1/9/2024 0 Comments Satori ithacaIt then shifts to his attempt at conceptualising an affective reading which resists the universalising idea of one ideologically determined signified. To illustrate Barthes’s growing awareness of the importance of this epistemological move, the article starts from his textual ‘reality effect’ as a critical vehicle of realist representation. In light of his whole oeuvre, Barthes anticipates the understanding of emotion as an integral part of cognition presented in contemporary social neuroscience. The article addresses Barthes’s development from a structuralist semiotician towards an affectively responding reader in terms of ‘post-rational’ subjectivity. For example, at the end of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes writes the following under two unreadable graphic signs: ‘Doodling … or the signifier without the signified.’ I want to suggest that he provides us here with a key for understanding the nature of his project, in which writing – graphein – acquires a new dimension. My claim is that these elements play a significant part in the Barthesian photobiographical project evoked above. In the second part, I consider Barthes’s use of handwriting and of other referential and identity signs such as proper nouns. In the first part of this paper, I focus on Barthes’s photobiographical writing, discussing it in the light of Philippe Lejeune’s theory of autobiography in order to demonstrate its radical originality. The use of photography gave him an alternative to what he views as a typically Western ‘tyranny’ of meaning and logic. Barthes severely criticized traditional autobiographies, describing them as ‘biochronographies’ and as characterized by chronological linearity and a search for rational explanations of human behaviour. In this respect, Japanese Haikai played a major role in his reflexion. This project was based on a desire to express autobiographical content outside the realm of meaning, through simple designation. How can this phenomenon be explained? My aim in this paper is to show that, in the 1970s, Barthes conceived an autobiographical project that involved the use of photographs and ‘biographemes’ (which he describes as ‘details’, ‘tastes’, and ‘inflections’). While these two books have very different aims, they are both inhabited by photographs. However, several of his works clearly manifest an autobiographical character, most notably Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and Camera Lucida (1980). None of Roland Barthes’s texts could be said to be an autobiography in the traditional sense of the term. In conclusion the ethics of the photograph is a demand that we labour carefully with this surplus of knowledge in a global world. Using the international movements of satori and the critical lens of translation studies, the author argues that the photograph is a surplus of reality and not an equivalent index of it. A consideration of this history suggests a revision of some elements of Barthes’s theory of photography, particularly his conception of how the photograph translates reality and the ethical stakes of the photograph. Barthes’s understanding of the term is in fact a modern invention with surprising roots in the work of William James. Satori is traced back to its use in popular Zen texts and its place in attempts to modernise Japanese philosophy. The term satori is a supplement to Barthes’s text and carries a greater historical weight than Barthes realises. A general exposition of the centrality of the punctum to the text points out the subtle way in which it is linked to satori. This article begins with a discussion of two terms in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: punctum and satori.
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