Living Alone Together: Barthes, Zola, and the Work of Letters

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.

Is it possible to create a community where everyone lives according to their own rhythm, and yet respects the individual rhythms of others? This volume contains new essays which investigate and actualize the concepts that Roland Barthes discussed in his famous 1977 lecture series on "How to Live Together" at the Collège de France. The anthology presents original and thought-provoking approaches to questions of conviviality and "idiorrhytmic life forms" in literature, arts and other media. The essays are written by 32 highly competent scholars from seven countries, representing literary studies, philosophy, social sciences, theology, church history, psychoanalysis, art history, architecture, media studies, history of ideas, and biology.

‘When familiar meanings dissolve…’: Essays in French Studies in Memory of Malcolm Bowie, ed. by Gill Rye and Naomi Segal, 2011

Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2021

This essay discusses methodological issues raised by Barthes's La Chambre claire within the context of his later work. It examines Barthes as a precursor of autotheory, an umbrella term applied to writing (and other cultural expressions) that combines reflections on art and theory with an exploration of intimate life.

Cultural Studies, 2004

How might the injunction to ‘think differently’ in the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have informed a re-thinking of everyday life? In Barthes’ work, a critical analysis of myth and ideology in the contemporary everyday life of the late 1950s gives way to counter-ideological strategies that might seem to move away from the everyday and towards the utopian. However, the utopian imagination at work in Barthes’ thought is effective precisely in its insistence on the everyday detail. This is reflected in the later work in the attention given to the incident and the haiku. In his later work, Foucault turns towards antiquity in response to his own assessment of the ubiquitous diffusion of relations of power and the need to ‘think differently’. It is, however, in the interviews and specifically in a series of comments on homosexuality that Foucault is most attentive to the ‘possibilities for new life’ in his own time. It is through the undoing of already established relations and the experimentation with different modes of relation that a locus of difference can be found in everyday life. This is characterized by Foucault as a heterotopia. Foucault’s tentative suggestions of different possibilities are oriented towards an intensification of pleasures, counter to the psychoanalytic attention to desire. However, Foucault’s account of pleasure is associated with mortality, suggesting the question: is this different life one destined only to posterity and its own transcendence? Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian subjectivation suggests a different strategy of resistance, more attuned to the immanence of a life.

Paragraph, 2016

This essay explores the relationship between mourning and writing by tracing the various uses and connotations of the term ‘intermittence’ in the writings of Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes, with particular reference to the middle volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, Sodome et Gomorrhe, and to Barthes's posthumously published Journal de deuil. Against the backdrop of the Proustian ‘Intermittences of the Heart’, I demonstrate that intermittence is a useful interpretive framework for Barthes's Journal de deuil in terms of the sporadic rhythm of the author's experience of grief, and suggest that this rhythm is audible in and performed by the Journal's fragmented, discontinuous form. Finally, intermittence in its etymological meaning of ‘sending between’ is brought to bear on broader, fundamental questions concerning the purpose of mournful writing, including to whom it is addressed and of what it speaks.

The essay presents the literary debate between R. Barthes and A. Camus, reflecting on the role of interpretative elements in Camus’s well-known novel, “The Plague”. The consideration of critical points of view in the debate, requires, as the author believes, to refer to theories of the novel, as presented by both Barthes and Camus in 1950’s as well as important critical remarks in the literary exchange of the era, especially considering Sartre and Jenson’s understanding of Camus’s work. Such context of the debate, clearly referring to Marxism and realism in art will allow for fuller understanding of the reasons for consequent attacks on Camus’s novel, perceived as a source of anti-historical ethics, leading to solitude rather than solidarity. On a meta-level, the debate shows, how ideologically driven theory of art may lead to serious limitations in interpretative possibilities.

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

Paragraph, 2008

In our contemporary society one would be tempted to see solitude as the result of individualism. The most striking idea Barthes developed in Comment vivre ensemble was the way in which solitude could be lived as a collective experience. This collective enterprise was not the result of a selfish retreat devoted to personal preoccupations. It fulfilled itself rather as an action dedicated to the other. In front of this singular way of seeing, the question arises how Barthes conceived this culture of distance as a ‘social’ action. Is it correct to present this ideological pathway as a form of courtesy, implying that others do not need to be confronted with the inner life of the individual? Taking these preliminary thoughts as a keystone, my article explores the content Barthes gives to his so-called socialisme des distances and how texts of early mystical societies develop this notion of distance.