Marking A Writer’s Centenary... Backwards. The Case of Roland Barthes, 1915-1980

This article considers the potential benefits of taking a ‘backwards’ approach to writing Roland Barthes's life. To write a person's life ‘forwards’ risks privileging, teleologically and deterministically, the end of their life and career over all those earlier stages that led (up) to the finality of mortality – to the point that the ‘end’ comes to explain, colour and over-determine the ‘rest’. What would it mean to read Barthes's life starting in the (final) 1977–1980 period and ‘ending’ with his orphaned childhood in interwar France? The aim is to show that a backwards biography can be fruitful, both for Barthesian study – showing the circular, spiral nature of his concerns, how they return in different places at different stages of his career – and for a more subjective, communal, even gregarious, relationship with History: a complexity of the past, and of otherness, that never reaches, but could approximate to, a ‘totality’