2 - Leçon and ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure…’

Summary

The objective wealth of meanings encapsulated in every intellectual phenomenon demands of the recipient the same spontaneity of subjective fantasy that is castigated in the name of objective discipline.

Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 1958

Mieux valent les leurres de la subjectivité que les impostures de l'objectivité.

Barthes, La Préparation du roman, 2 December 1978

Early in La Chambre claire, Barthes explains that in his writing he has always hovered between two sorts of discourse; he feels the ‘inconfort’ of a subject ‘ballotté entre deux langages, l'un expressif, l'autre critique’. His only sense of certainty, within the network of discourses in which he finds himself, is that he feels an ineradicable ‘résistance […] à tout système réducteur’ (CC, 794). His own subjectivity, ‘“l'antique souveraineté du moi” (Nietzsche)’, must be used as a methodological starting-point. Selecting the photographs he would use for the book, Barthes had the ‘bizarre’ thought that perhaps, after all, it is by examining contingent individuality that a general validity can be reached – a ‘mathesis’ or knowledge which would respect particularity, and yet ultimately lead to the attainment of general truths:

Pourquoi n'y aurait-il pas, en quelque sorte, une science nouvelle par objet? Une Mathesis singularis (et non plus universalis)? J'acceptai donc de me prendre pour médiateur de toute la Photographie: je tenterais de formuler, à partir de quelques mouvements personnels, le trait fondamental, l'universel sans lequel il n'y aurait pas de Photographie. (CC, 795)

Here we see the culmination of a method which Barthes had been setting out with increasing confidence over the course of the Collège de France teaching: the ‘idée bizarre’ of a mathesis singularis was in gestation during this time.