Roland Barthes: criticism as an active response and the “game method”

Abstract

This paper is a rewrite of a class from the course "Roland Barthes y la escritura del duelo", within the framework of a reading of the French critic's Journal de deuil (1977-1979), paying attention to the diaristic impulses that reconfigure, in the register, the afflictions and the author's experiences. In these, an insistence that is recognized in the last works of Barthes, those in which a notable autobiographical turn occurs: the need to respond actively to the affirmation of literary language survives –and supervenes–. This disposition is, in Barthesian logic, a deviation from the crushing force exerted by criticism as an institution, whose operations tend to generalize and totalize. The method of this active response is the “game method”, a paradox: to rescue, through formal experimentation, the irreducible and irreverent gestures of the non-productive, of the random, of what puts the body of the critical essayist at stake. The latter concerns in particular the form of this article. Here, the entry to the Journal is not exhausted in the expository progress of the class, but rather an essay search lies behind it. Reading thus acquires, in the course, the modality of an excursus, of what borders, of what is outside.