The Afterlives of Roland Barthes

Neil Badmington

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474297462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

Roland Barthes – the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime.

1

Introduction: The Afterlives of Roland Barthes

There were lights on the side of the bridge over the railway line. They formed letters, words, a phrase: ‘Commence alors la grande lumière du Sud-Ouest’. Then the great light of the South West begins.

The text came from an essay by Roland Barthes and had been installed on Pont de Birambits in Bègles, a suburb of Bordeaux, by the artist Pascal Convert to mark the centenary of Barthes’s birth in 2015.¹ The location was not neutral: as Magali Nachtergael has explained, the crossing over the tracks marks the point of entry into the southern region formerly known as Aquitaine – a part of France in which Barthes had lived as child, where he would later spend much of his time when he was not in Paris and which he celebrated at length in ‘The Light of the South West’.²

I am writing these introductory pages in early 2016. If I allow my memory to drift back to the other side of the new year, I feel weary, overwhelmed; my body tenses and prickles. Trying to keep up with all of the commemorative events and publications during 2015 was exhausting, perhaps impossible, but nonetheless intellectually thrilling. I feel privileged to have lived through those twelve months and it saddens me to think that I will not be here to enjoy the festivities which will no doubt surround the second centenary. (Should an as-yet-unborn Barthesian happen to be reading these lines in 2115, I salute from beyond the grave and apologize for my absence. It is now your turn, as Chateaubriand puts it at the end of his Mémoires d’outre-tombe.³) The late Michael Sheringham was right, I think, when opening the ‘Roland Barthes and Poetry’ conference at Leeds University in March 2015, to say that a ‘Barthes-athon’ was underway.⁴ Celebratory events were staged in, among other places: Paris, Bordeaux, Orthez, London, Providence, Delhi, Tucumán, Cherbourg, Manchester, Lisbon, Tartu, Cardiff, La Paz, Londrina, Zagreb, New York, São Paulo, Lancaster, Bucharest, Arles, Bayonne, Kaslik, Boston, Saint Petersburg, Budapest, Mexico City, Valencia (Venezuela) and Buenos Aires. (I remember a bright and busy day in late June on which Twitter was describing simultaneous Barthes events in Cardiff, Zagreb and São Paulo.) Elsewhere in the year, the fashion house Hermès unveiled a luxurious silk carré inspired by Barthes’s bestselling A Lover’s Discourse, the French postal service produced a stamp bearing the author’s face, and the southern town of Bayonne gave a new name to one of its public spaces: ‘Esplanade Roland Barthes’.⁵

Then there was the mighty wave of publications – ‘the ultimate tyranny of paper’, to take a phrase from Ian McEwan.⁶ Among these were: a large and elegant volume of previously unpublished writings by Barthes entitled Album: Inédits, correspondances et varia (AL), along with a new edition of La Préparation du roman (PRN); Tiphaine Samoyault’s monumental Roland Barthes: Biographie; Fanny Lorent’s Barthes et Robbe-Grillet: Un dialogue critique; Magali Nachtergael’s Roland Barthes contemporain; Chantal Thomas’s Pour Roland Barthes; Philippe Sollers’s L’Amitié de Roland Barthes; Antoine Compagnon’s L’Âge des lettres; Dimitri Lorrain’s Roland Barthes, la mélancolie et la vie; Guillaume Cassegrain’s Roland Barthes ou l’image advenue; Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s Lettre à Roland Barthes; a special issue of Critique entitled ‘Une année avec Roland Barthes’; Jean Narboni’s La Nuit sera noire et blanche: Barthes, La Chambre claire, le cinéma; and, somewhat controversially, a novel by Laurent Binet, La Septième fonction du langage, which reimagined the traffic accident that led to Barthes’s death as an assassination attempt linked to a bizarre global conspiracy.⁷ At the same time, anglophone readers were treated to: three volumes of hitherto untranslated material by Barthes; Andy Stafford’s Roland Barthes in Reaktion’s ‘Critical Lives’ series; a special number of L’Esprit créatur entitled ‘What’s So Great About Roland Barthes?’; and, if I may be permitted to refer to a modest contribution of my own, the first issue of the new journal Barthes Studies.⁸

