Death in La chambre claire:: Barthes and Derrida

This article takes Derrida's "Les morts de Roland Barthes" as a starting point for examining relations between the photographic sign, the linguistic sign, and the referent. Barthes's La chambre claire treats punctum as an uncoded "beyond" of photography; its resistance to analysis and its ambivalence towards the structure of the sign link it with Derrida's texts on spectres and aporias of mourning. Barthes's "Analyse textuelle d'un conte d'Edgar Poe", on the other hand, deals with the performative "I am dead" which tests the limits of speech act theory, emphasizing its dependence on the phenomenological notion of self-presence. Derrida's dispute with Austin ("Signature evenement contexte"), as well as La voix et le phenomene, a study of Husserl's logocentrism, coincide with Barthes's claim that life is not opposed to death, but to language: signs must be readable beyond empirically determinable contexts, and performatives, signatures and proper names necessarily remain signs of absence.