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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.

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.

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.