Editing Roland Barthes

Abstract

The reception of Barthes in France is distinguished by its emotional dimension (his first commentators were his students) and by the presence of his archives on national territory. The edition of the Complete Works, overseen by Éric Marty, gave rise to two publications that reflect the author’s image and its evolution: while the first, in three volumes (1993–1995), without critical apparatus, establishes a monumental Barthes, the second, in five volumes preceded by lengthy prefaces and more financially accessible, presents a utilitarian Barthes. The publication of unpublished materials (notes from seminars at the Collège de France and the École Pratique des Hautes Études) stems from the same authorial imaginary: based on Barthes’s distinction between the spoken and the written, between the “writer” (écrivain) and the “writing subject” (écrivant), the editorial principle evolves to culminate in the publication of the oral versions of The Preparation of the Novel and The Neutral. Barthes’s Fichier and correspondence represent the two major ongoing projects. The former offers access to the writing workshop, allowing one to assess the complementary roles of the notebook and the file, the word and the sentence, the nota and the notula. The latter, barely explored, suggests how deeply Barthes made dialogue a fundamental element of creation.