155. Antoine Compagnon was then working on his thesis on the citation, which would give rise to his book, La Seconde Main, ou le Travail de la citation, published by Seuil in 1979.
156. These pages appear in the first part of La Seconde Main, in sequence 1, “La Citation qu’en elle-même,” beginning from the section titled “Ciseaux et pot à colle.”
157. A reference to the “Lecture” article that Compagnon and Barthes were to write for the Enciclopedia Einaudi (Einaudi, 1977–82), in fifteen volumes, edited by Ruggiero Romano and for which Roland Barthes asked friends and students to write with him or to write a certain number of articles; among those asked: Jean-Louis Bouttes, Roland Havas, Éric Marty, and Patrick Mauriès.
158. Pothos, the brother of Eros in Greek mythology, is associated with amorous desire.
159. It must be a matter of the fragments composing the “Lettura” article for the Encicloedia Einaudi.
160. The first article written by one of Roland Barthes’s recruits had been rejected by Einaudi; the compromise they reached was that Barthes corrected this first text and cosigned all the others to avoid any further rejections.
161. The essangeage (“first rinse”) is the preliminary step of soaking or scrubbing dirty laundry before actually washing it.
162. This note is written on letterhead from the Collège de France, the first available to Roland Barthes, newly appointed.
163. Barthes went to Bayreuth to attend performances of Richard Wagner’s Ring produced by Patrice Chéreau and under the direction of Pierre Boulez on the occasion of the centenary of the work’s creation.
164. Barthes went to Bayreuth in the company of Romaric Sulger-Buël.
165. With regard to Fragments d’un discours amoureux.
166. See the letter from August 16, p. XXX, in which Barthes asked Compagnon to pick out an image for the book on amorous discourse. In the fall, Compagnon sent him from London a reproduction of the painting from Verrocchio’s workshop Tobias and the Angel (National Gallery, London, 1470–75), from which Barthes would take a detail to illustrate the cover of his Fragments d’un discours amoureux. “Tenir un discours” is the subject Barthes chose for his first seminar at the Collège de France.
167. Published by Hervé Guibert, March 19, 1986, in L’Autre Journal (OC, vol. 5, 1005–6).
168. La Mort propagande, published early 1977 with Éditions Régine Deforges.
169. The shift to the use of the familiar “tu” between the letter of February 1, 1977, and this one is explained by the meeting between Roland Barthes and Hervé Guibert that took place on Saturday, February 5; we can thus hypothesize this response was by Barthes on March 4.
170. A reference to Barthes’s mother’s illness.
171. In an interview with Didier Éribon in Le Nouvel Observateur from July 18–24, 1991, Hervé Guibert spoke of a text titled La Mort propagande n° 0, for which Roland Barthes was to have written a preface. Barthes’s defection apparently quashed the project. In the rest of the letter, Barthes alludes to the “contract” linked to this book as a “fantasy.” He thus repeats the term present in S/Z with regard to the epilogue of Sarrasine, a text in exchange for a night of love (OC, vol. 3, 192–93).
172. Regarding that evening, a few days later (December 10) Roland Barthes sent Hervé Guibert “Fragment pour H.,” which offers another reading of the event (as mentioned earlier).
173. André Téchiné was going to film Les Soeurs Brontë during summer 1978; the role in question was that of Branwell, which would be played by Pascal Greggory.
174. Hervé Guibert had a photo exhibition at the Agathe Gaillard Gallery, Rue de Pont-Louis-Philippe, Paris IVe.
175. La Chambre claire had just been published. Hervé Guibert worked at Le Monde, where he did the photography column.
176. Hervé Guibert’s article “Roland Barthes et le photographie, la sincérité du sujet,” appeared in the February 28, 1980 issue of Le Monde.
177. Reprinted in L’Image fantôme (Minuit, 1981).
178. OC, vol. 3, 409–13.
179. OC, vol. 5, 977–93.
180. In “Soirée de Paris,” following an evening with Philippe Sollers, Barthes notes: “He (Sollers) ignited the idea that I’d had to write a History of French Literature (through Desire)” (OC, vol. 5, 982).
181. Published posthumously by Éditions du Seuil in 2009.
182. Barthes is evidently referring to the death of his mother, which occurred on October 25, 1977.
183. We know nothing specific about this “decision”; nevertheless, it is clear that it is a matter of a mythical conversion—in the manner of Pascal—to a “new life” wherein existence would be entirely taken up by “literature.”
184. R. H. are the initials of the character-pretext that led to the writing of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.
185. This Greek term, which is difficult to make out, has been transcribed here as Κoμπoλóιó {Komboloï} rather than Κoβoλι, as Barthes writes mistakenly. Meaning “beads” in modern Greek. In this instance Komboloï refers to the traditional pastime with which Greek men occupy themselves while the women knit: a secular pastime that involves manipulating a kind of rosary that is passed from one hand to the other.
186. Éric Marty: the word would appear to be “expansion.” {Diana Knight, however, suggests “expression,” which would fit with the phrase in the fifth plan: “I’m withdrawing from the world to begin a great work that will be an expression of … Love.”}
187. {A is the first letter of agir, or “to act.”}
188. The Zenrin poem is a poem in the Zen tradition from Zenrin Kushu (fifteenth century). Barthes alludes to it in Incidents as a way of characterizing the pose and the attitude of the Moroccan child he mentions here: “A kid sitting on a low wall, alongside a road he isn’t watching—sitting, as it were eternally, sitting in order to be sitting, without procrastinating. Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows of its own accord.” See Diana Knight, “Idle Thoughts: Barthes’s Vita Nova” Nottingham French Studies (Spring 1997): 88–98.
189. This is clearly a reference to Dante. “ ‘Now go, for one same will is in both: you are guide, you lord, and you master.’ So I said to him; / and when he had set forth / I set out upon the deep, savage path.” The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 47. {translation modified}
190. {Mam. is used here as an abbreviation for Maman, a familiar term for Mother}
191. {The Café de Flore, in Paris}
192. {Barthes’s term here is Recherches, echoing the title of Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).}
193. This Greek term signifies motleyed, multicolored, changeable. It is notably used apropos of the Romantic novelists to designate the total novel that combines all literary forms. In his 1979–1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, which was cut short by his death but drafted in full, Barthes wrote: “Romantic Novel or Absolute Novel. Novalis (Encyclopaedia, Book 2, Section 6, fragments 1441 and 1448): Art of the Novel: Shouldn’t the novel include all kinds of styles, variously linked to and animated by the common spirit? The art of the novel excludes all continuity. The novel should be an edifice that is built anew in each of its eras. Each little fragment should be something cut out—something circumscribed—a whole worth something in itself.” A little further on Barthes adds: “I forgot to give the Greek word: poikilos, daubed, spotted, mottled—the root of pikilia in modern Greek: various hors d’oeuvres—we could also cite the Rhapsodic, the tacked together (Proust: the Work as made by a Dressmaker) → the Rhapsodic distances the Object, magnifies the Tendency, the act of Writing.” See p. 144.
194. {Barthes’s term here is reliefs, signifying remains or remnants but also the raised or visible portions of something. Both meanings are used in the seventh plan. See p. 405.}
195. Allusion to François Porbus the younger, a Flemish painter, born in A
nvers in 1570 and died in Paris in 1622, who appears in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, to which Barthes is referring here. Yet Barthes makes a peculiar mistake: the actual author of the chaotic canvas—a “kind of formless fog”—from which a single fragment—a bare foot—emerges is Frenhofer.
196. {Allusion to the fable by La Fontaine: “The Frog Who Wished to Make Herself as Big as the Bull.” See Selected Fables, trans. Christopher Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13–14.}
197. {A term adapted from the Italian bolgia, used by Dante to refer to the gulfs or valleys of the eighth circle of the Inferno.}
198. {Barthes’s plan reads: “Politique H etc.,” with the “H” shorthand for Homosexuelle; here the “G” should be read as shorthand for “Gay,” as in “Gay Politics etc.”}
199. Barthes is alluding here to Jean-Louis Bouttes, one of his closest friends.
200. {Barthes’s Journal of Mourning, which belongs to that “panorama” of writings that form a background to The Preparation of the Novel discussed in the editor’s preface (see pp. xvi–xviii), has recently been published in French: Journal de Deuil: 26 octobre 1977–15 septembre 1979, edited by Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil, 2009).}
201. Barthes initially wrote “79” here, but then corrected it by writing “78” over the top.
202. In the 1979–1980 lecture course, Barthes quotes this passage from Heidegger in the section on “Idleness”: “Heidegger (Essays, XXVII, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’): ‘The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows. The birch [the tree, that is!] never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. It is first the will which arranges itself everywhere in technology that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and change of what is artificial. Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus the impossible’ → that, I think, is a good description of the Conflict between Writing (will, exhaustion, wear, variations, whims, artifices, in short, the Impossible) and Idleness (Nature, development—”sensitivity”—within the sphere of the Possible).” See pp. 156–57.
INDEX
Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.
Academy of the Romanian People’s Republic, 119, 123
Actors, with understanding/hearing, 272–73
Adamov, Arthur, 91–92, 93, 317n52
Adverb, 219, 332n53
Akinari, Ueda, 101, 319n105
Albérès, R. M., 150, 325n105
Alexandria University, 314n1, 314n3
Allées Paulmy, 310n16
Allocution, loss of, 227–28
Alors, la Chine? (Barthes, R.), 202–3, 309n4, 330n17, 340n141
Alpha, 235, 334n84
Althusser, Louis, 316n35, 327n154; Foucault and, 196; Nouveaux Essais critiques and letter from, 201; Sade, Fourier, Loyola and letter from, 200; Sur Racine and letter from, 196–97
American Journal of Ophthalmology, 119
me romantique, L’ (Béguin), 79
Amis du Théâtre Populaire, 317n69, 317n73
Amour de Swann, Un (Proust), 310n11
Anacoluthons: disintegration and, 233–34; as reversal, 226–27; of two truths, 217–18
Analysis, of content, 105
Analysis/synthesis split, 224–25
“Ancienne rhétorique: Aide-mémoire, L’” (Barthes, R.), 180, 325n111
André (Pinguet’s companion), 278, 279, 340n126
Annales, Les (review), 144, 165, 248
Année dernière à Marienbad, L’ (film), 158–59
Annie, 12
Antelme, Robert, 328n177
Anthology, 213, 214–15
Antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, Les (Compagnon), 285
anti-Semitism, 313n93
Antisentence, 218
Antonomasia, 109
Anzieu, Didier, 330n17
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 210
Apollinaire, Sidoine, 299
Apollo, 7, 139
Aquin, Hubert, 324n94
Archambaud, Michel, viii
Argo (ship), 334n82
Arguments (review), 315n8, 318n82, 320n10, 328n175
Aristotle, 151, 152, 180, 212
Arland, Marcel, 147, 316n45; letter from, 78; letters to, 76–77, 78–79, 87; La NRF and, 73, 77, 78, 79, 147
Armée nouvelle, L’ (Jaurès), 5, 310n8
Arnauld, Antoine, 334n77
Art, 330n26; dramatic, 272–73; Flaubertian sentence and, 217; of living, 278; with novel as antiartistic genre, 6–7; Pop, 281; supernatural and, 103; “tonality” of, 6
Artaud, Antonin, 271
Artifact, letters as, viii
“Artisanat du style, L’” (Barthes, R.), 210–11. See alsoDegré zéro de l’écriture, Le
“Aspects de Roland Barthes” (Pinguet), 276
Attal, Jean-Pierre, 327n150
Attali, Arlette, 131, 331n33
Audiberti, Jacques, 83
Audry, Colette, 315n8, 320n10, 328n175
“Aujourd’hui ou Les Coréens” (Barthes, R.), 319n99
Aumont, Jacques, 330n17
Authors: with historical method and literature, 106; in parodic relationship, 233; Sartre and, 333n69. See also Writers
“Avenir de la rhétorique, L’” (Barthes, R.): dreams and, 187–88; enemies of rhetoric, 180–81; language and, 181–83, 185–86; with poetry and prose, 183–84; with rhetoric defined, 180; silence and, 181; with writers and language, 184–85
BA. See Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 56
Bachelard, Gaston, 83–84, 157
Bachmann, Ingeborg, 329n177
Bacille de Koch dans la lésion tuberculeuse du poumon, Le (Canetti, G.), 312n58
Badiou, Alain, 162, 327n154, 327n156
Balcon, The (Genet), 319n96
Balzac (Curtius), 319n108
Balzac, Honoré de, 109, 216, 235, 343n195
Barbisan, Gala, 316n28
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 95, 318n80
Barrès, Maurice, 314n107
Barth, Karl, 322n39
Barthes, Berthes (grandmother), 310n17
Barthes, Henriette (mother), 25, 55, 63, 68, 71, 133, 208; death of, 298, 342n182; health of, 294, 342n170; letter from Exelmans, A., xii–xiv; letter from Le Bihan, xii
Barthes, Louis (father): death of, xi–xvi; Exelmans, A., on, xii–xiv; Le Bihan on, xii
Barthes, Michel (brother), 310n23
Barthes, Roland, 195. See also specific topics; specific works
Baruzi, Jean, 322n40
Bastié, Maryse, 210
Bataille, Georges, 214, 233, 318n81, 330n26, 332n51; Critique and, 156–57; on irony, 218; Le Prix de Mai and, 320n10
Bataille dans la rizière, La(Roy), 317n52
Batany, Jean, 161, 327n148
“Bathomology,” 334n76
Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 23, 109, 276
Baudrillard, Jean, 337n54
Baumeister, August, 92, 317n61
BBC broadcasts, 335n12
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 5, 209, 210
Béguin, Albert: cultural-political meeting and, 318n81; letters from, 79–81; support from, 73, 315n22
Béjart, Madeleine, 110
Bélavel, Yvon, 157, 326n134
Bel éte, Le (Pavese), 101
Belles Lettres, 114
Bellow, David, 338n85
Benedictine monks, 13, 14, 15
Benjamin, Walter, 97, 318n92
Benveniste, Émile, 128, 207, 320n13, 330n27
Bercoff, André, 341n148
Berdiaff, Nicolas, 6, 310n13
Bereavement, “Vita Nova” and, 300, 301, 303, 304
Bernac, Pierre, 89
Bernet, Daniel, 92
Bernou (doctor), 51, 312n76
> Berthet, Frédéric, viii, 309n1
Bêtise, 256; as conclusion, 224, 232; copy and, 211, 229, 235; Sartre and, 333n69; truth and, 218
Bettencourt boulevard ou une histoire de France (Vinaver), 99
Bianciotti, Hector, 156, 326n128
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (BA), 262, 265
Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques-Doucet (BLJD), 76, 78, 84–85, 87–88, 199, 202, 208
Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), 64, 88, 92, 102, 115, 141
Bibliothèque Nationale Suisse (BNS), 258, 260
Bieber, Margarete, 317n62
Biology, 111, 120, 236, 319n116
Birth of Tragedy, The (L’Origine de la tragédie dans la musique ou hellénisme et pessimisme) (Nietzsche), 310n20
Blanchot, Maurice, vii, 237, 254, 276, 315n12, 324n99; arguments, 172; description of, 328n173; letters from, 172–73, 174–75, 176–79; letters to, 171–72, 173–74, 175–76, 179–80, 329n186; Manifeste des 121 and, 329n188; “Revue internationale” and, 170
Blank page, 22, 82, 97
Blatt (doctor), 119
Blemen, 161, 327n152
Blin, Roger, 336n33
BLJD. See Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques-Doucet
Blum, Léon, 4, 310n5
BNF. See Bibliothèque Nationale de France
BNS. See Bibliothèque Nationale Suisse
Boltanski, Luc, 337n54
Bonniot, 28–29
Bordas, 235, 334n84
Boronat, Teresa, 310n12
Bosquet, Alain, 199, 330n6
Bost, Pasteur, 10
Bostock, Anna, 318n92
Boulez, Pierre, 342n163
Bourcier, Claude, 143, 147, 323n69, 324n84
Bourgois, Christian, 202, 330n17
Boutique obscure, La: 124 rêves (Perec), 266
Bouttes, Jean-Louis, viii, 341n157, 344n199
Bouvard et Pécuchet (Flaubert): “anthologic” operation and, 214–15; commentary, method of, 214; influence of, 210–11; with languages, engine of, 232–36; research for, 211–13; sentences, choice of, 213
Bouvard et Pécuchet, sentence 1: anacoluthon of two truths, 217–18; disconnection, 215–16; ellipsis and catalysis, 216–17; form (in traditional sense), 215; truth/bêtise, 218
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