ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes writes an autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), and instructs the reader to consider all ‘as if spoken by a character in a novel’ . He deliberates about the journal form, ‘Delib-
eration’, and concludes that the journal keeper is shown to be a
comedian by the jou rn al’s forcing the comic question, the bewildered
m an ’s ‘Am I? ’ Characters and comedians are, then, severally, said to be
those that write the stories of their lives and keep journals, the two traditional ways for a person to express or represent himself in a writing intended for public consumption. In saying so Barthes plays havoc with the traditionally conceived relation between authors and self-conscious writings of the self by forgoing the question characteristic o f such writings, namely, ‘Who am I? ’ and raising instead the pragm atically self-contradictory ‘Am I? ’ The autobiography and the
essay on journal-keeping comprise two assaults on the pertinence of
the pronoun of the first person to autobiographies and personal
journals: the first shifts the privilege usually accorded the real author
of a biography or ajourn ai, as one who may say T and ‘m yself’ , to a text called ‘R .B .’ :
I do not say ‘I am going to describe m yself’ but: ‘I am writing a text, and I call it R .B .’ I shift from imitation (from description) and entrust m yself to nomination. Do I not know that, in the field o f the subject, there is no referent? The fact (whether biographical or textual) is abolished in the signifier, because it immediately coincides with it: writing myself I merely repeat the extreme operation by which Balzac, in Sarrasine, has m ade castration and castrature ‘coincide’ ; I m yself am my own symbol, I am the story which happens to me: freewheeling in language, I have nothing to compare myself to; and in this movement, the pronoun of the imaginary, ‘I , ’ is im-pertinent\ the symbolic becomes literally immediate: essential danger for the life o f the subject: to write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea; but it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide.1
