Qualcosa di opaco. Barthes, il lutto e la scrittura

Something opaque. Barthes, Mourning and «Écriture» This paper aims at investigating the presence and effects of mourning in Barthes’s last work. Always focusing on this theme, particular interest will be devoted to Barthes’s Journal de deuil, in comparison with the famous Chambre Claire and with a very important late text like La preparation du roman. The main hypothesis is that the stillness of mourning (in conjunction with the narcissistic configuration of the subject), following to Barthes’s mother’s death, permits building a funeral monument (La chambre claire), but it does not allow accessing the narrative dialectization that the project of a novel (Vita nova) would have required.