Sunday, June 23, 2019

Evading Politics with Roland Barthes

Andrea Schiavone
Standing Woman writing in a Book
ca. 1545-64
etching
British Museum

Julia Margaret Cameron
May Prinsep Letter-writing
1870
albumen print
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jan Ekels the Younger
Man writing at his Desk
1784
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"Barthes's praise of writing as a gratuitous, free activity is, in one sense, a political view.  He conceives of literature as a perpetual renewal of the right of individual assertion; and all rights are, finally, political ones.  Still, Barthes has an evasive relation to politics, and he is one of the great modern refusers of history.  Barthes started publishing and mattering in the aftermath of World War II, which, astonishingly, he never mentions; indeed, in all his writings he never, as far as I recall, mentions the word "war."  Barthes's friendly way of understanding subjects domesticates them, in the best sense.  He lacks anything like Walter Benjamin's tragic awareness that every work of civilization is also a work of barbarism.  The ethical burden for Benjamin was a kind of martyrdom; he could not help connecting it with politics.  Barthes regards politics as a kind of constriction of the human (and intellectual) subject which has to be outwitted . . . "

Sebastiano Conca
Genius of History (Fame writing History)
before 1764
oil on copper
National Trust, Stourhead, Wiltshire

Gari Melchers
Writing
ca. 1905-1909
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Jacobus van Looy
Man writing at a Desk
before 1930
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"To assume that society is ruled by monolithic ideologies and repressive mystifications is necessary to Barthes's advocacy of egoism, post-revolutionary but nevertheless antinomian: his notion that the affirmation of the unremittingly personal is a subversive act.  This is a classic extension of the aesthete attitude, in which it becomes a politics: a politics of radical individuality.  Pleasure is largely identified with unauthorized pleasure, and the right of individual assertion with the sanctity of the asocial self.  In the late writings, the theme of protest against power takes the form of an increasingly private definition of experience (as fetishized involvement) and a ludic definition of thought."

– Susan Sontag, from On Roland Barthes (1982)

William Blake
God writing upon the Tablets of the Covenant
ca. 1805
watercolor
National Galleries of Scotland

Jusepe de Ribera
St Jerome writing
1615
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Vivant Denon after Gabriel Metsu
Philosopher in his Study
1784
etching
British Museum

Matteo di Giovanni
St Jerome in his Study
1482
tempera and oil on panel
Harvard Art Museums 

Félix Vallotton
Woman writing in an Interior
1904
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Thomas Wyck
Scholar in his Study
before 1677
oil on canvas
Hallwyl Museum, Stockholm

David Wilkie
The Letter Writer
before 1841
watercolor
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Parmigianino
Youth with Book
ca. 1518-40
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum