To Write Pain in Spite of Everything

Grief in Roland Barthes

Abstract

This essay offers a renewed reading of Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes, written after the death of his mother, guided by Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia. The aim is not only to reflect on the affective dimension of Barthes’ grieving writing, but also to examine its subjective and performative construction in relation to other seminars delivered by the French semiologist. In this sense, the diary form is approached as a genre capable of highlighting a decisive turn in the production of subjectivities inscribed in the face of loss–a mode of working through grief and preserving memory through literature.