Barthes and ‘Subtle Forms of Living’

A life cannot be dissociated from its forms (its ways, regimes, spaces, and rhythms) for these forms are also ideas of what life should be. This question is keenly felt today, especially in our ways of experiencing politics: we need ‘other sorts of life’, ‘other ways of living’, other rhythms and connections. Yet these phrases are often emptied of their meaning: they are the stock-in-trade of advertising, which allows us to dream of passing from one lifestyle to another without regard for the ethical complexity of what Pavese called ‘the business of living’. Roland Barthes helps us here. Right from his sanatorium years, and all that it cost him to become aware, so young, of the life made for us by daily routines, food, the weather, our ways of relating to others, and through to La Préparation du roman (which reflected on how everyday life must be organised to lead to a literary work), Barthes was always conscious of the seriousness of what the forms of living entail, in all their precision and detail. This chapter tracks the constancy of this conviction in Barthes’s trajectory, from the early sanatorium correspondence to Comment vivre ensemble and Journal de deuil.

‘A Country Free by Default’: Barthes and the Atmospheric Experience of Literature

In the last decade of his life, Barthes increasingly turned to classical literature for the expression of what he called ‘minimal existence’. He found an ideal way to access this experience in literary descriptions of the nuances of the weather, le temps qu’il fait. In these passages, the virtual space of literature opens up the existential space of the experiencing body, by providing a discourse to explore atmospheric conditions. As the experience of the atmosphere is cultural, a form of education is needed in order fully to appreciate it. It was this education Barthes found in the abandoned, untimely field of classical literature: ‘a country free by default’. Barthes’s literary explorations of the weather can be understood as a crucial part of the ethical project he developed at the Collège de France. Barthes’s ‘active semiology’ urges us to consider literature as a personal, intimate ‘guide de vie’, and to understand literary semiology not only as a contribution to a field of knowledge, but also to a field of experience. The sensation and expression of atmospheric conditions becomes an unexpected way to defend the existential and critical value of literature in our contemporary, increasingly virtualised information society.

Barthes and the Lessons of Ancient Philosophy

Roland Barthes was a classicist by training; his work frequently alludes to the classical literary canon and the ancient art of rhetoric. This chapter argues that ancient Greco-Roman philosophy permits insights into Barthes’s very late work, particularly when we understand ancient philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a mode of thought which prioritises an art of living. This chapter will focus on Barthes’s posthumously published Collège de France lecture notes (1977–80) and on other posthumous diary material, arguing that this work can be seen as part of a tradition of thought which has its roots in the ethics and care of the self proposed by ancient Greco-Roman philosophical thought. The chapter uses the work of the historian of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot, to set Barthes’s teaching in dialogue with Stoic and Epicurean thought, and subsequently refers to Stanley Cavell’s work on ‘moral perfectionism’ to demonstrate how Barthes’s final lecture courses, and the associated Vita Nova project, can be seen as efforts by Barthes to transform his ‘intelligibility’. Barthes’s late moral perfectionism, and the individualism of his teaching, corresponds to the ancient philosophical ethical imperative to think one’s way of life differently and thereby to transform one’s self.

The Intelligible versus the Real: Barthes’s Historiographical Option

Roland Barthes’s ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ was first published in France in 1967, in a journal sponsored by the École pratique des hautes études where he was teaching at the time. It appeared in English translations in 1970 and 1981, and soon came to rank as a source comparable to Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) in so far as it proposed a radically new mode of analysing historical writings. This chapter explains the broad international context in which the article was initially produced, and subsequently gained its reputation. Although critical approaches to the language of historiography were hardly practised at all in France in the 1960s, a fellow member of the Hautes Études such as Le Roy Ladurie was already coming forward as a spokesman for the new methods of ‘quantitative history’. Barthes’s own critical procedure was, however, notably indebted to the discourse analysis of the French linguistician, Émile Benveniste. It is argued that Barthes’s stated preference for the ‘intelligible’ as opposed to the ‘real’ as a criterion for historical analysis is a logical outcome of his cultural and political stance at the time. His seemingly perverse categorisation of the approach of the nineteenth-century historian Augustin Thierry is an unfortunate consequence.

Barthes, the Desire to Write, and the Prevision of the Work

This chapter explores the connections between Le Lexique de l’auteur (the seminar of 1973–4 in which Barthes reflects on the genesis of the text that will become Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), La Préparation du roman (his last Collège de France lecture course of 1978–80), and critical essays he wrote in the mid- and late 1970s on scription, the ductus, and writing as gesture (from an anthropological point of view, as in the posthumously published Variations sur l’écriture, and within the paintings of Bernard Réquichot and Cy Twombly). The main focus will be on Barthes’s reflection, across the two seminars, on the idea of the virtual work: his exploration of the modalities of literary genesis in the grammatical mood of the ‘as if’, and his development of ways of modelling literary genesis through the concept of the œuvre-maquette. This bringing together of modelling, genesis, and writing as process, placed in relation to the desire to write as a significant dimension of actual writing, is one of the strikingly original aspects of Barthes’s 1970s thought. It is one that the posthumous publication of the seminars and lectures allows us to understand.

