published Variations sur l’écriture, and within the paintings of Bernard Réquichot and Cy Twombly). The main focus will be on Barthes’s reflection, across the two seminars, on the idea of the virtual work: his exploration of the modalities of literary genesis in the grammatical mood of the ‘as if’, and his development of ways of modelling literary genesis through the concept of the œuvre-maquette. This bringing together of modelling, genesis, and writing as process, placed in relation to the desire to write as a significant dimension of actual writing, is one of the strikingly original aspects of Barthes’s 1970s thought. It is one that the posthumous publication of the seminars and lectures allows us to understand.
Stephen Bann
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Roland Barthes’s ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ was first published in France in 1967, in a journal sponsored by the École pratique des hautes études where he was teaching at the time. It appeared in ...
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Roland Barthes’s ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ was first published in France in 1967, in a journal sponsored by the École pratique des hautes études where he was teaching at the time. It appeared in English translations in 1970 and 1981, and soon came to rank as a source comparable to Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) in so far as it proposed a radically new mode of analysing historical writings. This chapter explains the broad international context in which the article was initially produced, and subsequently gained its reputation. Although critical approaches to the language of historiography were hardly practised at all in France in the 1960s, a fellow member of the Hautes Études such as Le Roy Ladurie was already coming forward as a spokesman for the new methods of ‘quantitative history’. Barthes’s own critical procedure was, however, notably indebted to the discourse analysis of the French linguistician, Émile Benveniste. It is argued that Barthes’s stated preference for the ‘intelligible’ as opposed to the ‘real’ as a criterion for historical analysis is a logical outcome of his cultural and political stance at the time. His seemingly perverse categorisation of the approach of the nineteenth-century historian Augustin Thierry is an unfortunate consequence.Less
Roland Barthes’s ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ was first published in France in 1967, in a journal sponsored by the École pratique des hautes études where he was teaching at the time. It appeared in English translations in 1970 and 1981, and soon came to rank as a source comparable to Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) in so far as it proposed a radically new mode of analysing historical writings. This chapter explains the broad international context in which the article was initially produced, and subsequently gained its reputation. Although critical approaches to the language of historiography were hardly practised at all in France in the 1960s, a fellow member of the Hautes Études such as Le Roy Ladurie was already coming forward as a spokesman for the new methods of ‘quantitative history’. Barthes’s own critical procedure was, however, notably indebted to the discourse analysis of the French linguistician, Émile Benveniste. It is argued that Barthes’s stated preference for the ‘intelligible’ as opposed to the ‘real’ as a criterion for historical analysis is a logical outcome of his cultural and political stance at the time. His seemingly perverse categorisation of the approach of the nineteenth-century historian Augustin Thierry is an unfortunate consequence.
Kris Pint
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
In the last decade of his life, Barthes increasingly turned to classical literature for the expression of what he called ‘minimal existence’. He found an ideal way to access this experience in ...
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In the last decade of his life, Barthes increasingly turned to classical literature for the expression of what he called ‘minimal existence’. He found an ideal way to access this experience in literary descriptions of the nuances of the weather, le temps qu’il fait. In these passages, the virtual space of literature opens up the existential space of the experiencing body, by providing a discourse to explore atmospheric conditions. As the experience of the atmosphere is cultural, a form of education is needed in order fully to appreciate it. It was this education Barthes found in the abandoned, untimely field of classical literature: ‘a country free by default’. Barthes’s literary explorations of the weather can be understood as a crucial part of the ethical project he developed at the Collège de France. Barthes’s ‘active semiology’ urges us to consider literature as a personal, intimate ‘guide de vie’, and to understand literary semiology not only as a contribution to a field of knowledge, but also to a field of experience. The sensation and expression of atmospheric conditions becomes an unexpected way to defend the existential and critical value of literature in our contemporary, increasingly virtualised information society.Less
In the last decade of his life, Barthes increasingly turned to classical literature for the expression of what he called ‘minimal existence’. He found an ideal way to access this experience in literary descriptions of the nuances of the weather, le temps qu’il fait. In these passages, the virtual space of literature opens up the existential space of the experiencing body, by providing a discourse to explore atmospheric conditions. As the experience of the atmosphere is cultural, a form of education is needed in order fully to appreciate it. It was this education Barthes found in the abandoned, untimely field of classical literature: ‘a country free by default’. Barthes’s literary explorations of the weather can be understood as a crucial part of the ethical project he developed at the Collège de France. Barthes’s ‘active semiology’ urges us to consider literature as a personal, intimate ‘guide de vie’, and to understand literary semiology not only as a contribution to a field of knowledge, but also to a field of experience. The sensation and expression of atmospheric conditions becomes an unexpected way to defend the existential and critical value of literature in our contemporary, increasingly virtualised information society.
Maria O’sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
In Roland Barthes’s ‘Michelet, l’histoire et la mort’ (1951), Michelet’s linear journey through centuries of French history is contrasted with the panoramic ‘tableau’ that holds together, in a moment ...
