ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what functions music plays in the process of mourning, as Camera Lucida re-appropriates the Orpheus myth. Barthes's fascination with the myth has been a long-standing one dating back to the 1960s. Language kills off the complexity of living reality. What is harrowingly painful for the mourner, be it Orpheus or Barthes, is that Eurydice is lost twice, first to death, then to language. The chapter shows how Barthes creatively sidesteps this interdict and how music allows him to express what words cannot: the inexpressible uniqueness of his mother's identity and the uniqueness of his grief. Music, as a language, is at once the expression of emotion and the locus of its taming. According to Adorno, the figures of Apollo and Orpheus together convey that music has the power at once to elicit passions but also to pacify their violence.
