Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

igid generic definitions, nor in the resistance of those who find the problems of the
autobiographical so vertiginous that they are led to conclude that no such thing exists. And where
Barthes will always be a little ahead of the pure theoreticians of autobiography is in producing a
text which is at once a rigorous critique of the conventions and undergirding assumptions of
autobiographical discourse, and itself an autobiography of peculiar economy and richness. Those
who are interested will discover that Barthes has never read the Hegel to whom his theoretical
discourse made recourse, that he likes salad, cinnamon, Glenn Gould, having loose change,
walking in sandals, that he doesn't like white Pomeranians, women in slacks, Miro, tautologies,
telephoning; that he had at one time intended to write books with the titles The Discourse of
Homosexuality, A Life of Illustrious Men, Incidents; that, for him, there is never self-restoration
only self-writing, that several episodes of pre-pubescent sexuality occurred in his garden at
Bayonne, that he dreams of arising in the early morning. All this, and more, without ever, finally,
writing Roland Barthes par lui-même.
Derrida might also have had Roland Barthes in mind when he wrote of the enigmatic and fluid
boundary between the writer's life and work: 'This divisible borderline traverses two different
"bodies", the corpus and the body, in accordance with laws we are only beginning to catch sight
of.' 85 From the first written page of Roland Barthes, where it is said—'you will find here, mingled
with the "family romance", only the figurations of the body's prehistory—of that body making its
way toward the labor and the pleasure of writing'—to the concluding 'Anatomie'. the ideas of
writing the body, and the body writing, dominate the discourse. However, somewhat typically,
Barthes, refuses to clarify either what is meant or what is at issue here. The fragment 'Ellipsis' is
both a beautifully direct and elliptical example of this:
Someone questions him: 'You wrote somewhere that writing proceeds through the body: can you
explain what you meant?' He realises then how obscure such statements, clear as they are to
him, must be for many others. Yet the phrase is anything but meaningless, merely elliptical: it is
an ellipsis which is not supported. To which may be added here a less formal resistance: public
opinion has a reduced conception of the body; it is always, apparently, what is opposed to the
soul: any somewhat metonymic extension of the body is taboo. (80)
The idea of the body of the writer had been with Barthes from the outset. In Writing Degree Zero
it is said that style is biological; 86 Michelet is concerned with the themes of body in the
historian's work; in Sade Fourier Loyola, the oeuvre is seen as a body of pleasure, and the
biographeme is likened to cremation ashes; in The Pleasure of the Text, textuality is seen as the
site of an erotic communion of the bodies of reader and writer. Barthes is well aware that this
theme varies dramatically from text to text, though this instability, he feels, is an index of its
significance:
In an author's lexicon, will there not always be a word-as-mana, a word whose ardent, complex,
ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that by this word one might answer
for everything? Such a word is neither eccentric nor central; it is motionless and carried, floating,
never pigeonholed, always atopic (escaping any topic), at once remainder and supplement, a
signifier taking up the place of every signified. The word has gradually appeared in his work; at
first it was masked by the instance of Truth (that of history), then by that of Validity (that of
systems and structures); now it blossoms, it flourishes; this word-as-mana is the word 'body'.
(129)
Yet no sooner does Barthes disallow the word any fixed meaning than he makes the most
daringly constative claim on its behalf: 'How does the word become value? At the level of the
body.' (130) Once again 'body' arises via an 'ellipsis which is not supported': once again Barthes
cunningly tempts us to ask what the 'body' means or what it does in his discourse.
Barthes declares that the prime influence on (or 'intertext of) Roland Barthes is Nietzsche, and
the most influential Nietzschean text will be Ecce Homo with which Barthes's autobiography has
decidedly elective affinities. 87 Ecce Homo, as well as being a text which forces a serious generic
revaluation of the autobiographical, is also the text in which Nietzsche repeatedly recapitulates
his insistence on the biologistic, physiological basis of the drive to knowledge. For Nietzsche, the
emphasis on the body is avowedly autobiographical, as it is with Barthes, but it is also firmly tied
to a primary philosophical objective. Nietzsche utilised the theme of the body to conduct a
biologistic challenge to Christian idealism which he characterised as a slave morality, a fettering
of the strong in health by the weak via the institution of otherwordly, spiritual ideals. Part of the