The Tender Specificity of Roland Barthes

        My attraction to Roland Barthes – which was immediate and intense – began as a kind of recognition. In the charming imperiousness of Mythologies (an authority that seduced me, that brushed past my defenses with disarming erudition and humor), I recognized my ticket to a pure superiority – intellectual political, moral. At the age of twenty-one, I was starving for this power (though I’m not sure I knew this myself). If Barthes, dismantling the structures that give us detergent ads and Lego sets, could rupture the very fabric of middle-class life – a life I was coming increasingly to disdain (a form of self-disdain, no doubt) – couldn’t I, simply by reading him, step outside and above these same ugly structures? I mistook his sensitivity for smugness, and I adopted this smugness as my own. I shrank just as much as I grew.

But now, six years later, as I read Camera Lucida, I see the limits of my previous reading – the limits of pure criticism. Through love, the inconsolable love of mourning, Barthes steps beyond the structures that, in Mythologies, confine him to a critical parlor trick. Camera Lucida is not an act of reduction, dissection, and dismissal; it is an exercise in tenderness, in transcendence through the particular.

Delineating the tension between the Mother as Figure and the exquisite specificity of his mother (who had died two years before), Barthes writes:

I could understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped it. In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother…. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. (Camera Lucida 75)

For my own part, I am learning – much too slowly, perhaps – not to read or write as a means of fostering distance. It is true that the clichés of ideology are dangerous, and we must always seek to dismantle them. But just as important (if we can remain ever wary of pre-structured falsehood) is the recognition of another’s humanity, of its “radiant, irreducible core.”