Le Journal avec et après Barthes: de l’écriture désœuvrée à l’écriture exposée

Although Barthes never published a diary in his lifetime, his work possesses a subjective dimension in which we encounter writing practices that reflect on the diary or even approach diary writing itself. Barthes’s experience of mourning the loss of his mother and of a “désœuvrement” (Jean-Luc Nancy) led him to pursue a synthesis that would never see the light of day, the project of Vita nova. Would the idea of a synthesis be taken up by writers who came to diary writing after Barthes? A brief comparison with Éric Chevillard’s l’Autofictif will show, in the last part of this article, that the transformations that the material culture of literature has undergone have overturned the Barthesian idea of the synthesis between the Book and the Album.