Roland Barthes

There are two broad reasons why we have had to wait so long for an authoritative, comprehensive, intellectual biography of Roland Barthes. The first is the controversy surrounding the access to material from Barthes's archives and correspondence, which severely impeded the first attempt at a biography (Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: 1915–1980 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), discussed by Diana Knight, FSB, 90 (2004), 13–17). The second, paradoxically, is the great fascination with Barthes's life, a ‘rolandisme’ comparable to the ‘marcellisme’ that surrounds the life of Proust (p. 37), which has led to a proliferation of personal testimonies and fictionalized accounts. Marie Gil's Roland Barthes: au lieu de la vie (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), for all its insights, is in the same vein as these fictions, as it fully assumes the teleology implicit in its project to treat the vie as a texte. Tiphaine Samoyault's new biography benefits from the co-operation of the major stakeholders of Barthes's literary estate, and indeed one of the book's greatest contributions is that it provides information on the range of these archives, and indicates the extensive study that remains to be undertaken. As for her overall presentation of the life and work, she successfully avoids imposing an artificial unity ‘en pluralisant Barthes [...], en ne recherchant pas l'homologie entre existence et œuvre, en inscrivant les deux dans des histoires [...], des contextes, des relations, en décrivant différentes genèses’ (p. 37). The first three chapters — a detailed account of Barthes's family history and early life — are highly speculative in their relation to his later work, whereas the relevance becomes more manifest when the narrative reaches Barthes's formative experience of the sanatorium. As Barthes's work gathers pace in the 1950s, so too does Samoyault's account of the multiple ‘contextes’, ‘relations’, and ‘genèses’, which has the effect of changing focus away from the chronology of the book publications and on to ‘le temps de la production de la pensée et des textes’ (p. 42). One might regret the relative neglect of the landmark publications that shaped Barthes's public image, but this perspective has the advantage of revealing the lateness of some books in relation to Barthes's pensée (Le Degré zéro, Système de la mode) and the intimate connection between others (S/Z, L'Empire des signes, and Sade, Fourier, Loyola). The chronological progress of the biographical narrative is interrupted by several chapters devoted to Barthes's relation to one antecedent and three contemporaries (Gide, Sartre, Sollers, Foucault), which mainly serve to elucidate his developing role as a writer, a politically engaged intellectual (who avoided confrontation and manifestos), and a homosexual public figure (in a very different way to Foucault). The single biggest revelation of the biography concerns the project that was interrupted by Barthes's premature death: whereas many have assumed that Barthes's notes for a novel entitled Vita Nova were hypothetical reflections on a practically impossible work, Samoyault demonstrates that this goal was pursued far more extensively and seriously than had been imagined, and critical work on this topic will have to be readdressed. Owing to its particular insights, and its sensitive and detailed treatment of every stage of Barthes's career, this biography will be an invaluable resource for Barthes studies for a long time to come

Knight · Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies · French Literature and Criticism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

• Barthes, Roland (1915–1980)

  Open Access•Michael Moriarty•The Blackwell Encyclopedia of…•2019

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• Committed to Writing/Writing Commitment

  Alexandra Ilina, Alexandru Matei•Exemplaria•2021

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• Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida in the rough waters of photography theory

  Snježana Šimić•Social Semiotics•2025

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