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A review by casparb
Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes
barthes I always find a sweetie ; he's a rare critical theorist in being a warm & trusting person. I first read him years ago in school because I wanted to know what literary theory was like & immediately I was knee-deep in essays about washing up powders, einstein's brain, how romans look in the movies, supersonic jets. I remember reading Camera Lucida, - which is heavily related to the mourning diary - in my little dark room at the end of 2020. Lucida begins as an essay on photographic theory, but transforms into a kind of elegy-essay, a cri de coeur following the death of RB's mother. Barthes was hit by a van & died only a couple months after its publication.
So this book, the mourning diary, isn't a Book of Theory. It's quite literally a diary, consisting of notes from the two or three years after his mother's death, beginning on the day itself. A kind of autoanalysis, a self-diagnosis (though that term has sprouted other connotations. There are two kinds maybe). so this is HEAVy stuff, as per, it's me, ,, and I like it a lot. I'm to sit with it since I'm not about to process three years worth like this, just as with denise riley writing years after her son's death. but because this is a review site I think 1) it's good 2)these are very sharp observations 3) they ride a line between the barthesian theory-brain and the more Lewisean emotive-brain 4) that is a good thing I think it is refreshing 5) transmission of death from an event to a duration is really just the move, the business, what can care for the rest
So this book, the mourning diary, isn't a Book of Theory. It's quite literally a diary, consisting of notes from the two or three years after his mother's death, beginning on the day itself. A kind of autoanalysis, a self-diagnosis (though that term has sprouted other connotations. There are two kinds maybe). so this is HEAVy stuff, as per, it's me, ,, and I like it a lot. I'm to sit with it since I'm not about to process three years worth like this, just as with denise riley writing years after her son's death. but because this is a review site I think 1) it's good 2)these are very sharp observations 3) they ride a line between the barthesian theory-brain and the more Lewisean emotive-brain 4) that is a good thing I think it is refreshing 5) transmission of death from an event to a duration is really just the move, the business, what can care for the rest