Camera obscura
Camera obscura

Summary/Abstract: This essay endeavours to decipher the closing years of Roland Barthes as a photograph. Contrary to the title of his last book, Barthes wrote and constructed more of an existential camera obscura whose mechanism served the task of mourning, i.e. La Chambre claire, as well as disclosed the fundamental figures devised in his imagination, namely, darkness and enclosure. The biography of Barthes’ last years proves to be a counterpart of an initiation–like transition towards darkness, the digging of one’s grave, and a reversed version of illumination.

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