Summary
Jean Louis Calvet: Roland Bart - Biography
"If I were a writer, I would very much like that after my death, thanks to the care of some friendly and unobtrusive biographer, my life would be reduced to a few details, a few emphases, to - so to speak - a few 'biographemes', independent and mobile enough to be able to travel beyond each individual destiny and touch, like Epicurus' atoms, some future body destined for the same dissipation; in a word, to be a riddled man, like Proust's described in his books..."
Roland Bart, Sad, Furie, Loyola
Bart got a friendly and easy-going biographer in Louis-Jean Calve, a prominent French semiologist and linguist. In the biography of Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Calvet depicts the dynamic and unpredictable life of someone who would become one of the most important intellectuals of post-war Europe, even though he had little chance of becoming one. Immediately after birth, Bart loses his father in the First World War and the first decades of his life will be marked by poverty and tuberculosis, which prevented him from following the well-trodden paths of an academic career. But Calvet did not dwell only on "biographemes", on a few details and highlights, and he explains this: "Without wanting to start a debate with an absent author here or present arguments against a theory with which I otherwise agree in many points, I still have to say that life, for me, is one whole and that between a man and his work, between the body and what the body produces, there are connections that need to be kneaded, there are close relationships and kinships, sometimes they are strange". Calvet's book is truly the result of long-term and exhaustive work: inquiries, research, conversations with many people with whom Bart had some kind of relationship - from the French president of the republic to childhood friends - reading Bart's works and reactions to them and, especially, Bart's correspondence: Roland Bart wrote several letters a day and, faithful to his friendship, he maintained correspondence with many for a long time.
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