In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Death of the Critic
  • Daniel T. O'Hara (bio)
Barthes: A Biography
Tiphaine Samoyault
Andrew Brown, trans.
Polity
www.politybooks.com
584 Pages; Print, $39.95

Of the three major biographies now available—Louis-Jean Calvert's Roland Barthes (1990, translated into English in 1994), Marie Gil's Roland Barthes: Au Lieu de la vie (2012), and Tiphaine Samoyault's Roland Barthes: A Biography (originally published in French in 2015 for the centenary of its subject's birth) has all the earmarks of an "official" biography, even if it has not been designated so publicly. It contains archival materials—from note cards, journals, and letters, to earlier drafts of published works and plans for works left undone, which have previously not been made available by the estate, as well as discussions of the final three lecture course lecture Barthes delivered from 1977-1979. It also contains highlights and paraphrases of conversations with former lovers, close friends, family, and long-time associates also never before published. With a foreword by Jonathan Culler, the curator of Barthes's reputation in the USA, this critical life is thus as authorized de facto as it can possibly be. And like the other two biographies, and many synoptic studies of his work, it is the death, not any aspect of the life, which stands out for multiple interpretations. Given Barthes's extensive reflections and notations of his cruising life-style in France and especially in countries such as Morocco, this is a curiosity of our moment, I would think.

Here is Michael Wood, from his recent review in the London Review of Books, on how Samoyault handles the death, after using it via an opening prologue and a closing vignette to frame, in a big full circle, the life she narrates, with several breaks in chronology, for chapters on Barthes and Sartre, Barthes and Brecht, Barthes and Sollers, and Barthes and Foucault, with generous dashes of Blanchot and Derrida to taste:

On 25 February 1980, [Barthes] stepped off the pavement of the rue des Ecoles in Paris—either carelessly or looking around quite carefully, depending on the testimony of different friends—and was hit by a van. He was taken to La Bitie-Salpetriere, where he was found to have several fractures but not to be in a grave condition. He never left the hospital, though; he died on 26 March. Did he lose the will to live? Did his grieving for his mother, which was constant, interfere with his recovery? How serious was the flare-up of the old lung condition? There is also the idea of an "introgenic infection of the kind that is regularly contracted in hospitals."

The official verdict was that "the accident is not the immediate cause of death, but favoured the development of pulmonary complications." Samoyault is sure that he was not "deliberately allowing himself to die" because of his mother's death, but not sure he didn't "lose the will to live" because his book Camera Lucida was not yet taken seriously." The balance seems odd, and I don't see why all these possibilities couldn't have played a part. Samoyault leaves the question open—"what did Barthes die of"—but there are perhaps too many half-answers in the air.

This dissemination of suspended conclusions, a kind of absolute suspended judgment or absolute irony ("infinite absolute negativity," in the Hegelian phrase), so familiar from the German Romantics, Kierkegaard's analyzes of it, and much of high modernism, would fit with the running argument in the recently published The Neutral (2005). This is one of the three final lecture courses Barthes gave at the Collège de France in line with his augural address there as the new Professor of Literary Semiology that his courses from then on would be guided by an initial fantasy to explore with his students, not as intimately as he may have done previously in his seminars at the Etudes Practiques, but surely more publicly and definitively declared to be from the outset phantasmagoric, visionary. Just as Barthes in his Sartrean writings contrasted the zero degree or literal formulations of social doxa to the connotative if alienating free...

pdf

Share