Esoteric Knowledge • EN EREBOS PHOS

Jan Frans De Boever, “Will-o’-the-wisp”

Mr. Sardonicus | 1961 | dir. William Castle

Barthes's text seeks to deconstruct—or to reconstruct—the ontological foundations of the autobiographical text. This is why it works so rigorously against being nostalgic, why it works, in fact, to present nostalgia as the condition of an illusion. In methodological fashion, it resists nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for a past "self," and nostalgia for a more authentic narrative mode with which to present both. Barthes writes about himself in his book "without . . . ever knowing whether it is about my past or my present that I am speaking". In denying that his past has any advantage over his present, his text rejects nostalgia in favor of the more creative moments in which he is actually composing it. The very negation of "recovery," his "patchwork" text is a rewriting of the self who writes: "I . . . rewrite myself—at a distance, a great distance—here and now". For Barthes, nostalgia constitutes the illusory sense that there is a "place" for the autobiographer to return to, and another self there for him to reanimate. A corollary of the idea that the self can simply be "divided," this notion of a "homesick" self is replaced with a more ghostly image of the subject as "dispersed" and "diffracted" in the present. Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes