Tiphaine Samoyault: "Roland Barthes, a French intellectual like no other"

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

On March 26, 1980, forty years ago, Roland Barthes disappeared. Philosopher, literary critic and semiologist, the man was one of the high figures of the French intelligentsia of the post-war years. He had made himself known to the general public by publishing in 1957 Mythologie (Seuil), a collection of ironic and insightful essays on French cultural practices.

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Hit by an afternoon in February 1980 by a laundry van at the entrance to the Collège de France, in Paris, where he had occupied the chair of literary semiology for four years, Roland Barthes died a month later, after his accident. His brutal and precocious disappearance at the age of 64, deprived French thought of an intellectual coupled with a literary theorist who had known how to renew literary studies. Author of hard-hitting and inventive essays on literature, but also on social facts, fashion, photography or the science of signs (1), Barthes was preparing to publish, at the time of his death, his first novel in order to realize his dream of leaving his mark in the literary field as a writer.

Back on the flashes and influences of this plural thought and open to the world and disciplines, with the academic Tiphaine Samoyault (2), author of a masterful biography of more than 700 pages of the master, published on the occasion of centenary of the latter in 2015 and since then translated into ten languages.

RFI: Roland Barthes dies at the age of 64 when his writing career had not yet fulfilled all of his promises. By starting your biography with his death, you seem to be telling us that this brutal end of the writer holds the keys to his life and his work.

Tiphaine Samoyault : The death of Roland Barthes, 40 years ago, was experienced by many people as an enigma. Hence probably this posthumous life that the essayist knows through the multitude of romantic revivals transforming his person into a literary character, even a legendary character. The Barthesian legend has been amplified by the very important posthumous work of the writer, including his personal texts such as his Journal de mourning (Editor's note: which brings together the notes taken by Barthes after the death of his mother in 1976) or his Journal travel to China (Editor's note: in 1974). In opening the biography of Roland Barthes by his death, I was guided by the need to do away with the legends that had been built around this death and around posthumous Barthes in order to find the authenticity of the character who is at the heart of his life, not precisely in his death. In a way, to be able to enter into the experience of my subject, it seemed to me that I had to go through death which transformed life into legend.

It was an exceptional life, accomplished through books, through debates of ideas, without however man being at the heart of the intellectual life of his time as a Sartre or a Camus could be. How to define Roland Barthes?

Roland Barthes was not an intellectual like other intellectuals of the post-war period. This is explained by his personal itinerary. He comes from a much less privileged social background than Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir or the other great figures of this period. He lost his father very early. His childhood and adolescence were marked by poverty and deprivation. Furthermore, as he suffered from tuberculosis, he spent almost six years of medical confinement in a sanatorium, between 1941 and 1946. This seclusion experience enabled him to acquire an independent way of thinking because he would not be formatted, like the were his peers, who were products of the grandes écoles. Barthes, he had to find his way alone, in a somewhat circumstantial way: through sociology because he read Marx, through history because he read Michelet, through literature because he read Gide, Proust and the other great classics of French literature. However each time, he transforms this knowledge into something very personal, which will allow him to impose himself in the debate of ideas of his time by his originality as a researcher, as an intellectual and theorist.

We could, however, criticize him for being an all-round intellectual ...

He was indeed interested in a plurality of disciplines and practices, ranging from combat sports to music, including photography, cinema, mass culture, celebrity. What saves him is his great analytical intelligence, allowing him to speak of the world in many different ways, but always with empathy and a taste for the world.

In the post-war literary field where Roland Barthes burst into the 1950s with his first books The Zero Degree of Writing (1953) or Michelet by Himself (1954), how does it stand compared to his contemporaries, in particular compared to the essential Sartre?

The post-war period was a particularly fertile time in French intellectual life. We are witnessing a renewal of thought, its codes and its languages. It is within this framework that the meeting between Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre took place, a meeting which is immediately situated on the mode of opposition. It was very strategic on the part of Barthes because places were already taken when he burst onto the literary scene. The years spent in the sanatorium had cut him off from the intellectual commitments of his time. To make up for lost time, he must demonstrate a certain radicalism with regard to the forces involved, particularly in relation to Sartre, whose thought dominated French literary life at the time. His book The Zero Degree of Writing, which praises white or neutral literature, is a real pavement in the pond. This book challenges the Sartrian doxa based on commitment. On the political level also, the anti-communist Marxism that Barthes professes is a way of calling to question the pro-Soviet Sartrian thought, calling for "the dictatorship of the proletariat".

