Committed to Writing/Writing Commitment: Roland Barthes and Jules Michelet

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Michelet, Barthes’s historical reflection on the evolution of writing unfolds between two poles of fascination: the one with Michelet, which takes the shape of a “critique thématique” (thematic criticism), and the other with History, from which Barthes gradually detaches himself during the 1970s. The Barthesian reflection on writing the Middle Ages already reveals, as in a palimpsest, a positioning: this is what modernity calls “commitment.” But this position is also a shift, a shift from the Sartrean “pure,” absolute commitment towards another form of commitment aware of the individual agencies of the writer: someone who practices writing and who, in the exercise of writing, posits themselves. There is, in the Micheletian history of the Middle Ages as Barthes reads it, a space which, from the point of view of modernity, can be called a writing space in the sense of practice (involving the body of the scriptor) and inscription (of a tradition of writing: institutional commitment). Could this commitment be considered as having originated in Barthes’s thinking about the Middle Ages?