Abstract
Even after his accession to the Collège de France, Roland Barthes continued to write from commission, and his rare unsolicited books were often published posthumously. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes was originally conceived by the author as a " hoax ", aimed at parodying the collection of " Écrivains de toujours ", which had begun in the years 1950. While Barthes was keen to challenge the collection, he was caught in the trap of exploring his own imagination. This inner tension is partly explained by a taste for perversion (" la perversion rend heureux "), a notion that agitated intellectual circles in the 1970s (Félix Guattari in particular). In this text, Barthes makes a link between perversion and writing : " écrire est un verbe intransitif ", i.e. pure pleasure. Perversion also consists in playing on the contract by subverting the order. Barthes defines three types of contract : neutral, negative, positive, the model of the positive contract being prostitution. In contrast, the " négatif " contract is that of commercial exchange, linked, in Barthes' mind, to the publication process, which he disliked. Thus, while he often described the material and immediate aspect of writing, Barthes remained silent on publishing and the commercial aspect of his books. Indeed, he refused to allow his Fragments d'un discours amoureux to be marketed in paperback.
With La Chambre claire, Barthes returns to the regime of demand. The first part of the book reproduces some of his earlier articles, even though it was published by a different publisher. This " infidélité " thus took the form of a flexed response to demand: more precisely, it was a question of responding to unformulated demand, to deep-seated desire. Hence the paradoxical nature of publishing this book in the " Cahiers du cinéma " collection, while proclaiming, from the outset, his hatred of the seventh art.
This approach of " cheating " with every commission was brought to a climax when Barthes himself took on the task of reviewing Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, for Nadeau, under the title " Barthes puissance 3 ".
