Roland Barthes' Legacy and the Question of the Novel

Bernard Comment reflects on Roland Barthes' enduring relevance, focusing on the delayed publication of his Collège de France lectures and the persistent question of whether Barthes would have written a novel. Initially, posthumous publications like 'Incidents' controversially highlighted Barthes' homosexuality, but recent releases of courses on 'Living Together' and 'The Neutral' are major events. Comment examines Barthes' critical projections onto authors such as Albert Camus, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jean Cayrol, whom he reinterpreted to fit his own obsessions with a pure present and surface over depth. Later, Philippe Sollers became a model through semiosis, but photography ultimately emerged as Barthes' ideal of coincidence between sign and referent, culminating in 'Camera Lucida.' Barthes' aesthetic of the fragment, inspired by the haiku and photography, sought an instantaneous writing that captures the present. Comment critiques Barthes' lack of a 'science of the future' compared to Pasolini, and calls for an intellectual biography to understand Barthes' aversion to depth and pathos, shaped by his wartime sanatorium experience. The essay ends with Barthes' defense of literature against science: 'Science is coarse, life is subtle, and it is to correct this distance that literature matters to us.'