Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing

The first serious analysis of Barthes as a writer with specific aesthetic techniques, this fresh and original study focuses on some of the ways he discusses the nature of his own writing. The first two chapters examine the key but ambiguous term of derive (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 maneuvers 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 animosity 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.