Roland Barthes, Nathalie Léger (editor), Richard Howard (translator) · 1977-79 (written); 2009 (Journal de deuil) · EPUB · Calibre ID 182
Resurfaced in The Dated Slip (2026-10-10).
Role in the triad
The vigil: dated slips with no hypothesis; the same instrument as Nabokov’s turned to grief, with time’s discontinuity suffered rather than sought.
Why this book
Quartered typing paper, one note per slip; Barthes names mourning’s ‘Units’ and ‘discontinuous character’; entries silt up after the anniversary; Léger had to correct the order and calls it ‘the hypothesis of a book’.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “He wrote in ink, sometimes in pencil, on slips of paper (regular typing-paper cut into quarters) of which he kept a constant supply on his desk.” (Léger, Foreword)
- “Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes?” (Oct 27, 1977)
- “In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.” (Oct 29, 1977)
- “What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. / [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]” (Nov 1, 1977)
- “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” (Nov 26, 1977)
- “These journal notes grow rarer. Silting up. So forgetting is inexorable?” (Nov 4, 1978)
- “Each time I dream about her (and I dream only of her), it is in order to see her, believe her to be alive, but other, separate.” (Mar 18, 1979)
Themes
anniversary · Camera Lucida · discontinuity · dream of the dead · fragment · mourning · notatio · posthumous edition · slips · units · Winter Garden