Roland Barthes and the 'Affective Truths' of Autotheory (original) (raw)
Related papers
Letras Raras, 2019
This paper addresses the notes published posthumously as Roland Barthes' Mourning diary. Considering its role in Barthes' oeuvre, we examine a) the special relationship between presence and absence that occurs in mourning, b) Barthes' reckoning with that psychoanalytic concept and c) the particularities of writing harboured in grief. Our analysis revisits Freud's pioneering study "Mourning and melancholia", Kristeva's work on the same subject and Blanchot's musings on the close ties between writing and death, as well as critical studies of Barthes' Mourning diary and other writing projects equally haunted by the loss of his mother (Camera lucida and the intended novel Vita Nova); we also identify similarities between the writings-in-mourning undertaken by Barthes and by Dante Alighieri. At the end, we discuss inscriptions of affection in the experience of loss and the distinguishing traits of mourning writing; we propose that a certain pathos may be at work in the Diary, weaving a particular brand of connection between writing, love and their spectre-like objects and participants.
Discoursing Love: The writer and X A fictional response to Roland Barthes
2013
Discoursing Love-The Writer and X' offers a series of microfictions written in response to Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1990 [1978]). In A Lover's Discourse Barthes seeks to 'stage an utterance not an analysis ... amorously confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak' (3). Likewise I have written short pieces-outbursts, ripostes, manoeuvres-each less than seven hundred words and connected by meditations on love as experienced by a writer towards her lover. Questions include: How does love confront us? Can the emotional complexity of love, and of the loved Other, find voice in language? I have also experimented with structure, using Barthes' text to frame each story. This project, conceived in collaboration with Dr Shady Cosgrove, is the first stage of an ongoing work concerned with the interplay of theory and creative writing.
ROLAND BARTHES ON WRITING: LITERATURE IS IN ESSENCE
This paper intended as Roland Barthes views on writing. Barthes argues that language is a relatively autonomous system. The literary text is opaque and unnatural. The denial of the opacity of language and the notion that true art is verisimilitude is a bourgeois fallacy. A Zero Degree Writing in contrast, call attention to itself. It reveals itself as language and as a sign system.
Roland Barthes's Photobiographies: Towards an “Exemption from Meaning”
2009
None of Roland Barthes’s texts could be said to be an autobiography in the traditional sense of the term. However, several of his works clearly manifest an autobiographical character, most notably Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and Camera Lucida (1980). While these two books have very different aims, they are both inhabited by photographs. How can this phenomenon be explained? My aim in this paper is to show that, in the 1970s, Barthes conceived an autobiographical project that involved the use of photographs and ‘biographemes’ (which he describes as ‘details’, ‘tastes’, and ‘inflections’). This project was based on a desire to express autobiographical content outside the realm of meaning, through simple designation. In this respect, Japanese Haikai played a major role in his reflexion. Barthes severely criticized traditional autobiographies, describing them as ‘[auto]biochronographies’ and as characterized by chronological linearity and a search for rational explanations of human behaviour. The use of photography gave him an alternative to what he views as a typically Western ‘tyranny’ of meaning and logic. In the first part of this paper, I focus on Barthes’s photobiographical writing, discussing it in the light of Philippe Lejeune’s theory of autobiography in order to demonstrate its radical originality. In the second part, I consider Barthes’s use of handwriting and of other referential and identity signs such as proper nouns. My claim is that these elements play a significant part in the Barthesian photobiographical project evoked above. For example, at the end of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes writes the following under two unreadable graphic signs: ‘Doodling … or the signifier without the signified.’ I want to suggest that he provides us here with a key for understanding the nature of his project, in which writing – graphein – acquires a new dimension.
