Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing

This study examines, through close reading of a wide range of texts, some of the ways Barthes viewed his own activity of writing. For him, writing was a highly figural activity - like a metaphor, what it conveyed set up a force-field of different meanings. This book focuses on some of the ways Barthes discusses the nature of his own writing. The first two chapters examine the key but ambiguous term of `dérive' (`drift'), a word which raises questions about how exactly Barthes's writing develops across three decades, about the `scientific' legitimacy of his concepts, and about his own frequently fraught relation to the scientific discourses around him, especially psychoanalysis. Two typical discursive manoeuvres that structure his writing, `naming' and `framing', are then shown to generate particular aesthetic effects which cause complications for some of his theoretical stances. Barthes's fascination for the idea that all writing is a kind of scribble, closer to the visual arts than to speech, is investigated in depth, and his latent animus against speech as such is made manifest. The final chapter suggests that, for Barthes, `the real' can leave its mark on writing only as a disturbing, indeed traumatic trace.