Barthes: A Biography

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother’s unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing Ð and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes’s life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped Ð as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes’s life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements viii Bibliographical note x Foreword by Jonathan Culler xi Prologue: The death of Roland Barthes 1 Introduction 13 The voice 13 ‘Life’ 15 1 Setting off 24 A father dead at sea 27 The mother as replacement father 35 2 ‘Gochokissime’ 48 From the seaside. . . 48 . . . to the heart of Paris 55 3 His whole life ahead of him 64 The years of apprenticeship 64 Elective affinities 75 4 Barthes and Gide 83 The beginning and the end 84 Music on the large scale and the small 87 Homosexuality 90 Journal 92 5 His whole life behind him 99 From Antiquity to Greece 99 From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 106 From the Atlantic to behind the lines 110 6 New vistas 121 The body and its illness 121 ‘At the sanatorium, I was happy’ 126 The first texts 133 7 Sorties 143 Far from the sanatorium 143 ‘Nadeau, to whom I owe that capital thing, a debut . . .’ 147 Far from Paris (1). Bucharest 150 Far from Paris (2). Alexandria 159 Modes of writing: the Ministry and ‘Degree Zero’ 164 8 Barthes and Sartre 177 The argument about responsibilities 178 Childhood and history 184 An invitation to the imaginary 188 9 Scenes 193 Liquidations 194 Theatre 205 The year 1955 216 Theatricality 221 10 Structures 231 The sign 232 The École 237 Structure 248 The house 257 11 Literature 268 Encounters 269 Literary criticism 274 Barthes explains himself 283 The year 1966 291 Thinking the image 300 12 Events 306 Absences 307 The book on May: ‘Sade, Fourier, Loyola’ 317 Changes 320 Cut-ups 331 13 Barthes and Sollers 343 Friendship 346 Everyone’s off to China 354 14 The body 367 The eye and the hand 371 Taste 379 Hearing and vision 384 Loving loving 391 15 Legitimacy 401 The professor 401 The Collège de France 409 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 413 The colloque de Cerisy 425 16 Barthes and Foucault 430 Parallel lives 431 An accompaniment 435 Two styles 437 17 Heartbreak 445 1977 445 Love 447 Death 458 The Mourning Diary 460 18 ‘Vita Nova’ 470 15 April 1978 470 New life? 479 Clarity 484 The end 489 Notes 499 Image credits 565 Index 567

About the Author :
Tiphaine Samoyault is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3.

Review :
"Barthes, like no other modern writer, invented a critical form that was “live” in every sense, where the labor of writing criticism acquired animate breath and pulse as it entered Barthes’ chronicle of aesthetic preparation for a Vita Nova, a new life, a novel, a reading of ideologies, images, voices, cultural myths and above all literary texts. Such a self-writing subject poses a daunting challenge to the biographer. But Tiphaine Samoyault has risen to it, with a magisterial life of Roland Barthes, enriched by new archival material and her own peerless talents as both writer and literary critic." - Emily Apter, New York University "Tiphaine Samoyault’s outstanding biography of Roland Barthes allows us to meet him in person, as it were, as a lively, seductive French intellectual. At the same time, Samoyault offers us a splendid introduction to Barthes’ ground-breaking writings in so many fields, from literary theory to meditations about the meaning of human existence." - Thomas Pavel, The University of Chicago ‘While offering the most detailed and elegantly written interpretation to date of the life and works of its remarkable subject, this book is much more than a traditional intellectual biography. Typhaine Samoyault’s masterful, multilayered and, at times, lyrical narrative captures Roland Barthes the person and writer, essayist and scholar, and depicts him in his time and with his contemporaries, family and friends, colleagues and lovers, to be sure. Her phenomenal study tracks the doing and undoing of a great writer and thinker, a witness of what is still, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, very much our own time and cultural, indeed, political predicament. In so doing, she offers a valuable testimony of a person facing opportunities and challenges whose enduring lesson and bitter sweetness we have all learned to appreciate and savour.’ - Hent de Vries, The Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University ‘superb’ The New York Review of Books