ABSTRACT

This chapter considers Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust’s last seminar 'Proust et la Photographie: Examen d'un fonds d'archives photographiques mal connu'. Contrary to what one might suspect, Barthes's seminar is not, as he claims in his opening remarks, about Proust the pre-eminent writer, nor is it about the role of photography in A la recherche du temps perdu. In Barthes's seminar, the author Marcel Proust was to serve once again as the object of identification. The decisive difference can be detected in the photographic portraits themselves, and concerns Barthes's conception of true and truthful presentation. In their autobiographical works Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes describe the structural transformation of memory, of experience and of affect by using corporeal and technological practices of looking as their primary means of signification.