L'Antichambre litt raire

This essay shows that Roland Barthes's La Chambre claire, a work engaged in a revolt against the author's former critical positions, is overdetermined by a desire, announced contemporaneously in his seminars, to write a novel roughly modeled on the Proustian Search; that this Search, as echoed and pursued in this text, drastically distorts and narrows its treatment of photography; and that this restricted treatment of photography, centred on the well-known studium/punctum distinction, reveals a troubling impassivity before images of historical violence, which in turn is linked with a number of regressive gestures and attitudes with deep and likewise troubling political implications

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Gesture · Overdetermined system · Photography · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Visual arts · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · Law · Philosophy · Psychology