Barthes: A Biography

by Tiphaine Samoyault, Jonathan Culler (Foreword by), Andrew Brown (Translator)

Overview

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This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas,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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509505692
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	01/13/2017
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	584
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

02/20/2017
Samoyault, with the help of rare primary sources, brings to life Roland Barthes, a famous French literary critic whose personal story is often overshadowed by his innovative ideas. This biography includes the expected pieces of Barthes’s intricate intellectual puzzle: the development of his thought and his attempts to grapple with the ideological function of art, books, and language. But this book is less about Barthes’s theories than the equally fascinating life that informed them, and readers will come to see the two as inextricably entwined. Samoyault provides detailed accounts of Barthes’s struggles with tuberculosis, which directed his attention to his own physicality and informed his writing’s focus on the body. The narrative begins not with Barthes’s 1915 birth, but rather with his death in 1980—an unexpected choice that’s entirely fitting for such an iconoclastic subject. Most significantly, this book includes new sources: letters, journal entries, and photographs that offer further glimpses into Barthes’s public and private lives. The book reproduces the manuscript for Barthes’ inaugural lecture at Collège de France alongside journal entries meticulously documenting his diet. This work is easily recommended to Barthes enthusiasts, as well as to anyone interested in his ability to make sense of a baffling and tumultuous world. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly