He was close enough to the center and smart enough to be aware of the currents and could read the trends. But being outside worked to his advantage: by not being part of the establishment, Barthes owed no allegiance to the institutions of knowledge. Due to the constant interruptions to his formal education, Barthes never completed his intellectual training at the higher levels and for years he was on the fringes of the university community. Barthes was very interested in film but he seemed to have little interest in photography as an art and he probably came to write this book, not as an expert but as a grieving son.Īll his life Barthes had been the outsider, hampered by bouts of tuberculous, which kept him from serving in the Second World War, indeed he spent the Occupation in a sanatorium in the Alpines. Her death in 1977 ended that fusion as traumatically as the intervention of the Father but out of that long delayed primal wound came one of the most widely read of his books, a book–not on photography but on photographs and their power.

As he said, “No father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration.” Because his father had been one of the millions who died in the Great War, he had no father to rebel against and he lived his entire life with his mother, always fused into the warmth of her love. For Barthes, attending the lectures of Jacques Lacan and hearing of the Oedipal struggle between the Law of the Father for the body of the Mother, an agon that would traumatically wound the son with a castration complex, would have been like listening to fiction. It is one of the ironies of his ironic life that his last book–an extended act of mourning–would be his last before his ironic death. When he wrote Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes had little time left to him.

Camera obscura barthes