Rozmyślanie.
Meditation.

Summary/Abstract: Translated from the French by Paweł Mościcki. The article is a personal reflection on diary writing. Barthes initially confesses that he never wrote a diary and was not sure if he should do that, as diary writing accompanies “an indispensable doubt in what we write in it”. Thus, he finds only a literary justification for any diary and lists its four possible motives: poetical (revealing the author’s handwriting), historical (discerning the traces of an epoch), utopian (knowing the intimacy of the writer), love (polishing the accuracy of expressing). The question asked by Barthes if he should keep a diary is connected with a more important question: can one make a diary a work? Consequently, Barthes quotes two samples of his diary to return at the end to the problem of literary status of a diary. For Barthes, the status in question is ambivalent: due to its austerity, a diary has an unstable form, so it is not a text, but simultaneously it is a form in the making, it is a germ, a scrap of a text. As Barthes sees it, one cannot overcome the ambivalence since it would result only in “overworking” the diary to its death, but then it would stop being a diary.

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