ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author illustrates how Barthes manages to redeem Brecht throughout this transformation in Barthes’s thought. The central essay ‘The Structuralist Activity’, coming in 1963, after Barthes’s ‘mythological’ period proper, situates Brecht in relation to Barthes’s overall approach, loosely deemed as ‘structuralist’. Barthes’s discussion of decay emerges from a discussion of the photographic image and its relation to Brecht’s theatre work. It is through the techniques of estrangement that Brecht’s theatre performs for us the human world as a signifying world and an historical world. The numen is mentioned in the essay in relation to some failed shock photos that attempt to capture a frozen action, such as ‘the leap of a soccer player’. Camera Lucida is only ostensibly a book about photography; it is also Barthes’s confession of profound mother-love. The politicized deployment of the maternal in the symbolic links the structuralist Barthes to the libidinal Barthes.
