À la recherche du père perdu o un retorno a la diferencia

Abstract

This paper attempts to reexamine the presence of the father in the work of Roland Barthes: Louis Barthes, the blurry paternal figure, is conspicuous precisely in his absence. The appearance of a new and monumental Roland Barthes biography by Thiphaine Samoyault brings to light autobiographical elements that until now had been lost in a box of documents in the Roland Barthes archives. These newly discovered facts give way to a new interpretative matrix brought on by the figure of the father who died at sea, and which I characterize as a “return to difference”. The paper also makes a brief overview of Barthes’s work taking as a starting point this father figure, which could also be read as the search for a missing or lost father.