Barthes: A Biography

by Tiphaine Samoyault, Jonathan D. Culler (Foreword), Andrew Brown (Translator)

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother's unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible.

This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today.

Barthes's life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes's life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy

584 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2015

Reviews

[Antônio Xerxenesky]

uma das biografias mais chatas que já li (ou, no caso, tentei ler) na vida.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, rich, immensely detailed and judiciously informed book that doesn't just offer a portrait of Barthes but of the intellectual life of the second half of the twentieth century in France.

Samoyault knows her Barthes and if you don't then I would suggest this isn't the book for you. I've read Barthes but knew little of his life and learned much from this book. His writing which is so often mischievous as well as penetrating seems strangely at odds with his difficult, often unhappy life.

With due attention to people like Gide, Sartre, Derrida, Levi-Strauss and Foucault, this is wide-ranging and sometimes provocative. At times, Samoyault writes as densely and opaquely as Barthes himself, but she manages to capture and convey some of the excitement, the thrillingly radical and transformative impact of his thinking and writing.

Not for beginners but a full and impressively-marshalled work of scholarship.

Review copy via Amazon Vine

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes such biographies can be a tedious review of dates and events. Samoyault instead provides a detailed *analysis* of these events and the written works that make up Barthes's life. While this book probably has some heavy lifting for anyone not already familiar with 20th Century French intellectual culture and concepts, the effort will still pay off mightily.

[Frank B. Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barthes is of interest both because he had a substantial influence on American literary and cultural studies and because he shows someone reacting to the various ideological and intellectual pressures on French writers from 1950 to 1980. From a Marxism that did not involve commitment to the Communist Party, he moved toward analyzing how there was an ideological and implicitly mythological content to simple affairs in French life: the cover of a popular magazine, the presentation of a wrestling match, a restaurant menu. His most influential work was in developing a notion of writing that was influenced by French avant-garde experiments in literature. When constructing a text, we might suppose that we make sense of it by situating it in a space determined by three factors. First is the referential world that is being talked about, that is being brought into view. Second is the individual self or subject who generates the text on the basis of his intentions, beliefs, desires, goals, and feelings so that the resulting writing is a form of self-expression. Third are the meanings defined by and circulating in the culture that become fixed in a text through the arrangement of the words. Barthes wanted to reduce the pressures of all three of these factors on the written text and to exalt, to a point of near autonomous generative power, the written text itself. Writing as a set of linguistic and grammatical shapes, he claimed, is not essentially referring to the world or expressing the mental life of an authorial self. It is an independent machinery that always keeps referring to other written texts, rather than to the world or to the self. It generates ever new patterns through the chance combinations and connections that occur among these items of language. It expresses certain cultural codes and grammars that regulate how we set linguistic shapes in certain arrangements, quite apart from our own mental doings. Since the pressure of cultural meanings on a text is a form, so he claims, of authoritarian coercion, even perhaps of fascism, the goal of the writer is to find ways of textual construction, of textual play, of resistance, that keep frustrating the efforts of meaning to come to dwell in a determinate manner in a certain sequence of words. Barthes on a trip to Japan loved the large advertising signs that to him were just interesting linguistic shapes without meaning. He started a practice of doodling on canvas, without actually representing objects or individuals, so as to discover interesting patterns of written shapes that had no evident meaning. The spoken word, he said, was too much captured by the realms of subjectivity and meaning, and so was more caught up in humanist prejudices than was writing. It was writing as a kind of autonomous machinery that would liberate us from the pressures of the community doxa that coerces us into thinking in certain ways.

It is of great interest that relatively late in his life, as he began to write in detail about his erotic longings for young men and as his mother, with whom he lived his whole life, died, he began to produce texts that do not match his earlier account at all. They make sense only as the self-expression of an intensely moved subject concerned with issues of loss, grief, separateness, the impossibility of fusion with the beloved other, the extension of crucial attachments across very long periods of time, the nature of memory and of photos of the beloved, and so forth. In other words, Proust seems to return with great force to the scene of writing, and the autonomous generation of sequences of linguistic shapes, without meaning and without expressing the mental life of the self, disappears once events truly matter to Barthes. Samoyault is good at examining Barthes’s homosexual life, including trips to Morocco and Japan for sex with younger males, and at describing his personal relations with other French intellectuals, most notably Sartre, Sollers, and Foucault. (Relations with the last of these may have been broken off either because Foucault’s new boyfriend did not get along with Barthes or because Barthes and Foucault tangled over a Moroccan both were attracted to. One always appreciates a bit of gossip in the life of an intellectual.)

I have written at length about Roland Barthes in my book Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism

You can read an excerpted chapter on Barthes for free at the link below:
https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/p/...

[Bob H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive, thorough, somewhat dense telling of the life, work, influence and influences of an important thinker, philosopher, literary critic and writer of the mid-20th Century. It's all here, his early life, his upbringing by his widowed mother, his education and intellectual growth. Long spells in sanatoria with TB meant an often-cloistered young life, avoiding WWII and yielding introspection. His growing body of work, his intellectual friendships and gradual influence is told in detail here, along with his homosexuality and political views. It's about as complete a work on a major intellect as can be, and will be a good resource for universities, scholars and individuals interested in this man's life, work and importance.

[Mayra Barbosa de Souza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barthes é único.