52 Desire for completion.
Linear time promises closure, an ending, a finish. And we expect this of the book: an ending. But sometimes the book that gets published is authored in collaboration with absence.
Take Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary for example: this is the book he didn’t write about the unending grief of losing his mother. It wasn’t intended for publication, but it was written. Barthes scribbled the first entry of what would become the Mourning Diary the day after his mother died.
He continued adding sheets to it as he wrote, lectured, and lived. It isn’t “a book completed by its author,” Nathalie Legere writes, “but the hypothesis of a book desired by him.” Legere’s wording is important: what is desire in the context of mourning? How is the desiring self changed by mourning? And what does it mean to want the book one cannot write?
One could argue that the fact of its publication makes it a book, but Barthes didn’t consider this ongoing list of tiny, dated notes on loose paper as a book. Mourning Diary was assembled, edited, and published after his death.
The hypothetical nature of the diary asks us to live outside a clear temporality in which things have been said and done. The same feels true of the home video.
There is no portrait that offers us the same person. Each portrait gives us a person differently. As does each photo, or each still I freeze in the film’s frame in order to get a better look at the subjects.
Roland Barthes died without his identification papers. He was run over by a laundry van in Paris. It seems that it took a month for his body to be claimed. But this is also the sort of thing Barthes would have wanted to become a rumor after his death. He would prefer, I think, to spend his afterlife suspended between posthumous selves.