Barthes on Writing and Authorship

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.

In this paper, I am concerned with the conditions of Roland Barthes’s understanding of the act of writing. My concern is how the will-to-write, which Barthes addresses in his late lecture course La Préparation du roman (1978–80), emerges as ‘a necessity to write intransitively’. I trace how Barthes transposes this will-to-write from Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s L’Absolu littéraire (1978) into the context of the life of the writer who desires literature. I argue that the historical condition of this act of writing is the emergence of literature as an absolute condition of life and as a pure a priori form of writing in post-Kantian thought.

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 second of three essays intended to accompany 'Roland Barthes' by Mireille Ribière (Philosophy Insights, Humanities-Ebooks, Kindle edition, 2010).

Published in Mike Gane and Nicholas Gane (eds.): ROLAND BARTHES, vol. I-III, Sage Masters of Social Thought, 2004

For Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes literature appears to be inseparable from the language in which it speaks. With their theories of language as the starting point, I discuss how their views on literature meet. Their paths cross, for example, in the antithesis: the idea that the allegorical counter-image creates the field of tension in the text that is able to release one from all that which is cramped and unfree in existence. This release always comes 'from within,' from language's concrete use of emblematic or coded stereotypes. And not 'from without,' like the impact of an already existing truth or release in a symbolic indirectness in the text. In Benjamin's critique of the 'profane concept of symbols' of classical-romantic aesthetics and in his indication of the cognitive potential of the dialectic concept of allegory there is an attitude which is fundamentally in agreement with that of Barthes regarding the semiotic way in which both the content and the expression sides of language function.

Paragraph, 1988

Barthes: ideology, culture, subjectivity Je n'ai pas du tout une pensée politique, historique ou sociologique. (Roland Barthes) To pose political questions about Barthes's texts is to challenge the above statement.1 It is certainly not to lay claim to an inheritance. Barthes has no legitimate heirs: his work cannot be appropriated in accordance with a Law.2 Nor can the text be placed under the sign of an authorial political commitment expressed and lived outside it. 'Au fond, s'il fallait vous définir, l'étiquette ď "intellectuel de gauche" collerait pour une fois assez bien' (At bottom, if one had to define you, the label of 'left-wing intellectual' would for once fit quite well), suggests an interviewer. Barthes shrugs his shoulders: 'Ce serait à la gauche de dire si elle me comprend parmi ses intellectuels' (It would be for the left to say if it counts me as one of its intellectuals) ; all he will admit to is an obstinately anarchist sensibility.3 Up to the Left, then, to decide what use it can make of Barthes in its political and theoretical projects. The present paper offers no more than suggestions about possible lines to follow. It is not, furthermore, really a question of making use of Barthes. By this I mean two things. The first, with an important qualification that I shall make presently, is that the aim is not to judge Barthes as the moral subject of his ideological positions, although the positions themselves come under scrutiny. Such evaluations can be left to the bourgeois ideology of the ultimate responsibility of the individual subject. 'We know', as Barthes tends to say in his bouts of theoretical euphoria, that the text resists attribution to an individual: it escapes, goes beyond its author. Paradoxically, though, one of the ways in which the text of Barthes escapes its author is precisely in being attributed to him, against its own drift. The economy it enters into is not an authorless one. At one point Barthes wonders if literature is going to regain its medieval status as 'un objet à commentaires, un tuteur d'autres langages' (an object for commentaries, a prop for other languages),4 but this would require an institutional death of the author: the medieval culture that identified 'author' and 'authority' was paradoxically far less author-centred than our own, commenting on pagan, Christian and Moslem authors alike without concern for their individuality. It is a fact-cultural, political and ideological-that modern Western culture consumes texts 'by