Barthes’s Menippean Moment: Creative Criticism 1966–70

Using an unpublished seminar that Roland Barthes delivered in 1966–7, this chapter considers the challenge to rewrite, re-use, and ‘re-cover’ other writers’ texts. It shows, first in Critique et vérité, then across the seminar ‘La linguistique du discours’, and finally in the 1970 essay S/Z, that Barthes was developing a creative, literary-critical, practice rather than promoting ‘la nouvelle critique’. In this spirit of creative criticism, using Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Menippus, Barthes designed his radical approach to Balzac in S/Z. An egregious reading of Barthes’s approach notwithstanding (Bremond and Pavel, 1998), three elements are identified in his essayistic rewriting of Balzac’s Sarrasine that point to creative criticism: digression, drama, and historiality. These techniques allow Barthes’s essay both to distance and bring nearer the ‘tutor-text’ Sarrasine which, written in 1830, raised important questions about the cusp of modernity, and how to write criticism as literature.

Barthes and Religion

Recent publications have enabled a much fuller understanding of Barthes’s religious (Protestant) background. The work published in his lifetime shows a negative attitude to religion, to Christianity in particular, fairly typical of French left-wingers of the period; but certain religious preoccupations continue to inflect his thought. In the lectures published as Comment vivre ensemble he discusses religious communities of various kinds. The notion of the Neutral is asserted as a value against the arrogant and intolerant certitude of faith. He shows a strong interest in Eastern mysticism, as distinct from Christian varieties of mystical experience. Yet the experience of bereavement sends him back to reading Pascal and to passages of Proust with a marked religious resonance. Thinking about his mother’s relationship to religion leads him to think again about what Christianity could mean and to ponder the possibility of a faith without violence. The chapter concludes by asking whether, along the lines of Barthes’s distinction between politics (an object of suspicion) and the political (a value to be affirmed), it is possible to make a similar distinction between religion and the religious.

Time and Space: Barthes and the Discourse of History

In Roland Barthes’s ‘Michelet, l’histoire et la mort’ (1951), Michelet’s linear journey through centuries of French history is contrasted with the panoramic ‘tableau’ that holds together, in a moment of euphoric understanding, otherwise unconnected points in time. This chapter moves from this play of reversible and irreversible time to that of centred and decentred spaces in an unpublished section of Barthes’s 1966–7 seminar, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’. It suggests that Barthes’s discussion of time and space, which draws on the work of Vernant, Levêque, and Vidal-Naquet, and is applied to Michelet, Machiavelli, and Bossuet, can be mapped onto a shift from a structuralist focus on intra-relations between elements of a structure (as in Lévi-Strauss’s account of totemism) to the nascent post-structuralist emphasis on excentric structures associated with Derrida’s notion of ‘play’. The excentric centre is shown to underpin Barthes’s analysis of Michelet’s Tableau de la France, whereby Jakobson’s account of the poetic function of language is applied to Michelet’s rhetorical construction of the geography of France: the sequential ordering of the outlying regions according to their antithetical characteristics is ‘poetic’ in its form; by contrast, the ‘prosaic’ centre (the Île de France) absorbs and neutralises these differences.

Barthes’s Ordinary Writing

This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of Barthes; second, it derives from a part of Barthes’s writing he kept separate from the rest. This part is called ‘ordinary’ because it corresponds to those modest gestures of writing we all share: writing letters, postcards, to-do lists, notes, messages, or shopping lists. In Barthes, it is a kind of writing cut off from the rest, but that silently accompanies literary or intellectual production. His early habit of methodically recording his academic research on fiches develops into the production of the enormous self-archive he maintained all his life, a repository of things seen, read, and heard, of thoughts and projects, of impressions of places and people, of quotations he liked, or of bedside scribbles. This fichier is a malleable form absorbing all forms of ordinary writing, a kind of hypertextual document allowing flexibility for infinite redistribution, and the chapter concludes with discussion of Barthes’s diary-writing practice and its relation to the tenacious reworking of notes, plans, and fiches for the projected ‘novel’ he called Vita nova.

From Fichier to OEuvre: Barthes and the ‘Our Literature’ Project

Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked right up to his death on his Vita nova project. What is less known is that another project entered into competition with it. In the last months of his life, Barthes was hesitating between writing a fictional work or writing the literary history he referred to as ‘Notre littérature’ (Our literature). The existence and gestation of this project, which can be traced in Barthes’s fichier, offers an illuminating example of this filing-system at work. The fichier can be seen as a curious intellectual object: autonomous and self-renewing, but in constant dialogue with previously published texts; often, these return to their starting point as fiches, before being recycled by Barthes in new contexts. More specifically, this chapter has two aims: first, to present the detail of Barthes’s project of a ‘subjective’ history of French literature, contextualising it within his earlier publications on literary history; second, to analyse his very late hesitation between the two forms of writing he wished to renew – a fictional work or a literary history.