Tracing the Figure of Roland Barthes in The Argonauts : A "many-gendered mother" of Maggie Nelson's Heart

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Roland Barthes is among the thinkers and artists whom Maggie Nelson claims as her "many-gendered mothers" in The Argonauts (2015). This essay foregrounds Nelson's mode of engagement with Barthes's work, proposing that she replicates the active, writerly reading that Barthes himself advocates in S/Z (1970) and elsewhere. Where Nelson expresses deep affinity with Barthes, she also brings herself to his work and pushes against and beyond it. In my analysis, there are four axes to this active engagement with Barthes in The Argonauts : firstly, Nelson establishes Barthes as a foundational figure in her intertextual, queer literary lineage. Secondly, Nelson experiments with Barthes's formal and stylistic innovations. Thirdly, Barthes provides a foil for Nelson's recuperation of maternal subjectivity. Finally, Nelson builds on Barthes's writings on love to attest to the joy and viability of queer kinship. In foregrounding Nelson's (re)readings of Barthes, I elucidate her work and its citational politics, while inviting new perspectives on his. As a reader of The Argonauts , moreover, I find I must comb the text's layers to find meaning, bringing myself to its (typographical) gaps. Nelson's work, like that of Barthes, invites a mode of reading that makes space for dialogue, intimacy, and intellectual innovation.