Dead Writing: Barthes and Posterity
Supriya Chaudhuri ___________________________ Posteritati (To posterity) In 1971, Roland Barthes gave an interview, originally intended for a series of televised broadcasts recorded under the title ‘Archives of the 20th Century’, in which he was asked to reflect on his life and work in response to a detailed questionnaire prepared by Jean Thibaudeau. This was four years before he published his idiosyncratic ‘auto-biography’, Roland Barthes (1975), translated into English as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977). The interview was never televised so far as I am aware, not even, as Barthes speculated it might be, after ‘the death of the author’. This playful reference to a physical event, the cessation of a human life, through a phrase that the author had himself made famous as metaphor, comes at the very beginning of the published text of the interview in Tel Quel, Issue 47, a special issue devoted to Roland Barthes. The responses – which were in any case a ‘game’ to Barthes and Thibaudeau — had been rewritten for publication. Nevertheless, Barthes insists that ‘the effect of enunciation’, rather than the protocols of writing, is at work through the text, producing ‘an entirely imaginary and continuous first person’ (Barthes 1998: ‘Responses’, 249), rather like the subject of a novel who shared his birth date, 12 November 1915, with Barthes himself. Reflecting on the form of the interview, Barthes says: ‘What writing never writes is ‘I’; what speech always says is ‘I’; what the interviewer should solicit is thus the author’s imaginary, the list of his phantasms, in as much as he can reflect on them, speak of them in that fragile state’ (266). In Roland Barthes, he begins with the proviso, ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.’ (Barthes 1994: 1) It is this Barthesian imaginary, this phantasm, then, who towards the close of the interview tells his interviewer: As for posterity, what can I say? It’s a dead word for me, which is giving it its dues since its validity is only established on the basis of my death. I consider I have lived well up to now … buried in the archives (of the twentieth century) perhaps one day I will re-emerge, like a fugitive, one witness among others in a broadcast of the Service for Research on ‘structuralism’, ‘semiology’, or ‘literary criticism’. Can you imagine me living, working, desiring, for that? If one day the relations between the subject and the world were to be changed, certain words would be dropped, like in a Melanesian tribe in which at death a few elements of the lexicon are suppressed as a sign of mourning; but it would be rather as a sign of joy; … this would happen doubtless to the word ‘posterity’, and perhaps to all the ‘possessives’ of our language, and, why not, to the word ‘death’ itself. (266-67) But posterity is not a possessive, as Barthes knew well: it is a substantive based on the Latin posteritas (‘descendants’), from posterus (‘coming after’, from post ‘after’). That Barthes links it to all the ‘possessives’ of our language indicates that he has in mind the genealogical notion of descent, that he wishes to disclaim the unborn generations claiming filiality with the dead author, and to say that they are dead to him. That is, we, who celebrate Barthes today, who call upon him to bear witness to structuralism, semiology, literary criticism, we are dead to him: and ‘if the relations between the subject and the world were to be changed’, both posterity and death would disappear from the lexicon. Rarely has an author spoken with more authority from his grave to disallow a memorial celebration. Still, if Barthes disclaims posterity, he does not in fact disclaim death, which may be why Jacques Derrida, in the first chapter of The Work of Mourning, uses the possessive case to speak of ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’. In effect, this is to remind us not only of the dead author – dead in physical fact at the time of writing – but also of the deaths by which he was moved and of which he wrote, the inscription of death in his writing, contrasted with the ‘literal’ impossibility of his actually saying ‘I am dead’ (Derrida 2001: 52, 64-65). Yet, as Barthes says elsewhere, ‘the voice is always already dead, and it is by a kind of desperate denial that, we call it living; this irremediable loss we give the name of inflection: inflection is the voice insofar as it is always past, silenced’ (Barthes 1994: 68). Writing insistently, obsessively, of death, throughout his life as a writer, Barthes may seem to avert his face from ‘his posterity’ (I use the possessive deliberately), but he is always addressing the ghosts, the spectral presences, released by the knowledge of death, his own and those of others. In his ‘auto-biography’, Roland Barthes, published five years before he died, Barthes positions himself, as Petrarch had done six centuries earlier in his ‘Letter to Posterity’, (‘Posteritati’, Seniles 18.1) within the binary of portrait and biography: offering us a choice of two representational modes, synoptic and chronological. The first is a selection of photographs mainly from his childhood and youth, haunted by that deathliness that Barthes associates with the form of the photograph itself; the second is a set of notes about a historical person, incomplete because he is still living, but anticipating death as the punctum that will make them meaningful. Yet, curiously, Barthes associates narrative with the first form of representation: the photographs tell a story, though one that is entirely ‘imaginary’, they are a succession of images, of a body now irrevocably lost, no longer that of the writer, ‘figurations of the body’s prehistory – of that body making its way towards the labor and the pleasure of writing’ (Barthes 1994: 3). That remembered, imagined narrative of youth is interrupted by the subject’s fall into text: Once I produce, once I write, it is