A prominent Barthes scholar emailed me on 1 January 2016 to say that she was rather relieved to have a quieter year ahead. Things will be calmer, no doubt, but new publications and events have continued to appear while I have been putting the finishing touches to this book. In February 2016, for instance, the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton unveiled a selection of Barthes’s drawings for the first time in the United Kingdom as part of its Barthes/Burgin exhibition.⁹ A couple of weeks later, a special issue of the journal Textual Practice entitled ‘Deliberations: The Journals of Roland Barthes’ was published and two more volumes of previously untranslated material by Barthes will be released by Seagull Books in the spring.¹⁰ In the summer, meanwhile, the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy will host a week-long conference on Barthes’s work, thirty-nine years on from the famous event of 1977 attended by, among others, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Antoine Compagnon, Jacques-Alain Miller and François Wahl.¹¹ Barthes, as ever, lies ahead.

Afterlives, structure

When Roland Barthes died in March 1980, he had published a vast amount of work and was one of the key intellectuals of the twentieth century. But death was by no means the end. As Dora Zhang put it in 2012: ‘Lately the posthumous corpus of Roland Barthes has been growing at a rate that rivals Tupac Shakur’s. (Can a hologram Barthes be far behind?).’¹² This ‘posthumous corpus’ includes: the five-volume Oeuvres complètes, which featured previously unseen material (such as the sketches for the unrealized Vita Nova); the ‘outing’ Incidents; six full collections of teaching notes; two diaries; notes and drafts for Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida; and the letters, notes and short texts of the recently published Album. In short, in recent years we have witnessed Barthes enjoying a remarkable afterlife – or, to be more precise, given the range of the posthumous publications, a series of remarkable afterlives. When I glance now at early studies in the field – Annette Lavers’s Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After or Philip Thody’s Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate, for example – I am struck above all by how small, comparatively speaking, a body of work such critics faced.¹³ Looking back in this way is like studying Roland Barthes through the wrong end of a telescope.

In the immediate aftermath of the centenary celebrations, while the scent of the fireworks still lingers, this book seizes the day to ask a series of questions about the afterlives of Roland Barthes. How do the many publications bearing Barthes’s name which have appeared since his death affect our understanding of his work? What difference do these posthumous offerings make? What is the relationship between then and now? Why, in short, might we need to consider the afterlives of Roland Barthes? I want to ask these questions, and I want to ask them by moving freely across the posthumous body, because it seems to me that they have not been asked to date with sufficient sweep. There are several fine studies specifically of Barthes’s lecture notes from the Collège de France, for example, but those notes represent just a part of the much larger posthumous corpus.¹⁴ There are other afterlives, other stories to tell, and I want in what follows to pursue these closely and rigorously by reading the recent publications which carry Barthes’s name with a careful eye for what they reveal and what they rewrite. My aim is not to offer a masterful encyclopedia which says everything about everything published since 1980. I wish, rather, merely to intervene in a timely manner with a new approach to, and new observations about, the work of Roland Barthes. While this book is in English, it engages often with recent texts by and about Barthes which have yet to be translated from French, as another of my aims in these pages is to expand the knowledge of readers who are curious but unable to read such works in their original language. (The afterlives do not wait for translators.)

Because Barthes’s posthumous publications differ so notably from each other – in terms of form, purpose, mode of address and date of composition, for example – it would be naive to argue that a single thread binds them all together, and therefore that a single theme in the posthumous Barthes can unite the chapters of this book. Such an indifferent approach would also be at odds with Barthes’s later writings, in fact, where the old certainties of structuralism, of underlying systems, came to be treated with great suspicion. Seeing a landscape in a bean, as the opening paragraph of S/Z so memorably proposed in 1970, is ‘a task as exhausting … as it is ultimately undesir...