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In Roland Barthes’s ‘Michelet, l’histoire et la mort’ (1951), Michelet’s linear journey through centuries of French history is contrasted with the panoramic ‘tableau’ that holds together, in a moment of euphoric understanding, otherwise unconnected points in time. This chapter moves from this play of reversible and irreversible time to that of centred and decentred spaces in an unpublished section of Barthes’s 1966–7 seminar, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’. It suggests that Barthes’s discussion of time and space, which draws on the work of Vernant, Levêque, and Vidal-Naquet, and is applied to Michelet, Machiavelli, and Bossuet, can be mapped onto a shift from a structuralist focus on intra-relations between elements of a structure (as in Lévi-Strauss’s account of totemism) to the nascent post-structuralist emphasis on excentric structures associated with Derrida’s notion of ‘play’. The excentric centre is shown to underpin Barthes’s analysis of Michelet’s Tableau de la France, whereby Jakobson’s account of the poetic function of language is applied to Michelet’s rhetorical construction of the geography of France: the sequential ordering of the outlying regions according to their antithetical characteristics is ‘poetic’ in its form; by contrast, the ‘prosaic’ centre (the Île de France) absorbs and neutralises these differences.Less
In Roland Barthes’s ‘Michelet, l’histoire et la mort’ (1951), Michelet’s linear journey through centuries of French history is contrasted with the panoramic ‘tableau’ that holds together, in a moment of euphoric understanding, otherwise unconnected points in time. This chapter moves from this play of reversible and irreversible time to that of centred and decentred spaces in an unpublished section of Barthes’s 1966–7 seminar, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’. It suggests that Barthes’s discussion of time and space, which draws on the work of Vernant, Levêque, and Vidal-Naquet, and is applied to Michelet, Machiavelli, and Bossuet, can be mapped onto a shift from a structuralist focus on intra-relations between elements of a structure (as in Lévi-Strauss’s account of totemism) to the nascent post-structuralist emphasis on excentric structures associated with Derrida’s notion of ‘play’. The excentric centre is shown to underpin Barthes’s analysis of Michelet’s Tableau de la France, whereby Jakobson’s account of the poetic function of language is applied to Michelet’s rhetorical construction of the geography of France: the sequential ordering of the outlying regions according to their antithetical characteristics is ‘poetic’ in its form; by contrast, the ‘prosaic’ centre (the Île de France) absorbs and neutralises these differences.
Marielle Macé
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
A life cannot be dissociated from its forms (its ways, regimes, spaces, and rhythms) for these forms are also ideas of what life should be. This question is keenly felt today, especially in our ways ...
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A life cannot be dissociated from its forms (its ways, regimes, spaces, and rhythms) for these forms are also ideas of what life should be. This question is keenly felt today, especially in our ways of experiencing politics: we need ‘other sorts of life’, ‘other ways of living’, other rhythms and connections. Yet these phrases are often emptied of their meaning: they are the stock-in-trade of advertising, which allows us to dream of passing from one lifestyle to another without regard for the ethical complexity of what Pavese called ‘the business of living’. Roland Barthes helps us here. Right from his sanatorium years, and all that it cost him to become aware, so young, of the life made for us by daily routines, food, the weather, our ways of relating to others, and through to La Préparation du roman (which reflected on how everyday life must be organised to lead to a literary work), Barthes was always conscious of the seriousness of what the forms of living entail, in all their precision and detail. This chapter tracks the constancy of this conviction in Barthes’s trajectory, from the early sanatorium correspondence to Comment vivre ensemble and Journal de deuil.Less
A life cannot be dissociated from its forms (its ways, regimes, spaces, and rhythms) for these forms are also ideas of what life should be. This question is keenly felt today, especially in our ways of experiencing politics: we need ‘other sorts of life’, ‘other ways of living’, other rhythms and connections. Yet these phrases are often emptied of their meaning: they are the stock-in-trade of advertising, which allows us to dream of passing from one lifestyle to another without regard for the ethical complexity of what Pavese called ‘the business of living’. Roland Barthes helps us here. Right from his sanatorium years, and all that it cost him to become aware, so young, of the life made for us by daily routines, food, the weather, our ways of relating to others, and through to La Préparation du roman (which reflected on how everyday life must be organised to lead to a literary work), Barthes was always conscious of the seriousness of what the forms of living entail, in all their precision and detail. This chapter tracks the constancy of this conviction in Barthes’s trajectory, from the early sanatorium correspondence to Comment vivre ensemble and Journal de deuil.
François Noudelmann
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Barthes kept music separate from semiology, refusing to regard sounds as signs. By analysing music from the perspective of his body, he made audible its discreet phenomenologies. Many experiences, ...