Biography of Roland Barthes, by Tiphaine Samoyault (Seuil 2015) RFI / Chanda

You remember in your biography that Mythologie, which appeared in 1957, remains Barthes' most read book today. What is the strength of this book?

This book is a collection of short texts which analyze the myths of the daily life of the French. Barthes talks to French people about their own cultural and social practices as an everyday ethnologist, pinning down the transformation of what is cultural into natural, erected as a defining and essentializing reality. The enemy is the doxa, the prejudices which are maintained through collective representations and which participate in the construction of what Barthes calls "myth today". What makes this book original is the fascination for the objects it takes hold of and which it lets appear behind the criticism. For example, in his ironic essay on wrestling, a sport that was part of the homosexual underground of the time, the reader felt the attraction and the effect of magic. The strength of these texts also lies in their concise, synthetic concise mastery. Barthes was the man of brief forms par excellence.

In the interviews you gave to the publication of your biography in 2015, you said that the books of Roland Barthes were very important to you in your own journey as a reader and future academic. What is the work by which you entered this work?

I entered this work by Le Plaisir du texte that a philosophy teacher in the final classes made me read. This text struck me because it did not have the overwhelming authority of other texts that we read in philosophy, but also in criticism and literary theory in general. I had the impression of being faced with a flexible thought that gave language its full value. If I felt in agreement with this writing, it was also because it seemed to me to include the feminine much more and did not embody the Fa. It was a writing that was sensitive, intelligent and open, which put the status of the author into perspective, erecting the reader that I was co-author of the process of literary creation.

What is striking in the career of Roland Barthes that you have so masterfully traced is the absence of anti-colonial engagement. He did not take part in anti-colonial demonstrations or protests. How is this silence explained, when in the post-war period the struggle against colonization had become the famous cause of the left intellectuals whom Barthes claimed?

I do not agree with you. I would invite you to re-read Mythology which is, for me, a true anti-colonial manifesto. This book was also an opportunity for Roland Barthes to settle his accounts with his grandfather who was none other than Louis-Gustave Binger, the first civil governor of the future Côte d'Ivoire. The Mythology essays have an obvious anti-colonial subtext when, for example, the author compares Soviet totalitarianism and colonial totalitarianism in the essay entitled "The Cruise of Batory" or when he deciphers the colonial ideology hidden behind the sentence and phraseology in the official vocabulary of the French government. The book is full of examples of Barthes' hatred of colonial ideology. He had indeed been criticized for not having signed the "Manifesto of 121" against torture in Algeria, forgetting to say that he had signed many other petitions against the war in Algeria. It must be remembered that the form that political engagement, anti-colonialist and anti-Gaullian right, took in Barthes was very different from public intervention than that of other intellectuals of his time. He did not recognize himself in the " theatricality " of the commitment of his contemporaries which he had openly denounced.

"Vita Nova" is the title that Roland Barthes had chosen for the novel he did not have time to write. By borrowing this title for the final chapter of your biography, did you mean to suggest that the Barthesian work remains incomplete forever?

The works are always incomplete since they end in the death of the writer, regardless of the age at which the author dies. In the case of Barthes, it is particularly incomplete because it lacks something that the latter had always dreamed of doing: writing a great literary work, in the classical sense of the term. However, the conception of literature having evolved in recent decades, Barthes readers are more and more inclined to think that this literary work he had done, certainly in new forms, which were not necessarily considered as being typically literary at the time, but which today earned him the status of a full-fledged writer.

(1) Read Roland Barthes: The Zero Degree of Writing (1953), Michelet by Himself (1964), Mythology (1957), Critical Essays (1964), Elements of Semiology (1965), Criticism and Truth (1966) ), System of Fashion (1967), The Sign Empire (1970), New Critical Essays (1972), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), Fragments of a love speech ( 1977), The Dark Room: note on the photograph (1980)

(2) Tiphaine Samoyault is a writer, literary critic and professor of comparative literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 university. Her latest book Traduction et violence was published on March 12, 2020, by Seuil editions.

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