The middle way: Barthes between Benjamin and Adorno

Abstract

In Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), the French critic encourages us to read his autobiographical essay as if spoken by a character in a novel. This gesture is usually considered one of the beginnings of the so-called “last Barthes”, a period marked by an explicit volition for his work to tend to the novelization. A few years later, in the Leçon (1978) —delivered in 1977—, he considers himself an “uncertain subject” for having only written essays during his career. The purpose of this paper is to read La Chambre claire’s (1980) writing on the horizon of this double tension. On the one hand, the novelistic pole of said tension, together with Barthes’ own postulates about the eminently realistic character of all literature, allows us to inquire about the way in which the realistic mimesis is used in the Barthesian book on photography, through certain contributions from Walter Benjamin (2007). On the other hand, the essayistic pole, considered as having the impulse of formulating a true critical thought, invokes the need of attending to the formal dimension of the book (in the Adornian sense of the expression [Cfr. 2013]). Both lines of research shed light on the question of the medium or the mediation understood as the core of the tension between novel and essay.