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Barthes kept music separate from semiology, refusing to regard sounds as signs. By analysing music from the perspective of his body, he made audible its discreet phenomenologies. Many experiences, mental, psychic, and corporal, are at stake in performing and listening to music, and they played a subtle role in Barthes's thought. His listening and his musical practice led him to favour a relationship to his piano that permitted an imaginary appropriation and erotic play. Musical pulsation develops an intimate resistance to the law, one that combines repetition and perversion. Barthes highlights obsessive rhythms such as accents, syncopations, and off-beat rhythms. His writings on music, alluding to the language of the solitary body, emphasise erections and back-and-forth movements. He frequently over-interprets the performative indications on musical scores, such as the rubato or fingering, choosing to hear in them the sexual power of desire which leads the pianist towards a disseminated jouissance. By recording himself playing the piano, he extends this pleasure to enjoyment of his own rhythm as in an onanistic practice. From a theoretical perspective, musical practice allowed Barthes to bid his farewell to semiology and to maintain a subjective resistance, both philosophical and psychological, to social language.Less
Barthes kept music separate from semiology, refusing to regard sounds as signs. By analysing music from the perspective of his body, he made audible its discreet phenomenologies. Many experiences, mental, psychic, and corporal, are at stake in performing and listening to music, and they played a subtle role in Barthes's thought. His listening and his musical practice led him to favour a relationship to his piano that permitted an imaginary appropriation and erotic play. Musical pulsation develops an intimate resistance to the law, one that combines repetition and perversion. Barthes highlights obsessive rhythms such as accents, syncopations, and off-beat rhythms. His writings on music, alluding to the language of the solitary body, emphasise erections and back-and-forth movements. He frequently over-interprets the performative indications on musical scores, such as the rubato or fingering, choosing to hear in them the sexual power of desire which leads the pianist towards a disseminated jouissance. By recording himself playing the piano, he extends this pleasure to enjoyment of his own rhythm as in an onanistic practice. From a theoretical perspective, musical practice allowed Barthes to bid his farewell to semiology and to maintain a subjective resistance, both philosophical and psychological, to social language.
John Paul Ricco
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226717777
- eISBN:
- 9780226113371
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226113371.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
In this chapter, Roland Barthes’ book on photography Camera Lucida, is read alongside his lectures at the College de France on The Neutral and The Preparation of the Novel, in order to argue for the ...
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In this chapter, Roland Barthes’ book on photography Camera Lucida, is read alongside his lectures at the College de France on The Neutral and The Preparation of the Novel, in order to argue for the way in which through his writing, Barthes opened up a space for a shared sense of the future anteriority of loss and death with his readers, including in and around scenes of beds and bedrooms—as in images by such contemporary French photographers as Daniel Boudinet and Bernard Faucon, both of whom Blanchot wrote about. These images, like others in this book, are read as scenes of erotic pleasure and a certain kind of mourning now theorized as “neutral.” By attending to the textual and rhetorical spacing of Camera Lucida and other late writings, and to Barthes’ own thinking on the space of writing as peri-graphic, the author foregrounds the caesurae, parentheses, and ellipses that punctuate Barthes’ writing, and argues that these suspensions textually present and perform a notion of neutral mourning that Barthes was on the verge of developing right up until his accidental death in 1980.Less
In this chapter, Roland Barthes’ book on photography Camera Lucida, is read alongside his lectures at the College de France on The Neutral and The Preparation of the Novel, in order to argue for the way in which through his writing, Barthes opened up a space for a shared sense of the future anteriority of loss and death with his readers, including in and around scenes of beds and bedrooms—as in images by such contemporary French photographers as Daniel Boudinet and Bernard Faucon, both of whom Blanchot wrote about. These images, like others in this book, are read as scenes of erotic pleasure and a certain kind of mourning now theorized as “neutral.” By attending to the textual and rhetorical spacing of Camera Lucida and other late writings, and to Barthes’ own thinking on the space of writing as peri-graphic, the author foregrounds the caesurae, parentheses, and ellipses that punctuate Barthes’ writing, and argues that these suspensions textually present and perform a notion of neutral mourning that Barthes was on the verge of developing right up until his accidental death in 1980.
Nicholas Harrison
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159094
- eISBN:
- 9780191673481
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159094.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
In his book on Sade, Roland Barthes expresses that the greatest type of subversion or counter-censorship does not necessarily bring shocks to the law, the police, or to public opinion. Instead, it ...
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In his book on Sade, Roland Barthes expresses that the greatest type of subversion or counter-censorship does not necessarily bring shocks to the law, the police, or to public opinion. Instead, it concerns the inventing of a paradoxical discourse in which invention proves to be a revolutionary act. This chapter attempts to look into the ‘counter-censorship’ discourse in French literary culture during the 20th century. Also, the chapter aims to show that this discourse emerged from the overlap and intersection of the discourses covered in both the legal-historical notion of censorship as well as in the psychoanalytic notion of censorship. Specifically, the explanation rests on Breton and the Surrealists's work on Sade's singularity, and on the work of Barthes and the Tel Quel group.Less
In his book on Sade, Roland Barthes expresses that the greatest type of subversion or counter-censorship does not necessarily bring shocks to the law, the police, or to public opinion. Instead, it concerns the inventing of a paradoxical discourse in which invention proves to be a revolutionary act. This chapter attempts to look into the ‘counter-censorship’ discourse in French literary culture during the 20th century. Also, the chapter aims to show that this discourse emerged from the overlap and intersection of the discourses covered in both the legal-historical notion of censorship as well as in the psychoanalytic notion of censorship. Specifically, the explanation rests on Breton and the Surrealists's work on Sade's singularity, and on the work of Barthes and the Tel Quel group.