Barthes the Phenomenologist and the Being of Literature
Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 2019
This essay explores Roland Barthes' recourse to phenomenology, especially in the later work where his phenomenology is found to be more indebted to Husserl than to Sartre. It also finds parallels between what Barthes claims is the eidos of photography and what he implies about the nature of literature. Louis-Jean Calvet describes an encounter between thirty two year old Roland Barthes and one of the editors of the newspaper Combat, Maurice Nadeau, which resulted in Barthes submitting two manuscripts for possible publication. Nadeau agreed to publish one of them, "Le Degré zéro de l'écriture," and added a foreword in which he wrote "Roland Barthes is a young, unknown writer.. .. Yet, after several conversations with him, we decided that this young man, the fanatic about language (who has thought of nothing else for two years), had something new to say" (qtd. in Calvet 78). Barthes would later pass through various schools of thought; and indeed toward the end of his career he himself would list some of the stages along the way-social mythology, semiology, textuality, and morality-and situate his books within them. Of course, it is possible to question these phases and find other labels. Why not simply distinguish between "early" and "late" Barthes? Why not label the more inward-looking last phase "autobiographical"? What about Barthes the structuralist or Barthes the poststructuralist?1 In a biography of Barthes which appeared in 2015-a year which marked a revival of interest in Barthes particularly in Europe and North America as reflected in numerous international conferences, seminars, exhibitions, scholarly books and articles-Andy Stafford suggests that although Barthes would not shy away from making use of the tools provided by particular theoretical movements, he would at the same time resist or even undermine each 1
The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, ed. by Mark Durden and Jane Tormey, 2020
Although Roland Barthes was always reluctant to be labelled a photography theorist, he occupies a central position within the discourse owing to his semiotic analyses of the 1960s and his canonical, phenomenologically-oriented Camera Lucida (from 1980). In addition, several of Barthes’ posthumous publications deal with photography to various degrees, including Mourning Diary, his lecture series at the Collège de France The Preparation of the Novel, his seminar “Proust and Photography,” and his fragmentary project “Autobiography in Images.” This chapter reassesses Barthes’ contribution to photography theory in the context of these posthumous publications and unpublished archival material and evaluates the extent to which they shed a new or different light on some of his well-known arguments and ideas. Against the wider background of his strong opposition of photographic representation to language, this chapter shows that the reassessment of Barthes’ work on photography extends as far back in time as to his second book, the 1954 biography of Jules Michelet, seldom mentioned in relation to his writing on photography, although clearly relevant to it. It demonstrates that a phenomenological, affective, and autobiographical approach to photography is characteristic of his entire engagement with the medium – interrupted by his semiotic-structuralist phase – rather than only a feature of his late work as has hitherto been assumed to be the case.
An alternative approach for personal narrative interpretation: The semiotics of Roland Barthes
… Journal of Qualitative …, 2007
In this paper the authors propose Roland Barthes's analytical method, which appears in his classic work S/Z (1974), as a new way of analyzing personal stories. The five codes that are described in the book are linked to the domains of poetics, language, and culture, and expose facets that are embedded in the deep structure of narratives. These codes are helpful in revealing findings with regard to the development of the professional careers of teacher educators.
2016
A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments is one of the most read text on love by the end of the twentieth century. Considered within the larger span of Roland Barthes’s works, his Fragments are a sort of preview for the main affective utopia Barthes ever dreamt of: the Neutral, as closeness and distance at the same time. The main trigger of Barthes febrile research of the Neutral is his conception of an affect apt to be separated from power. Love without exerting any pressure on the other. One of its origins may be considered his own difference: being homosexual in a society deprived of institutions meant to shelter homosexual affection.
The Message is the Medium: Roland Barthes and the Materialities of Writing and Reading Practices
2014
Some reflections on re-reading Roland Barthes' early work, its connections with Marshall McLuhan's _Mechanical Bride_, and its potential utility in materialist critiques of technologies. Please note this is an UNPUBLISHED WORKING DRAFT and is comprised of text with accompanying slides. Please consult both. A working draft of the conference paper that accompanied this presentation can be accessed here: TEXT https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XjwfGZTvJmae0Cq\_QoUqoqeLOldyhG0J/view?usp=sharing IMAGES https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nWhe2yHmWKXdJxcrrVe3516wdIUZEuMe/view?usp=sharing