Pour Roland Barthes by Chantal Thomas (review)

This book is a pleasure to read from beginning to end. Perhaps that is because Chantal Thomas’s relationship with Barthes began just when he had published Le plaisir du texte, and that seminal text lurks behind the articles in this book. Thomas’s reading concerns the values transmitted by Barthes and his work: l’amour de la langue, la différence au lieu du conflit, le goût du présent, le désir. She intends this concise appreciation as “un exercice d’admiration et de reconnaissance,” an expression of her affection, her “empathie rêveuse,” for Barthes—but it is also an exploration of the self she portrays in writing it.

As a student in his seminar, with a thesis on Sade, she speaks with a deeply felt warmth stemming from those weekly meetings. Ten short chapters follow the preface, mostly articles published in well-known reviews between 1982 and 2014. Her first contact with Barthes, wittily recounted in “Une voix d’un autre temps,” occurred from a phone booth in the post office, the musical sweetness of his voice already indicating the delicacy and clarity she would admire in the seminar. “Le séminaire, ou écrit en dansant” opens for our eyes the seminar’s intimate space, where Barthes’s diction, calm and melodious, was neither dogmatic nor a matter of free association. In “Ne pas écrire” she brings the reader deeper into the language of the seminar—“entre écriture et parole”—and we read that Barthes was parsimonious in his advice to thesis-writers, who learned to experience the writer’s solitude. “L’objet-Mode” observes that Système de la mode “ne nous fait caresser ni tissus, ni pétales, ni chair. Il ne contient aucune image autre que des schémas, et le carré sémiotique n’est pas capitonné”; rather, the system was sometimes a matter of torture. In “Paris et le Sud-Ouest,” Thomas depicts Barthes’s mental system as a quasi-structuralist quadrillage of Paris. The longest essay examines Barthes’s life-long intimacy with Michelet—his “passion” defining “le cœur secret” of his œuvre and prefiguring his own autopor-trait in Roland Barthes par lui-même. Michelet is a figure of the present, but also a teacher and a guide in the sensuality of scientific desire; hence the illuminating connection Thomas finds with La chambre claire, in which Barthes applies the Michelet method to make the photos reveal to him “le mystère d’une vie qui n’est plus.”

Two particularly complex essays, “La science impossible de l’être unique” and “La douceur froissée du crêpe de Chine,” illuminate the two languages, critical and expressive, that characterize the poles of Barthes’s writing in Roland Barthes, where the photographs belong to youth and writing to maturity, and in La chambre claire, where they come together in an “écriture romanesque.” That writing achieves the unity of the self. It is a measure of the grace and poise of Chantal Thomas’s critical and expressive writing that it also achieves such a novelistic unity.